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Hey, Daniel, do you get tired of answering questions?
Oh? Never, I love our listener questions.
Just mean questions in general, like about the universe, but your personal life.
Poor like this question you're asking me now.
From your podcast host partner.
No, people ask me questions all the time, but it's fun to answer them. You know. Sometimes I wish I got asked more science questions. You know, sometimes the questions are more prosaic.
What about your kids? Your kids constantly pester you with science questions too.
I wish they asked more. You know. It's the occasional like what does a black hole look like? But more often It's like, can I have more dessert? Or how can my sister just to use the iPad more than I do?
And the answer is always the same. Nobody knows that.
We have no idea?
What the idea? They're kind of physics questions too, aren't They Like they're about time? Who gets more time on the iPad?
Or matter who gets more dessert exactly? And what about you? Your kids ask you science questions?
They do? Yeah, pretty pretty often. I think my kids like to read and sometimes they kind of make connections in their head and they ask me questions.
And what do you do when they ask you questions if you don't know the answer?
What do you mean you assume that I don't know the answers.
I often don't know the answer, so I assume not everybody has all the answers.
Sure, no, Well I do my best, I guess and baby, mainly I just tell them to send their questions into our podcast so that you can answer them.
That sounds good. I'm glad to be your backup science parent.
I mean, what's the whole point of befriending as a physicists if not to get these questions answered?
Knew?
Why would you want to be friends with a physicists.
I knew I felt used. Now I know why.
I am Orge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics.
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a backup science parent for many people out there.
And welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we take funny, weird, amazing, crazy things about the universe and explain them to you so that you can explain them to your kids or your.
Parents, or just sit them down with our podcast as free babysitting.
That's right.
Yeah, so we love answering questions, right, Daniel.
Oh yeah, it's really fun because we can think about the universe and we can talk about what's exciting for us. But the most is interesting is answering questions from listeners because it reveals what they understand and what they don't and what they're wondering about, what all those collective brains out there are cognating on.
Yeah. So, if you don't know this already, we actually answer people's questions. If we have an Instagram account, a Twitter account, a Facebook account, and if you post a question well, first of all, follow us there. But if you post a question, most likely Daniel will answer the question, right, Daniel, or at least maybe one of your regrets.
That's right. No, I'll answer questions via email or Twitter or Facebook. I'll be honest, though, I don't use Instagram, So all those people asking physics questions on Instagram are just questioning into the void. Sorry, folks. The question is does anyone use Instagram anymore? Now that I don't?
I think the question is who doesn't use Instagram these days? Just me, I guess, I guess just physicists me. No.
But it's wonderful. We hear questions from all over the world, and sometimes there are questions people just had in their minds they wanted to know the answers to, and those are wonderful. But also sometimes the questions are in reaction to something we talked about on the show. You know, on the show, we do our best to think, what's confusing about this? How do we explain this? How do we make something clear? But we never can completely succeed. So it's really nice to have feedback when people say, you said X, but then that made me wonder why, and that helps us be more clear in the future. So please send us feedback us questions, send us presents, send us gags, send us whatever.
You mostly just send us money please. I mean, how much do you think podcasting makes?
That's right? And sometimes people send us serious questions about the universe, and then sometimes people send us silly questions.
Yeah, like what bit us silly questions?
All right, here's a question we got on Twitter from Patrick Norman. He says, Dear Daniel and Jorge, I've got a question that really want to get answered. How heavy would a blob or banana be of all of the photons in the sun? And how big would it be?
Ooh interesting? So you took all the photons in the sun and somehow what do you think transform them into a banana? Or put them in a space shape them into a banana? What do you think?
You know?
I actually started trying to work on this question, and first I thought, well, how many photons are in the sun, right, Like, is that a number? You know? And it's pretty tough, But it turns out you can do a rough calculation and the sun creates ten to the forty five photons per second. That's ten with forty five zeros. Yeah, that's a lot of photons.
It's a lot of like trillion, Billy busily.
But gillions, yes, exactly, bananilions and yeah, exactly. But not all those photons escape the sun. You know, the Sun is a huge ball of planets, and most of the stuff that's made by the Sun is then just reabsorbed by the Sun, and so only things that actually penetrate and leave the Sun and hit your eyeballs arrive here on Earth. That's a tiny fraction of what comes out of the Sun. But anyway, let's say you had ten to the forty five photons. Okay, that's a huge amount of energy. And then this question is interesting. He said, how big would that be? Right, Like, if you had a pile of ten to the forty five photons, right, how?
Well, how how how close together can you cram them in? Is maybe the question?
Yeah, And that's really interesting because there's no limit on how close you can cram photons together. That's not true of ordinary matter limit like electrons and other particles. These things are fermions, and fermions are different from photons and other kind of particles that we called bosons because fermions have to have different quantum states. No two of them can be in the same quantum state.
They can literally be on top of each other.
That's impossible, that's right. They have to have some difference, Like you can have two electrons in the same level of energy in an atom, but then they have different have to have different spins or something different about them. And so fermions have to be distinguishable. Whereas bosons, these are particles with integer spin like a photon. They can be right on top of each other. They can be in exactly the same place, have the same momentum, have the same everything.
I feel like the silly question is gotten a little serious. Yeah, it's got some serious physics.
Yeah, even silly questions reveal something interesting about the universe. And so you can have ten to the forty five photons on the head of a pin, basically.
Right or on top of each other.
Are you saying, yes, exactly, all on top of each other in a tiny, tiny space. So thank you Patrick for sending in that hilarious question. It really made us think, and there really is some physics in that question, even in silly questions.
Well, we do have three questions today from listeners, and so that is the topic of today's podcast to the On the podcast, we'll be talking about listener questions five point zero, five point one, five point one because because we just askeered Patrick's question, so we got to add a little that's right.
We're part way through this episode already. Yeah's right. We'll be answering questions about electrons, about space, about stars, about black holes, questions from far away, and questions from surprisingly nearby.
Yeah, and we might even know the answer to some of these questions this time.
And if we don't, we'll speculate hilariously.
All right, let's jump into a daniel. Our first question today is from this really pretty cool guy, fun guy, maybe one of my favorite people. Has a great dad.
Yeah, so this is a question from Oliver from southern California.
What a far whole solar system is in a black hole?
And we don't notice? Wow, that's a deep question. His voice sounds a little familiar to me.
Yeah. What a smart sounding little kid.
He sounds like he might grow up to be a cartoonist.
Well not if he's that smart, hopefully.
So.
Yeah, that's my son who just asked that question. And he just turned to me one day, Well, what happened was he was reading our book. So we, Daniel and I wrote a book called We Have No Idea, A Guy to the Unknown Universe, available now in Amazon dot com and local.
Books, and you can verify it's been read by at least one person, since your son is reading it.
That's right, that's right. He's underage, but he still counts as a person. He's nine years old. And so he's been reading our book, and I always kind of wonder how much of it he's getting. You know, he's nine, he's in third grade, but he seems to be enjoying it, and he keeps reading it. And so one day he just turned to me and he asked me this question.
Right, and what do you think is behind the question? What do you think he's wondering? Explain the question to me?
Do you even explain my son do a deep dive? If I knew that answer, Daniel, if I could explain my son, my parenting experience would be so much easier.
So I thought it was really interesting. One part of his question says, what if our whole solar system is in a black hole? Cool? Fascinating, Yeah, But then he says, and we don't even notice like, I think that taps into you know, is the universe different from how we expected? Is it possible that we think we're living in universe X, but we're actually living in universe?
Why?
You know?
I think he was probably kind of reading about black holes and he just kind of wondered, like, what if what if we're inside of a black hole? Is that possible? Like could the universe? Or or like could could a solar system exist inside of a black hole? And you know, we don't even know it?
Yeah, And I think there's something wonderful there about the feeling that maybe, you know, the universe could be revealed to be totally different from what you expected, because that's precisely happened a lot of times in history, right, We've thought, oh, the universe works this way. Nope, it's totally different from what you imagined. And those are the best moments in physics. So to hear your son like sort of wondering if he's coming to that realization himself, or wondering if this kind of realization is around the corner, that's fantastic. He's been bitten by the physics bug, so be careful.
Oh no, he's gonna be like spider Man.
Well, that's only if he's bitten by a radioactive physicist.
Okay, aren't they all radioactive by now?
Well, I grew up in Los Alamos, so maybe I'm especially radioactive. But I'll do my best not to not to bue your son. Yeah, but let's break it down. It's interesting question. And you know, some thing that's important to think about is sort of the size of a black hole, Like could our entire solar system fit into a black hole? Well? Right, the size of a black hole is really we usually consider that to be the size of the event horizon. That's the point, right the black stuff.
Like, look at a black hole, it would look like a black sphere, and so the size of that sphere that's the size of the black hole. Yeah.
Yeah, and if you go past that point, you can't escape, right, And nobody knows what's inside of a black hole, but we know how to calculate the size of the event horizon. It's determined just by the amount of stuff in the black hole. So the more mass in the black hole, the stronger the gravitational pull. The farther away it can grab stuff and never let go. Right, So the size of the black hole is determined by its mass, So how much stuff is in our solar system? Well, basically, the first approximation, our solar system is just a sun. Like the rest of the stuff in the solar system Jupiter, mall me, you hamsters, all that stuff is negligible. It's a tiny fraction of the mass of the solar system. So basically you can ask, like, if you had a black hole with the mass of our Sun, how far away would the event horizon be? Would it be out past the edge of the of the solar system? Is it possible to fit a solar system in a black hole that has the mass of our Sun? It's sort of the way I interpret the question.
So you're interpreting the question as could our solar system be a black hole?
Yeah? Exactly? Could we be inside a black hole right now? Is there enough room in a black hole with the mass of the Sun to fit the entire solar system? Oh?
I see? So could we be in a hole where the only thing inside of it is our solar system?
Yeah? Exactly exactly is how you're interacting the question, And the answer to that is no, Because a black hole that has only the mass of our Sun, the event horizon would only be three kilometers from the center of the Sun, and so it definitely wouldn't be big enough to have the whole solar system in it, because the solar system is a lot more than three kilometers. It's one billion kilometers wide.
So we couldn't be in a black hole where the only thing in it was our solar system. But is it possible that we are that our solar system is inside of somebody else's black hole?
Do you know what I mean?
Like, yeahs black hole out there with a lot of mass inside of it, and we are just inside of the event horizon of that black hole floating around.
Yeah, that's possible. Right, Let's consider that for a moment. So, what if there's a really dense blob somewhere else sort of nearby, and that makes a black hole that's big enough to encompass us and we're inside that black hole right right right, Well, that's possible, but it's difficult to imagine because such a huge mass would have a big effect on us. You know, if there was a like if there's a really big mass somewhere else inside our solar system next to the Sun, like an invisible, huge block of dark matter that made their enough mass so that the black hole was big enough, we would definitely notice that that would affect the orbit of the planets. What if there was another big mass kind of far away but close enough that we were still inside the event horizon, Well, you're talking about still really strong gravity. So it's hard to imagine having some enormously powerful gravitational attractor nearby and not having it disturbed like the orbits of the planets or even just tossing of baseballs and all sorts of stuff. So I think if you were inside a black hole that was big enough to hold the Solar System, it would have to have a huge mass, and that mass would definitely be noticeable. It would affect the way things move on Earth.
Would it, though? Because you know, like, so our Solar System is moving around a galaxy, right, Like, a galaxy has a lot of mass, and it's huge, and there's a lot and there's a huge black hole in the center of the galaxy, but it's not really affecting us in a local level, right Like that gravity is kind of spinning us around the galaxy, but it's not really changing the orbits of the planets around the Sun.
That's right, Yeah, and that black hole in the center of the galaxy is really massive and it's pretty big, but it's also super duper duper duper far away. Right. Any black hole that's either near enough to include us or far away but huge enough to include us still would definitely affect the gravitational poll But you know, I haven't done the calculation. There is one configuration I imagine though. Imagine our entire solar system and then it's surrounded by some enormously dense sphere of material. Okay, if you're inside a sphere of material, then the gravitational pull of that stuff doesn't affect you at all, right, because it all balances out. There's enough stuff on the left to balance the stuff on the right. Just like that episode we talked about where you jump inside the Earth. Once you get to the center of the Earth, there is no gravitational force from the stuff around you. Right. Well, I have a sphere, a super dense material surrounding the Solar system, right, then that might be enough to create a black hole, right that we would be inside of. We wouldn't feel the gravitational force because we would be inside all the stuff. It'd be all around us.
Yeah, that's what I mean.
Yeah, yeah, but they'd have to be perfectly distributed, right, And the only reason that there's one reason to think that's not the case, and that's that we have sent stuff outside the Solar system, Like we've launched probes and they're floating off into space and we're watching them, and they haven't like banged up against the wall of some hugely massive blob of stuff.
But what if you expand that idea even further to encompass the whole observable universe. It is possible then that we could be inside of a black hole.
Yeah, yeah, it's possible the entire observable universe is inside a black hole. Yes, you can't rule that out.
How do you feel about saying that on a public record.
I wonder if any my colleagues are listening. No, I think it's awesome.
You would be surprised.
I think it's awesome. And I think sometimes these awesome questions come from the minds of children, And that's why I hope that people are listening to the podcast with their kids, because kids ask amazing questions that make us think about things we otherwise would have totally discarded that might actually be reality.
Well, so that's the answer. The answer is that it is totally possible that we are inside of a black hole and not knowing.
Yeah, but I think our whole universe would have to be inside the black hole, not just the solar system. But yeah, that's a pretty small conveat for in it for a yes answer to that question.
Isn't that sort of a theory out there that we, like the whole universe, are inside the whole universe inside of a black hole and there are other black holes and stuff like that, or is that pretty fringe?
I think it is a theory out there, and it's pretty fringe, but it's also totally possible. You know, like we really just we don't know what's going on inside black holes are their little universes in there, you know, the inside of a black hole is totally disconnected from the space that we live in, right, Like there's no way to get from here to there, right That's why that's how a black hole works, even like can't escape it, not because it's like slowing down the light as it tries to leave, but because it's bent space in such a way that there's just no path out, like just zooming around inside the black hole. So in some ways you can think of it as sort of like a different universe, disconnected from our space, and so you can imagine then anything that goes on in there. And when experiments can't constrain things, theorists' minds tend to go wild, and so they think about all sorts of crazy stuff that could be inside there, dancing bears or entire universes.
Crazy scientists, and nine year old boys.
Who might grow up to be crazy scientists.
All right, well that's the answer for Oliver's son of Horror hap and I'll let him know if he's Stumpedy physical.
Yes, yeah, it's a great question. If he was Icelandic, his last name would be Jorgesn exactly.
All right, Well, we have two other awesome questions that we are going to answer about electron identity. I guess is that we would be the right topic, and also about dark matter stars, which sounds like a heavy battle.
Band name flash science fiction movie.
So stay tuned. We'll be right back.
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All right, we are back answering listener questions, and so our next question comes from Yugi from the Netherlands, and he is wondering if electrons have identity crisis.
That's right, and this particular listener is something of a super fan, writing it to us on Twitter fairly often with insightful questions, and he sent me this one and I thought, well that's a good question. Let's take it online. And so here he.
Is, Hi, Danielle and Jorge. My name is Eugenie Radermacher and I live in the Netherlands, hence the actions. I'm a big fan of your mar of a spotcost series, for it makes me understand more of physics and it makes me think a lot about the universe in general. After listening to your episode about quantum tunneling, the following question came to my mind. If an electronal tap will say A suddenly appears in well b, how can physicist tell it's actually the very same electron? I realized that I had the bowling ball, empty swimming pool and analogy in my mind when the question suddenly appeared in my will. Thanks for spending time answering my questions live and now.
All right, thank you you for saying this question, and also for being a fan of the show. We really appreciate everyone listening out there. Yeah, exactly, And it's a really a wonderful question, you know. To me, it goes to the heart of like what are these particles? What are we talking about?
But the way I interpret this question is like, you haven't an electron over here, and physics tells us the electron can then later be over there. But his question is, how do you know it's the same electron? Right, because we don't have this sort of notion anymore of a classical path that you can like watch a baseball fly through the air, and when a baseball, you know, when somebody hits a home run, you watch it fly. You don't ask like is that the same baseball or is it suddenly swapped out, but with quantumuy care particles, because you can't observe them all the way along the path. You just get these snapshots. You can sort of wonder, like, how do you know that's the same electron? Maybe it's from another electron down the street, right, it's just Tom or Harry or Mary or Sally.
I feel like the question is is there such a thing as an electron? Is there an electron? You can say and follow it around and it has a birth in a you know, journey, and then it maybe ends or at some point, wow, we can you follow an electron?
Or are we getting into identity politics now? So there's electrons go back to where they came from. Two identity physics business qualified? Yeah, obviously we're not qualified to dive into those topics. You know. Well, it's a famous topic in physics, and it's something that real physicists wonder. And in nineteen forty, this famous physicist John Wheeler, he had this sort of moment of insight, and I don't know if he was smoking banana peels or what, but he was wondering, like, why do all electrons behave the same way? Like you drop an electron in the circumstance. It's always going to get repulsed in the same way. It's not like this one's got a little bit more charge and that one's got a little bit more mass. They're all identical. They're not like scoops of ice cream, right, they all have exactly the same properties. And he at this moment of inside he thought, oh wait a second, maybe there is just one electron. These are all the same electron.
What what do you mean, like the electrons in my body and the ones in your body they're all the same.
Yes, yes, sort of, And I think that's actually sort of the answer is that the electron is not really a particle that has an identity. It's sort of like a state of mind or a state of matter, right, because these days we don't think quantum mechanically about particles as the fundamental basis of the universe. Instead we think of fields, right, and particles are just excited states of the field. It's sort of like when you look at the ocean, you know, and you've tried to follow a wave, right. A wave is not the basic unit of the ocean. It's the water, right. The wave is just like you know, the ocean has got excited a little bit by the wind, and it comes and it goes, and there's more waves behind it.
It's just the motion of the ocean.
That's right, exactly. And so in that same way, you can think of electrons not as like here's a little chunk of matter, a little like piece of the universe we're going to follow around, But it's just like a momentary excitation of this sort of hard to think about thing called the electron field which fills the universe. And when it gets a little bit of energy somewhere, you call that an electron.
It's not an object. It's kind of a wiggle of an object.
Yes, exactly, it's a wiggle of an object. And you know, this goes back to that other question we tried to answer. It's a photon, a particle, or a wave, for example, And I think I said on that podcast that it's sort of neither and sort of both, and really it's something else weird and fundamental that we just cannot understand by making analogies, right, analogies from our macroscopic experience. The things that we're familiar with just don't work because we've never seen anything like that before. Well, it turns out you can apply the same ideas to an electron. Also, an electron is both a particle and a wave, and both and neither and something else totally weird. It's really just the excitation of a quantum field. And the reason, the reason actually that we came up with quantum fields, the reason that this whole development is progress, right, and not just confusion, is that it helped us think about the way particles are created and destroyed. Because when an electron is flying through the universe, it doesn't just sit around happily. It generates photons, and those photons turn into electrons and positrons, which turn back into photons. Every electron is actually surrounded by like a fuzzball of virtual particles photons and electrons and things popping in out of the vacuum.
What do you mean, Like, an electron is not always an electron. It's constantly kind of fuzzy and morphing and changing.
Yes, exactly, it's constantly morphing and changing, and it's surrounded by a ball of almost an infinite number of low energy particles that are being created and destroyed around it, right, And so we came up with this alternative mathematical formulation quantum field theory because it's really hard to follow the path of an individual particle through this sort of probabilistic storm of things that's happening, and it's much easier to just think about the field that's generating all these particles, and then a particle creation and destruction is much more natural in quantum field theory than in old quantum mechanics, where you try to follow an individual particle as if it was a baseball. So we had to sort of let go of this whole idea of particles having identities, particles having paths, and just think of them as momentary oscillations in this field.
Well, I think there's several questions here, Like, you know, maybe was also thinking of the wave analogy maybe, and so maybe his question was, you know, just like you can follow a wave in the ocean, you know, if you if I make a ripple in the in a lake or something, or if a wave is made out into the ocean, you can you can kind of follow that wave, right, like that's wave A I'm gonna call it Sally, and you can follow Sally as it moves across the Pacific.
Right, you sort of can. But what if Sally looks exactly like all the other waves, and there's billions of them, and you look away, and then you look back and you wonder which of those waves is Sally m.
That's the situation where the one that like, if I see that point A and I see at point B one second later, well that's his question, right, the one that's a point C another second later?
Basically right, could be or could be that along the way got turned into something else and then got turned back into a wave, And is it the same wave then?
But it almost always is, isn't it Like do electrons really just transformed to something else.
Constantly, constantly, even while we're looking. Electrons are constantly in flux. Yes, exactly.
You know, there's that even the ones in my body, even the ones.
In your body, and they're not special, sorry to inform you. You know, there's that ancient philosophical question. Right. There's some some ancient Greek ship and every time it comes into harbor, it's lost a piece and they repair it, and then after five years there are no pieces of the original ship, and they wonder, like, is it still that same ship? You know, if it's made out of all new pieces and it's sort of that question, but it's the particle version of that question.
And wait, what if it rides the same wave though? That just that just blows the Greek's mind.
Yeah, exactly, And so I'd say in this in the same way there there is really no particle identity. I don't I don't know that I've smoked enough banana peels to say they're all the same electron But I think sort of what he's saying is that they're all manifestations of the same field. Right, there's really just one electron field, and it appears in lots of different places in the universe.
But then what's really going on? Because you know, I feel pretty consistent, you know, like I am this way sort of now and and I'm sort of the same way a second ago. I think that's my perception. Are you saying that, you know I could have changed into something totally different between now and the next second that I am conscious about.
Yes, But the whoreheness is not about the stuff that you're made up of, but the arrangement of those particles, right, just like that ship is not about the pieces of wood that went into it, but how they're put together and what it's doing, and you know how it spends its time. And so in the same way, you were a constantly frothing mass of quantum mechanical particles. But that's not what makes you you. What makes you you is the way they're arranged and the way they live their life.
Well, I am a constant frothing mass of something.
Sure, it's a really hard question. And you know, this is a question which is definitely on the philosophy side of the threshold. And something I love about physics is that it bumps up against philosophy so often because there are deep consequences to the answers of physics questions. And so I've always been really interested in the philosophical implications of particle physics. But I have to say it's not something that most of us, most of us particle physicists, are actually qualified to talk about, even though we do pontificate long windedly on it.
Oh, I see. It's it's one of these questions that the answer is kind of like it depends on what the definition of is Istately you have to.
Go there, but.
I think it applies in this case. Yeah, right, It's like it depends on what you mean by having an identity or being the same electron.
Exactly. You could dig into that forever and smoke banana peels and not necessarily make any progress exactly. Yeah, but it's a really fun question, so thank you for asking it.
Yeah, well, what's the What would you say is the answer? Then? Do electrons have an identity or can you have the same electron? And the answer seems to be I.
Would say no. I would say identity is a microscopic quality that we like to attribute to things because we're used to it, because we're familiar with it, we expect it to We expect also tiny particles to have it, but they don't, and so I think it's odd and uh, and it tells us more about how we think than about how the universe works.
So you're saying, at the microscopic level, at the individual electron level, these things we can't apply because things are just constantly changing and frothing, And.
Yeah, exactly, I don't think it has any meaning at the microscopic level.
All right, Well, thank you hearing you from the Netherlands for that question. Please keep listening. I hope you answer your question, answer your question to your satisfaction. So we have one more question, and this one comes from Mexico or Mexico about dark manner stars.
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All right? Our last question of today comes from ben who is sending his question from Mexico, and he has a question about dark matter stars.
Hi, Daniel Lane Jorge, This is Benjamin from Mexico, and I was wondering, if the dark matter has all these gravitational properties as the regular matter, why haven't askedrophysicists discovered yet a big celestial body made of dark matter, like a dark matter star or something big that we can indirectly know it's there.
Thank you?
All right, that's a pretty cool question. Why aren't there dark stars besides a in comic books?
Yeah? Exactly, it should be, Yeah exactly. No, it's an awesome question. And the way I interpret it is that he's wondering, why can't we tell that dark matter is there? Why hasn't dark matter coalesced into some sort of object that we could then pinpoint, because I think he maybe is frustrated at the sort of diffusiveness of dark matter. We know it's there, we know it's sort of everywhere, but we can't seem to say exactly where it is and why not? Is that how you interpret the question?
Why does it stay so fuzzy?
Yeah? Yeah, exactly right? And I think that the key thing to understand here is remember that gravity is really really weak, and it's the only way we can see dark matter so far. The only way we can feel it is through its gravity, and and so it takes a huge amount of stuff to notice something just from gravity. Remember that gravity is so weak that you can feel the Earth's gravity, but you can't feel the gravity of your car or your house, even though there is a gravitational pull there. It takes some huge body to even feel it.
Right, Well, maybe we should recap in a little bit about dark matter. Right, So we know that dark matter feels gravity, right, that's how we sort of know it's there because it's pulling us around the galaxy. But it doesn't feel electromagnetic forces, which means we can't see it or touch it.
Right, that's right, exactly it doesn't give off light, it doesn't reflect light. We can't see it using any of those normal methods that we usually use to see stuff.
Right, But it does feel gravity, and so I think maybe Ben's question is, if dark matter feels gravity, why hasn't it clumped together out in space because it's attracted to itself, right, isn't it attracted to itself?
Dark matter is attracted to itself by gravity, absolutely yes, and it has clumped together. Right, dark matter is not evenly spread throughout the universe. Dark matter has clumped together thanks to gravity, and it's formed these big blobs. And it's in fact only because dark matter has clumped together to make these blobs that we have galaxies and we are alive, because without dark matter's gravitational pull, there wouldn't be enough gravity to hold the galaxies together. And we've done simulations and seeing that in universes without dark matter, it takes a lot longer for gravity to pull all this luminous stuff together to make stars and planets and galaxies. So dark matter does make structure. It does make objects, but those objects are sort of big and diffuse, and they's sort of the size of the galaxy and you might ask, well, how do we know that the dark matter inside the galaxy hasn't also clumped together to make you know, star sized stuff or planet sized stuff the way normal matter has, right, And we don't know the answer to that, right, And the reason we don't know is because we can't see dark matter in enough to tail Like, it's totally possible that the distribution of dark matter in the galaxy is either a totally smoothly spread out right b sort of you know, like a like a cloud. Now we know it's denser towards the center and less dense towards the outside, but it could still be a like a big cloud, right, Or it could be that they're structure that it's clumped together to make you know, a bunch of dense points, just the way normal matter has.
So there could be dark matter stars, yes, or dark matter planets.
Exactly, but the only way to see them would be through gravity. And it's really hard to see the gravity from one planet or the gravity from one star right unless it's really close by. Like if there were dark matter stars and a dark matter star passed near our Solar system, then we could detect it the way we detect black holes right there. Black holes are invisible. We detect them from their gravity. Sometimes we detect black holes because of the X rays that are produced from impressed gas nearby. But a lot of black holes we see through their gravity. But you need to be a pretty big black hole to detect its gravity from far away or to see its gravitational effect on nearby stuff. Right. And in fact, there are a few of these things we found, and they have a pretty silly name.
You ready for it, always physics silly names.
Yeah. Back a long time ago, before we knew whether dark matter was a thing, people were wondering if there were just big clumps of normal matter that were sort of hidden out there. And they give them this name, massive compact halo objects, and the acronym for that is m A c HO. Right, So MACHOs not nachos. Nachos are a totally different thing. These are MACHOs, right, And.
So that's not physics over compensating for anything at all, not at all.
No.
And so people went out there and looking for these things, like can we find dark blobs out there, dark condensed blobs out there that might be responsible for all the missing mass? Right, And they did find a bunch of not nearly enough to account for all the dark matter, but they found a bunch of them. They would find them like eclipsing stars or bending the path of other objects. And so we know that there are dark objects out there. Some of them could be dark matter, right, some of them could be. So it's totally possible that dark matter has clumped these objects together. We just don't have the gravitational sensitivity to see them because they're too small essentially, and gravity is so weak.
Like our ability to notice or feel or see dark matter is not at the planet or at the star level. It's only at sort of the galaxy level.
Yeah, exactly a little bit less than the galaxy. We can get some sense of where they are based on how rotations vary as a function of the radius from the center of the galaxy, but roughly get much more at the galaxy level than the star level. But it's fun to think about, like imagine what would happen. What would happen if you had a huge blob of dark matter and it coalesced into sort of a tight blob, Like would it make a star?
Make a planet?
You know, when we say a star, we sort of mean something that's big enough has enough gravity that it's pushed the stuff together that begins to fuse and release energy. Right, And so another interesting question is that what would happen if you squeeze that much dark matter together?
What interesting things happen, like, you know, elements fusing and releasing photons and things like that.
Well, we don't know, but we know it's not made of elements, right, it's not made of atoms. It's made of some other kind of matter. And the only interaction we know it has is gravity. So as far as we know, it would just squeeze and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze, and there's no repulsion. Right. The thing that keeps a star or a planet from immediately becoming a black hole are the other forces. It feels like electromagnetism, which and the strong force which fuel fusion, right, which keeps a star exploding, It keeps it from collapsing immediately. So if dark matter has no other forces, then every time it has to be a pretty dense clump, it's just going to turn into a dark matter black hole because that's it's just gravity. But if dark matter does feel some other force, maybe some new force we've never seen before that only affects dark matter on dark matter interactions. Then maybe, you know, clumping a bunch of the dark matter together could spark some sort of dark matter interaction which could release like dark photons. We're just wildly speculating here because we just really don't know what happens when dark matter bumps into dark.
Matter, dark photons, and dark light. Yes, exactly, sounds like all good comic book characters.
That's right. Today we've been exploring the connection between physics, philosophy and physics and comics books.
Is a trifecta. I think, you know, maybe that's where Ben's question came from. You know, like, you know, we know dark matter feels gravity, so why hasn't it clumped into dark matter black holes? You know, why is it still kind of diffused and not not more noticeable?
Right?
Does that mean that you know these are alternative you mentioned are maybe probably true? You know that there are other forces or there are maybe other mechanisms going on inside of a dark.
Matter Absolutely, I think a lot of physicists believe that there must be some other kind of force that dark matter feels, not just gravity and the sort of complicated arguments for that based on what happened in the early universe and how some matter and dark matter turned back and forth into itself. We have indirect evidence of that happening, which suggests there must be some other force that dark matter feels, but we haven't figured that out yet at all. It's really it's very indirect arguments. But there is one thing that keeps dark matter from collapsing sort of quickly into a black hole, and that's our old friend rotation. Like, one thing that keeps the galaxy from collapsing into a black hole is that it's spinning, and so that keeps the stars from falling in just the way spinning the Earth spinning around the Sun keeps it from falling into the Sun. Right, it's an orbit. If you have a huge blob of dark matter and it's rotating, that rotation keeps it from collapsing gravitationally into a black hole. And so that's something that dark matter can do even if it has no other interactions. But yeah, I think that it's totally possible that dark matter has formed really dense blobs inside our galaxy, and it's possible that there's new interactions doing weird stuff inside those dark matter objects that we have no idea about.
But I think what you were saying maybe is that we sort of haven't seen that yet, right, Like if we are surrounded by dark matter stars or dark matter you know, giant asteroids, you know, and one of them came through our Solar system, we would notice it, right, like we would notice all the other planets going whoa gravitation.
Yes, exactly, that's the kind of thing we would notice, for sure. I mean we noticed Omua mua, right, this tiny lil of rock coming through from deep space and passing through our Solar system with no gravitational interaction at all. That was but it was reflective. But imagine some really dense, heavy object that perturbed the path of the planets that we would definitely notice. Yeah, it would have to be pretty big though, because gravity is pretty weak, so like some random rock flying through the universe we wouldn't notice. It have to be you know, like the have to be a pretty significant object. I'm not sure exactly how massive, but some significant fraction in the mass of the Sun at very least.
Yeah, we would notice it, right, it would totally disrupt our Solar system.
Yeah, absolutely, But there could be a lot of these dark matter blobs out there, and just none of them have passed through the Solar System because the galaxy is huge, right, and there's lots of blobs out there that made of normal matter that don't pass through our Solar System. Doesn't mean they're not out there.
I mean there could be a giant banana shaped massive dark matter out there that's right waiting for us to slip on.
That's right. You're going to tie all the questions together. What if there's a banana shaped mass of dark matter creating a Solar System sized black hole and we're in it, we tell if there was another one that was identical.
All right, Well, I guess that Ben's answer is that there could be dark matter stars and planets or things out there. We just can't see them yet, That's right. I just don't have the right glasses to see it more sharply, right.
That's right. Yeah, And it's not clear that we ever will because we don't know what glasses to put on, or if there are glasses that you could even potentially theoretically put on to see this stuff.
Well, obviously we just need dark glasses.
I wear my sunglasses at night. I don't know about you.
All right, Well, once again, thank you listeners for sending you us your questions. We love to interact with you online, and so please follow us and please tell your friends about this podcast.
That's right. And if you're listening to us talk about something in physics and you have a question that pops into your mind, please share it with us. The reason we're doing this podcast is to clarify these things and explain them to you. And so if there's something we've missed, we want to get on it.
Yeah, and we'll answer it even if you are not our sons.
Unless you're on Instagram. In that case, sorry, in that case, you're out of luck. Do you have any sons on Instagram, you know where?
If you're trendy and like the rest of the universe, then maybe you should ask the question on Twitter.
That's solid advice.
All right, Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed it.
Thanks for tuning in. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at feedback at Danielandhorge dot com. 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 you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
As a United Explorer Card member, you can earn fifty thousand bonus miles plus look forward to extraordinary travel rewards, including a free checked bag, two times the miles on United purchases and two times the miles on dining and at hotels. Become an Explorer and seek out unforgettable places while enjoying rewards everywhere you travel. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank Member FDIC subject to credit approval offer subject to change terms apply.
California has millions of homes that could be damaged in a strong earthquake. Older homes are especially vulnerable to quake damage, so you may need to take steps to strengthen yours. Visit strengthen your House dot com to learn how to strengthen your home and help protect it from damage. The work may cost less than you think and can often be done in just a few days. Strengthen your home and help protect your family. Get prepared today and worry less tomorrow. Visit Strengthen your House dot com.
