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Episode 148 - BONUS: X-Rays from Pluto

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Recap: When a NASA press released announced that scientists had observed x-rays coming from Pluto, my knee-jerk reaction was that certain people would use this to claim that Pluto was built by aliens. A later thought was that some might use it to bolster their ideas of the electric universe. Conveniently, I was going to be seeing one of the main study authors, Dr. Casey Lisse, just a day later at a conference, so I interviewed him about the find to really figure out what was going on, what was expected, what was unexpected, and if aliens built everything.

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Episode Summary

As this was an interview, there is no transcript. Here is an approximate outline based on questions that were asked:

1) What did you find? --Is Pluto actually "emitting" x-rays? (Rick: What is something that people might be able to relate this to, like, is it similar to a medical x-ray? Does it modulate like a radio signal or is it steady or random?)

2) Why were you looking? (Robert: Why did you expect or think they might be there in the first place? Have you seen other planetary bodies emitting x-rays?)

3) What was the instrumentation?

4) What's the current explanation?

5) What're the remaining questions?

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