Latest / Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries / #410: Stellar Puzzles & Galactic Gold: Space Nuts Unpacks the Universe's Riddles

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#410: Stellar Puzzles & Galactic Gold: Space Nuts Unpacks the Universe's Riddles · Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries

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Hi there, Thanks for joining us on another edition of Space Nuts our Q
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and a edition. I'm Andrew Dunkley, your host, Great Behavior Company,
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and on this particular episode, we're going to be looking at black holes.
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Shocker. We never get black hole questions, but this one's pretty involved and
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lots of sort of moving parts to this question, so it might take a
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little bit of unraveling. We also have a question about supernova and the elements
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they create. Why is it so? How is it so? The Fermi
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paradox has been brought up, and we're going to talk time travel and make
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Nito spheres. All coming up on this episode of Space Nuts fifteen in Channel
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ten nine ignition sequence Space Nuts or three two more review on Space Nurse as
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when I reported Neil Goods and clearing his voice to get things going. With
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this addition is Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large. Hello, Fred,
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I should learn whether the mute button is shouldn't I for that sort of thing?
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You know? Even enough, if I've got a mute button, hang
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on, I think I have no I have to oppress it. We might
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not get your back. Yeah, I'm not game. I'm not game.
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That's the problem with digital technology. Hey, it's been since I saw you
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last five seconds ago. Your work very well, thank you still still had
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in the clouds because of our North American tour of all the spacy things you
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could think of in North America. Yes, a lot of spacey things there,
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and now there's plenty of them all over the world these days. It's
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yeah, that's true, this big growth industry, we've got this, Yes,
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very true. Yeah, we've got some questions to try and answer,
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and I use the word try loosely. Let's get stuck into the first one.
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Now, this is a pretty involved question, so we'll be back in
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twenty minutes. But this comes from Jose. Hello, fellow space nutters.
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Jose here from California in the United States. I love your guys' podcast and
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listen to it every day at work. I know, I got to get
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a life, sorry, but I was listening to an episode one day where
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you guys were talking about possibly or a theory that you guys were talking about
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where possibly universes could exist inside black holes, and it got me thinking that,
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you know, this would have explained a lot of the mysteries of the
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universe, for example, the Big Bang, The Big Bang could have just
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been in a supernova explosion from a star in an alternate universe which gave existence
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to our universe. And I was also thinking that as a black hole,
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I guess as the event horizon grows, that is actually our universe expanding.
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And the reason nothing can escape a black hole is because you would have to
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be traveling faster than light, which is not possible unless you're you know,
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the expansion of space. I guess that travels faster than the speed of light,
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and the material that gets sucked into a black hole, that all gets
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converted into dark energy, which is the energy that we can't see, or
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I guess the expansion of the universe that we could see. But you know,
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I just I was just thinking about all this and I was completely sober,
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mind you connds and doing anything. But you know, I know there's
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all speculative. I trying to get your guys' point of view on this.
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Do you guys see this as possible, impossible, feasible, or you know,
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I'm just completely crazy, but also wanted to get your guys's opinions on
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what you guys believe is beyond the event horizon of a black hole. You
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know, just speaking without any proof of anything, just ideas. What you
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guys believe. Do you guys believe you know there's a white hole at the
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other side? Do you guys think there's nothing? Maybe you just you know,
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you just die if you go inside a black hole. I don't know,
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but let me know you guys think. I'd love to hear your guys
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answers. Keep up the great work and I will be listening to you guys
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NonStop. Go spaceness. Oh that's lovely. I can't help it. I've
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got to do it. The answer is no, why howse I of course
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good? And help myself dreadful. There were lots of bits and pieces in
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that one, Fred, I've sort of written down some notes. Big Bang
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created by a supernova, which created our universe. I venture to say that's
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probably yeah. I think that theory has been put forward before. But it
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was the Big Bang caused by a supernova, which means there had to be
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a preceding universe before ours. I imagine, what do you think? I'm
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so I'm thinking that I can tell I can tell you thinking what has described
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sounds a lot like some of Roger Penrose's ideas. Nobel Laureates who got his
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basically got his Nobel Prize for proving that black holes can exist. So he's,
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you know, he's well and truly in tune with this, but also
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has a theory of a kind of cyclic universe which does involve the Big Bang
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effectively coming from a black hole. Now, I'm just looking online there to
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see if I could find some, you know, pithy words from from Penrose
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that talk about this. I do remember some years ago I ventured into his
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book on this topic, the kind of multiple black hole universe theory, which
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is the same shape as a brick andrew. It's very very thick book,
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indeed, and he's in two halves. The first half is all the mathematics
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you need to understand. The second half. Yeah, so it left me
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not exactly really, but I you know, I'm always confronted by hard mathematics.
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It nearly cost me my degree back all those decades ago university the So,
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I yes, I didn't plow into it very deeply. But Penrose is
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I think what Jose is talking about and very similar to some of Penrose's ideas.
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He is, it has to be said, a maverick in his view
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of this kind of cosmology. His his work is I would say, viewed
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with certainly his work on the multiple universe and the idea that that you know,
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big bangs spawn universe, sorry, black hole spawned big bangs. I
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have to say that that is at the the sort of more speculous event of
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the way astronomers view our understanding of the universe. We really don't have any
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direct evidence of there being any other universes, and in the in the Penro
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theory, and I suspect in the ideas that Jose is putting forward there what
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you end up with is multiple universes because you're inside a black hole, and
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black holes are ten a penny, you know, the commonplace, as we
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know. So he asked what our view of this is, and mine is,
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uh, it's as I am on many things, open minded, but
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with you know, recognizing that mainstream cosmology does not see us as being within
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a black hole that was spawned in some sort of higher dimensional space or in
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some kind of multiverse scenario. So I, yeah, follow this with interest.
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I probably should have read up a little bit more on Penro's theory than
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I did, but I, I, you know, encourage chose to go
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online and check out what Roger Penro's model of the universes. There will be
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fairly easily digestible versions of it online. Don't go and buy the brick that.
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Yeah, you know it takes you twelve years to read because you spend
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the first six trying to understand the mathematics. I think that indeed much.
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What about the dark energy theory as to where that comes from? You and
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black holes creating dark energy? Yeah, well, feeling I heard some theory
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or some study that came out that said there's some relationship. Apparently we actually
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covered it on Space NOTTS. Yes, so, and once again, that
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is an interesting idea that I can't remember the details. It's kind of about
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the equation of state and things of that sort. But it was suggesting that
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black holes are the source of dark energy and the mechanism don't remember. But
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let me just put one other issue into into the you know, the conversation
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about this, because it looks as though with really very recent studies of the
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geometry of the universe, looking back over millions of years as we can do,
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that maybe the dark energy is not behaving in the way that we thought
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it was. In fact, we covered this as well on space dots,
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and that is this is to do with the equation of state that the number
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is not you know, it was thought to be minus one, which means
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that the dark energy is what we call the cosmological constant. It's constant throughout
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the history of the universe. So every space gets bigger, so does the
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dark energy. But that relationship between the volume of space and the amount of
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dark energy is constant throughout throughout the history of the universe. It may well
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be that that's not true because the new evidence point to it not me and
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that might once again feedback into theories like the one that jose is talking about,
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where you where you postulate the idea of a black hole being the or
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the universe being within a black hole. My issue with that is where does
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it all come from? You know? Yeah, if you've got stuff being
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sucked into a black hole from outside the universe, where's it coming from?
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And that naturally leads you to ideas of multiverses, which, as I said,
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are definitely not mainstream at the moment, although people are open to them,
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including indeed the astronomer Royal in the UK, who I think kind the
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term multiverse quite some time. Yeah. Yeah, and his final point beyond
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what's beyond the event horizon could be a white hole maybe. I mean,
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you know what, That's what I'm just saying. In order to have something.
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If the whole universe is is within an event horizon, you've gotta have
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some thing beyond it. Yeah, And that leads you into multiverse theory.
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White tools might Yes, a gigantick white tool might be another kind of universe
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that doesn't have dark energy in it. Great thinking, because Ela, you're
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thinking very nicely put in your in your recording. Thank you, jose lovely
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to hear from you. We've got a question from Alan. I've been reading
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about the gigantic super nova detected by the James Webb Space Telescope and how it
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has cast doubt, amongst other things, as to whether supernovae are always or
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at all, the creators of heavy metal elements like gold. This has revived
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a long standing question I've had in relation to gold and other elements found in
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distinct, extracable concentrations on Earth. How did such concentrations form out of the
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totally chaotic molecule soup of a supernova? Nice question, Yeah, it was
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beautifully written to be honest, just covering the first bit of that. Yes,
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you know, we now think that gold might be produced by neutron star
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collisions as well what are called killer overs, things that are a bit less
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than super and overs. So gold. So, but the bottom line either
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way, whether it's super and ova or neutron star collisions, you've still got
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exactly as Alan says, this chaotic distribution of these elements throughout space. When
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when a super and over explodes, you've got them being created in a mishmash
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with lots of other elements. And so the way we find them in concentrations
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is as we do on Earth. We find gold in you know, not
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just at one atism at a time, but we find it nuggets at the
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time sometimes or in other forms. The way the mechanism to create that really
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involves planet formation. So you've got this cloud of dust and gas, which
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is much of which is enriched by elements like gold. In the cloud of
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gas that condenses to form a star and its planets. So the important thing
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is here is that gravity now plays a part in it, because gravity is
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pulling the heavier elements together. If you've got what we call protoplanets and planet
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isimals, which are their precursors. Planet isimals are basically baby planets in a
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swirling disc of dust around a star, which we call the protoplanetary disc.
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So those planet isimals are pulled together by gravity. And so if you've got
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gold that tends to concentrate as it's pulled towards the middle, all the heavy
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elements are pulled to the middle. And this is a process we call differentiation.
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And then what happens is another planet sysemal bashes into this one and it's
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smashed into smither Eaves and then goes to form another, you know, slightly
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bigger body, and eventually you've got a planet. And eventually you've got a
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planet with stuff in its crust that has come from these concentrations within planetism.
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So I think that's the process that Alan is looking for. Why we get
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concentrations of these materials in them in the crust of a worldlike planet Earth.
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There you go, Thank you, Alan, and a fantastic question, thanks
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for sending it in. This is space Nuts Andrew Antley with Professor Fred space
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Nuts. Now we'll go to our next question, and this one comes from
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justin. Hey God, I'll listen to your show, and I think it's
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do a great job. My questions about Fermi paradox and from what we can
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see, every planet that we every new discovery of every planet that we find,
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every planet seems to be so much different from the last one, and
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the next one is different. Then we're finding things that we've never seen before
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all the time. So isn't it becoming more and more rockly the more planets
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we find that aren't like Earth, that Earth is taping unique in the universe?
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Is that becoming more and more of a possibility the more we look.
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Thanks guys, Like I said, great job, love your shirt. Thank
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you. Justin I love this question because it does throw up that possibility that
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every planet could be unique. And you know, and the more exoplanets we
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find, the more weirdness we seem to witness as a consequence of that.
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However, then you look at some of the moons that are within our Solar
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system and the similarities between some of them are quite stark, like Europa and
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Enceladus. So it stands to reason from my perspective that there probably are other
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planets in the universe that are maybe not identical, but quite strikingly similar to
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Earth or Mars or Venus or Jupiter or you name it. It. Just
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I think there'd just be too many for them to all be absolutely and utterly
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different from one another. What do you think, Fred, Yeah, yes,
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so we we we've just we have discovered sorry I just out of coffee
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delivery that, yeah, I saw. We have discovered planets that are earth
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like in the in the you know, in the sense that the size of
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the planet, it's mass, its diameter, is similar to Earth, and
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we might well discover more because Earth like planets are not that easy to find.
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They're the smaller end of the planet range. So it was when we
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started discovering extra planets. At first there were all the big ones because they're
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easy to find, So we may be missing a lot of Earth like planets.
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But I basically do agree with Justin because we think earth like planets are
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relatively rare. But then when we look at our own planet, we see
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not just that it's an earth like planet, which really is, but it's
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got other really interesting quirks about it, like a massive moon that may well
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have stabilized its rotation over very very long periods of time, and so all
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of that comes in to sort of direct your thinking to the idea that maybe
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the sort of environment that we've had that has allowed life to flourish, and
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in particular to take that step from single cell to multicelled organisms, which we
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think could be a very energy hungry process and therefore very air. When you
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look at that, you begin to wonder just how unique we are, And
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well, you can't really qualify uniqueness, can you, But you know what
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I mean, we are probably unique, and it may well be that that's
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one of the reasons why we're not seeing alien life everywhere. Astrobiologists are fairly
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convinced I think today that yes, you can probably get single celled organisms forming
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relatively easily if you've got the right conditions, but it's much more difficult to
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produce multicelled organisms, and to go on from there to vertebrates and all you
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know, primates and all the rest of it. Giant they are all giant
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leaps. But I think that itself is the answer to the Fermi paradox that
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if there are species like us elsewhere, they are so far away that you
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might as well forget them. We might be alone, you know, galaxy,
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for example, Although I've been watching the Three Body Problem series on TV
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and those aliens are way too close. So in fact, it's prompted me
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to buy the book because I know it's a Chinese book that's translated to English
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but makes it a bit difficult to read, but well, not difficult to
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read, but totally different setup because it's been americanized for television, so you've
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got to get your head around that. But I'm really enjoying it. I
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don't know why I mentioned that, but thank you justin and because it involved
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aliens, obviously, let's go to our final question. Will be real quick
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on this one. Hello again from James. I've got a couple of hypotheticals
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for Fred, thank goodness. If we could travel in time in reverse in
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the same fashion as going forwards, would gravity behave in the reverse like you
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can mathematically reverse a black hole in it or white hole? Uh huh?
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And question two, if in the future we have a strong enough power source,
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could we travel to a metallic body such as Psyche and put some form
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of electro magnetic generator at opposite ends of the body and generate an electro magnetic
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current through the asteroid or even a planet to generate an asteroid planetoid planetoid magnetosphere.
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Thanks for entertaining my nonsense, James. Yeah, actually, Psyche might
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already have a magnetosphere because it is miscellic. You know, there may be
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residual magnetism in there. So the answer to to Germs's second question is probably
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yes that you know, if you were not enough to think about doing that,
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it may already have a magnetisphere. We'll find that out when Psyche and
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the spacecraft gets to Psyche. The asteroid, I can't remember when it is.
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I think it's a couple of years time. I remember writing something like
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that. It's on its way now, so you're going to look it up
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for me, I hope. And the first question, that's an interesting one.
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If if if you Rea July twenty twenty nine, there you go,
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thank you, so five years time. Yeah, when to talk about reversing
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time? Yeah, we time, the arrow of time goes forward for us.
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If and we know that the physics are symmetrical so that you could reverse
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the arrow of time. And if you do that you get white holes rather
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than black holes and things of that sort. But I don't know that you
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get negative gravity. That's a really interesting one. I'd have to think about
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that, and yeah, we look up some of the equations negative. I
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can't imagine you could you could reverse gravity like that. It's such a dominant
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force and it seems to kind of be like we still we know what it
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is, we know what it does and bend things like the light, but
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it just I can't imagine that you could equivocally flip it on its head.
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It just doesn't seem Yeah, I mean, just thinking along further along from
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that. So we we imagine that there are particles called gravitons that carry gravity.
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This is quantum theory that is not yet proved, but yeah, hypothetical
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particles, but they are probably what's the name for them is a unipolar It's
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something like that, they've only got one sign. They're only positive. It's
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like it's so electrical charge. You can have positive negative make this ism.
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You can't, which is odd. You can have north and south pools,
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but that's slightly different. The graviton is probably something that you can't have a
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negative version of. So I'm sticking my neck out here and saying that the
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answer to James's question is probably no, probably not moron. Thank you,
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James, Thank you to everyone who's sending questions. Don't forget to keep them
24:27
coming. You can do that via our website, space nuts podcast dot com
24:30
or space nuts dot I and just hit the Send us your Questions tab on
24:37
the right or the AMA tab up the top where you can send us text
24:41
and audio questions. Please don't forget to tell us who you are and where
24:45
you're from. We just like to know. And I hate to do it.
24:48
I hate to do it. But we've got a dad joke from Misty
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who's listening in Live today. There she is. Now, how did you
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get your number? Fred? What did the black holes say when they collided?
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Gone? Nothing? They just waved nice one. I like that.
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Yeah, very good. Yes, all right, Thank you Fred, as
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always great to catch up again, and we will talk to you again real
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soon. Sounds good. Thank you very much, Andrew. I think I'm
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probably missing another meeting, so I should skip off now. I'm okay,
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I'm going on next door. We'll talk next week. We'll force all it.
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Yeah. Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large. And thanks to Hu in
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the studio for being here in the studio, because he's the best person in
25:45
the world at being here in the studio and from me Andrew Dunkley. Thanks
25:48
to your company on this episode. We'll see you next time on another edition
25:52
of Space Nuts. Bye Bye, You Nuts. Podcast available at Apple Podcasts,
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