Volcanoes on the Moon
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LULU: Hey there, Lulu here. We are coming up on the new year. And, you know, we're in our last days of 2024, and this is a time when many people are looking back. They're making lists of the best books or the best songs or the best movies. Well, I want to consider the best celestial events of 2024. And it is just no question, no contest. The thing that takes the cake was the total solar eclipse back in April of course the moon went in front of the Sun at just the perfect distance that made it so that a swathe of North America was showered in sudden darkness. I skipped work that day. It was a Monday. My wife skipped work too. We got our kids out of school, we bought a bunch of chips and drove five hours to Indiana so that we could be in the path of totality. And in those moments where the moon finally closed over the sun, the temperature suddenly dropped, the birds got all quiet. A guy next to us started playing the pan flute, just (humming). It was so eerie and so neat, um, and so today what I want to do is play you a show that the Radiolab team made in honor of the eclipse that's all about the moon! The moon, the thing allowing for that eerie darkness. It turns out that shiny, glowy, nice white thing in the sky that you can find at night. Well, you might not really know it as well as you think you do.
LULU: But hopefully that'll change after you listen to this episode. So here we go. I'm going to play you the episode, sit back, relax. It kicks off with Radiolab’s Molly Webster telling me and Latif Nasser why she was so excited about the eclipse.
MOLLY: So you may have heard we had a big solar eclipse, which I was unabashedly pumped about. I’ve never - I don’t get into eclipses so much but this was my year.
LULU: Comin’ in every day with the glasses on.
MOLLY: [Laughs] So basically an eclipse is, like, the moon gets between the Earth and the sun, and so then it, like, blocks the light of the sun. And the shadow of the moon is cast upon the Earth. And the shadow is actually about 115 miles wide.
LATIF: Okay.
LULU: Oh! Interesting.
MOLLY: And so as the Earth rotates, the shadow of the moon sweeps across the Earth.
LATIF: Hmm.
MOLLY: Passing over mountains and forests and cities and towns—and maybe your house.
LATIF: Fully—fully blocking.
MOLLY: Fully—fully blocking. That's why this one was such a big deal. It was a total solar eclipse.
LULU: Okay!
MOLLY: And so when we were thinking about this eclipse, I was like, okay, how—like, would there be an interesting way for our show to cover this? And I started to notice this funny thing, which is that everything I was coming across was all about ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: The sun.]
[ARCHIVE CLIP: The sun.]
MOLLY: ... the sun.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Understanding the sun is important for understanding our place in the universe.]
MOLLY: What happens to the sun, what we can learn about the sun. But also ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: There it is!]
MOLLY: ... if it wasn't about the sun ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: There it is!]
MOLLY: ... it was something about Earth and Earthlings.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: I'm speechless. I'm literally speechless.]
MOLLY: About what we'll feel or what it'll be like.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: Bumper-to-bumper traffic.]
MOLLY: About ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: How the atmosphere behaves.]
MOLLY: ... the atmosphere. About ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP: These amazing shadows.]
MOLLY: ... the shadows, the light, the wind.
[ARCHIVE CLIP: About what you should keep in mind when it comes to our furry friends.]
MOLLY: And I was like, wait, what about the moon?
LULU: Hmm.
MOLLY: Like, the only reason any of this is happening is because of the moon, and yet we're treating it like it's like the, you know, silly best friend who only has a couple of scenes.
LULU: Treating it like the photo bomber ...
MOLLY: Yeah.
LULU: ... in the way of the thing.
MOLLY: Yeah. And I'm like, you're cau—this—the only reason this is happening is because the moon's causing it.
LULU: Yeah.
MOLLY: And no one's really talking about it. And I feel like that's sort of the case with the moon. Like, it doesn't really get talked about that much. It sort of gets short shrift.
LATIF: What are you talking about? People talk about the moon all the time! There was just like a—wasn't there a whole thing about something that landed on the moon and fell over, and everyone was, like, rooting for this thing on the moon? And I mean, just in general, aren’t we- NASA's going back to the moon. We already went to the moon. We haven't gone to the sun. Like ...
MOLLY: Yeah, fair point about the sun. We haven't gone there.
LATIF: [laughs]
MOLLY: But I would just say, like, I feel like you see the moon, so you think you know about the moon.
LATIF: Sure.
MOLLY: But I don't—like, what do you know? Like, tell me what do you know about the moon?
LATIF: Um ...
LULU: Okay.
LATIF: Craters. It has craters.
LULU: Craters.
MOLLY: Uh-huh.
LULU: It's, um, a rock, I think? That is in orbit with us.
LATIF: Yeah.
LULU: It's circling us.
LATIF: Yeah, that's right.
LULU: Uh, does it also spin? Probably?
LATIF: Yeah.
LULU: Yeah.
LATIF: Yeah.
LULU: Okay.
LATIF: Sure. [laughs]
MOLLY: Okay, so just to sum up your—your deep knowledge of the moon is that it's a round rock that orbits the Earth ...
LULU: Like, it's a round rock ...
MOLLY: ... and that may or may not spin.
LATIF: Yeah. And has craters. You forgot about the craters.
LULU: It has craters! And it has craters.
MOLLY: Right. Right. I think you've just underscored my point.
LATIF: Okay. Fair.
MOLLY: That I think we think we feel like we know a lot about the moon because we spend a lot of time looking at it, but I would say that one, like, that's kind of the collection of facts most people know about the moon. But it's ...
LATIF: And that we've been there. That we've been there, of course.
MOLLY: Yeah, exactly. So that's the other thing is that we often think of the moon in relation to us, and I just felt like when I realized this I thought: oh, the moon is our closest neighbor, and it feels a little weird how little we know about it.
LATIF: Hmm.
MOLLY: It feels a little rude. And so I just started to wonder: can I know this cosmic neighbor more than it may or may not be round and rocky? Like, can I get to really know it? And so that led me to this idea that what we should do today is a moon show.
LATIF: Ah, nice!
LULU: Like, you want a profile of the moon.
MOLLY: I absolutely want to profile the moon.
LATIF: Yeah!
MOLLY: And that—that is what we're going to do. We're gonna do, like, a birth, a middle age ...
LULU: Ooh!
MOLLY: ... a death!
LULU: Oh. I don't want it to die.
MOLLY: Well, just stay tuned, Lulu.
LULU: Okay.
MOLLY: Stay tuned. Okay, so the first part of our moon profile comes from managing editor Pat Walters.
PAT WALTERS: Yeah, so when we started working on this moon show, I got curious about where the story starts.
LATIF: Okay.
PAT: Like, where did the moon come from?
LULU: Um, I mean, I guess I've always thought it sort of just was something in space whizzing by, and Earth's orbit caught it at some point.
PAT: Hmm.
LATIF: Hmm.
LULU: Maybe?
LATIF: I think I always thought that it was just like—it's always been around. Like, it came from wherever the Earth came from, and they've always just been here together.
PAT: Yeah. Yeah, good guesses. Not correct.
LULU: [laughs]
PAT: But those are both ideas that people have had for a long time.
SIMON LOCK: Yeah, so there were sort of a number of different suggestions.
PAT: This is according to Simon Lock. He's a research fellow at the University of Bristol in England.
SIMON LOCK: And I study the formation and early evolution of planets.
PAT: And the moon.
SIMON LOCK: Mm-hmm.
PAT: And he says for most of modern history, people thought what you thought.
SIMON LOCK: Another idea was that the moon could have actually been sort of thrown out from the Earth itself.
PAT: Like, as the Earth was spinning, a chunk of it flew off and became the moon.
SIMON LOCK: An idea called fission.
PAT: This was apparently a Darwin idea.
SIMON LOCK: Not the Charles Darwin, but his son, I believe.
PAT: George.
SIMON LOCK: Yeah.
PAT: He actually thought the Pacific Ocean was the hole left behind by the moon when it flew off into space.
LATIF: Weird!
PAT: Totally, yeah! And also wrong.
SIMON LOCK: What all scientists probably agree on is ...
PAT: Simon says what most likely happened was a bit more explosive.
SIMON LOCK: Yeah. The moon formed as the result of a giant impact.
LATIF: Like, a giant, like, of what? Like, a giant impact? What does that even mean here?
PAT: Well, I should say there are a couple different versions of this theory, but the one Simon told me is wild. And it starts about 4.4 billion years ago.
LATIF: Okay, so let's begin at the beginning.
PAT: Okay, so just to set the scene.
SIMON LOCK: The overall picture is this.
PAT: We're on Earth. And Earth is only about 100 million years old.
SIMON LOCK: So it's quite early in the whole history of Earth. It's really sort of the—you know, still in the overture of Earth.
PAT: But even in these early days, it looked kind of like Earth does now.
SARAH STEWART: Just imagine a slightly smaller Earth. It probably had oceans and an atmosphere.
PAT: This is Sarah Stewart.
SARAH STEWART: Professor at the University of California at Davis.
PAT: And she and Simon explained to me that if you were standing on this baby Earth all those billions of years ago, gazing up into the night sky, it would have been full of stars, just like it is now. The stars would look different because they won't yet have reached their current configuration. But it would be a starry sky.
LATIF: Yeah.
PAT: If you were staring up at it, at some point a new little glimmer would have appeared in the sky. Next night, that dot would've gotten bigger. Night after that, a bit bigger still. And by the time it got big enough for you to tell what it was, which is a planet that's rushing towards Earth at 20,000 miles an hour, it would have consumed the entire sky, and then smashed into the baby Earth.
LATIF: Dramatic.
PAT: Yeah.
SARAH STEWART: The energy, the collision dumped into the Earth was the power of the Sun. And as a result ...
SIMON LOCK: You vaporize—vaporize—so turn to gas, the rock of Earth.
PAT: And, of course, the planet that hit it. And what's left ...
SIMON LOCK: Is this sort of huge, swirling ball of gas.
PAT: A big spinning cloud.
SIMON LOCK: But made out of vaporized rock.
PAT: And Simon says the cloud is extremely wide ...
SIMON LOCK: Ten times the size of the present-day Earth.
PAT: ... incredibly hot ...
SIMON LOCK: 2,000 Kelvin or so.
PAT: ... and spinning super fast.
SIMON LOCK: The central part is rotating with a sort of three-hour day.
PAT: But it doesn't stay that way for very long.
SIMON LOCK: It's cooling really rapidly, causing the vapor to condense into droplets of magma.
SARAH STEWART: Clouds are forming that are magma clouds
PAT: Sarah Stewart again.
SARAH STEWART: The magma droplets fall.
PAT: As rain, basically.
SARAH STEWART: And the magma rain would have been torrential.
PAT: Pretty quickly, the magma rain starts clumping together with ...
SIMON LOCK: Bigger lumps of molten rock.
PAT: And at some point, several of these lumps clump together and start ...
SIMON LOCK: Pulling nearby stuff towards it, and using that to grow in mass.
PAT: And this lump of magma, this will eventually become the moon. And the rest of this rocky gas cloud, that will become the Earth.
SIMON LOCK: Yeah. The moon is forming within this huge extended Earth.
PAT: But the gas cloud version of Earth ...
SIMON LOCK: It's contracting.
PAT: ... is getting smaller as it cools, and more and more of the gas turns into liquid magma. Until eventually, Simon says ...
SIMON LOCK: This sort of wonderful dramatic moment ...
PAT: Where the moon, which has been forming inside the gas cloud of Earth ...
SIMON LOCK: Would emerge from the Earth as sort of this newly-born satellite.
PAT: And begin orbiting the Earth. And that, according to Simon and Sarah's theory, is how we got our moon.
LATIF: What? So it literally popped out of us?
PAT: Yeah.
PAT: And how long did this whole process take?
SIMON LOCK: The—the moon probably takes about, you know, on the order of ten to a few tens of years to form.
PAT: Ten years?
SIMON LOCK: Yeah, it's fast.
LATIF: What? That took less than one of us. Less than me or you, less than our life.
PAT: Yeah. And what I think is so amazing about this moment is that it didn't only give birth to the moon.
SIMON LOCK: This event is really significant not only because it formed the moon, but it also actually formed the Earth if you think about it.
PAT: Like, before that giant impact, there was a version of the Earth, but it was different. It was smaller, it was made of different stuff. It wasn't, like, tilted off at a slight angle away from the sun in the way that it is now. Like, if the giant impact hadn't happened, it's not just that we wouldn't have a moon, but Earth wouldn't really be Earth in the way we know it. This moment when the moon became the moon is also ...
SIMON LOCK: How Earth became Earth.
PAT: Cool. Yeah, amazing. Um ...
PAT: And not only were they born in the same moment, but they're also sort of twins.
PAT: What do we have here?
PAT: Like, when you look at a moon rock ...
PAT: What's that?
MUSEUM CURATOR: You can hold that, by the way.
PAT: Oh, I can hold it? Oh my God!
PAT: ... which I actually got to do recently at a museum in Maine.
PAT: It's quite heavy.
MUSEUM CURATOR: Yeah.
PAT: Yeah.
PAT: It looks surprisingly familiar.
PAT: In some ways it's, like, not that dissimilar from rocks that I've held before.
PAT: It just looked like a chunky gray and black rock.
PAT: But obviously it's from the moon.
MUSEUM CURATOR: It's a rock.
PAT: Which is insane to think about. [laughs] But yeah, it's just a—it is just a rock.
PAT: And it turns out it's not just that moon rocks look like Earth rocks, but if you were to break them open and examine their geochemistry, you would find that Earth rocks and moon rocks are almost identical.
LATIF: Wait, can I just understand—because okay, so if you tell me they're the same ...
PAT: Yeah.
LATIF: ... I would just be like, oh, of course. Like, everything in the universe is—or everything in the solar system was made at the same time. Like, of course this thing is gonna have the same as that thing. Like, would—is Mars the same?
PAT: No.
PAT: This looks quite different.
PAT: I got to hold a piece of Mars at that museum, too.
LATIF: What?
PAT: Yeah, it was awesome.
PAT: I can't believe this is a piece of Mars.
PAT: And it looks totally different than a moon rock or an Earth rock.
PAT: It looks more metallic.
PAT: Kind of red with green streaks through it. And according to Simon, is also geochemically very different.
SIMON LOCK: Because all of the things that were happening in the galaxy ...
PAT: As the solar system's forming ...
SIMON LOCK: ... produce different amounts of different elements.
PAT: In different parts of the solar system.
SIMON LOCK: Yeah, exactly.
PAT: So Mars looks different than Venus or Mercury, but Earth and the moon look the same.
SIMON LOCK: And nothing else in the solar system looks quite the same.
PAT: Why, if the moon and the Earth are made of the same stuff and both were sort of born out of this one explosive moment, why didn't the moon just become a little Earth?
SIMON LOCK: Yeah, just because it's so much smaller.
PAT: Hmm.
SIMON LOCK: So it is only about one percent the mass of the Earth, but what that means is that the moon can't really hold onto an atmosphere. If you, you know, open, you know, a bottle of air on the moon, very quickly that'll get driven off into space.
PAT: So it's not big enough, so meaning it doesn't have enough gravity to hold that stuff down?
SIMON LOCK: Yeah. This is why when you see, you know, the astronauts bouncing across the surface of the moon, they can do that just because the gravity's so much lower.
PAT: Hmm.
SIMON LOCK: And so the force that's holding onto our atmosphere just doesn't work as well when it—the gravity's that much lower.
PAT: Okay.
SIMON LOCK: And without the atmosphere, none of the rest of it can happen.
LATIF: Oh, that is kinda shocking and it makes you—because it's like the whole—you know, so often we talk about, like, oh it's the Goldilocks zone, and it's like we're in the right spot. Like ...
PAT: Like, distance from the sun and everything.
LATIF: Yeah, exactly.
PAT: Yeah.
LATIF: Like, it's like oh, this is perfect for being habitable. But then you look at the moon and you're like, oh, it makes life and Earth seem pretty special and rare and unique again in a way.
PAT: Yeah. Like, if that giant impact that gave birth to the Earth and the moon had gone down a little bit differently, and some chunk of Earth had gotten blasted off into space and we had ended smaller, we might not have been able to develop oceans and birds, dogs, babies, music. We might have just ended up like a slightly bigger version of our cold, dry, airless twin, the moon.
LULU: Managing Editor Pat Walters. [laughs] All right, Molly. Where are we—where are we going from here? That felt kind of like a punctuation point, this poor, dusty dead moon.
MOLLY: Honestly, by Pat's description, it sounds kind of dead to me too. But I want to liven it up. I want to take you up there and liven it up.
LATIF: But there's nothing alive. What are you gonna do?
MOLLY: There is, it's true. There are no palm trees or anything up there.
LATIF: [laughs]
MOLLY: But—but there is, it turns out there's just so much stuff happening there. I am sort of a pressure cooker of facts, and I just have to tell them to somebody.
LATIF: Okay.
LULU: We will continue to moon you after this short break.
MOLLY: Yeah! [laughs]
BREAK
LULU: We’re back, with reporter Molly Webster.
MOLLY: So you are my captive audience. Are you ready?
LULU: Let's do it.
MOLLY: So the moon does look a lot more like Earth than I would have expected.
LULU: Huh!
MOLLY: There are craters that Latif remembered.
LATIF: Right.
MOLLY: Plus it has a bunch of mountain ranges ...
LULU: Okay.
MOLLY: ... a point that's higher than Everest.
LATIF: Hmm!
MOLLY: Scientists have found moon caves.
LULU: Ooh!
MOLLY: And they've also found volcanoes that are billions and billions of years old.
LULU: With—with—with lava?
MOLLY: With lava.
LATIF: Whoa!
MOLLY: It's very, very dry old lava.
LATIF: [laughs] Okay.
MOLLY: But really, the first thing I learned about the moon that really arrested me and made me want to know so much more about it is that the moon is covered in soil that kind of looks like sand. People will call it moon dust ...
LATIF: Hmm.
MOLLY: But it's incredibly sharp.
LATIF: Whoa!
LULU: Like a little grain of it?
MOLLY: Yeah, a tiny, tiny grain of it is, like, razor sharp.
LULU: Hmm.
MOLLY: And it is that way because there's no wind on the moon or flowing water.
LULU: Oh!
MOLLY: There's nothing to, like, erode and give you ...
LULU: And, like, dull it?
MOLLY: ... that soft, like, fine surface.
LULU: Hmm.
LATIF: So, like, let's say you're on the moon, you take off your boots and you try to do the beach, squish your toes in the sand thing, just like the instant you put your foot down it'd get all cut up or—like ...
MOLLY: Likely, yeah.
LATIF: … like, how—whoa!
MOLLY: And then probably before that happened, depending on where you were, it would either burn up or freeze your foot.
LULU: What?
MOLLY: You wouldn't—because, like, the temperature on the moon is super extreme.
LULU: Hmm.
MOLLY: It's like, one scientist said to me it's either kill ya hot or kill ya cold.
LULU: [laughs]
MOLLY: And that's because on the moon, if you're in the sun, it can be something like 250 degrees Fahrenheit.
LULU: Wow!
MOLLY: But if you're out of the sun, it can be -250 degrees Fahrenheit.
LULU: Whoa!
LATIF: That's like 500-degrees difference.
MOLLY: Yeah, it's a 500-degree difference, and the other thing is that on the moon, there is no sunrise and no sunset.
LATIF: Hmm. What do you mean?
MOLLY: You just turn from day to night or night to day. Just goes from light to dark or dark to light. Just like—boom!
LATIF: What?
MOLLY: And so it's kind of like just pulling up a blind and it's like—boom!—there's the sun.
LULU: Huh!
LATIF: Whoa! Okay, so—okay, so so far we have—so there's the dirt, there's the—there is the temperature extremes, there is the lack of dawn and dusk, um.
MOLLY: And so what those temperature shifts do on the moon ...
LATIF: Mm-hmm?
MOLLY: ... is they actually cause the moon to shake.
LATIF: Really?
MOLLY: Yeah, there are moonquakes.
LULU: What?
MOLLY: So many kinds for actually so many different reasons. The ones I think are sort of super interesting are the ones that are caused by the tides.
LATIF: With our tides?
MOLLY: With our tides.
LULU: Oh.
MOLLY: And basically how that works is the moon causes the tides on the Earth, which means the moon's gravity pushes and pulls the water in the oceans on the Earth.
LULU: Right.
MOLLY: Which then changes the gravity of the Earth, which actually fiddles with the moon itself again. It's like a feedback loop.
LULU: Huh!
MOLLY: And moonquakes are happening quite often. So just know when you look up there, it's trembling.
LATIF: Stage fright.
LULU: Oh, that's lovely!
LATIF: Yeah.
MOLLY: I know.
LATIF: And I guess when you're—like, when we're looking at the moon, the whole thing is kind of grayscale, right? Are there colors on the moon?
MOLLY: Everything is pretty gray. One thing I did hear was that when things land on the moon, like an asteroid or a meteor, there's like a whiteness to it that's really bright. It's almost like newborn material that has hit from—from far away in the solar system. And then over time, as it starts getting pummeled by, you know, the solar wind from the sun and different types of, like, charged radiative particles from space, that those cause that whiteness to kind of like heat and condense and heat and condense, and then it becomes dark. And so the moon seems like it's a place of light and shadow.
LULU: Hmm. I feel like having this conversation with you, I think you were very successful in your premise. But more than that, like, it's like—this—most of our images are either the ones we can see with the naked eye where it's this, like, comforting twinkle. It's this source of light in darkness. And it's so twinkly and forgiving and welcoming, and then it's like, "No. Take off your shoes. Welcome to this place. The dust is daggers. You're gonna bleed if you scrinch into the dust."
LATIF: Temperature extremes!
MOLLY: I mean, it is probably both twinkly and dagger dust, and then also cold and alive. And probably a thousand other things, because we still don't know it that well. Like, in all of time, we've only spent three-and-a-half days up there. It hasn't—we haven't actually spent that much time on the surface of the moon.
LATIF: Oh really?
MOLLY: Yeah. Three days and, like, a handful of hours.
LULU: We've only—that feels—I mean, quite literally like we've only scratched the surface. [laughs]
MOLLY: Exactly. We really don't know this friend of ours that well, actually.
LULU: Huh.
MOLLY: And, like, one of the things that came out of these conversations with scientists is just how many questions they still have about the moon and, like, how much we have yet to discover about it.
LULU: Hmm.
MOLLY: And it's just like, you know, they would just rattle them off, like, what is the history of impact events on the moon? Or what is the moon like below the surface? Or why don't we ever see moonquakes on the far side of the moon?
LULU: Hmm!
MOLLY: Or what is the little bit of lunar atmosphere that is up there made of? And how can the moon help us understand other planets? Like, the list goes, like, on and on. Like, someone sent me a 120-page NASA book ...
LULU: Wow!
MOLLY: ... that was a lot about the questions on the moon. So it just feels like what we've done here is, like, this is what we know about the moon day to day right now.
LULU: Yeah.
MOLLY: But that could just get blown up again in—as we learn more.
LULU: Yeah. But still I just—I don't know. It's like, instead of going to bed thinking about the little boys fishing off the moon, which is a nice image, I'm gonna think about the long-ago volcanoes exploding on it.
MOLLY: Young lunar craters, that's what you're gonna go to bed thinking about.
LULU: I am. For real. It's beautiful. It's beautiful.
MOLLY: Yeah.
LULU: That'll do it for today. I truly do think about the volcanoes on the moon now when I'm trying to fall asleep I picture the different colors their lava may have been because apparently the lava was composed of different minerals. I picture them purple, yellow, and green. I'm not sure if that's accurate, but it's what I like to think about If you want to send us a picture of volcanoes on the moon or anything else that this show inspired you to think about, you can send it to terrestrials @wnyc.org, t -e -r -r -e -s -t -r -i -a -l -s at w -n -y -c dot org.
LULU: Anyway, I hope all of you have a happy New Year, and I'm going to just drop the hint that we have a special treat coming for you on New Year's Day, A little gift, a little offering from the terrestrial team. We hope you'll check it out. That'll drop early in the morning on New Year's Day. Until then, thank all of you for listening. Catch you once we've completed another lap around the sun.
CREDITS: This episode was reported by Molly Webster, Pat Walters, Becca Bresler, Alan Gafinski, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sarah Qari, Simon Adler, and Alex Neeson. Produced by Matt Kielty, Becca Bresler, Pat Walters, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Alan Goffinski, and Simon Adler. It was edited by Becca Bresler and Pat Walters, fact checkers Diane Kelly and Natalie A. Middleton, original music and sound design by Matt Kielty, Becca Bressler, Jeremy Bloom, Maria Paz Gutierrez, and Simon Adler, mixing help from Arianne Wack.
CREDITS: Special thanks to Rebecca Boyle, whose new book is Our Moon, How the Earth's Celestial Companion transformed the planet, guided evolution, and made us who we are. Also to Renee Weber, Paul M. Sutter, Matt Sigler, Sarah Noble, Chucky P., Sarah Stewart, and Patrick Leveron and Daryl Pitts at the Maine Jem and Mineral Museum in Bethel, Maine. Radiolab is supported by the Simons Foundation, who's in the Path of Totality Initiative, celebrates the April 8th Total Solar Eclipse, more at inthepathoftotality dot org. Thank you for listening. Until next time.
EMMA: Hi, I’m Emma and I live in Portland, Maine. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.
TAMARA: Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radiolab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.