Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseListener Questions 40: Ways our Universe could end us
Daniel and Jorge answer questions from listeners about the dangers of our Universe and whether engineers could save us.
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Hey, Jorgey, does learning more about the universe make you feel more or less safe?
I think it makes me feel small and insignificant, which I guess is let's safe me too.
The forces out there are just so crazy and powerful. It's like you would take nothing to squish us and wipe us out of existence.
But I hear there's a silver lightning.
Oh yeah, what's that.
You know, as science progresses, maybe we figure out ways to protect ourselves.
Hmmm. That sounds like a job for the engineers, not the scientists.
Yeah, that's right. You scientists learn how we might die, and engineers save us.
I'm totally happy with that division of labor.
Are you saying that engineers are heroes?
That's no problem for me. I mean I hate wearing spandex.
Awesome, I have my cape ready.
Hi.
I am Poorhem, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and science is my superpower.
But wait, you're not a superhero. You're a super villain. Almost kind of like you're trying to figure out how everyone might die.
Yeah, but I'm not shooting laser beams out of my eyeballs and actually killing people. There's a distinction there.
What are you plotting? Are you plotting how to do it?
Though?
I mean, if someone offered to make my eyeballs and the laser beams, I would seriously consider it. I guess yeah.
I would make cooking easier, right, starting a fire while when you're camping, also easier.
Doing the dishes, you know, frying that crusty stuff off the bottom of pants, No need to soak it anymore.
That's right. Super villains have it easy.
But I do think it's incredible that we have this power to understand the universe and unravel its true nature, even if that does sometimes reveal great danger.
M Although we always say that everyone is a physicist, which technically means everybody has that superpower, which maybe makes it not a superpower, just makes it a skill.
Is that like Superman on his planet Krypton, is not really a super at all, even if it's a planet of Superman.
Oh Man, Daniel, We've had this conversation. Everyone in Superman's planet doesn't have powers because of the sun.
Oh, that's right, that's right. But if all of them came to Earth, would they all then be superheroes? Is there a limit to the number of superheroes you can have?
They would be super compared to us, So technically, yes, they would be super. This is all a very philosophical conversation. What is super?
Well, then we're all superheroes compared to like cats and dogs that can't do any science.
Yes, I imagine. So yeah, to your dog, you probably are superhero. I mean you give it food magic food that just appears every day, twice a day.
And I don't even have to wear a cape.
And you also pick up their poop. I mean that's like, that's like the best kind of superhero. But anyways, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of Our Heart Radio.
In which we dig into the deepest questions of the nature of the universe, such as who is picking up daniels dogs poop? And what's inside a black hole? And can we use one question to solve the other one?
That's right, although I'm guessing that the answer to the first question, who picks up daniels dogs poop is Daniel, I mean it is your dog.
It is my dog, and I'm very conscientious about it.
But yeah, it is an amazing universe, full of interesting and crazy phenomena and mysteries and things for us to discover and figure out with our puny, little human brains.
And many times when we explore the universe, we discover fascinating facts about the way that it works. Sometimes we can even put those facts to work to improve our lives. Maybe one day someone will invent a black hole powered dog poop picker upper. But sometimes we discover that the universe is crazy and powerful and dangerous, that our lives are a little bit more precarious and fragile than we ever imagined.
Yeah, I guess if you think about it, we're just tiny, little squishy beings living in a little thin layer of air on a giant rock, hurling through space, barely not falling into a giant ball of fire called the sun.
Living right on the edge between being burned up and being frozen to death. We are riding that knife edge into infinity.
Yeah, it sort of makes you appreciate how precious life is, right, or the fact that we're here to talk about the universe.
And how amazing that it's gone on for so long that the Earth has been habitable for billions of years, even under vastly changing conditions. Over all that time, it's been possible for these little squishy things to make more squishy things.
Yeah, and I guess it also makes you think about how precarious our existence is, and what are all the things out there in the verse that could maybe end our existence?
And even if there are crazy dangerous things out there in the universe, I still want to know what they are, not just because I have a deep curiosity for understanding the nature of the universe, but because I'm hopeful that if we can characterize what's going on out there in the universe, eventually the engineers will save us.
Yeah. I guess that's the only way you might say yourselves is if you know what's coming for you right then you maybe we'll be able to do something.
About it exactly. That is why we track all the asteroids in the Solar System and try to keep a handle on where the comments are so that we can see one coming with enough time to maybe divert it. That is why we try to understand the nature of space and time so that if a black hole does approach our Solar system, and we'll have some ideas for how maybe to handle it.
Yeah, and it all starts with questions. And it's not just scientists who have questions, it's everybody. Everybody has questions about what's out there, what might affect them, what it might change the way you live out there in the universe. Everybody has questions.
That's right, and we love hearing your questions. If you have thoughts and questions about the nature of the universe and its future and how we might live in crazy future times or strange corners of the universe, please don't hesitate to write to us. We answer all of our questions. Just email us at questions at Danielandjorge dot com.
So today on the podcast, we'll be tackling listener questions number forty ways the universe could kill you.
Addition, I just happen to notice when I was putting these together that all of today's questions have something to do with very powerful forces that could extinguish humanity.
Isn't that every physics question ever? I mean, is there a physics questions about something that would not totally annihilate humanity?
Sometimes it's just about everyday objects. Remember, we had people asking about like why does my truck look blue? And how does the sun bleach my clothing? And stuff like that. Though I suppose there are cancer risks.
There, yes, radiation and chemicals. I mean maybe the more you know, the more afraid it makes you.
I think it's something like a Worshark test. You know, the way you look at the universe do you see it as dangerous and crazy or do you see it as fragile but still wonderful and lovingly supportive of our existence?
I see, like, is the universe half dangerous or half safe? Like, if you have a fifty percent chance of surviving, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Yeah?
Is the universe half trying to kill you or half trying to save you? Or both?
I guess it depends on what it's like for dogs and cats and if it's better worse than us.
I think my dog at leaves is a pretty good life.
But it is a pretty interesting topic. I guess people are curious about what's out there and how it might, you know, change our existence, and what can suddenly happen to change our existence.
That's right, and so we're very excited to answer today's questions. All about the nature of space and time and the whole universe and storms and dramatic superw.
Yeah, we have three awesome questions here, and so it's jump right in with the first question from Steve.
Hello, Daniel n Johey, my name is Steve, and I have a question about dark energy. You've mentioned on your podcast previously that since we don't really understand what drives dark energy, it may be possible that the current rate of expansion could at some point in the future slow down and maybe even reverse, so that space starts contracting rather than expanding. If this scenario did happen, My question is, how would we first deteck this?
Hmm?
Interesting question. I think Steve is saying that we know that right now the universe is expanding, and it's expanding faster and faster every day. But could that change, Could somehow the universe stop expanding faster and faster and maybe even start shrinking, In which case, when and how would we even notice that that's right?
Could it be happening right now? And how could we tell Steve wants to know whether he should sell his bitcoin or not.
Or real is Steve right? Should we buy more planets? Because the universe is shrinking and real estate is going to be at a premium in the future or not. If the universe is just going to keep growing, it's going to be worth less and less.
Well, this is a really pretty dark question because I don't think there's anything the engineers could do to save you. I mean, if the universe decides it's going to turn around and crunch back to a super dense state, it's pretty hard to imagine anybody surviving that.
It is a dark question also because it involves dark energy.
It does involve dark energy, and one of our favorite topics the expansion of the universe and our almost total lack of understanding for how it works, which makes it pretty hard to predict what's going to happen in the future.
All right, well, let's dig into the answer to this question, Daniel. I guess, first of all, how do we measure that the universe is expanding?
Right?
So Steve makes a good point, which is that we're measuring the current rate of expansion, and then we're extrapolating into the future and we're wondering about whether that's going to change, and wondering about how we're going to know that. So, yeah, let's say about how we actually measure the expansion of the universe. And so what we mean when we say the expansion of the universe is we mean the increasing distances between galaxies. So we look at our galaxy, and we look at other galaxies, and the best way to measure it, in principle would be to pick a galaxy, measure our distance from it and our speed relative to it, and then come back a billion years later and say, Okay, where's that galaxy now and how fast is it going. We can't do that because it would take a billion years, and so instead we do something different, which is that we look further back in time for other galaxies, and we say, well, galaxies at a certain distance, which is a certain distance back in time because of the propagation of light, are moving away from us at some velocity. And galaxies that are further away, which is further back in time, back in the history of the universe, how fast are they going? So we can sort of read back the expansion of the universe the velocity of galaxies relative to us versus distance, which is also reading it versus time.
Right. But I guess the basics of it is that we're measuring how fast galaxies are moving away from us. They'll look like they're moving away from us, and we attribute that to the expansion of the universe. And then you want to check whether, like that speed that the galaxies are moving away from us, whether it's faster now than it used to be, or whether it's lower than it used to be, right exactly.
And to draw those conclusions, you need two pieces of information per a galaxy. One is you have to know how far away is it, so you basically know how far back in time are we looking, and you have to measure its velocity, how fast is it going relative to us?
You know.
Something to understand also is that when you look out into the sky, everything is moving away from us, except for Andromeda, which is gravitationally dominated and moving towards us. The overall picture is that everything is moving away from us. And this is something that Hubble first noticed like one hundred years ago, that if you look out into the sky, everything is essentially red shifted because the light that comes from these objects, its frequency is shifted towards the red side of the spectrum. How we measure the velocity these things, we look at the light from a distant galaxy. We see how much it shifted from the light it should be sending us, and we use that shift to measure its relative velocity.
Right, Because if it's moving away from us, the light it sends us gets a little bit stretched out into the red spectrum, right, And if something is moving towards us, the light gets get a little bit compressed as it moves towards us into the blue spectrum. Right. So the red or the light looks the faster it's moving away from us exactly.
And there's two different ways to think about that. One is that these galaxies have velocity relative to us, and things that are in motion relative to us, their light will be shifted, so it's called the Doppler shift. The same way that like a police siren sounds different as it passes you, because when it approaches you, its sound waves are blue shifted to higher frequency, and when it passes you, its sound waves are red shifted to lower frequency. You can do the same sort of thinking about the light from these galaxies. That's not one hundred percent really the right way to think about it, because these galaxies are so far away, and it gives you velocities greater than the speed of light. The way cosmologists think about it instead is that space is expanding between us and those galaxies, and so instead, what's happening to the light is that it's getting stretched out by space expanding, So the wavelengths get longer as the light travels through space, and so that's why we'd see it red shifted. So it's two different ways to think about it that end up giving you exactly the same prediction. Either you're measuring the expansion of space or you're measuring the velocity of those galaxies relative to us.
It's the stretching of space itself that is changing the color of the light.
Yeah, that's the way cosmologists think about it, because they think about each galaxy is having its own little inertial frame. You could think about physics happening in those galaxies, and then between them space is expanding, and that's why the light gets red shifted. And that avoids anything being like faster than the speed of light because you can't really compare velocities in one frame to velocities in another frame. In general relativity, it gets really hairy.
All right.
So then you said that we can look back in history in the history of the universe by looking at galaxies that are further and further away from us. And what we've noticed is that galaxies that are really old move at a different rate away from us than galaxies that are younger.
Yeah, exactly, we can look at the velocity versus time, and from them we can see how the velocity is changing versus time, and so basically we're seeing whether the universe's expansion is accelerating, speeding up, or whether it's decelerating, whether it's slowing down. So we can see like the history of the expansion velocity of the universe by looking further and further back in time. Nearby galaxies are very recent, they tell us about the expansion rate. Now, very very far away galaxies, the light from them we get is very old, very out of date. But it's sort of like looking at the fossil record. It's seeing what was happening in the universe a long time ago. So we can see the acceleration or deceleration history of the universe.
Now, the fossils also turn nd the older they get, or is that why like when you go to a museum on the bones are brown, where am I totally misinforming our public.
Here.
You got to get a paleontologist on here to answer that question. I'm not qualified. We need a paleophysicist. Paleophysicist wow, a phrase I don't think I've ever heard before. And who is picking up dinosaur poops? Really? Nobody was cleaning up after.
The Yeah, maybe it was a dinosaur.
Physicists, paleophysicists should have been picking up those paleo poops. But one thing I think is super fascinating and not really widely enough appreciated, is that the universe has not always been accelerating. Like, the universe has always been expanding, but it hasn't always been accelerating, right.
There's been like periods when the universe was getting bigger at a bigger rate or a slower rate.
Right Exactly. The sort of brief version of it is that you have this very very super rapid inflation, very early universe that we don't understand at all, but it gives you this huge universe with hot, dense.
Plasma does what we call the Big Bang, right sort of, we're like right after the Big Bang.
So there's a bit of a disconnect in the terminology here. What most people think of as the Big Bang, is that inflation that really rapid expansion very early on what scientists call the Big Bang is actually what happened after that. Once you start from a very hot, dense place and then you evolve that forwards in time. That's what we mean when we say the Big Bang. We don't know how we got that original very hot, dense state. Maybe it was inflation, maybe it was something else. We really just don't know. Big Bang starts from sort of the Plank era, when the universe already existed and was super hot and dense, and we evolve it forward in time. That's sort of what we mean by the Big Bang. It's sort of different from the popular conception of the Big Bang.
Okay, but do you say there was an initial period where the universe was expanding super fast?
Yeah, So we think probably inflation is this very rapid expansion from quantum primordial soup to some very hot, dense state. Then general relativity takes over and gravity and things cool and expand, and we end up with the universe we have today. Between the very hot and dense state and where we are today. The universe has expanded a lot, but it wasn't always accelerating. It was always expanding, but for the first seven or eight billion years or so, that expansion was slowing down. But either it was enough matter and energy in the universe to start pulling stuff back together. Gravity was working hard to pull stuff back together because of all that mass has gravity yanking on it. But around eight billion years after the universe started, something changed. Dark energy took over. This expansion of the universe slipped from being decelerating to being accelerating. The expansion used to be sort of slowing down, but then it turned over and it started accelerating. So the last six or so billion years of the universe, we've had an accelerating expansion of the universe. It's been going faster and faster.
It's like the universe hit the accelerator button or pedal.
Yeah, And it all comes down to the nature of dark energy. Like as the universe expands, matter gets more dilute, it gets more thinned out right, the same amount of matter more space, and so things get more dilute. But dark energy, we don't think is like that. Dark energy is a constant in space, and so as the universe expands, you get more space, you get more dark energy. So dark energy increases in its fraction of the universe because everything else is getting more and more dilute, and so eventually it takes over because as the universe expands, it starts to win and it drives the expansion, and so eventually it just takes over, and it's zooms so far ahead that nobody can catch up to it. But if you look back at the history of the universe and you look at these diagrams and the expansion, you'll notice that there was a time when the universe was decelerating a little bit and before it started to zoom off.
Hmm.
Interesting. Yeah, We've often talked about how dark energy the exploration of the universe changed, but it's I think what I'm getting is that it like nothing really changed, Like dark energy didn't suddenly turn on or some fundamental parameter of the universe suddenly flipped. It's more like the density of the universe got so sparse at some point that dark energy just became more significant. Because dark energy, its power is sort of proportional to how much space there.
Is matter and energy is power gravitational is proportional to its density, which drops as space gets bigger, and that doesn't happen for dark energy. So you're right, the rules didn't change, and what we think of as the amount of dark energy in the universe didn't change. It's just that things got so cold and dilute that eventually dark energy sort of wins the tug of war.
But I wonder, like, if the universe had started with more stuff, like more density of stuff. Is there a universe in which things they're so dense that dark energy always loses and things always compress.
Yeah, it's possible to have a closed universe like that universe where you start with enough stuff that dark energy doesn't win. Absolutely. You can start with different initial conditions and you might end up with different outcome. Absolutely.
All right. Well, so thee's question is what if that acceleration of the universe slows down and even reverses, like the universe starts to get smaller, there's less space every day. Could we detect that and when would we detect that? Right, that's a good question.
A super good question, and motivated by the fact that everything we've said about dark energy is so far is kind of a guess, Like we do not understand what dark energy is. We have no like real theory for it. What we've talked about so far, dark energy is this constant in space and time. That's just really like a hack. We just like put a number into the equations and said, here's the number you got to put in to make the equations work. We don't know where that number comes from. We don't know why that number would be constant. We just like use the number because that's the simplest description. And the point is that that could change. And what if in the future it does, and it changes to another value, and it changes to a smaller value, goes away, so that gravity then does win and the universe does take over, or what if it changes in such a way that it works in the opposite direction to compress the universe. Basically, because we don't know what's going on, we can't make any predictions about what's going to happen in the future. And so Sieve's question is great. It's like, how would we observe a change, How would we notice that things deviate from this simple prediction? And it would be hard. The first clues we would have would be for nearby stuff, right, stuff that's really really far away. We're not going to get messages from that for a long time. But closer by stuff, nearby galaxies and galaxy clusters, those are the ones that are telling us about the recent history of the universe, but how things are expanding right now or at least in the very recent past. So if we watch very carefully the closer stuff, that's where we could see like a change in the slope, like if things are accelerating less or more, or if it's even started to decelerate.
Oh, I think you're saying that, Like, if the universe starts to decelerate right expand slower, it's going to happen all throughout the universe at the same time. And so it's going to happen now, and it's going to happen to the galaxies that are really really far away. So if it all happens at the same time, then the freshest news we would get of it would be from the nearby stuff.
Yeah, and that's also an assumption, right there could be like weird bubbles. Maybe it doesn't happen everywhere in the universe, But the simplest model is, like, let's assume that something changes in the whole parameter of universe everywhere at once and so we wouldn't notice it from really far away galaxies very quickly. We'd notice it from nearby galaxies. As you say, that's the freshest news. And so we'd have to notice a change in the relative velocities of nearby galaxies that their velocity away from us is decreasing instead of increasing, Like if things nearby start to blue shift instead of red shift, we'd be like, WHOA, that's.
Weird, right, But I guess if you're assuming that it all happens at the same time, wouldn't it already have happened to stuff that's really far away.
If it's happening all at the same time, then it happens also to stuff that's really far away. We wouldn't see any evidence of it for a long time. Like we can't see right now what's happening for stuff really really far away, we won't see that for a long long time because it's so far away.
So that's good. We would know right away if the universe was slowing down.
Yeah, that's true, although the nearest galaxies are even not that nearby, and the closest galaxies are dominated by gravity like Andromeda in the Milky Way, are actually approaching each other because of their relative gravity. You'd have to do is look far enough away that you're looking at stuff where dark energy is really dominant. That's like between galaxy clusters, so it wouldn't even be that nearby. So now we're talking about like tens or hundreds of millions of light years away these galaxies, which means if the universe starts to turn around and compress, we wouldn't know for tens or hundreds of millions of years.
Right, But I guess there's some comfort to know that. Like, we're looking at galaxies that are, you know, the thirteen billion years old, and so far it doesn't look like the universe is compressing, right, So like, why would it suddenly change?
Now, Yeah, we have no reason to suspect that it will, but we also don't understand what's going on really at all. So you're right, the simplest model is to just extract a continued accelerating expansion, So don't worry about this if you're an anxious person. But the truth is that we don't really have a reason to believe that, and so the universe has surprised us many times in the past. And remember this whole idea of accelerating expansion was also a surprise. Nobody expected that at all, so there probably are more surprises in store.
I think what you're saying is that engineers could say us in the future, we don't know yet.
We should keep finding engineers.
Yes, I totally agree, that's right, keep us around, please all right, Well, I think that answers Steve's question. How would we first detected, Well, we would detect it in the galaxies that are closest to us. If there is sort of a universe wide shift in how things are expanding, we would know right away from where if the things around us are expanding faster, or if they're starting to creep in a little bit more each day, then we would know. All right, let's get to our other two questions. We have an awesome question about supernovas, or I guess kind of a deadly question about supernovas, and about danger storms in our solar system. Let's get to those. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, we are answering listener questions, and I guess these are very worried listener questions. Our listeners are worried about how the universe might end human existence.
Or they're just in awe about the crazy power out there in astronomical and after physical objects.
They're shocked and odd. All right. Our next question comes from crest Off and it's about supernovas. Dear Daniel, I have always wondered what would happen to the Earth if there was a super and nova nearby? Thanks, we would all die. Done. Next question, Oh, let's give him a little bit of hope. Come on, that's right, Yes, it depends on which side of the Earth you're in. Maybe hopefully it's like nighttime or you're sleeping when it happens.
That's only if the supernova is brief enough to only last during somebody else's night.
Mmmm, all right, let's dig into it. I guess the question is what would happen even supernova of a star explodes nearby us? Would we have a chance of surviving?
Or?
I guess also, how likely is that to happen to us?
Yeah? So to understand the amazing, incredible power of a supernova, you have to understand what we're talking about here. What is a supernova? Where does its energy come from? And is supernova is essentially the endpoint of really massive stars. They burn their hydrogen to make helium, They burn their helium to make heavier stuff. They burn carbon, they burn oxygen, they burn nitrogen. Eventually they get really really heavy. They accumulated all this really heavy metal in their core, and gravity gets so powerful inside these stars that it can no longer be resisted by the pressure of that fusion. And all that energy flying out has been puffing up the star keeping it from collapsing. So you get this million or billion year long struggle between gravity trying to compress the star and fusion resisting it. But eventually gravity is going to win that battle, and you get this incredible compression of the star. This collapse of the star we call it a core collapse, which leads to very very high temperatures inside the star, which triggers this brief moment of super intense fusion, which then explodes the star. So you get this gravitational collapse followed by this very dramatic explosion. And in that explosion, the supernova gives off so much energy that it can outshine the entire galaxy that it's in. Right, a single supernova can be as bright or brighter than like one hundred billion stars in the galaxy that it's in.
Yeah, it's a big explosion.
It's a big explosion, and it's.
Basically it's sort of like if a building collapses, but the bill is full of dynamite, kind of right, Like, it collapses and then the wind crunches down together. Things get exciting and they explode and then everything flies out.
Yeah, it's actually a pretty good model for how hydrogen bombs work. Hydrogen bombs are fusion bombs, but the conditions for fusion are created by a fission bomb, which implodes the fusion fuel. So you get this fission bomb which blows up and then squeezes the fuel for fusion, which then triggers the more dramatic fusion bomb. And that's basically what's going on inside of supernova, except the fuel pellet is like the size of a star, and so that's what we call a type two supernova. There's also another kind which are even brighter, even more dangerous and more deadly to life on Earth, which is a Type one. That's the kind of star that originally wasn't going to go supernova. It burned and accumulated these hot metals at its core, but not enough so the gravity would take over and actually collapse until some other source of fuel comes by, some like red giant in a binary star system with this white dwarf, and the white dwarf steals a little bit more fuel which gets it heavy enough for gravity to overcome this threshold and then trigger a collapse. That's a Type one supernova, and they can be like ten times as bright as a type two supernova.
That's interesting, I guess the question is why is that? Why is it brighter and more explosive if it's sort of like the same amount of stuff being exploded.
So we don't really understand very well exactly what's going on inside supernova. So this is sort of an area of current research. People speculate that like the amount of coalbalt inside these things might be enough to trigger more dramatic reactions or at least more energy, but it's really sort of an area of fuzzy understanding. So far, we don't even understand exactly when a star will go supernova. It's the exact thing that triggers this collapse is not something that we understand very well yet. So this is something we're still trying to figure out. A lot of this stuff is just descriptive, Like we see these kind of things in the universe, and we so describe these one and we describe these another way. We don't always understand the mechanisms and the underlying science.
I guess maybe a follow question is like how do we know that they're different? I mean, I imagine we saw some things blow up in the sky, and we saw some of them are bigger and smaller than others. How do we know like, oh, this is a totally different kind of explosion.
Yeah, it comes down to categorizing. We're like looking at these things and we're tracing their light curves and then we're looking back through our records to find the progenitor, like, what was the thing that led to this? Was it a big red star or was it a white dwarf? And we don't know what's going to go supernova? So you can't just like watch one and see it happen. You have to go backwards. You see, oh, we saw supernova. Now let's go back and see what used to be there in the sky. And so if it was a red giant, then you're going to call it a core collapse. If it was a white dwarf and there was a red giant nearby that it was stealing matter from, you're going to call that a type one supernova.
And then if it's really particular about every little detail of the explosion, then it's a Type A supernova.
If it just got to be the biggest supernova in the galaxy, no matter what, then yeah, exactly.
It's the very competitive. If it's a super dupernova.
It's a tiger supernova. Exactly.
All right, Well, let's get to Christof's question, which is what would happen if one of these stars, either a red giant or white dwarf, it explodes near us? What would happen to our Like, first of all, what are the chances of that happening.
It's very unlikely because supernova, first of all, are very rare, Like we think that maybe one in every few million stars will go supernova just because massive stars starts big enough to have this happen are pretty rare. Most of the stars in the universe are colder and smaller than stars that will go supernova. They're even mostly colder and smaller than our star. So most of these stars are red dwarfs and they will end up making white dwarfs and they will not go supernova. In fact, they're so rare that we haven't even seen a supernova in our galaxy in four hundred years. They're that rare, so.
They're not likely to happen. But I don't think that's why it keeps. I guess maybe let's think about it, like, what's the closest star to us, and what's the likelihood that it will go supernova.
Yeah, so the closest star to us is proximist Centari, and it's a pretty low mass star. It's much more typical than our star. It's like twelve percent of the mass of the Sun. So that thing is definitely not going to go supernova.
Right, Like a star needs to be a certain size for it to go even think about going supernova, and like our Sun and Proximus Centauri are not they'll qualify for supernova's status.
To really even have any chance to go supernova, you need to have like eight to ten times the mass of the Sun. I remember, the Sun is already an unusually massive star, and so ten times the mass of the Sun is even less likely. The more mass of the star, the much less common they are. There are some sort of nearby stars. For example, there's a star named Speaker, which is eighty parsecs away, that's like two hundred and fifty light years, and its mass is a little uncertain, but you know, order of magnitude about ten times the mass the Sun, and so that's a candidate, you know, But it's two hundred and fifty light years away.
Right. There's some sort of list out there right of the stars that we can see that are closest to us. Which of these stars are big enough to maybe go supernova. There's like a list out there, right, There.
Is a list exactly, and so Speaker is one of them. Another one is Beetlejuice. Right, Beetle Juice is like six hundred light years away, but is a pretty massive star. It's like maybe up to twenty times the mass of the Sun. And so these things are candidates. And again because we don't know exactly what triggers the supernova, like what are the conditions to make this happen, we can't look at Beetlejuice and be like, oh, this one is ten years to supernova, or this one is ten million years to supernova. But all of these things are pretty far away, so you don't have to be too worried about it.
Right, they're far away, but it maybe depends on the size of the explosion, Like if something is super duper massive, could that explosion affect us or is the distance going to keep us safe?
So really the danger zone is something like twenty five years. Anything like twenty five light years away or closer is going to do some significant damage to the Earth. Anything further away than twenty five or fifty light years is so far away that things are not going to be so dramatic. Remember that all the radiation that comes out of a supernova and all the particles and all the energy drops very quickly as the distance gets larger, because there's this one over distance squared rule in physics. So if you are ten times further away, then the amount of radiation is one over one hundred, and if you're a thousand times further away, then the radiation drops by a million. So every time the distance doubles, the danger drops by a factor of four.
All right, So that means we're safe, right, Like the nearest star to us that could even go supernova is two hundred and fifty light years away, so we're good, right.
Maybe. I mean there's this other star called ik Pagasi. It's about one hundred and fifty light years away, and it's actually kind of small, but they think it's a candidate to be a Type one A supernova because they think it's probably going to end up a white dwarf and there is a red super giant nearby that it could draw. So it's like a candidate to be a Type one A supernova. And those are the most dangerous ones, right, those are the ten times as bright ones.
Yeah, that's what I meant earlier. It sort of depends on how big the explosion, So is a type one A explosion one hundred and fifty light years away from us safe or would that totally burn us to a crisp.
Well, let's do the math. One hundred and fifty light years away, it's like six times as far away as the danger zone we said of like twenty five light years, and so to be as dangerous at one hundred and fifty light years away as another supernova is a twenty five light years away. Since it's six times as far, it would have to be like thirty six times as powerful. So if it's only ten times as powerful, then we'll be all right.
Okay, so that's good news.
Then that is good news. Exactly we're safe. We're safe. But you know, a lot of it depends on the uncertain physics of supernovas. We just don't really know which stars are going to go supernova or not, so we could always be surprised if.
We're totally wrong about this limit for star. Like if we're wrong and our star could certainly go supernova, is that even a possibilities? I think that's what you're saying, right, Like, what if we're wrong, what if like any star can go supernova? Or are we pretty sure it's not going to go supernova.
We're pretty sure our star is not going to go supernova. I'm just saying, don't take financial advice based on the uncertain physics of supernovas.
Don't take financial advice from physicists in any circumstance that's right, supernova or not exactly.
That's why we have the whole crash in two thousand and eight. Too many physicists working on Wall Street.
Because they were too distracted looking at stars and not paying attention to the economy.
Because they were building silly numerical models that didn't make any sense.
Because clearly they don't care about money if they went into a career in physics, but if.
There was a supernova nearby, it is interesting to think about exactly what the danger is. In one sense, we're fortunate because most of the energy of supernova is actually put out in the form of neutrino, Like ninety nine percent of the crazy energy of a supernova comes out in the form of neutrinos, which the universe is mostly transparent to, so it's not actually dangerous. A huge flux of neutrinos could pass right through you. You wouldn't even notice it's happening right now. The Sun puts out lots of neutrinos you don't even notice. So it's like that one percent of the energy of the supernova which comes at as like very high energy photons gamma rays, that could potentially damage us.
So it would be bad news.
It would be bad news. Like if it's high enough intensity that actually makes it down to the surface, that gets through the ozone layer in our atmosphere, which is mostly opaque to these very high energy photons, then they would just directly fry you, right, and it would fry the Earth. And these supernovas they are very short lived, but you know, we're talking about like days, weeks, months, So even if you're on the other side of the Earth, eventually the Earth is going to rotate and you're going to be exposed. So unless the supernova is super short lived, it's gonna fry both sides of the Earth. That's pretty unlikely. It'd have to be super close to like literally actually fry the Earth to a crisp. More realistic is if the supernova is close enough to bathe us in hih energy radiation, but the atmosphere absorbs that. Even that would be pretty dangerous because they would basically deplete our ozone layer. It would fry all the oxygen and nitrogen the atmosphere into other oxides and basically strip us up protection, exposing us to UV radiation from the Sun, which would basically kill all the planes in the oceans, which would undermine the ecosystem, and things would be bad.
Things would be bad.
Things would be bad.
Well, I think that answer is Christo's question directly, Like he asked, what would happen if there's a supernova nearby? And the answer is bad things would happen. We would get fried, our ozone would get fried. It would be not good. But the bigger answer is that it's not likely to happen, Like, as far as we know, there are no stars neros enough that might go supernova to really harm it.
That's right, So for the near future we're pretty safe. Remember that the stars were nearby change as the galaxies rotating and we move up and down through the galactic disc, And so this is sort of like an answer for right now. Over the next few thousand years, you want to project forward to like hundreds of millions of years, then things might change and other stars might get closer to us that are more dangerous. They estimate when they look back that maybe twenty supernovas have happened within a thousand light years of Earth in the last ten million years. But remember a thousand light years is pretty far away. That's well out of the danger zone.
But don't we sort of know, like all the stars our neighborhood, like how it's going to change over the next you know, maybe several hundred million years. Can we do that math?
We can do that math in some cases, but measuring these stellar velocities can be challenging. We have these awesome new satellites, the Gaya satellite, for example, which is cataloging the exact location of these stars and tracking them, and so we're getting better and better at modeling these things. But it's kind of chaotic, right, stars pull and tug on each other. You have a very high number of objects. We can't really even solve equations for three objects, and we're talking about like hundreds or thousands or millions of objects. So there can be chaotic predictions. You can never really be sure what's going to happen deep into the future, all.
Right, So Christop, the answer is bad things might happen, but you don't have to worry about that, but maybe check back again in one hundred million years, just to double check.
Keep making those retirement deposits.
Though, I think he's good for now. All right, Well, let's get to our last question of the day, and this one is about storms in our solar system. We'll get into that, but first let's take another quick break.
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Right. We're answering listener questions here today about the ways that the universe could put an end to human existence perhaps, and so our last question comes from Jane, who is in fifth grade.
Hi, I'm Jane.
I'm in fifth grade and we're learning about our solar system and I would like to know what is the strongest storm in our solar system.
Awesome question from Jane. Thank you Jane for asking that question. I wonder if she's asking so whether she knows to bring an umbrella to school the next day.
Or maybe she's planning a trip and she wants to know if she should visit Venus or Mars or Jupiter.
Because she wants to see the storm or avoid the storm. She sounds like a very curious person.
She does sound like it. Yeah, exactly. Let's send Jane on our next trip to visit the Sun.
Give her a lead umbrella just in case. I guess her question is that like actual storms, like weather, storms that happen not just on Earth. They happen in other planets, right, other planets atmospheres with gases and things like that, and clouds and weather, and so her question, I think is like, out of all the planets in the Solar System, who has the biggest storm that we've seen?
Yeah, because there's this tendency to imagine that things out there in the universe are sort of like they are here on Earth. But as you look around the Solar System, you discover, wow, Earth is pretty different, right. We have liquid water on the surface, we have clouds, we have very different kind of situation, and the storms we have here on Earth are actually not very representative of what's going on in the rest of the Solar System. It's actually quite nice and calm here on Earth compared to the stormy Solar system we live in.
Yeah, so that's the recap of all the storms in the Solar system, starting with I guess the Sun, right, the Sun has storms.
The Sun has really big storms.
Right.
It's not just a ball of plasma. It's like throbbing and pulsating, and there's these tubes of plasma controlled by magnetic fields that we don't even really understand. And occasionally big loops of plasma are ejected from the Sun travel towards the Earth. These are called coronal mass ejections, and when they happen, they're very dramatic, Like these loops of plasma can be bigger than the entire Earth. And so some of the biggest storms in the Solar system are in the Sun itself.
I guess maybe let's take a quick step back here, and what do you define as a storm, Like what counts as a storm and what is just the irregular things moving around?
Yeah, it's a good question. I guess I would call a storm sort of an unusual high energy like high speed or high velocity event, right, Like that's what we think about on Earth. There's wind every day, there's a storm when the wind is sort of like unusually high, or there's unusual amount of rain.
Okay, So like when things get exciting in the atmosphere or something.
Exactly exciting or dangerous depending on your attitude. And so basically we're thinking about like unusual events like tales of distributions, and it's even fun to think about like the strongest storms here on Earth. The strongest typhoon on Earth or equivalently, hurricane depends on which ocean you're in, was in nineteen and seventy nine. It's called Typhoon Tip. And this lasted for weeks, and it was one thousand miles wide. It's like big enough to cover like half of the United States, though he was actually in the Pacific.
So this is a weather event here on Earth that was one thousand miles wide. And here on Earth, I guess storms happened because you know, there's air currents moving around, because the air heats up from the sun, it moves into the cold sides, and I guess sometimes in all of this air moving, sometimes you get like these pockets of things where things get intense. That's kind of what a storm is on Earth.
Exactly, and they get spinning because of the Coriolis force, which is why these storms spin differently in the northern hemisphere and the Southern hemisphere. You know it's a myth that toilets flush differently in Australia than they do in the US, for example, But it's not a myth that storms spin differently in the northern and southern hemispheres.
How do you know it's a myth? Daniel? Have you flushed every toilet in Australia to make that statement?
I have not gone on a toilet flushing tour of Australia. That's still on my to do list. But I've relied on listeners who've written in we verify this for us.
But it is true that it affects like if you drain a giant waiting pool, it is going to affect how the water swirls. Right, maybe, just like in toilets is too small.
If you have a hurricane sized toilet, then yes, that will definitely affect you. I'm not exactly sure what the minimum sized toilet has to be to see this effect.
Sounds like an experiment of physicists should do.
I'm going to go rite a grand proposal after we're done here.
All right, So then on Earth, that's the biggest storm and in recorded history one thousand miles wide a couple of decades.
Ago, lasted for weeks and had winds up to like six hundred kilometers per hour, which is pretty dramatic. And then of course there are storms on our neighboring planets. Venus has storms, and in general the weather on Venus is generally pretty terrible. It's like very high air pressure, very strong winds, sulfuric acid rain, lightning, storms driven by vault caanic eruptions.
And it's super hot in Venus too, right.
And it's super hot exactly is the reason that when we talk about colonizing Venus, we think about like creating floating cities above the cloud layers. But there are also some really cool storms on Venus at its poles. Like the Pioneer Venus spacecraft in nineteen seventy nine saw this really incredible hurricane on Venus's north pole that had two eyes to it. The storms on Earth usually have one core, right, there's an eye at the center and it's a big swirl, But this one on the north pole of Venus has two eyes.
Whoa.
It sounds like somebody flushed two toilets at the same time in the north pole of Venus.
And then they went back to Venus in two thousand and six and the Venus Express saw what looked like a double vortex at the south pole. As a scientist, we're like, whoa, maybe these crazy double hurricanes on Venus are stable and permanent. But as they watched, they saw that it sort of shifted and morphed and didn't really survive.
It didn't become a viral video. This is going whoa double storm?
But it's interesting because Venus has these like very high wind speeds, and the weather changes a lot from the poles to the equator, where the winds, for example, vary greatly with altitude. The windspeeds can vary by like a factor of two. Anyway, it's really crazy weather on Venus as well.
All right, well, what's there in the next planet on the list of Mars? Does Mars get storms?
Mars does get storms.
Mars has a very sparse atmosphere, right, yeah, and so.
They can look very dramatic, but they're not actually that powerful. Like there are maybe once per decade or so a dust storm that can engulf like the entire planet for a whole month. That's pretty dramatic. And people who saw the movie, the Martian will have noticed like, ooh wow, these storms are dangerous and they can knock stuff over. But as you say, Mars does not have a very dense atmosphere. It's like one percent as dense as the Earth's atmosphere, and so like you couldn't really fly a kite on Mars very easily. Or the helicopter that they recently landed on Mars was really amazing that he could even fly because the air is so sparse. So even the wind in like the largest dust storm on Mars could not really tip over or rip apart like major mechanical equipment, not the way storms here on Earth do.
But isn't it the case that scientists think Mars had an atmosphere and past, So maybe Mars did have bigger storms before.
Yeah, Mars probably lost its atmosphere because of solar winds and the lack of a magnetic field. And also it's just lower mass and so it's not as good as holding onto its particles. So in its past it may have had more dramatic storms. These days, they look dramatic, but they're not actually very intense.
All right, let's get to some of the bigger planets. What about Jupiter.
Jupiter has, of course the famous Great Red Spot. This is a huge storm, a few times the size of the Earth, right, so, like we're talking mind boggling all sizes here, though again it's small compared to Jupiter, which is just much much bigger than the Earth. The Great Red Spot goes around Jupiter once every six earth days and it's like a couple hundred miles deep, and it's really impressive because it's lasted a long time. Like we've been watching this storm on Jupiter since Galileo, basically since the sixteen hundreds and so it's hundreds of years old, which makes it incredibly stable.
Mmm.
Yeah, and it's shrinking too, right, like it's been getting smaller.
Yeah, it is stable in that it's like lasted a long time, but in the last forty years or so, we noticed that it has been getting smaller. Now it's like maybe just one and a half times the size of the Earth. And you know, not something we understand very well. These chaotic things turbulence and vortices are very difficult to model and very difficult to understand. But it's still a.
Huge storm, right, and we don't know why it's red, right, like we don't know for sure.
Yeah, that's right, And we did a whole episode about the Great Red Spots to dig into that if you want to learn more about that crazy storm.
M all right, how about Saturn.
Saturn is super cool because it has really weird storms on the poles like Venus does, remember with its double hurcue, except Saturn has this six sided storm on its poles. It's a hexagon. It's like thirty thousand kilometers widen, like one hundred kilometers deep. First discovered nineteen eighty one by Voyager and then when Cassini flew by took really beautiful pictures of it, and now they think it's probably like a complex set of vortices and different layers of clouds, but it creates this incredible hexagon effect, which looks really weird.
It's almost like it's wearing a hat.
Yeah exactly, all right, Yeahromo coo, right, Yeah, but it's sort of a stable feature of Saturn, we think. On the other hand, Saturn also has unusual features, like it has these storms which crop up like every twenty or thirty years, and sometimes they can encircle the entire planet. So there was one in December of twenty ten. That was like ten times the size of the Earth, so like much bigger than even the Great Red Spot and lasted for like ten months.
Whoa, it's a big store. And how fast were the winds moving?
The winds in that storm, we think we were in a one hundred kilometers per hour, So pretty dramatic.
Stuff, right. What about Neptune.
Well, the strongest winds in the Solar system might be on Neptune. So maybe the biggest storm it was that one on Saturn, but the most powerful winds are probably on Neptune. So in Neptune. We saw this great dark spot in nineteen eighty nine, this huge spot on Neptune, which they now think are methane ice clouds which are forming crystals, probably about the size of one Earth. This storm had wind speeds of two thousand kilometers per hour.
Two thousand kilometers per hour. That's super fast. Is that faster than the speed of sound here on Earth?
Yeah? The speed of sound here on Earth is about twelve hundred kilometers per hour.
Whoa, So this was this supersonic storm.
That's pretty awesome. Although the speed of sound depends a lot on the density and the temperature and all sorts of stuff. So I don't know what the speed of sound is in those methane ice clouds, but yeah, it's faster than the speed of sound in air on Earth, so that's pretty incredible.
And it's also the most powerful storm because it's made out of methane, which means it smells like.
Farts, And that's why we're glad it's on Neptune and not on Urinus.
He who storm smelt it? I guess.
I'm just glad there are no supersonic farts here on.
Earth, yeah, or supersonic storms or farts that would be even worse, all right, So maybe to answer Jane's question, those would be maybe the candidates we would put up as the strongest storms in our solar system. There's the one at the top of Saturn, which looks like a hexagon, which is thirty thousand kilometers wide, which is like ten times the diameter of Earth or something like that.
Mm hmm.
And then there's the storm we saw on Neptune about thirty years ago that had two thousand kilometers per hour winds.
I don't know if you want to study those or avoid those, but either way, pack some boots and a raincoat.
But I guess one is gone now.
Right When we looked at it again in nineteen ninety four with Hubble, they didn't see it and it has not come back.
So maybe the most awesome storm right now is Saturn until we see something else which can happen, because all of these things are happening right now, and they can change at any moment.
That's right, and these aren't complex effects. Remember, we can't even predict the weather on Earth very well, and so when it comes to the weather on Neptune, we are all left guessing.
All right, Well, thank you Jane for your question. I guess she's maybe asking because, like if we go to another planet, we want to avoid these storms, right because they can also end us exactly.
Or maybe she's just in awe of the incredible conditions out there in the rest of the Solar System and grateful that we don't have such crazy storms here and that.
We can look at them from a distance. All right, Well, that's all of our questions for today. Thank you to everyone who sent in their questions, and hopefully we answered them a little bit.
And I hope we give you confidence that whatever the scientists uncover about the crazy natures of the universe. Eventually an engineer will save us.
That's right, a super inching.
They're all superheroes in my book.
All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain 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. 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 usdairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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