 All right, on this last show, episode 10.31, you talked a lot about eclipses, but there was one new story we didn't have a chance to get to talking about comments. Comments. Not comments. Comments. Let's hear your comments. We did comments. We did comments. Let's hear your comments on comments. Yes. Yeah. So NASA had a really cool mission, still does actually, called the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer. And it's basically an infrared telescope that's in space. Infrared telescopes are awesome, because if you want to look at cold objects, you can do it with an infrared space telescope. Just make your telescope colder than the objects you're trying to look at. That's how an infrared space telescope works. Is that NASA's, does that, WISE? Yes, WISE. WISE. Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer. Yes. WISE. WISE. Definitely a acronym. And before I go into what the study found, I have to tell you there's two different kinds of comments out there. Just like how we have classifications of planets and also classifications of where space begins. We also have two different classifications of comets and they're based on their orbital periods. So we have short period comets, which they complete a full orbit around the sun in 200 years or less. So yes, 200 years is short period in astronomical terms. There's also long period comets, which complete a full orbit around the sun over 200 years or longer. So if your orbit takes 76,000 years, you're a long period comet. Now long period comets are thought to originate mostly from the orc cloud. So there's the Kuiper Belt, which is a object of icy bodies that goes out from Neptune to about four to five times Pluto's orbit. So there's that area there. Those are where we think short period comets come from. Long period comets come from the orc cloud, which is much further away. It extends out about one light year from the sun. Probably a big cloud of the cold leftovers from the formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Well using data from WISE to see comets, they have figured out that there are about seven times more long period comets than we were originally expecting. So by using WISE and looking at the comets, which is what comets look like in the infrared, we have found out that there's seven times as many as we predicted. Now that's kind of important because long period comets are kind of like cosmic time capsules. They tell us exactly what the conditions were like during the formation of the solar system. Also this is sort of like a hazard assessment as well because long period comets, they move at amazingly fast velocities when they're coming through the inner solar system, especially at the closest approach during the sun, which means that they pose even more of a threat to Earth as impact events, especially because most of them don't start out gassing or basically being able to see them in visible light until maybe like two or three years before they actually reach the inner solar system. So yeah, so really cool result. There's more stuff out there than we expected, which is good because we can study it, which is also bad because it can hit us. So yeah. You also just kind of brushed off. You have to make the object, so you have to make your infrared camera essentially instrument colder than the object that you're trying to look at. Yes. But you kind of glossed over how insanely cold things can get in space. Yes, it's very, very cold. For instance, on the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, the cryo cooler in order to cool down the instruments is going to be at like minus 415 degrees Fahrenheit. It's like seven degrees Kelvin, which is like ridiculous. Right now in the studio, we're sitting at about 273 degrees Kelvin, so that's cold. That's very cold. Very, very cold. And with WISE, what they did is they basically used liquid helium in order to chill down the instruments because the instruments can chill themselves down a lot, but not enough to get super, super cold. Would liquid helium want to escape badly? Oh, isn't it just a teeny, tiny little particle that just wants to hit? It is, but if you pressurize it and you have a really good plumbing system to make sure that it doesn't escape as fast as you want it to, because it does vent out when you cool the instrument and then you eventually deplete or empty your supply of liquid helium, which is what happened a couple of years ago with WISE, as expected. It was designed to have that happen. Yeah, you do eventually lose it. You just make sure that all your plumbing's right. So get some good rocket plumbers or astronomer plumbers. See, we need plumbers in space, space plumbers. It's very important. So yeah. All right. Thank you so much, Jared. Thank you so much, Jared. Speaking real quick, just as a thought experiment, if one of these comets did hit us since they're made mostly out of water, would all that water just evaporate as it's entering the atmosphere or would that actually hit the surface? And if it's something big enough, could that cause sea levels to rise and stuff? I mean, holy cow, I'm just trying to even picture this. So a comet, like a long period comet, would be moving at, I saw some of the velocities they were talking about was 50 to 60 kilometers per second coming through the inner solar system. So that's kind of like, like through the atmosphere in one and a half seconds. That's not enough time to cause enough heating on a comet to actually evaporate it. And then it just straight up hit the earth and then it's game over for whatever's here. So yeah. So it's not good. So that's why we want to find out where a lot of them are and try to check if as best we can. On that happy ending. Yeah. Thank you, Jared. You're welcome. For all the positivity and leaving this place right now. For all of the news. For all of the news of asking how that space program's coming along. Exactly. For all of the news this last week, head on over to Tomorrow Space Orbit 10.31. You can see everything that happened this last week. Thank you for the one of the news stories that we just missed. We also had an incredible interview with Bob Walker this last week. It was really great talking about the National Space Console. And remember, we've got live shows every Saturday at 1800 coordinated universal time. That's 11 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time or what is that, 2 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.