Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / The biggest collisions in the Universe
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Hey everyone, Daniel here, we have a little bit of
- 0:02Speaker 1: a special treat for you today. Earlier this year, Jorge
- 0:05Speaker 1: and I recorded a special episode with audio and video
- 0:09Speaker 1: for premiering in the Metaverse, and today we are bringing
- 0:13Speaker 1: it to you on the feed as a special bonus episode.
- 0:17Speaker 1: It's a bit different from our usual episodes, but we
- 0:19Speaker 1: thought you'd enjoy it. Thanks for listening. Hey, Jorge, is
- 0:32Speaker 1: this the way to the metaverse? I met a donna?
- 0:35Speaker 1: Where is the metaverse? I don't know. I was supposed
- 0:36Speaker 1: to meet you there to do an episode. Are we
- 0:38Speaker 1: in the right place? Let me see every saying. We're
- 0:41Speaker 1: inside of simulation right now, this is a virtual conversation.
- 0:44Speaker 1: It might be a simulation within a simulation. That's so meta. Well,
- 0:48Speaker 1: that is the most interesting theory I've ever meta. Maybe
- 0:51Speaker 1: in the end, none of it really met us. Hey,
- 1:09Speaker 1: we made us to our land. On our podcast, Daniel
- 1:13Speaker 1: and Horrie explain the universe. We like to talk about
- 1:15Speaker 1: planets and galaxies, but we never thought we'd get to
- 1:18Speaker 1: do it from another world, and here we are in
- 1:20Speaker 1: our heart land. How cool? Is then? So cool? Now?
- 1:23Speaker 1: On our podcast, Jorge and I typically talk about some
- 1:26Speaker 1: of the biggest most amazing unanswered questions in the universe,
- 1:30Speaker 1: and today we have some really fun stories about the
- 1:32Speaker 1: biggest collisions in the universe. Planets colliding with other planets,
- 1:36Speaker 1: stars colliding with other stars, even galaxies hitting other galaxies.
- 1:41Speaker 1: But before we start, we want to give a shout
- 1:43Speaker 1: out to our partners State Farm and of course Fortnite
- 1:46Speaker 1: for having us here. Hi'm Ho I'm a cartoonist and
- 1:48Speaker 1: the creator of PhD comics. Hi I'm Daniel. I'm a
- 1:51Speaker 1: particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I
- 1:54Speaker 1: love to smash things together to figure out what they're
- 1:57Speaker 1: made out of. Welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Horta
- 1:59Speaker 1: explained to universe in production of our heart Radio, in
- 2:02Speaker 1: which we try to smash your brain together with the
- 2:05Speaker 1: whole universe. We think that there are so many interesting
- 2:08Speaker 1: things to understand out there. We want to bring your
- 2:10Speaker 1: brain together with all of those questions and give you
- 2:13Speaker 1: some understanding of how things work. So today we'll be
- 2:16Speaker 1: breaking down some of the biggest collisions in the universe.
- 2:19Speaker 1: You know, that's kind of a tricky word to these
- 2:22Speaker 1: biggest because especially in physics, that can mean a lot
- 2:24Speaker 1: of things, Like you can mean biggest in size. It
- 2:27Speaker 1: can mean biggest in speed, or biggest just in terms
- 2:30Speaker 1: of the impact that we have on our planet, or
- 2:33Speaker 1: biggest in drama. Right, we do for drama. So what
- 2:39Speaker 1: would you say are some of the biggest collisions in
- 2:41Speaker 1: the universe. Well, we do some pretty fast collisions here
- 2:44Speaker 1: on Earth. We accelerate protons to almost the speed of
- 2:48Speaker 1: light and smash them together underground in Switzerland. So you
- 2:52Speaker 1: have a proton going in the speed of light this way,
- 2:54Speaker 1: proton going to speed of light this way. That's a
- 2:56Speaker 1: pretty dramatic collision. That's pretty big stuff. That's the biggest,
- 3:00Speaker 1: one of the biggest experiments humans have ever done. Yeah. Absolutely,
- 3:03Speaker 1: It's one of the most expensive and one of the
- 3:04Speaker 1: biggest experiments. So I'm here. I'm basically a shill for
- 3:07Speaker 1: big collision because it's my day job. And you said
- 3:10Speaker 1: you smash protons together, which is which are tiny little
- 3:13Speaker 1: particles that are part of the atom. So every we're
- 3:16Speaker 1: we're all made out of atoms, of course, and the
- 3:18Speaker 1: atoms are made out of stuff inside of them, including
- 3:20Speaker 1: electrons and protons. Yeah, so we take hydrogen, which is
- 3:24Speaker 1: a proton and electron, we pull away the electron because
- 3:27Speaker 1: we're not interested. And then we just smash the protons
- 3:29Speaker 1: the hydrogen nuclei together, and sometimes just like proton debris
- 3:34Speaker 1: comes out, and sometimes weird new stuff comes out where
- 3:37Speaker 1: any weird new stuff. But one of the amazing things
- 3:41Speaker 1: about collisions with particles is that what comes out doesn't
- 3:44Speaker 1: just have to be a rearrangement at what went in.
- 3:46Speaker 1: You can actually annihilate it and turn it into something new,
- 3:49Speaker 1: like a Higgs boson or a photon or a z
- 3:52Speaker 1: boson or something you didn't even know existed. Now, how
- 3:56Speaker 1: do you smash these protons together? You have like slingshots
- 3:59Speaker 1: to p pull back and they to scientists stand in
- 4:02Speaker 1: front of each other and then pull back and smash
- 4:04Speaker 1: the protests together. How does that work? That we take
- 4:06Speaker 1: the protons, we push them really hard with electric fields,
- 4:09Speaker 1: and then we bend them with magnets, so they go
- 4:10Speaker 1: around in a circle and we do that over and
- 4:12Speaker 1: over and over again until they're going really really fast
- 4:15Speaker 1: and we have another beam going the other direction, and
- 4:17Speaker 1: then we crossed them. So that's one of maybe one
- 4:20Speaker 1: of the fastest collisions that we know about as scientists
- 4:23Speaker 1: in the universe. And it's weird because we actually are
- 4:26Speaker 1: making that collision, but it actually doesn't even compete with
- 4:29Speaker 1: what the universe is already doing all the time. What
- 4:32Speaker 1: you mean, there are things in the universe smashing close
- 4:35Speaker 1: to each to each each other faster than twice the
- 4:38Speaker 1: speed of light. Absolutely, the universe is filled with huge
- 4:41Speaker 1: particle accelerators that are throwing particles at us that are
- 4:44Speaker 1: colliding with the Earth much faster than the particles are
- 4:47Speaker 1: moving in the Hadron collider. Okay, so that's maybe another
- 4:50Speaker 1: type of collision of things smashing together that we can
- 4:53Speaker 1: talk about is cosmic rays coming from space exactly. Cosmic
- 4:58Speaker 1: rays are a fancy word, but they just particles in
- 5:01Speaker 1: space zipping towards the Earth and then smashing in the
- 5:04Speaker 1: atmosphere like tiny little meteors. Now, these things normally would
- 5:08Speaker 1: be kind of dangerous, right like if you're hit by
- 5:11Speaker 1: even even though they're tiny particles, if it's going fast
- 5:13Speaker 1: enough and it hits it, it can actually kind of
- 5:15Speaker 1: um not be good for you. The atmosphere is like
- 5:18Speaker 1: a blanket that protects us. They hit the atmosphere and
- 5:20Speaker 1: they bounce against particles in the atmosphere and they lose
- 5:23Speaker 1: a little bit of energy by the time they get
- 5:24Speaker 1: down to the surface. Instead of having one particle with
- 5:27Speaker 1: a lot of energy, you have like trillions with a
- 5:29Speaker 1: little bit of energy. So we see these big showers
- 5:32Speaker 1: of particles hit the surface of the Earth. Alright, But
- 5:34Speaker 1: then it's a good thing we have our atmosphere to
- 5:36Speaker 1: protect us from these cosmic rays. It's like a dangerous Exactly,
- 5:40Speaker 1: if you're an atmosphere, you go out into space, you
- 5:42Speaker 1: really need to think about shielding because there's a lot
- 5:45Speaker 1: of crazy stuff out there in space. Maybe you think
- 5:47Speaker 1: about space as being empty, but really it's filled with
- 5:49Speaker 1: high energy particles whizzing all around. It's quite dangerous. Asteroids,
- 5:53Speaker 1: rocks from space that come flying towards the Earth, they
- 5:56Speaker 1: kind of get burned up in our atmosphere because they
- 5:58Speaker 1: hit that air and then they create all that friction
- 6:01Speaker 1: and then they burn up before they hit the Earth. Right. Yeah,
- 6:03Speaker 1: the atmosphere is like a big buffer, and if the
- 6:05Speaker 1: rock isn't too big or going too fast, then it
- 6:07Speaker 1: melts in the atmosphere, sort of the way like spaceships
- 6:10Speaker 1: when they re enter the atmosphere, they get heated up.
- 6:13Speaker 1: The same thing happens to asteroids and meteors that hit
- 6:15Speaker 1: the atmosphere. Well, but I just said, speed and energy
- 6:18Speaker 1: are really important, right, And sometimes we want to create
- 6:22Speaker 1: these collisions like once we talked about. I know you
- 6:25Speaker 1: were doing to study things and also what we observe
- 6:28Speaker 1: out up there in the sky, but sometimes we want
- 6:31Speaker 1: to create these collisions, maybe even to save the planet Earth. Yeah,
- 6:34Speaker 1: this is pretty cool. I don't know how many of
- 6:36Speaker 1: you know this out there. Put NASA, the Space Agency
- 6:39Speaker 1: of the US, has a program called the Planetary Defense System, right,
- 6:44Speaker 1: like that somebody's job is to literally like stand there
- 6:47Speaker 1: and be ready to save the Earth. I'm glad somebody's
- 6:50Speaker 1: doing it, because it's not my job. You're trying to
- 6:53Speaker 1: save the Earth on a daily basis, And so this work,
- 6:56Speaker 1: this happened recently. They send the what did they sound like,
- 6:58Speaker 1: a spaceship, like a little spacecraft, and then they just
- 7:01Speaker 1: accelerated it and aimed it towards this asterid. Yeah, the
- 7:04Speaker 1: spacecraft it's like the sizing weight of a refrigerator. So
- 7:07Speaker 1: they basically slammed a fridge against a big rock in space.
- 7:11Speaker 1: I like an ostril fridge. That would have been pretty cool.
- 7:14Speaker 1: I mean they stocked it first. You know, it's filled
- 7:16Speaker 1: with good drinks and all sorts of stuff like a
- 7:18Speaker 1: normal fridge. You know, it's like a huge cube of metal.
- 7:21Speaker 1: And they just slammed it right into the asteroid to
- 7:23Speaker 1: see if they could change its course and it did
- 7:26Speaker 1: right where was going before and they hit it, hit
- 7:29Speaker 1: it with the fridge spaceship and then they noticed that
- 7:33Speaker 1: the asteroid kind of change course. Right, Yeah, yeah, it
- 7:36Speaker 1: really did. So as a university professor, it's my job
- 7:42Speaker 1: to add a pop quiz to every situation. Well, ask
- 7:45Speaker 1: multiple questions and you answer by jumping on the square.
- 7:48Speaker 1: With the right answer, you get it right, you win rewards.
- 7:51Speaker 1: If you get it wrong, you'll get bounced out. Ready good,
- 7:55Speaker 1: because it's time for how fan are you? What happens
- 7:58Speaker 1: when black holes collide? It is it A, they explode,
- 8:03Speaker 1: b the universe ends? See you get one big black
- 8:07Speaker 1: hole or D. Nobody knows. The correct answer is c.
- 8:17Speaker 1: Nothing can destroy a black holes. They just get bigger
- 8:20Speaker 1: when they eat other things, including other black holes. So
- 8:26Speaker 1: we're talking about the biggest collisions in the universe, and
- 8:29Speaker 1: we talked about the fastest ones that we know about,
- 8:32Speaker 1: but you can also maybe think about biggest in terms
- 8:35Speaker 1: of like impact, right, like how it can affect us
- 8:39Speaker 1: here on Earth. Well, the Earth is getting hit by
- 8:41Speaker 1: this stuff all the time. We can't deflect all of it.
- 8:43Speaker 1: A lot of it gets melted by the atmosphere. But
- 8:46Speaker 1: in our history we have been smacked by some pretty
- 8:48Speaker 1: big asteroids. Like the dinosaurs were not as on point
- 8:52Speaker 1: as NASA is in terms of planetary defense, so they
- 8:55Speaker 1: got smacked by a pretty big rock about sixty five
- 8:58Speaker 1: million years ago. It killed off like fifty percent of
- 9:01Speaker 1: all the species on Earth actually in about an afternoon.
- 9:05Speaker 1: It would changed life on Earth forever, right, like we're
- 9:07Speaker 1: here because dinosaurs are not. That's right. It made room
- 9:10Speaker 1: for us mammals, So thank you alien asteroid tossers or
- 9:14Speaker 1: whoever is responsible for that had awesome theory. But then
- 9:18Speaker 1: asteroid by Throne was thrown by enemies of the dinosaurs species. No.
- 9:23Speaker 1: But one of my favorite theories is that they have
- 9:25Speaker 1: reconstructed the path of this asteroid before hit the Earth,
- 9:28Speaker 1: and they think it made two passes around and came
- 9:31Speaker 1: near the Earth before it actually hit, which means that
- 9:33Speaker 1: dinosaurs could have looked up into the sky and seen
- 9:35Speaker 1: it like ten years before it hit. The hit the Earth.
- 9:38Speaker 1: So they had their chance, right, they were warned, they
- 9:41Speaker 1: had their science together, they'd still be here, they'd be
- 9:44Speaker 1: doing this podcast instead of us. If that happened again,
- 9:48Speaker 1: would we be Do you think we'd be able to survive?
- 9:50Speaker 1: What do you think if like it gets past the
- 9:53Speaker 1: nasid defense system, it would be pretty challenging. What actually
- 9:57Speaker 1: happens depends a lot on where it hits. If it
- 9:59Speaker 1: hits in the water, then you're getting a lot of
- 10:01Speaker 1: vapor in the atmosphere. It hits on land and you're
- 10:03Speaker 1: getting smoke and getting volcanoes. None of that is going
- 10:06Speaker 1: to be very easy to survive. In order like remedy that,
- 10:09Speaker 1: you need planet wide geoengineering projects, and I just don't
- 10:13Speaker 1: think we're capable of today to start building those bunkers,
- 10:19Speaker 1: start investing and big beans. I hear those last a
- 10:23Speaker 1: long time. Question to what particles are collided in the
- 10:29Speaker 1: Large Hadron Collider A large hadrons, B protons, see photons,
- 10:38Speaker 1: D electrons. The correct answer is beat protons, which are
- 10:49Speaker 1: a type of hadron, and they're used in the Large
- 10:51Speaker 1: Hadron Collider. But that's also not the first time an
- 10:56Speaker 1: asteroids hid Earth. Yeah, we think there's a whole history
- 10:59Speaker 1: of these collisions dating back millions and millions of years.
- 11:03Speaker 1: But we also think that very early in the Earth's
- 11:05Speaker 1: formation there was an enormous collision. A whole planet hit
- 11:09Speaker 1: the early Earth. What Yeah, Actually, we do think that
- 11:12Speaker 1: there were other planets in the Solar System which got
- 11:15Speaker 1: ejected by Jupiter's gravity early on, kicked out of the
- 11:19Speaker 1: island off Jupiter. We're the survivor so far. But we
- 11:26Speaker 1: think that a Mars size planet probably hit the early
- 11:29Speaker 1: Earth and created an enormous collision, basically vaporized the whole surface,
- 11:34Speaker 1: and what came out of it turned into the Earth
- 11:36Speaker 1: and our Moon. So we're like, our Earth right now
- 11:39Speaker 1: is actually Earth two point Oh, it wasn't Earth before
- 11:43Speaker 1: that got obliterated and then it reformed again. That's the
- 11:46Speaker 1: Earth we have now, which you know feels like an upgrade, right,
- 11:50Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's pretty good. I got no notes.
- 11:54Speaker 1: So then a comet can hit a planet we saw,
- 11:56Speaker 1: we saw it in the nineties. It hit Jupiter, and
- 12:00Speaker 1: it could hit does And those are actually kind of
- 12:01Speaker 1: more dangerous, right, Those are more dangerous because comments go
- 12:04Speaker 1: really really fast because they come from much further away,
- 12:07Speaker 1: so they have more time to gather speed as they
- 12:09Speaker 1: come towards the Sun, and because they have long orbits,
- 12:13Speaker 1: you might not see them until they're basically headed right
- 12:15Speaker 1: towards you. Like, there could be comments out there right
- 12:18Speaker 1: now that take five years to go around the Sun
- 12:20Speaker 1: and we just haven't seen them yet. Now. I was
- 12:23Speaker 1: around in the nineties when that collision happened. That's when
- 12:26Speaker 1: the comments mashed into Jupiter. But I don't think I
- 12:28Speaker 1: was kind of paying attention. But you were. You were, like,
- 12:31Speaker 1: what else were you doing? Man? You were watching the
- 12:33Speaker 1: live broadcasts of it, right I was. I actually had
- 12:36Speaker 1: a telescope focused on Jupiter and I was taking video
- 12:39Speaker 1: myself because I wanted to see the explosion. Yes, at home,
- 12:42Speaker 1: you could you see it through the telescope like it
- 12:44Speaker 1: actually hit it, Like did it happened fast or in
- 12:46Speaker 1: the slow motion? It happened pretty fast and you can
- 12:48Speaker 1: see these fireballs be created. And each fireball is like
- 12:51Speaker 1: the size of the Earth. We're talking about incredible collisions here.
- 12:55Speaker 1: Fireball like it hits Jupiter, jupiters gas so that to
- 13:00Speaker 1: get into that. But when it hit Jupiter, it created
- 13:02Speaker 1: a fireball like that impact? Was that that? Yeah, there's
- 13:07Speaker 1: so much energy. Jupiter is basically a huge ball of
- 13:09Speaker 1: cotton candy, Like you're saying that, you hit it with
- 13:11Speaker 1: enough energy with a big enough rock, and the rock
- 13:14Speaker 1: gets vaporized in the atmosphere and you create a huge
- 13:18Speaker 1: ball of fire as big as the Earth exactly. So
- 13:22Speaker 1: we're sorry Jupiter, but we're glad it didn't happen us.
- 13:27Speaker 1: That would be bad. N Question three. What collided with
- 13:32Speaker 1: the planet Jupiter in a banana, B, an asteroid, c
- 13:40Speaker 1: aliens or z A comment? Correct Nassas D comment Shoemaker
- 13:52Speaker 1: Levy Clyde into Jupiter in alright, so that that's maybe
- 13:59Speaker 1: the biggest in the sense of the biggest collisions in
- 14:01Speaker 1: the universe. But we said we would talked about the
- 14:04Speaker 1: biggest collisions in the universe. Let's go bigger. Can you
- 14:07Speaker 1: smash stars together? Suns together? Now you've got the trick
- 14:12Speaker 1: of it, right, What would happen if you could smash
- 14:13Speaker 1: stars together? Right? Yeah, yeah, I'd love to see that.
- 14:17Speaker 1: It turns out that's actually quite rare. Our stars in
- 14:20Speaker 1: the galaxy are all swirling together around the center of
- 14:23Speaker 1: the galaxy sort of like a big lazy river. So
- 14:25Speaker 1: it's not very typical for stars to smash into each other,
- 14:28Speaker 1: but sometimes things do smash into each other. It does happen. Now,
- 14:31Speaker 1: what would happen actually happen if two stars collided with
- 14:34Speaker 1: each other. Yeah, it depends entirely on the velocity. If
- 14:37Speaker 1: they're going really fast, then they're going to obliterate each other,
- 14:40Speaker 1: just like what happened with proto Earth and the other planet,
- 14:43Speaker 1: like a huge spray of stuff. It's weird to think
- 14:46Speaker 1: about because we think you think of the Sun is
- 14:48Speaker 1: like a ball of fire, right, and so like if
- 14:50Speaker 1: you take two flames and you smash it together, nothing,
- 14:53Speaker 1: nothing really explodes. But the Sun is actually kind of
- 14:56Speaker 1: pretty neaty, right, Like there's a lot of mass in
- 14:58Speaker 1: the Sun, I mean, the almost all of the mass
- 15:00Speaker 1: in the Solar System, and it is stuff. I mean
- 15:03Speaker 1: it's on fire, but it is stuff. Yeah, it's a
- 15:05Speaker 1: huge ball of plasmids burning hydrogen. And the mass of
- 15:10Speaker 1: the Solar System is in the Sun. And so a
- 15:12Speaker 1: Sun's sun collision could obliterate both of them. It could
- 15:15Speaker 1: spray out a lot of this burning stuff, and the
- 15:18Speaker 1: temperature would be really incredible, so would be super bright.
- 15:21Speaker 1: Because what's happening inside the Sun is fusion to create
- 15:23Speaker 1: all that light, and that pressure and temperature would make
- 15:26Speaker 1: a fusion happen to like a super charged rate. It
- 15:29Speaker 1: would be like much brighter than the Sun has ever been. Wow.
- 15:32Speaker 1: So it would you basically see a giant spark from
- 15:36Speaker 1: the collision, and then it would spray out and then
- 15:38Speaker 1: it would turn off, or with this cloud of stuff
- 15:43Speaker 1: debris keep burning, it would go out right, the cloud
- 15:46Speaker 1: of debris would probably reform back into either one big
- 15:49Speaker 1: star or two smaller stars, but it would take a
- 15:51Speaker 1: little while, would take you a few hundred million years
- 15:54Speaker 1: probably the recoalesce into something else that could burn. Right,
- 15:57Speaker 1: let's go bigger, Daniel, what happened can be bigger than
- 16:00Speaker 1: two stars colliding. Well, instead of just colliding one star,
- 16:03Speaker 1: what if you collided like whole groups of stars? Right,
- 16:08Speaker 1: a group collision? Okay, are you talking about like colliding galaxies? Yes, exactly.
- 16:13Speaker 1: Let's go really big. So like our galaxy, the Milky
- 16:16Speaker 1: Way has hundreds of billions of stars in it, and
- 16:19Speaker 1: the neighboring galaxy and Drameda is even bigger. It's much
- 16:22Speaker 1: more massive than our galaxy, and it's headed right for us. What, Yes, exactly,
- 16:28Speaker 1: somebody throw it out us. There's another conspiracy, conspiracy theory.
- 16:33Speaker 1: If the light rate didn't work, if the astars didn't work,
- 16:36Speaker 1: Now they're throwing a galaxy. Somebody is just making sure
- 16:39Speaker 1: there's a lot of drama in the universe. Right, We've
- 16:41Speaker 1: got lots of sequels lined up. Two, three, four. Question four,
- 16:47Speaker 1: what galaxy will collide with the Milky Way in four
- 16:51Speaker 1: and a half billion years? A Candice Major B, the
- 16:55Speaker 1: peanut butter galaxy, c Omega or D and draw amada.
- 17:06Speaker 1: The correct answer is the Andromeda will collide with our
- 17:10Speaker 1: galaxy in four and a half billion years. But the
- 17:14Speaker 1: good news is that the collision will not actually be
- 17:17Speaker 1: that dramatic. Okay, so the whole galaxies colliding, that's not
- 17:21Speaker 1: that exciting, you're saying, because galaxies are actually kind of empty. Right.
- 17:26Speaker 1: They're big, they're big, they're bright, but they're like kind
- 17:30Speaker 1: of like clouds almost like they're not that meaty. Yeah, exactly.
- 17:34Speaker 1: It's like throwing two handfuls of sand towards each other.
- 17:36Speaker 1: Mostly the sand doesn't hit other bits of sand. Mostly
- 17:39Speaker 1: they just miss. Can we go bigger than you can?
- 17:42Speaker 1: These mass things that are bigger than the gust of
- 17:44Speaker 1: course you can, and of course you can always go.
- 17:47Speaker 1: There's still limits science, and this is where you go.
- 17:55Speaker 1: But it's part of a big group of galaxies that
- 17:56Speaker 1: I'll orbit each other. So it's like a big object
- 17:59Speaker 1: that's gravity deciently bound together. It's the cluster of galas
- 18:02Speaker 1: cluster of galaxies that's like a lot of galaxies are
- 18:05Speaker 1: kind of moved together exactly. Gravity is holding them together.
- 18:09Speaker 1: And then the universe is filled with these clusters of galaxies.
- 18:12Speaker 1: Do we know if our cluster is heading towards a
- 18:14Speaker 1: collision with another cluster? Do we know that? Or is
- 18:17Speaker 1: it just inevitable? It's just inevitable. Eventually you're going to
- 18:19Speaker 1: bump into somebody else. Yeah, just like the Milky Way
- 18:22Speaker 1: and Andromeda. The universe is trying to push them apart,
- 18:25Speaker 1: but gravity is so strong between them that it's pulling
- 18:27Speaker 1: them together, so that eventually they will collide. Can we
- 18:30Speaker 1: go bigger than you? What? What's the biggest thing we
- 18:33Speaker 1: can let's just wrap this up. What's the biggest thing
- 18:35Speaker 1: we can collide that we can smash together in the universe.
- 18:39Speaker 1: So galaxy clusters organize themselves into something we call superclusters,
- 18:43Speaker 1: which basically like clusters of clusters, and these are huge
- 18:47Speaker 1: enormous things, like mind bogglingly big, like five hundred million
- 18:51Speaker 1: light years across five hundred million, so like a ray
- 18:55Speaker 1: of light would take five hundred million years just to
- 18:59Speaker 1: like go from one side of the ing. This is
- 19:01Speaker 1: like a pretty big chunk of the universe. So we
- 19:04Speaker 1: call this a supercluster. And we're part of a supercluster,
- 19:07Speaker 1: of course, and so superclusters can smash into each other, right,
- 19:11Speaker 1: And we actually think that our superclusters is sort of
- 19:14Speaker 1: headed towards another supercluster. Really, we can track it. We
- 19:18Speaker 1: can track it is this thing out there called the
- 19:19Speaker 1: Great Attractor, which is a huge source of gravity far
- 19:23Speaker 1: out past our galaxy. We don't understand it. We don't
- 19:25Speaker 1: really know what's going on, but we notice everything is
- 19:28Speaker 1: moving towards it, and other superclusters are moving towards it.
- 19:31Speaker 1: So like deep in the future supercluster collision, oh man,
- 19:35Speaker 1: And it's all being pulled together by a mysterious force, right, Like,
- 19:39Speaker 1: we don't know what it is. We can't see anything
- 19:40Speaker 1: there that's pulling these things. We think it's probably gravity,
- 19:43Speaker 1: but we can't see what's causing that gravity. So Yeah,
- 19:46Speaker 1: we don't understand what the great attractor is? Question five?
- 19:52Speaker 1: Where is Daniel a professor? Is it a U c
- 19:56Speaker 1: Irvine b UZ Berkeley ce Universe University or d sir
- 20:09Speaker 1: great aspect ay you see, Irvine Daniel is a professor
- 20:12Speaker 1: of physics at the University of California Aderba University University.
- 20:25Speaker 1: Right now, the universe is kind of, like you said,
- 20:27Speaker 1: organizing galaxies and clusters and super clusters, and these are
- 20:30Speaker 1: like form kind of like like branches out during the universities,
- 20:33Speaker 1: everything s matches together. Does it all become like a
- 20:36Speaker 1: giant ball of stuff or like a giant black hole
- 20:39Speaker 1: or like a giant star? You know, like what's the
- 20:41Speaker 1: eventual uh uh, you know event there were consequence of
- 20:46Speaker 1: two of these giant things smashing. Yeah, what's the ultimate
- 20:49Speaker 1: spoiler of the universe? Well, you've got two big forces
- 20:52Speaker 1: a play. You have the universe trying to pull itself apart.
- 20:54Speaker 1: Dark energy is like accelerating everything further and further apart.
- 20:57Speaker 1: Do you have gravity pulling itself together? The question really
- 21:00Speaker 1: is like how much gravity pull stuff together before dark
- 21:04Speaker 1: energy tears everything apart? Because the far future is we
- 21:06Speaker 1: have these like islands of stuff separated by space, and
- 21:10Speaker 1: so gravity is like trying to gather as much together
- 21:12Speaker 1: as possible before the universe tears it apart. So all
- 21:16Speaker 1: this stuff is going to end up in a super
- 21:18Speaker 1: black hole eventually. What Yes, So all this stuff that's
- 21:22Speaker 1: close to us will eventually smash together, saying like that
- 21:25Speaker 1: that's inevitable in a way, will form tiny black holes,
- 21:29Speaker 1: and then those black holes will crash into each other.
- 21:32Speaker 1: That's another interesting collision, black hole on black hole. Yes, exactly,
- 21:36Speaker 1: we've seen that happen already, black holes hitting each other,
- 21:38Speaker 1: swirling around each other and creating bigger black holes. They
- 21:41Speaker 1: make these amazing ripples in space time. But that's the future.
- 21:45Speaker 1: Everything falls into a black hole, which is then separated
- 21:48Speaker 1: from the nearest black hole in the universe, keeps those apart.
- 21:52Speaker 1: But everything in our little like sort of gravitational well
- 21:54Speaker 1: nearby is going to end up inside that black hole.
- 21:57Speaker 1: Oh cool. Well, like you said, I think that watching collisions,
- 22:01Speaker 1: thinking about collisions, imagining collisions, sometimes simulating collisions is a
- 22:05Speaker 1: big part of how we understand the universe, right, because
- 22:09Speaker 1: that's kind of how you test things and see what happens.
- 22:12Speaker 1: That's how that's how you learn how things actually work. Yeah,
- 22:15Speaker 1: you can see what's inside stuff, you can see how
- 22:17Speaker 1: they react with each other. These are great experiments for
- 22:20Speaker 1: understanding the basic nature of the universe. So that's why
- 22:22Speaker 1: we do the underground on Earth when we can, and
- 22:25Speaker 1: we watch them in the sky when they happen for us.
- 22:27Speaker 1: That's how you crack open the secrets of the universe. Yes,
- 22:30Speaker 1: exactly together. Yeah, that's when the spoilers all come out, right,
- 22:35Speaker 1: So that's when we're paying attention I see from the drama,
- 22:38Speaker 1: because I guess you can just ask the universe how
- 22:41Speaker 1: it works, do you get to Yeah, you learned from
- 22:43Speaker 1: the drama. Well, I've been asking, but nobody's answering. It's
- 22:47Speaker 1: like a mystery, right, You just got to pay attention
- 22:49Speaker 1: to the clue. It is a big mystery, the universe,
- 22:53Speaker 1: and we are slowly learning more and more about it
- 22:55Speaker 1: every day thanks to scientists and thanks to uh good
- 22:58Speaker 1: Thanks smashing into each other. Thanks everyone for joining us
- 23:01Speaker 1: on this episode of Daniel and Jorge Explain the universe
- 23:04Speaker 1: and keep asking your own questions about what's out there. Yeah,
- 23:07Speaker 1: we hope we smashed your brain with some new knowledge
- 23:11Speaker 1: and blew your mind or not or just merged it
- 23:14Speaker 1: with a little bit more with the Cosmos and the Universe.
- 23:17Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, see you next time. Thanks for listening,
- 23:28Speaker 1: and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is
- 23:31Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast for
- 23:34Speaker 1: my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
- 23:38Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah.