Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge talk about the deep future fate of our cosmic neighborhood.
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Ay or Hey, I have a physics version of when you rather Oh, I'd rather not play? Not an option today? So would you rather be blown up in a supernova or crushed in a black hole?
Well, if I fell into a black hole, there would be time dilation, so it sounds like it would take forever. So maybe I'll go with a supernova nice and quick.
All right? Next one, would you rather be eaten by aliens or live your life never knowing if aliens exist.
I would pick live my life over and being eaten by anything, aliens or otherwise.
Wrong answer, wrong answer. Next one, Would you rather keep playing this game or start the podcast?
I'll pick the supernova again. Please. I'm crushed just trying to blow this up.
Hi.
I'm Poorhamy cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I would rather be eaten by aliens than never know if they exist for real.
Well, I guess if you get do you get to choose when you get eaten by aliens? You know, if you can choose to get it done right before you're gonna die of natural causes, maybe that's okay, But like right now, you would make that choice right now.
I think this game is all about those loopholes, like when people are planning for end of life, like do you want to get buried or do you want to get cremated. I'm going to fill out a box that says I want to get eaten by aliens. But yeah, it'd be nice if they waited till after I already died of natural causes. Then you know, hey, barbecue me for the alien pop luck. That's fine.
You gotta be careful, though, do you mean like extraterrestrial aliens or people who are you know, alien? Alien to your life or to your city?
You know what, I'm not gonna be around, so I guess it doesn't really matter.
Oh, you're gonna be run as you're getting.
As long as I get to learn about the aliens while I'm still alive, nothing else really matters.
Oh boy, anyways, Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we take great pains and great sacrifices to try to explain the nature of the universe to you. We cast our minds out into that dark cosmic mystery and wonder what's out there, who's out there, what's going on out there? How big is it? Is it still sloshing around, and what will be its final fate. We want to understand the cosmic context of our very existence because it drives the choices we make every day about whether or not we sign ourselves up to be part of an alien barbecue.
That's right. It is a humongous universe full of amazing and awesome things out there that may kill you or eat you and or inspire you to learn more about the universe and the cosmos and how everything works in it.
And it's part of this sort of incredible mental history, the trajectory of our sort of mental map of the cosmos. You know, it started out pretty small, your little village, your neighborhood, eventually expanded to be a larger and larger region. Finally people started incorporating the cosmos into it, this mental picture of the whole universe that we were in. But it just gets bigger and bigger as we understand where our solar system sits and where our galaxy sits, and as our telescopes get more and more powerful, we can now understand even further the context of our cosmic neighborhood.
Yeah, it used to be there. Our context was pretty much like the Earth, and people thought that the Sun and the moon and the stars all revolved around the Earth. People thought that the entire universe was just us.
Yeah. I was reading about ancient Chinese astronomy and they even calculated like how far away the stars were. They thought it was something like twenty seven thousand miles above the Earth.
Oh, that's pretty close.
And the Greeks thought that everything moved in like literal crystal spheres around the Earth that was the original ether.
Interesting, now, Daniel, do we know for sure that's not true? Do you know for sure that's not true?
I mean, we've sent probes out there to visit these things, so we're pretty sure there are no crystal spheres out there moving the planets.
By we mean the priverurial we but have you gone up there and touched these that made sure there's no crystal spheres.
I'm going to take NASA's word for it, you know, for sure. I'm not part of the conspiracy community that thinks NASA's been lying to us all these years, you.
Know, part of the crystal sphere conspiracy.
I'm sure there's a group of crystal truthists out there.
You know, part of the China was right theory.
No, but the Chinese did make a lot of really amazing observations. You know, we have like records of eclipses dating back thousands of years from China, and observations is like super nova from almost a thousand years ago. So it's a really rich history of astronomical observations, some of which are still relevant to our studies today. Is incredible.
That's pretty cool. Yeah, because, as you were saying, our understanding of where or and how we fit in this universe keeps growing and growing, and it seems like each time we just get more and more insignificant with each step.
But we become more and more aware of that significance, which makes us sort of like philosophically more important. Right, We're like incorporating more of the universe into our minds.
No, that makes no sense. We're insignificant specs in this giant universe.
But it's better to know about your insignificance because then you've gained some philosophical stature.
Like being know where you're being eaten by aliens doesn't help the fact that you're being eaten by.
Eighties still makes it worth it, still makes.
It worth it. In fact, that makes it worse. But it does seem like we are getting smaller and smaller in the Humerus. And literally that's true, right, because every year, every second of the day, the universe, or our understanding of how big it is, keeps getting bigger.
Right, it does. And even though we cannot explore the far flow edges of the observable universe. We can build this mental model, this sort of map of our neighborhood that tells us where we are in this glittering cosmos. And so even though no human will probably visit those planets or visit those stars, we can still tell you something about what's going on out there. And to me, that's incredible. Yes, we are probably trapped on this rock or our neighboring rocks, but still we can build this map of the cosmos, we can understand something about it, And to me, that's a great achievement sort of intellectually and scientifically, and what I'm pretty proud of.
Yeah, again, I think you're using the proverbial we there. You're proud of the work of others. Let's be honest here.
No, I'm standing on the shoulders of many, many giants, and I'm proud of their work. Absolutely, I'm not personally taking credit for our understanding of the universe in case anybody misunderstood.
But at least we're helping, I guess, talk about what they've done and disseminate this information out to others. And it's interesting when you say like that we might never reach those places that we're seeing far far away. I'm wonder if that's it's really true. I guess that's true because our view of the universe is expanding at the speed of light, and there's no way that humans could outpaste that. Right.
Yeah, it's amazing we can see things that are moving away from us faster than the speed of light. A bunch of listeners wrote in and asked, like, how does that work? We have a whole episode covering it, but briefly, the thing to understand when you're looking at an object and they tell you, oh, this thing is thirty billion years away and it's moving away from us faster than the speed of light, is that you're not seeing it where it is now. They're telling you where it is now, but you're seeing the light that was emitted from it when it was much much closer. So it used to be much closer, and it's sent a photon our way. In the meantime, it's moved really really far away. When they say here we're looking at a galaxy that's really really far away, we're not seeing light that came to us from it when it was that far away. We're seeing light that came to us when it was much much closer light that leaves it now we will never see, which means also we will never visit it.
M Yeah, because the universe is expanding faster and faster every time, every second of the day. Although we don't know what's going to happen in the future, right, it could be that in the far distant future or maybe tomorrow, the universe might decide, Hey, I think I'm gonna stop growing and I'm going to collapse back on myself, and in which case we're going to basically visit every place in the universe at some point.
Yeah, or they're gonna come visit us and they're gonna bring with them all their aliens, with all their barbecue.
Tools, all their appetites. Well, maybe the big joke is that in the end, the universe eats us all.
Well, we are the universe, so I guess the universe eats itself. I'm not sure how that works.
Whoa dude.
And even though we are learning that we are a tiny speck in a vast, vast cosmos, I think it does make us sort of like, philosophically or intellectually more powerful to have grappled with that vast cosmos. It's better at least than being ignorant of what's going on right right?
But don't they say ignorance is bliss?
Sometimes who's looking for bliss? Man, I'm looking for knowledge.
Maybe that's the difference between you and me and Daniel. I'll go from bliss any day.
Okay, Well, I'm glad we can split the tasks. But it's also fun to think about that far future you were talking about and wondering, like, what does the future hold? Will our solar system survive for our billion years? Will our galaxy survive for ten billion years? What exactly is going to happen to our cosmic neighborhood over cosmic deep time?
Yeah, because, as we mentioned, the universe is expanding faster and faster and faster, and that has some pretty dramatic consequences for some of the bigger structures in the universe. And so today on the podcast we'll be tackling the question will our super cluster be torn apart? Sounds kind of sad, like.
A chunk of juicy barbecue.
Well, wow, who would eat a giant supercluster of galaxies?
Some giant super space crab? I suppose, Oh boy?
And how big does the barbecue sauce bottle need to be? Well, this is an interesting question and so we'll dig into it of what a super cluster is, what does it mean for it to be torn apart, and what could be causing it to be torn apart. But as usual, we were wondering how many people had considered these words together as a question out there in the internet.
So thanks very much to everybody who participates in this segment of our podcast. It's super fun for us to hear what you're thinking about the topic of the day. Please don't be shy. If you'd like to participate in the future, just write to me to questions at Danielandjorge dot com.
So think about it for a second. Do you think our supercluster will be torn apart? Here's what people have to say.
I say no.
I believe that dark matter and dark energy will keep it together, just like it build the supercluster that we see today.
Well, our supercluster, if I believe right, is a collection of galaxies that we're in kind of grouped up. So if anything, I feel like it would get larger just by gravitationally attracting other galaxies that are just floating out there.
If I get it's right, the galaxies of our supercluster won't drift apart due to the expansion of the universe, but they might dive into each other.
A supercluster is a group of galaxy. Dark energy obviously is moving things apart. But I think the galaxy would stay together, but that galaxies would separate from each other. So I reckon our supercluster will be torn apart.
All right, some people are feeling optimistic about our supercluster.
It looks like three to one for our superclusters sticking together. We got some optimists out there.
Yeah. Yeah, everyone wants to remain I guess in the cluster.
They want to stay cozy. No one wants to blow up our spot.
Yeah, but I guess some people mention gravity as keeping us together instead of letting the supercluster get torn apart, and some people mention dark matter as a way to keep things together.
Yeah. And the overall theme here is pretty much spot on that the universe is in a tug of war between gravity and dark energy, and those things play out very differently on different distances and different scales, And so the fascinating question is, like, at what point does dark energy win? And where will gravity win?
Who will eat who? Gravity versus dark energy.
That's like Godzilla versus King Kong.
That's like slow roasted ribs versus grilled chicken.
I'll just eat them both.
Mane sounds good. Well, let's dive into this tasty topic here step us through Danielle. What is a supercluster of galaxies?
So a supercluster is the biggest thing in the universe. It's the largest structure we think can exist in the universe. And this episode is going to hinge closely on what we mean by a structure. What is a thing in the universe? Because you could just look out in space and say, I'm going to group all this stuff together and call it a thing and give it a name, the way we sort of do for constellations. But astronomers like to think about things in the universe structures as things that sort of hold themselves together, that have enough gravity to be tied together to be an equilibrium. So in our immediate neighborhood, for example, we think of the Solar System as a thing. The Earth is going around the Sun and it's going to keep doing that. Gravity is holding the Earth around the Sun. And all the other planets. So we think of the Solar System as a structure, as this gravitationally bound kind of object.
Yeah, because I guess if you think about just the word structure and what it means in our everyday lives, it basically just means like things that are clumped together, right, or that move together, or that can be separated from each other. And you sort of drill down into it, like even the house you're sitting on, or the building you're sitting on, or maybe even the car you're sitting on, it's just a collection of loose particles being held together by a force in the universe. Like they're not part of the same thing. They're individual particles, but there's just some force that keeps them all moving together.
Yeah, and it feels like a really natural thing to say I'm held together. I'm a thing. You're held together, you're another thing. Even if we're standing next to each other, it's easy to draw the line between us and say, like where I end and you begin. That's sort of philosophically, very straightforward, and so we imagine maybe that's possible to do for other stuff too, right, to say, well, here's one planet and there's another planet to draw these lines and say this thing holds itself together and that thing holds itself together. So that's sort of the idea of a structure, but it can also get kind of fuzzy. Like when you look up at the sky and you see a cloud, it's this big blob of vapor. It's not really holding itself together. I mean, it looks like a thing sort of localized and clumped, but it's definitely not gravitationally holding itself together. It just sort of happens to be all in the same place at the same time, or like a crowd in a park at lunchtime. Right, they all happen to be near each other. They're clumped, but they're not holding themselves together. So there can be sometimes things that are like near each other. There are clumps but not structures.
Interesting. Yeah, crowd is a good example, right, because it may look like a cluster, or like a from a farm might look like a clump of things, but really there's nothing keeping those individual people or structures together.
Right.
They could at any moment just leave the group.
Yeah, every kindergarten teacher knows that when you try to take them out on a field trip, right, they can all just suddenly run in any random direction.
Yeah, whereas maybe, like for the planet Earth, all the rocks on planet Earth are being kept from flying away by gravity, by a force.
And it's really fascinating to think about the sort of levels of structure, right, Like a rock is a structure, but it's also part of a larger structure the Earth, and the Earth of course is a structure, but again it's part of a larger structure. So we have this incredible nested hierarchy of structures, which is really fascinating to think about, like the scale of those things, right, Like an atom is a structure, You're made of so many structures on so many levels. It's incredible to think about, like how organized the universe is. And there's a whole group of philosophers who study this kind of thing and wonder like why do we have structure these distances and not other distances, and does it bubble up from the fundamental laws of the universe and all sorts of fascinating philosophical rabbit holes. But it's also just kind of fun to figure out, like what is the structure? What is our cosmic neighborhood? And so we can like zoom out step by step and understand how we fit in to this sort of larger cosmic set of like Russian nesting dolls.
Yeah, because I guess you know, sort of like you were saying, the atoms in my body make up my structure, but they're all also kind of being pulled by the gravity of the Earth, right, So like, is it more part of my structure or are all the atoms in my body more part of the earth structure? And even like the atoms in my body are being pulled by the gravity of the Sun, but we wouldn't say, like, hey, I'm just me and the Sun are one, even though if you sort of follow the chain of forces that we are sort of in the same structure as the Sun.
Yeah, and so you're part of many structures. Or you could say that there's substructure. Right, you could just look at the whole galaxy and say the galaxy is a blob, but obviously it has substructure. It's not just a smooth distribution of atoms. There are stars and solar systems and even clumps to those stars. They're like these groups of stars are all formed together that are still moving together like that kindergarten group. So there's sort of lots of layers of structure, and it's fascinating to ask, like how many layers are there? How many layers can we zoom out and still see things that seem to be holding themselves together. So we start with ourselves, and then of course we have the Earth, and then there's the Solar system, and then we zoom out. The next sort of big layer of structure would either be like a group of stars that we all form together with, or you would zoom all the way out to the galaxy. Because those groups of stars that form together, they don't really hold themselves together for very long. They tend to disperse into the galaxy.
Do we know that's for sure? Or I mean, like, do we know which stars are near us? And would you say maybe they're too far away for their gravity to really affect us.
Yeah, other stars are too far away for the gravity to really affect us. And we all have velocity through the galaxy, and so we know a lot about actually how stars dissipate from their original cluster. It can take tens or hundreds of millions of years, but we definitely see evidence of that when we look out at the pattern of the stars in our galaxy. It also helps us understand like how the stars are moving. For example, like the Big Dipper is a group of stars that were all formed together and they're moving together. They're also moving really fast and they're kind of close by, which means that the Big Dipper is changing. You don't think about the constellations as changing very much, but they actually are all moving. We're not all moving at the same relative velocity. So like the galaxy is a big, slashing bathtub of stars. So the Big Dipper changes, and over like one hundred thousand years or few hundred thousand years, the Big Dipper will no longer look like the Big Dipper.
Now are they would you say they're a structure or are they just moving together like a crowd or like a wisp of cloud.
They are not a structure because they're not going to hold themselves together. They're not like tight enough to be a structure. They're definitely going to dissolve into the larger sort of bathtub of the galaxy. There are some times substructures to the galaxy, but those tend to be like little dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way and that have their own gravitational hold on themselves, that haven't gotten pulled apart by the Milky Way. But within the Milky Way, there aren't really those kinds of structures.
So you would say, like after our solar system, the next structure is a galaxy. You wouldn't maybe call the arms of a galaxy a structure.
Well, those are density waves, right, Even the arms of the galaxy are not physical structures. It's not like the same stars are moving through those arms. The arms are a wave through the stars. Like when you go to a football game and people do the wave. That wave itself is not a structure. It's just an arrangement of the people as they move up and down. Galaxy arms are the same way. They're not physical structures. They're just density waves. So they're not actually holding themselves together, just like waves in the ocean are not really structures. They're not bound together.
And so our solar system, our star is not part of a like a mini dwarf galaxy. We're just out in the larger Milky Way galaxy.
Yep, We're just floating in the bathtub of the Milky Way, along with hundreds of billions of other stars.
And potentially aliens that might eat us one of us. Right, it sounds like a dangerous hot tub. Well, let's dig into the next level of structure in the universe and let's see how big we can go. How far can we add or recognize structure in the universe and what's going to happen to all that structure at the end of time. So let's dig into that. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're asking the question will our super cluster be torn apart? Which kind of sounds like an oxymoron question or a contradictory question. Will something that's clustered together and not be clustered together.
Yeah, in the end, we're going to learn that astronomers are arguing about how to define a supercluster, and some definitions make the answer obvious, and some definitions make the answer to this question very fuzzy.
But we were talking about how you know things, how do you define structures, And it seems like sometimes, like in a cloud or in a crowd, things might look like they're together, but really they can fall apart at any point, so you wouldn't call that a structure. But like the atoms in your body or the atoms in the building or car you're sitting on, they're helped together pretty tightly by forces, and they basically sort of ignore other forces in favor of the forces that are holding them together. And so maybe that's why we call them.
A struck that's right. And it can be gravitational, or it can be electromagnetic, or it can be the strong force that forms these structures, like the proton is a structure of the strong force, and the atom is a structure of electromagnetism. But at larger distances, basically anything bigger than a few meters, it's mostly gravity that takes over because the other forces are so powerful that they tend to neutralize themselves. Anything that has a large positive or negative charge is going to attract the opposite charge and end up neutralizing itself. But over the large distances, it's gravity that forms structure because gravity cannot be neutralized. Essentially, it's only attractive. There are a few scenarios we can talk about with like repulsive gravity, and dark energy might be an example of that, But on the whole, gravity is attractive, and so it's the force that's responsible for most of the structure we think about in the universe.
Mm yeah, like after about the size of a planet, there's no other forces really at play in the universe that we know of. Maybe there's something hitting out there. Could dark matter be some kind of new force.
Energy is definitely in that category. We don't know if it's a manifestation of gravity due to the quantum energy of space or something totally else and.
Weird All right, Well, we talked about how we're part of a solar system, and the Solar system is part of a bigger structure called the Milky Way Galaxy. What's after that?
So the galaxies aren't just like floating out in space, sprinkled evenly through the universe. They tend to clump together, and they can clump together into something that we call a galactic group or a group of galaxies. In our galaxy, the Milky Way is part of a group we call the local Group very cleverly, and it has about fifty ish galaxies in it. The biggest one is Andromeda, which is also the nearest one to us.
And so these are galaxies that are not just neros out of convenience. We're actually sort of locked together with them in some sort of gravitational dance. Right.
Yeah. We think that these galaxies are holding themselves together. They're like a single gravitational object. They are orbiting the center of mass of all of these galaxies. And people hear a lot that the universe is expanding and everything is getting farther and farther away. And that's true sort of on the whole when you look at vast distances, but nearby gravity is powerful enough to hold us together, and that's happening also with these galaxies. That's why, for example, we are headed towards the Andromeda galaxy and in a few billion years our galaxy and Andromeda will collide and will merge because gravity is winning the battle over the expansion of space. So this local group, we think is a thing. It's a structure that gravity is powerful enough to hold together.
And now, what kind of shape does this local group have? Is it like a disk like our solar system or the galaxy or is it still kind of like a fuzzy cloud of things moving all in all directions.
It doesn't really have a great shape because it's sort of weirdly distributed. Like there's Andromeda, then there's the Milky Way, there's another galaxy called the Triangular Galaxy, and the rest of it is like a sprinkle of little tiny galaxies. So they're not like nicely organized into a flat disk or anything like that. It's just sort of like a blob.
Or at least not yet. Right, maybe if you fast forward a few billion years, things will even out into a disk, because that's what things do in space. They organize themselves into discs, right.
They do tend to do that if you give them enough time, because they're spinning and gravity will collapse everything down eventually, except along the plane of their spin. They can resist gravity a little bit, which is why they end up as discs, so in sort of one direction they can collapse, and along the other two dimensions on that plane they end up sort of spinning around, which is how you get a flat solar system and a flat galaxy. Eventually, though, we think that gravity will win, that those things will bump against each other and lose angular momentum, or they will radiate gravitational waves and lose that energy, and eventually we think that gravitationally bound objects will all collapse together, first into one big galaxy and then eventually just into one big black hole yike.
But before that happens, we can see other kinds of structures, right, bigger structures, So like a group of galaxies can be part of a larger kind of thing.
Yeah, So we call this either a group or a cluster of galaxies, And depending on the size, like if there aren't that many galaxies in it, like in ours, we call it a group. If there are more galaxies in it, you can call it a cluster. And so nearby, for example, is the Virgo cluster. It has more than a thousand galaxies that are like the Milky Way, so it's much much bigger than the local group. And we think that is also like an object that has structure, we think it's going to hold itself together, that there's enough gravity to keep itself together.
Yeah, isn't it pretty amazing to think? Even at these numbers, like a thousand, A thousand doesn't sound like a lot, But if you imagine a thousand galaxies like the Milky Way, that is sort of mind blowing. Right, Like, we think our galaxy is pretty huge and we'll probably never get to the other side of it, and has billions of stars. Now imagine there are thousands of these things out there in space.
And the thing that blows my mind is the planets. Right, even in our galaxy, we know there are hundreds of billions of stars, and a significant fraction of those have Earth like planets. You know, planet about the same size, with about the same surface temperature. We don't really know that much more about them, but like, that's a lot of Earth like planets. We're talking about tens of billions just in our galaxy, and now multiply that by a thousand for all the galaxies in the Virgo cluster. It's hard to keep track of, like all the places aliens could be sharpening their barbecue tools.
Yeah, so let's not think about that. Man, Yeah, I agree with you.
But the Virgo cluster is like the biggest thing around. There are other little galaxy groups nearby, like there's the M eighty one group and the Sculptor group, other little groups of galaxies that are sort of in this sort of the same size as our group. But the Virgo cluster is like the big Papa and Mama galaxy cluster nearby. It's like the most massive thing in the nearby universe.
Well, it's interesting with gravity, I feel, because gravity doesn't have a limit, right, Like there's no distance limit for gravity, Like this Virgo cluster is super dup or duper far away from us. But technically speaking, like the atoms in my body and in your body and everybody's bodies is being tugged pulled by the gravity of that cluster is super far away.
That's right. Everything in the universe technically is pulling on you gravitationally. Gravity does have this weakness though, which is that its power drops as the distance squared. So if you're twice as far away from something, its gravity goes down by a factor of four. If you're ten times further away, then the gravity goes down by a factor of one hundred, and this gets to be a very powerful obstacle to gravity as distances grow large. And so the Virgo cluster, even though it's the most massive thing in the nearby universe, it's like fifty or sixty million light years away. That's a big distance to square, right, So its gravity is really tiny, which is why it's not obvious whether our little group, the local group, and the Virgo cluster should be considered as part of some larger object.
Right. It gets attenuated a lot, it weakened a lot by distance, but it's still there, right, Like I feel like like I'm sensing I have this feeling of like a small tendril of force that pulls me from the atoms in my body to the Virgo cluster, right, And it also kind of depends like, what if the Virgo cluster was super duper massive, right, we would eventually feel their gravity.
Yeah, that's true, and we do feel it's gravity. You're absolutely right. I feel like you're just sort of preparing an argument for when the aliens come and you're like, hey man, we're all part of the same thing, and we can feel your gravity, and we do and we can feel that gravity. And there's another way in which we are connected to those objects. Right now, we're just thinking mostly about the stars, the things that shine brightly, but there are these filaments that connect us to the other galaxies. Like between us and Andrama is not empty space. There's this filament, this string of both matter like hydrogen atoms, et cetera, and also dark matter. So it's not like a bunch of dots out in space. These galaxies they're connected to each other. It's part of some huge cosmic web where the other parts are more invisible because they're not glowing.
Yeah, it's sort of like a spider's web, right the universe. Like if you look at a picture of the universe and all the stars in it, the stars, even though they're pinpoints, they sort of don't look like a random white noise. They sort of look like a spider's web kind of mm hmm.
And in between those dots there really is stuff. You know, galaxies form in certain locations because that happens to be where there was a little bit more dark matter. So there's like a blob of dark matter there that's gathered together enough light to start fusion going in those stars, but between them there are these filaments of gas and dark matter still flowing into those halos. So you could think about it like a network of lakes with rivers flowing into them, still filling them up. So galaxies are still gathering dark matter and gas from these filaments. Structure there is still sort of forming. Even though fourteen billion years have gone by, Things are still happening out there in the universe.
I guess if there's a big cloud of something like hydrogen out there in the middle of empty space, gravity would be pulling it together, that cloud together into a smaller cloud, and then our gravity would be and the gravity of other clusters would be trying to suck that gas towards them. And so that's why maybe you get these tendrils, these sort of like tentacles of gas out there in space, because they're being stretched out and sucked into the different galaxies.
Exactly, and mostly it's the dark matter doing that. Remember, we only see the visible matter, but that's twenty percent of the matter that's out there, most of the gravity in the universe. Most of those tendrils you feel from the other cluster are actually from the dark matter in that cluster. Because that's most of the matter and so most of the gravity in the universe. Like, the reason we have a galaxy here and not somewhere else is because there was dark matter to form this structure. It created this like gravitational well, the sort of lake to pull all the other rivers of matter into it.
Cool Well, after a cluster of galaxies, what's next?
So what's next is a little bit controversial, and in the last ten years or so there's been a lot of argument about it. But there's a group of astronomers out there that say that all these clusters and these little groups can be gathered together into something bigger, called a supercluster. The supercluster would take like the Virgo cluster and our little group, and a bunch of other things, including like the Great Attractor and the Normal cluster and the Centauris cluster and many others into some huge object that has like one hundred thousand galaxies in it.
Right, And this supercluster is called the lani Kiak supercluster. Right.
Yeah. It's a Hawaiian word that means immense heaven, and it was defined in like twenty fourteen when a bunch of astronomers looked at the velocity of all these things and said, you know what, all these things are sort of like falling towards themselves, and there's another blob of stuff over there that's falling towards themselves. And so they figured out how to sort of like draw a line between one set of blobs and another set of blobs, and they said, we're in this blob over here.
Mmm.
I see. But can you make the mathematical calculation, like if you compute the gravity that we're feeling between these clusters, does it really work out that you can group these superclusters as one or is it more like an illusion like a wisp of cloud or a crowd of people in a park.
Yeah, that's exactly the question, and that's really what we're answering today is what is the future of this supercluster? Is it going to hold itself together or is it going to get torn apart? Because we've been talking about gravity so far, but there's another force at play here, and that's dark energy. If it was only gravity, then this thing would collapse landi Ko would definitely fall into one big object and maybe form one super galaxy and one super black hole. There is enough gravity if the universe wasn't expanding to pull this thing together, like it's already right now falling inwards. Everything in the Lanti Kia Supercluster has an overall in falling velocity. But there's another player on this stage, right, which is the expansion of the universe. And this has a very different behavior as distances grow large. Like gravity gets weaker and weaker as distances grow large. But dark energy, this accelerating expansion of the universe, gets more powerful as distances grow large. So at some point it takes over. There's like a crossover point where dark energy starts to win.
Well, let's dig into that, Giuse. That is the main question of the episode. Now we are in the Lenni Kia Supercluster, and so the question is is something tearing it apart. It's the biggest structure in the universe. And so Danny, you're saying that maybe dark energy is tearing it apart, or maybe at least fraying it at the edges.
Yeah, dark energy is definitely working to tear it apart. And listeners right in all the time and ask about dark energy and have this idea sometimes that dark energy is something happening at the edges of the universe, that there's something pulling on us from the outside, or that maybe the expansion is only happening out there between galaxies, but the expansion is happening everywhere. Every chunk of space is expanding. Like the Hubble constant is a measure of how fast things are expanding, and it's like seventy kilometers per second per megaparsek, which is sort of a hard thing to get your mind around, but really it just means that like every megaparsec, which is like three light years, grows by about seventy kilometers every second, and that happens everywhere in space. If you have a smaller distance, like the distance between the Earth and the Sun, which is only a few tens of millions of miles, it would grow by a much smaller amount than seventy kilometers every second. So that expansion is happening everywhere, but it's sort of faint and weak. It's not very strong over short distances, and gravity is strong enough to hold us together against this like very weak breeze of dark energy. But then at large distances, when gravity is weak, dark energy is more powerful. It sort of adds up as you get to these bigger distances, and so for the supercluster, it really is an interesting question of whether that's the crossover point.
Yeah, it's interesting to think about. Like even here in the room where I'm at and the room where you are and where listeners are, if you just stare at your hand, like the space that your hand is occupying is expanding, it's getting trying to like pull your hand apart in a way, except that your hand is being held together by the bonds of the atoms in it. But if it wasn't your hand, which is kind of dissipate eventually, right.
Yeah, exactly, if there wasn't gravity and there weren't those forces, then dark energy would pull your hand apart, and it would pull the Earth from the Sun. So there's a bunch of really interesting things all happening at the same time. Like gravity needs time to form structure. You start from like a fuzzy universe, and it gradually pulls things together, and so as time goes on, gravity makes bigger and bigger and bigger structures. So one reason we don't have bigger structures than superclusters, or even if superclusters counter structure is just time. Like without dark energy, if you ran the universe forward, it would form larger and larger and larger structures. But dark energy turned on a few billion years ago and it started accelerating the expansion of the universe. So gravity is sort of running out of time, which means something kind of fascinating. It means that we are living maybe at the moment of the largest structures in the universe.
Well, I think that's kind of the point of discussion, is like, is dark energy eventually going to tear our supercluster apart? Or is maybe that expansion not strong enough to really tear apart and keep things the way they are forever, Right, that's kind of the question we're asking today.
Yeah, that's right. But whether or not our supercluster survives, there will never be anything bigger in the universe because dark energy is getting more and more powerful, and so gravity will never have time to make anything bigger. Like if a structure hasn't formed by now in the universe, it will not because dark energy is just growing in power. So whether or not our supercluster survives, nothing bigger than anything that's been made already will ever be made.
Well, let's dig into that and what it might mean for our local structure or superstructure of galaxies. Does that reduce our chances of getting eaten by aliens? We'll see first, let's take another quick break.
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All right, we're talking about getting eaten by aliens, now, Daniel, are you sort of prepared? It sounds like you look forward to it. Are you preparing yourself? Are you staying in shape or are you trying to fatten yourself like like your goose, so that you're tastier to the aliens? You know, tag on those calories.
I just don't even know, Like what do aliens like? How am I supposed to anticipate what they're gonna find? Yummy?
Like?
So I'm just living my life, you know, and hoping hoping that they.
I'm hoping they pick you two over me.
Hey, something we can agree on? Awesome?
Well, we're talking about whether we're actually talking about whether our supercluster, which is called lanny Kia, which is a cluster of galaxy clusters, will one day be torn apart because of dark energy. Now, dark energy is expanding all space as far as we know, and the question is is it expanding space faster than lenny Kia can hold itself together? And it sounds like you have the answer to that.
I do. Yeah. So originally they defined a supercluster to be this object because everything was sort of falling in towards itself. That like delineated a blob of stuff that was moving towards itself, and the next supercluster is a blob that's moving towards itself. But then astronomers thought, hm, that's not really enough. Like what we want is something that's going to survive. We wanted to find a supercluster to be something that is going to manage to hold itself together against dark energy. So they did a bunch of calculations and it looks like it's probably not gonna make it. It looks like the supercluster is very loosely organized. It's just more like a cloud or like a crowd, you know, it happens to be nearby, but it's not really like in equilibrium, you know, like the Earth and the Sun had a lot of time to sort of get in balance and find a place where they're happy together, and the Earth can orbit forever and be here. But the supercluster, like we said earlier, hasn't really had a lot of time to gather together and to form something solid. It's just sort of like a big blob of stuff that happened to be near each other and are starting to fall in a little bit. But dark energy is powerful enough that they're pretty sure it's going to tear it apart.
Now you mentioned one of the reasons is that dark energy is getting stronger. Now, is it getting stronger at the local level or is it just are you're saying it's getting stronger because the universe is getting bigger and so therefore there's more dark energy. Is it getting stronger measureably like inside of my hand, Is this dark energy that I would feel over the course of my life getting stronger or is it going to be constant?
Dark energy is everywhere at the same level, so it's a constant in space here and there and in other gallon every chunk of space has the same amount of dark energy. So when the universe expands, it's making more space, which means more dark energy doesn't get diluted. It's a constant in space. That's not true for other stuff like matter or radiation. As the universe expands, matter gets more dilute because more space doesn't mean more matter. So as time goes on, the expansion of the universe means dark energy is constant. But then it's an increasing fraction of the energy of the universe because it doesn't get diluted and other stuff does. And when dark energy is an increasing fraction, that triggers more expansion, which only tills the balance further towards dark energy. So it's like a runaway effect. Once dark energy starts to win, which happened about six billion years ago, it will zoom ahead and be impossible to catch up to. But about seeing it change. We live such short lives that we can't really notice it changing on our time scales, but we can look back into the past by looking out into deep space and seeing how things used to be. And of course there's a huge asterisk to all of this because we don't really understand dark energy and what's going on and what making this happen, and so the rules could be very different from this very simple model that honestly we're pretty sure is wrong.
Right, Well, I guess what I mean is that, you know, we've always talked about dark energy as being kind of the force that's expanding the universe, expanding space, and I always think of it as sort of like the foot in the accelerator. So like when I'm driving, I press the accelerator and I usually leave it at a certain level to keep going at a certain speed. And if I want to accelerate go faster, I press it harder, and if I want to go slower, I let go of the pedal. And now it sort of seems from what I've we've talked about before that is that, you know, the pedal of dark energy is sort of pretty constant. And for example, our Solar system is never going to be torn apart by dark energy because the gravitational bonds between us and the Sun is strong enough. But even if the space between us gets bigger and bigger and bigger, we're always going to hang on to the Sun.
Dark energy is expanding the space in our Solar system, but it doesn't have much effect over those short distances. And short distances is when gravity is the most powerful. So gravity is always going to be powerful enough to hold the Solar System together if dark energy is a constant in space. Remember, a constant in space can still be an increasing fraction of the universe's energy budget, which leads to accelerating expansion, even if the dark energy in any given chunk of space isn't changing except for the scenario of the Big Rip where dark energy gets more powerful and even tears our Solar system apart and even our atoms. But you're right, in our current projection of dark energy, it will not tear apart our Solar system.
Right, and so it's because it's not being accelerated enough. Now, at the level of a galaxy, do we currently think that our galaxy is going to be torn apart or not?
We think our galaxy is going to survive, and we think our group is going to survive. So everything below a supercluster, we're pretty sure gravity is already won and it's going to continue to win again. Assuming this naive projection of dark energy continuing at the same rate that it's been continuing, that it's not going to ramp up into the big rip or turn around into the big crunch. So our solar system will survive. Our galaxy will survive, our local group will survive. The Virgo cluster nearby will survive. But the question is will our supercluster survive. And that's where dark energy starts to win. Dark energy will tear these groups of galaxies apart and basically pull apart.
Lenika because the things that make up Lenikaia, you know, our cluster, the Virgo cluster, the great attractor. They are being attracted to each other, but not more than the expansion of the huge amount of space in between them. That's kind of what you're saying.
Yeah, it's just too big, right. Gravity gets weak over those huge distances. It does not have the strength to overcome dark energy. And as the distances get bigger, dark energy becomes harder and harder to surmount. Like it doesn't take that much mass and that much gravity to overcome dark energy in our solar system. It takes more mass to overcome the dark energy in the galaxy, and even more to overcome the dark energy of the group. But to overcome the dark energy of the supercluster, we need an incredible amount of mass because of the vast distances involved.
So you're saying that lanni Kia the supercluster of galaxies, It's really more like a visual cluster, right, It's more of a visual structure. It looks like it's sort of holding together. It looks like a wisp of cloud or a crowd of people in the park, but really there's nothing that much holding it together, or at least proportionally to the dark energy in the universe.
Yeah, our supercluster seems to be right about that turnover point where things that are smaller or more massive either one would survive and things that are bigger definitely would not. So sort of fascinating. It's like the biggest kind of blog we can identify. But it's not really technically a structure. So there were some papers a few years ago suggesting we shouldn't be calling leni Ka a supercluster because it's not a structure, and they said, maybe we should redefine what a structure is as something that will survive in the future, right, things that will hold themselves together in the long term after dark energy has played itself out. So by that definition, the lani Ka supercluster is not actually a structure, and we shouldn't even be calling it a supercluster.
Well, I mean, as long as you're playing with definitions, you can get either way. I feel like, right, like you could just redefine what a super cluster means. A supercluster could just mean like a cloud or a crowd in a park. Right, Maybe you could just define a supercluster as not necessarily a structure, but you can still call it a super cluster, right because a cluster, the word cluster just means like, hey, hanging out together.
Mm hmm, I suppose. I mean, you could call it a banana if you wanted. Yeah, we want these words to have some meaning to them, and so these papers suggest that we shouldn't. And they actually suggest another name because there are some other superclusters that they do think will hold themselves together. So some superclusters are more massive or a little bit closer together, and they think they will overcome dark energy, and they suggest calling these things superstise clusters. What it's a word in Latin that means survivor probably not pronouncing it correctly, but I think it's supersts clusters. It's the new name for superclusters that will survive dark energy.
It sounds like we're really rather about way for what did you say, what did you just call them structures like superstructures? Why do we have to go Latin?
Well, because you know, not all superclusters are structures. They don't hold themselves together. And you're right, we could just put a name on things. But we like this hierarchy of structures. We like thinking about the universe in terms of the structures all the way down from the proton zooming out to the biggest structures in the universe. And we want a consistency there. We want it to mean something. For there to be a structure you don't want just like an arbitrary definition at every level.
Well, I feel like maybe you're only having to adjust this definition because of dark energy, right, Like, if it wasn't for dark energy, Yeah, Lenny, care would be a structure and it would be gravitational bound and it would last until the end of time. But you have dark energy, which will make it fuzzy up in the future, except that you don't know what dark energy is going to do, right, So it seems a little bit like you're rushing ahead to redefine everything based on something you don't know what's going to happen.
Well, you know, astronomers love fights over names and definitions and who gets to name something, so this is one of the hot topics these days. But you're right that the definition of depends a little bit on what happens in the future. In that sense, it's sort of like the way you think about an event horizon for a black hole, Like the event horizon isn't a physical structure. It's just like a delineation that says anything passed here in the infinite future will never escape. To really know that, you have to see the infinite future, we just sort of project it and in the same way we like group this stuff together and say, hey, is this going to survive? Is so that we can call it a cluster or a structure or a supercluster or a superstise cluster or whatever the astronomers finally settle on. But the basic story is that if dark energy continues the way it has been, probably lani Kea will just dissolve into a bunch of islands of mass.
It sounds more like you're saying that we shouldn't call anything anything until the end of time.
Go that's exactly right. We want to be totally accurate about everything. We've got to wait to the end of the universe. Then we'll know what was going on.
Well, let's spend a minute here because if we still have like a few minutes left here talking about the dark energy, right, because it seems like it all depends on what dark energy is going to do, whether the universe is going to press harder on the accelerator or press lower on the accelerator. What's been the history of that, Like since the beginning of the universe, there was a huge expansion and then it slowed down and now it's picking back up again.
Right, Yeah, that's true. And there's sort of a bunch of different time periods to talk about there, Like there was inflation very very early on, huge expansion very short time scales. We don't understand what caused that at all. There's a few theories insuloton field, whatever, but it's a big question mark. And then after that, you know what we call the Big Bang, the sort of like more gradual expansion of the universe as it cools. We have pretty good models of that. We have gravity, and we have dark energy, and we have all the other forces that come into play, and in that period, we can model dark energy as constant, saying like a chunk of space has the same amount of potential energy, and that creates this repulsive field in general relativity, which drives the expansion of the universe. Remember that dark energy can be a constant in space, every chunk has the same amount, but still be a growing fraction of the universe's energy because other stuff is getting diluted as things expand. So dark energy is both constant and taking over as other things get more dilute. It's not exactly true, because we make these measurements over time we get slightly different answers, so nobody really knows if that's true or it needs a little bit of adjusting. We had a whole episode about early dark energy, whether dark energy was more powerful early on this kind of stuff. But mostly we can explain the history of the universe after that first inflationary period. We can explain it assuming dark energy is constant. So that seems to be a reasonable assumption.
Meaning that the universe is not pressing the accelerator faster, it's just kind of leaving it on.
That's right, it's pressing the accelerator at the same level, meaning every part of space has the same amount of dark energy. But eventually that does take over. You know, like when you press the accelerator on your car. There are other things keeping you from going faster and faster, right, there's friction and this error resistance whatever. That doesn't quite apply to this model, because in this model, the level that the accelerator is at ends up speeding us up. It's like winning against the other forces. So it really is accelerating the expansion of the universe. So sort of two different ideas there. One is the amount of dark energy in space is constant, but because it overcomes the other things, it ends up accelerating the expansion of the universe.
Meaning that the space is growing at an accelerated rate. But is that acceleration getting faster or is it slowing down or is it pretty constant.
We think that acceleration itself is pretty constant, yes, And we can track that back through the history of the universe and see if that explains our history, and it mostly does. Again, there's some questions there about the early first few bits you might have read about, like different measurements of the Hubble constant that we can't quite reconcile. And that's what that's about. Is that level of acceleration the same all the way through time or not It is it or not? We think that it is, but we don't quite know that these measurements that we can't quite reconcile.
I guess it's kind of the difference of whether dark energy is a constant like a number in your equations of the universe, or is it a variable that somehow feeds in it itself or that maybe has a little button that you know, the makers of the universe are increasing exactly.
Yeah, right now, we can describe it just using a number. It's a cosmological constant. We don't know where that number comes from or why it is what it is. We have really no explanation for it. But we can mostly describe the history of the universe using just a number for dark energy.
All right, Well, it sounds like the answer to the question of the episode is yes. It sounds like, as far as we know, if things stay the same with dark energy, our super cluster of galaxies that we live in will be torn apart sometime in the future.
That's right, So our more immedia cosmic neighborhood is safe and probably will eventually collapse into a black hole. But the Virgo cluster will not be in our neighborhood forever. Dark energy will take over and pull us apart from it.
It's going to be declustered, but we won't know, I guess until the end of time.
That's right, So we'll do our five millionth episode at the end of time and we'll answer this question definitively.
So maybe I shouldn't call you a person, Daniel, because eventually, who knows, maybe aliens will come and tear you apart. We just have to wait and see before we call you a person.
That's true. From that point of view. None of us are.
Structured, So I'll be lunch in our future, Hey, fellow, lunch.
Meat ashes to ashes, dust to lunch.
And lunch to something else. Once the eighties digestus, all right, Well, pretty interesting lesson to think about, not just like our place in the universe and how small we are compared to these enormous clusters of galaxies, but also about the permanence of the universe, like even something as huge as a super cluster Lenny Kia, it may not be around for the entire life of the universe.
That's right, and think about these incredibly powerful, vast forces at play, tugging on these galaxies with millions and billions of stars, all in a battle against dark energy. It's really a very dynamical place if you think about the universe and sort of fast forward. It's slashing, it's frothing, it's doing a lot.
All right. We hope you enjoyed that. 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. 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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