Oncast Mix · Big Ideas

Mercury's magnetic heart explained

· Fact-checked before it aired. Unconfirmed claims from this segment are not shown.

This is a vague claim referencing a "playbook" about admitting DC and Puerto Rico as states and packing the Supreme Court. While some Democrats have proposed DC and Puerto Rico statehood, it is not an established "plan to end democracy," and court-packing is not official Democratic policy. Musk's framing has no factual basis. This is an announcement about Grok Bot integrating with phone apps; no factual claim needing verification. This is a personal anecdote about using Grok Bot to order Garmin watches; no factual claim needing verification. This is a personal story about joining a flu vaccine clinical trial; no factual claim needing verification. This is a report about a scientific study modeling Mercury's core and magnetic dynamo; no factual claim needing verification, though the linked

Fact-check

VERIFIED FALSE

This is a vague claim referencing a "playbook" about admitting DC and Puerto Rico as states and packing the Supreme Court. While some Democrats have proposed DC and Puerto Rico statehood, it is not an established "plan to end democracy," and court-packing is not official Democratic policy. Musk's framing has no factual basis. This is an announcement about Grok Bot integrating with phone apps; no factual claim needing verification. This is a personal anecdote about using Grok Bot to order Garmin watches; no factual claim needing verification. This is a personal story about joining a flu vaccine clinical trial; no factual claim needing verification. This is a report about a scientific study modeling Mercury's core and magnetic dynamo; no factual claim needing verification, though the linked

This is literally their plan to end democracy in America https://t.co/YGa92MsmhY

Original post · Elon Musk (@elonmusk)

bbc.com NAMES: Grok Bot = xAI's AI assistant integrated with X (formerly Twitter). POST 2113444022408937913: NOCLAIM N/A POST 2113444197978255814: NOCLAIM N/A P

Sources

What the hosts said

EBig Ideas is on, and tonight's show starts inside a planet.
SMercury. Smallest planet, but it has a magnetic field. That's weird.
EA new model suggests the secret is a silicon-rich core, with a solid inner core about 1,100 kilometers across.
SSo the planet is basically a giant dynamo, churning molten metal.
EAnd that churn generates the magnetic field we see. AstroCurrent posted the study link. BepiColombo will test this when it arrives.
SUntil then, it's models all the way down. But it's the best explanation I've heard for why that little rock still has a shield.
ESpeaking of shields and models—black holes of wildly different sizes seem to launch jets at the same point in their feeding cycle.
SWait, a stellar-mass black hole and a supermassive one both turn on their jets at the same stage? That's a scaling law we didn't expect.
EUnknown Verse flagged the study. If it holds, it means the physics of jet launching is universal, not size-dependent.
SWhich would be huge—a single rule from a few Suns to a billion Suns.
EAnd there's a new tidal disruption event: a star shredded by a million-Sun black hole, three thousand light-years from its galaxy's center.
SA black hole that got kicked out of its own galactic core? Those debris stayed hot for over a month.
EJWST's finding these exiled black holes more and more. They're probably the result of galaxy mergers.
SSo the working idea is that these are leftovers of catastrophic collisions, still feasting.

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