Forums » Epic Week 2022 » Distant Symbol (SOLVED)

This topic is for discussing clues and potential answers to the Distant Symbol in Epic Week 2022. Please stay on topic. Remember, these riddles are designed to be challenging and require a group of people brainstorming together; don't feel intimidated if you don't know the answer right away. Every little idea can help. Research is not cheating; it is expected!

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So if going by theme of space, this probably has to do with this thing.

"Ethylene glycol, the chemical commonly used as automobile antifreeze, was discovered recently in a massive interstellar cloud of dust and gas near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Scientists used the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) 12 Meter Radio Telescope to detect this organic molecule."

The cloud is called Sagittarius B, but that didn't work (neither did Sagittarius on its own. also tried Sagittarius B2). Other terms that did not work:
-Interstellar cloud
-molecular cloud
-Ribose sugar
-ethylene glycol
-glycolaldehyde
-alcohol

If not and has nothing to do with space at all, then uh... I found a fun fact.

More failed guesses:
- Solar sail / er / ing
- Extraterrestrial liquid / water
- Sagittarius B2 Cloud
- Tardigrades / water bears
- Internal Active Thermal Control System

After doing a quick search, could we try Titan ? The gas around it acts as an antifreeze or something to make to hot, and its by Jupiter, so it's far away (do NOT quote me on that; my search was relatively surface-level). I was also thinking of the gas giants in general ? Maybe it's something we should try.

The icon for this being a moon also adds to my theory :]

Enceladus could also be a candidate, too.

"Where the orbit has not cleared" suggests we're looking at a dwarf planet or somesuch, then - and not Ceres, that's probably too close.

I have been tag-teaming this one with my partner and she was very surprised to find that Europa wasn't a hit, but we also started looking through dwarf planets -- Pluto, Eris, Haumea, and Ceres in our solar system, but none are really applicable to the antifreeze bit.

So, following up on my little search, I looked up what not clearing an orbit means, and it means (I'm paraphrasing here) that an object in space is not the dominated gravitational pull in its orbit. Since it's not, it cannot clear its orbit of smaller chunks of space stuff. Perhaps we need to look to one of the asteroid belts (maybe the Kuiper belt ?) Lots of dwarf plants reside in there, as well as some other cool stuff.

I'm seeing a whole lot of guesses like Enceladus, Hubble telescope, Titan or Pluto.

Apropo of nothing, just musing out loud, when we write these riddles we generally avoid making the answers, say, a main character in a series because people tend to go through and slam in all the major names from the wiki. If it were about a fandom we'd be much more likely to pick something about the character that we were interested in, such as a specific prop associated with them, or the name of the street where they grew up for example.

Just, y'know, thinking about the probabilities of how this might have been constructed. 🤔

Right! I was looking at named features of Enceladus and Charon, for example. Volcanoes, oceans, that kind of thing.

It may actually be related to Ceres somehow - the warmth of the sun doesn’t penetrate out too far past the asteroid belt, does it?

I think I have completely drifted off course with this one at this point. I don't want to say I'm grasping at straws, but I think I've started grasping at straws. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I've delved into the possibilities of the Kuiper Belt and got as far as Pluto's Heart. But I can't seem to affiliate all the clues. I can get some clues to match, but then again, if this has to do with a fandom, I may be out of my league. This is my first Epic Week so I'm still learning the ropes.

Just to be crystal clear, I am not implying that this is fandom related.

:0 woah, my guesses are helping ! That's super cool, considering this is my first epic week. I was also thinking of Ceres, but I'm also seeing that the Kuiper Belt is thought to be the source of comets, so maybe that's a direction worth pursuing ?

Hahaha, okay, those clues pretty much narrow things down. Evidently I did not trip across the answer while I was putting in features of Pluto and Charon earlier! Time to dig some more in that direction.

Pssst, friends, "A feature on a place" is trying to give you the answer format. Something on something.

Pluto's Sputnik Planitia may be insulating its underground ocean -- which is a part of a former planet's feature thus being it's heart shape. That is where my brain keeps going.

Congrats on solving this symbol! The answer was "Ice volcanoes on Pluto".

For those of you wondering how this answer could be arrived at, here's a quick explanation.

My parents actually wrote this one! You can see where I get my space science interests from. Ice volcanoes were recently discovered on Pluto. The images were captured by the New Horizons mission, which visited Pluto back in July 2015. But pluto is so distant and the amount of data captured was so massive, it has taken years to receive and review it. We're still making new discoveries now based on that flyby.

It appears that Pluto has some heat in its core. Not so much heat that it can have a molten iron core like we do on Earth, but enough of a heat difference that drives slushy ice volcanoes - the largest ice volcanoes known in our solar system, even larger than the ones on Titan (a moon of Saturn).

There were about 15 variations on this phrase I would have accepted, but all of them required both ice/cryovolcano and pluto to be included in the same guess.

Hahah, there we go. I tried out Wright Mons and Piccard Mons - the two biggest cryovolcanoes on Pluto - yesterday or Friday, figuring that they fit the clues, but evidently we were looking for something more general!

I can't tell you how excited I got the last few days when I saw guesses like that, or just "ice volcano" or "cryovolcano"