Latest / Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries / Stellar Questions, Black Hole Mysteries & the Dance of Dark Matter

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Stellar Questions, Black Hole Mysteries & the Dance of Dark Matter · Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Space Nuts. I'm your host today, Heidi Compo,
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: and I'm here with Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large,
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: and we are going to be answering some of your
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: questions today.
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: For fifteen seconds.
• 0:14
  Speaker 3: Guidance is internal ten nine ignition.
• 0:18
  Speaker 4: Sequence dot space nuts nine four.
• 0:22
  Speaker 5: Three two more Space Nurse as the nat reboard.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: It feels good.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: So we have a question from Keith Wilson. Keith did
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: not list where he was from. Are you from Earth, Keith,
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: or are you hailing us from another planet? That would
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: be my question for Keith. Keith's question for Fred is
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: I have a question, because the Sun burns, it's feels
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: so fast. How much smaller is it now compared to
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: its size two billion years ago?
• 1:01
  Speaker 4: And there's an answer to that which we can calculate.
• 1:06
  Speaker 4: We weren't around two million years ago, so it's not
• 1:08
  Speaker 4: easy to measure it then, but we can work out
• 1:11
  Speaker 4: what it was by the rate at which the Sun
• 1:15
  Speaker 4: is burning its fuel now. So the sun goes through
• 1:18
  Speaker 4: these numbers always stagger me. Roughly four million tons of
• 1:24
  Speaker 4: fuel hydrogen fuel per second, and that means you think,
• 1:30
  Speaker 4: my god, that's so awful. A lot of hydrogen every second.
• 1:36
  Speaker 4: That's what it's turning into helium. And it's that process,
• 1:39
  Speaker 4: the nuclear fusion, that is releasing the energy that we
• 1:42
  Speaker 4: see with you know, with all the light and the
• 1:48
  Speaker 4: subatomic particles and everything that comes from the Sun. Is
• 1:51
  Speaker 4: the underlying process is that nuclear fusion. There is also
• 1:58
  Speaker 4: I've not seen this statistic before, but I did look
• 2:00
  Speaker 4: it up about one and a half million tons per second.
• 2:04
  Speaker 4: That is the solar wind, that's the particles coming off
• 2:07
  Speaker 4: the Sun. So there's this loss of about you know,
• 2:10
  Speaker 4: roughly five million tons per second. So you can do
• 2:17
  Speaker 4: the calculation and it turns out that what saves the
• 2:21
  Speaker 4: day is the Sun is very big. It's you know,
• 2:26
  Speaker 4: it's got the huge amount of material in it. When
• 2:32
  Speaker 4: you think of it, it's one hundred times the diameter
• 2:35
  Speaker 4: of the Earth. It's a very very massive object. So
• 2:39
  Speaker 4: there's a lot of it. So that release of energy
• 2:43
  Speaker 4: and solar particles over its lifetime four point six billion
• 2:48
  Speaker 4: years amounts to a loss of mass of wait for it,
• 2:52
  Speaker 4: zero point zero five percent. It's virtually negligible. The Sun's
• 2:59
  Speaker 4: mass has changed, but by a very tiny amount. There's
• 3:03
  Speaker 4: a number of places on the web where you can
• 3:06
  Speaker 4: find that calculation, but that's what we believe. It's lost mass,
• 3:11
  Speaker 4: but it's only lost a tiny amount compared with it's
• 3:16
  Speaker 4: the mass of the Sun itself.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: That's interesting. I have never thought about that, but it's
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: good that this is something that doesn't need to also
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: keep me up at night along with the other things
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: I worry about. Our next question is from Michael, who
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: is in New York.
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: Hello, this is Mike from New York and I have
• 3:38
  Speaker 3: a question about primordial black holes and dark energy. I
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: believe you guys have addressed questions before about primorial black
• 3:47
  Speaker 3: holes and how a concentration of them could result in
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: dark matter and the gravitation that we observe behind them,
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: and that's I believe generally been disproven. My question is,
• 4:00
  Speaker 3: how could primordial black holes potentially relate to dark energy
• 4:05
  Speaker 3: if we assume that they are spread evenly across the universe,
• 4:11
  Speaker 3: if there's a sufficient amount of them as they evaporate,
• 4:16
  Speaker 3: and that loss of gravitation goes with them as they evaporate,
• 4:22
  Speaker 3: could that explain the increased acceleration of the expanding of
• 4:26
  Speaker 3: the universe being driven by dark energy. I'm just curious
• 4:30
  Speaker 3: to know if you've heard of that being tossed about
• 4:34
  Speaker 3: before as an idea, and as I imagine, the math
• 4:38
  Speaker 3: doesn't bear out as any studies been conducted to definitively
• 4:42
  Speaker 3: say that is not the case. Thanks guys, and keep up.
• 4:45
  Speaker 4: The good work. Yeah, thank you, Mike, A good question.
• 4:50
  Speaker 4: You're right, the mask doesn't bear it out. But the
• 4:54
  Speaker 4: bottom line here there were two things. I guess what
• 4:59
  Speaker 4: was it. The basically got rid of the idea that
• 5:03
  Speaker 4: dark matter was made up of primordial black holes. It
• 5:08
  Speaker 4: was experiments done in the nineties nineteen nineties to look
• 5:16
  Speaker 4: for the gravitational lensing effect. If we had a universe
• 5:21
  Speaker 4: that was filled with black holes that we couldn't see
• 5:25
  Speaker 4: because they weren't gobbling anything up, so they didn't blow
• 5:28
  Speaker 4: in X rays as you do when you gobbling stuff up.
• 5:30
  Speaker 4: If you're a black hole, those black holes should have
• 5:36
  Speaker 4: distorted the images of stars behind them, magnified them, and
• 5:41
  Speaker 4: we should have seen these If we measured the brightness
• 5:44
  Speaker 4: of large fields of stars regularly, we should have seen
• 5:49
  Speaker 4: stars brightening and dimming all over the place due to
• 5:53
  Speaker 4: all these black holes, and that was not seen. It
• 5:57
  Speaker 4: was an experiment called Macho a Macho actually was basically
• 6:02
  Speaker 4: the acronym for those objects massive compact halo objects matt shows.
• 6:09
  Speaker 4: So it was at that point that we decided it
• 6:11
  Speaker 4: wasn't match chose it was WIMPs. WIMPs being weakly interacting
• 6:16
  Speaker 4: massive particles, and that's what we've been looking for ever
• 6:19
  Speaker 4: since with dark matter not finding it. If to say,
• 6:23
  Speaker 4: but then going on to your comment about black holes
• 6:27
  Speaker 4: relating to dark energy, black holes do evaporate. We know
• 6:33
  Speaker 4: that from the effect of well, the theoretical work that
• 6:37
  Speaker 4: was done by by Stephen Hawking back in the seventies.
• 6:41
  Speaker 4: Actually that demonstrated that there is a radiation that comes
• 6:45
  Speaker 4: from black holes is by quantum processes rather than relativistic processes,
• 6:51
  Speaker 4: and that is called Hawking radiation. And what it leads
• 6:54
  Speaker 4: to is the evaporation of black holes. But the timescale
• 6:59
  Speaker 4: for that doesn't tally with the dark energy problem. Black
• 7:05
  Speaker 4: calls evaporate, but on timescales of tens to hundreds of
• 7:08
  Speaker 4: billions of years. It's a slow, slow process, and it's
• 7:14
  Speaker 4: hard to imagine how that could contribute in any way
• 7:17
  Speaker 4: to the dark energy that we see that is making
• 7:19
  Speaker 4: the universe expand ever more rapidly. So a nice idea
• 7:24
  Speaker 4: which I think doesn't as exactly as you said, doesn't
• 7:28
  Speaker 4: hold up because of the mathematics. Thanks a lot, Thanks again, Michael.
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's very very interesting, a lot of deep thinking
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: questions here.
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: Now let's take a break from the show to tell
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• 9:51
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• 9:52
  Speaker 5: Three Space Nuts and speaking of deep questions, we have
• 10:00
  Speaker 5: Duncan Sargent from Weymouth.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: It's a follow up question and it is a thesis
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: that he's having me read here. So buckal up listeners,
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: we have the question of the episode coming at you.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: Hello to both of you. This is a follow up
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: question from one I asked ages ago, well over a year,
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: if I recall, it was the one about how can
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: two black holes merge into one? If no mask can
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: come out of a black hole, neither can take the
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: matter from one, neither can take the matter from one
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: to the other to become one. Of all the questions
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: I have sent the answer to, this is the one
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: that was the least satisfying.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: I felt.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: Normally I feel you give good answers, but on this
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: one I was. But this is the one that I
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: was suggested that I read up on the process. Well,
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: I have spent months doing this. He has done his homework,
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: he has read it, and I still do not have
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: a definitive answer. But I will lay out what I
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: have discovered. Basically, as black holes near merger, something happens
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: within them that creates massive amounts of gravitational waves. This
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: accounts for roughly ten percent mass loss in the eventual
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: combined black hole. I initially thought this mass loss was
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: from the event horizon only, but apparently not, and the
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: actual black holes themselves lose mass. Now, neither mass or
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: energy can escape the black holes. But apparently this is
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: what the math says, and words can't really describe it
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: other than just to say that the mass says so
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: as it does. It is something to do with the
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: mass energy that is not really defined in the way
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: that we think it is, and it becomes a bit fuzzy.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: The gravitational waves are in space time itself, and the
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: whole merger process is somehow carried out with the actual
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: confines of the space time they occupy, rather than the
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: actual black holes themselves. As we know, neither of them
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: can actually take mass from the other. Apparently, at the
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: very last point before they merge, each black hole sends
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: out a very thin tentacle of something, which when they
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: touch together the merger happens. However, whilst this mathematically defined,
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: it is not able to be easily defined by words.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: So could Professor Fred please attempt to put into words
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: for me, as with all the reading I have done,
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: my head hurts and I cannot think of a way
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: to put it myself. How much does matter from one
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: black hole or two of them get extracted from one
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: from sorry, get extracted from the other and combined, what
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: happens to the actual singularity? Do we end up with
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: nested singularities? And how can that exist? Please help me
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: understand then easily in easily defined English. I get impressed
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: from I get impressed from what I have read that
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: a lot of this comes down to the math that
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: says we see it happening. So it does, but we
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: actually don't know, We actually don't know. How Is that
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: pretty much it? Okay? Thank you for looking into my
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: answer my follow up. I look forward to your podcast
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: each week, listening carefully for new snippets of information. Please
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: keep up the good work.
• 13:20
  Speaker 4: Well done, Heidi.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: Thank you Duncan put me through the challenge my first
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: Q and A.
• 13:27
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like a script for a whole show. But
• 13:30
  Speaker 4: thank you Duncan. Yeah, Duncan, fellow Brits living in Weymouth
• 13:35
  Speaker 4: there in the south of England, always nice to hear
• 13:37
  Speaker 4: from him. But this, yeah, look Duncan, this is it's
• 13:41
  Speaker 4: a challenging thing and it challenges the whole, you know,
• 13:47
  Speaker 4: the whole of astrophysics because we don't really know what
• 13:53
  Speaker 4: happens to black holes within that last well three point
• 14:00
  Speaker 4: twenty six light years is the number. It's called the
• 14:03
  Speaker 4: final parsec problem. A parsec is a distance. It's what
• 14:07
  Speaker 4: astronomers measure rather than light years. You can't measure light
• 14:10
  Speaker 4: years because we don't have to stop watch is good enough.
• 14:13
  Speaker 4: But a parsec is three point twenty six light years,
• 14:15
  Speaker 4: and it's what we in the trade of astronomy, what
• 14:19
  Speaker 4: we actually talk about. So the final parsec problem is
• 14:25
  Speaker 4: that there's not the way the energy from the merging
• 14:34
  Speaker 4: black holes is released into gravitational ways, which is exactly
• 14:38
  Speaker 4: what you've said. That is the issue. How does it happen?
• 14:43
  Speaker 4: I'm going to read a paragraph from actually space dot com,
• 14:50
  Speaker 4: one of the websites that we are big fans of
• 14:53
  Speaker 4: at space nuts, they had an article a few years
• 14:56
  Speaker 4: ago called what happens when black holes merge? And I'll
• 15:01
  Speaker 4: read a paragraph from that because it sort of illuminates
• 15:05
  Speaker 4: what you said and actually sort of quotes almost quotes
• 15:13
  Speaker 4: to the letter what you had in your what you
• 15:17
  Speaker 4: had in your question. The final partic problem, reading now,
• 15:21
  Speaker 4: is currently an unsolved riddle in astrophysics. But whatever mechanism
• 15:24
  Speaker 4: takes place, eventually black holes get close enough that the
• 15:27
  Speaker 4: gravitational waves can really pull a lot of energy from
• 15:31
  Speaker 4: the system that this point, the black holes only have
• 15:34
  Speaker 4: a few seconds before they merge. At those close distances,
• 15:38
  Speaker 4: the black holes start to deform each other. They don't
• 15:42
  Speaker 4: really have surfaces. The event horizons are just invisible boundaries
• 15:45
  Speaker 4: that mark the region of no escape. But the shape
• 15:48
  Speaker 4: of the event horizon depends not just on the black
• 15:50
  Speaker 4: hole itself, but also the geometry of space time around it.
• 15:53
  Speaker 4: So as the black holes begin they're deadly dance. The
• 15:57
  Speaker 4: event horizons elongate and stretch towards each We understand what
• 16:01
  Speaker 4: happens next only through complex computer simulations that monitor and
• 16:06
  Speaker 4: track the evolution of the event horizons. In the milliseconds
• 16:09
  Speaker 4: before impact, each black hole sends out a thin tendril,
• 16:13
  Speaker 4: a tiny tunnel of its event horizon, towards its companion.
• 16:18
  Speaker 4: These tendrils meet and merge, forming a bridge between the
• 16:21
  Speaker 4: two black holes, as if they were connected by an
• 16:24
  Speaker 4: umbilical cord. Very quickly, the bridge widens and the event
• 16:27
  Speaker 4: horizons glue together like two colliding soap bubbles. Within an instant,
• 16:32
  Speaker 4: the black holes merge into one. But here's the crunch.
• 16:36
  Speaker 4: What happens inside is anybody's guess. The center of a
• 16:40
  Speaker 4: black hole is known as a singularity a point of
• 16:42
  Speaker 4: infinite density. This is where our current understanding of physics
• 16:45
  Speaker 4: breaks down. Simulations show that the singularities quickly find each other,
• 16:49
  Speaker 4: briefly orbit, and then merge, but what actually happens is unclear.
• 16:55
  Speaker 4: So Duncan, your question is at the forefront of astrophysics,
• 17:00
  Speaker 4: and I applaud you for asking it. I don't think
• 17:04
  Speaker 4: you'll find this answer satisfactory, as you've commented before, because
• 17:10
  Speaker 4: you're asking questions that really we don't have answers to.
• 17:13
  Speaker 4: But thank you for getting your head around the problem
• 17:16
  Speaker 4: in the way that you have and thanks again for
• 17:18
  Speaker 4: your question, Fred.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: Are there any theories yes? On are the leading theories?
• 17:26
  Speaker 4: Well, it's basically what we've said. We you know that
• 17:29
  Speaker 4: somehow the black holes actually come together, that there is
• 17:34
  Speaker 4: a there's a sort of all This happens very much
• 17:37
  Speaker 4: in the last absolutely the last few milliseconds of a merger,
• 17:42
  Speaker 4: and that's the bit that we see with the gravitational
• 17:46
  Speaker 4: wave records that we get from instruments like LIGO, the
• 17:52
  Speaker 4: Large Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory and other gravitational wave detectors.
• 17:57
  Speaker 4: So somehow they come together, there is a phenomenon which
• 18:02
  Speaker 4: is talked about in black hole merger parlance as being
• 18:07
  Speaker 4: the ring down. And this is when the merger is complete,
• 18:12
  Speaker 4: the gravitational waves from the collision have been emitted, they've
• 18:17
  Speaker 4: basically stopped, they've switched off, and the thing rings down
• 18:23
  Speaker 4: and it's got I suppose implications of something vibrating. So
• 18:28
  Speaker 4: it may well be that there is a bit more
• 18:31
  Speaker 4: to the story than what we've just been talking about.
• 18:36
  Speaker 4: But that's after the event, that's after the collision has happened.
• 18:40
  Speaker 4: And Duncan's problem is trying to understand how something that
• 18:45
  Speaker 4: you know, that won't let go of any mass, how
• 18:48
  Speaker 4: it can come together with something else. And the answer
• 18:51
  Speaker 4: is it does you know?
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: I think of this and probably this might be the
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: strangest metaphor you've ever thought of for black holes, but
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: I'm thinking of this like cooking an egg. If we
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: have two cracked eggs in a frying pan, they're they're
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: you know, the the yolk would represent the singularity and
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: the white would represent the event horizon. If these two
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: eggs were to let's just say, because eggs don't do this,
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: but let's just say they they were being pulled towards
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: each other and merged. That point where they're merging is
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: when the yolks both break, So there is kind of
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: a point where it's two broken eggs. But then if
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: they merged together to form one super egg, there would
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: be something going on there. I don't know. This is
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: how my brain is trying to wrap around these really
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: complex problems. Is something as simple as.
• 19:40
  Speaker 4: Food, Food's a good right to do it? And if
• 19:45
  Speaker 4: in doubt turned to food, and so I think it's
• 19:49
  Speaker 4: a good metaphor. Okay, technical space nuts.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: All right, So our lit question for today is from
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: Lawrence Lawrence Ingham, and this is an audio question.
• 20:06
  Speaker 6: Hi, Fred Andrew, It's Lawrence from Ingland Here. I have
• 20:09
  Speaker 6: a question about your favorite subject matter, that being dark matter,
• 20:14
  Speaker 6: and I got straight to the chase. Could dark matter
• 20:17
  Speaker 6: not simply be energy manifest And what I mean by
• 20:21
  Speaker 6: that is it seems that during really intense periods in
• 20:26
  Speaker 6: the universe, we don't really have the current scientific models
• 20:30
  Speaker 6: to explain how those processes occur. And my main example
• 20:35
  Speaker 6: will be the epoch of inflation, where such a rapid
• 20:39
  Speaker 6: expansion of the universe in such a small period of time.
• 20:42
  Speaker 6: To me, it seems as though there must be processes
• 20:45
  Speaker 6: going on there which we just do not understand and
• 20:48
  Speaker 6: we cannot recreate, we cannot test it. But there must
• 20:53
  Speaker 6: have been in such an intense period certain processes in
• 20:57
  Speaker 6: which events happened which created things like potentially dark matter.
• 21:03
  Speaker 6: And when you look at the expansion of the universe
• 21:06
  Speaker 6: and reasons why there's all this unaccounted mass, all these
• 21:11
  Speaker 6: things we attribute to dark matter, could that not potentially
• 21:15
  Speaker 6: be simply energy manifest during that epoch of inflation, Energy
• 21:19
  Speaker 6: itself could potentially have been transformed into a different type
• 21:24
  Speaker 6: of matter, which we do not understand yet and cannot understand.
• 21:28
  Speaker 6: But that would explain why universe is expanding. It would
• 21:32
  Speaker 6: explain why we can't visualize and test dark matter, because
• 21:35
  Speaker 6: once that energy has been used, you can't then test
• 21:39
  Speaker 6: it because it's expanding universe. And I guess it also
• 21:44
  Speaker 6: somewhat aligns with Einstein's equations with energy and mass being
• 21:48
  Speaker 6: almost interchangeable. I don't know. It seems that as there
• 21:52
  Speaker 6: are certain periods in which we cannot explain what's going on,
• 21:55
  Speaker 6: and our current scientific models aren't fit for purpose because
• 21:59
  Speaker 6: those events so unique and so extreme. Is this something
• 22:03
  Speaker 6: that's been explored is it something that's currently being explored.
• 22:07
  Speaker 6: I'd love to hear your answers.
• 22:08
  Speaker 4: Many thanks, so so yes, in fact, you know the
• 22:14
  Speaker 4: answer is Lawrence the the you basically said exactly what
• 22:25
  Speaker 4: the situation is as we understand it. Sorry pausing for
• 22:30
  Speaker 4: words there, trying to find new words. So the idea
• 22:36
  Speaker 4: of dark matter being energy manifest in other words, energy
• 22:40
  Speaker 4: turned into matter because they're related by equals mc squared,
• 22:45
  Speaker 4: is how we think it got there. That's how we
• 22:48
  Speaker 4: what we think the origin of dark matter is within
• 22:51
  Speaker 4: the Big Bang itself, which was an energetic phenomenon that
• 22:56
  Speaker 4: very quickly created the matter that we see in the universe.
• 23:01
  Speaker 4: So it's that some of the processes are actually quite
• 23:04
  Speaker 4: well understood. It's not that we're not understanding that, it's
• 23:09
  Speaker 4: just when it happened. That it happened right at the beginning.
• 23:12
  Speaker 4: The dark matter was created at the same type whatever
• 23:15
  Speaker 4: it is, was created at the same time as the
• 23:18
  Speaker 4: normal matter what we call the baryonic matter, and basically
• 23:23
  Speaker 4: formed this as the universe expanded, formed this web of
• 23:25
  Speaker 4: material that we call the cosmic web, and that led
• 23:28
  Speaker 4: to the distribution of galaxies that we see today. So
• 23:33
  Speaker 4: the answer to your question is yes, but it doesn't
• 23:36
  Speaker 4: change the issue. We yes, energy was turned into particles,
• 23:41
  Speaker 4: but we don't know what those particles are. The dark
• 23:43
  Speaker 4: matter particles are as yet undiscovered. It's some form of
• 23:47
  Speaker 4: super you know, sub atomic particle, which is very important
• 23:52
  Speaker 4: in the universe. We think it's why galaxies formed. Without it,
• 23:56
  Speaker 4: maybe they didn't, They wouldn't have formed. So the quest
• 23:59
  Speaker 4: is still on to find out what dark matter is.
• 24:01
  Speaker 4: But you're right, it came from energy.
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: Excellent, Fred Well, I feel enlightened myself. These are fantastic questions,
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: and it's interesting, you know, there's always so many questions
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: that everyone always wants to ask about dark holes and
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: dark matter, and the big, heavy hitting questions is the
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: questions that all humanity has. And I think that that's
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: just the exciting thing is to remember that's the thing
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: in space is there's more questions than there are answers,
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: and we do our best on this show to provide answers,
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: but ultimately it's up to the scientists and the people
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: who are discovering these things. And you can even get
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: involved as a citizen scientist. I'll give a little plug
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: for NASA and some of the opportunities they have for
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: free online. You can help contribute to some of this
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: research if you look up citizens Science with NASA. That's
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: something you can get involved with yourself.
• 24:55
  Speaker 4: Always as a fan of citizens science. Absolutely some great
• 24:58
  Speaker 4: things have come from citizens anti Yeah.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. Do you have anything else you'd like to say
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: about citizens Science.
• 25:07
  Speaker 4: No, we might do it. We might have a chat
• 25:09
  Speaker 4: about that down the track in one of our upcoming episodes,
• 25:12
  Speaker 4: because it is it's such a now a fundamental part
• 25:16
  Speaker 4: of what we do. It's very very important, not just
• 25:19
  Speaker 4: in astronomy and astrophysics, but of course in the you know,
• 25:23
  Speaker 4: the whole world of research, whether it's botany or arctic
• 25:28
  Speaker 4: arctic evil sorry, ecology, all of those things can benefit
• 25:33
  Speaker 4: from cities and science. Yeah.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: Well, and there's the really really fun one. If you
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: guys have telescopes and you're into astronomy, as I assume
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: these listeners are, you can even look up some of
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: the exoplanet opportunities that you can have now sort of
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: try and help discover and identify exoplanets. But with that
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: being said, I think we've answered some questions, we've gave
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: some questions, and we have more questions yet to answer.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: So Fred, thank you so much. That concludes another Q
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: and a session of Space Nuts.
• 26:07
  Speaker 4: Great pleasure, Hide always good to talk, and we'll speak again.
• 26:10
  Speaker 7: To You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast, available
• 26:17
  Speaker 7: at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player.
• 26:22
  Speaker 7: You can also stream on demand at bites dot com.
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.