Coming up next on this special edition of Arizona Horizon, astronomers from the University of Arizona discover a growing baby planet outside our solar system.

Also tonight, we'll hear about efforts to conserve water through the use of algae and fossils discovered by local researchers suggest new ideas about human evolution.

Stories and more.

Next, on this special edition of Arizona Horizon.

Arizona Horizon is made possible by contributions from the Friends of Arizona PBS.

Members of your public television station.

Good evening, and welcome to this special science and nature edition of Arizona Horizon.

I'm Ted Simons.

Astronomers recently detected a growing planet outside our solar system.

The discovery is a first in that the baby planet was found in a cleared out area of a disk of dust and gas.

Now, astronomers had always thought there might be a growing planet there, and they finally found one.

We learned more from the University of Arizona.

Astronomer.

Close.

Good to have here.

Welcome to Arizona Horizon.

Thanks, dad.

I just love this kind of stuff.

Okay.

So this is not.

This is the first time a growing planet was found outside our solar system in this fashion.

Or the first time a planet was found.

Period.

All right, so to be clear, we have found, I don't know, about 6000 planets outside of our solar system.

So.

But what's special about this is, we almost know nothing about how planets form.

And so we know that there are baby planets out there.

We know that there are planets that are growing, because, after all, they they get big like Jupiter.

But we've never really seen that process of how a Jupiter like planet is formed like a big gas giant.

So what's so excited about about this discovery is that we've actually been able to discover a planet, take a picture of it, no less actually growing.

And we can we can see material falling on the planet.

And when that material, it's gases like hydrogen and helium, it falls onto the planet.

And like, as everybody probably at home knows, when something falls through the atmosphere and lands on a planet gets hot.

And so we can actually see this heat that's being generated by this process of like, literally waterfalls of gas from outer space falling onto the surface of this baby planet and starts to grow.

Maybe people can see this as well.

What are we looking at here?

Right.

So this is this is this is this amazing system.

And I've been looking for this for 15 years and never found anything quite like this.

No one's ever seen anything quite like this, so it's very exciting.

So you see a star in the center, right?

That kind of looks like a star.

And then you see a ring around it.

It looks a little bit like Saturn's ring.

But here you can see this white ring that's around a star.

So right away that's an interesting looking young star.

It's got a big ring of dust and gas.

And then you see this purple dot kind of to the bottom there.

That's the planet.

That's wisp bit to be.

That's the name of the planet.

And, that's a very special planet because you can see it's kind of a purple color.

Yes.

And that's because it's, it's glowing from that heat of material falling on to its surface.

And that's a very unusual thing to see.

And even more unusual, again, it just gets better and better.

There's sort of a bunch of rings and it's sitting right in sort of a dark gap between there's a even a, there's a fainter ring, but it's down there to the bottom.

And then there's that very bright ring.

Right in between the rings is the planet.

And that planet is working really hard to keep that ring dark and cleared of dust and gas.

I saw that in the story about this.

I saw where it's kind of compared to, you know, clearing snow out.

Something is being cleared out to allow this little baby planet to become a big planet.

That's right.

I mean, the planet itself is is is pretty effective at clearing that area.

So it's scattering out the dust.

It's getting rid of any other planetesimals.

It's accreting the gas.

We thought that this is how these sort of things would work, but we've never been actually able to find a planet in one of these dark rings.

And and I suspect we're going to find more.

That's tricky stuff.

You need a really fancy, a really fancy camera.

Yes.

Take a picture like this.

I want to ask on how it was filmed.

I think we have another graphic here.

I want you to take a look at this and find out what what it is like.

Holy smokes.

What are we looking at here?

Okay, well, now, this is an artist's illustration.

Okay, the other image was a legit.

The real deal.

Yeah.

But this is an artist's illustration of what what might be going on on that planet.

And what you're kind of seeing here is you're seeing this gas and dust.

It's falling on to, the planet itself.

Astronomers like to call it accreting.

So it's it's accreting hydrogen and helium, and it gets really hot.

And so see, you see, it's white hot and it's emitting, a bunch of different colors of light.

One of them is a very special color called each alpha.

And that's where we were able to find it.

And because we can see this bright light coming from the planet at this very special wavelength, we know that it's from material falling onto the planet itself, and.

It looks like it's within that ring.

It's centered right there.

But I'm also seeing a ring on the outer edges.

Yeah.

So this is a little there's there's a lot going on here.

So this planet, it's so young that it has its own little ring, which you couldn't see in my photograph because believe it or not, all of that, this, this whole image that we're seeing here would all be inside one pixel of my photograph.

So.

So it's all this is an artist's illustration of what would happen if you looked at it with a really big telescope, much bigger than we have.

But but it tells you sort of the concept, the astrophysics of what's probably going on.

And we have real evidence that that this, planet really is accreting this material on to it.

It's growing, it's a baby planet and it's growing.

And this suggests to us, to you that this is maybe how our solar system developed.

That is why I'm so interested in these things, because, of course, we don't know how our solar system formed.

This solar system is 5000 times younger than our solar system, but it might look a lot like what our solar system looked like when, our solar system was just 5 million years old.

Our solar system's about 4.55 billion years old.

So if you go back a thousand times in time, our solar system might have looked a bit like this, and Jupiter might have looked a lot like wisp it to be.

But we're kind of running out of time, so we can't get too deep on how it was found.

But my question is not so much how it was found.

But when you found this, does that mean now you can find others?

Yes, yes.

It's very exciting.

So we're like, oh yes, it's all working.

It's a camera that was completely developed here in Arizona and yeah, at the University of Arizona.

And, it's it's an amazing camera.

It's about the size of a small car.

It's very fancy.

I just want to.

It's sort of a little silly, but, it has the ability to see the difference between two dimes that I'm holding up here.

Yeah, if I was looking at it from Tucson.

Okay, you know how far away do so?

Yes.

My goodness.

120 miles away, it can actually determine whether I'm holding up two dimes or one dime.

And that's the power.

It's a 20 millimeter second imaging camera.

So it's the sharpest imaging camera that we have.

Well, close you have a astronomer.

That's a little freak freaking me out there a little bit with that thing, but, great information.

Very exciting.

This is really good stuff.

Thanks so much for sharing this.

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A Phoenix based soil health company has teamed up with ASU to show how Arizona farmers can conserve water through algae.

We learn more from Kathleen Merrigan.

She's the executive director at ASU Sweetie Center for Sustainable Food Systems.

Good to have you here.

This is this I we used to do a lot of algae stories.

It seems like ten, 15 years ago.

And then it kind of eased off a little bit.

Is algae still a thing?

Is still a thing a great thing, actually.

Really good to be here.

Let's talk, let's talk.

All right.

Let's talk about improving soils with algae.

Yeah.

So what this company does that's mean it's space is called my land.

One word they extract live native microalgae from a farmer's field.

And then they take a close look at it, and they figure out what the best strains are.

They boost it, in a proprietary way, but sort of fermentation.

And then they pump it back to the irrigation system that the farmer already has in place to enhance soil quality.

How does it enhance soil quality?

So algae is a bio stimulant.

There are a lot of bio stimulants out there.

And farmers are understandably wary because they're all promoted.

You know, this is the greatest thing since the beginning of time.

And so I actually came across this company when I was working for a venture capital firm based in Europe, and I thought it was very exciting.

But the partners at the firm were somewhat skeptical because there was not enough third party data to support the company's claims.

So that was the genesis of this ASU partnership with my land.

Okay, so we're talking better water efficiency or parking, better water conservation.

We're talking the whole nine yards here.

Well, microalgae live microalgae is my land.

Puts it into a farmer system.

Can do a lot of things, including increasing water holding capacity.

And in our very thirsty state that's very important, but also will enhance the soil quality generally.

But what is this project is all about is using state of the art technology to measure and measure the impact on the farmers water use.

And by doing so, you're measuring the impact on the crops themselves, how much they hold.

You can do that, how much they they additionally hold water.

Now with algae.

What's being held in the soil?

Okay.

So so what we do is we go to a farm and we have several farm sites throughout the state where farmers agreed to let us do an experiment there.

So we have a control plot and the plot where we're using the million solution and we're collecting real data, a lot of data over time throughout the crops and a lot of different crops, too.

So how is it installed?

I mean, is it do you install like, fertilizer or do you put it underneath as a pump through?

How does it work?

It's great because for the farmer it's easy peasy.

You, do have a my land tank operation that's set up on your farm, but it it it blends right in with your existing irrigation system.

So it's it's quite easy, actually.

Yeah, yeah.

And it does make a difference again.

How much of a difference?

Let's say I got a let's say I'm using X amount of water right now.

I get mile and I get all this algae in there.

How much am I going to save X minus what.

Well that's the question that issues working on.

So my center along with the ASU center for Hydrologic Hydrologic Innovations, is doing measurements on the water with these things called any covariance towers, state of the art equipment.

And in another few months, we'll have the first reams of data.

But my land does have data on their website that makes claims that before I speak from the ASU, I'm going to make sure it's all certified, stamped with approval and.

All of that.

Yeah.

You bet.

All right.

Is this the kind of thing that is viable to be mass produced?

I mean, in other words, can we see the San Joaquin Valley and all the Midwest with these towers and with this algae being pumped into the ground?

Or is this kind of a specialized boutique kind of a thing?

It's actually being used in several states now, and I have a bunch of my graduate students this summer.

We've been looking at the U.S.

Department of Agriculture's Equip program Environmental Quality Incentive Program, which helps farmers cost share innovations on their farm that are conservation focus.

So saving water, improving soil quality that potentially could qualify for equip.

And if it does, and farmers might get as much as 50 to 90% cost share when they implement the technology.

So that's a part of our project too.

Last question before you go real quickly, the quality of the crop is is it as good as it is before?

I guess more algae shouldn't make that much difference, should it?

More algae should make a better crop.

It should make it better crop better tasting taller, stronger.

Well, taste is a little subjective, but certainly, it will, contribute hopefully to yields.

But certainly in terms of the resilience in these harsh climates that we face in our climate stress world.

Yeah.

Well, it's very encouraging.

Kathleen Merrigan, again, the Swedish Center for Sustainable Food System, that sounds like a sustainable food system.

And then some.

Thanks for sharing.

We appreciate the information.

Thanks for having me.

AC scientists have uncovered a set of fossils in Ethiopia that speak to human evolution.

And perhaps a new species of ancient human ancestor.

We spoke to ASU geologist Christopher Camp Asano about the discovery.

Welcome to Arizona Horizon.

Good to have you here.

Thank you very.

Much.

All right.

So so ASU, this is Ethiopia, right?

This is here at a site.

What did you find?

So ultimately we found 13 teeth.

But in those 13 teeth we have, three different levels preserved at around 2.8, 2.7, and 2.6 million years ago.

And what it shows is that at 2.6 and 2.8, we have members of our genus Homo and Unsuspectingly, or surprisingly, at 2.7 million years old, you have something called Australopithecus, which is something more aligned with what you see at around 3 million years or so in this region.

Interesting.

How do you know?

How do you got these dates?

Pretty cool.

I'm pretty close to bones, but, I mean, how do you know?

So, a really cool thing about working in East Africa is it's a, active rifting environment with lots of volcanoes.

And they've been volcanoes there for millions of years.

And when they erupt, the ash that they deposit includes a mineral called feldspar that we can use to date.

So the argon argon dating or potassium argon dating, radiometric dating, we can date those ash horizons, and we have multiple of them in our sequence so that we can say, well, this fossil is between this date and that date and this fossils between here and here.

And so you can use them to set up a, Kronos stratigraphic framework, if you will.

How many points of dates that you can insert your fossils in between.

So basically you work around and can figure that out.

Yeah.

So in fact, we knew most of the dates of the fossils before we even found them.

Yeah, we had we knew the age of the sequence and that's why we were surveying there because it's sort of an important time period.

We just saw Lucy.

Where does Lucy fit into all this?

So Lucy has found about, maybe 50 miles away.

30 miles away, from where we found these these new specimens.

And Lucy, exists in the afar, this region of Ethiopia, from about 3.8 to about 3.0 million years old.

Wow.

A million years away.

And, so there's this gap that we had and from about 3 million to 2.5 million, and we started showing that in about ten years ago with, again, this material we call early homo.

So our genus Homo.

And this additional material shows that, you know, potentially this Australopithecus lineage, it could be related to Lucy somehow.

We don't know.

It's still not enough to tell is only nine teeth that we have of this, that there's another critter on the landscape.

So it goes from this sort of big gap for half a million years to now, two species on the same landscape.

Is that why you were surprised.

A little bit?

Yeah.

I mean, it's it's a it's a time period.

It's not well preserved.

And, and hominin fossils, as we call them, are very rare on the landscape.

So it takes a lot of time until you come across them there.

You know, you find hundreds of other animals on the new fossilized animals.

But hominins are extremely rare.

And so it took us, you know, ten years to find the first one.

And so then finding this one and finding it being something different, it's kind of a cool surprise.

So.

So Australopithecus existed maybe at the same time as the oldest human answer I do.

Yeah, exactly.

And so there are bits of Australopithecus, in the area.

Again, there's this one called Australopithecus gari from 2.5 million.

But it may not doesn't seem to be exactly on, on our lineage.

And so this, that sort of takeaway is that, you know, this sort of simplified model of evolution where you assume that one species splits into maybe 1 or 2 species, other species, it's not so much a family tree as it is a family bush, if you will.

So all of a sudden now you have, if you look at East Africa, you have four different early human taxa earlier and species running all around the landscape.

Does that make it doesn't sound very linear to me.

Does that make it more difficult to figure things out?

Yeah, it.

Does make it more difficult, especially when you only have a small sample size, like again, nine teeth, but not enough to either really characterize it into a new species.

You know, it doesn't look like Lucy's species.

It doesn't look like the other things that we know at that time.

So we didn't name it, but we didn't group it into something.

It exists already.

And so, it creates a challenge because you're, you know, you have little tiny pieces of a puzzle, but it makes it that much more exciting because you know that there's still more out there to find.

Could they have co-existed?

I mean, is this the kind of thing, it could it possibly have happened?

Or just.

You stay on over here.

I'll stay over here.

That kind of stuff.

Yeah, it's it's tough to say because, you know, there we have sort of the early Homo, Australopithecus, early homo.

So we know that they overlapped broadly in time and space.

Yeah.

It's tough to say whether they, you know, wave to each other as they walked around during the day or not.

Yeah.

But it's possible.

It's just it's, you know, you can't really say one way or the other, so.

But, but in any way, just looking at this and this discovery, what does it say about human evolution?

I think it tells us that there's still a lot more to find.

And this is sort of the case, with discovery driven science in general, whether it's dealing with, you know, dinosaurs or early humans.

Right?

It's it's getting people into the field, boots on the ground.

The more time you're looking for things, the more things you're going to find.

It may take a long time.

It might only be a handful of teeth, but every discovery sort of becomes important.

Well, you said more needs to be found.

Can more be found at this particular site?

Can more be found in this general area?

Oh for sure.

I mean, are are the sites being taken up as I guess, my quest.

I mean the sites are, are we've we've carved up the landscape pretty good amongst different research groups.

But every year.

Right.

You have, you know, wain sorry, rain and wind eroding the landscapes.

And you go back out and you find new things every year.

So, the sediments are sort of renewing with fossils.

And so, you know, like I said, you know, we found one fossil in, you know, important fossil in ten years.

And it took us a while to find the other one.

So it's just a probably a matter of time.

Yeah.

And I imagine a lot of questions you still want answered as well.

Exactly.

Yeah.

We definitely want more.

We want to know what this thing was like.

Right, right now we know what its teeth look like.

We want to know, you know, what was its skull like?

How did it move around the landscape?

What did it eat?

Those sorts of things.

So this is sort of a little teaser.

Chris Campuzano great stuff geologist.

Thanks for sharing the story.

So thank you for having us.

And that is it for now I'm Ted Simons.

Thank you so much for joining us on this special edition of Arizona Horizon.

You have a great evening.