The pleasant story is informed on a January 2004 episode of Radiolab, the well-known podcast about science and society. Radiolab presenter Latif Nasser was impressed by a poster that hung over the crib of their two-year-old baby, which confirmed an object subsequent to Venus referred to as Zoozve. Nasser thought this was odd, as he had by no means heard of a moon of Venus, so he referred to as up a pal who works for NASA — and so they hadn’t heard of it both.

Nasser acquired in contact with the artist of the map of the photo voltaic system, an illustrator referred to as Alex Foster. “Basically, I don’t know about this stuff,” Foster mentioned on the podcast. “I wanted to make a solar system map, so I looked online and did a bit of research.”

Foster scribbled down some notes based mostly on what he discovered on the web — one thing we have absolutely all performed — and got here again to those notes to attract his map. But Nassar and his NASA pal, Liz Landau, nonetheless could not work out what on-line supply the identify Zoozve might have come from. They could not discover it wherever on-line.

“But then I sort of looked away for a minute 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-VE,” and I found this object, which I did not know existed before,” mentioned Liz Landau.

They concluded that Foster will need to have scribbled down the data after which misinterpret it, and a legend was born.