Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge absorb listener questions, reflect on the answers and emit some silly jokes
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Hey, Daniel, I have a light question for you.
M I hope I am bright enough to answer it.
See I can tell you're taking this a little too lightly.
Well, you know, I'm happy to answer it and try to lighten your intellectual load.
Now I need a pretty awesome answer here, or something totally lit as the kids would say.
All right, what is it? I can illuminate for you?
All right, are you ready? What is a photon?
Anyways? That is not a lighthearted question, but go.
Ahead, light it up.
Unfortunately I don't have a very enlightening answer for you.
Just light puns.
My puns are massless.
Hi am Horham made cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and now I find myself very light on the puns.
You're a shining example of in academia.
Now I just used up all my light puns, and now my brain is like a black hole of ideas for how to make more puns about light.
You're dimming on the puns there. Welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we try to shine a bright light on the deepest mysteries of the universe. We wonder how everything works. We wonder why it works at all, We wonder why there is anything how much of it there is, and what rules it follows. We are amazed that we can make sense of any of this incredible, crazy cosmos that we find ourselves in, but we are appreciative that we can, and we seek to share that little sliver of understanding with you.
It's RDA. It is a pretty amazing universe full of light and shine, any things for us to wonder and ask questions about, like, for example, light or the opposite of light, like black holes, big stars, giant stars, small stars, dark matter, all kinds of things for us to wonder.
About, because it's not just a universe filled with stuff. It's a universe filled with stuff that is sending us messages. We couldn't see stars in other solar systems if they were not shooting light at us or sending other kinds of particles. So don't imagine a universe out there doing its mysterious stuff in the darkness. Instead, all the crazy dancing that's happening in the physics, inside stars and inside black holes and all over the galaxy is beaming you answers, beaming you clues at least to lead you towards answers and understanding of the fundamental physics that would explain it all.
Yeah, the universe is bathing us, but information about itself and how the laws that it follows to make everything work, from giant stars and galaxies to the tiny smallest molecules and.
Particles, assuming of course, that the universe does follow laws.
Are you saying the universe is some kind of outlaw, some kind of criminal universe? Does it need to go to universe of jail?
I don't want to put a black mark on the reputation of the universe in any sense I think you did. I'm just asking questions, you know.
I see I wonder if Daniel Whitson broke the law again today. Is that the kind of question that wouldn't that is harmless?
Yeah?
Yeah, exactly. And I'm impressed with how well the universe so far has been following laws, or put another way, how we've been able to discover the laws the universe seems to be following. But you know, there is a deep and fundamental mystery there, which is like, why is the universe following laws at all? And is it possible to ever come up with a single law that describes everything in the universe. That's a little bit of an article of faith in the whole process of science.
Yeah, it's a big question. Fortunately, the universe, as you said, is bright and is full of things that shine and give off light, and that like gets to us and we can use that information to figure out if the universe should be arrested or not.
And that raises another deep question, which is if the universe breaks the law, who punishes it? Does it go to universe jail? In what universe is that jail?
Obviously there's a multiverse department of justice.
I'm amazed that I've never read that science fiction novel.
I think Marvel has that pretty well covered.
But a whole universe in jail, Wow, that's quite the budget.
Now they kill universes, oh.
Man, they shut them down. The death penalty for a universe that gives me the shivers.
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty It's called the time Authority.
Oh that's right. Yeah, they do cancel whole branches of the timeline. That's true. Well, let's hope that never happens to us. We are just here trying to figure out how the universe works. We're trusting that it is following some laws and it's not putting us in existential danger because we would like to understand how it works. We look at all these photons that come to our eyeballs and we try to make a mental picture of how everything works. And sometimes we're confused. Sometimes we see something we don't quite understand, and that, of course leads to my favorite part of science, asking questions.
Yeah, and it's not just scientists who ask questions or love to ask questions or have questions about the universe. It's everybody. We all, at some point in our lives look up at this guy and think, where did it all come from, how does it all work? Why are we here?
Who is it that stole my chocolate? And how can I put them in universe jail? These are big questions basically everybody asks in their lifetime. Because science is not just a process that professors can do in their offices or in their basement labs. It's just part of being human. It's just like a way to codify and systematize the natural feelings that we have of curiosity and investigation. It's something that everybody can do, and it's something that everybody is always doing as they maneuver in this world.
Yeah, all you have to do is observe the universe, think about it, and use logic to work things out. That's basically signs.
Right, that's basically science.
Also, drink coffee. Coffee is a big part of it. I think.
You don't drink any coffee anymore though, Does that mean that you don't do any science?
Oh, I don't get paid for it. If that's what you mean.
It's the coffee drinking that I'm getting paid for over here, that's true.
It's the extra mile. Yeah, when you ingest chemicals for something, that means you're a pro.
That's what goes to my timesheets nine espressos today. Ooh, I'm getting overtime.
Over time ah yeah, and overclocking your heart as.
Well, exactly and my brain. But what we love to do is not just ask questions ourselves and talk about them, but encourage you to ask questions. We hope that this podcast tickles that inquisitive part of your brain and makes you look around at your universe and thinking, do I understand how this works? Can I figure this out? And when you don't, we want you to write to us with your questions so we can help you understand them.
So today on podcasts will be tackling listener questions. Light Edition. Now it's just like a low calorie version of our usual listener question episode.
Welcome to Daniel and Jorge on an intellectual diet. That's right, it's all cottage cheese and cantaloup today, folks.
Soall, what is it? Aspertain? We're going to give Aspertain answers.
The sweetest questions to the sweetest mysteries in science, but.
With no calories. It's going to feel sweet when you listen to our answers. But don't worry, you're not going to learn anything.
Is that?
Is that our promising here?
Or maybe we should have very heavy answers and people should like bench press us, you know, like really massive, deep answers to the heaviest questions in the universe.
Maybe that should be a different podcast, the heavy edition.
The fitness version, the massive Edition. We should be playing like fitness music in the background so everybody can be like doing their crunches as they listen.
That might make it a little hard to talk, Yeah, I would think of physicists would know.
That we do love encouraging you to ask questions and to send us your questions. If you have questions about the way the universe works, or there's something that's always puzzled you. Please please please write to us to questions at Danielandjorge dot com. We answer all of our emails. We answer all these questions, and sometimes we might pick your question to answer here on the podcast.
Yeah, so today we have three awesome questions, and they're all in one way or another about light kind of right or the lack thereof perhaps.
Yeah, exactly. Photon's what they do when they hit stuff, how far they can travel, and what's going on inside a black hole?
As always, I feel like everything comes back to a black hole.
One of the most massive mysteries in science.
I feel like it's kind of the rug for physicists. When you hit a question that you don't know the answer to, you're like a black hole. Sweep it on another Why didn't I answer your email? Oh it must have been routed into a black hole.
My apologies.
Oh that works. Yeah, an email black hole. That's how I would describe my regular inbox.
Exactly, a certain number of unread messages. It just collapses.
It creates a distortion in space and time. Yeah, all right, we'll start here with our first question, which is about photons and what happens when they hit stuff? And this question comes from Matthew.
Daniel and Jorge.
What's up?
I loved the episode about photons bumping into each other, but it really got my brain spinning here.
Which is not difficult.
What happens to photons when they hit my skin? Are they just absorbed and turned my skin a beautiful golden brown? What happens when they hit solar panels? Why do things heat up when they're hit by photons? What happens when photons hit the opaque plastic cover on my little camper and I can see light through it? Do some get through and some don't? What happens when photons hit a mirror? What happens when photons hit rock versus water, versus clouds? I think you get the point.
Boy. Let's uh, let's really dig in.
It's gonna be phautanastic.
All right?
Wow, I love that question.
Yeah, that question or questions? That was like twenty different questions there.
It was fantastic. Do you think he was eating a bowl of fu as he was thinking about these things?
Hopefully it was diet faux Yeah, But well, first of all, we should just say what's up? Bathew back to you.
Let me just say how much I enjoyed hearing him spin out on this question, realizing that there are really basic, deep questions about how photons interact with matter and everything around us. It is really complicated. So thank you very much for inviting us to dig into it.
Yeah. I think he seemed to expand in his head as he was asking the question on the idea that, first of all, light is everywhere. It's bouncing around everything and hitting everything. But also there's kind of a huge variety of things that light does when it does seem to hit things, right, sometimes it goes through things, Sometimes it bounces back, sometimes it gets absorbed, sometimes it heats things up. Right, There's kind of a wide range of things that light does.
Yes, light is very amazing and very complicated, and even though it's everywhere in the world, it does react very differently to different kinds of stuff. It's a great way to show off like the fundamental quantum mechanics of our universe, to understand all these different behaviors when light hits different kinds of stuff.
Yeah, so let's dig in, as Matthew requested, So Daniel, let's start with the basics what is light? What is this thing we call light?
Yeah, So the short answer is, we really just don't know.
Done if we don't know what light is and we don't know what it does when it hits other things. Next question, we.
Don't know what light is in the sense that we don't have like a good intuitive analog. I can't say it's like a beach ball, or it's like a wave in water. It's not like anything else we know. On the other hand, we do have a very nice mathematical description of what light does, so we can predict very well what happens when light hits metal, or when light hits plastic, or when light hits water, or when light hits your skin. We can do all those calculations even if we don't fundamentally know what light is in the sense that we can't like translate it into something familiar.
Wait, what do you mean we don't know what it is? I thought that light was, you know, excitations or wiggles in the electromagnetic field that propagates across the universe. Right, isn't that the idea that the universe is filled with quantum fields and the electromagnetic force is one of them, and the wiggles in it are the photons.
Yeah, that's part of the mathematical description of how light works. We can model light as a wiggle in the electromagnetic field, and what happens to light when it hits something can be predicted by solutions to these wave equations, which we know mostly how to deal with in lots of circumstances, like when they hit a barrier, or when they go from air to water, or when it goes from air to skin. We know mostly how to solve these problems. We don't know what light is in the sense that we don't really understand the fundamental quantum mechanics of it. Like light is a wave in the sense that it's fluctuations in this electromagnetic field. On the other hand, it also acts like a particle because you can't observe all of these waves directly. What you see are individual packets of light that let go here or go there. So there's something fundamentally probabilistic and quantum mechanical about light, And in that sense, we don't really know like what light is that we do have the mathematics to describe it.
Well, you could also say that about everything else in the universe, right, all the matter particles, all of the force particles, they are all just quantum mechanical wave packets. Right.
Yeah, absolutely, we don't know, for example, what a particle is. We have whole episode talking about the various philosophical ideas for.
What it is.
That doesn't stop us from having a theory about it and having mathematics that describe it, even if we don't know who the subject of that mathematical story is. Right, So if you ask me, like, what is is light? Then boo boy, that's a whole big philosophical question. If you ask me like, can you predict what happens when light hits a mirror?
Oh?
Yeah, that I can certainly do.
Well. Fortunately, this is not a philosophy podcast, so we'll just focus on the latter part of describing light as waves any electromagnetic field. And you're saying that we can with that description of light, we can tell what happens when it hits different things.
Yeah, that's right. We think about light, it's a little packet of energy, a little pulse in the electromagnetic field propagating through the universe. So you imagine like light coming out of the star and flying through space. And making it through the atmosphere and hitting your skin. And his first question was, like, what happens to that photon, right, Is it just like absorbed?
Right? Well, hopefully he's wearing sunscreen if he's out there in the sun, and most of it will get refracted, refracted, reflected. But maybe just step us through the basics, like what happens when one of these packets of energy in the electromagnetic field runs into a matter particle like an electron, or maybe like an atom, like the atoms in the skin. What's going on?
So if you want to think about in terms of an individual particle of light, then you can imagine like the photon flying through space and it hits the matter. Matter of course is made of other little particles, and so the photon interacts with that matter. It's not like the photon hits your skin as a whole big blob. It touches like one particle of your skin. It would like zero in on a single electron in an atom on the surface of your skin and interact with that electron. And one thing that it can do, for example, is it can be absorbed by that electron. Electrons can just eat photons and then that electron now has the energy of that photon.
Yeah, that's pretty well. Although you said that the photon touches a matter particle in your skin. But that's not actually true, right, or at least the idea of things touching each other is kind of controversial or philosophical. Really, what happens is that they get close enough to each other where they have some kind of quantum interaction.
Right.
Well, the quantum interaction here is the two fields coupling directly. Like you have the electron field and the photon field, and they overlap in space and energy passes from one field to another. That's the fundamental way we describe an interaction is passing of energy from one field to another. If you're talking about two matter particles like two electrons, Yeah, they don't actually touch because they communicate through a photon. Right, So two electrons don't push against each other directly. They pass photons back and forth. But a photon interacts directly with an electron. It's energy flows from the electromagnetic field into the electron field.
Right, But I guess I mean like that, there's no actual touching. It's just that the one wiggle gets close enough to the other wiggle where they somehow, through the magic of the universe, the energy gets transferred from one field.
To the other. I guess that's what touching is, right, So then now we're in a philosophy podcast again.
Darn it. But that's an interesting way to think about it, is that it's like energy going from the photon field to the electron field, right, like that just magically happens. Is there there's no conduit, there's no channel for that to happen. That just automatically happens. These fields are sort of like kind of on top of each other in that way.
Yeah, as you said, space is filled with these quantum fields. There's a bunch of them. There's one for electrons, there's one for quarks, there's one for photons, there's one for every kind of particle. A lot of those fields ignore each other, but some of the fields don't. Some of the fields do talk to each other. We call that a coupling, and that coupling is determined by the charges of the particles. So, for example, the photon field can pass energy to any field for a particle that has an electric charge. That's actually kind of what it means to have an electric charge. So yeah, the energy can pass directly from the photon field to the electron field. Like mathematically, when we describe these fields, we write them down together in the lagrangein of the standard model, and we add a term in front of them which is not zero, which means that energy can pass from one field to the other. So when the photon flies out of the sun and hits your skin, that energy is propagating through the electromagnetic field and now into the electron field. It's absorbed by the electron.
Okay, so that's one thing that can happen to the photon. It can get absorbed by the electron, and then after that a couple of other things can happen, right.
Yeah, it's possible for that electron to then release that energy like back into the photon field. Right. That's a two directional interaction. Electrons can eat photons, They can also create photons. They can spit photons out. That electron, for example, has a bunch of energy now, and the universe doesn't like to have energy density very high in one place. It likes to relax, likes to roll down to lower potential energy. So the electron. One thing you can do is jump back down in energy and give off a photon again. And that can happen lots of different ways. You can call that reflection, you can call that fluorescence. But that's one thing that the bit of matter can do, is it can spit that photon back out into the universe.
Yeah.
I guess there's two interesting things about that. One is that, first of all, the original photon is basically gone, right, like when we think of light bouncing off over mirror or bouncing off of your skin, like, Actually, what's happening is that the photon dies, right, It disappears into that electron, and then a new, old photon gets split out by that electron.
You know, you keep saying we're not a philosophy podcast, and then you keep asking philosophy questions like is the photon killed when it's absorbed? You know, it's really interesting question, is it the same photon? Well, that photon didn't exist for a moment, it was absorbed into the electron. It's quantum information still exists, right, it's certainly correlated with the original photon. So it's not like there's no relationship between the new photon and the old photon. But yeah, you might say it's a new photon. It's not the same one, I guess.
I mean, like in your views of physicists, is that like an actual sequence of events, like the photon got absorbed, the electron realizes it had too much energy, so then it powered down and spit out a new photon, Like is there a certain amount of time that happens in in a certain order in which it happens.
It's not an instantaneous, right. The electron can absorb the photon and can hold on to it for a little while, and then it can give it up later with a podcast episode about that process. It's called fluorescence, and that can be quite delayed, and there certainly can be a time gap. On the other hand, sometimes the electron gives it up almost immediately, and it's more like the photon bounces off of the electron, for example, in a mirror. What happens is that the photon is basically just immediately reflected, though it is momentarily held by the electron. And it's important to consider the other things that can happen. It's not necessarily the case that the electron gives up that photon. There are other options. It can pass that energy to the nucleus of the atom or into the lattice of the material, basically heating it up. So there's a few varieties of things that can happen to the electron after it's absorbed the photon.
All right, maybe walk us through a little bit of those options. So how does it impart energy to the nucleus.
So the electron is interacting with the nucleus and the same way the electron can interact with the photon. Right, it's bound to the nucleus, and it's also interacting with other electrons in the material, and so in the same way that it can give up a photon, it can also bump up against other electrons, or it can push up against the nucleus. All these, of course would be mediated by other virtual photons. But basically, instead of just giving up that photon back out into space, it can create a photon which is absorbed by like the next atom or by another particle, and that particle can have that energy in terms of its vibration or its rotation. There's lots of ways for energy to be stored in matter. And once the electron has absorbed that photon, it's possible for that photon to get into like many of these different kinds of buckets.
All right, well, let's get into some of the examples of what like does as it hits different materials, and whether or not it dies or not. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're answering listener questions today and our first one was about light and basically what happens when light hits stuff, And we talked about how it's actually photons in the electromagnetic field hitting the particles in the atoms of the things that you're trying to shed a light on. And one thing it can do. It can be reflected back, or it can the electrons can spit out basically an identical photon back in the same direction or sort of the same direction that the initial photon came in. Ad but saying he could also absorb that photon and you know, give the atom more energy or the material it hit more energy. That's kind of what happens when you're sitting out in the sun heating up right.
Yeah, that energy comes from the sun via photons and gets absorbed by your body. When you feel hot, that's because the atoms in your body are moving faster, they're wriggling or sliding around faster, and then energy comes from the photon. So yeah, that photon is now like gone. You know, maybe every time you sit in the sun you need to have like ten to the twenty six funerals for all the photons that you're killing.
Yeah, it's pretty sad.
You sound really sad.
That's why you should cover yourself in aluminum foil or mirrors, or just never go outside your house.
That's right. If you want to be a photo vegan, that's right.
You can join the Society for the Humane Treatment of Photons. But so that's I guess that's reflection, and that's absorption. What about refraction? Like he asks, like what happens when the light hits like a semi opaque window like in his camp, or you know something that's translucent. Maybe what's going on there? How does refraction work?
So refraction is complicated to understand from this like microphysical picture of a single particle, and you have to back up and really remember that the path of a photon is determined by the wave equations that are guiding its motion through the electromagnetic field. Refraction is a very familiar wave phenomena. When a wave hits another kind of material, part of it reflects, part of it gets transmitted, and then it gets bent in a slightly different direction. For example, if you have a straw in your glass of water, it looks like the straw is sort of broken in half because the part of the light that's going through the water gets bent slightly in a new direction. So that's what we call refraction, and that's tricky to understand for like the path of an individual photon, but it's very straightforward from like the mathematics of the wave equation.
So what's going on then? Why does light or any wave change direction? When it changes the medium it's going in.
So when a wave travels through a medium, it's like wiggling something right, and different kinds of medium wiggle in different ways. So, for example, if you shout in the air and then that sound wave hits water, part of it reflects and part of it goes into the water and changes direction. But it gets fundamentally transformed when it goes into the water. Right now it's wiggling water molecules instead of wiggling air molecules. In order to balance all the frequencies at the surface, to make the math add up at the surface, so everything is like making sense and being continuous, those waves sort of have to change direction in order to account for the fact that it's like a new kind of wave. So that's the fundamental physics of like refraction of waves. For light, it's a little bit complicated if you want to think about, like what happens to one photon when it hits the surface of the water. How does it know how much to bend right? And that's determined by the wave equation. That's why it's fundamentally quantum mechanical. Two photons hitting a surface might bend in slightly different directions, but a bunch of photons hitting the surface sort of average out to give you the answer you would expect from the wave equations.
But I guess, like, what's happening to the individual photon? How does it change direction? For example, you.
Can't really ask the question what happens to an individual photon unless you're actually observing it, Unless you're seeing it. You can only really think about photons as particles when you're observing them. So you shoot a photon out, it hits the surface of the water, then you detect it somewhere in the water, right, and you want to know, like what happened at the surface of the water. That's like going to the double slit experiment and asking, like which slit did the photon go through? Really, the photon has many possible paths between the source of the light and where you're detecting it, and quantum mechanically speaking, it does all of them together. Right. There's not a single story for what happened to that individual photon.
Right, But I guess it's a little bit different because to the photon, it didn't change mediums, right, Like it didn't change how is the electromagnet field didn't change between outside the water and inside the water, right to A photon is just going through the electromagnatid field. The difference is that it's suddenly surrounded by a bunch of water molecules, Right, And so are you saying, like all those water molecules basically act like little double slits.
Yeah, all those water molecules are like little interactions. How do water molecules change the path of the wave. Well, remember that the water molecules are charged particles, so they interact with the photon field. You know. One way to think about it is that like the photon is getting pulled on by all those molecules. But you can't really have like a single picture of the path of an individual photon and say this one got bent in this particular way. There's lots of different possibilities for what might happen to the photon when it goes through. And one photon will go in one direction, another in the other direction. If you average up over many, many photons, millions of photons, then you'll get these sort of average behavior you expect from a classical wave. But for an individual particle, it's a little bit random.
Because I guess the photon. From its point of view, it's like it's going along. Suddenly it sees a wall of water molecules, and some of those males bounce it this way or bounce it that way or right. Is that what you're saying?
Mm hmm, yeah, exactly.
And when you say bounce it you mean reflection.
Yeah, we mean interaction, which of course means like absorption and re emission.
And I guess the angle of that reflection will change because the water molecules are you know, in random precisions. And so you're saying the aggregate effect is that it refracts light along a stain angle.
Mm hmm exactly. It's the aggregate effect that's controlled by the wave equations. It's maybe crispest when you think about like reflection. What happens when light hits a mirror, for example, Sure, it gets absorbed by the atoms and the surface of the mirror, but how do those atoms know what direction to send the light out? Right? Light when it hits the mirror doesn't just come off at any angle, comes off at a very precise angle, like it bounces off right following Snell's law, how do the atoms that absorb the photon know in what direction to send it. You can't really answer that question from the particle point of view, because you know they don't really know. But there's a lot of wave mechanics that are guiding what's happening to the average photon. Because nobody's actually watching a single particle absorb that photon and re emit it. It's just like an average process for many, many possible paths, and a lot of those conflict and interfere, giving you overall the photon being emitted in the right direction that's predicted sort of by classical optics.
Right, doesn't it all have to do a lot with the crystals, right, and the order of the things that you're shining in light on. Then that's when you get something like a mirror, which bounces things more neatly.
Right, mirrors do bounce things more neatly. It has mostly to do with the conductivity properties of the surface. Conductors are things that don't allow electric fields very deep in them. They have a bunch of electrons inside of them which rearrange themselves to cancel out any electric field, and so photons when they hit something that's like a mirror, don't go very deep, they bounce right off the surface, whereas things that are not mirrors, like your wall, which is which reflects a lot of light, doesn't act like a mirror because the photons can get sort of deeper in and interact with things further inside, and because different photons will get different distances inside, they come out a little bit scrambled. So images are, for example, scrambled by a white wall, whereas they're not scrambled by a mirror, because a mirror reflects everything basically from the very same depth, which is right at the surface, right.
Right, Oh, that's interesting, yeah, but I mean it also has to do with the surface sector, right, That's why you can polish things to make them look shiny.
Yeah, exactly. You want a very flat surface, so all the photons are bouncing off at the same distance, and that's why conductors like silver or steel whatever make good mirrors.
All right, Well, I think that answers Matthew's question what happens when photons hit stuff? The answer is they die. Yeah, Daniel, I think that's their basic conclusion today.
Yes, every interaction is an absorption and a re emission, which means the original photon is gone. Baby, gone.
I mean, it's we joke about it, but it's kind of true. Right, Like all all light interactions reflection, when something shiny, not shining black white colors, you know, all that is in every interaction. Every time light bounces off of something, it dies and then it gets resurrected.
I prefer to think that as like having children, because the original photon is influencing the new photons.
Certainly, Man, and now you get into whether photons are house photons reproduced? Is that what you're I think that gets into a philosophical biological podcast, right.
We only allow certain kinds of baseless philosophy on this show.
That's why we have standards here, only fantastic discussions here.
Well, thank you very much, Matthew for that really intriguing question.
All right, our next question comes from Tim and it has to do with stars.
Hey, Daniel and Coregey.
I had a question.
Is there such a thing as a star that is so big, are so bright that it would actually affect the daytime nighttime cycles of planets in a nearby solar system. I'm not talking about like a binary solar system.
I'm talking about a star that is in a neighboring system.
Just listen to your podcasts about twinkling stars and that made me thinking about it. Thanks for the answers because I know you'll have them.
Bye.
Well, thank you Tim for that question and the faith that you have that we will have answers. I come in every time having the same confidence as you do.
Well, we'll definitely have something to say, even if we can't answer the question definitively.
Oh, that's right, that's right. Anything technically counts as an answer. I learned that with my kids.
When questions hit the podcast, they die.
That's right, to get absorbed, and then we birth them back out into your ear.
We emit something.
All right. Well, Tim's question is that is it possible for a light from a different solar system to effect the feeling of day and night in a planet in another solar system? Right? That's the basic question?
Yeah, Basically can stars change the day night pattern?
Like?
Could stars be bright enough that they cause shadows? For example, I've been out at night looking at the stars and then checking out behind me to see like, am I casting a star shadow?
Oooh, star shadows sounds like a good gamer tag.
But of course, as you look up at the night sky, those stars are obvious to your eyes, but they're not bright enough to make the night sky bright right to make it feel like it's daytime.
Well, technically they do cast. You do cast a star shadow, right, or a shadow star right like the Technically, yeah, you are blocking light from stars and preventing something behind you from getting that light.
Yeah, And it's fundamentally the same process as getting a shadow from our sun. It's just that our sun is closer, right, and so it's brighter, so you notice it much more because it does dominate the brightness of our planet. And the thing I love about Tim's question is that he's wondering about these two different categories, our sun and the distant stars, and wondering if there's something that bridges them. Is it possible to have something in between other stars that are close enough to be sort of like part of our day night cycle. Really cool way to think about it.
I guess maybe the question is like, how close can two solar systems get so that one son actually changes the day night time feeling of another solar system?
Yeah? Maybe Tim's working on a science fiction novel and this is an important part of the plot.
Right, isn't everybody working on a science fiction novel.
I don't know. I feel like science fiction gets absorbed by the reader and then not always re emitted as a new novel. Right, Sometimes science fiction novels just die.
I see, they die in the reader's brain.
Maybe the reader just goes to an excited state of knowledge and enlightenment.
Oh there you go, transforms that energy into their own work.
They're own imagination. But anyway, here we are not answering Tim's question.
Oh once again, yes, but we are try too here and so I guess the question is how far can two solar systems get before maybe they're not two different solar systems. I wonder if that's kind of part of the question.
Yeah, because he specifically ruled out like a binary solar system where you have two stars. It's a really interesting question, and there's a couple of bit different parameters we can play with here. One is where you are in the galaxy, which really determines how far apart stars are, and also how big the stars are, because there's a huge variation in the brightness and the size of stars.
Right there are big ones and small ones, and out.
In our neighborhood of the galaxy, we're sort of like halfway out from the center of the galaxy, things are not very tightly packed. We're sort of like in the suburbs of the galaxy. Like the closest star to Earth is about four light years away. That's really really far away. And remember that the brightness of a star gets dimmer as you get further away, and it gets dimmer by that distance squared. So if you're ten times further away, a star is one hundred times dimmer. If you're a thousand times further away, then it's a million times dimmer. So that mathematics really works against the distance stars. It's why the Sun really dominates our experience.
Yeah, and it's why if we were ten times closer to the Sun, we would feel its heat a million times more. Right, we'd be toasted.
Yeah, And in our neighborhood the stars are pretty diffuse, but if you go to the center of the galaxy, things are much more cozy. Right in the center of the galaxy, it's not uncommon to have stars that are less than a light year apart, or even less than a tenth of a light year apart, and so those stars benefit from that short distance. They get the same math, but working in their favor to boost their brightness. You're ten times closer. Now you're one hundred times brighter. To give you a sense of what that means, if we had another star as bright as our sun that was like half a light year away, we would see it during the daytime. It would be like bright enough in our sky to see during the daytime, be about as bright as venuses, which you can see during the daytime.
So like we would look up into the day sky and maybe among the clouds you would see a little pinpoint of light.
Yeah, you'd see a pinpoint. It wouldn't change the day night cycle, right, you could see it during the day the way you can see the moon. But doesn't mean that the night would feel like the day, but it would be something that's visible. So you could see another sun that was like point four light years away. You know, if it was even closer than it would be even brighter and in the center of the galaxy. That does happen. Stars get very close together.
But I guess at what point does it become part of a binary system? You know, like how close can two stars get without them basically being the same in affecting each other gravitationally so that they become one big solar system.
Well, stars are always going to pull on each other gravitationally, Right, we are getting pulled on by our neighboring stars even though they are four light years away. Right, our galaxy is getting pulled on by the neighboring galaxy even though it's millions of light years away. So it's just sort of like a cosmic web of gravitational interactions. And in the center of the galaxy, these stars are all tugging on each other, but they're not like in stable orbits around each other. I think for a binary star system, you want them to be like gravitationally captured by each other. But it's more like a mosh pit than a bunch of dancing couples. In the center of the galaxy. It's kind of crazy down there.
So I guess if you're close to the center of the galaxy, there's not just probably one star that's half a light year way, there's a bazillion stars that are light your way. So if our solar system was and near the center of the galaxy, we would look up at the day sky and it would be filled with pinpoints. Right, maybe just a huge cloud. It would all just kind of be super bright everywhere.
Yeah, exactly, And it wouldn't be unreasonable that your night sky might have a very very bright star in it. You might have a neighbor which is pretty close and just the same way, when you're trying to sleep, if your neighbor has like floodlights on in their house, it can go through your windows and disturb your sleep. Near the center of the galaxy, you might have a neighboring star that's bright enough to disturb your night, especially if that neighboring star is not like the sun, if it's one of the big monster stars. Because stars have a huge variation in their brightness. You know, our sun is pretty bright, but there are many more stars out there that are much much brighter than our sun.
Right, I guess it's all relative, right, Like what we consider daytime here might be equivalent to night time on a planet near the center of the galaxy, right, just from all the life from all the nearby stars.
Yeah, potentially, Yeah, that's true exactly, And just to give you a sense of the range, you know, like in our night sky, there are other stars we can see that are much brighter, like siious is a star in our sky, and it's twenty five times as bright as the Sun. If you're at the same distance from serious as you were from the Sun, it would be twenty five times as bright. But that's just like a little step up. There are other stars, like the biggest stars in our galaxy, one's called Etta Karina, that are like two million times as bright as the Sun two million, And so any star in the neighborhood of at A Karina is basically going to be bright all night long.
Yeah, And I guess it also opens the possibility that like maybe if you're a planet orbiting a dim star, like maybe like a brown dwarf or something that's just kind of simmering there and not really shining as bright as our Sun, then for you, if you were near the center of the galaxy, then really your sun maybe doesn't even influence the day and night cycle, right, Like maybe for you in that Solar system, day and night is when your planet is facing the center of the galaxy or not facing the center of the gall right like a day could be like a whole year.
Yeah, and the darkest times could be when your sun eclipses the other bright neighbor. So you could have like a star star eclipse.
Wow.
Yeah, who said science fiction dies on this podcast.
We're not just absorbing science fiction here, we are in emitting it in real time.
We are creating it. You're redirecting it.
We are reflecting these ideas back at your Tam, we want to hear this story. Send us the draft of your novel when you finished it.
Yeah, but make sure we sign an NDA here. I wouldn't trust us not to copy your ideas.
Copy. We're collaborators, we're co authors. We're here work shopping it live man.
All right, Well, thank you Tim for that awesome question. I guess the answer is yes, there could be stars so bright that they do affect the night day time cycle. And in fact, if you're close or far away from the center of the galaxy, it might make a bigger or smaller difference.
Yeah, the whole definition if day and night would be really different, and it would lead to really complicated patterns of life on that planet, which could be really fun to explore in Tim's future debut science fiction.
Novel, Tim Joorhan Daniels new debut Right, yes, right, yes, of course, In fact, you'd he go first on the author list. I don't know.
We'll take that question all right.
Let's get into our last question here about black holes that are maybe made out of dark matter. We'll jump right into that hole, but first let's take another quick break.
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Hi everyone, it's me Katie Couric. Have you heard about my newsletter called Body and Soul. It has everything you need to know about your physical and mental health. Personally, I'm overwhelmed by the wellness industry. I mean, there's so much information out there about lifting weights, pelvic floors, cold plunges, anti aging, so I launched Body and Soul to share doctor approved insights about all of that and more. We're tackling everything serums to use through menopause, exercises that improve your brain health, and how to naturally lower your blood pressure and cholesterol. Oh and if you're as sore as I am, from pickleball will help you with that too. Most importantly, it's information you can trust. Everything is vetted by ex ets at the top of their field, and you can write into them directly to have your questions answered. So sign up for Body and Soul at Katiecuric dot com slash Body and Soul. Taking better care of yourself is just a click away. Hi.
I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientists at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe.
In our heads.
We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much. Why is it so hard to keep a secret, When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories. I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about.
What's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, we're answering listener questions and also stealing their ideas.
Apparently we are interacting with them, and we're interacting.
I see, Yeah, that's right. The universe is not a criminal, it's just very interactive.
That's right. The podcast host field is interacting with the podcast listener field. Right, there's a couple of there's a charge there. I can feel it.
Yes, I didn't steal any classified documents. I just say I interacted with them in my private home.
Let's hope we don't get charged officially.
All right. Our last question here comes from Matteo's and it's about black holes.
Oh, Daniel and Jorge. This is Mattea oushtrom Poland. I was wondering about the possibility of having a black hole made entirely from the dark matter. I understand that it's unlikely to happen because of the dark matter properties, but I was wondering, how could we detect one if we can measure the black hole's electric charge, would a zero judge mean that there is no normal matter inside? How likely would it be for a black hole to have zero electric charge? This also has led me to some more general questions. Is the total electric charge in the universe equal to zero? How about on galaxy or planet level? I'm eager to hear your answers to my questions. Thanks a lot for your great work with the podcast.
All right, thank you Mattel's for that great question. And it came to us free of charge. That's all questions do. Now, this is an interesting question he's asking, first of all, well, he's asking several questions, but the first one was what would happen if a black hole was made entirely out of dark matter? He said, you know, he caveats that it's unlike he knows it's unlikely to happen. But what if you made a black hole with dark matter? Would it be different? Could you tell the difference between a regular black hole?
Yeah, and even suggest a way of maybe distinguishing dark matter black holes from normal matter black holes, which I thought was pretty clever.
He's thinking like a scientist. He's like, if this word to happen, if I basically speculate about this, can this help me write a grant?
Yeah? And so there's a bunch of stuff going on here. First is the idea of what's in a black hole? What can you make a black hole out of? And you know, we think that black holes can eat anything. They can eat normal matter, they can eat dark matter, they can eat other black holes. They can eat basically anything and grow because the curvature space is determined not just by mass but by anything with energy. That's what general relativity tells us. So black holes can basically eat anything. You can make them out of normal stuff or dark matter. But we think that most black holes are probably dominated by normal matter because it's harder for dark matter to fall into black holes. Mostly, we think dark matter swirls around in big clouds, doesn't clump together. And fall into black holes as often as normal matter.
Right, because it's harder to make a black hole out of dark matter. I think materioas kind of acknowledge that they're harder to make and therefore less likely to happen in the universe. But the basic answer is that you can make a black hole out of dark matter. Like, if you can somehow take dark matter squeeze it down to a small enough radius, it would form a black hole.
And principle absolutely yes, it would. And the reason that it's harder to squeeze dark matter down is that we don't think dark matter feels any other forces other than gravity, so you can't push on it, for example, to compact. It doesn't stick to itself, and that means it's hard for it to give up angular momentum if it's spinning around a black hole and the accretion disc for example, why do things fall into the black hole and not just spin around them forever? They do that because they lose angular momentum. They bump into something else in the accretion disk and then head towards the black hole. Dark matter, because it doesn't feel those forces we think, just passes right through itself, doesn't bump into anything, doesn't stick together into big blobs and fall into the black hole. But it is possible if you somehow got a bunch of dark matter together, it would make a black hole.
Right, And like also given enough time, right, Like, if you have a blob of dark matter out in space, eventually, maybe in trillions of years, it will all collapse into a black hole.
Right.
That's right, because rotation is acceleration, which means it's giving off gravitational waves. So even something that feels nothing else but gravity will eventually lose its orbit because it's giving off energy out into the universe and it will fall in. So, yes, eventually dark matter will fall into a black hole.
Right, isn't there a I mean, there's a lot of dark matter out there in the universe, a lot more than regular matter, and the universe is pretty old. Isn't it possible that at this point some dark matter may have fallen and created a dark matter black hole.
It's almost certainly the case that every black hole contains some dark matter. While a big cloud, it's hard to collapse into a black hole if you have an existing black hole and a dark matter particle just like heads towards it. It's just going to fall in. There's no like special protection. So every black hole probably contains some dark matter. He's asking about, like, if it's possible to have a black hole that's only dark matter? Right, So imagine some big blob of dark matter that's gotten separated from normal matter, which could happen, right, like the bullet cluster collision stripped dark matter from the normal matter. In those galaxies, you have these big vast clouds of dark matter basically all by themselves. Wait long enough, and that would collapse into a black hole.
Right. He's asking, like, I think you're saying that, you know, most black holes are like milk chocolate, you know, maybe thirty percent dark chocolate. But he's asking, can you have one hundred percent dark chocolate bar? Can you have a black hole made entirely out of dark matter? And the answer is yes, right, that can happen.
The answer is yes, that can happen. And then we have the question of like how could you tell Now we run up against the problem which is that we can't know very much about what's going on inside the black hole. The no hair theorem tells us we can know the mass of the black hole basically how much stuff is in it. We can know whether it's spinning, and we can know it's electric charge. And that's the key that Matteos is focusing on to tell us whether or not the black hole is built from dark matter or normal matter. Because if you take a black hole and you throw electrons into it, you can't tell what happens to those electrons once they pass in, but it does change the overall electric charge of the black hole, and you can measure that the same way you can measure a black hole's mass increasing, you can measure its charge increasing or decreasing as you add charge to it, because charge is conserved in our universe.
But how do you measure the charge of a black hole if no information can come out?
You can measure the charge of a black hole the same way you measure its mass, right, you measure the field it creates. Black Holes can make gravitational fields that go past their event horizon, and in the same way they can make electric fields that go past their event horizon. You don't need information to come out out of the black hole in order for that electric field to exist outside the black hole.
Now, I guess the question is that matt Teos was thinking about it was that you know, dark matter doesn't feel the electromagnetic force. That's one of the things we know about it. That's why it's invisible. You can't see it. So if you made a black hole out of dark matter, does that mean that the black hole wouldn't feel the electromagnetic force.
Yeah, that's true. If a black hole is made out of dark matter, then it has no charge, and then it wouldn't feel electromagnetism. If an electron flew by a dark matter black hole, it wouldn't feel any force, just the same way doesn't feel any force from any other neutral object.
Well, it would feel the force of gravity, it just wouldn't feel the electromagnetic force.
Right, Yes, it wouldn't feel any electromagnetic force. It would only feel the gravity, just the same way when it flies by any other neutral object. It doesn't feel an electromagnetic force from it. Only it's gravity, all right.
So then I guess Matteos was thinking. If that's true, then could we tell whether a black hole is made out of a dark matter or not by measuring its charge? Like if you see a black hole, you measure its charge, you see that it's zero charge or that electrons are not affected by are not attracted or repelled by this black hole? Would that be evidence that this black hole is made out of dark matter?
Yeah, And the last strinkle there is to think about normal matter black holes. Would they also have zero electric charge, in which case you couldn't distinguish them from dark matter black holes. Or do they typically have some amount of residual charge, in which case an exactly zero charge black hole would be weird and would be a nice signal of a dark matter black hole. So that's sort of the last part of the question is how likely is it for a normal matter black hole to have zero electric charge?
I see, So if a normal black hole somehow in its formation aid more electrons than to say, protons or positrons, then it would have an overall negative charge. Or if it ate it didn't need enough electrons, it would have a positive charge. You're saying, maybe a zero charge large black hole wouldn't tell us that it's made out of dark matter, because it can also happen normally in a black hole.
It can also happen normally, and it's a bit of a probability thing. Black holes are just randomly eating particles. What's the chances that it's exactly balanced, that it eats exactly as many positive particles as negative particles. On one hand, it's very unlikely to get exactly that balance. On the other hand, is also the most likely outcome. In the same way that like, if you flip a coin a million times, what are the chances you're going to get exactly fifty percent heads and exactly fifty percent tails. Well, it's unlikely to get exactly that number. It's also the most likely outcome, right right.
And also, I guess it would be kind of hard to make a pure dark matter black hole, right, Like if you have a pure dark matter black hole and one electron falls into it, then suddenly it's got a charge.
Yeah, So that would make this pretty challenging. But it is really interesting to think about what is the charge distribution of black holes out there in the universe. Are they all basically zero zero or very close to zero? What is the overall charge of these things? We have a whole episode planned about the charge of the entire universe and the galaxy, But briefly, most of the stuff that's out there is close to neutral because the electromagnetic force is so strong that anything that isn't neutralized, the force basically cancels it out. It will like suck electrons off of something to balance it out. Mostly like the Sun, for example, actually has a slight charge because its solar wind has electrons and protons. But it's easier for the electrons to escape the Sun than protons because they have a lower mass. So the Sun gives off more electrons than protons, so it has a very slight positive charge.
Hmmm.
Interesting. I do agree the Sun is a very positive influence on my life at least for sure. I mean, it's not free of charge, but I do have to work some blocks so it.
Answer matat this is the question. It's a really clever way to think about what might be inside a black hole, but I think it'll be very challenging to prove that a black hole is a one hundred percent dark matter because it's possible to get zero overall charge even without dark matter, right.
And also I guess it maybe points to this idea that black holes are black holes, right, Like, even if it's dark matter that falls into it, dark matter eventually just gets transformed into pure energy, right m hm, So like a black hole really kind of grinds everything up and maybe makes it impossible to tell if what you put in was dark matter or not.
Yeah, we don't know. The quantum states are the things inside the black hole. It's one of the deepest questions in modern physics, like what is the form of matter inside there? We don't know the answer because we don't have a theory of quantum gravity. We don't understand how gravity works for individual particles. So once the dark matter is inside the black hole, it's not really dark matter anymore. It's something weird and new that we don't understand. Interesting.
All right, Well, thank you Mitteos for that question. And these are all pretty good questions, not really light. They're pretty heavy in content. Last one's super extra heavy.
For those of you on an intellectual diet. Sorry for the heavy meal.
Hopefully we had expanded your brain. You're wasteline.
But thank you for emitting these questions, these particles of curiosity that we love to absorb and to shoot back at you.
Yeah, we hope we shed some light on these topics and then you come back for more. Thanks for joining us, see you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digesters 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.
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