Poured Over: Moiya McTier on The Milky Way

“To me, science is the rigorous attempt at understanding the world around you. And most people think that that means you’re in a lab wearing a coat, working with test tubes. But I think that that’s just a matter of using the scientific method in your everyday life. It’s a matter of observing the world around you and being curious enough to ask questions and having the logic skills and some math and science skills to find the answers to those questions. But it goes beyond physics and chemistry. It goes beyond math. It goes beyond psychology and sociology, the social sciences.” Dr. Moiya McTier delivers a very fun and somewhat surprising look at our universe in her debut, The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy. Dr. McTier joins us on the show to talk about stepping outside of herself to find our galaxy’s voice, the importance of story (and how it relates to science), growing up in rural Pennsylvania, her hit Exolore podcast, why space isn’t just for billionaires, and more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we finish this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Becky.

Featured Books (Episode)

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy  by Moiya McTier

House of Sky and Breath by Sarah J. Maas

Featured Books (TBR Topoff)       

Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku

How I Killed Pluto by Mike Brown

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode:

B&N: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I am so excited for the show. I know I say this frequently, but I am smarter after reading our current desk book and that always gets me really excited. So, Dr. Moiya McTier is an astrophysicist. She’s a folklorist. And she’s a science communicator. She’s going to explain all of this desk. She is the host of the XLR podcast, which if you are not listening to it, yes, I’m plugging someone else’s show. So good. And also the co-host of Fate and Fabled, which is part of the PBS Digital Story series, which is pretty fun as well. So we’re going to cover all of this. There’s also The Milky Way, her new book. Like I said, we’re going to cover all of this, but I have to ask first, Dr. McTier, when do you sleep?

Moiya McTier: Oh, Miwa. Well, first of all, thanks for having me here. Um, I sleep a lot. I think that I, it seems like I do a lot, because it’s a lot of different things. But in reality, I do the same amount of work that a person with a nine to five job would do, I just don’t have one job. I have like many part time jobs, I try to be strategic about all of it so that I can double up on the work. I started writing this book, the Milky Way when I was in grad school, getting a PhD in astronomy, studying galaxies. So it made sense to write a book about galaxies, so I didn’t have to do double duty.

B&N: How do you tailor a book like this? A book that pardon me contains the entire universe? How do you tailor it for the layperson?

MM: I spend most of my time as a science communicator and talking to laypeople, I have honed my skills of taking complex concepts and boiling them down, not dumbing them down at all, but boiling them down into their most important parts, and then translating them into language that the layperson can understand. So this is, this is my job. And the fun part about this book was getting to do it from a perspective that wasn’t mine. Because I’m usually explaining things as Moiya. And in this book, I got to explain things as The Milky Way, which was a whole different exercise, because The Milky Way has different references that it would use, it’s coming from a different starting point. And also, it doesn’t really understand what it’s like to be human, it doesn’t know what the average human knows. So that was the tricky part, trying to take the skills that I have as human science communicator, Moiya, and giving those skills to The Milky Way.

B&N:When did you decide to do this though, and write The Milky Way as an autobiography? Was it as you were setting out to create the book? Or was it, Oh, I started the book. And now I’m gonna step back for a second and figure out how I want to do this.

MM: No, it was from the beginning. Okay, I was very lucky in that I was approached by a literary agent. I had given a talk in June of 2019, about Juneteenth. And it was this really interesting talk that explained the history of slavery in the context of astronomical events, like for more than a century of slavery in the US, here’s how far the Galaxy moved. Here’s how far a photon could have moved. Here’s how much mass the earth gained because the Earth is gaining mass from cosmic dust every single day. And someone that Jeff, my agent represents saw that talk told him about me, and then he reached out. And so from the very beginning, when Jeff and I met to talk about book ideas, we landed on writing a book about the galaxy. And then I didn’t want to write it from my perspective, I thought, Who am I to be adding to this list of awesome popular science, astronomy books? What can my voice add to it? Not much. I mean, like, Yes, I have a unique perspective. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that different from astronomers that have come before me. The Milky Way, though, has a very different perspective. And it was this confluence of things at the same time, I was reading the Raven tower by Ann Leckie which is written from the perspective of a sentient rock, God character, and it just all fit together. And I remember being really nervous, actually, to tell my agent Jeff that I wanted to write it from this perspective. I went to an open mic at Caveat on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and just tried it out. I was like, hey, audience, I am going to tell you like a list of chapters that I’m thinking of writing in this upcoming book, let me know what you think. And it was well received, and my agent didn’t laugh at me. And so, I just rolled with it.

B&N: I’m gonna quote your opening of the book. And the first line is take a look around you human. What do you see? And then you follow it with? You’ll start naming objects and places but that chair You’re sitting in isn’t just a chair, that book you’re holding isn’t just a book, even the planet your kind is on the brink of ruining isn’t just a planet. They’re all me.

MM: Every single thing. We are part of the galaxy. And there are so many quotes that touch on this Carl Sagan, we’re all made of star stuff, the We Are The Universe trying to understand itself like it’s it’s true. We the elements that make up our body, all of the carbon and oxygen and nitrogen, those are formed in stars. We are literally Stardust, and so is the chair that you’re sitting on or the book that you’re reading, because it’s all the same stuff.

B&N: But also measuring time is really important. I mean, 200,000 years ago, human showed up. But when you’re talking about The Milky Way, and when The Milky Way is talking about itself, you’re talking in terms of billions of years. And that too, I mean, perspective, you’re putting a lot of context into something, you know, we look up and we think, Oh, that’s lovely, that’s pretty or if you’re in a city like we are, we don’t necessarily get to see the stars because of light pollution. But yeah, can we just talk about that scale, and how you actually communicate that kind of scale of time?

MM: Yeah, time and space. Because the Universe is big, along all of these dimensions. And that’s what I really wanted to do with this book was get people’s mind expanded as much as possible. I think that that’s one of the great benefits of studying astronomy, or at least the way that I have studied astronomy, I have this mental map of the galaxy, like when I close my eyes, and everything goes dark, I can picture the swirling disk of The Milky Way in my head, I can picture where our solar system sits within that big system. And I can even picture how The Milky Way sits within the larger galaxy. I think that’s really useful because it gets me out of my stupid little human brain for a while and gets me thinking about how I am a small part of a larger hole. And what I do doesn’t matter on the grand scale of things. But it matters so much to everyone around me, because I know how unlikely it is that we all managed to be here at the same time in the same place.

B&N: Okay, but one of the things you say in the book, too, is seeing isn’t the only way to gather information. And you and I have been talking we started this conversation about what you see and how you see. But seeing isn’t the only way to gather information. How do you study a black hole if you can’t see it, Dr. McTier?

MM: Yeah, that’s one way in which seeing is not helpful in astronomy. Black holes are these gravity pits, they’re super dense objects that have so much gravitational attraction that light photons cannot escape them. If they try, they just get bent back in towards the black hole. So we can’t see them. But we can see the influence that they have on everything around them. I think of it kind of like wind. You know that Katy Perry song, do you ever feel like a plastic bag just drifting through the wind? Well, you can’t see the wind, but you know that it’s there. And you know how it’s behaving because of the way the plastic bag moves. The black hole is the wind and all of the stars and gas and dust around it. That’s the plastic bag, we can see how stars move. And when they’re around something very massive like a black hole, then they start to move faster. So we can actually measure the mass of the black hole just by measuring the speeds of stars around it.

B&N: And you will also come out. And so another thing that sort of made me sit and think for a second. “Gravity is a galaxy’s most valuable tool.” I mean, I think of gravity is the thing that keeps me seated, I think of gravity. Force equals mass times acceleration. Like I that’s literally the only thing I remember from high school physics. And well, you know, it’s vaguely useful, but at the same time, gravity when we talk about because I don’t think of gravity in terms of outer space. I think of Neil Armstrong bouncing along the surface of the moon. I’ve seen that footage. I’ve seen those photos, but I don’t think of gravity as something that’s happening outside of where we are. And that speaks more to me as a words person than a book person. I mean, no book person than a science person.

MM: But I think it actually speaks to the way that we talk about gravity, the term zero gravity. We say astronauts on the International Space Station are experiencing zero G. They’re experiencing microgravity, because there is still gravity out in space otherwise, our planet would be flung out into the universe is gravity keeping us around the sun. There is even gravity keeping our entire solar system inside The Milky Way. So yeah, there’s gravity everywhere. But the whole gravity is the tool of a galaxy thing, I needed to anthropomorphize the galaxy. And so I needed to assign it some agency. But I also needed that to be rooted in the science because otherwise this would not be an effective science communication vehicle. And I have heard over and over again, through my studies that gravity is king, or I think I say in the book, gravity is king or queen. Because gender doesn’t matter to galaxies. And it’s true. All of the motion in the universe is because of gravity. The fact that stars form is because gravity can pull all of those particles of gas and dust together, the fact that orbits happen is because of gravity. So if you anthropomorphize a galaxy and assign it some agency, it needs to be able to do things. And we see that gravity does things.

B&N: I didn’t know that you grew up in a log cabin in the woods of Pennsylvania.

MM: No running water.

MM: Near the West Virginia border, no running water. Did you have electricity? I know you didn’t have a television, but

MM: We had electricity. Okay, we had Wi Fi, because both of my parents were adjunct English professors. So we needed the internet, but not running water.

B&N: This is a really tough way to grow up.

MM: You’re not wrong.

B&N: At one point, in the book, you say, I started talking to the sun in the moon as if they were my celestial parents, because that just made sense. And no one else was doing it. But it made sense to me. So I want to talk about you getting grounded as a tiny person and figuring out that here’s this big giant, where I mean, I’m not a woods person. I’m a city person. I like the desert. But I’m a city person. And I will own that. And I have spent time in the woods and I’m okay. Y’all can have the woods. But I want to talk about you getting grounded in story and narrative and how you can push things forward, and basically create a world.

MM: That’s my favorite thing to do. So imagine you’re this little girl who grew up in a city, and then you were transplanted to the middle of the woods where no one for miles looked like you. No one really understood where you were coming from. And so you spend most of your time alone. That was me, I spent most of my time alone, going on adventures in the woods or reading. And because I didn’t have other people to play with, I imagined things and I read stories and I came up with my own stories. And I started to see how these stories could give me companions, and how you can make companions out of anything or anyone if you are creative enough. And so that that just kind of stuck with me for my entire life, a love of stories and how they can transform people’s minds and like lived experiences.

B&N: Do you remember the book that made you think oh, I’m a reader? I want more of this I want story I want I want this. I mean, do you remember how old you were? And do you remember what it was?

MM: My entire life has been full of books. My mom was studying for her comps she was in a Ph. D program in English when she had me. So my earliest memories are her reading me the books that she was studying from Yeah, like reading little like newborn Moiya, Milton and Shakespeare and, and Thoreau. So I’ve always been a big book nerd. That’s why I was so excited to be on the Barnes and Noble podcast. It was one of my like, it was one of my favorite places to go when I was a kid. My mom used to read me this bedtime story called The Paperbag Princess. And it was about this, this princess, she was betrothed to a prince that she didn’t really like. And a dragon comes to attack her kingdom steals the prince away. And then she goes to save him. But her clothes are burned. So she’s wearing a paper bag. And when she finally saves the Prince he like, turns her away because she’s not dressed fancy enough. And I think that was pivotal in terms of my like, oh, you know, screw expectations.

B&N: You are the only person who’s graduated from Harvard with degrees in astrophysics, and mythology. And it shows up throughout the book, but very specifically in chapter four: Creation. That’s a big Gods versus science chapter Modern Myths in chapter seven. You have always sort of put together the pieces as you see them needing to be put together. What does world0building look like to you? As a science writer?

MM: I have a very broad definition of both science and the world-building. To me science is the rigorous attempt at understanding the world around you. And most people think that that means you’re in a lab wearing a coat working with test tubes. But I think that that’s just a matter of using the scientific method in your everyday life. It’s a matter of observing the world around you and being curious enough to ask questions and having the the logic skills and yeah, some some math and science skills to find the answers to those questions. But it goes beyond physics and chemistry. It goes beyond math. It goes beyond psychology and sociology, the social sciences. I think that folklore is a type of science. I think that the myths that we’ve been telling since the dawn of humanity, were humankind’s first attempts at understanding the world around them, which is exactly what I think science is. And they just didn’t have the benefit of all the accumulated knowledge that we have now, in 2022. My very broad definition of world-building is that it’s any speculative exercise where you’re imagining what could happen if x condition were met. I think that we can use this in fiction, obviously, making fun fantasy or sci fi worlds, but we can use it in policy creation. Legislators are using world-building all the time, when they imagine what the world would be like if a certain bill were placed on or not. Interior designers, makeup artists, I think that anyone who is trying to intentionally craft a space, or an atmosphere or or set a movement in motion, I think that’s all world-building. And, because I’m gonna bring it all together now, because I have broad definitions for both of these. I think that when you’re doing your world-building in any aspect of your life, it’s helpful to use science, this rigorous attempt at understanding how the world works, to make a richer, more realistic world.

B&N: You have a great line actually, this is from Chapter Seven. “Modern myths and you say, myths or stories that you Capitol be believing, even if you know, some or all of it to be false.” What does truth mean, anyway, when it butts up against a narrative that you folded into your identity and voice to me, I mean, whether you’re writing fiction, or nonfiction or memoir, or s, it doesn’t matter what you’re writing, it doesn’t a piece of legislation is voice, right? I mean, a scientific paper, an academic, it’s all voice. I mean, yeah, it fits within a certain structure, obviously, I mean, there are formal rules to writing a scientific paper that don’t apply to writing an essay that’s going to run an excellent, but it ultimately comes back to voice. And part of what I love about the work that you do, and the fact that you are working in different media. I mean, video is not the same as podcasting, is not the same as the written word on the page, is not the same as speaking. All of those are very different forms of storytelling. So ultimately, everything you’re doing comes back to story and your voice, which I really appreciate. But who are some of the other literary influences that have gotten us to this point? I mean, you’re not just scratching out scientific papers for a specific audience. I mean, you’re going bigger, you’re going broader. I mean, you’re writing your scripts for the PBS Digital series, which I’m so sorry, I just blanked on the title of.

MM: Oh, it’s called Fate and Fable, I get to write and host, which is really exciting, because I’ve started out hosting episodes that someone else had written, and it just feels totally different to be reading and presenting your own words.

B&N:Are you a linear writer? Or do you just sort of jot as you go and then sort of reassemble?

MM:No, no, thank you for asking. I wrote from the beginning to the end. Okay, this book, I tried to jump around there were times when I got stuck. In the crush chapter, for example, where The Milky Way is talking about its epic romance. And I got so stuck, but I refused to move on to a different chapter. And everyone around me was like, why I just just write the next chapter. Like it’s a myth chapter. It’ll be a nice change of pace. I was like, No, have to write from beginning to end.

B&N: This is what 216 pages. You cover a lot of ground and you cover a lot of conceptual work and a lot of scientific theory, and it’s all kind of fun and poppy. But for you as astrophysicist, what’s sort of the great mystery that you’re poking at and trying to figure out next?

MM: For me, personally, it’s got to be aliens. Okay, it has to be my dissertation in grad school was titled, Why Are We Here? constraining The Milky Way’s the lactic habitable zone, I opened up with this little story about four scientists getting together for a meal and discussing this question, why are we here, but they’re each placing emphasis on a different word. So the philosopher is asking, WHY are we here? What’s our purpose? And the biologist is asking, why are WE here? Like, what is it about our bodies? And the astronomers asking? No, the real question is, why are we HERE, in this place and time? Okay. And that’s really what I want to know, I applied to grad school with that question in mind, I had heard about circumstellar, habitable zones, or Goldilocks zones, the place around a star where life might form. But I hadn’t heard about that same concept on the scale of galaxies, and I just really wanted to know that. So I did. That’s what I went to grad school for. I figured it out. I’m still waiting for the ultimate conclusion of that, because my, my research was figuring out where in the galaxy we think that conditions are right for human like life. And I just want to know if we’re right, I think that it’d be really cool to understand what dark matter is made of and it’d be totally rad if we knew what dark energy was, and we could predict the eventual outcome of the universe. That’d be nice. But for me, I will not be happy until I know if there are aliens and what they’re like.

B&N: Okay, would you explain what dark matter is for folks who have not yet read The Milky Way?

MM: I can try. Which as any astronomer can try. Essentially, it is a type of matter that is very unlike the matter that we are made up of, because it doesn’t interact with light. It doesn’t emit light, it doesn’t absorb light, light just seems to pass right through it. But we know that it’s there because of its gravitational behavior, kind of similar to black holes. Although, they are not the same. Black holes are just so dense that light can escape, but they are still made of regular matter. We call it baryonic matter, like you and me. Dark matter is made up of something different. And there are a lot of hypotheses for what it could be different particles or different behavior behaviors of the nature of matter. But it’s a big mystery. And when when I say big mystery, I mean big because of all of the matter in the universe, we think that 80% of it is this dark matter that we can’t see that we can’t point a telescope at. All we can do to learn about dark matter is examine the gravitational influence that it has, and try to run experiments where we try to create particles and see if they behave like dark matter. That’s what we’re doing to figure out what dark matter is made of. It’s frustrating that we don’t know because it’s like, it’s kind of embarrassing for astronomers, right? Like, here’s something that makes up 25% of the universe. 80% of all of the matter, all of the gravitational attracting stuff is dark matter, and we don’t know what it is. And then it’s even more embarrassing that we don’t know what dark energy is, this stuff makes up like 70% of the universe. And we know even less about dark energy than we do about dark matter. So it’s an embarrassment of riches.

B&N: I know it’s frustrating for you, but it’s really fun to listen to you talk about it. And that’s the I mean, I’m still thinking about this little girl in the woods who’s like, huh, I like the night sky. You describe yourself as a weird kid.

MM: Oh I was. Capital D, capital W, capital K.

B&N: So here you are. In the woods. Yeah, your mom is reading you Shakespeare and Milton and all of these things. And you end up taking what on the surface, I mean, mythology and science. And you explained it beautifully how the two come together. So we don’t need to go back there. In the second. I’m just really appreciating the idea that you made your own path entirely. You made a thing that just did not exist until you said, Oh, I think I’m going to do this. It’s great. I think it’s a wonderful.

MM: Thank you. I think I’ve always lived a life of contradictions, a life of refusing to choose between one thing or another. I’m a very both/and type of person.

B&N: I think that’s pretty great. But I want to talk about your show for a second because it has a very great tagline. fact based fictional world building. And I’ve listened to a couple of episodes and I have to say I will be binge listening to the rest of them. But this idea where you sit in conversation and literally, sometimes it’s a scientist, sometimes it’s another creative sometimes I you know, you just do this sort of thing. Again, it goes back to this idea. That story is the thing that connects everything.

MM: It’s what we understand implicitly.

B&N: Dark matter, dark energy, gravity, I understand those connect us to, but really, ultimately, its story. So can we talk about where you’re hoping to take the show and what you’re hoping to do, and maybe explain a little bit more about your show to some folks who are listening?

MM: Yeah, of course, it’s called exolore, which is actually a portmanteau of exoplanet and folklore, just smashing those together, because that’s what I did with my interests. And I am using this show to explore all facets of fictional world building. Sometimes it means building a world from scratch to see like, in real time, how do you build a world, and I try to follow these six steps that I have come up with for how to build a world the way nature does. You know, it starts with the the physical world, that’s what forms first out in space, and then that world has climate, it has an environment on it, life forms, it evolves in that environment. So it’s adapted to it. And then culture forms based on biological needs and what you have available in your environment. So, I go through that process. But I don’t just want to show people how to build worlds. I also want to give them the tools to do it. And that’s writing tools. So I just did an episode, interviewing someone who came up with a software program to help novel writers. Sometimes it’s the information, that’s a tool. So I did an episode about how to build a culture from scratch and like, what is a culture and I think that it’s important as a world builder to be able to analyze other worlds that other people have built, so that you know what you like, from those worlds and what you don’t and also to like, see what’s been done. So that you know what else there is still to explore.

B&N: What’s next for you to explore?

MM: I’m developing a TV show.

B&N: Oh my, okay, can we talk about it? Or is it too early in the process?

MM: I think we can talk about it. No one’s told me I can’t.

B&N: Okay.

MM: Um, it is a science comedy show. The format is is loose and vague. We’re still in the development period. So we are open to working with a network to really nail down the final details of the show. But the general idea we have so far is that it’s a New York City apartment building full of celebrity tenants. And I am the science super so anytime they have a ridiculous science question like Kate Winslet’s small hadron collider is broken, or what is it? Lizzo’s flute is broken. And I need to teach her the science of acoustics to get her a new one before her concert starts in an hour. And over the course of the episode, I explained the topic and we have fun shenanigans with the celebrity and I think it’d be just a blast to make that show.

B&N: That sounds great. I would totally watch I would totally, totally watch that. Your real world too included quite a lot of love for the night sky, which you know, like I mentioned earlier, you and I live in cities now. So we don’t really get to see the sky. But when you do get to see the stars in the sky, and I don’t mean a planetarium I mean, the actual like standing under the sky at night. What do you think of first? What do you see?

MM: I think of how much of a shame it is that what we can see is a tiny, inaccurate version of what is actually out there. I know that all of the stars that we can see are actually the rarities in space, the most common type of star, we call it an M dwarf star. They are too dim for us to see any of them like we aren’t seeing any M dwarfs. When we look up at the sky with our own unaided eyes. And we can’t see the dust and the gas. We can’t see the 3d nature of it. We have these constellations that we we lump these stars together because they look like they’re near each other. In reality, there’s depth in space, a star all of the stars in the Orion constellation, they’re so far away from each other. So, that’s what I think of and I usually think of it in terms of like numbers. I am the worst person to go stargazing with because I can literally only identify one constellation and it’s Orion, which is why that was the example I used. But I still do love the night sky. But I think going back to what we were saying earlier about how everything is started us to the chair, you’re sitting on the book you’re holding, I realized lately that I have internalized that message and I now see everything As a part of nature, sometimes people ask me if I miss trees, because I live in Manhattan. And there aren’t a lot of trees. And I do try to get to Central Park as often as I can. But like the concrete skyscraper is a part of nature in the same way that I am. And in the same way that a car is and in the same way that a flower is like it’s all recycled stardust. So I have gotten into the mindset of like, just feeling connected to the whole world around me. And regardless of whether it’s city or country or nature, accepting that that is a natural part of the whole.

B&N: I’ve asked sort of who you were as a child reader, but who are you as reader now?

MM: I’ve had a lot of trouble reading lately. Actually, I think since the pandemic, I have had troubles sitting down and focusing. And especially because I started writing this book, I got the book deal a week before lockdown. So, this entire project has been kind of a pandemic project and I didn’t want to read books that would influence my writing style and tone because I spent so long trying to craft the voice for the way I didn’t want it to be influenced. But I read a lot of fantasy books right now I’m reading A House of Sky and Breath. It’s part of the Crescent City series by Sarah J. Maas. I have a book called vagina obscura on my on my TBR pile. Like a giant TBR. A book about rain by Cynthia Barnett. I think so many I’m trying to get more into nonfiction because before I’d say before 2019 I had not read like any nonfiction.

B&N: Oh, well, that’s interesting. So really, your world building was exactly that. It was truly, truly fictional. Oh, that’s so interesting to me, because I do again, like I think journalists build worlds, and world building to me is not a pejorative in any way, shape, or form. It’s a writer’s job. It is first and foremost, your job to pull us into whatever you’re trying to tell us. And I mean, I just want to be told a really good story. That’s what I’m looking for. And sometimes it’s going to horrify me and sometimes it’s going to be great. And sometimes, I’ve learned that maybe I should just listen to the audiobook, because if the author’s narrating it, especially if it’s narrative nonfiction, I’m less likely to get enraged. Because the author’s very calm about what the story they’re telling you about. Like you’re so much calmer than I was when I read this. Okay, what do you want readers to know about The Milky Way and what you’ve been trying to do in terms of being a science communicator? Because I think that’s a really original phrase.

MM: Science communicator? Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, it’s a growing thing. I think the first person I saw using that title was Allie Ward, who hosts the Ologies podcast in terms of the book The Milky Way. I think that I would like people to know that the hardest part about this book was pretending to be an omniscient being. When I am not at all omniscient. I had to pretend to know what dark matter is, but like, Haha, I’m just not telling you stupid humans. That was really hard. And I also was so terrified at different points in the book that I would say from The Milky Way’s perspective that humans haven’t figured something out. But, but that I was wrong, and I just hadn’t found that paper yet. So that was, that was the hardest part. Something that I just want you to know about The Milky Way, like the Galaxy, is that it is there for you. You do not have to be a scientist. You don’t have to go to school. You don’t have to have a lot of money to appreciate and even study the night sky. There are websites like Zooniverse where you can get involved in these citizen science projects. Citizen, amateur astronomers have discovered exoplanets, they have discovered galaxies. So The Milky Way is for you to play with and do what you want with it. Don’t let it seem like space is just something that billionaires can access.

B&N: That seems like a really, really great place. To end this episode. Dr. Moiya McTier, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. The Milky Way is out now.

MM: Thank you so much. This has been a blast.