Zoozve
54:52 Share

WNYC Studios is supported by Zuckerman Spader. Through nearly five decades of taking on high-stakes legal matters, Zuckerman Spader is recognized nationally as a premier litigation and investigations firm. Their lawyers routinely represent individuals, organizations, and law firms in business disputes, government, and internal investigations and at trial. When the lawyer you choose matters most.

Online at zuckerman.com. Radiolab is supported by AppleCard. Reboot your credit card with AppleCard. Earn up to 3% daily cash back that you can grow at 4.40% annual percentage yield, APY, when you open a savings account through AppleCard.

Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on iPhone. Subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners. Subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com. Radiolab is supported by Progressive. Most of you aren't just listening right now. You're driving, exercising, cleaning.

What if you could also be saving money by switching to Progressive? Drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average, and auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Multitask right now. Quote today at Progressive.com, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023.

Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations.

See Mint Mobile for details.

Wait, you're listening? Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. See? Yeah. I know nothing except one very weird word. That's right. Okay, so. Hey, this is Latif Nasser. Okay. And Lulu Miller. This is Radiolab. And today. All right. I'm ready for your story wares. We're going to start with a mystery about the universe that I stumbled across in

In my kid's bedroom. Oh. Okay, so about a year ago, I was putting my son to bed, my two-year-old son. You know that moment where it's like, okay, it's time, like, and boop, in the crib, right? Spike the football, run out of the room. Right, exactly. So as I was doing that, I, like, looked up to the adjacent wall.

at this poster that we have up. A kid's poster of the solar system. Real on brand for the NASA match family. Yeah, very on brand. And I would say it's a little bit more detailed than the average children's solar system poster, which is, you know, why my wife and I picked it in the first place. I get that. So anyway, I look at this poster, it's on the wall, and I like notice something, which is that

So Venus on this poster, Venus had a moon. And I was like, that's weird. I don't remember Venus having a moon. Huh. But like, what do I know? I don't know. You know? Right. So I put my kid to bed. Huh.

So then I went back to my bedroom and then I just look up on my phone, does Venus have a moon? And the first thing that comes up was a NASA website and it says Venus does not have a moon. Oh. Yeah. Okay.

But then the next morning, after my son wakes up, I look at the poster again. And on the poster, Venus very much has a moon. And not only does it have a moon, the moon has a name. Okay. Wait, I'm actually going to have you read it. Okay, one second. Okay, so I'm unrolling the poster here. Oh, it is in high detail. Right. Okay. And here, tell me what this moon is called.

Okay. I'm straining my eyes here. Zuzve? Zuzvi? Yeah, Zuzve. Okay. When you see the name, I'm like, that's too weirdly specific to be an accident. Right. That's not just like a poster designer being like, a little dot would look cute here. Right. It's labeled. Okay. Right. Okay, so then I started Googling Zuzve. It's a nice Google-able word. It's a very Google-able word. And there's nothing. Nothing.

Like, they were literally no results in English. What? The results were all in Czech. Huh. And they were about zoos. And I'm like, that's not the thing I'm looking for. Mm-hmm. So I was like, okay. Yeah. Where do I go from here? Uh, hi. Hey, Latte.

I'm good. So I called up my friend. Her name is Liz, Liz Landau. Just like a space nerd, but then also you as a professional space nerd. She has spent the last 10 years working with the media department at NASA. Oh. And before that, she used to be CNN's space correspondent. Okay. And so I told her, I showed her the poster. Doofus.

Zuzve. What? It's like supposed to be a moon for Venus. I've never heard of those. Okay. There are no moons of Venus, right? Right. Hmm.

So at this point, the next logical step... Your signature is very cryptic. Yeah, I've changed it to just writing my name now. ...was to track down the person who made the poster. Oh, oh, good. Okay. A guy named Alex Foster. I'm an illustrator and I'm from Margate, which is like the southeast coast of the UK. And I was basically like, did you put Zuzvay on here as a joke? Old map makers would make up fake towns. Or like a little hidden signature or something? Or is it your dog's name? Um...

No, no. Basically, I don't know. I don't know about this stuff. Like, I wanted to make a solar system map, so I looked online and did a bit of research. He says he found a detailed list of all the moons online, and there it was. Z-double-O-Z-V-E. But then when I tried to find that same list, I couldn't find it. I mean, I was, like, scouring the internet, and nothing. Huh. Weird. But then, around that same time...

I got this text from Liz. So in my head, because you had said Zuzbe, I was like, oh, it's Zuzbe. It's Zuzbe. But then I sort of like looked away from it and I looked at it again. And I was like, what if it's not Z-O-O-Z? What if it's 2002? And so I just Googled 2002 V-E and I found this object. What?

Which I did not know existed before. It's probably my writing as well. Like, I write in all caps. I thought it must have been said rather than two. And so when I told Alex about the mix-up, he realized he'd misread his own notes. And I thought the names, as soon as they made more sense. Oh!

Anyway, okay, okay. So long story short, there is a thing next to Venus and it is called 2002 VE. It was discovered in 2002. That's why it's called 2002 VE. 2002 VE 68, if you're being technical. Yes, but it's not a moon of Venus? So I thought that there was a simple answer to that, but it turns out there isn't. It's not a moon of Venus, but it's also not not a moon of Venus. Okay. Because...

2002 VE, which I'm just going to keep calling Zeus VE, is a mischievous weirdo character that defies long-held rules of our solar system and upends, at least for me, the way I think about the entire universe. Okay, so we humans first discovered Zeus VE, but then we were like,

Thanks to a cultural moment of astronomical angst. March 23rd, 1989. In the late 80s, early 90s, a couple things happened. Billions go about their day, oblivious to the approaching global killer. First of all, this asteroid, 4581 Asclepius. Scientists report that a huge asteroid... Came close. Mankind's closest encounter to the deadly asteroid...

Around that same time, geologists find evidence in the Yucatan that it was an asteroid. A gigantic asteroid. A speeding object. That wiped out the dinosaurs. Then, just a couple years later... A comet named Shoemaker-Levy 9 rained down on Jupiter. Scientists actually watched, for the first time, a comet smash into a planet. And before long...

people's creeping sense of fear of what else might be out there turned into an all-out asteroid frenzy. In the 90s, you get asteroid blockbusters like Deep Impact. Yeah.

Not to mention a horde of B-grade movies and TV. And all the while, people keep spotting real-life asteroids and comets.

And the anxiety just compounds. 2028, that could be our last time on Earth.

Now imagine bundling up all of that fear and anxiety and plopping it on the desk of this guy. I mean, I actually have no formal training in astronomy, believe it or not. Really? Because that's basically what happens next. I just have a BS in physics, which I just barely got. So this is Brian. I am Brian Skiff. He does, in fact, work in astronomy. At Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. I

I am a research assistant. Apparently he's sort of like a legend over there. Like basically since the 70s, he's been there like every night and day and holidays and weekends. Anyway, so back in the 90s, during all of that asteroid frenzy, Congress got concerned enough that it sent a mandate to astronomers all over asking them to figure out what else is out there.

And so Brian and his colleagues kicked off this brand new asteroid scavenger hunt. Lonios, is that how you pronounce it? Yeah, the Lowell Observatory Near Earth Object Search. NASA likes acronyms when you put in grant proposals. And what they did was... We refurbished a wide field camera of a special kind. Essentially, their job was to scan... A substantial fraction of the sky. Every single night.

And what they were looking for were... Potentially hazardous asteroids. What they call PHAs. Asteroids that could be the killer. And it is in this nightly hunt that Brian discovers Zuzvay.

Okay. It looks like an asteroid about the size of the Eiffel Tower. Oh, okay. Imagine something kind of gray and pockmarked and potato-shaped. And it's a PHA. Oh, okay.

Soon thereafter, people do a bunch of calculations about it and they're like, it's technically within the range, but it's very, very unlikely to ever hit Earth. Yeah, this is not one of those. Okay. So at that point, Zuzvay seems so unremarkable that Brian kind of mentally crosses it off his list of things to worry about and... I had no notion that I had even discovered it. ...forgets about it entirely. Huh. But fast forward a year and...

Can you see my face? I can see your face. Zuzve catches the attention of this other scientist. In Finland, my name is pronounced simply Seppo Mikkola. Back in 2003, Seppo was an astronomer at the University of Turku studying... Celestial mechanics. Basically, orbits.

Seppo says that when he first noticed Zuzve, he realized it was in a... As in, its orbit didn't really make sense.

So, SEPVOT calls up his colleague, whose name is Paul, whom I also called. I'm not huffing and puffing too much from coming up the stairs, and I think I'm good to go. He's also an orbit-studying astronomer at the University of Western Ontario. Yes.

And he says in order to fully understand how weird Zuseve's orbit is... Let me think about the best way to explain this. You have to understand this one fact about the solar system. It's an ironclad rule of our solar system... That every celestial body moves in an orbit. And even though it can get gravitationally nudged around by other things near it, it primarily orbits one thing. And so the moons orbit planets...

The planets orbit the sun. Wait, but moons, doesn't a moon technically orbit the planet and the sun? The answer is sort of technically, but we're actually talking about something different. What we're talking about is like, it's almost like a primary partner, right? The sun is pulling on everything in the solar system. That's true. But moons, including ours, are much closer to their planets. So it's looping the planets.

And that's what Paul says objects in our solar system generally do. Everything hula hoops one bigger thing. Yes. Got it. Now, Seppo and Paul look at Zeusvei. Making careful calculations, computer simulations and so forth. And what they find is it's being pulled around by the sun's gravity.

So it orbits the sun, that's its primary partner. But weirdly, even though it's orbiting the sun, Venus is also keeping this tiny gravitational toehold on it. And because of that, while Zuzvay is going around the sun, it actually stays relatively close to Venus and loops around it. It circles Venus too. To our amazement, it's orbiting both.

So Zeus-Ve is like in a poly relationship with the Sun and Venus? Yeah, which by the way, nobody has ever seen before. Revealing, if you will, the first quasi-moon known in our solar system. Quasi meaning just like a small moon? Quasi meaning neither moon nor not moon. It's this mysterious in-between thing that's the first anyone has ever discovered anywhere in the universe.

When you say it, I like quasi because it sounds like crazy. And it really is kind of crazy because Paul and Seppo realize its orbit takes a close...

Both to the Earth and to the planet Mercury, it actually is quite a large distance from Venus at times. And not only that... I wondered where it came from. Seppo actually computes Zeusvei's trajectory backwards in time. And I found that 7,000 years ago... It was actually way closer to us. And we flung it away. And now it's off dancing with Venus. It's this free spirit do-si-do-ing around the solar system.

So like, Latif, this is neat, but it does seem like just one sort of weird little pebble out there ping-ponging around in the whole solar system. Like, why has it captured your attention? Why do you care about it so much? Okay, so much of it goes back to...

The poster, right? The map. In your kid's room. In my kid's room. But really, at least for me, in my head, and I think kind of in all of our heads, the solar system diagram that we all see in school. And it's like you have the sun and then you have all the planets. And it's like a beautiful, perfect circle inside a circle inside a circle inside a circle inside a circle. And they all have like...

Tracks, right? They're rails. Right. And it's predictable. You can keep your watch by it. Totally. Like, this is just Earth. This is the speed she goes. This is her rotation. She'll be back here at this station this time next year. Yeah, exactly. It's a clock. We live in a clock, right? Right. And that's basically what scientists have thought of the solar system for millennia, right? Like, okay, so when I was in college, one of the things I studied was the history of astronomy. So...

You go back 2,000 years, right? You have Aristotle and the Greeks. They were writing about perfect crystalline spheres all nested one inside the other. And then 1,500 years later, you have Copernicus and the whole scientific revolution. You move the sun to the center instead of the earth. The circles become ellipses. They're more like ovals. The planets get their own moons.

Still, it's a new version of the clock. Everything is still moving in graceful nested curves and predictable ways. Right. And and that's how I always envisioned everything moving up there.

Right. But then Zuzve doesn't seem to fit neatly within that system. It's a weirdo. It's a rule breaker. But don't you think Zuzve is still operating within a bigger clock? Like it might still just be following different rules. Sure. There are rules. There are definitely rules. But the thing is, Zuzve is following rules that we can never fully grasp.

It's a three-way dancer, not a two-way dancer. So it's not on those predictable rails. And because of its polyamorous relationship with the sun and Venus, it actually presents sort of a mathematical conundrum known as the three-body problem. Three-body problem. Okay. Basically, the three-body problem is this idea that if you're tracking, mathematically trying to predict and understand these two bodies that are...

circling one another or orbiting one another, their gravity is pulling on one another, like the Earth and the Moon or the Sun and the Earth. That's totally doable. Very clear math. You can do that. When you literally add one other thing, when there's three bodies, which is, Zuzve is a third body, right? All of a sudden, the math becomes exponentially more difficult to the degree that... Mathematically...

It's impossible to follow it. You just cannot calculate where Zuse is going to go next. That is really counterintuitive. I would expect that like the right physicists or astronomers with the right math. It's like, OK, now you just also have sun pulling. So it'll go. You think it's like juggling balls. Like it's like juggling three balls is not that much harder than juggling two balls. Right. Right. But this is like.

Literally, once you add the third ball, it's like every mathematician drops all the balls. It like becomes unknowable? Yeah. It's only possible to do it for a certain amount of time. It's like you can't predict it more than a little while out. Like, for example, we know that Zuzve is going to leave Venus at some point. Oh. But we don't know what it's going to do after that. It's a mystery. Okay. That is exciting. And by the way, Zuzve is not...

the only unpredictable free spirit out there in the solar system. It's just the beginning.

Because since 2002, scientists have started finding lots more of these quasimoons. And these other quasimoons, some of them behave in even weirder ways than Zeusveta. Huh. Okay. There are the Jovian Trojan asteroids. Even though they're orbiting Jupiter, they don't circle it. They actually stay ahead of or behind Jupiter as all of them go around the sun.

There's a group which always stay in front of it and another group which always stay behind it. Like Secret Service agents or something. Yeah, something like that. Then there are horseshoe quasimoons, which...

Which look like they... Start out in front of the planet. Orbit partway around the planet. And then they stop and slow down. Turn around, go back the other way. Wait, how do they stop and slow down and turn around? It's the planet's gravity that causes this advance and retreat motion. Weird. It's going to get weirder here. There's some that do like a comma shape. Hmm. Like back and forth. Ha ha.

And those ones are called tadpoles. That's cute. And Earth has a bunch of quasi-moons too. We do? How many have they found? There's at least like seven of them, I think. What? And all of these are all different. Like we have some Trojan moons. We have some horseshoe moons. Wow. And so now when I think of that same map...

It's full of all these weirdo characters all dancing around like a Fantasia, you know? So it's not like we're not stuck in a clock. We're what? We're in a club? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. It's like Venus hooked up with this random asteroid at a club. They're dancing together. Nst, nst, nst.

But then at the end of the night, they're going to part ways. And who knows where they're going to go next? Yeah. There's so much unknown. It's like you don't know who you're going to dance with next. Right. And I would rather live in a club than in a club. Yes. You know what I mean? No, I feel that. And...

There's one more thing, actually. When I was talking to that Finnish scientist, Seppo, I asked him what he thought about Zusevei. Because, I mean, like, this is a guy who has spent his whole career mapping out where objects will go next in the solar system. Yeah, like building the clock. He's been a clockmaker. That's right. And so I was like, okay, what do you feel about Zusevei? How do you feel about the fact that Zusevei is so unpredictable? Nothing. Nothing.

So he was like, this is not a new idea. This is not a new thought for him. And in fact, he never really thought of the solar system as being knowable in the first place. If I could predict everything, then we would just believe that everything has been determined. But it's not predetermined because, Seppo says, Zuzve is just an exaggerated version of

of what he has already known. Everything in the universe is pulling on everything else. The three-body problem, it does apply to Zuzve, but it also applies everywhere, which means, you know, in the long term, everything is impossible to predict. Yeah, yeah, that's right, because very tiny things can change everything. If I do this with my...

So at some point, Seppo, he just picks up his finger and he starts like waggling it side to side. Like scolding you? I had no idea what he was doing. And then he was like, look, just by doing that with my finger just now. I may have changed the Earth's orbit. I might have changed the Earth's orbit.

Wait, and is that really? That's like, that's not just hubris dream thinking. That's like an astrophysicist who understands the forces of gravity saying, I could have for real, real. Yeah. It becomes obvious after some billions of years. Very tiny things affect everything when there is enough time.

And for me, like, for Zuzve to enter my life in this totally random way because some illustrator accidentally put it there and it ended up in my kid's room and then Zuzve itself was this, you know...

promiscuous rock star that let me in on this secret that this place we live in is stranger and more connected and more filled with chaos and possibility than I ever thought. Like, that's what I want and that's what I want my kid to go to bed thinking about every night. Okay, that is pretty beautiful. Yeah, right? That gave me the shin tingles. Zuzbe, right? Zuzbe, right. Go, Zuzbe.

Okay, so Lulu, this was supposed to be the end of the story. Felt like an end. But it felt like three ends. But as I was reporting, this other possibility opened up. Uh-huh. And I just could not, I could not resist. It is a way to put Zuzve on the map for real. What do you mean? I'll explain after the break. Okay. Okay.

How do you solve a problem like a Zuzve? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? You can't because gravity and we're going to follow Zuzve as she tears another hole in the universe into a new possibility. Okay, continue.

Radio Lab is supported by Apple Card. Reboot your credit card with Apple Card. Earn up to 3% daily cash back that you can grow at 4.40% annual percentage yield, APY, when you open a savings account through Apple Card. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on iPhone.

Subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners. Subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com. WNYC Studios is supported by Rocket Money.

Did you know nearly 75% of people have subscriptions they've forgotten about? Rocket Money is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so that you can grow your savings. Rocket Money will even try to negotiate your bills for you by up to 20%. All you have to do is submit a picture of your bill, and Rocket Money takes care of the rest.

Rocket Money has over 5 million users and has saved a total of $500 million in cancelled subscriptions, saving members up to $740 a year when using all of the app's features. Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash WNYC. That's rocketmoney.com slash WNYC.

Radiolab is supported by BetterHelp. We all like to try to set our non-negotiables, whether it's hitting the laundromat every Wednesday or hitting the gym X times a week. These goals can start to slip when schedules get packed and the mind gets cloudy with stress. But when you're starting to feel overwhelmed, a non-negotiable like therapy can help you.

is more important than ever. Therapy can help you keep your cup full by giving you the tools you need to get back into balance. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire about all your quirks

to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash Radiolab today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash Radiolab.

Hey, Jon Favreau here. There's no shortage of political takes in 2024, but quantity doesn't cut it. We need a better conversation about the latest biggest election of our lives. On Pod Save America, me and my co-hosts cut through the noise to help you figure out what matters and how you can help. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, Pod Save America is breaking down the political news that makes us laugh, cry, and snap our laptops in half. Expensive year for laptops. Make sure to check out new episodes of Pod Save America on your favorite podcast platform or our YouTube channel now.

Okay. So this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser. I'm Lula Miller. Back to Zuzve. Mm-hmm. So when I was talking to Paul Wiegert, remember, who's the guy who helped figure out this was a quasiment. Yeah. He said this, like, one line kind of...

Not even what I was asking about. But like once he said it, I couldn't unhear it. All asteroids, when they're first seen, are given what's called a provisional designation. 2002 VE is just the name it got auto-assigned when it was discovered. Not its final name. Oh. An asteroid can be named...

Only after it is considered to be sufficiently well-studied and sufficiently well-understood. And 2002 VE68 is now at that point. Yes, but it has not yet been assigned one. And it hit me, like 2002 VE68 is a...

Is a terrible name. It sounds like a car serial number. It's like, what if David Bowie was named 2002 VE68? It just doesn't feel right. Yeah, it's not the right name for this beautiful creature in the sky. I hear that. And that's when I got the idea that I, we have got to name it. Wait, can you do that? Well, so I asked Paul, like...

Who's in charge of naming asteroids? The privilege of suggesting a name goes to the discoverer. It turns out that is me. So I went back to Brian Skiff, the guy who discovered Zuzve. In the early days, one was encouraged to be, you know, imaginative. He's discovered over 50 asteroids and has named a bunch of them. In the early 80s, we had four asteroids numbered consecutively. We named them for the Beatles. I have the letter from Ringo.

Wow.

And hearing him say all these names, like, it just occurred to me. Do you think it would be possible...

to actually name this thing Zuzvay. Oh my God, yes, yes. Yes, I guess that is possible. I mean, it has to be. You have to immortalize the typo. It needs to be Zuzvay. It should be Zuzvay. It wants to be Zuzvay. There's no better name. Like even just for search engine optimization, like there is nothing else called Zuzvay out there. It's not going to get confused with anything else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now, theoretically, you just have to like...

send a request to the powers that be, and then they will name it? Yes, yes. And you are thinking favorably of naming it Zuzve? Oh, I wouldn't think of that at all. You would not name it Zuzve? No. I think the answer is no. The answer is no?

Okay, can I make a case to you? And Lulu, as you know, I am nothing if not persistent. That's like my number one superpower. This is true. So... The illustrator mistook 2002 for Zed. I tried to make the case. And in the process, I realized I actually had forgotten to tell Brian the whole story behind the name Zuzve, like with the poster and everything. And when I did... Oh...

Wow. It was a mistake. Wow. It was a mistake. So he made an error, but I kind of fell in love with the error. Wow. Yeah, that's kind of interesting. And there's nothing else in the whole world called Zeusve. Zeusve. Would you like to name this asteroid Zeusve? Yes.

It'd be interesting if the story of this mistake could be compressed down to 300 characters. Brian was like, okay, look, it's a great story and all, but in order to submit the form to request the name, everything you're telling me has to fit in 300 characters or less. Okay. Yeah, I can write the heck out of those 300 characters. Can I write the heck out of those 300 characters and send it to you to send it? Yes. Okay.

We could do that? Yeah, sure. That's enough of a little twist that that would be very interesting. Right? To see if it gets by the naming committee. Wait, wait, naming committee? Yeah. Yeah.

So basically when Brian submits the name, it would then have to be reviewed by this group called the IAU. The International Astronomical Union. Those are the name keepers, name deciders. Yeah. Well, a committee under the IAU gets to do this. It's called the Small Bodies Nomenclature Committee or something like that. Well, the official term is the Working Group Small Body Nomenclature.

Which is a bit of a mouthful. Yeah. So we normally just call it the WGSBN. It's very cool what you do, but I do think maybe you need a better name. So this is Gareth Williams. He's an astronomer who worked at Harvard for many years and is the secretary of that working group. Rumors that I'm an alien are not correct. I'm glad you clarified. I would typically work 100 plus hours a week. And so the rumor went around that I wasn't human.

Anyway, so Gareth explained that the working group is responsible for naming asteroids and comets. And it's made up of 11 voting members who are astronomers who live all over the world. We have a couple of members in the US. We have members in the Czech Republic, Russia, China, Japan, New York.

New Zealand and Uruguay. As I understand it, it's their job to rubber stamp the name choice of the discoverer, who again is the one with the naming rights. Well, we don't call them naming rights. We call them naming privileges because if it's a right, they could argue, well, you can't tell me what I want to name it. Right. Yes, we can because it's a privilege and...

And we have to vet what you want to say. So I very quickly figured out that it's a lot more than just a rubber stamp and that Gareth and the entire working group take that vetting pretty seriously. We don't allow political or military names unless the person, if it's a person. No names of products or companies. Are there like people wanting to name things after themselves? You can't do that. No names that are too generic. No names of pets. Mr. Spock.

caused a bit of controversy. Scientific animal names are okay, though. Right. No names that are acronyms. Yeah. No names longer than 16 characters. Yes. And there are lots more. Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

But there was one rule in particular that stuck out to me as a potential problem. Any object that approached the Earth closely should have a mythological name because no person should have an object that could hit us named for them. If for some reason that object did, you know, turn to Earth or destroy the space station or something like that, they don't want it all over the news that like,

51054 Ellen DeGeneres, you know, was the cause of that or whatever. Anyway, so only mythological names. And even though there's no way Zuzve is approaching us anytime soon, because it's within a certain range of Earth, it does fall under that rule.

And are there ever exceptions to that rule? Not really. Okay. People try and say, can I slide on this? No, you can't. If we let you slide, we'll have to let everybody slide, which makes a mockery of the rule. Oh, that's not looking good. Yeah. But still, I thought to myself, I convinced Brian. I could definitely convince Gareth. Some people are just very persistent.

And does persistence pay off, do you find? No. No. No. Persistence just annoys me. Okay. Interesting. Good to know. Although I maintain my cool. Okay. But internally, I'm seething. Really? Oh, my gosh. Okay. This is very good information to have. You are so out of luck. You're so out of luck.

You're doomed. Maybe. But remember, he's just one person out of 11. Basically, it's a majority vote. Okay, so hypothetically, how does one make their case to these 11 people? Do you all gather together to discuss the proposals in some marbled hall somewhere? Marbled hall.

No, we don't have formal meetings. They do everything online. Any member of the working group can log in to the website through a special interface and vote on the names whenever they feel like it. Got it. Basically, I just became even more convinced that it all goes back to that

you know, that 300-character statement. Because that's what all the members of the working group are looking at when they cast their vote. Okay, so what did you end up writing? Here is the sentence. Are you ready? Okay. So I actually did call Brian back to read it to him before he...

Submitted it? Here it is. And it's actually, so the requirement is 360 characters. Oh, okay. And this is actually only 287 characters. So we got even gravy. If there's something you want to add in there, like whatever. There's room. Okay, here's what I got. As the first quasimoon ever discovered in the universe, this object deserves a name as rare as its orbit.

When artist Alex Foster drew this object on a solar system poster for kids, he misread the temporary name 2002VE as Zuzve, thus coining this original, odd, and memorable name. That sounds fine.

Yeah? Oh, yeah. Yeah, we might, you know, change kids to children and, you know, very minor tweaks. Okay. But other than that... Okay, great. Easy. Done. It sounds fine to me. Do you think they'll do it? What do you think is going to happen? I guess I don't have a good feeling for that. Okay. So after that, Brian officially submitted the name proposal to the working group. Okay. And our sense was this kind of thing usually takes a couple months. Right. That was about three and a half months ago. It took...

every fiber of my being to not email Gareth a million times. Yeah, you've got to sit on your hands. You have to restrain your natural personality. Sitting on my hands, locked up my keyboard. Don't spook him. Yeah, totally. But then we scheduled... Oh my God. Are you about to tell... Okay, okay, okay. Keep going. So we scheduled a time for when he would have the verdict. Mm-hmm. Yep.

I hear you. Oh, great. I can hear you. So we got on the phone for the moment of truth. Okay. Let me just check my phone. Great. For the, I'm logged in on my phone to the voting site. Okay. Let me just check. Let me just refresh the page. Oh my gosh. This is so dramatic. I'm like, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm holding my breath here. I've got to sign in again. Gareth, you're killing me. I have to log in again to the site.

Annoyingly sign in and this time I will save the password. Save. This is cruel and unusual.

Okay. As of yet, the decision on Zoos V has not been finalized. Okay. Okay. It's not been finalized. Meaning we don't have a resolution as of yet. Oh, okay. Wait, they still don't know? They're still waffling over there in the naming the stars land committee? We're still waiting on two members to vote.

And I sent them both emails last night and this morning. Thank you. Appreciate it. Well, it turns out one of the people who hadn't voted yet had COVID, which is why they didn't vote. All right. You got to send them some soup. Okay. But in the soup, the alphabet letters can only spell Zuzve. Okay.

Subliminal messaging here. You got to send them a voicemail. That forward says blulup, but backward says zoosweb. Okay. What I did do instead was I just tried to get any information I could. Can you tell us where the vote tally is now? I can't give you numbers. Okay. Okay.

Was it close? I can't be more specific. Like needle any intel I could out of him. Have you already voted? Oh, yes. Can you tell me what you voted? No, I can't. Okay, okay, okay. All right. No problem. Yeah, so basically we just have to wait. Aw. Are you okay? I'm sorry. I'm sorry you don't have an answer. I'm just patiently waiting on the edge of my seat.

Not knowing what's ahead of you, much like Zuzve. Right. Themselves. Okay, wait, but he did actually... Yes? Say one thing. Can you tell me in which direction it's leaning? It's leaning for... Really? For Zuzve? Yes.

Oh, Latif, that's good news. We're very close. Could go either way. Like any group, there's a conservative wing, there's a liberal wing, and there's a middle-of-the-road wing. Who are the two holdout votes? Where would you put them on the spectrum?

Middle of the road. Okay. Huh. Swing votes. Oh, they're the swing. Oh, gosh. Well, so what does that make you feel? I mean, it just opens it back up. It could go either way again. I don't know. Yeah. It's like vote counting on the Supreme Court, basically. Yeah, right. So we'll just keep, we'll keep hoping. And when are we going to find out? In a couple of weeks. I'll come back at you with an update. Okay. Yes. Call me any time of day or night. I am now invested.

Radio Lab is supported by Apple Card. Reboot your credit card with Apple Card. Earn up to 3% daily cash back that you can grow at 4.40% annual percentage yield, APY, when you open a savings account through Apple Card.

Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on iPhone. Subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners. Subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com. WNYC Studios is supported by Rocket Money.

Did you know nearly 75% of people have subscriptions they've forgotten about? Rocket Money is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so that you can grow your savings. Rocket Money will even try to negotiate your bills for you by up to 20%. All you have to do is submit a picture of your bill, and Rocket Money takes care of the rest.

Rocket Money has over 5 million users and has saved a total of $500 million in cancelled subscriptions, saving members up to $740 a year when using all of the app's features.

Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash WNYC. That's rocketmoney.com slash WNYC. Hey, Jon Favreau here. There's no shortage of political takes in 2024, but quantity doesn't cut it. We need a better conversation about the latest biggest election of our lives. On Pod Save America, me and my co-host cut through the noise to help you figure out what matters and how you can help.

Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, Pod Save America is breaking down the political news that makes us laugh, cry, and snap our laptops in half. Expensive year for laptops. Make sure to check out new episodes of Pod Save America on your favorite podcast platform or our YouTube channel now. Hey, it's Lev. I'm Lulu. This is Radiolab. And Lulu. Wait. Yes. Are we here for news? So, um...

We are here for news. Okay. So, okay. So as you know, I have to do the, do the, do the previously on. Okay. You want me to do it? Sure. Yeah, you do. Sure. Sure. Sure. Okay. So basically Zeus way is this mischievous piece of space rock that is neither moon nor not moon.

that is orbiting Venus and the sun, which makes it dance in all these wild and beautiful and different ways. And also means that we don't know where it's going, which gives you this giant thrill that maybe we're not stuck in a clock where everything is ordered and known in the cosmos. It's more like a club where there's possibility and it tears a hole in your heart. And it doesn't actually have a name yet.

Excellent. Thank you. And so given that this was the first discovered of an entirely new kind of thing in our solar system, and it's called 2002 VE68, like it needs a better name. And of course, the natural name felt like it should be Zeus VE. Had to be.

It was destined. Yeah. So we put in a proposal to this sort of all-powerful working group for small bodies nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union, which is like... They're the guardians of the galaxy. Yeah, basically. They were about to take a vote. And when we released the episode, the secretary of that working group, Gareth Williams, had told us... We don't have a resolution as of yet. Okay. We're still waiting on two members to vote.

But actually... Left, right. Hello? I can hear you. Can you hear me? But now, a little over a week later, just got off the phone with Gareth. Oh, okay. Votes are all in? Votes are all in. And... Well, I'm very pleased to announce that the working group Small Body Nomenclature has approved the name Zuzvay. Oh!

Oh, my God. Are you serious? Wow. Are you serious? Yeah. They're naming it Zuzve. Oh, wow. Great. I also just broke the news to Brian Skiff, the discoverer of Zuzve, who helped us propose the name. Well, that's a great little coup on everyone's part. And... Oh, good. That's so cool. Yeah. I also called Alex Foster. A poster guy? A poster guy to be like...

Like your mistake is now etched in the heavens forever. Now, having gone through what we went through, that retroactively makes the poster correct. That's amazing. Wow. How do you feel? I mean, I feel awesome. Like it's like, I don't know. It's the first thing like it that we ever found. And now it has a weird one of a kind name. So that that feels right. How do you feel?

I feel happy. I think it's a good name. Can you tell me what you voted? Well, since it's now been approved, I can say that I voted for it.

I just want to give you a big hug right now. A virtual hug will have to be since we're quite a few miles apart. Yes, yes. Oh my God. Wait, but wasn't there like that it had to be a myth? How did it get past that rule? The mythological rule? Yeah, so that was the sticking point for the people that voted against it. I mean, he doesn't know exactly why everyone voted, but he thinks we did get like no votes because of that rule.

But he also said that there are circumstances under which non-mythological names would be accepted if there's a good reason why. Really? I didn't know that. And the cute story behind this name, I think swayed the members who voted for it. Yes.

But we don't want to encourage, you know, a lot of non-mythological names. And in the end he says... It sort of just scraped by. Zizwe passed by a narrow margin. Has anything ever been named after a typo before? After a typo? Oh, that's an interesting one. I'm having a hard time thinking of a prior example of a typo. Gee whiz. I can't think of anything right offhand either. Yeah.

Wow. That is wild. This funny little thing you like squinted at, this typo that a poster designer put on a piece of paper that reached your eye that then led you on this whole chase, like that that is now immortalized and will outlast all of us in the sky. Right.

And to me, I think what's kind of beautiful about that is something that started to dawn on me as I was talking to Brian Skiff. Both Seppo Mikkola and Paul Wiegert did the real work, of course, identifying this thing. I was trying to sort of, you know, give him his flowers for starting us off on this whole journey, but he wouldn't take them. I hope people get the idea that, you know, people do their little bits and pieces incrementally and...

And, you know, it works out. It sounds like astronomy is a team sport. Yeah. And then when I was talking to Alex Foster... That's the weirdest thing because it feels like my part in this is so small. He did the same thing. It was just an accident. It's like so silly that this could happen. I feel like I didn't do anything. Like, what did I do? I did a tiny thing here. And the thing that finally hit me is that each of us was sort of stepping back to see ourselves differently.

as just one little ripple in the butterfly effect that you just described, where one seemingly insignificant thing led to another, led to another, led to another. And to me, that's kind of a microcosm of the world that Zuzve lives in, right? Where bodies move through space and exert a web of invisible and often unknowable forces on each other

leading to a universe where things happen that you just cannot predict. Wow. But, okay, so that's actually only half of the news. Okay. What's the other half? So it was so fun. It was so exciting to name...

A Quasimune of Venus. This whole time we've also been working and lobbying the same people, the International Astronomical Union, to basically open up fan submissions to name a quasimune of Earth.

No. So we're going to do a contest. No. We're going to do an International Astronomical Union Radiolab fan contest. So that listeners can name a quasi-moon? That listeners can do it too. So we did it. I want everybody to be able to do this. And not even just for Venus. This is now one of ours. This is Earth. Oh my goodness. Wait, this is awesome. Yeah. And this isn't one

isn't one of those companies that's like name a star after your sweetheart for Valentine's Day for $29.99 and then you're like Bates name Marty it is not that okay

No, this is for real. Okay. So basically what happened is Gareth, who you heard in the episode, the guy from the IAU, he showed me the quasi-moons of Earth that have yet to be named. So they're like, I don't know, seven to 12 quasi-moons. And he gave me three to pick from. And he showed me like little gifs of the orbits of each one. And basically-

I basically picked the weirdest one. I picked the... Like, in the spirit of this thing doing its own weird dance. Moving to the beat of its own drum. Moving to the beat of its own drum. Like, I picked the weirdest one. It's so weird, in fact, that it's like... Like, imagine the shape of a saddle. Okay.

And then imagine you're like that saddle is on like a like a bucking Bronco or something. And if you had like motion capture dots on the bucking Bronco saddle as it was moving around, like and then and that thing was circling Earth like some avant-garde artist made a saddle that no one could actually ride. Okay, so I'm feeling like words are like.

It's frisky. It's wild. It's untamed. Oh, my God. How would you describe this? Okay, so Lasha's showing me... Okay, neat. So in the middle, that's the earth. Hold on. Let me keep looking. Oh, it's... Okay. It's weird, right? So the middle of it is the earth? Yeah, that's it relative to us. Okay, I think I can describe it. How would you describe it? Well, let me finish watching it. So what I'm watching...

is this animation of like a pink line of its orbit that's slowly kind of building over time. And it's not, yeah, by no means is it a neat, you know, circle that's just going over itself. It's like each year or whatever, each rotation, it's going somewhere else.

And what I see is that it's slowly building quite a butterfly-shaped orbit. But that's only because it's... No? Yeah, I think that's the... I don't think that's exactly right because it's like... If you were to see it in that angle. If you were to see it from a different angle, it doesn't look like a butterfly at all. Okay. And we'll put the visual on our... Yeah, we'll put the visual on the website. Yeah. Here, Sara, do you want to take a turn at this?

Yeah, I was going to say send it to me. Okay, here. Yeah. I mean, the overall shape of it that it's like forming, it almost looks like a bow or something. I saw a bow as well. Yeah. A bow or a butterfly. Or a butterfly. Like a classic little girl's or like a bow on a present or a bow in a girl. That's true. Arianne, do you want to look at it too? I mean, I'm...

I'm super curious. Okay, here. There's part of me that's like hearing you guys describe it as a bow and then be like, oh, but it doesn't look like a bow from different angles. And then I want to be like, well, a bow doesn't look like a bow from different angles either. Oh, that's a good point. That's a good point. That's fact. Yeah. I mean, mostly I see like...

- A spirograph on drugs. - That's what it is. Spirograph on drugs, I think is the best description so far. - It's like if someone tried to use a spirograph to make a drawing of like an orchid.

Right. You know? It's like already a weird shape. It's a little bit like if you were to take a slinky and you sort of start wrapping it in weird ways. Slinky is right. Slinky is right. It's like a slinky that was too loved and too used and it got all tangled up. It's like a tangled up slinky. An overhand.

Overload. That's kind of the motion that it has. But the thing itself... So it's a rock. It's kind of several football fields long. You could walk it. You could walk it. Except that it's supposedly... It would probably be pretty jagged. It's not smooth. It's rough. Again...

We can't escape these on our show. Potato-shaped. Okay. It doesn't have any rings? It's probably gray. It doesn't have any rings or anything. Any volcanoes? No volcanoes. Nothing like that that we know of. We know it's shaped potato. We know it's texture, rough. We know it's size, rough.

Eiffel Tower-y. You know its color? It's probably gray, grayish. Okay. And then for its orbit, we're going to get... What we've hit today is slinky, orchid, bow, butterfly, saddle... Spirograph. Spirograph. M.C. Escher drawing of infinite things. Okay, but let me now talk about the contest. Okay. Okay. Yeah, so what are the rules? Okay, so here are the criteria. I'll go through them really fast. Okay, so names must be...

In Latin script, so using the alphabet that we use in English. Okay. 16 characters or less. Okay. 16 or less. Characters. Okay. Keep it tight. And then this one is the key one, and this is like following a tradition in naming things in space. It has to be from a mythological source. Hmm.

Of any culture. It could even be like kind of mythology from literature. Like they've had ones in the past from like Lord of the Rings, I think. Yeah, it has to be somewhere. It can be from any culture, somewhere from mythology. Names cannot be already used for something in space. Okay. Your own name.

Your pet's name. Darn. A military, political, or business name. Okay. Or a number. Okay, so you have to pick a name, and then the other thing you kind of have to submit. Well, there's two things. One is the caption. The caption is like the thing that will be in the record books next to the name. And then you also have to submit your reason for that name, like kind of make your case. So it's like a subtitle and then a pitch. A subtitle and a pitch, exactly. Okay. Okay.

Got it. The subtitle is like what myth it's from, what it did in the myth. The pitch is like why it should win. Yeah. Okay, Latif, so you mentioned that like you can't submit something that's already been named in space.

How do you know if it's already been named? Oh, yeah. Okay. So there'll be a list of all the already taken space names, as well as all the other rules on the website. Just so you know what's coming, this whole thing is going to go in two rounds. Round one from now till September, submit your name ideas. Then a team of Radiolabbers and IAUers will narrow it down to 10-ish of them. Then in the late fall, it'll be round two.

Vote on the names. Top vote getter wins. And we announced the winner in January 2025. It'll be like kind of like a new year, new moon kind of thing. And that's it. The website is now officially live. So go submit your QuasiMoon name at Radiolab.org slash moon. Amazing. So go to Radiolab.org slash moon and you can see the picture of the orbit and submit your name idea. That's it.

Go do it. This is a pretty rare thing. They don't do this kind of fan contest very often. How fun! Yeah, yeah, right? That's really rad. That's great. All this news-vay about Zeus-vay was reported by me, Latif Nasr, with help from McKeddy Foster Keys. It was produced by Sara Khari with original music and sound design by Sara Khari. Mixing help from Arianne Wack. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly and edited by Becca Bressler.

Special thanks to Larry Wasserman and everyone else at the Lowell Observatory, as well as to Rich Kramer. Thank you to the IAU and their small but mighty working group for small bodies nomenclature, as well as to the Bamboo Forest class of kindergartners and first graders who also have small bodies. Liz Landau, who you will remember, cracked the 2002 VE mystery. You can hear her work on NASA's Curious Universe podcast.

Dream big, everybody. Anything is possible. Hi, I'm Hazel, and I'm from Silver Spring. Radiolab was created by Chad Belmatt and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design.

Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Eketi Foster-Keese, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nainasam Fadan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khari, Sarah Sandbach, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Thank you.

Hi, I'm Luis Vera and I'm calling from Mexico City. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, the Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.