Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWhat do we know about fermi bubbles?
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If I told you that today we're talking about bubbles, what comes to mind?
I'm thinking of bathtime?
Are you in the bath as we're recording this.
I'm just worried. I listened to the Higgs boson. I think that rubber duckies might destroy the universe.
All right, well, I want you to think bigger than just your bathtob.
Okay, like those hula hoop bubbles that you make with your kids in.
This classic that's the right direction.
But go bigger, Okay, bigger than that. Then you've got to be talking about like our atmosphere or something as a huge bubble.
Around the whole earth, even bigger.
Can a bubble be that big?
Can you even think about a bubble that big? Or is it going to blow your mind?
Hi?
This is Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and the co author of the book We Have No Idea, A Guide to the Unknown Universe. My other co host and co author is Jorge cham, a cartoonist and a friend of mine. Jorge is not here today, so we have a guest host, Professor Matt Georgiani of the University of Maryland. Say Hi to everybody.
Matt, Hello everybody. Yeah, I'm Matt Georgianni and I'm a biologist, so I don't know anything about physics unless it meets animals.
Biology is basically just big physics, though, isn't.
It it is? I mean, it's biologist is what physicists wish they could study. Oh, we're going to lay the gauntlet down now.
Wow. I thought you were admitting that biology is nothing but an emergent phenomenon of physics. But now it seems you're trying to turn the tables on me.
It won't be the first time.
So tell everybody a little bit about yourself, Matt. Why are you a biologist? What do you study? What do you find fascinating?
I loved Matt early on in high school and in college, but I got really taken.
Loved is in past tense, loved, I.
Still love, but I got really taken with evolution, and I loved how big mood you know, animals evolved into different shapes and beings and how all of life on Earth came to be. And I just find it utterly fascinating.
You mean the theory of evolution, right.
The theory of evolution, yes, but what a wonderful theory. Right up there with the theory of gravity is two of my favorite theories.
Oh snap, snap, all right, I will I will take that blow touche. So do you study evolution in your research?
I do. I study rattlesnake venom, actually, and how that has evolved across different types of snakes.
Wow, So how many years until humans evolve venom that we can squirt out of our teeth?
Man, I keep waiting. Every day I check my teeth and I haven't done it yet.
What do you mean waiting? If anybody's going to develop that technology, it's going to be you. We are all waiting for you to develop it. Matt.
Well, I'm working on it. I'll get there.
Have you tried getting bitten by a radioactive rattlesnake?
I feel like now this is why I called you. Now I can finally complete my research.
All right, Well, I want authorship or at least acknowledgment on the paper where you announced that.
I'll give you my first bite.
That's a deal. That's a deal.
All right.
Well, welcome you are our co host today our guest host on the podcast, Daniel and Jorge explain the universe featuring today Matt Georgiani. So, I guess it's right. Daniel and Matt explain Daniel and Jorges universe or I'm not sure what the temporary name should be.
Or maybe I can just mark up what you guys explain.
That's right. Daniel tries to explain the universe and Matt confuses everybody, that's right. And our podcast is a production of iHeartRadio. Today we're going to be talking about all those amazing things that you do go into science to discover. You went into science to talk to discover evolution and unravel the secrets of the history of life, and I went into physics to reveal a deeper truth about the nature of the universe. And as old is, when you jump into something scientific, you never know what you're going to discover. And today's episode is going to be all about that, about unexpected discoveries. What's the most interesting or famous unexpected discovery in biology or in rattlesnake venom.
I can only say that one of the things about biology is that we as we keep discovering things, the conclusion is always that everything is way more complicated than we ever thought it was.
Oh I see, so we're like, hey, we evolved from primates. There must be a straight dotted line between us and some common ancestor of chimps, And then we dig up a bunch of fossils and they don't make a nice dotted line.
I think human evolution is in one of these great cases where we did kind of think maybe there would be a sort of simple line. And all we keep learning is that populations of early humans and different hominids were intermingling and mixing, and that the modern human that we that what we envision is actually this really complex mixture of a bunch of different populations of humans and early humans and we're just way more complex than we ever thought we were.
And do you think that's like a really fun moment when you're digging up a skeleton and that doesn't look anything like the one you expected to find, because that opens the doors to crazy new ideas, Or do you think it's like frustrating when you're like, look, I just got to graduate, I want to write this paper, and now this data doesn't make any sense to me.
I think it's a little of both. I think the first time you realize it's not the answer you expected, you think, oh great, I was really hoping I could wrap this up, And then your mind starts to click and you start to think of all the other new questions you suddenly have, and then all of a sudden, the world just becomes that much bigger and that's really a fun moment.
Yeah, And I think there's an analogy there. I think like the progress of science in general is something like the weird, complicated mess of human evolution. You know, we make progress in this direction, and we got to back up and go this other way, and then we stumble across this thing, and then the end we draw some conclusions based on this big, messy combination of ideas, this popular discoveries. Yeah, and so today on the podcast, we'll be talking about an amazing discovery that was made very recently, within the last ten years, something which totally changes what we know about the very galaxy we live in.
I love that physics is still discovering things.
You thought physics was used up like one hundred years ago.
I thought that Einstein and Newton had figured it all out. So this is great.
No, no, not at all. So today on the podcast, we'll be answering the question what are the Fermi bubbles. When we're talking about bubbles, we're not talking about Matt having a soapie bath or making hula hoop bubbles, or even the bubble of our atmosphere. We're talking about something on an enormous scale, something basically the size of the galaxy, that was only recently discovered, and we talked about recently on a podcast about how stuff at the center of the galaxy is still a huge mystery. Like, we know there's a big black hole there, we have lots of questions about black holes. There's a bunch of stuff swirling around that black hole, and questions about how those black holes were made and all sorts of stuff. It's a big, messy swarm of goop there in the middle of the galaxy. And even Gwyneth Paltrow can't give us any insight.
Yeah, well maybe she's in the Fermi bubbles. So we'll see.
That's right. And so today we're gonna be talking about an amazing discovery that they made recently. They found these huge blobs of gas. They're like basically the size of the galaxy, and they called them the Fermi bubbles. And before we dig into talking about what they are and what they mean and what they might reveal about the nature of our galaxy and the universe in general, I was wondering had anybody heard of this, because in my field in physics, everybody knows about it because it's a big discovery made pretty recently. Somebody has recently awarded a big prize for it. But I wasn't sure if it had sort of penetrated into the cultural zeitgeist. People had been talking about this, and so I walked around campus at UC Irvine and I asked people, Hey, have you ever heard of the Fermi bubbles? Do you know what they are? Before you listen to these answers, think to yourself, do you know what the Fermi bubbles are? If I had asked you randomly on the street, what would you have said.
This is actually my favorite part of your podcast, when we're asked to just quietly listen and think about our own answer. I love it, and I'm never right, so I love time.
All right, Well, listen to these answers and hear what people had to say. Have you ever heard of the Fermi bubbles? No?
No, no, no, no, no, I have not.
No.
I've heard the.
Name, but I the definition escapes me.
All right, Matt, what did you think of people's responses?
Well, I have to say that I also had not heard of Fermi bubbles and I wasn't really aware of them. I know who Fermi is because I was in Chicago. However, I didn't really know what these were. And it seems like the people on her of mine did not really know much about them either.
No, pretty much nobody had ever heard of them. You hear some clever guesses, right, people like, oh, I think I know who Fermi is, or you know, maybe there's some connection to particle physics with the bubble chamber. That was clever, But basically zero percent of these people had ever heard of the Fermi bubbles. And God, that blows me away because we're making these huge discoveries. This is like when we talked about on the podcast about the hexagon on Saturn. You know, everybody's heard of Jupiter's red spot, obvious thing, fascinating mystery, but very few are Almost nobody had heard of the fact that there's a huge hexagon on the top of Saturn. Like, people just don't know that there are these big mysteries out there, these recent discoveries. And so I hope at least after today people will know a little bit about what the Fermi bubbles are, why they're such fascinating discovery. All right, so we'll dig into what the Fermi bubbles are, but first let's take a quick break with big wireless providers. What you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill. The price you thought you were paying magically skyrockets. With Mintmobile, You'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When Mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan, they really mean it. I've used mint Mobile and the call quality is always so crisp and so clear. I can recommend it to you. So say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts. So dit your overpriced wireless with mint Mobiles deal and get three months a premium wireless service for fifteen bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month, go to mintmobile dot com slash universe. That's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Cut your wireless bill to fifteen bucks a month. At mintmobile dot com slash universe, forty five dollars upfront payment required equivalent to fifteen dollars per month. New customers on first three month plan only speeds slower about forty gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxi speeds and restrictions apply. See mint Mobile for details.
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Okay, Daniel, So now I've got some questions, right, So what I've done is I've looked at a picture at Google search for Fermie bubbles.
Is that how you biologists do research? You just type stuff into Google?
Ninety nine percent of the world of the answers are pretty much already out there. So I'm looking at these Fermi bubbles, and what I've seeing is this really great picture of our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, and I see two big purple bubbles I guess that are extending out from the plane perpendicular to the plane of our our spinning disc. So I guess I can start with my first questions, which is what am I looking at?
Yeah, it's amazing You've visualize the galaxy most people think of something pretty flat like a disk, and it's got these swirling arms of stars, and that's correct, right, But in this image that we're looking at, and that I hope that to folks out there have a chance to google if they're not currently driving, you see these huge balls, these big purple balls. And the most important thing for people to know is these things are basically the same size of the galaxy. They're like twenty five thousand light years above and below the galaxy. They're basically the biggest feature of our galaxy, and nobody even knew they existed until ten years ago.
Right, the disc becomes this little belt that are of all the galaxy.
Has, yeah, exactly, all.
The planets, all of life, all the stars are kind of like the feature around the balls.
I know exactly. It's like we are the side note to this enormous feature. Right. And for those of you who don't know the whole galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy is about one hundred thousand light years across, so to have something that's fifty thousand light years wide, that's a pretty big feature. Right, that's maybe the dominant thing. And so there are these two giant blobs and they're basically circular. Also, like they're tight at the center of the galaxy and then they sort of expand out and then taper off a little bit. So they look basically like two huge basketballs, one above and one below the galaxy, touching right there at the center of the galaxy.
Or if I try my belt really tight.
Okay, I just got a very disturbing mental image.
Let's pack that out.
And there's two of them, right there's the north one in the south one, and they're about the same size right there. There is there's a lot of symmetry here.
So let's just start with what are they made of?
We don't even know the answer to that question. We think that maybe they're made of some sort of hot gas, which in this case basically means protons. Right, remember that gas. Most of the gas in the universe is hydrogen, which is a proton and an electron, but a lot of it is hot, which means it's iron eye. So the electron has escaped, so basically just protons. So one idea is maybe it's just a huge number of protons. And the thing to know is like it would be a huge number of protons, like if you took all those protons and like use them to build stars, which is something our galaxy is good at. You could make two million stars, right, This is not a small amount of gas. So one idea is maybe they're protons. The other idea is that maybe they're electrons. Right, maybe they're like really fast moving, zippy electrons. And I think the thing to understand is what we're looking at. What we're seeing, of course, is light. Right. We have a telescope out in space that can see these things, so we're seeing photons from these objects. Right. You know, when we see like stars that are really far away, we're not seeing the star. We're seeing the life from that star. So things that we only see things that give off light. Right, there could be something out there like a big black rock or a black hole. We wouldn't see it because it's not giving off any photons.
So how did we just discover this? Then?
I know, right, how did we not see this before? Well, the story is that, you know, we didn't have a telescope that could see these things before. People I think imagine that we've looked out into the universe, that we've basically seen the whole universe. But that's not true, right, We've looked at a very tiny fraction of the universe. Just recently, we had an episode about like how many stars have we seen in the sky, and we talked about how the Hubble, which can see really deep into the universe, has only looked at a tiny patch of the sky. Most of the sky has not even been examined by Hubble. And if you could look out there and find this crazy, amazing stuff nobody's ever seen before, there could be huge surprises there. So I think the lesson is like every time we turn on a new astronomical device, we see crazy stuff that we didn't expect because the universe is filled with crazy stuff and we just got open lots of new kinds of eyes.
And the key is not that we're it's not that we're not pointing in the right direction. Is that we're not looking with the right or we're not using all the wavelengths or.
Something, Yeah, exactly. So this this these things are called Fermi bubbles because they were discovered by the Fermi telescope, which is name after Enrico Fermi. So it's a bit of a you know, double misdirection there. People thought Fermi might have discovered these things, but no, the telescope named after him discovered it. So I think it's cool that he sort of gets credit for stuff he didn't discover, because, like you know, if you become a famous scientist and then they name something after you, and then that device is used to discover stuff, you get like secondary credit for it. I think that's pretty cool. But yeah, that telescope was the first one that could see these photons. These are very high energy gamma rays like above fifty or one hundred giga electron volts, and we just didn't have a great space telescope that could see these things before. And so essentially the first time they built one of these things, put it in space, and then looked out into the universe with it, they spotted these things. It was pretty quick, like it only took a couple of years of data before they noticed these things. So we just hadn't been looking at the right energies before.
So there are more of them.
Well, there's the our galaxy has only these two. Yeah, there's the one, the north one and the south one, And there's a lot of really weird things about them. Like if you look at the picture, you notice is like a really strong cutoff, Like they're not these like amorphous blobs. They're not like you know, sort of gradually fading out. They're pretty crisp, like the edges are kind of sharp, right, And that's really interesting because they're trying to understand, like what are these things made of, like you were asking, and so either their protons or they're electrons, or you know, they could always be something totally weird and different. But the thing that's happening is that, you know, there's photons out there all over the universes, cosmic ray background and other sort of soft photons, and then these really high energy particles, the protons or the electrons in these bubbles. What they do is they basically give those photons a boost, like they interact with those photons, and the photons like get pushed and then they become really high energy gamma rays and they come to Earth. And that's what we're seeing. So we're not literally seeing the gas or the photo or the electrons directly. We're seeing the photons that got boosted by those high energy particles in these bubbles.
So it's almost like this little chain that's everything that comes into its shooting it out or it's a I guess that's the high energy part of it.
Yeah, exactly, it's like a little accelerator, right, everything that comes in gets zoomed out, and that's what we're seeing. We're seeing that photons in this region of space are getting pushed or getting boosted up to some really high energy. And that's the mysteries, like why are these things here, what are they doing, what's causing it, where do they come from?
And do we think it's a cloud of gas or is it like a bubble with a perimeter and then a hollow center.
Now that's really interesting things that it seems to be sort of smooth. It's not like there's an edge like a bubble right where mostly it's happening on the edge, and it's also not really much more intense Closer to the center of the galaxy. We see the same intensity basically all the way across it, which is really hard to explain physically. Like we'll talk later about the possible things that could have made these things, but none of those hypotheses explain what we see because none of them can generate a bubble that's smooth all the way through it. It's really weird I.
Can't believe you're going to make me wait for an answer, Matt.
At least you have to listen to the rest of the podcast. You're on the podcast, don't tune out?
Should I tell everybody to skip forward ten minutes? Now, let's not do that. This might be one of these moments, right, So when these things were first discovered, can you actually what was it like? If it was recent, then what was it like in the physics community.
It was a big surprise, right because the Fermi telescope was not launched to find the Fermi bubbles because nobody knew they were there. It's one of these moments when you build a device to look for something and you find something totally different, you know. A famous example is like the cosmic microwave background. These guys built a radio telescope to do radar testing and listen to other stuff from the universe, and they found this weird buzz background that they couldn't explain, and it turned out to be this amazing discovery cosmic microwave background. We got a podcast schedule for that next week, I think. And this is the kind of thing that happens a lot. You build a new instrument, you look out in the universe, do you expect to see something? You see something totally different. So this one was designed basically to discover dark matter. I mean, this also has other intentions, but in my community, we're most interested in the Fermi telescope because it could see dark matter. And you might wonder, like, how can you see dark matter? Right? And the idea is that dark matter could bounce into other dark matter and annihilate, and maybe sometimes that would produce photons and you could see those. So this device, the Fermi Telescope, it's basically it's like a big particle detector in space. It can see high energy photons. It turns them into electrons and positrons, splits them, and then it can measure their energy. And so essentially it's like looking out into space with a very very high energy light. Right. You know, the Hubble, for example, looks at visible light, but this looks at really really high energy photons.
Did they think there would be anything near the center of the galaxy like this above and you know above and below it?
Yeah, great question. There was another instrument recently called w map, and it's sort of like a fuzz. They called it the w map haaves above and below the center of the galaxy, and it was more in the radio waves, and nobody understood what that was either, and so these guys were interested, like, well, let's look at that, but let's also they were looking more specifically at the center of the galaxy to try to understand whether they could see a signal of dark matter from there. And you know, when you do that, you got to understand the deity. You have to say, like, what are we seeing? Do we make sure we understand what we can see so then we can look for the thing we're looking for. It's like, you know, you got to understand the backgrounds before you can look for your signal. But they couldn't. They were like, what is this? You know this yeah? Yeah, And it's one of those moments where they're like it's an obstacle because they wanted to answer this other science question. But then potentially that obstacle is a whole new avenue for discovery, and so they released this paper. It was kind of a bombshell. People were like, what are you telling me that the galaxy is a totally different shape than the one we always imagine and always draw, Like there is this huge new structure, which basically changes the way you should think about the shape of the galaxy. Right, so it was a pretty big deal.
Did you find it annoying? You were really hoping to know about dark matter, and now all of a sudden it was that he knew that everyone was going to be focused on these bubbles.
Yeah, why can't we just turn those bubbles off so we can get back to the dark matter studies?
Somebody get rid of them.
Yeah, exactly. No, it's frustrating in that respect. It does obscure the dark matter signal a little bit, but it's also fascinating because every time you see something that you don't understand, something that you don't expect, it's a clue, right, It's a clue that tells you where to look for a new answer, where to find something new, because by definition, if you didn't expect it, it means there's something either a new kind of object out there in the universe or something you knew about doing something weird, right, like, oh, I didn't know that stars could do that, or I didn't know black holes could make this kind of feature. So you're guaranteed to learn something new.
So presumably this is going to teach us a lot about black holes, presumably right, since it's near the center of our galaxy.
And I knew you were either clear you were either going to go for black holes or for aliens, right, because those are your go to explanations for weird stuff in space.
I wish it was alien. That would be fun.
Hey, Well, you know aliens is my go to explanation. When we don't understand something, you could always explain it using intelligent life, right, Yeah, So let's talk about that. Let's dig into like what these might be, how we might explain it, what the various ideas are, and why none of them actually work. But let's take another break. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of greeky yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are US. Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. 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. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times. The same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crop. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient deentse dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
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Why are they the center of our galaxy? Is that important?
It's definitely a clue, right. We think that they must have been generated by something at the center because they're touching sort of the disk of the milky Way only there at the center. So they must be related to something crazy happening at the center of the galaxy. And remember that the center of our galaxy would have a really big black hole, and so you might think maybe like it's a burp, right, maybe the black hole like eats something really big. And remember when things get sucked into a black lush, it's a galactic black hole. Belch indigestion from the black hole, because remember when black holes eat something, things don't just like trip and fall into the black hole and they're totally gone. They swirl around the black hole because they still have angular momentum. They get torn up into pieces, and most of it goes in the black hole, but some of it gets flung out, right, it gets shot out from the black hole. And so when you see black holes eat something big, often there's like a big jet of gas or something that gets emitted. So you like to think maybe that's.
What's remarkable here, too, is that I often think of the sci fi black holes where you're looking at the black hole and the spaceships circling and about to fall into it. And I often think of then, for some reason, black holes as being one sided. But I guess when I see these two bubbles and the symmetry here, it really tells me more that the black hole exists potentially as a disc, I guess, and it's belching out of both ends.
Well, remember, black holes are not like loony Tunes black holes right where anybody can roll them up and drag them around.
They're spoil this for me, all.
Right, you're a biologist, you're allowed to have a totally unreliable.
No.
Black hole is more like a sphere, right, It's not even really a hole. It's a dense blob of stuff, right, So it's more like a really black rock, you know. But you can fall into it from any direction, So you're right, it's not preferring the north or the south side of the galaxy. Either way, it's happy to gobble stuff from either direction. You would expect if the black hole created some sort of feature, it would appear in the north, in the south. And in fact, some galaxies do have features, like they have these jets of material that get shot out exactly in these directions, like one north and one south right from the center of the galaxy. But those look very different. Those are really collimated. They're long, they're thin, they're about the same size, but they don't look anything like this. And most importantly, they're really intense close to the black hole, and then they sort of spread out and slow down, which is what you'd expect. But these bubbles they don't look like that. Right, like we were saying before, they have these crisp edges and they're smooth. They like look the same on the very top, the very farthest part from the center of the galaxy, as they do close to the center of the galaxy and in the middle. So that seems like an important clue about how they were made or what made them. Right, they don't look like they were spewed out from the center in that way.
I mean, it really seems like I think the image that also invokes is one huge bubble that's been cinched in the middle, presumably because of its the spinning of the Milky Way. But I guess that would make you think that the center should be more dense as well.
Yeah, yeah, precisely, that would. You would see a density there from the sinching, right, So, but we don't know what made it. We don't know. And you know, other galaxies have jets, but the Milky Way doesn't have jets, right, it doesn't have these huge jets. It's spewed out, so though maybe it did in the past. Right, we don't really know what the history of the Milky Way is. We can't look back in time at it and understand if it had jets in the past. But this can't really be explained by the same mechanism that creates those galactic jets.
And then, given our perspective on the arm of the Milky Way, would we be able to see if a big bubble was shutting out towards us. Are you worried in the same way? I don't know. If we're in a bubble or not. Listen to the news. They tell me, I'm in a bubble, but I don't know if that here.
You're in a biology bubble, You're in a rattlesnake bubble. No, we are, We're in an arm in the Milky wayte We're not in the middle of one of these bubbles. We are separated from it. So you can take off your tinfoil hat. You do not need protection.
I just yet. But we would be able to tell if it was like so, the bubbles only extend sort of perpendicular to the plane of the desk of the Milky Way.
Yes, now that we have this Fermi telescope, we can see these bubbles. We can see where they are, and we can see where they aren't. We are not in a bubble. And we can also point this telescope at other galaxies and be like, hold on, if our galaxy has these bubbles, you know, does every galaxy have bubbles? And we don't know the answer to that question yet because these bubbles are a little bit tricky to see. Like, first of all, you need this telescope, and you need a bunch of data because the picture you might see if you google that's after like years of data and background subtraction. It's not this kind of thing you can see with the naked eye in five seconds of data. And the and the other galaxies are really far away. So we've pointed it Andromeda, and we've looked for these bubbles, but we just can't tell if they exist in other galaxies or or not. So we just we don't know the answer to that question.
In fact, we haven't so we haven't seen any of them.
Or have we No, there are other galaxies that are much bigger, that have really big black holes, and they have jets, and some of them have like bubble like features, but they're not the same as these kind of bubbles. They're like lower energy photons and also they're much much bigger. So we've never seen a galaxy like this one before. But again we don't know if there are other galaxies out there like this one because we only recently discovered the ones that are like around the corner. So the ones that are in another galaxy really far away will be harder at a spot. So that's you know, for future astronomers to discover.
Now, are future astronomers looking in one direction or another?
Yeah? Future astronomers want to look everywhere, right, because the universe is jammed full of crazy stuff. And you know, the next person who's trying to answer this question, are there Fermi bubbles and another galaxy? They're probably going to find something else weird and crazy and get distracted and never answer that question because they're going to be studying you know, the Fermi bicycle or the you know, whatever next crazy thing they find out.
There probably more hexagons. So but there must certainly be scientists now that are looking for these.
Right, Oh, absolutely. Yeah. They announced this paper in twenty ten, and there was some folks at MIT. It was Tracy Slatcher and Dunk Doug Finkbiner at Harvard and other folks. And people have been following up, and people are looking for these things at other galaxies, and people are also spending a lot of time having fun coming up with various ideas to explain it. One of my favorite is this starburst hypothesis. They think that maybe candy is your mouth watering right now? Yeah, all right, and we're going to charge Starburst for this plug right. Anyways, The idea is that maybe ten million years ago, the Milky Way went through a period of star formation because a bunch of gas slammed into another bunch of gas. And when gas creates these collisions, you get these density that you get these pockets of density, and that's how stars formed. And maybe when those stars were formed, that kind of event could have also jetted out a bunch of gas in either direction. It could have been these big gas outflows from a big burst of star formation, you know, and that would have happened like ten million years ago.
Hold on, you said ten million years ago.
Ten million years ago, and remember, guys, that's nothing.
It's it's like an evolutionary standard, that's.
Not I know there were things and people crawling around on Earth right at the time that this happened. And remember that there were.
Million years ago. This is.
Recent, yeah, even on biological timescale. And remember the galaxy is super old. It's almost as old as the universe. It's thirteen billion years old. So this is a very new feature. And we all also don't know how long it's gonna last. Maybe it'll dissipate and in a few million years it'll.
Be gone, right, and our could just be a blip.
It could just be a blip, right, something we tell our grandkids about and when I was a kid, we had these big bubbles and shut up, Grandpa.
Or one of many blips. Yeah, aresumably this might be a feature that's happened for the entire life of the galaxy.
Yeah, And none of these explanations, like the gas outflows from star formation or the black hole burps or you know, anything else, none of them explain this really weird feature that the bubbles are smooth. Right, All of those hypotheses predict something more intense close to the center and then sort of fading out. So the real answer is something that nobody's thought of yet. The real answer is something that some future scientists will discover. And you know, it could be something really deep, like there's a new kind of object there in the middle of the black hole or in the middle of the galaxy, or it could be like, you know, very rarely black holes have indigestion and fart out these weird bubbles, and you know, we just happen to see one, and itach case like, how weird and lucky that our galaxy did this, like right now, basically, but.
If these bubbles are smooth, it makes me, it makes it hard to believe that there it's emitting out almost from this black hole. Is it possible that these bubbles are being pulled into the galaxy from elsewhere?
WHOA, that is such a good idea. I'm going to write that down and take credit for it.
Good, right, I expect nothing else.
You're so smart. It's like you got bitten by a radioactive rattlesnak or something.
I'm beginning to feel it now.
Uh no, that's a great question. But then where would they have come from? Right? Like, maybe if they're sucking up something from the outside, then they'd have to be a symmetric source, right, you need something on the north and the south to get to create these bubbles from outside the galaxy. That seems pretty unlikely because they're so symmetric that the same size on both sides.
Sure, yeah, I don't understand it. I just have to pose the ideas. You're supposed to explain.
It for me.
All right, Well, on the biology version of this podcast, I'm going to expect some answers from you.
All right, Well, so this has been very informative, and I have to say, physics, you're doing a good job. But I think, you know, these are kind of amazing. I think it's amazing that we have these new, i mean really young clouds of gas that are just essentially stuck at the center of our center of our galaxy. The fact that we don't know what they are, I think is just fascinating. The fact that the science behind it is only not even ten years old is really fascinating. So it seems like the kind of thing that we might actually get some really cool answers for in the near future.
Yeah, twenty years from now, people to look back and they're going to know the answer, hopefully, and it's going to seem obvious to them, right whereas right now we're standing at the forefront of human ignorance, not knowing where it's going to lead.
But the favorite place to stand, Well, my.
Favorite thing about this kind of thing is that it's a hint, right, It's a hint about how many more amazing discoveries there are out there. If every time we open a new kind of eyeball into the universe we see something crazy and unexpected, that tells you that there's a lot more crazy stuff out there waiting to be discovered, And so we should build as many kinds of scientific eyeballs as we can, especially astronomical ones, because there's so much out there in the universe waiting for us to find it and to go What the f is that?
More eyeballs is absolutely what we need, all right, get on at physicists, engineers, more telescopes.
Now, yeah, I don't mean rattlesnakes with more eyeballs, they have plenty. What I'm talking about is new scientific instruments. All right. Thanks everyone for tuning in. That was our podcast about the mystery of the Fermi bubbles. If you have something you'd like us to rattle on about ignorantly, then please send us a suggestion to feedback at Danielanjorge dot com. Or if you have a question about something random about physics. We answer all of our listener emails. Send it to questions at Danielanjorge dot com. Thanks Matt for joining us on today's podcast.
Thank you, it's been marvelous.
All right, So go save all right, missus Masel go off and solve your rattlesnake venom problem. And we don't want to hear back from you until it's done.
I will you solve these problems.
Sounds good? Thanks everyone for tuning in before you still have a question. After listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. More podcast 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 as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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