Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseListener Questions 16: pictures from space, antimatter stars and Jupiter-eating aliens!
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Hey Jorge, I've got a space ethics dilemma for you.
Oh I am definitely not qualified for that, but glhead.
All right, So imagine that aliens come and they insist on destroying one planet in the Solar System and they make you choose which planet are you going to sacrifice. That's not a dilemma, really, you already have a least favorite planet picked out.
Oh yeah, I'm totally happy to lose Uranus. It does nothing for us except, you know, make things a little uncomfortable. Wow, I thought you were going to drop Pluto, but Plut does not technically a planet. And I imagine the aliens are smart enough to know that.
I guess there are benefits to being demoted from planetary status.
Yeah, maybe it could be a odub for them, or you know, just an apparae teeth.
And a mouse alien.
Hi am poor hammy cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I would never give up any planets in our Solar System.
We are all one, really, you love them all.
I just feel like it's a slippery slope. And you know, first you give up your Aus and then you go up Neptune. Then what are you going to say to protect Saturn? And Jupiter.
What about the asteroids? Do you feel fondly about the asteroids too?
We're all part of one gravitational disc man.
I see. So if aliens came and wanted to eat something in our solar sysm, you'd be like, no, We're gonna fight eat to the death.
I'd be like, can we just talk about it and you know, get some answers to physics questions first? There you go, I would trade Saturn for some physics answers.
Oh really, huh? So you would give a planet to be eaten.
I'm not giving up. I'm trading. I'm getting something invaluable in return for the human species.
I see what, as they say, if we don't need Neptune will eat the Earth, then you're trading something there.
I don't negotiate with terrorists, even aliens.
Especially hungry aliens. But welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio in which.
We imagine all of the crazy scenarios out there in the universe. We prepare you for crazy legal, ethical dilemmas, and we also prepare you for what we might learn about the universe. We take you on our ride to the very edge of scientific understanding, and we invite you to speculate, to ask questions, to think about what the answers might be to the biggest, deepest, most fun most consequential questions in the entire universe.
That's right because there is a lot to discover out there, a lot of answers to find. It's a big universe, and we are here to talk about the answers and the questions with you.
That's right because those questions are really what drives science forward. Signs wouldn't happen if, as a species, we weren't all collectively curious. If we all just really deeply and desperately want to know the answers to questions about how the universe started and where it's going and how it all works. It's not just scientists being curious. It's all of us. It's all of humanity collectively wondering about the nature of the universe. And that includes you.
Yep, Because that is how our search for knowledge begins. It starts with questions, right, Daniel, Physics doesn't start with statements. You're not big on statements.
Physics usually starts with coffee.
Actually, okay, well, that's kind of a statement that caffeine is the most important kind of matter in the universe.
No, it's a question which kind of coffee would you like today? No, but you're right, we do. We start with questions because science is all about those questions. It's about wondering how things work. It's about trying to unravel the greatest mystery in the history of humanity.
Yeah, and sometimes, Daniel, you even have questions about your questions. You have nested questions or even question your questions, like are these good questions to ask? Why do we ask so many questions meta questions? And it's not just physicists and scientists who ask questions, it's everybody. It's an inherent part of being human to wonder about the universe, to think about and ask yourself how it all works.
That's right, and that's what we're hoping to do with this podcast, not just to give you the answers to questions people are wondering about, but to inspire your questions, to get you to think about what it is that you want to know about the universe. Because in the end, science is personal. It's not a big institution somewhere where everybody's wearing lab coats and eye protection. It's just people, people wondering about the universe, people just like you.
Wow, you actually wear eye protection. Is that going to stop the high energy particles that might be coming at your face?
I'm wearing eye protection right now to protect me from bad jokes that come across the audio.
Nothing can protect you, Daniel.
I got two or three pairs on right now. They're coming for you, dad, joke proof eye protection.
He could wear lead glasses for that to help you. You can see nutrinos maybe, but you know they might not help you read.
The best defense is a good offense and.
Go after the particles. That's right, need some anti matter at them. Maybe. But we do like questions and we like to listen to questions from people like you, and sometimes in our podcast we like to feature these questions and try to answer them or at least talk about them live in front of an audience, like, for example, this great question we got from Hugo who is five years old.
Hello, my name is Huico. How big the black hole has to be to suck me up? And oh so I'm fun?
Great question? How big does a black hole need to be to suck you up? I feel like I wonder if he's concerned about that.
I don't know. Yeah, do you think he's like planning a visit to black holes and he's wondering, like what size a black hole he should visit in order to be safe.
Maybe he's trying to get one as a pet, and he's wondering, like, should I get a big one or a small one? What are the trade offs?
Maybe he wants a black hole to suck up his sister, and he's like, you know, really he's asking about that.
Now, that is a mystery that would be make for an interesting novel there. But what's the answer, Daniel? How big does a black hole need to be to suck a small five year old child up?
There is no minimum size to a black hole that could eat Hugo. Like, any black hole, no matter how small, would successfully eat up a five year old child.
Really, even like a microscopic black hole would work.
Even a microscopic black hole. The issues here are that really small black holes tend to evaporate, because black holes evaporate more quickly as they get smaller, which is why, for example, we're not too worried about maybe making black holes at the large Hadron collider because they would evaporate really quickly. But if you made a really small black hole and you put it near a small child really quickly before it evaporated, it would eat parts of that child, and then it would grow and that would protect it. And so a very small black hole would grow quickly if you fed it, and it would get bigger and bigger and need a child, and that child's sister, and then the entire apartment block, and eventually even us.
Oh man, hugo, please please don't do it. So it wouldn't evaporate faster than it could maybe absorb some of the mask from Hugo.
It depends on how quickly you start feeding it. If you create the black hole and immediately start feeding it, it doesn't matter how small it is. It will just grow. If you create the black hole and leave it by itself for a little while before you feed it, then it might evaporate before you get back to it.
I see, don't you need to feed it at a faster rate than it's evaporating at.
Yeah, you do, but you know if you put it right next to a small child, it's going to gobble that energy pretty quickly.
Let's not imagine this scenario too much.
It makes me a little uncomfortable.
There might be some laws against this.
But let's just say to Hugo that it's very unlikely you will ever visit a black hole, and if somebody's trying to sell you a black hole online, it's not a real one. So don't worry.
That's right. And it's easier just to make up with your sister and you know, appreciate them because years they'll be your best friends.
That's right. You don't want your siblings to evaporate or to be eaten by a black hole.
Or by anything I guess in general. But anyways, we love questions like this one from Hugo, and so today on the podcast, we'll be tackling listener Questions number sixteen. This is our sixteenth episode in which we do and talk about listener questions.
That's right, which means we're getting up on almost answering fifty of these things, which is pretty awesome. And I want to encourage anybody out there who has a question about the universe, something they'd like to hear us explain, or something they can't quite figure out just by googling, to write to us with their questions to questions at Danielianjorge dot com. We answer every email, we respond to every tweet. We might even put your question on the podcast.
That's right, this is our sweet sixteen episode. It's almost ready to drive. It can get a driver's permit.
Then what does it need us for anymore? It can just take itself around the.
Country pilot of spaceship. Maybe they do they give permits for.
That, not yet, but Amazon is selling them for a billion dollars each.
I think, really, do you think to let you drive the spaceship if you pay a billion dollars?
I think everything is for sale at Amazon.
Or for a billion dollars. So yeah, So we have three amazing questions here from our listeners, and they have to do with space photography, about antimatter stars and what would happen if you ate a giant planet again? Do you think these are practical questions, Daniel, or maybe just born out of curiosity?
I'm going to go with born out of curiosity because I'm really hoping that there are no evil villains in their layers. They're typing out questions to us. I don't want to be a part of anybody's plans to eat Neptune, or even to sell Jupiter to the aliens.
You don't want to be a villain enabler.
I do not want to be a scientist working for an evil villain.
Or a scientist working on some kind of particle collider that might create small black holes that, if put into contact with children, might be bad.
News, or a scientist helping a five year old child plot the demise of his sister.
Man, let's focus on the positive here.
Absolutely.
So we have three questions and so today we'll be tackling those, and we'll start with this one first from Simon from England, and he has a question about taking photos in space.
H is Simon from Nottingham, England. My question is one that's bothered me for some time. On Earth, of course, we can look up at the sky at night and see starlight and during a clear day, some particularly bright stars, these celestial bodies of Venus are visible to the naked eye too. Also telescopes on Earth picked the stars up as well, and the incredible deep space images by the Hobble telescope. But what I don't understand is how the critical footage captured joined the Apollo missions and later space missions don't show any starlight. Example of being Apollo eleven docking footage the Earth and the Moon. I'll just imagine that being in space with our atmosphere, the stars would be even brighter instead of in key blackness. The show's a simple answer, but I would love to know what that is. From you, Thank you. It's a brilliant show, loving every episode.
Thank you, all right, thank you. Simon. His question is why don't we see stars and space pictures, and specifically he mentioned the ones from the Apollo mission to the Moon. Do you think he's maybe thinking there's a conspiracy going on.
There's definitely a conspiracy theory about how people didn't actually land on the Moon and how these pictures were taken at a sound stage in Burbank. Of course that's all nonsense.
Right, It was in Hollywood, obviously, or Glendale. They do a lot of filming in Glendale.
You can tell by the humidity. And one thing that people often quote when they say these ridiculous things is that you can't see any stars in the backgrounds of those pictures. And that's true. When you look at these photographs of astronauts on the Moon, you see the moon, you see the astronauts. You can see the Earth sometimes in the background, but you don't see the stars out in space.
I guess even today, like when they show pictures of the International Space Station or a picture of the Earth from space, like you don't see the trillions and trillions of stars that we know are out there in space. I mean, technically we should see like the whole sky lit up with light from stars because there are, you know, bazillions of them.
That's true for most photographs because of the way those photographs are taken, and we'll dig into that in a moment, But there are times that you can see the Earth in a field of stars, like the famous pale blue dot picture is a picture taken from Jupiter of the Earth and you can see the Earth is just one of many dots in that picture.
Yeah, I guess, you know, it makes sense when we're here on Earth, Like if we're here on Earth covered with an atmosphere which is blocking a lot of light, that would make sense why we wouldn't see the trillions of stars that are out there. But I guess his question is like, if you're out in space going to the Moon and you look out into space, why can't you just see all the maybe infinite number of stars that are out there.
Yeah, and the answer doesn't really have to do with atmosphere. The atmosphere does absorb some light. It's not infinitely transparent, but that's not really an issue. That doesn't really stop us from seeing stars. I mean, the reasons we have telescopes out in space is not because the atmosphere absorbs light. It's because it makes the pictures fuzzier. It just sort of like shuffles everything around, so we can get crisper pictures out in space that we can down here on Earth. The real issue is not one of the atmosphere. It's the issue of the sun. It's the issue of having other sources of light that are really really bright. Like you can see the stars just fine from down here on Earth as long as the Sun is not blinding you, as long as the Sun is on the other side of the Earth.
So you're saying, like, the reason I can't see more stars with my eyeballs, it's the sun.
It's the sun. Like, if you go outside right now and it's daytime and you look up at the sky, there are stars there. There are photons coming through space through the atmosphere and hitting your eyeball from stars, you just can't see them because the sun is there and it's overwhelming everything.
You know.
It's like trying to hear a really quiet noise while you're at a super loud rock concert. You can't even tell that it's there.
You're saying, the light actually is hitting my eyeballs, and maybe is hitting my photoreceptors and sensors in the back of my eyeball, but they're getting so much more light from the sun that basically doesn't register. Or maybe my eyes have calibrated not to notice these small things.
Yeah, exactly, it's about the range and your eyes respond during the day, Right, if you look up at the sky and it's bright out, then your pupils will close a little bit. Right, the little hole in your eyeball that lets in the light will shrink because it's very bright and you don't want to damage is the very sensitive stuff on the back of your eyeball. So during the day that shrinks, and so you're actually less sensitive to really dim objects. And then if you go into a dark room, it takes a little while of your eyes to adjust. They relax and they open up and they let in basically every single photon. That's why you can see dimmer things at night because your eyes have opened up to let in more photons. So it is actually harder to see those stars during the day because your eyes are protecting you from the sun. If you looked up at the sky in the middle of the day with your eyes on like night vision mode, you could damage the back of your eyeballs.
Yeah, don't look at the sun, people, please. This is not an experiment suggestion here.
So it's all about relative intensity.
Right.
The stars are there, they're just very dim relative to the other things you're seeing during the day, namely sunlight.
Right, but what about during the night, Like, if I look up at the sky at night, why can't I see the trillions of stars that have been we know are out there.
You can see the trillions of stars that we know are out there. You can see lots of stars. It depends a little bit on where you are. If you're near a city, then you're seeing a lot of light pollution that's washing out a lot of those stars. If you go to the very very dark woods or a place where they protect the night sky, then you can see an incredible number of stars. It's really amazing. So for those of you who have always lived in the city and never been camping, find a way to go out into the woods at night and look up, and you can see an incredible number of stars. They really are out there. You just mostly don't see them, right.
You just need a telescope and some bear spray just in case.
And if you want to see even more, you just need to accumulate more light. Like the more distant ones, the ones that are hardest to see, they are dim because they are not sending you as many photons per second, right, They're further away, so fewer of their photons are coming to Earth. But if you set up a camera and you leave it out there for hours at a time, so it can like accumulate those photons, it can see things that you can see with your eye because it can take like an eight hour exposure, and so then you can see incredible stuff. You can see Andromeda, the neighboring galaxy. You can see very very distant objects.
Right. I think maybe that's the key to all of this and to this question, is this idea of aperture and like how much time your sensor is out there receiving photons, because maybe something that people don't think about is that when something is dim, like a light is dim, it doesn't mean that the photons are somehow less powerful. It just means that they're less frequent.
Right, that's right, because light is broken up into pieces, and every photon travels at the speed of light, and an object that is dim just means fewer photons per second, right, not less energy per photon. The energy per photon tells you the color the frequency of the photon. But if something is dim, it just means you're not getting as many photons. The way I think about it is like imagine some star out there. It's pumping out a huge number of photons every second, but as you get further and further away, you have a smaller and smaller slice of this big sphere that surrounds that star. So you get a smaller fraction of those photons. And the further way you are, the fewer photons are going to come and hit your eyeball. Mostly they're going to go to the left or to the right of the earth. And so yeah, dimness comes from smaller number of photons. And so that's also the answer to what's going on with the pictures taken in space.
Yeah, because the cameras sort of worked like your eyeballs, right.
Yeah, cameras work just like your eyeballs, And when you're in space, most of those photographs are basically the equivalent of taking a photograph during the daytime, because it's hard to hide from the sun in space, right. The Earth is not usually between you and space. So most of those photographs, like the ones in Apollo eleven, are taken when the sun is beaming down with its full brightness on the Moon, and so the stars are there, but you just can't see them the same way you can't see the stars when you take a picture in full sunlight here on Earth.
Right, because the film and the camera is sort of adjusted to get the light from that's bouncing off the Moon. It's not you know, a setup to kind of be sensitive to the light that's coming from the background in the stars.
Yeah. And if you did that, if you open the aperture wide and took a long exposure, then you would be totally washed out by the sunlight. You just get a huge white blob, the same way you did if you took a picture here on Earth and you left your camera shutter open for too long, it would just get all washed out. If you are on the part of the Moon where the sun isn't shining right, then it would be dark, and you could take a night sky photograph from the Moon and it would be clearer than the one you take on Earth because there wouldn't be any atmosphere fuzzing it up.
Right, you could take a picture where the sun don't shine and you might see a lot of interesting things.
And it might even be PG rated. And you can actually see these because the International Space Station right it orbits the Earth and so sometimes it's in the shadow of the Earth. And so if you google these you can see photos from the International Space Station that do show stars. They really are there.
Right right. I guess you don't need to be in a shadowy or dark place. Can you just point your camera away from the Sun or not in the direction of the Sun or anything like the Moon or Earth bouncing light?
Yeah, there's definitely an advantage to being in space because you don't have the atmosphere bouncing off the light everywhere like here on Earth. You can't do that because the Sun's light is hitting the atmosphere and then coming down to your camera basically from every angle out in space. You're right, it's only direct sunlight, but the moon itself is bright, right, the moon is reflecting. The reason we see the moon down here on Earth is that the Sun's light bounces off the Moon and then comes back down to the Earth, so you don't have the atmosphere messing up your photograph. But still there's ambient light from lots of other places, like the moon itself is basically reflecting the Sun.
I guess the main answer is just that you know, light from faraway stars is very rare. The photons are rare. They might not be coming directly at your camera or your eyeball, so if you want to see them, you need to leave your eyes open for a very long time or your camera shutter open for a very long time, which usually doesn't quite work exactly.
To see those stars, you need to avoid any other bright source of light so that you can effectively make out very dim sources.
Great. So hopefully that answers Simon's questions and maybe puts away another conspiracy theory about the Apollo program. All right, let's get into these other questions about anti matter stars and eating Jupiter. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're answering listener questions and we just answered one about space pictures, and now we also have a new question here from Petrie who has a question about anti matter stars.
Hi, Daniel Njor.
My name is Petrie, and I have some questions about antimatter stars. I recently read an article which described possible observations of antimatter stars by an instrument aboard the International Space Station. I wonder how likely is it that antimatter stars exist? If they do exist, what would happen if two galaxies collided and one of those galaxies contained antimatter of stars? Would we be able to tell? I know that during galactic collisions, the odds of two stars colliding is small, but what about the interstellar dust would on antimatter interstellar dusts annihilate when interacting with an antimatter star?
And could we detect this?
Thanks for all the great podcasts and keep up the good work.
That's definitely a supervillain network right there.
Plotting a way thinking about antimatter, Like how can I create the biggest explosion a whole galaxy of antimatter?
That does sound pretty dramatic. I'm gonna pop some popcorn when you make that happen.
If you use antimatter kernels, they would pop expra fluffy here. But thank you Patrick for this question. And this is a pretty interesting question. I guess his question is are there antimatter stars? Like we know that antimatter might exist, and we know that there are stars, and so can you put the two together and can you make a star out of antimatter?
Yeah, it's a really fun question. And I love these combination questions, you know, like let's combine two crazy things and make a crazy thing. Squared.
Can I make an antimatter black hole, Daniel, It's like an anti question. I'm not against that.
So the cool thing about it antimatter is that it's basically exactly the same as matter, except that has all of its quantum numbers flipped. By quantum numbers we mean like electric charge and the other kinds of charges like weak hypercharge and color charge, all the charges that have to do with forces. But as far as we know otherwise, it's the same, which means that you should be able to build things out of antimatter the same way you can build things out of matter, Like you should be able to take an anti proton and combine it with an anti electron to make anti hydrogen. And we've done that, and we've seen that anti hydrogen behaves exactly the same way as hydrogen. It has the same energy levels as all the same physics, and so we suspect that antimatter works really the same way as matter, And there's no reason why you couldn't build elements and molecules and all sorts of complex stuff, even up to stars, out of antimatter.
You can make anti people perhaps or anti antifos, So it's not theoretical, it's like an actual well, I mean, it started as a theory, but you've been able to make it in particle colliders. But I think maybe you haven't been able to study it quite that thoroughly, right, because it's kind of hard to make and it's really hard to handle, so you can't sort of test it the way you can normal matter.
Yeah, it's not easy to make antimatter. You've got to smash particles and other particles of really high energy to make heavy, unstable particles which then sometimes decay into antimatter. So we sometimes can make it, and we have produced it at CERN, but it's like picograms of antimatter. It's very, very difficult to make large quantities, and as you say, it's difficult to deal with because it comes into contact with normal matter and boom, it annihilates. Like if an electron meets an anti electron, they like to interact, and they interact and turn into a photon. So that's turning all the mass of those particles directly into energy. By E equals mc squared, And because C squared is a big number, when you're multiplied by mass, you got a big energy. So combining matter and antimatter into energy at least is a huge amount of energy. So yeah, it's difficult to handle, and it's difficult to do big experiments on, Like we've never made enough antimatter to do even simple tests like does antimatter feel gravity the same way matter does? We don't know because we've never made enough.
Of it, right, Like, you could maybe make a ball of antimatter and find that it floats or something right or like have feels anti gravity, and so it would shoot off into space.
I know, and that seems ridiculous, but we just don't know. And the stranger things have been true in the universe, So it's possible that antimatter feels anti gravity. You know. It's just the kind of thing we've got to go out and check. But it's difficult to do because the universe seems to be made almost entirely of matter. As far as we know, everything in the Solar System is made out of matter, as far as we know, everything in our galaxy is made out of matter, though we're not one hundred percent sure.
Right, So it's sort of like regular matter in that it sort of looks the same like an anti electron looks like an electron. It just has a lot of these quantum numbers flipped, so you don't know everything about it, but you do know that it could probably and it has formed atoms with antimatter.
Yeah, and we have constructed those atoms, like they've done these experiments at CERN where they put an anti proton together with an anti electron and they made anti hydrogen and it survived for a while and they studied it. So that's not theoretical, that is real. And we see antimatter all the time also in cosmic rays, like it's produced when stuff hits the atmosphere and creates these big showers. The one really high energy particle bumps into a bit of the atmosphere and creates two particles with half the energy, which then create four particles with a quarter of the energy, et cetera, and you get this big shower of particles, and a lot of those have antimatter particles in them that don't last very long. They pretty quickly annihilate with stuff in the atmosphere. So most of the universe is made out of matter, but antimatter is something that we can create and we can also find it occasionally in nature.
Right, And so if it feels gravity the same way then matter feels gravity, then it is technically possible to make like hydrogen antimatter and then bunch of those up to make an antimatter star. Right like it would be fusing at the core just like a regular star would, but it would all be antimatter.
Yeah, And there's a little bit of a subtlety there, Like, if it feels gravity the same way that our matter feels gravity, then yes, it would accumulate. If it feels anti gravity, then it would depend on exactly the kind of anti gravity. Like it might be that it feels attractive gravity with other antimatter, but repulsive gravity with matter, in which case it could still again accumulate into a star. But if it feels some sort of weird anti gravity where it repels any other kind of mass, then you wouldn't be able to gather it together. It would always like repel itself. But if it feels any kind of accumulative gravity where it pulls itself together, then in principle you could pull it together and you could accumulate a lot of it, and you could make a star. Because we think that the strong force and the weak force and all these things treat matter and antimatter very similarly. So the fundamental processes that go on inside a star should also work for antimatter fusion. For example, you should be able to fuse anti hydrogen together to get anti helium.
Interesting, and would it give out the same kind of light as our sun or would it gives them sort of like anti version of light.
Yeah. The cool thing about light is that it is its own anti version, Like the anti photon is just the photon. The photon is its own anti particle. And that has to be the case because what happens when antimatter meets matter, It gives off a photon, right that one particle, the photon unifies matter and antimatter. It's like the gateway between them. So it has to be the same particle. And so we think that if there are antimatter stars out there, they should shine in real light the same way normal stars do. So just by looking at a star, it would be hard to know if it's an antimatter star. But stars don't just create light, they also create particles, like our star creates the solar wind, and the solar wind is mostly matters, protons and electrons, So an antimatter star would have an antimatter solar wind wind, which consists mostly of anti particles and like many more anti neutrinos than neutrinos. So there are ways to tell of a star is a matter star or an anti matter star.
Oh, you could get wind of its madderness or on its pocision on matter.
Yeah, what happens if anti wind blows into uranus?
I want it on the record that it was a physicists who made that joke, not the cartoonists. Even I wouldn't go.
Then you walked me to the ledge. Man, you walked me to the ledge.
And I nudged you. I see, I blew some antimatter wind on you and it pushed you over. Well, I guess I'm a little disappointed because I would have thought, maybe like an antimatter star would I don't know, do the opposite of light, like it would suck in life or something.
That's a black hole? Man?
Are black holes anti matter stars? Daniel, let's misinform the public.
No, the cool thing about antimatter is that it could have been matter. Right, as far as we can tell, there really aren't many differences between matter and antimatter, and so one of the deepest questions in physics is why is our universe made out of this kind of matter and not the other one? Obviously if it had been made out of antimatter, we would have called it matter and the other one antimatter. So really the question is like why are there two kinds and why did one get left over? Because we think that in the very beginning in the Big Bang, there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter made, but now there's only matter left because a lot of the matter and antimatter annihilated itself and disappeared in two photons. But why is matter preferentially left over? Was there a little bit more antimatter made in the early universe or is there something out there that prefers to go to matter instead of antimatter. It's not a question we know the answer to, and it really like sets the stage for everything. It's like why are we even here?
Right? I think that was part of Petri's question, which is like if there was an antimatter star out there, would we be able to tell the difference, or like if there was a whole galaxy made out of antimatter, would we be able to tell that it is an antimatter galaxy, And so I guess maybe a follow up question is, like, how do you know there is an more antimatter in the universe, Like, how do we know the galaxies we see in the night sky aren't made out of antimatter.
Yeah, it's a great question. We're not one hundred percent sure. We have two ways to look for it. One is that we expect if there are antimatter stars out there, or antimatter galaxies or antimatter regions of the universe, that they're be putting out antimatter radiation and when that antimatter radiation hits the radiation from the matter parts of the universe, it will annihilate. So like halfway between a star and an antimatter star, or between a galaxy and an antimatter galaxy, you should see like a whole wall where particles are hitting each other, annihilating and turning into photons. So these like flashes of light in the middle of space. And so we've looked for these kinds of flashes, and we even know like what energy they should be at, but we don't see them. We don't see those anywhere, and that rules out there being like significant antimatter stars in our galaxy or in our galaxy cluster, and probably even further than that. Though it gets difficult because now you looking for like low energy photons from pretty far away. So we can't, for example, rule out there being a huge antimatter region of the universe out beyond the observable universe because we just can't see it. But we can pretty much rule out there being big antimatter regions of the universe because of these photon flashes that we would see if they were there.
I guess maybe if the universe does have a matter preference over antimatter, maybe couldn't those antimatter particles turn into matter by the time they get to other galaxies.
Well, there is a conservation of electric charge, and so for example, a positron, the anti electron can't just turn into an electron, right, You have to conserve electric charge. And so these things are pretty persistent. And that's the other way we look for antimatter stars or antimatter galaxies is that we look for those antimatter particles coming from them. So Petri mentioned this really cool experiment on the space station. It's called AMS, and it's on the space station. It's basically a big magnet with a particle detector, and it takes particles that shoot through it and it bends them, so we can tell are you positively charged or negatively charged, and it measures their mass and stuff. And the really cool thing is that they think they have seen two anti helium particles coming through in the last few years.
Mm, well, what do you mean You can actually detect that it's anti helium.
Yeah, you can detect that it's anti helium because you measure its charge and you measure its mass. You can do all sorts of studies on it. Now, it's not exactly conclusive. It's not like they trapped it and took pictures and probed. It sort of just passes through their detector, So there's a chance that what they've seen is actually something else. But it looks a lot like anti helium. And that's pretty amazing because anti helium is not just something you expect to be around, like we see antiprotons occasionally in cosmic rays, we see anti electrons, but anti helium that's the kind of thing that would be made in the heart of an anti matter star. And so seeing one you could shrugle that off. Seeing two, that's pretty weird and interesting. So we don't know if this means that this is like a mess from an antimatter star somewhere in the milky way.
Whoa, or it's just from an anti balloon that it escape. But I guess how do you catch an anti healum when didn't it annihilate with the stuff that you're trying to detect it with, When it didn't create an explosion?
Yeah, but that's what we do with particles, was that we explode them, right. The way we detect particles is we destroy them, you know, we have them interact with stuff and deposit their energy. And so the way AMS works, it has a big magnet and it sucks stuff in and it bends it and then it gets it to interact with the matter of that detector. And it doesn't like blow up the detector because we're talking about tiny little particles, so it's not like a bomb or anything. You know. We create anti matter all the time at a large hadron collider and it flies through our detector and interacts you know, positrons and anti muons and stuff. We detect them the same way did we detect other stuff, just by getting them to interact with our matter.
Cool. Well, I guess my question now is if you breathe in anti helium from a balloon, will it make your voice deeper or a higher pitch like regular helium.
Nobody knows the answer that question, right, And that's the first experiment we'll do when we make enough anti helium.
All right, all right, I'll put my name on the waiting list there.
But there was one more little part to his question, which was what would happen if we collided a galaxy with an anti galaxy. I'm guessing a lot would happen. Yes, a lot would happen, big explosions. Yeah, Because, as he says, stars are pretty diffuse and so they wouldn't necessarily collide with each other. But they're also pumping out a lot of stuff, and the dust and the gas would also be antimatter, so there would be a lot of collisions, just sort of like with the Bullet cluster. When we saw those two collisions. The stars mostly passed through each other, but the rest of the stuff, the gas and the dust, definitely collided. So it would be pretty dramatic, right.
I guess galaxies are pretty sparse, and so it's like throwing a bunch of sand at another bunch of sand, and most of them would just go through itself.
Yeah, most of the stars would, but the gas and the dust would definitely interact.
And you're saying, we haven't seen that kind of you know, event, So maybe that's kind of evidence that there aren't antimatter galaxies or antimatter stars.
Yeah, but we can't really explain this result from ams, like two anti helium particles is a lot more than you expect to see if there are no antimatter stars. On the other hand, it's preliminary, so it could just be a fluke, could be a mistake. We're not exactly sure, but it's a tantalizing clue.
All right. Well, then, to answer Petrie's question, are there anti matter stars? We don't quite know, right. I mean, it's theoretically possible from what we know about antimatter, but we don't see a lot of evidence for antimatter stuff out there in the universe, except for maybe these two anti helium particles that the space station just found. All right, Well, let's get into our last question of the day, and this one is about aliens eating Jupiter, which hopefully hasn't happened I don't think. But let's get into it. But first, let's take a quick break.
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Vgwroup Ford. We're prohibited by Law eighteen plus. Terms and conditions apply, all right, Listener. Question number three for the day comes from Joe, who has a question about hungry aliens.
Hi.
I wanted to ask a science fiction question. I was wondered if aliens were, for some reason just to make a pitstop in our solar system and steal off all our gas giants to use this fuel, would that affect our orbit at all? Would Earth's climate be affected by that? Have a follow up question as well, if they were to remove those gas planets, would that also have any kind of effect on our ability to leave the Solar system? Would that take our ability to fuel some kind of ORP drives or whatever away from us?
All right? Interesting question from Joe and his baby, who I'm guessing it's the one feeding him the questions and was really impatient to hear the answer.
I don't know, but apparently asking us these questions is more important than whatever his baby needed.
Well, maybe the question is somewhaw related to the baby. Maybe the baby is the alien and the baby's really hungry, so he's like, what if I feeded Jupiter, will it stop crying for the rest of his life?
And when the mom gets back, what did you feed our baby a lot of gas? Or maybe he's just thinking about the future that this baby will inherit and wondering how we will deal with the inevitable galactic empire that's going to come and visit us and pose us these difficult questions.
Yeah, I noticed he had a follow up question, which I think, you know, tells me that he's thought this through, like he's thought about it and he thought about the implications of it. Yeah, all right, So well, the question is what if aliens aid Jupiter? And I think he means more like, what if Jupiter suddenly disappeared? Like what would be the consequences? Would it throw our solar system into chaos? And is follow a question was will it sort of take away a huge source of possible fuel for us to go see the stars.
Yeah, it's really cool to think about Jupiter versus the Earth, and it gives you a sense of like the scale of these objects. Because remember, Jupiter is like much much bigger than the Earth. It like dwarfs the Earth. On the other hand, Jupiter itself is dwarfed by the Sun. Right, the Sun is like ninety nine points something percent of all the mass in the Solar System. Jupiter is like ninety nine percent of the rest of it. But the Sun is like a thousand times more massive than Jupiter. So when you're doing like gravitational calculations to ask like what's tugging on the Earth. What's important for the Earth, it's mostly the Sun. Everything else you can ignore because not just is the Sun more massive than Jupiter, it's also closer to us than Jupiter. Like, Jupiter is pretty far out there, and so the gravitational force on the Earth from the Sun is twenty five thousand times more powerful than the gravitational force on the Earth from Jupiter.
Mmm, you're saying, Jupiter is big, but it's far away and it pales in comparison. To the Sun now at one in twenty five thousand seems like very little, but I don't know. Maybe in space, these small differences make a huge difference.
It does definitely affect the trajectory of the Earth. So if you got rid of Jupiter, it would have a small effect on earth trajectory. You know, it would change like the elliptical nature a little bit, but we would still have a stable orbit and it wouldn't affect us in a way that we could measure, like it wouldn't affect the radiation we're getting from the Sun et cetera.
All Right, so it would maybe changed or weather a little bit, but it wouldn't like throw us off of the Solar system.
Yeah, exactly. We would still be stable. And you know, people have done these calculations, and it depends a little bit on where Earth lands. But if you just like delete Jupiter, you definitely get a stable orbit and most of the times it's almost essentially unchanged from its current orbit.
WHOA, people have done these calculations, Like people are are planning for this somehow or expecting this.
I actually assign this as a problem in one of my programming classes to do like numerical simulations of the Solar System and consider what would happen if a new planet came in or if you deleted a planet. It's pretty fun to see, like the chaotic events that transpire when you mess with the Solar System.
Oh interesting, I see you've been outsourcing your villainy to your students.
I've been inviting young scientists to participate in these intellectual explorations.
In your intellectual villainy. Yes, that's what I'm saying now, I'm just kidding. So it would have a small effect on Earth, but maybe would it have a ripple effect on the rest of the Solar System. Like you know, one twenty five thousand seems small, but if you add it up to all the other things happening in the Solar System could throw it into chaos.
It definitely would affect the rest of the Solar System because there's stuff out there that's much closer to Jupiter, and that's where Jupiter is basically the dominant gravitational effect. Like the asteroid Belt, this huge collection of rocks, some of them are between Mars and Jupiter, and they're very very strongly affected by Jupiter's gravity, and some of them are actually in orbit with Jupiter. They're like part of Jupiter's orbit, they're like co orbiting. So Jupiter is the big boy out there and is definitely in charge of what's going on. And if you deleted Jupiter, then it would totally disrupt the asteroid belt. It would become chaotic very quickly, and they would get all new trajectories.
Right, and maybe that could disrupt thanks and maybe throw an asteroid our way, right, it could maybe spell doom for us that way.
Yeah, because what Joe didn't specify also is what would happen to the moons of Jupiter. Like if they just delete Jupiter and leave its moons, then those moons are suddenly flying through space without the gravitational force needed for their orbits. So depending on their angles, like they could plummet into the Sun, they could shoot out of the Solar System, or they could like start orbiting the Sun on their own. And you know, some of those things are pretty big, Like they're bigger than mercury. And so we'd have like a new planet. You know, Io could be a new planet if you deleted Jupiter.
Who oh, that would be the ultimate poking the eye for Pluto. If like a moon got upgraded. Well, it got downgraded.
Yeah, I know, talk about promotion or you know, one of them could plow through into the inner Solar System, disrupting the asteroid belt, and that would not be great for the Earth because a lot of those things could end up hitting the Earth. You know, most of those are in stable orbits and NASA is monitoring them and we don't think any of them are on trajectory to hit the Earth anytime soon, but a big chaok event like that could definitely shake that up.
M all right, So I guess the answer to the first part of the question is that it wouldn't affect us that much gravitationally, but it might who knows, trigger some kind of random fluke event that could kill us potentially.
So if the aliens come and you offer them ju butter, remember that still has consequences for the Earth because we're all one solar system.
Man.
Yeah, maybe point them to the nearest solar system and get them to eat those over there.
We hear that Alpha centuri is really really nice and chewy this time of year.
Yeah, they have a better buffet, You have better desserts. What about the second part of his question, though, like, would it rob us of potential fuel for space exploration. Like we know Jupiter is full of you know, gas that we could maybe use for some sort of fusion powered space engine.
Right, It's true, and if the Aliens are coming because they want to fuel up, then it's definitely a resource and it would suck to lose it. But you know, space is filled with these resources, like there is water and hydrogen and all sorts of elements all over the Solar System. A lot of the things that seem rare and difficult to find on Earth are difficult to find only because you're on the surface of the Earth. You know, there's like asteroids that are huge chunks of platinum. So whatever you really need out there in the Solar System, you can pretty much find it even if you lost Jupiter. So I'm not too worried about that. But there are some consequences of losing Jupiter, Like we use Jupiter and Saturn and the big planets right now as like gravitational slingshots. You want to get out to Pluto, for example, one good way to do it is to aim at Jupiter and swoosh around it and have Jupiter like sling you out into the outer Solar System, and so we do these maneuvers. I think we had a whole podcast episode about how they work, and that's pretty helpful. So it'd be bummer to lose Jupiter for that reason.
Also, Yeah, like you aim at Jupiter and then let Jupiter pull you out to where it is, and then once it pulls you in, you swing around and use that momentum to shoot off into the stars.
Yeah, exactly. So it's a way without burning any fuel to gain some speed because you're stealing a little bit from Jupiter, and also to change direction.
I see. We wouldn't lose any important fuel because the Solar System has other resources, but we would lose kind of like a nice stepping stone to get out of the Solar system. Yeah, could you use the new moon io, I mean the new planet io instead.
I suppose you could, but it doesn't have that nearly the power gravitationally that Jupiter has.
All right, Well, that answers a question for Joe. What if Aliens aid Jupiter not much at least for now, so eat away Ilios. That is what you're saying, Daniel, That's what I'm saying. Give us physics and then you digin all right. Well, that answers are three amazing questions from our awesome listeners. Thanks again to Simon, Petrie and Joe for submitting their questions and recording them. If you have questions, please email Daniel.
That's right, and thank you everybody for using your curiosity to power this podcast and all of science. The reason that we're doing this stuff, the reason we are looking for answers to questions about the universe is because we want to know, and we know that you want to know.
Yeah, and we are happy to give the answers and also anti answers, which sort of behave the same way as answers to.
You, right until they collide with answers, right, and then they annihilate into pure mental energy.
All right, Well, thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed that. See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorjiggs in the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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