Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseListener Question 10: Particles, stars and universe-sized black holes!
Daniel and Jorge answer listener questions about the smallest, biggest and cataclysmic-ist things in the Universe!
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Hey, Daniel, do we get a lot of interesting questions at the podcast? You know, through email or Twitter?
Oh, we get the best questions. I'll be honest. It's my favorite moment of the day when I see a new question come in from the listener line.
All right, cool, So tell me how do you decide when to answer a question. Do you reply to them on the email or do you wait until we talk about it on the podcast.
Well, I feel like these listeners want to know the answer. So if I know the answers, I write them right back. And if you don't, well then I got to go off and do a little bit of research. And that's how a question ends up on the podcast.
Oh, I see you think I know the answer?
That's right? Like I'll ask a real expert.
So basically it's just a big stalling tactic when you're stumped.
That's right. Listeners are very smart and if they ask me a hard enough question, it will end up on the podcast.
Hi a warhand, a cartoonist. I'm the creator of PhD Comics. Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I've often been stumped by listener questions.
Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we take you on a mental tour of the universe, all the things that science has figured out and all the things that science is still puzzling over, all the things we know and all the things we want to know, which is basically every that's right.
We take you to the limits of the curiosity of scientists and also to the limits of the curiosity of our listeners. People would like you who are listening to this podcast, who have questions about the universe, about the cosmos, about our planet, and about the things that make up who we.
Are, because being curious is just part of being human. Wondering how this whole thing works, how this amazing and crazy universe came to be, how it's put together, and what its ultimate fate will be. That's just part of being human. And so we think that wondering and curiosity belongs to everybody and we want to bring you to the forefront of knowledge. And often we talk about the kind of questions as scientists are asking about the universe, but sometimes we talk about your question.
And mad question. Daniels, I'm curious about how we still have a podcast. Who gave a couple of introverts a platform this big to talk about the small thing that is to you.
Well, it just cost us a few bananas a week, so I think that's the reason.
Well, bananas are hard to come by these days. You never know. But yeah, welcome to our podcast. And sometays in this podcast we love to answer listener questions, So if you have a question, you can send it to us via questions at Daniel Andhorhead dot com or through our Twitter accountant.
That's right, I'm pretty good at monitoring the Twitter page and answering listeners questions. In fact, it's the way I take a break from my day working on something hard. I'm gonna take a break and answer some fun listener questions.
Yeah, and sometimes you pay questions to answer on the air. And so today on the podcast, we'll be tackling listener questions number ten, Particle Stars and universized black Holes, Old.
Man, and these are some of my favorite episodes because I love understanding what the listeners are thinking about and what they are wondering about. The reason that we do the person on the street interviews is it because we want to take the pulse of current knowledge. What are people understanding? What are they confused about? Because we want to educate them right there. We want to take them and unravel those points of confusion, help them have that moment of clarity of understanding when things click into place. And another way to do that to have the listeners ask us directly something that they are wondering about. And when we get a question that I think is especially clever or hard to answer immediately, but I think other people will want to hear the answer to, then yeah, we put it on the podcast.
Yeah. Do people get a reward if they stump you Daniel? You send them a Crackerjack prize.
Yeah, I'll send you a list of people you need to send Crackerjack prizes to put that on your to do list.
See it's a pyramid scheme for the universe.
They just get the joy of knowing that they've asked a really good question. And you know, we got a lot of wonderful questions. We get questions from five year olds, we get questions from ninety five year olds, and all of them just reflect this desire to understand, to not live in confusion, but to have all the pieces of the universe fit into place in their minds. And that's my goal too, that's everybody's goal.
Yeah, And we get pretty good questions, and especially the ones we're going to cover today, I thought they were pretty cool. I was like, wow, I don't think I know the answer to these questions, which is not saying a lot I know, but still, I've been hanging out with you for a couple of years and I feel like I don't really know the answer to these questions.
Well, you know, I feel like you're a deputized physicist. I've heard you answer physics questions when I haven't been around. I thought that's a solid answer.
Wow, yeah, yeah, yeah, Wikipedia, thank you. No.
On our live stream, Remember I got dumped off for five minutes and came back and you had totally answered a bunch of physics questions, and I thought, maybe I'm not even needed around here anymore. I've, you know, I've made myself obsolete by teaching you enough physics.
I think I can probably handle answering a question. I just can't handle follow up questions. I'm guessing it's probably when you know you need to call them real physicists. But today we have some really great questions about how new stars form in the sky, about the Large Hadron Collider detector, and about basically everything and the Big Bang.
And the fate of our universe?
Did they include also the meaning of life? How much of the universe can you roll up into one question? I think our third question today might take.
The case, well, you know, you get one shot, you might as well roll it all up into one big, fat question.
All right, Well, let's get in to it. Our first question comes from Meredith, and Meredith has a question about the night sky.
Hi, Daniel and Jorge. My name is Meredith, and I've been wondering if new stars are always appearing in the night sky, and how do we know if they're newly formed stars or if they're so far away that their light has only just reached us.
Thanks all right, awesome question, Meredith. I guess our question is, does I guess, does the night sky change, like do we get new stars forming and disappearing all the time, or is it pretty much set in the I guess lifespan of a human.
Yeah, it's a wonderful question because it reflects on these differences between like human scales and human time length and cosmological time length.
I'm getting this sn as you're gonna say, No.
The night sky is not static. No, it's only static on the short little blip of life that we live. Right. The universe has been around for much much longer than a human life or ten human lives, or a thousand human lives or a million human lives. And that means that if you watched it on like time laps, seem really active in chaotic it's like a frothing puddle. Right. We're living sort of like in slow motion, where the universe and the galaxy seem like frozen in time, but in reality they're not.
Yeah, And we have the ability to sort of look back into time, right, and also the ability to kind of project forward to sort of get a broader sense of the history of the universe.
I imagine that you were something that lived just a brief millisecond, and you live that entire lifespan, that tiny little millisecond inside like an exploding grenade or something, or you know, a rock dropping into a puddle of water. It wouldn't seem very chaotic to you because on that millisecond, not that much happens. You know, things don't move very far, don't change very much. And so that's our viewpoint of the universe. We live this little brief lifespan inside a vast, very slow moving explosion. But if you watched it happen at a faster pace, you could tell that there are things bouncing off each other, there's new stars forming, there's all sorts of crazy stuff happening on the universe timescale.
I was gonna say it's like hitting the fast forward bun, but nowadays we don't have fastward buns. We just have like skip ten seconds buns. And that wouldn't be a ready right intro on Netflix. Don't want to be very satisfying, would it If you skip the intro of the universe, do you miss most of the exciting style?
Well, what if we are just living in the intro of the universe. This is just the credits and the drama hasn't even really begun.
Somebody's gonna skip us.
Don't skip us. No, I feel bad every time I skip the intro, though, because somebody spend time making that. You watch it at least once, you know, if it's more than fifteen seconds, then then I skip it every time.
All right, Well, I guess the question is does the night sky change and specifically, do we get new stars in the nice sky? Could I be watching the sky one of these nights when I'm out in the wild or camping, and suddenly like a new star would shine that wasn't there before, and nobody in human history had recorded it? Is that possible?
Yeah, it's a fascinating question, And I think to understand that, we have to think about, like how stars are made. Then we can think about how often that happens, and also what fraction the milky way we can actually see, and those pieces together will help us answer this question.
See, like, what are the chances of that happening? Yeah, depends on all these different factors.
Yeah, exactly, And so we have to remember that, like how our stars made. It's not like somebody just goes along in the simulation in the universe and runs some subroutine that says make new star, Like it happens through a process, and it starts when clouds of gas collapse.
Okay, so let's get into star formation then. So stars are saying form when the clouds of gas out there in the universe crunched together.
Yeah, and the Milky Way surprisingly is filled with these clouds. Our galaxy is a bunch of stars and it's dark matter, but there's also sort of the raw materials of stars just floating around there, these vast clouds of gas. They are like seventy percent hydrogen and each one has like millions and millions as much mass as our sun. They're like, you know, one hundred light years wide. Wow, And there's thousands of these things just sort of floating around the Milky Way capable of making stars.
It's like the raw, unformed basic material of stars just waiting to be you know, brought together by gravity.
Yeah. It's like your star pantry, right, It's all the ingredients needed, but just not in the right arrangement.
Okay. And so then eventually these clouds kind of collapse because of gravity and then that's how stars get form.
Yeah, And there's a few ways that can happen. One is they just get big enough. You know, they slowly accumulate enough stuff that eventually their heat and their pressure can no longer keep them from collapsing. Right, Gravity is always working to pull stuff together. But if something is hot enough, you know that it won't collapse. Like, why isn't our atmosphere just collapsing into little stars all the time because it's got energy, right that overcomes that gravitational.
Pull, like it wants to expand kind of.
Yeah, it's velocity is too great for gravity from the other parts of the atmosphere to pull it together. But if the gas gets heavy enough, right, there's enough mass and it's cold enough, then it can collapse. The gravity will take over and just collapse it.
And so that happens a lot in the in our milk away galaxy, or does it happen? Because I guess maybe what you're saying is that most of the stars we see when we look at it out into the night sky come from our milky Way, So we should focus just on sort of how stars form in the Milky Way.
Yeah, that's right. When you look out into the night sky. You're looking at the stars in the Milky Way. You're looking through the Milky Way out into the rest of the universe, And if you had a really good telescope, then you could see other galaxies also. They would show up looking mostly like stars unless your telescope was super awesome, and you could tell that they had different shapes. And you know, it was only like one hundred years ago that anybody understood that those little blobs were entire other galaxies. But yeah, most of the stars that you can see are actually just stars in the Milky Way.
Okay, so we have these clouds and they're making stars, But can you see these clouds in the night sky or the daytime sky or are these pretty sort of hidden from us?
Well, if you ever see the band of the Milky Way, like sometimes on a really clear night when you're going camping, you see a bunch of stars and then you see sort of this milky way in the sky, right, that's an accumulation of stars but also gas and dust.
That's where stars would come from, and.
That's where new stars will come from. That's the plane of the galaxy. That's the densest region of the galaxy that you're looking at, and you know one of these, the Orion nebula in the direction of Orion, is about thirteen hundred light years away. It's capable of making stars. And you know, we don't quite understand the whole process of how this happens. Sometimes it's just gravitational collapse. Sometimes these clouds could collide and the points of friction provide the sort of the impetus to make the cloud collapse. Sometimes we think it might be like a supernova went off and that energy sort of triggers the cloud to collapse.
It's not an inevitable thing for a start to form out of a cloud. You got to kind of trigger it.
Yeah, if the cloud gets big enough and dense enough, or if something comes along and strikes it, Yeah, then then it can happen.
Okay, I guess then if you're not looking at the Milk Way, then is it possible that a new star will form kind of like out of the blue in between the stars. And if you look the other direction.
If you're not looking in the Milky Way, then know, like there aren't these clouds to make stars out between galaxies. So it's really just only in our gally see that we could see a new star be born. There are other galaxies that make their own new stars also, but it's really hard to see a single star inside another galaxy. That's really pretty tricky. So it only really sort of be in our galaxy. And when these collapses happen, they don't just like make one star. You're talking about a cloud that's capable of making lots and lots and stars at once, and so when the collapse happens, you get a bunch of stars whoa twins or triplex much more than that a thousand, yeah, exactly. I don't even know what the Latin word for that would be, but you could get thousands of stars forming basically at the same time.
Wow, I see the stars are made in batches.
Yeah, stars are made in batches, just like cupcakes. Right, You don't make one cupcake at a time.
And then they go off into the galaxy, or do they? You know, is it possible to that a star gets made somewhere and then moves in another place, or is it pretty much all condensed and concentrated in the center of the milk away.
It could happen all sorts of different parts of the milky away wherever one of these clouds are, and after the gas collapses and forms the star, it doesn't change the overall grab chagtional trajectory of that mass. And so whatever the center of mass of that material was doing, probably orbiting the center of the galaxy is what it will continue to be doing. So these guys will be bound together in their fates. They'll be nearish each other sort of in the vicinity, but they may end up getting spread out later, but initially they'll be moving together.
All right. So then what sort of the rate or like how many new stars get made this way per per day or per year.
It's hard to say like per day because it's pretty stochastic, like for this to happen, clouds have to collide, or a supernova has to go off, or the cloud has to reach the right critical density or something. So it's easier to talk about sort of averages and to just think, like how long has the milky We've been around, well, about thirteen billion years, and how many stars are there? Right, and there's one hundred billion stars, right, and so that means that roughly about every forty seven days in the history of the Milky Way a star has been made. Now, it's not like every forty seven days a new one turns on. You know, you get a thousand made, and then you might go years and years before another one is made. Then you get another thousand. But on average it's every forty seven days.
It's like Los Angeles star is born every forty seven days, and the sucker is born every day.
There's a lot more suckers than stars. Yeah, exactly.
Okay, so on average, the Milky Way makes like one star every month and a half.
Yeah, one star every month and a half. That's its rate of production. And you know, the Milky Way is a big place, so that's not a whole lot of new stars. You know, one star here, another star could be on the other side of the Milky Way. It's like one hundred thousand light years away. So it's not that many.
Because we can't see all of them, right, But I guess of thinking about the ones that we could see, what would be the raid, do you think?
Yeah? I think people will be surprised to understand that when you look up at the night sky, you're seeing a very small fraction of the Milky Way. Because most of the Milky Way, the stars are too far away for you to see them, Like your naked eye is not good enough at capturing those photons from those stars. The stars from the other side of the Milky Way, they're shooting their light at us, and it's getting here. But you know, you might get like one photon per minute. And so if you're looking up at the night sky with a naked eye, you're only actually seeing a few thousand stars of the Milky Way of one hundred billion stars in the Milky Way.
You're not seeing all the stars you could be seeing of the Milky Way.
That's right. If you had like two hubbles for eyeballs, you would see a lot more stars. Right. It'd be kind of awkward to like get in your car or walk around, but you'd have a great view at.
Night, Like if my eyes were bigger or I had like super night vision.
No, I mean, like literally, if you had two hubbles attached to your.
Eyeballs, See you're being literal.
I was being literal. I was fantasizing from.
You, like, go up into space, grab one of these telescopes and stick it in your eye.
Imagine what you could see. And so essentially that defines like a sphere, you know, nearby stuff that you could see. So for us to see a star be born, you would have to be born fairly close to the earth. And again it depends like how bright it is. If it's brighter, it could be born further away. If it's dimmer, and have to be born closer. And so we could just do a simple division again and say, well, there's a few thousand visible stars the Milky Ways, billions and billions of years old. Do the math and you get that a new visible star appears about every million years.
Oh, I see, if I were to look at the night sky, I would have to on average wait a million and a half years to see a new star.
Yeah, exactly to see a new star be born. Wow, so not likely, not likely, although you could get lucky. You could watch for ten minutes and see one hundred stars appear. Right, That could happen, because you could get a cluster of stars born near the earth. But yeah, I wouldn't bet on it.
You could win the lottery. It's possible, Yeah you could.
And she also asked about how do we know if the stars are newly formed or if the light is just reaching us, right, which is another great question.
Yeah, like if I see something. If I am looking at the next guy and I see something turn on like blink, how do we know it's a star that formed or maybe a start? What the form a long time ago and now I'm seeing it? What's the difference in her question?
Yeah, I think she's asking did the star just form if it turns on or did it form a long time ago and we're just now seeing the light. And the answer is always the second. It's always that we're just now seeing the light and it formed a while ago. If it formed really close to the Earth, we'd be in trouble. Right, You don't need another star really close to the earth, So that means it has to have formed somewhere far away, which means it takes light a while to get here. And she also asks, like, you know, how do we know? We can measure the distance to these stars using various methods. We had a whole podcast about it. We can like look at it from telescopes from different parts of the Earth and see it shift, sort of the way you can tell how far away something is by changing your eyeballs by opening one eyeball or just the other one, right, Or we have other with hubble telescopes. That would be awesome at telling how far away basketball is. So we have ways to tell how far something is away. And then we can tell of this light from this star that has just arrived, since this five million light years away, that means the star formed five million years ago.
Okay, so I guess the lesson is if you are seeing a newly formed star in real time, then you're kind of in big trouble. That's right, because that means you're you should have worn more sunscreen.
Yeah, i'd say run, but there's nowhere to run.
Dig maybe all right, Well that I think that answers Meret this question, which is that new stars are appearing in the night sky. The answer is yes, but they probably don't happen that often, maybe every one and a half million years. So we're sort of blessed and stuck with the night sky that we have right now.
That's right, But hey, you never know. Wish upon a star and maybe you'll see one.
All right, let's get into our other questions. We have more questions here about the large Hadron collider and what Daniel actually does as a job, and about the Big Bang and black holes. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're answering listener questions and our next question comes from a Hunter from Buffalo, Wyoming. And here's a question about what exactly does Daniel do that is john.
Other than napping. Let's get into it all right.
And drinking coffee somehow at the same time. I don't know how you do it.
You have the coffee, then you have the nap. That's the key. Anyway, here's Hunter's question.
Hey guys, my name is Hunter from Buffalo, Wyoming, and my question for you is how does the detector concern actually work? How does this massive device detect these tiny, tiny particle interactions. And when they do shoot particles together, how do they make them hit each other? I mean, these particles are so small and they're going in this massive chamber. You'd figure that there's a ninety nine percent chance that they miss each other. So how do they do it? Thanks?
All right, thank you, Hunter Daniel. I feel like Hunter is kind of skeptical about your professional year. He doesn't seem like it should work.
Are you sure that's skepticism? Maybe it's awe, maybe it's wonder right.
You see, he's amazed. He's amazed that you have a job.
I'm amazed that I have a job doing this. Sometimes. I mean I get to like tear apart matter and figure out what it's made out of. As a job, I feel pretty lucky and special sometimes awesome.
And so his question is how does the large Hadron collider detector actually work? I guess he's sort of wondering about the mccanaic because it seems like, we know, you guys smashed particles together. But I guess his question is that it seemed something impossible to do, like how do you take a pin and have it hit the head of another pin and actually see what happens.
Yeah, it's a great question, and it's fascinating because he asked questions about the only two parts that we can do, which is like try to smash stuff together and then look at the stuff that comes out. We can't actually see the collision itself, right, this moment of collision when something magical happens, well not magical, obviously, something scientific happens and the new particle is made. That moment is invisible to us. But we can try to control the initial situation, what we're shooting in at what energy, and then we can try to observe what comes out the eventual stuff. So the first part is like how do you shoot these things together and actually make them hit? And you're totally right, Hunter that if you shot one proton at another proton, you would miss, and you did it again, you would miss, and you'd miss like one hundred billion times before maybe you would hit. So that's not what we do. Instead, what we do is we fill our guns with one hundred billion protons and we shoot it at one hundred billion protons and we shoot those little like clouds of protons at each other.
I see, it's kind of like dating, you get it. You do a lot of swides before you find the right person.
Yeah, exactly, you got to throw a lot of darts at the wall. And so here, essentially we're throwing a cloud of darts against another cloud of darts and hoping that the tips meet right.
And you don't just throw a bunch of darts, You throw like a bazillion darts a bazillion times a second.
Yeah, every twenty five nanoseconds one of these bunches. Bunch is the technical term we use for this little cloud of protons. We're very fancy. One bunch, which contains you know, one hundred billion protons, passes through another bunch, and that's every twenty five seconds. We do it twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year.
And do you call these collections of protons bunch yons? Then I know you're trend is if you collect particles, that's another particle.
I'm feeling some judgment here now about our naming scheme. You know, we call those bunches and we collide them, and you know, it's really it's an amazing engineering achievement to build this thing, to accelerate the particles to this energy to focus those beams to the smallest possible dot to maximize the number of collisions we get. And when you pass one hundred billion protons through another one hundred billion protons, both going at nearly the speed of light, you don't get one hundred billion collisions. You get like sometimes zero, sometimes five, sometimes ten, sometimes twenty five collisions.
So the probability is pretty low. It's like five in ten to the ten.
It's very small. Yeah, And the probability it gets better the tighter you can make your beam, right, the denser you can make that little cloud, the smaller the area over which you're spreading those protons. But it's not very high. And even when we get collisions, mostly those collisions are pretty boring. It's proton bounces off of proton. Nothing happens, Protons go in, Protons go.
Like dies like biller balls. They just deflect.
Yeah, they just deflect. That's like ninety nine point ninety nine percent of the time what happens. Usually it's not very exciting.
I guess one proton repels another proton, so they just kind of like push each other away.
Yeah, they're both positively charged and they will interact. But that's the most likely thing to happen. If you're throwing darts at a wall. You know, most of the spots on that dartboard are proton. Bounce itself proton. Sometimes you hit the spot where like it makes a Higgs boson, or it makes some new weird particle. And that's why we do it so often, because we're sifting through so many collisions looking for the rare one that will help us see something new. We think the weird stuff is rare, so we have to look at a lot of collisions to find them.
It seems like sifting through sand for a special grain of sand.
Yeah.
I think that's probably a lot like tinder, right, just like you were saying, it's a lot like dating. You're looking for that one special somebody and you got to look through a lot of people sometimes to find the one that fits.
And so part of a hunter's question was, first of all, how do you smash it together? I think you answered that, But now how do you tell what actually happened? You know, because I imagine these are you know, small things that smashed together. How do you actually tell what happened when they smash together?
Yeah, well, you can't just like a video. We'd love to do that, but first of all, these things happen too fast. So for example, a Higgs boson or a top cork, if you make it, it lasts for ten to the minus twenty three seconds before it turns into other particles, so you just can't see it, Like, we don't have cameras that are that fast. And on top of being super duper short lived, they're super duper tiny, and we don't have cameras that can see things that's small, and so they are smaller than like the wavelength of light we could use, so we don't see at all these collisions. They're totally invisible to us. It's like they happen behind a dark curtain. Instead, what we see is what they turn into, is you know, what trots out onto the stage in front of the curtain where it's more like showing up at an intersection after a car crash and trying to figure out what happened, because we see the remnants.
You see, like the bits and pieces.
Yeah, the Higgs or the top or whatever happened will turn into other particles that do last long enough that we can observe, and so we look at those and we try to figure out from what's left over, from what was produced, what actually happened in that exciting moment of collision.
And that's kind of what you see when you look up pictures of the large Hadron collider. They mostly show you detectors, like the giant machines used to figure out what came out of these collisions, like the huge cylinder and the sort of warehouse size machines and the little tiny people standing in front of it. That's kind of what you see, right. It's the detectors, not the actual gun that shoots the protons.
That's right. And in fact, there are totally different communities of people that work on that. Like I work at CERN, I work on the LEDC. I don't work on the accelerator at all. I have no expertise in building an accelerator. But I work on the group of people that build the detector that surrounds this collision point to take some kind of digital picture of what flew out of it. And that's what you're describing, these huge detectors and so this for example, I'm in the Atlas collaboration and there are four places around the ring where people have built these detectors to surround it, and so the Atlass collaboration built the Atlas detector, and a lot of the other detectors follow a similar scheme. Essentially, what you're trying to do is take pictures of the particles that fly out, but again you can't directly image them. You have to measure somehow their properties.
You have to measure what they're doing. It's not just about capturing them, but it's like, oh, it was going this way with this speed, with this momentum.
That's exactly it. And so what we do is we pass all the particles through a magnetic field, because by seeing how much they curve in that field, we can measure their momentum, and we can also tell if they had an electric charge or not. And then we have another layer of detectors that tries to measure their energy. And so by putting these pieces of information together, we can sort of tell what the particle was because everything has a distinct signature. Like an electron is a charged particle, it will bend in that magnetic field and then it'll splash a bunch of its energy in that outer layer, whereas a photon won't bend in that magnetic field, it'll be totally invisible, but then it will leave a splash in the outer field. So we can sort of tell what was what by piecing this together, but we never we never get like a picture. It's like, oh, look, this is the electron that was made. It's all like we see tracks in the snow. We to do from that, you know what ran away?
It's like your kid leaving a mess. You're like, there was definitely a kid here.
There's a bucket of paints billed, and I see little footprints, so I'm pretty sure I know who it's here.
Something delighted here exactly. And it's done in sort of layers, right, Like, I think that's cool that first you have the magnetic field and that's how you measure momentum and charge, and then you have a whole another layer that measures energy, and then another layer that measures other things.
Yeah, because some things escape, right, there's the layer that measures energy. Its job is to slow the particle down to grab all of its energy in order to measure it. But some particles get right through there, like a muon will fly right through. It hardly interacts with that detector, and so we have a whole other layer of detectors on the outside to try to bend muons and measure their energy. So muons get bent twice, one in the inner magnetic field and then one in the outer magnetic field, and then some things escape completely, like neutrinos. If they're produced in these collisions, they're just totally invisible to us. We can't see them at all. And neutrino would fly through like a light year of lead before interacted, So there's no chance it would interact with our detector unless you put a light year of lead. Yeah, I'm gonna write that, grand proposal. Can I get a cubic light year of lead? Please?
That's right, Then you put it in your eyeballs and you would be able to see natrinos.
Even if the EDSF said yes to that. Where would you even source a cubic light year of lead?
Like?
Seriously?
All right, well, I think that's the kind of answers. The question is how does the LAC detector actually work. It works, and it works by amazing feats of engineering where you take bazillions of protons and smash them bazillions of times a second, and then using incredible and warehouse sized machines you kind of track what happens and what comes out of these colosions.
Yeah, and for every collision, we read out one hundred million pieces of information and we do that every twelve hundred one hundred million. That's for one channel, and each channel can have, you know, bytes and bytes of data. And so we have a lot of data coming out of this thing because it's every twenty five nanoseconds, and so we're just producing petabytes and petabytes of data and so actually most of it we throw away. Most of it we filter it away really quickly because usually it's boring. Right, two protons collide, two protons come out, that goes in the trash. So a lot of the stuff that we do is making rapid keep it or kill it decisions.
And that's kind of what you do, right, That's kind of your part in this whole giant scientific endeavor is you used to work on algorithm to try to sift through this data and throughout the ones that we don't need.
That's right. Part of being in a collaboration of like five thousand people is becoming a specialist is saying I'm going to do this bit, and you do that bit. And the bit that I personally work on, that my group works on is this trigger system that makes the keep it or kill it decisions every twenty five nanoseconds. And it's not just me it there's a collaboration of hundreds of people who work on on that one system in this huge.
Detector filtering the car cross at the universe.
It's sort of terrifying sometimes because if you make the wrong decisions, you're just throwing it away. Like once that data is gone, it's gone forever. And so we worry that sometimes in the garbage that we're throwing out could be hidden nuggets, things that could reveal fascinating insights into the universe. But you know, hey, we're throwing it in the trash. No pressure.
All right, Well, thank you Hunter from Buffalo for asking that question, and so we'll get into our last question of today, which is about the Big Bang and black holes. But first let's take a quick break.
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Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'man neuroscientists at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe.
In our heads, We're looking at a whole new.
Series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives looked the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret, When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily fall from tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Right, Daniel, Our last question of the day here. It comes from Charles, who has a question about the Big Bank.
And it's a big question.
It's a big it's a whole of a question, it's a whole big question. So here's what Charles wanted to know.
Hey guys, So we know that black holes appear when a huge amount of mass is compacted into a tiny area of space. So my question is, if during the Big Bang all the matter in the universe was gathered into a really small area of space, why didn't the Big Bang become a giant black hole?
Boom?
Wow, what an awesome question. It takes me a second just to kind of wrap my head around.
It did make your head go boom or I guess what's the sound of a black hole being made? It's not boom, is it.
It's like, well, I guess I've never kind of heard the words big bang and black hole in the same sentence, have you. It's not normal.
Yeah, it's a fascinating topic, and you know, we can get into it. But there are black holes that were made in the first moments of the Big Bang and have this awesome, awesome title primordial black holes, one of my favorite names and physics.
They have little tales like lizards. But I guess the question from Charles is, you know, we know that black holes form when you get enough mass and stuff kind of compacted and crushed together into the right sort of space and the small enough volume. And so the Big Bang, at some point in the Big Bang, there was a lot of stuff in a very small amount of space. So why didn't the Big Bang not?
Why did it bang? After all?
Why did it bang? Why when did it bang so big lely? Why why didn't collapse into a black hole and stay not? Big bang?
Yeah? Well I'm glad it didn't because if it had, you know, we wouldn't be here to ask this question. And we wouldn't have this amazing, crazy puzzle of a universe to try to unravel. And I think the first sort of idea to unravel here is to work out, like, what are the necessary ingredients for a black hole? How do you make a black hole? What has to happen for a black hole to form?
Because then because then that will tell us kind of how it's different from the conditions of the Big Bang.
Exactly exactly right, Yeah, And I think a lot of people think, oh, all you need for a black hole is just a lot of stuff. If a lot of stuff and it's dense enough, boom, you get a black hole.
Right, you painted black, and.
You paint it black and then you sing that awesome song from the Stones.
Right. People think you need to create enough density and it will collapse into a black hole.
Yeah, and that's close to true.
Right.
It's true that you need a lot of energy density in one spot. Right, You need one location with a huge amount of stuff and that can curve space. That's that's how it happens. But the other thing you need is you need that to happen in flat space. Right. We talk about how space is curved, right, how space is expanding, the Space is not just like the backdrop, right, It's not just like emptiness and you're putting stuff into it and filling it up. Space responds to matter. Space responds to other things as well, forces and fields, and so it's dynamical. It changes, it can grow, it can squish, it can do all sorts of stuff. The canonical picture of a black hole we have is in non expanding space. It's in space that's not growing. And so it's true that if you have non expanding space, just like you know a flat universe, and you put a bunch of matter into it, then yes, it will form a black hole. It will create curved space in that region that light cannot escape.
I see, you need like you know, static space almost, you need like space that's just sitting there chill.
Yes, yeah, and that's the solution that was discovered.
Right.
Remember black holes were discovered theoretically before they were actually seen experimentally. It was an idea that came out of looking at the equations and people were studying Einstein's at the time fairly new equations for general relativity and thinking, all right, what are the consequences for the universe. Let's look at what would happen in this scenario. That scenario, and one scenario they found is in static space and non expanding space. If you put enough stuff in there, then you get this weird feature of black hole. And then you know, they went out and they actually found it in the universe. But the theoretical concept of a black hole starts from static space.
As you said, or we know that space is expanding now, but it's not expanding in a crazy way, like you can still make a black hole as long as the space itself is not expanding too much.
Yes, And so that's exactly the reason why the Big Bang didn't just make a black hole is that it was crazy expanding back then. It's still expanding now we have dark energy when the universe is expanding, and that expansion is even accelerating. But back in the early days, like during inflation and the Big Bang, it was crazy expansion.
Like space was stretching and creating new space at an incredible rate.
Yeah, and we don't understand what caused that and how it worked. We call it inflation just to sort of describe the expansion that we think was happening. But you need a lot more density. In the early days of the universe to make black holes. Given that expansion, it's like you have another force to contend with. We talked about on the Cosmological Constant podcast recently, how the Cosmological constant this force is providing this like repulsive gravity. It's like pushing things away. It's expanding space. It's working against gravity. So you need enough stuff to overcome that as well.
I see, but it is possible, like I've bad enough stuff, like I'm writing The Big Bang, and I put enough stuff together, I could form a black hole.
It's a fascinating question. And people think about this and they think about like if you had enough stuff, could you have collapsed the universe?
You have it canceled out to Big Bang?
Yeah, And we can dig into that in a moment. But you need one more thing. Is that you needed to be not totally smooth. Like if you have enough stuff and it's totally smooth, then where are these black holes going to form? Right? How do you pick where the black holes are? The other thing you need for a black hole is you need a bunch of stuff in one spot. But if everywhere in the universe has the same amount of stuff in it, then all the gravity just cancels out.
Oh really, yeah, you can cancel a black hole.
Well, it won't form a black hole, right, You won't form a black hole if the universe is filled perfectly, smoothly with stuff. And we think now that the beginning of the universe, the universe was infinite. It's not like the Big Bang was one little dense pocket of stuff. The whole universe tucked into an atom. We think it was an incredible density, but it was still infinite. The whole universe was filled with an infinite amount of stuff, just very very dense. So in that configuration, if it's totally smooth and very very dense, then where did these black holes form?
Oh it's like you can't make a chocolate chip out of a chocolate bar. Kind of I'm grasping for analygis here. But is that kind of like it's hard to see the black hole or it's hard to like all that matter that dance everywhere doesn't like forming into black hole.
Yeah. I think there's two different arguments you could use your mind to understand it. One is, take one particle, right, think about one particle in the early moments there. If the universe is filled with stuff and there's the same amount of stuff on its left and it's right. It's going to be pulled in both directions equally, and so those forces will cancel. And the same if you go up or down or forward or backwards, and so all those forces cancel. And the same argument applies for every particle in the universe. Another way to think about it is like symmetry, Like if black hole is going to form, it's got to form somewhere, And if every place in the universe is the same, then how do those get chosen? So there's no way to choose where they happen, So they just can't.
I guess. To form a black hole, you sort of need some space around you, yes see, not just a lot of mass and chill space, But you also need to not have a lot of stuff around you other like the stuff that you have wouldn't condense and compress.
Yeah, it's not just that you need density. You need more density than the areas around you.
Right.
If everything is dense but it's equally dense, nothing gets the form of a black hole. If everything is dense and then you have one hyper dense spot, then that could collapse into a black hole.
I can have a black hole. No one can have a black hole, that's right.
And you know, we did have these little areas of inhomogeneity that came from quantum fluctuations and were blown up by inflation, and so people do wonder like, even after inflation, why wasn't there so much stuff that the universe immediately collapsed wherever those little pockets, those little seeds of things that allowed structure in the universe to form, those little areas that were slightly denser that came from the quantum fluctuations that were expanded from inflation, Why didn't those just immediately trigger black holes?
Right?
Why do they happen to form enough gravity to pull together to make galaxies and stars and planets and not just collapse into black holes? And that we don't know the answer to it. It's just like we had enough stuff to make structure, but not so much that we just collapsed immediately into black holes. So we're sort of lucky.
I guess that only works if the universe is infinite. If the universe was finite, the Big Bank could have become a black hole.
If the universe was finite, then it's still very very large. It's at least larger than the age of the universe times the speed of light, and you factor in all the inflation. So that's a huge amount of stuff. That's too much stuff to instantly collapse into a black hole just because the speed of light would take too long to cross it near the edges. I suppose if space is flat and matter ends, then you could get collapsing black holes. But we're not living near the edge. If there is one, because we can see isotropic universe in every direction.
There could be a a a black ditch kind of surrounding the universe.
If it's finite, there could be, but there would have to be enough stuff after inflation for those things to happen.
All right, Well, then the answer is why didn't the Big Bang become a giant black hole? Is that there was just too much stuff base what was expanding too fast.
Yes, space was expanding too fast, which makes it hard to form black holes. And you need over densities of stuff, not just density. You need over density. You have to have more than your neighbors. You don't have to just have a lot of stuff.
Does that mean I can sort of kill a black hole if I expand the space it's in fast enough.
That's something we don't understand. We don't think so we think once the black hole is formed, it's impossible to like dark energy expandify it. We talked about this on the podcast. Once you know, like, could you shoot dark energy into a black hole and destroy it? We don't know what would happen because we don't really understand this whole expansion of space thing. We don't know how that interacts with a black hole that's already made.
Right, all right, Well, I think that answer is a question for Charles. Thank you for asking the question. And I think it's sort of interesting how we're people's curiosity is going with these questions, you know, yeah, you know, I feel like these questions are extrapolating from things that we've talked about or they've learned, and it's these are like next level questions.
Yeah, these are attempts to fit the ideas together, which is exactly what you should be doing. You want to understand the whole universe. You don't want to just understand this piece and that piece. You want to have one unified understanding of the universe, and that requires you to take this idea you heard here and ask why doesn't that apply in this other situation or how does that make sense given this other thing?
I know?
And that's how you build together a working knowledge of the whole universe. So keep doing it and keep asking us questions if it doesn't make sense to you.
Yeah, So congrat and Meredith Hunter and Charles for stumping a physicists.
Which gives us great stuff to talk about on the podcast. So thanks very much.
Send your prize, But you know, I think that's against team social decision.
That's right, So if you have questions about the universe or things you'd like us to talk about, please do send them to us at questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Hope you enjoyed that, See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iheartradou For more podcast from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact, but the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I mean neuroscientists at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship.
Between your brain and your life.
Because the more we know about what's running under the hood, that or we can steer our lives. Listen to Inner Cosmos with Savid Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Parents looking for a screen free, fun and engaging way to teach your kids the Bible. As a mom, I was looking for the same thing, so I created Kids' Bible Stories podcast. Thousands of families are raving about it, and kids actually request to listen. With captivating sound effects, voices and an apply section at the end to spark meaningful conversations. It's a hit with both kids and parents. Listen to Kids Bible Stoice podcasts on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
