Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseListener Questions 58: Donuts, disaster and discoveries!
Daniel and Jorge answer questions from listeners like you!
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Hey Jorge, have you been enjoying the donut revolution.
There's a revolution, like, are donuts planning to overthrow the government.
Maybe it's more like a donut renaissance. You know, there's all these creative donuts with cereal on top, or with croissant dough, or with wacky flavors. Though I'm guessing you probably prefer the original vanilla.
I enjoy a good crow nut and also a plane donut. I think you have to be careful, otherwise you might get a heart revolution.
I was recently tempted by a chicken and waffles donut.
Whoa is that like dinner, breakfast, and dessert in one bite.
You never even have to leave the house, and you can't afterwards.
Yeah, you might not be able to. How about a universe donut? Have they made those?
That's the donut version of the everything bagel.
A cosmic donut. Then you'll be everything, everywhere, all at once. I am Orge make cartoonist and the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I don't remember the last time I actually ate a donut.
Wait, what, that's kind of sad. Donuts are great.
I hear they're pretty tasty. But I don't actually eat breakfast or in lunch anymore, so there's a whole category of foods I just don't get to have.
Wait, you don't eat desserts either. Oh.
I eat plenty of dessert after dinner, but it's not very often people serve donuts for dessert.
You can have donuts at any time of the day.
That's why I was looking at that chicken waffle donut.
I was like, yeah, you can have it all in one bite, one treat.
A whole day's nutrition or at least calories.
For the calories, yeah, it's weissen some vegetables, though, it should be like chicken waffles salad on a donut.
Right, chicken brocoli donut?
Oh my god, chicken pot pie donut. You just invented the next food truck. Crazy chicken ponuts.
Chicken potpoury don't smell good too.
But anyways, Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio in which we try to serve.
Up the entire universe, all of its delicious, creamy nature and mysterious feelings to you. Not on a donut, but in your ear. We think that everything that's out there in the universe deserves to be explored and questioned and understood as best as possible. We don't shy away from the things that we don't understand. We embrace that ignorance and take you right up to the forefront of human knowledge.
We'd try to glaze the donut of your brain by not glazing over all of the amazing details that the universe has to offer and all of the crazy mysteries that are out there still left to be resolved.
Because the questions about the universe are not just for particle physicists and cosmologists in fancy offices or not so fancy offices, as the case may be. Is for everybody to wonder about the universe, and curiosity is totally democratic. Everybody can ask questions, everybody can make progress, everybody can push the boundaries of human understanding, and everybody deserves to understand.
Well, it sort of depends on where you live, though, doesn't.
It how fancy your office is.
You mean, I mean, whether you live in North Korea perhaps.
Hmm, Well, I think those people deserve to understand the universe, even if they're not allowed to talk about it.
Yes, yes, and everyone deserves donuts as well, which are part of the universe, and maybe even they might be the shape of the universe.
Yeah, are you trying to trigger a donut inspired pollution in North Korea?
You know, whatever it takes.
That wasn't to know.
If itf I do that makes it happen. Let's do it.
You gotta be careful now. We don't want to get hacked by North Korea.
Oh yeah, what would they find though in our files.
Boys, secrets about the universe.
They'll think we're keeping those secrets and saving them for a later podcast.
The puns that were so bad we didn't even use them on the podcast.
There's not just thing as a bad punt, Danyl. I think that's the definition of a pun. If it's good, it's not really a pun. It's a good joke.
I dare you to hack us North Korea and find those terror puns.
You to hack Daniel, please? I do have some secrets I don't want out there. But yeah, like you said, it all starts with questions, and everyone can ask questions, including our listeners.
We'd love to hear your questions. If you are listening, to the podcast and something doesn't quite make sense to you, or you're just walking down the street contemplating the universe and something bumps in your brain, Please reach out to us to questions at Danielandjorge dot com. Will you write back to everybody.
Yeah, just don't bump into any cars, into any potholes. But yeah, we like to take questions here on the podcast, and so today on the program we'll be tackling listener questions number fifty eight.
Thank you very much to everybody who sends in their questions. It's delightful to read your thoughts about the universe. And sometimes I ask people to send me a recording of their questions so we can talk about it here on the podcast.
Yeah, and so today we have three great questions from listeners. The first one is about the shape of planets. There's one about universe changing quantum events, and there's also a question about extremely massive and extremely old galaxies. So let's jump right in. Our first question comes from Eric from the Netherlands.
Hi, Daniel Hore. Eric came from the Netherlands. I have a fun question. I think about donut planets. So me and my friend were talking about space and planets and what shapes they could take, and so he pointed out that he saw an article once about how planets could have a torah shape or a donut and be stable. I recall as well seeing that paper. But I tried to think about how that would work, and I just I realized I couldn't really figure it out. So I was wondering what you guys had to say about that, like, how would a donut shape planet evolve or like be created? Yeah, would love to hear you guys thoughts. Thank you so much and keep making your awesome podcast.
All right. Do you think Eric was just hungry here?
Yeah? Well Eric is in the Netherlands, so who knows what sort of substances he was under the influence of his friends.
Think question, boy, I think that's an answer them reference.
Yes, I think it is.
I think there's a whole other there's a whole rest of the country that's not associated with drugs, Danue.
I just said substances. You said drugs. Donuts might be substances, that's right, Sure, high on glazing sugar or something.
Oh I see, yeah, yeah, well sniffing some tulips, I'm sure.
But it is a really fun question that goes to the heart of like how do planets form? And are the planets in our Solar system weird? Are there weirder planets out there in the universe? What's the sort of limit of planet topology?
M Like, what determines the shape of a planet? Yeah?
Exactly, Like why are most planets spheres? And are other shapes possible? Spheres? Come of make sense because gravity is the thing that determines the shape of planets. Remember, planets come together from little bits of rock, basically cosmic dust and gas and ice that gravity has pulled together. Before we had a Solar system, there was a massive cloud out of these ingredients of the Solar System. Some events, some spark caused a gravitational runaway that formed the Sun and the rest of the materials that was orbiting too fast to fall in continue to orbit in a plane, which then gathered itself together into asteroids and planets and stuff like that. So it's gravity that shapes the whole Solar System and gravity that tells us the shape of the planet.
Right. Without gravity, you wouldn't have planets, right, or anything out there in the universe.
Without gravity, we would still be in the dark ages of the universe very very early on, protons and electrons found each other and became neutral hydrogen, and they were just dark neutral hydrogen filling the universe. It was gravity that pulled that together, made the first stars, which shot out radiation and reionized at the universe and made it exciting.
M Yeah, I guess it. Just the universe would just be a giant soup if it wasn't for gravity, a big dark soup. All right. Well, I guess the question then might be what caused it to a planet? Like, how do you define what a planet is? Oh?
Man, that is a whole rabbit hole. You really want to go there?
Oh, they got twenty minutes, let's do it.
The answer is it's complicated and inconsistent. There's several definitions of a planet, depending on which international astronomical union you subscribe to.
There are multiple ones.
There are multiple ones, yes, like how many? Oh man? I have not surveyed them recently, but I remember them disagreeing about some borderline cases. But the basic idea is that you have some object.
Wait, I'm super curious about this union. So like astronomers have unions, like they're like associations, like clubs, or like you know, government bodies.
They're more like professional societies. You know. They get together, they eat stale cookies, they argue about who's a planet, who's not a planet. You know. They build an International Astronomical Union, which is not a union in the sense that they don't like collectively bargain for astronomers' rights or anything. They just get together and talk about stuff.
I see, And what's the competing organization.
Well, there's the astronomers in the IAU, and then there are planetary scientists that have other organizations that have their own definitions.
All right, Well, generally what's the general definition? Though?
The general definition is a large, rounded astronomical body that's not a star or it's remnant. It's something that has cleared its path and its orbit around the star.
And so it can be made out of anything, right, it doesn't have to be rocks. It can also be liquid or gases.
Yeah, it can be made out of ice, It could be made out of diamond, It can be made out of donuts.
Absolutely, WHOA, how about chicken and waffles.
I don't think the IAU has taken a stance on that. But I don't see a reason why.
You can't that that might be the hair that breaks the camel's back. There'll be so much disagreement they'll disunionize.
M M.
And So the thing that makes these planets is gravity. And if it was just gravity, then all these planets would be spheres because gravity likes to roll things downhill, and if you have a sphere with a bump on it, gravity will want to pull that bump down. And so if you only have gravity, then planets should naturally become spheres. It's like the lowest energy state for a big blob of stuff. Planets also do other things. They spin, Like the Earth itself is not actually a perfect sphere because it's spinning and that changes the shape of the planet.
Wait, wait, are you saying the Earth is not round.
I'm not saying the Earth is flat, but the Earth is not a perfect sphere. It's an ellipsoid because its spin makes it bulge at the.
Edges like the centropical force. Right.
Yeah, Essentially a counter acts gravity. For example, you weigh less at the equator than you do at the poles.
How bulgy is the Earth.
The radius of the Earth is like twenty ish kilometers different at the poles and at the equator, So it's not a tiny effect.
Isn't the Earth like twelve thousand kilometers in diameter? So's we're talking about like a zero point one percent.
Yeah, it's big compared to me or you or your house or your breakfast, and it's small compared to the radius of the Earth, so you might not even notice it, Like if you're holding the Earth in your hand, you probably couldn't detect it.
Mmmm, well, I guess going back to Eric's question, his question was, can you have a planet that's not shaped like a giant ball? Can you maybe have a planet that is shaped like a doughnut or a taurus?
Yeah, it's a really cool question, and people have been thinking about this for a long time. There's a long history as smart physicists thinking about stable gravitational configurations. Essentially, as you spin the planet faster and faster, you can make more and more interesting shapes. If there's no spin, you basically can only have a sphere. But if you spin it you can make stable shapes that are not spheres.
But aren't all of those shapes basically like oblongs or like squish balls?
Yes, and no, certainly ellipsoids are possible, and as you spin the planet it gets fatter and fatter, and then eventually it might even break up and you start like losing stuff into outer space. But according to the calculations, you can also have a torus. You can have a doughnut, which is gravitationally stable if it's spinning at the right speed.
Interesting, but I guess maybe it isn't another big factor what the planet is made out of. Like it's made out of gas, it probably can't hold any other shape other than a sphere, can it.
It turns out to not be very important if it's big enough, because if it's big enough like the typical sizes of planets or even something like the Moon or larger, then the gravity and the spin overwhelm any material strength. It doesn't really matter what it's made out of. You can think about this as like a drop of liquid, essentially, whose shape is completely controlled by its spin and by its gravity, not at all by its surface tension, because like the material strength of rock is tiny compared to the gravitational force of the whole earth m.
Meaning like even rocks are sort of liquid in a larger scale.
Yeah, exactly, and in the great pressure inside the Earth, for example, they do flow, and huge rocks and mountains can be formed by these pressures. So even if you have like a diamond planet, if it's big enough, then the gravitational forces are gonna be the only thing you have to worry about.
So you're saying you can make a donut shaped planet, Like, how does that even work? Then when in the whole collapse?
Yes and no, Like you can find the solution where it's in equilibrium, where everything is pulling on everything in a balanced way and so it doesn't collapse, but it's very very unstable, like a little bit of extra mass here or a little bit of extra mass there can break the thing up. So it's possible theoretically to construct this thing and to set it spinning and to have it avoid collapsing, but it's unlikely for it to appear in nature or to last very long. But if it's big enough, then it has enough like gravitational self energy, sort of like along the tube to avoid collapsing.
I guess you just made me think of like Saturn's ring. You know, those rings are made out of ice and rocks, and you know, assuming that maybe you could hop between rocks in those rings, you could maybe consider that one whole space body, couldn't you, or maybe like if you added more rocks to those rings, it eventually might be solid.
Yeah, exactly, And that's actually one potential outcome for a donut planet. If you start with a donut planet, it's likely to break itself up into smaller bodies and then you basically just have rings because if one spot is a little bit more massive then another spot, it's going to pull towards that. You're going to get this like bead instability, where it tends to break up into beads rather than being one continuous planet.
Right, But I think the idea is kind of the same, right, Like a doughnut shape planet is sort of basically like a ring, right.
Yeah, I think they're stable for the same reason, but they're a little bit different. Like a ring is basically flat, but a donut shape planet is actually a cylinder, so it's a little bit different. This is something we're thinking about, is like more massive and without a huge planet at the center, and so its gravity will pull it together into a cylinder rather than keeping it in a flat plane like a set of rings. But they are similar.
Yeah, Well, I guess what would it be like to be on that planet? Like, could you walk around the tube of the donut and stay on the planet, or you fall into the center of the hole.
You could walk around the whole planet and stay on the planet. Down would always be towards the center of the ring, not towards the dot that's in the hole.
Oh, I see, because even if you're in the inner part of the hole, you're spinning so fast you're sort of being pressed against the donut, sort of like in those carnival rides where where you're spinning it inside a graviton.
Yeah, exactly. Well, the spin definitely contributes and helps make this thing stable. But you have a combination of that spin and the actual gravity of this object, right, it really is pulling on you. But the interesting thing is that the gravity is not the same all the way around the planet. Like on a sphere, you're all he's the same distance from the center of the planet, right, and so the gravity is basically the same. Okay, there's small differences from the pole to the equator, as we just talked about, but essentially it's the same. But on a tourus it's significantly different gravity on like the inside and the outside.
WHOA meaning, what's the difference is it? Is it stronger or weaker on the inner hole.
So if you're walking around the inside or the outside, those are the two equators of the Taurus. Those have the weakest gravity. The gravity's strongest if you're walking on the poles. Now the poles are like a circle. It's kind of hard to visualize, but like the you have a north pole and a south.
Pole where you put the glaze right, yeah.
Exactly, either on the glazed side or the not glazed side. That a south pole has no glaze on it.
Not fun side.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So if you're walking along the glazed pole, then that's where the gravity is the strongest. If you're walking in the outside, you're kind of far away from a lot of the mass and so gravity gets weaker.
But what if you're from the Netherlands and you're walking around glaze nice on the glazes that.
You should have some chicken and waffles.
You go for the munchies. Yeah. Interesting, So as you're walking around the two of the doughnut, you're going to weigh less or more or less?
Right mm hmmm, yeah, exactly. So life on this kind of planet would be very weird. Although I don't think life could realistically evolve on such a planet because I don't think it would last very long. Again, it's an equilibrium, but it's not stable, which means a small deviation is going to end up breaking this thing up and collapsing it.
But I wonder if you can imagine, like taking one of those big asteroids out there in the Solar System asteroid belt and just carving a donut, you would sort of technically be a donut planet, and it wouldn't be unstable, would it.
You could build a small object like that that's a ring, like a space station. Essentially, you could be constructed that's a ring, and you could do the same thing using the structural integrity of an asteroid. Yeah, but I don't think that's really planet sized, you know, if you want something really like the size of the Earth, and you've got to use gravity and spin. But the cool thing is that such a planet could have really really weird moons, Like you could have moons that orbit in the plane of the donut. You could also have moons that orbit through the hole in the doughnut. Whoa, yeah, And there's some stable orbits where the moon just goes up and down through the hole just like bounces, like it's on a trampoline or something.
Oh wow, that'd be pretty fun, pretty interesting. But you're saying these planets would be unstable, meaning like if you knock it, they'll just crumble and collapse or or what what does unstable mean?
Yeah, they rely on the symmetry of it, So they rely on having exactly the same gravity from this chunk and that chunk, which means they rely on it all being the same density and having exactly the same shape, and so it tends to break itself apart. If you get hit by a pretty large asteroid for example, Now you've broken that symmetry. This part is pulling harder than the other parts, and the math tells us that while is a solution, it's wildly unstable and very easy for it to break down.
So basically impossible for it to be out there in real space.
I mean impossible in the infinite universe. It's pretty hard to say. It's technically possible, but so improbable that it seems very unlikely that it exists. Though if the universe is infinite, you know anything can happen.
Well, I wonder because it required the process of making the planet to be sort of like super duper precise and symmetrical perfect.
The rocks you basically just have to come together into that form. Right, It's not like this a.
Process and then nothing could touch it.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I guess that's the answer for Eric. Planets can be donut shape. You can carve a small planet maybe into donut shape, and you could maybe make one out there, but it's not probable and unlikely. My final question, Daniel, is, if you're on this donut planet, what does the donuts look like? Do they look just look like balls? We're like figure eights? Maybe? What do they call pretzels donuts?
I don't think I'm glazed enough to answer that question.
Just sprinkle some jargon there. All right, Well, thank you Eric. Now let's get to our second question, and this one is about universe changing quantum events, so we'll dig into that, but first let's take a quick break.
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Orright, we're answering listener questions, and our second question comes from Lauren.
Hi Danielle Norge. My question is about the universe changing quantum events like of a strange star and it's strange lids, or if the Higgs field that finds a more stable state than what it is right now. If this were to happen sufficiently far away from the Milky Way such that the origin point is expanding away from us relatively faster than the speed of light because of the universal expansion, well, that keep us safe from these events?
Thanks whoa interesting question. I feel like Lauren is basically saying, can the universe end and we'll never notice?
No, she's actually sad being the universe right, or she's talking about how the universe might be saving us from its own disaster.
M Well, let's break it down. First, she talked about universe changing quantum events. What does that mean?
Well, on the podcast a few times we've talked about how our understanding of the nature of matter and reality has given us some hints that there might be some weird potential events that could be quite disastrous. For example, now we know that the universe is filled with a Higgs field, and that Higgs field has some energy to it. Potential energy is stored in that Higgs field, and the way the Higgs field interacts with other particles gives them mass changes how their quantum fields vibrate in such a way that they move with inertia. But we don't know if that Higgs field is stable, Like it might be that all that energy that's in the Higgs field is sort of stuck in there, but it could get tipped over. It could be like that doughnut planet that works for a while, but you know, if something happens some particle collider triggers it, it could collapse, and it collapses. That would spread out at the speed of light. So that's a potentially catastrophic event because if the Higgs field loses its energy, all the particles lose their mass. And nobody's eating donuts.
Right at least, we're all lose weight pretty quickly. But maybe a question is how do we know this, Like, how do we know the Higgs field is like that and has this potential to collapse.
We actually don't know that the Higgs field could collapse. The Higgs field could be stable or unstable or meta stable. We're still figuring that out. We are measuring how the Higgs field couples with itself and how the Higgs itself gets mass, and that's going to help us understand the sort of contours of the Higgs field. Like, the Higgs field is different from every other kind of field. All those fields like to relax at a minimum energy, but the Higgs field like has a wiggle in it. It's sort of like instead of having a canyon with just a river at the bottom, there's a canyon with like a channel along one of the walls can also flow, But we don't really know how stable that is, if it's totally stable, or if there's just a very thin lip there that the universe could roll over down to the bottom of the canyon.
I guess maybe a question is how do you know this about the Higgs field. Can you measure it?
Yeah, we have measured the Higgs field, and we have a theory about how the Higgs works and the shape of the Higgs potential, but we just don't know the parameters of it.
Like, can you measure this little energy that the Higgs field has?
Absolutely, we have measured that energy. We know that value. Yes, we know the energy that's in the Higgs field. What we don't know is how stable that is. That depends a little bit about how the Higgs interacts with itself.
So what makes you think that it is maybe unstable.
Because if it interacts with itself in certain ways, that changes the shape of this potential, like the canyon that the water is flowing through, and it might mean that lip is very very narrow, and in some very high energy events, the Higgs field could get pushed out of that little channel and roll all the way down to zero, basically collapse to the true low energy state.
So the idea is that, like for some reason, where we are in the universe and as far as we can see in the universe, this Higgs value has this value to it. But you're saying that value could suddenly change, and if it does, then it basically the universe kind of collapses.
Exactly like the universe has been cooling for billions of years. It used to be very hot and high energy, and as it expands, everything cools and gets more dilute. But the Higgs field sort of got stuck on this ledge, and we don't know if that ledge is stable or if it could keep collapsing. But our whole way of life depends on it being stuck on that ledge.
Right, And the idea is that, like if it collapses somewhere, then that collapse is gonna spread out, sort of like a you have a room full of dominoes that are just standing there and you tip one over, that collapse is going to spread out.
M m.
Yeah.
It's like if you pop a balloon, you've popped the whole balloon, not just where you stuck the needle.
Why do you think that is couldn't be contained or can in the universe just fill that back up?
Yeah, it's a good question. It has to do with again, how the Higgs field talks to itself. If one of it has less energy.
You said one of them, what does one of them mean?
So if the Higgs field in one location loses energy that interacts with the Higgs field nearby. Right, The Higgs field is not a bunch of independent numbers in space. There's all this math that connects the Higgs field here with the Higgs field somewhere else, which is why like waves can travel through the Higgs field, you know, And so what happens one spot of the Higgs field affects the rest of the Higgs field as well well.
Lauren sort of here in her question imagines maybe a good new scenario where maybe this has happened or will happen, but maybe it happens somewhere so far away, this collapse never going to reach it.
Yeah, the real nightmare thing about the Higgs collapse is it could happen anywhere in the universe and it could reach us, and we would have literally no warning because it would be moving at the speed of light. So there's no advanced notion. It could be any moment this wave of Higgs collapse could wash over our solar system. So that seems kind of terrifying. But Lauren is pointing out that the universe has a horizon. There are things out there in the universe that are so far away from us that the expansion of the universe means we will never see light from them, and so she's asking if that also means that if the Higgs field collapses, there are we protected from.
It, right? Or not maybe protected from it, but just isolated from it by the expansion of the universe.
Yes, exactly isolated by the expansion of the universe. And she's right. The answer is yes. If the Higgs field collapses in a region of space that's so far away from us that light from it can never reach us, then also that Higgs field collapse can never reach us.
WHOA that is super cool. I wonder how she thought of this. Is this it a known thing or is she the first one to think about it.
No, it's definitely a known thing. It's something people have been wondering about, and it's something people think about because this expansion of space is so strange. It like breaks up the universe into little mini universes. You know, it's strange that we have a horizon in our universe beyond which we might never see if this expansion continues. You know, all of this assumes that the universe is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating and will continue to accelerate. This is what we call dark energy. As the universe expands, all the matter and the radiation gets more and more dilute, but dark energy doesn't, and so it becomes a bigger and bigger fraction of the energy budget of the universe, which then drives its expansion even more, which is why the whole thing is accelerating, and because it's space itself expanding. As you get further and further away, you have more space between you and something else that's expanding, and that's why the expansion can become faster than the speed of light, which seems like a violation of Einstein's relativity, but it isn't actually.
Right, right, although there are two sort of caveats here, Like one, we don't know if the universe is going to keep expanding, right, It might be that the universe stops expanding, in which case this Higgs collass is going to catch up to us.
Yes, that's true, and the Higgs collapse could change the way the universe is expanding. That's another wrinkle, right.
That's what I was going to say, Like, maybe the collapse makes the universe stop expanding, in which case it is going to catch up to us.
It's possible. It's possible. But there's another scenario there which is really cool. And the connection between these two ideas is actually pretty interesting because we don't understand what dark energy is. We just know there's some energy in space and that's contributing to the accelerating expansion. We don't know where that energy is coming from. Some people wonder if that energy is from the Higgs field, although current calculations say those numbers don't really agree by like ten to the one hundred. But if it is from the Higgs field, then what's fascinating is that if the Higgs field collapses, you no longer have dark energy everywhere in space, and so you no longer have accelerating expansion in that bubble, right because that collapse can't catch up with the cosmic horizon. The rest of the universe keeps accelerating expansion and this bubble just doesn't.
But wouldn't that bubble grow because the Higgs field is contagious.
That bubble grows, but at a smaller rate than the rest of the universe is expanding.
MM, then it wouldn't reach us even if it's stopped expanding.
Yeah, you'd get these local collapsed bubbles where the Higgs field is very very different in that little bubble, and in that bubble you would also not have expanding space.
Mmm.
So basically, we have to hope that if the universe ever collapses, it collapses outside of our horizon and within our horizon, yes, because if it collapses within our horizon, then we're toast.
Mm hmm exactly. The horizon right now is about five gigaparsex away, So anything that happens further away than that, any light that's emitted from objects further away than that, we will never see, and so any disasters sparked by those objects also we're pretty safe from.
MMM. So I guess that reduces our risk, right, because it means that because if the universe is super duper huge, maybe infinite, then we're sort of doomed because it maybe eventually it'll collapse somewhere, But then reduces our risk because it's not going to reach us.
Yeah, that's right. We're only at risk from an enormous, vast region of space, not actually infinite space. HM.
So I wonder if that means that we're not going to die soon, so we should eat all the donuts we can or if that means that we're going to live for a long time, and so therefore we should eat all the doughnuts we can.
We should get fitness donuts. That's our next food truck.
Did you say fitness donuts?
Yeah, solid donuts or something.
Oh, those don't sound as delicious. All right, Well, thanks Lauren for this awesome idea and great question. It sounds like the answer is, yeah, we would be safe from those universes collapsing outside of our horizon that we can see. So as long as we can see it, we're safe.
Close your eyes and you won't die.
Yeah. Basically, Well, I guess if it does, then there's nothing you can do.
You could always hide under the covers, right, covers protect you from everything.
Yeah, there you go, There you go. All right, Well, let's get to our last question of the day, and it's about extremely massive and extremely old galaxies. So let's explore that. But first, let's take another quick break.
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All right, we're asking listener questions here today, and our last question is about super duper old and massive galaxies.
Hello, Daniel and Jorge. This is Jamie in New Jersey. Recently I have read several stories reporting that teams have used the web space telescope to observe several extremely massive galaxies as early as one to two billion years after the Big Bang. In that galaxies this early challenge our models of the universe. I would be grateful if you could explain why these galaxies conflict with our models and is this revolutionary or does it just tug on the models a little bit?
Thank you? All right, great question from Jamie. I feel like he's referencing some kind of news that came out recently.
Yes, he is. There's a paper that came out in Nature quite recently. And a bunch of listeners sent this to me and we're curious about what it is. Meant. It has to do with some observations made by the James Webb spased telescope about the early universe.
What did they find and what did they report?
So remember, the James webs based telescope can see infrared light, which means that it can see stuff that's older than anything Hubble can see. Hubble works in the optical spectrum like visible light that our eyes can also see. But as things come from further away in the universe, they get expanded more and more, they get more and more red shifted. So James Web can basically look further back in time than Hubble can. There are photons that strike Hubble that just don't get recognized by it. Because it's an optical telescope. Those photons from the earliest moments of the universe will be seen by James Web. So James Webb can look further back in time at deeper redshifts, at older stuff. And what they saw surprise them about the formation of galaxies in the early universe.
Mmmm, they found a galaxy that's super duper extra old.
Yeah, they found galaxies that are really big for their age, Like we're talking about in the very early part of the universe. So these galaxies are sort of old in the sense that they were created a long time ago, but they're young in that we're seeing them when they were just made in the very early universe.
Right. It's like finding an old picture of your parents. It's like they're old, but it's a picture of them when they're young.
Yeah, exactly, and what they saw in that picture is very confusing. We had an idea for how galaxies form. The universe begins, you have big clumps of gases we talked about earlier. You form stars, and that ends the dark ages, and those stars come together to make galaxies. But that whole thing takes time. You know, it's seated by dark matter, because dark matter overwhelms the universe and has most of the gravity, and so it shapes all of this structure. But in our models, we expected this to take a few hundred million years. You know, stars take a wild reform and then for them to get pulled together. Gravity is not that powerful a force. And what we'd seen before this as we used hubble to look further and further back in time was as we went back in time to the earlier universe, we saw fewer galaxies and smaller galaxies, because as time goes on, galaxies form and then they merge and make bigger and bigger galaxies. And so Hubble saw this trend towards smaller and fewer galaxies. And when we turned on James Web, we expected to see more of the same, to sort of extrapolate back down to the smallest and initial early galaxies. But what they saw instead were big Papa and Mama galaxies in the early universe already with old stars in them.
What do you mean old stars?
So you can tell the age of a population of stars by looking at the light that it puts out. Big stars that don't burn very long tend to be very hot, and they make more blue light. Small stars that last a long time tend to make more red light. So if you see a population of stars with a bunch of blue light in them, you know they're fairly young because the blue stars don't live very long. If you see a population of stars that are more red, you know they're pretty old because all the blue ones have already burned out. So they can measure the age of a population of stars, and they see that these stars look kind of old already. So they expected young, tiny galaxies filled with blue stars, but they see big galaxies filled with redder stars.
I guess how do you tell the difference between like an old star that's really close by and a young star that's really far away.
Oh, I see you're talking about like the spectrum of the star versus it's red shift.
Yeah, I mean you're saying, like, we can tell how young the stars are, but we can also tell how far weight it is by the retinus of it. How do you distinguish the two.
Yeah, that's a good question. We can do that because the star puts out light in many different wavelengths, Like the fingerprint of a star, has energy from lots of different atomic spectra, and so we can tell both how far that whole spectrum is shifted, which tells us the red shift to the star and therefore how far away it is, and also how hot the star is, Like are there more the blue lines than the red lines? So we can tell the temperature of the star by like a ratio of various lines in the spectrum, and that we can tell how far away it is by the shifting of those lines. So those are two separate measurements mm.
And so what's weird about this measurement is that the galaxies are too old to be that young in the universe.
Yeah, and too big and with old stars in them. So it's really surprising.
WHOA, So what could it mean?
Well, nobody really knows yet. Everybody's puzzling over it, and there's lots of fun ideas that are being bounced around. Number one is like, well maybe we goofed. You know, we're making these measurements of the red shift of these stars, but it's hard, especially because we don't have measurements in the optical spectrum to back it up. James Webb is pretty precise, but these are difficult measurements to make if you only have a few lines that you're using to measure these red shifts, and you know, these galaxies are very faint blobs, very very far away, and so it's not like we can even really resolve it and tell that it's a galaxy. So the whole thing could just be a measurement error miscalibration.
Wait, wait, what we can't tell what would you see like a pinpoint of light or what.
It's like a few pixels. You know, these are blobs. One explanation is that these aren't even galaxies. That in the very early universe there could be super massive black holes that formed, and what we're seeing is light that's emitted from the accretion disk of these very early universe super massive black holes. So that's another possibility.
We just looked at a couple of pixels and they assumed there was a galaxy.
Well, basically, galaxies are worth out there in the universe. The universe is made of galaxies. That's the basic building block of the cosmos.
Oh, I see when you're talking about that scale. Yeah, you can't see individual stars beyond the Milky Way basically, so if you see a source of light, it has to be a galaxy.
You can see individual stars in some nearby galaxies, but in general, yes, the most distant galaxies, we can basically just tell there's a blob there, so probably it's a galaxy.
Or even like any source of light out there that far, it has to be a galaxy maybe or not. It could be also a black hole age you.
Said it could be. Now, there's no explanation for like how the early universe could have made supermassive black holes that have these accrusion discs and admit that light. But it's just like one fun idea. It gives you a sense of like the craziness of the ideas people are exploring to explain this unexplained data. That's the fun part of physics and science when you're like, what this doesn't make any sense, and it forces you to be creative about what else could be going on in the universe.
Mmmm, what are some other possibilities for these weird measurements?
So possibility one measurement error, Possibility two weird unexplained black holes. Possibility three is that maybe we are wrong about how stars and galaxies formed in the early universe. We have a model for how that happens, basically because we can see it happen in nearby galaxies which are kind of old. And what we see is that star formation is not that easy. Like star formation is kind of tricky. You need a big blob of cold gas and you need not too much radiation to like blow it apart. You need to leave it alone for a while, so gravity pulls it together. And there's lots of examples in the universe where galaxies are not making stars anymore, like they're just too hot or there's too much radiation from their central black hole. This process is called quenching. So it might be that our idea for how long it takes to form stars it's been biased by looking at star formation in the late universe when quenching happens. Maybe in the early universe it was possible to form stars much faster than it is today because you were still in the dark ages and there wasn't all this radiation or you know, these ideas are very speculative, but it could just be that star formation could happen much faster in the early universe than we thought.
I wonder if it could also be that maybe there was just a pocket of a lot of stuff there when the universe blew up. You know how there are fluctuations in the amount of the density of the universe. Maybe it just happened to be a lot of stuff.
Yeah, it's certainly possible that there are fluctuations like that. We don't have a huge number of data points here yet, so everybody's waiting to get more samples and more data and look for more things and see are these weird examples that can be explained by fluctuations, as you say that these fluctuations would be pretty unlikely given our current understanding of the cosmological model. But maybe that's wrong, right, Maybe our understanding of the early universe has more fluctuations than we expected. Maybe there's something else going on. It's definitely a lot we don't understand about the very early universe and the expansion of the universe in that time, and the balance between dark energy and dark matter. So there's definitely a lot to learn. And this could just be like the thread that begins to unravel it, or it could be just a measurement error.
Hmmm, I wonder could it also just be like, maybe these galaxies are a regular galaxy, but they're moving away from us really fast. Is that a possibility. That's why there were so red shifted.
So the red shift includes two different things. One is like the expansion of the universe as a whole, and then also galaxies can have velocity relative to that expansion, like for example, Andromeda is moving towards us even though the universe is expanding, right, so there's a peculiar local velocity. And then the overall universe expansion. And I think you're saying, like, could these actionly be closer and not as old as we thought, they just happen to be moving away from us really really fast. I suppose that's possible, but it would be a really large, peculiar velocity. They'd have to be like super zooming around, and that's not something we expect either. Even in that scenario, that would be something new.
Why don't we expect it sort of speed limit for galaxies.
It's not that there's a speed limit, but we have a model for how the universe was made and how structure is formed, and if things are moving around and much faster than that, it tends to disturb that structure. And so we see the universe sort of like cooling and crystallizing, and that tells us a lot about the speed of matter and galaxies in the universe. If they're rezooming around much faster than the structure of the whole universe would look different. But there could always be a few weird oddballs, right.
Right, right, There's always a few weird oddballs in the universe here on Earth, all right. So the answer for Jamie is, we don't.
We're not sure it's super exciting because we don't know what it means, and it's wonderful because it's a surprise. That's the best outcome. Every time you turn on a new kind of eyeball and look at a new spot in the universe, you hadn't looked at it before, and the universe shows you something new.
Right, Right, More job security for a physicists, and.
More joy for everybody who's curious about the nature of the universe.
I think more unknowns is not good for those of us who just want answers. Like, if you're curious, you want answers, right, But if you're making a living out of the questions, then it's good news for you.
I think if you're curious, you want answers, but you also want more questions.
Now you're trying to tell people what they want.
Yes, I'm Steve Jobs over here.
There you go, the Steve Jobs of physics. You're one black turtleneck away from that.
I'm one donut away from not being able to wear my turtle neck anymore.
I think they stretched Aniel, Yeah, so I think they're okay. All right, keep eating those donuts or not eating those donuts for breakfast? All right, Well, thank you to all of our question askers. It's always fun to see what people are curious about and to get a sense of what are the big unknowns out there.
Thank you very much everybody who shares your curiosity with us. If this is a ride we're taking together to explore the universe, so please don't be shy to write to us to questions at Danielandjorge dot com. We'd love to hear from you, and we'll always right.
Back and send us some chicken and waffle donuts if you can with your questions. Always appreciate it all right. We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Instant, and now TikTok. 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. House 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 Asdairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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