Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniversePlanets, stars, galaxies, clusters, then what? What defines a "thing" and how big can they get?
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Hey, Danielle, you know, sometimes I'm really amazed about how small we are compared to the entire planet Earth. Like, we're tiny compared to this giant ball of rock we're standing on.
It's true, we are really small compared to the Earth. But then on the other hand, the Earth is tiny compared to like the other planets.
But even the biggest planet it is dwarfed by the size of the Sun in our Solar system.
Yeah, like ninety nine percent of the stuff in the Solar System is just the.
Sun and the Sun. Our Sun is not even one of the bigger stars out there. It's like a mini star, right.
Yeah, there are some mango stars out there. And then of course, like all the stars together, the galaxy is just enormous compared to like our solar system.
Yeah, and as big as the galaxy is, it's really just one little, tiny drop in a vast ocean of galaxies. There are buillions of galaxies.
Out there, that's right. But the galaxies aren't just an ocean. There's really interesting structures there which get bigger and bigger and bigger.
There are things bigger than galaxies.
Oh yeah, the galaxies are just tiny dots in the end. It's fascinating actually, because it gets bigger and bigger and then it stops and at some point there isn't anything bigger.
Well, there is actually the biggest thing in the universe.
That's right, and it's not my ego.
Hi am Orhank, and I'm Daniel.
Welcome to our podcast Daniel and Orhank explain the universe.
In which we tackle the small and today the very very large things in the universe.
That's right. Today on the podcast, we're going to ask the question what is the biggest thing in the universe?
That's right. I thought that this is a pretty fun idea, Like the universe is big, but it's mostly empty, right, Like most of the of the the stuff in the universe is just emptiness. It's space. Right, If you took an average chunk of the universe, it would mostly be pretty empty, right, But it's also filled with really big, big things. You know. I love this. This is the contrast in the scales between the different stuff in the universe.
Right, Yeah, And it's all about context, right, Like something that you think is big, like you know, the Empire State building, it's big, but it's only sort of big in a certain context, in a certain scale.
Exactly. You can always zoom out from wherever you are and whatever you were amazed at how big it was then just becomes a tiny dot and there's some other new structure. You're like, wow, look at that. Look how big America is, or look how big you know the world is, or look how big the Solar system is. It's incredible how many different scales the universe operates on, right, right, Because it could have been different, right, it could have been like the universe is just a bunch of rocks and each rock is a meter in length and that's it, and there's no structure and they're not organized, they're just sort of distributed through the universe. Right. It could have been like that.
Just like a haze of rocks, it's right, in which case you would only be able to say that the biggest thing in the universe is like one to rock.
That's right. Yeah, But the universe seems so like to organize. I mean, I don't want to say like obviously in a literal way, because the universe doesn't like or dislike anything. But the universe does tend to organize stuff right into bigger and bigger objects. And whenever it's done organizing something that it groups those together into objects and grows those together. Right. So it's pretty amazing what it's managed to accomplish and only fourteen billion years.
Yeah, and so these structures of the universe keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger forever or does it at some point stop?
Yeah? So that's what we're going to dig into today. It turns out that there is a biggest thing in the universe. There's a point above which there is no more organization. Everything is just sprinkled evenly through the universe.
Wow.
So the question is what is the biggest thing in the universe.
That's right, Somebody something out there currently reigns supreme is the biggest thing in the universe? Yeah, that's a pretty impressive title, right. That's not one something that you can just pick up any day. It takes billions of years to work up to it. You've got to train, you got to prack this, you know, you Afternoon's endeavor.
Yes, right, lift weights, make stars.
I was thinking more like, eat a lot of pizza, you know this kind of stuff. You got to gather mass here. We're not trying to lose it, right.
The biggest thing in the universe. Yeah, So we were wondering how many people out there are new the answers of this question what is the biggest thing in the universe? And I think, Daniel, you sort of imagined that most people would say that galaxies are the biggest thing, right.
Yeah. I actually started out asking people just what's the biggest thing in the universe because I was thinking about, you know, organizational stuff like groups of things, solar systems, galaxies. But the first answers I got were mostly about like, you know, biggest stars and stuff. So then I started asking a slightly different question, which is like do you think the galaxies are organized in any way or they just sort of sprinkled evenly through the universe. So we got a variety of answers.
Yeah, so, as usually you went out there into the streets of you see Irvine or the pathways to you see Irvine, and you ask people this question.
The very beautifully cultivated Orange County campus of UC Irvine, which, by the way, if you haven't visited, really is.
Gorgeous, a little smart and beautiful people.
Right, everybody down here is smart and beautiful. Exactly.
Here's what people had to say.
I think it would be the song.
I think it has like the strongest impact on a lot of the different planets.
Thanks very much.
I know, I guess a lot bigger, but I don't know, like the termstally the galaxy.
Yeah, that's as far as I know it goes. No, I don't go Okay, I don't know that.
I know it's usually referred to as like planetary neighborhoods, so that could be groupings of multiple galaxies, but I don't know the term for it. Okay, great, it's just like open space, you know, it's like our universe. And then a larger I'm not sure what it's called, but okay, a larger area. And then if there's more universes like trillions, and you know, almost an infinite amount of like, okay, great, I'm not.
Sure, okay, all right. Sees most people say the galaxies, right, someone said the sun was the biggest thing in the universe. You know, they were probably weren't thinking very big. But galassies I think most people think about, right, like, there's nothing bigger out there than a galaxy.
Yeah, And you know, I think it's interesting to compare that to sort of historical understandings of what people thought. Remember, like a hundred years ago, people looked out into the sky and they saw stars like, okay, there are stars out there, just like there's our star. And they thought for a long time that the universe was just a bunch of stars sprinkled through the universe, that there was no organization to them, right, that that was all there was. Basically, that the universe was one big galaxy.
So to them, a star was the biggest thing in the universe.
Yeah, a star, or you could say a solar system, but that's really a small difference. So to them, a star was the biggest thing in the universe. And then about one hundred years ago they looked at some of those really faint smears in the sky and discover that those aren't far away stars. They're actually far away galaxies, right, whole other clusters of stars. And that was must have been a mind blowing moment because they realized one that stars do form structure, right, they turn into galaxies, and two that there are other ones right in the universe has lots of galaxies in it.
Right, that they're not a sort of spread out evenly in the universe. They cluster into things.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, they formed these big structures of galaxies. And so now people, most of the folks that we talk to and maybe the people out there listening, probably imagine that the universe is that's just sprinkled evenly with galaxies. Right, that's the next logical assumption, that instead of just stars sprinkled everywhere, it's just galaxy sprinkled everywhere. So I think that's probably what people think. They've heard of galaxies, they haven't heard of anything bigger, so they just assume the universe is evenly sprinkled with galaxies.
Right.
Well, let's think philosophically here for a second. Is a galaxy a thing, you know, technically is just made up of stars? What makes something a thing?
What makes something a thing?
Yeah?
I think there must be a lot of philosophers who've debated this, right, what is thingness? You know, it's probably a whole like branch of philosophy about defining objects and all sorts of stuff, and they have a seminars and argue about it and smoke banana peels and stuff. But from the physics point of view, I think we can answer that and say that a thing is something that is gravitationally bound, that is essentially held together by gravity.
Right, It's something that holds together. I was thinking like that's a good definition of a thing. Like you and I were made up of billions and trillions of molecules and atoms, and there's sort of spread out a lot, right, there's just a lot of space between atoms, right, and nuclei of atoms, but generally there were sort of held together into this thing that I call hooreheand and for you the thing that you call Daniel.
Okay, are you talking about us individually or us as a pair, because that's a different question. I'm definitely a thing. You're a thing? Are we a thing? Is that what you're asked? Are we?
Daniel?
Are you asking me out? Or are you doing this on air.
Hey you you raised the question, you know, like, what's a thing? Are we a thing? So here we are? You know? Daniel L'Age explore their relationship live on the tape.
Well, I mean I like you, Daniel, but I would say that I'm a thing and you're a thing.
Auch Man. That's cold. That's just the way the universe operates.
Though.
If you don't have a strong bond, then you're not a thing. Right.
Well, you know, I think we're just talking philosophically, hear right, I think.
Philosophically we're not philosophically or even scientifically. I think a thing is something that holds itself together, and like is the Solar system a thing? Right? Well? Yeah, the Solar system is a thing because the Earth doesn't have a different path than the Sun. Right, It goes around the Sun. It moves together as a single object. It's bound together gravitationally.
Just like maybe an electron, you know, sort of trap going around a nuclear of an atom together they make a thing, which is an atom.
Yeah, exactly.
So you could say, like the Solar system is a thing, and so a galaxy that's made out of a whole bunch of solar systems. You could also call it a thing because all of those galaxies, all of those solar systems are being held together. Hm.
And also like you and the Earth are a thing, right because you're held down to the Earth and together you form an object. And you know you have the same fate as the Earth gravitationally speaking, you move around the Sun together, right, So collectively we are all a thing with the Earth, right And so okay, yeah, I think that's a pretty good definition.
So when we say things like when we ask the question what's the biggest thing in the universe, we're kind of asking like, what's the biggest structure or what's the biggest thing? That you can say is being held together differently than other things in the universe.
That's right, the thing that has thingness that is also the biggest.
Okay, so that's a good thing. We got that out of the way.
I think we've thinked about thinging enough.
Yes, all right, let's get into the size of things like the scale of us in the Earth and the Solar system. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about the bigness of things and how what's the biggest thing in the universe? And let's start Let's start talking about the size of things. Let's start here on Earth, Like how big is Earth? Daniel? Know?
How big are you? Hoor?
How big? A? I'm a big you mean like like my largeness or largess like.
No for scale you know, like how many kilometers tall are you?
Or oh how many kilometers? Oh boy, I am.
About folks you're hearing them do math point?
Oh oh one eight kilometers tall?
All right, that's not a lot of kilometers. I mean you're an ire tall guy, it turns out, but that's actually not a lot of kilometers right in comparison, like the Earth right is thousands of kilometers in.
Width it's about eight thousand miles in diameter.
Yeah, that's right, which would make it about you know, like fourteen thousand kilometers in diameter, So compared to the Earth, you're just like a mote. You're like irrelevant, dude, like negligible, right, which is incredible, right, Right.
We're like a little speck of duest next to next two of the Earth.
Which makes me wonder sometimes, like what's the minimum size for a planet that could hold life? Right? Is it necessary? Because you know that book The Little Prints where the guy is this little guy and he's like on a tiny asteroid, And I love that because I think it would be really fun to be alive on a really small astronomical object where you could like run laps around it or something.
Right when do you float off at some point if you were that much bigger?
Yeah, your planet exactly. It's you need enough gravity not just for you to stay bound to it, but also to like have an atmosphere. If your planet isn't big enough, it can't hold onto gas on its surface, so you can't breathe. So there really is some sort of minimum size for a planet like Mars is probably too small, and you know it lost its atmosphere for.
Life as we know it, I mean, there could potentially be something out there that can live without an atmosphere, right.
Yeah, right, you can have an asteroid which is alive inside of it, like the organization of the flows of lava or you know, hot rock inside some object could be alive, certainly. But yeah, life as we know it, you know that lives and breeds and uses water, liquid water and stuff like that. Probably none of those things evolved on a planet that We're much smaller than Earth.
Right, So the Earth is pretty big. So then what's the next biggest thing in our solar system?
Well, if you want to scale up to planets, Jupiter is about ten times the radius of the Earth, right, which is huge, And you might think only ten times, but remember that volume goes as radius cubed, right, So if you're ten times the radius, then you're you know, a thousand times the volume, which means you could fit a thousand earths inside Jupiter. It makes Earth like tiny.
We're one thousands of the size of Jupiter.
Yeah, we're like a rounding error for Jupiter. Right. It's really it's incredible how small we are compared to Jupiter.
Like we make a good mood to Jupiter.
Exactly. I should look that up. But there might even be moons of Jupiter that are comparable to the size of Earth.
Yeah, it's amazing. So this is where I did to math. So I calculated that the size of the Earth is, as you said, about four kilometers in radios.
You just said it's four kilometers in radio. Sorry for thousand miles you didn't mean. Sorry, what's the fact of a thousand between frances? Watch out, people Jorges doing math.
That's right. Don't trust a cartoonist to do math. Four thousand miles, sorry, four thousand miles. But if the Earth was the size of a pinhead, like it was the size of the pin the head in a pin, that means Jupiter would be about the size of a marble.
Wow. So if Earth really was a spec Jupiter would still be pretty substantial. Yeah.
Yeah, And by that scale, the Sun, which is about four hundred and thirty thousand miles in radios, would be about the size of a candaloup.
Wow. I think it's really pretty interesting that the Earth is one tenth the radius of Jupiter, which is one tenth the radius of the Sun. Right, it's like powers of ten, right all here in our Solar system, each one dwarfing the next. You know, like that we are the size that the Earth to Jupiter ratio is about the same as the Jupiter's sun ratio. Right. The Sun dwarfs Jupiter exactly the way Jupiter dwarfs us, like if Jupiter was a bully pushing us around the playground, and then the Sun just sort of like trots up, like hey, pick on someone your own size, you know.
Yeah, like you could fit a thousand earth inside of Jupiter, and you could fit a thousand jupiters inside the Sun.
Yeah, when do some math? That means you could fit a million earths inside the Sun. Yeah right, yeah, Like we could plunge into the Sun and it wouldn't even notice.
It'd be like a little like a mosquito bite.
Exactly exactly like a millionth of you. It's like, you know, every time you blow your nose, you lose a millionth of your mass. Right, So we're like we're like a little bit of snot compared to the Sun. Right.
Yeah, Okay, So then if we keep going, if the Earth is a pinhead and Jupiter is a marble and the Sun is a canalobe.
Mm hmm.
Okay, so the right scale would be if you hold the pinnant in your hand, the sun would be, which is a candlobe. You would have to put it about one hundred feet away.
Yeah, yeah, because not only are these it's the Sun really big, but it's really far away.
Right Yeah. Like imagine like holding a pinhead then walking one hundred feet and sending down a cantelobe. That's how far the Sun is.
Yeah. All these things, these things we think are huge, are dwarfed by just the sheer emptiness of space, right, Like take the Earth to Sun relationship, Like most of that volume is just nothing, right, Yeah, it's incredible.
And it kind of shows you how powerful gravity is at those scales, right, Like, we go around the Sun. That's our life, that's how we exist, that's what makes our existence possible. And yet it's like it's a pinned revolving around a cannelobe one hundred feet away.
That's right. Well, we're glad we're not any closer, right, or we'd be a pretty toasty yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then all this, of course is just dwarfed by the galaxy. If you look at the galaxy. You can't even find the Sun. It's just a tiny dot.
How big is the milk Way? Daniel?
The Milky Way is hard to even describe in these units. Right, We've been talking about miles, and the Earth is thousands of miles and the Sun's radius is hundreds of thousands of miles. Right, the Milky Way is fifty thousand light gears across. Right, it takes light fifty thousand years to cross the Milky Way. If you convert that to miles, it's three times ten to the seventeen miles, So three and then seventeen zeros.
Right.
Actually looked up the scientific prefix for that, because I don't even know. And the Milky Way is one third of an exa mile X a mile exa mile. Isn't that pretty cool?
It's like a medical condition. I have an X mile.
So I'm so sorry to hear that you should get that cream they have for it.
So I did the math on this one too, Okay, So, if the Earth is a pinhead and the Sun is a candalope a one hundred feet away, the galaxy is the size of our solar system.
WHOA, I thought you were going to say, like a blue whale or like some other like really delicious food or something. But the Solar system that's pretty incredible.
Yeah, yeah, it's about Yeah, it would be about one point twenty eight times sent to little eleven meters.
Wow.
Yeah, that's how big the galaxy is. So imagine like a pin head and a canealobe in our Solar system. That's how big the galaxy is. And we are like a tiny thing on that pinhead.
Yeah. So, as we were saying, it just gets dwarfed, right, And some of you guys out there might be wondering, like, well, are these things typical, Like are the planets in our Solar system typically the size you find in planets, or is our sun normals the milky way like an average kind of a galaxy. So we did a big bit of digging there and it turns out that the biggest planet that they found in any solar system anywhere is about ten times the size of Jupiter. Right, So there's a planet out there that's.
Huge, that's almost the size of the Sun.
Almost the size of the Sun. Yeah, so that's like a big planet. That's like a planet that's almost the Sun in of itself.
Right, It's like literally a million times bigger than the Earth around in that order of magnitude.
Mm hmmm, well that is a big honkin planet, right, And stars also get really big, and stars change also in size in their lifetime, right, Like our Sun is going to get bigger as it gets older. It's going to burn and then the outer layers are going to get cooler and they're going to expand. And we did a whole episode on how the Sun is going to die. But there are stars out there right now that are like a thousand or two thousand times as big as our Sun. Oh wow, yeah, it's huge. If you had that in our solar system, it would like enveloped Saturn, you know, like it'd be no room for a planet, inner planets at all. It'd be pretty crazy.
So we would be inside the Sun.
Yeah exactly, we'd be inside the Sun, and we will be in a few billion years. Our Sun will also get huge and envelop the Earth. Right.
Oh, great, sun block and or rockets to other planets.
Galaxy. But there's one other thing. The galaxies are not just stars with planets around them, right, there's other stuff, and there's the stuff that makes the stars. Right, there's these huge clouds of gas and dust which are like the leftovers from blown up solar systems and blown up stars that eventually coalesce to make these stellar nurseries where new stars are formed. And those things are really big.
How big are they?
They can be like one thousand to two thousand light years across, right, So that's much much bigger than any individual star. I mean, this is where stars are born, right, there's like fields of stars being created in these things. But still they're small compared to the Milky Way. Right, the Milky Way was like fifty three thousand light years across. The biggest nebula or gas cloud we've seen is like two thousand light years across. So so far the galaxy is the biggest thing.
No, but it's interesting to think that there are objects kind of in the scale of things between our Sun and the milk Away Galaxy. I mean, there's bigger stars, bigger planets, and these clouds of gas that you meet that you talked about.
Yeah, And the wonderful thing about these clouds is that they look like something that's dynamic, but it's frozen in time. Right. It's like you know, if you see a picture of a steam engine and these puffs of clouds coming up from it. Right, it's frozen in time, but you can tell that there's motion there, right, that it's like in the middle of chugging and puffing and boiling and churning. Right right, these clouds look the same way, and they are boiling and churning, but just on very different timescales. You'd have to do like a crazy time lapse, like watch it for a billion years to see it roiling and toiling and bubbling and all that stuff. But it is. It's just that on our time scales, it hardly seems to be moving.
Yeah, and in that distance scale, because it's a thousand light years across.
Yeah, exactly. So it's it really makes you feel insignificant, and it's really impressive, like how dynamic the the universe is. It's just on huge distance scales and huge time scales. Right, It's like if there was a whole civilization that was birthed and then dyed in the middle of one puff of that steam engine, right, and it for it. The steam cloud was frozen rights hardly moving, you know. And so that's the way we are with this tiny dot suspended in a sunbeam around surrounded by all this crazy, very slow action.
Whoa yeah, and there are stars being born inside of that like popcorn.
Yeah, exactly, exactly, new star is still being born. Exactly.
Okay, let's let's let's keep going and see what the biggest thing in the universe is. But first, let's take another break.
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All right, we're building our way up to the biggest thing in the universe, and so far we've we've gone from the Earth to the Solar System, to gas clouds to the Milk Away Galaxy and so a lot of the people you talked on the street thought that galaxies were the biggest things in the universe. But that's not actually true.
That's right, and they're pretty big, right, And our galaxy is we said, fifty thousand light years across, and some galaxies get pretty big, they get up to like millions of light years across, right, Alliens. Galaxies can come all different sizes.
Yeah, it would take you millions of years going to the speed of light just to go from one side of that galaxy to the next.
Yeah. So if you like, forgot your lunch at home and you work on the other side of the galaxy, you like, forget it.
Man, that's a ten million a year round drip. Forget it.
That's right. The commute is terrible, and that's you know, and that's when there's no traffic. When there's traffic, forget about.
It, man.
Yeah.
Yeah, But so a lot of people thought that galaxies were just sprinkled everywhere through the universe. But you know, galaxies has been around for a while, and so what's going to happen when you have stuff hanging out for a while is that gravity is going to start to pull it together. Right, it's not perfectly smooth. There's slight differences, and there's a little bit more mass here, a little bit more mass there, and so over billions of years, galaxy will start to pull stuff together. And that's exactly what happened.
They started to kind of self organize.
Yeah, or as you would say, form a thing. Right, And so the next level up from galaxy is that we found that galaxies are organized into these things were not very cleverly called clusters, right, So galaxy clusters.
Like nut clusters, Like.
Yeah, I think, I think again. You should have had a snack before we had this, before we recorded this episode. A galaxy, a galaxy cluster usually contains about fifty galaxies and it's like five or ten million light years across, and you can remember a galaxy itself is like, you know, fifty or one hundred thousand light years across, So this is much bigger than one. Galaxies has fifty galaxies which are themselves pretty far apart. But they are organized, right, They're not just like, it's not an arbitrary assignment. They're orbiting each other.
It's like a separate group of galaxies that's interacting and kind of holding together, separate from other groups of galaxies.
That's right. They're all orbiting the center of mass of this cluster, right, the same way everything the Solar System is organized is orbiting the center of mass of the Solar System, which happens to be the Sun, and everything in the galaxy is orbiting the center of the galaxy. Everything in this cluster of galaxies is orbiting this center, which doesn't necessarily have anything in it at this point.
Right, Wow, So that's the next biggest thing is a cluster of galaxy. It's like a structure. Yeah, it's like a like if you zoom out far enough, it would look like a thing, it.
Would look like a yeah, exactly, like a blob exactly. And they're separated from other clusters. Right. The distances between things in the cluster is small compared to the distances between the clusters. The same way the distances between the planets are small compared to the distances between solar systems.
Right, It's like chocolate chips floating in a in cookie dough.
Tasty. Yeah, this is a tasty galaxy. Really, And then you keep going and the clusters themselves are organized into basically clusters of clusters.
Okay, so the cluster is not the biggest thing any So okay, So if galaxies have been sprinkled out evenly, you would say galaxies are the biggest thing in the universe. But they're not. They're organized clusters. And if those clusters have been spread out evenly, you would say that the cluster is the biggest thing in the universe. But there's another structure above clusters.
That's right. And you know, this is just things that people discovered as they looked out into the universe, and they did sort of the three D mapping, right, They're trying to understand that where is stuff around us and how's it organized? And as we get better and better at measuring distance scales and better telescopes, we can see further out. We can build this sort of three D map around us, and then we notice these these patterns. We notice that things aren't just distributed, and so the clusters themselves are organized into clusters of clusters, which we call superclusters. And I feel like these objects got like kind of a bad rap, you know, because cluster is not a very creative name. I mean, the galaxy is not just called like a star cluster, right, It's got its own cool name galaxy, right, But nobody named nobody named the you know, cluster of galaxies other than cluster of galaxies.
And somebody named it's superior, a supercluster, which means the cluster is like not super It's like saying this is Daniel and this is super Daniel cluster. Imagine how you're saying.
I'm not super I think you're saying I'm not super. I'm getting a lot of rejection here.
You're the super Daniel. Daniel, there's another Daniel.
I gotta go find the Subdanels and make me feel small exactly, the under Daniel. What I need really is a cluster of Daniels. You know, that would be pretty awesome. What is the biggest Daniel in the universe. That's really the question of today's podcast.
Well, let's come up with a name. Let's uh, let's you and I Christen clusters of galaxies. Let's do it.
Okay, Well, you're the creative one, go ahead.
I don't know a banana of galaxies, baxis baxes. It's a bnaxis of galaxies.
That's thenaxis of galaxies. That that really rolls out the tongue. That's beautiful. In some multi some alternate version of the multiverse. You were definitely a poet.
Well, I'm technically the first person. And uh, if there are any scientists out there, you teally have to quote me. Now when you refer to.
These you should you shouldn't just reach for the snack that's on your table. You should go deeper. You should think about, like you know, Greek mythology, or some sort of you know, historical event or something to motivate you, like.
I think they had bananas in Greece.
Come on, how about the union. Let's give it a political name. Let's call them the Union of Galaxies concerns. They're organized, go you go stand together, speak as one orbit together.
Yes, we can.
So the galaxies form clusters, and the clusters form superclusters.
What does that mean? So?
Like, well, the same way that you know, stars organized into a galaxy and galaxies organized into a cluster. Galaxy clusters themselves. You just think of each of those as like a little dot. Then about you know, one hundred of those together, which spans about one hundred million light years across, form what we call a supercluster.
Oh my god, give me a head to think about these scales. Yeah, so this is a cluster of clusters of galaxies which have millions of stars, and each star has planets, and each planet has little might have little people.
Like us mm hmm exactly. And so these superclusters, I mean, they're enormous. It's hard to even really think about these distances. You know, one hundred million.
Light years you mean super banazis.
Super unions. Yeah, exactly, and so that's pretty incredible. And people figure that out. They thought, wow, that's pretty big stuff. You know.
So you said there are one hundred million light years across.
Yeah, there are one hundred million light years across. And so then people started to look to see like, well, are those organized in some way?
Are those the biggest things in the universe?
Yeah? Are those the biggest thing in the universe. And so that's when people that's when the real shock arrived, because they started it started to sort of look like they were just sprinkled evenly. But then they noticed that in one direction it went on, superclusters just sort of went on for a long way. In another direction, they stopped, and you know, they're sort of building this three D, three D picture around us, And it turned out that we were in sort of a thick sheet, like there's like a great wall of superclusters as far as we can see, Like we are one supercluster sprinkled with a bunch of other superclusters, but it's not as thick as it is wide.
It's organizing too, like a sheet, like a table.
Yeah, like a sheet. And then people started to look like, well, what's in that spot where they're when the superclusters run out, right, So they built the map further and further and further, and then they discovered, oh, it's not a sheet of superclusters. It's more like a bubble, right, And so the superclusters are organized into these like massive bubbles that surround these huge voids in which there's nothing.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. So yeah, superclusters of clusters of galaxies of form a bubble like they're in the surface of a bubble.
Yeah, and you know, it's not like very regular bubbles. It's more like there are these filaments and sheets and empty spaces. They're not like the bubbles are spherical or anything, but there's it's like if you zoom out far enough, it's like a froth, right, It's like, uh, and and each it's like a froth of these little bubbles, and each bubble, the surface of that bubble, like the thin skin of that bubble is thousands and thousands of superclusters of galaxies. Oh my god, it's pretty crazy. And so we live on the on the edge of some little bubble and in that void, I mean those voids or billions of light years across with nothing in them. Nothing. Nothing. I mean empty space, which of course is never really empty. And you know, maybe like one rock got kicked out of a cluster one day and wandered into those voids, but essentially nothing.
And those bubbles are about billions of light years across.
They're billions of light years across, exactly, and that's pretty incredible. And then you know, that's it.
Wait, so that's that's the biggest thing in the universe. The bubble of superclusters, of clusters, of galaxies, of stars, of planets, of people.
Yeah, exactly. And if you zoom out far enough as far as we know, then it just looks smooth. There's no more organization.
It's just more bubbles.
Yeah. The bubbles are just sprinkled evenly. It's not like they're the bubbles form circles or form sheets or form groups or anything like that that we think that they are just organized. They're just sprinkled there.
The universe is frothy, yeah, and it really is frothy.
And the thing I like thinking about the most is where that froth came from, right like, and it's really it's connected to the first few moments of the universe. For those of you who remember like talking about the Big Bang and the cosmic microwave background. We've looked back in time also and we've seen the early few moments of the universe. And what we see there are is froth. Right, It's like quantum randomness which generated the initial seeds for all the structure of the universe. That's this structure we're talking about. So little random fluctuations in the early universe led directly to these huge structures that we're seeing. Now, why do we have a bubble here? Not there? Because there's some random quantum particle fluctuation fourteen billion years.
Ago at the Big Bang in a space in a really small space.
Yeah, exactly, and then it got stretched out by inflation and became the seed of structure in the universe. And that's the structure we're talking about.
So that these bubbles sort of you might say, kind of came first, right, Like the universe, the biggest thing in the universe was has always been a bubble.
Well, you know, were there were those sort of quantum froth. I don't know if you could really call those bubbles. They were just like areas where there's more density and less density. But I just want to make the connection and have people understand that that the structure and that we see in the universe today was determined in some sense by that quantum froth that happened in the early universe.
It just scaled up and scaled up and scaled up, and that's what gives us the biggest things in the universe. Yeah, exactly, super Benax's bubbles exactly.
And the fascinating thing is thinking about why there isn't any bigger structure, Like why don't those bubbles form structure? I said earlier, like anytime you got stuff hanging out, gravity is going to start to organize it, right, And that's true, But it also it takes a while. Gravity is not very strong. Remember it's the weakest force by orders of magnitude, and so even though it's the dominant thing in the universe on these scales and these timelines, it's not very powerful. So it takes a long time. It takes billions of years to form this structure.
The way, do we know for sure that these bubbles and this froth of super duper clusters, that's that's it, that's the biggest thing in the universe. We're pretty sure there's nothing bigger.
We're pretty sure. We know nothing for sure, but we've been building this map, this three D map of the universe, and that's all we see. Yeah, and it could be that we haven't, you know, just seen far enough. But we've seen pretty far, and it just looks like these bubbles and filaments and strands and sheets.
You know.
It's these superclusters and form these surfaces. But that's about it. No organization to those bubbles or sheets as far as we know. And I think the reason is that there just hasn't been enough time.
Right.
The universe is old and it's but it's done a lot in those fourteen billion years. I mean, that's a lot of galaxies to make, and a lot of superclusters to organize, you know, a lot of bubbles and filaments, right, of bananas to make a lot of bananas. Yeah, And you know, earlier in the universe there was less structure, right, and so these structures have formed gradually over time. You know, in the first billion years after the Big Bang, we didn't have any galaxies right, right, and so it takes a while for these structures to form. So it might be that you wait another fifty billion years and then you make something else, something new is crowned, is the biggest thing in the universe, and then we call a new joorge to give it a silly name after some fruit, you.
Like, a bigger one, bigger, a bigger fruit. I mean, like in the future, billions of years from now, maybe these bubbles will form into something like a mega bubble or a giants Miley face.
Who knows it might be. On the other hand, we've also talked a few times about dark energy. That's this mysterious force that's pushing everything apart, right, that's creating new space between galaxies. So that's making that actually harder to make new structure because it's spreading everything out, ripping everything apart, exactly ripping everything apart. So it might just be that we are living in the moment when we will have the biggest structures ever in the universe, that this is like a tipping point, and that after this things just get shredded and this is like the biggest we ever got.
Like in the future, everything will just be spread out evenly with no discernible structure.
Yeah, it could be right, And that's always weird when you come to the realization that you're living in a special moment. It makes you skeptical. Well, that's sort of I mean, how could that be? Would just be lucky to take a coincidence? Yeah, exactly, it seems like a coincidence. And in science we don't like coincidences. I mean, they happen, but every time there's a coincidence, it's an opportunity to ask why and to maybe get a revealing answer. So, you know, there's a lot of speculation and a lot we don't know.
It's like every generation thinks that they live in the peak of their culture.
Every generation thing they have the best music ever. Yeah, exactly, downhill.
Yeah, kids today, man, they don't know what good music is. That's what you're saying.
They don't know what a supercluster is exactly.
That's kind of what you're saying, is that you're saying we live in peak universal structure, like things are just kind of might be just downhill from here, and this is the most structure we'll see ever, Like these big things in the universe might at some point kind of get ripped apart and dissolve.
Yeah, And I want to emphasize again, this is a lot of this is speculation because we don't know what the future of dark energy is, right, and there could be other things we don't know about how the universe is organized. We're still really babies when it comes to understanding this stuff, But that certainly could be. We don't see any bigger structure, and we have reason to think that dark energy is gonna and that dark energy really could prevent more structure from being formed. It could even shred the structures we have. So yeah, we could be living at peak structure. Right. Wow, So be glad that you're alive right now and you could look out into the stars and see the biggest thing in the universe.
Well, that's the answer to the question we set out to talk about, which is what is the biggest thing in the universe? And right now, the biggest thing in the universe are these bubbles of superclusters of galaxies.
Yeah, and it also might be the biggest thing ever in the universe.
In the infinity of time. They might be the beggest thing ever exactly exactly in the history of the universe. In this infinitely long podcast. All right, so I think we answered the question.
Yeah, I hope we took you on a fundamenttal trip from mind blowingly small to mind blowingly huge and made you realize where you are in our cosmic neighborhood.
We hope you had a very large time thinking about these huge scales.
And jorgees over there doing some math to figure out how what fruit associates with the cluster of superclusters.
How big would that banana have to be to fit inside of the.
If you added up all the bananas you've eaten over your life, how big would that been? A berey.
It could be a galaxy of potassium probably.
Probably all right, everyone, thank you for listening to this biggest podcast ever.
See you next time.
If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandorge dot com. 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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