Episode 43 - early dark energy, the fate of Venusian moons, and the power of forbidden lines

yeah why not i feel like i haven't been first for a while excellent taking away pile okay so this first paper is tidal demise the evolution and fate of a hypothetical venus moon so i didn't know this was such an interesting topic of study so i was quite excited to read this paper i mean i just love solar system stuff as well yeah we

don't we don't learn or hear about it anywhere near enough here so yeah it's

like the astro i would have done in a parallel universe if i started astro again not that i don't love what i do i absolutely do but i do think I think planets are cool and you can see them in the sky.

And I think that's kind of nice that you really it feels more tangible, doesn't it? So this work was led by Stephen R.

Kane at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the University of California in the US.

And this paper has already been accepted in APCE.

So as the title says, this paper is on the subject of Venus.

And I guess I never really thought about it before, but it doesn't actually have a natural satellite.

I mean, that doesn't surprise me.

I just never really gave much thought to it, I guess.

So this paper is trying to investigate whether any moon could have formed at all and didn't survive.

Or was it just it never had a moon?

Right.

So the title Evolution on Planetary Satellites is actually quite interesting.

Again, another thing I hadn't really thought about much.

And that's just because it encodes all kinds of interesting things about the planet itself.

So, for example, the rotational states of the host planets, even the long-term habitability of terrestrial worlds like the Earth.

And so, for example, in the Earth-Moon system, you have angular momentum transfer from the Earth, which is rotating quite rapidly to the Moon, and that causes the Moon to migrate outwards.

But this has actually ended up impacting the climate on Earth, which...

I guess I knew a little bit, but again, didn't think much about it.

So that's kind of cool.

I mean, I feel like I've thought about tides, which are on a much smaller timescale, but not, you know, longer timescale variability.

So Venus, on the other hand, is quite interesting because it's almost identical in mass and radius to the Earth, but it doesn't have a natural satellite.

So there's several mechanisms that have been proposed in the literature to try and explain this absence.

So either Venus never acquired a moon through accretion, Or it did acquire a moon, but that was tidally destroyed.