Intergalactic Stars, Sun Switching Poles, A Second Sun | Q&A 264

are there any stars that aren't in galaxies are active galaxies and super massive black holes dangerous and did we recently find Dyson spheres all this and more in this week's question show Welcome to the question show your questions my answers as always wherever you are if a question Pops in your brain uh just write it down in the YouTube comments and I will gather them up and I'll answer them here however this is the last episode of the question show before we take our two-month Hiatus our summer break and so we won't be doing a show next week it's going to be two months we'll be back in early September we're still doing a lot of our other shows on the channel but the live streams and the question shows we take a break in the summer so go ahead and ask your question and maybe I'll answer them in the YouTube comments all right let's get into the questions Dawn guns hey freezer are there any stars that are without a parent Galaxy that we've observed thus far absolutely there is a whole class classification of stars that are known as Intergalactic stars or field stars and these are stars without a Galaxy and they have absolutely been seen and in fact they can be seen both around the Milky Way as well as in between galaxies as well as uh when you see galaxies that are interacting and they're throwing out these sprays of stars in their tidal Tales those are future Intergalactic Stars and that gives you a bit of an insight into the sources of these stars and there's a few so the first one is they're thrown out during Galaxy mergers and collisions that a galaxy is really just a collection of particles and so when you've got all of these particles that are coming together and you've got all of these three body interactions with all of the various parts of the Galaxy you get these amazing tidal tail sprays that throw out into space and if the tital tail is going at greater than the escape velocity of the combined Galaxy merger then those stars are on an Intergalactic trajectory and they are gone now they might end up in some other Galaxy and it's believed that there are stars that are already being transferred between the Milky Way and Andromeda so there must be stars in the Milky Way that came from other galaxies but others if they're not going to interact with the Galaxy at all they're just flying off into Intergalactic space the other thing is hypervelocity stars that are ejected out of the Galaxy and so we know that there are dozens of stars that have been found so far that are being ejected out of the Milky Way right now there are a few causes to this one is interactions with the super massive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way you can have some kind of three body interaction and a star can be kicked out and as long as it exceeds the escape velocity of the Milky Way then it's not going to come back and the other thought is that you can have Supernova where you've got two stars that are orbiting around each other and then one detonates as a supernova and essentially disappears and now the other star is is like on a slingshot and it gets fired out of the Galaxy and then the third idea is that you could have stars just form in Intergalactic space and have never been part of a galaxy so imagine if you have you know we know we have regions of star formation that are found inside the Milky Way but imagine if you had a region of star formation that was found just out in Intergalactic space now it would have to be fairly massive because it would have to have been able to pull together and there would need to be some kind of event that would trigger this gas cloud to start collapsing like maybe a supernova nearby or and this will lead into an the next question but we'll sort of I'll give you a hint of it which is that galaxies can actually fire jets of material out into space from the super massive black hole that could hit one of these pockets of gas and that could trigger star formation it could form a bunch of stars the Stars could be interacting in a cluster and eventually just start to break away from each other and then just start to float off into the universe and so it's believed that a fairly large percentage of the stars in the universe are these field stars these Intergalactic Stars they have no home they're just drifting in space now normally we have the Star Trek planet names that appear above my shoulder and but because this is the last episode before we go on our hius we're not going to do that this week but I still want to celebrate all the people who voted last week so thanks to sari Dory 78 looking for recommend recomendations on studying astronomy seriously so thank you for the question thank you everybody who voted and throughout all of the votes that we've done this year it's always super fun to see what you think is a good question good answer all right let's keep going with the questions zrich 12x wouldn't certain types of active Galactic nuclei pose as near galaxy-wide sterilization threats to life so this goes back to the episode that we had 2 weeks ago that's s the way Cycle Works um where someone was like asking for a Sci-Fi novel definitely not because they're a super villain wondering if there's a way that you could sterilize an entire galaxy and not just any single star system and I sort of brainstormed a bunch of ideas and I couldn't really come up with anything well this is possible and this is this idea that I mentioned in the previous question that you can have a super massive black hole and it can have this accretion disc that is going around the super massive black hole and this whips up these giant magnetic fields that twist around around the black hole and then you get material instead of falling into the black hole is funneled into these Jets and these Jets can be millions of light years long just going off into space and you've got material that is moving at relativistic speeds through this Jet and you know the research on this is still fairly new ason aren't entirely sure what the effects are but it appears that these can do one of two things if they hit a Galaxy one is that they can trigger enormous amounts of star formation that essentially this is one of those things that can cause gas clouds to start collapsing and beginning to form stars and so if you've got this galaxy it's got lots of puffy gas clouds in it and then the death beam of a super massive black hole just going sort of goes across this galaxy you could end up with star formation that is being caused by that but the other possibility is that you get quenching so in other words the beam is so intense that it doesn't actually create collapsing clouds but it's actually starting to strip away a lot of this material this light gas and dust that's hanging out in these gas clouds and that starves the stars for Star formation and so both kind of lead to the death of the Galaxy because in the one case it's as if the Galaxy is in an all you can eat buffet and it quickly goes through all of its gas and forms all of its stars and then it's out of star forming material and then it just turns red and dead and then the other possibility is that it never even had a chance that it just has all of its material Blown Away can never really form a lot of stars and so it's just undernourished underfed and both are very bad for the Galaxy and it wouldn't be like an instantaneous death nail for the Galaxy but when you think about it to have heavier elements in a star system like we have here in the solar system the sun needed to have collected elements from many previous generations of stars that our son is a third generation star and it's you know little bits of kilin NOA have been mixed in little bits of supernova stars that have lived and died and blown off their outer envelopes all that's mixed in with the sun and so we have all of the heavier elements all the heavier elements that are around you right now the the gold in your jewelry the the iridium in your chips uh all of this came from these you know Supernova and kilov and things like that and so if a Galaxy ran out of heavier elements early on it never got a chance to kind of build them up then it would be really hard for it to form life down the road and so there's this idea of a galactic habitable zone places in the Galaxy where there are enough heavy elements for life to be able to form and so if you don't have those heavier elements and maybe life can't form and so in the first few billion years of the universe as these death beams are blasting out of black holes you could end up with galaxies being not sterilized but starved and so they never have the conditions for life to be able to form down the road so I like that idea it's pretty evocative you know maybe that's your science fiction story you monster Alexis ztc 6xd can you please talk about the latest discovery of possible Dyson Sphere that was found sure so Dyson spheres now I'm sure you're all very familiar with them but the gist is is that some future civilization is going to need more and more energy and they're going to continue harvesting energy coming from the Sun with solar panels until they look back and go hey wait a minute we've enclosed our entire star in solar panels now it's not going to be some rigid sphere it's going to be probably a cloud a swarm form of satellites that are orbiting around the star and they're all collecting sunlight but the point is is that every available Photon that is coming from the Sun is striking some solar panel and then is being used for some purpose like I don't know some technological purpose maybe large language models it can use for AI can use for gaming uh who knows and we don't know what the the future holds and it's you know maybe it's ridiculous to think that someone will but it's something to look for now the thing is is that when you have all of this radiation that is striking the the satellites they're going to absorb the visible light that's coming from the Star but they have to release infrared radiation they have to release the heat they grab the light turn into electricity use it for some purpose and then they release heat into the universe and it's that heat that we're going to be looking for we're going to be looking for pointlike sources that are like a St star but instead of them giving off visible light the way a star should you're looking for them in infrared and so what the astronomers did was they looked through a bunch of surveys that have been done in the infrared with a bunch of different telescopes there's the two Mass survey there's some Gaia survey as well as the wise survey and these are all able to see into the infrared and they were look you know they ran all of these stars in the entire survey through a filter saying you know is there anything that is that looks like a star but it's in the infrared and they came up with a bunch of candidates and then they looked through the candidates removed all the ones that were clearly something else and they were left with a bunch of things that could be Dyson spheres so that's what led the paper the science paper that that you're talking about and we reported on it on Universe today and a lot of other people reported on it and then it sort of kept going and going I don't want to say we had it first but we had it pretty first pretty early on uh in that I saw it in the archive and the on the day when they published it and and I tasked a writer to write a story about it but the chances that these are actually Dyson spheres is really remote before you can say that it's aliens you have to be absolutely sure that it's aliens and there are other things that can explain this I mean there can be problems with the sensors on the telescopes there can be all kinds of stuff but one really compelling explanation is a type of thing called a dust obscured Galaxy and a dog and and what these are is fairly distant galaxies that have a large amount of dust in them and so that dust is blocking the light that's coming from the visible segment of the star and instead you're seeing just the infrared heat that is coming from the Galaxy and so you've got this dust obscured Galaxy that is glowing in the infrared and astronomers went and checked the known locations of dust obscure gal iies and found that it could explain some of the potential Dyson Sphere candidates and So based on that other astronomers said it's most likely that you're not seeing Dyson spheres within the Milky Way you're probably seeing galaxies with a lot of dust in them so they're shining in the infrared and they're much farther away so it's exciting it's a it's a you know I've mentioned this many times in the past this is a great way to go looking for advanced civilizations but like don't be surprised if it is more and more difficult to find things like this Patrick Fritz with the development of large language models and GPT type products doing better and better would you ever consider using AI to help put your articles together and do research so I have a real LoveHate relationship with artificial intelligence with large language models on the one hand uh they're cool they're fun to talk to and they you know help me brainstorm really cool recipes when I try to think of the things that I have in the house to try and make dinner from we call that Chef GPT on the other hand they you've got companies like Google and perplexity and stuff where they are taking your content on your website and they are cribbing it and then they are sort of summarizing it sometimes not correctly and then making this available to a wider audience and now people don't have to come to your website but they require the content that you've created on your website so that's clearly a problem but the biggest problem that I have is that they hallucinate and they are not to be trusted and the amount of time that you have to spend in looking at some article some content that is written by artificial intelligence is time that you could just spend just doing the work yourself so I would never ever ever let uh an AI write any of my content never I mean I want to say never like if it's better than me like at some point in the future when the artificial intelligence does a better job than me then you win I retire I will hand over Universe today to the robots and let them go and do a better job than me but the question you ask is like do I use it for research and so I don't use it for writing but I definitely use it for research and there's a lot of things that it's really good at like I'll take like a science paper and I will feed it into say Google's uh Gemini I'll feed it into chat GPT and then you know and it's a fairly technical complicated science paper and then I will start to talk to the science paper I'll say like what are some of the conclusions what are some of the numbers that were reached what are some of the you know how many What percentages and so on of of stuff and then I will be able to double check so if it makes a reference I'll look through the paper and make sure that that's what it's saying and that gives me a I'm able to digest science papers a lot more quickly and understand the conclusions that are being made because you know I'm I'm not a scientist right I'm a journalist and I have to read papers about astrophysics and cosmology and planetary science and astrobiology and all this kind of stuff and I can't know all of these fields at the same time and I found it's been very helpful but I'm always really skeptical of the results that I get from it so I think that it's really sad that a lot of websites have gone or you know big companies have gone straight for oh my God we can fire all our writers right and then use this stuff to produce sludge and that's that's not what the tool is for it is not you know you know when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail it is a very useful tool for helping you understand knowledge when used appropriately and that's sort of where it sits in my toolkit today but the pace is accelerating it's kind of amazing how how it's getting better and better and better and who knows what the future holds Billy Smith do you believe that there is a ninth planet there are some out there who already believe there is a ninth planet Pluto um I don't have an opinion on that so is there a Planet Beyond Pluto you know also known as Planet 9 and this idea came from two very renowned astronomers Mike Brown and Constantine badan they were studying the movement of objects in the Kyper belt and they think that they see evidence that there's a distribution of these objects that some large gravitational Mass out in the outer solar system is disturbing objects in the Kyper belt and that could explain the weird distribution I forget the number now it's to like one in 10,000 chance that there isn't something according to them even so nobody's been able to find it and that's not super surprising we don't have a lot of really big powerful infrared telescopes cuz it's probably going to be a very cool object that can observe wide swaths of the sky and look for anything that is moving night after night after night which is what you expect to see for for Planet 9 so astronomers went and looked in all of the really obvious places exactly along the plane of the ecliptic they've looked in the places that maybe you know the astronomers have be able to narrow down the range of locations where this object could be but they still don't know exactly where it is and space is huge you know when you think about the hobble Space Telescope in 35 years of observing has only looked at about half a percent of the entire sky and remember you would have to look you know you couldn't just look once because then you just see a star you'd have to look twice to see something moving you probably want a third time but the telescope that's coming shortly ver Rubin Observatory is going to come online next year it is going to be observing the entire night sky every few nights and it's a huge instrument the most powerful camera ever built for astronomy it's going to be able to find Planet 9 if it's out there like if ver Ruben doesn't find it then it probably doesn't exist so I am ambivalent I have no opinion about whether or not there is a larger Planet out there people think there is ver Rubin is going to come along and it's going to find out whether it is and I think it's best for everybody to hold their opinion until ver Rubin takes a crack at looking at the night sky and then and only then will we know whether or not there is a another planet or more in the outer solar system I mean if anything ver Ruben will find all kinds of stuff in the outer solar system so uh you know I like his chances yvi fryer if ver Rubin doesn't find anything that is planet sized would a black hole be the only other explanation no no no uh the most likely explanation for the perturbations of objects in the Kyper belt is some kind of effect from the overall Galaxy that you've got the sum gravity of all of the stars that are moving around in the Milky Way that are somehow causing the Kyper built objects to Bunch up in certain ways maybe there was a rogue star that moved through you know close to the solar system a million years ago and that caused enough of a clustering of objects back at the time the point is that there are just lots and lots of other ideas to exhaustively look through before you say Well it has to be a black hole now if it was a black hole then it's going to be a primordial black hole it means you know because you can't get a black hole with the mass of planet n by the collapse of a star it has to be something else and it has to be one of these black holes that were formed at the beginning of the universe and so there have been some proposals on how you might be able to detect the presence of a black hole I mean you could see some kind of micr lensing as the thing is passing in front of other stars out there but you have to be watching the entire Sky which there are some telescopes that are coming up there going to be doing that like the nas Grace Roman is going to be watching for these micr lensing events there's a survey called ogal where they're watching for micr lensing events so that could be possible but also the idea is that if it is a black hole then it's occasionally going to gobble up a particle in the outer solar system bits of Kyper belt things like that and every time that happens you're going to get a flash of gamma radiation coming from the black hole and so if you had this telescope that was watching the entire sky in gamma radiation you might be able to detect the presence of little bursts of gamma ray photons coming from a black hole that is orbiting around the Sun so if it is a black hole it's still detectable and so far nobody has detected a black hole in the outer solar system RJ if the Earth didn't spin if the Earth and planets didn't rotate around the Sun if the Galaxy was still in essence if nothing moved through space would there be zero gravity gravity doesn't come from Movement Like if the Earth didn't turn there would still be gravity also what is turning because it's compared to what uh you have to sort of think about your you know where you observing something moving something rotating uh and so you know you're not moving compared to your chair but you are moving compared to the airplane that's flying overhead and so it's very uh it's very difficult to to talk about something being completely still because you always have to ask yourself from what perspective who is asking if something is still but you know if the Earth for example didn't orbit around the sun then the Earth would fall into the sun because the Earth's actual orbit around the Sun is a balance between the speed of the earth which is providing an out outward force and the gravity of the sun that's providing a inward force and you get this perfect balance until this Earth is going around the Sun and without the earth going around the Sun part you would no longer have the outward force that counteracts the gravity of the Sun the Earth would just fall in if all of the stars in the galaxy weren't orbiting around within the Galaxy they would all just fall down into the center of the Galaxy and become a giant super massive black hole so um yeah so the motion has nothing to do with the gravity if you want to support the work we do at Universe today consider joining our patreon club your support lets us have a minimum of ads and no sponsorship messages patrons get no ads on university.com for Life want the extra parts of the live stream that aren't in this edited version you can sign up for a special Patron only podcast feed and get the overtime segments as well as other special behind the-scenes episodes including our monthly Patron only question show thanks to everyone who has already subscribed and Welcome to our recent newcomers Narco holer Max Francis Steven tropman David Shaw Ren Special K kaidu seals mcbs laurren fenstra Mr B Wayne J2 Abby and Roger tolk join the club at patreon.com Universe today Nadia n if Bal juice happens to explode what on the other side of the Sun from our point of view would the telescopes we have at L2 notice it and would they be able to study it from that Viewpoint oh that would suck so you know during winter in in the northern hemisphere like during November December January people in the southern hemisphere I know you exist um is when you can best see the constellation of Orion it is visible in the night sky and in the summertime or I guess winter in the southern hemisphere during June July augus is then Orion is behind the Sun from our perspective and so there would be a perfect time for Bal juice to explode and it would be lost in the glare of the Sun and that we wouldn't be able to see it and if we did even be able to see it then we would only be able to tell for a few minutes sunrise or Sunset before it was lost in the glare of the Sun and that would be terrible but fortunately earth based telescopes are not the only telescopes that we have in the solar system at this point so now the telescopes at L2 like James web well James web can't look because it can't look back at the Sun so James Webb wouldn't be able to do it you've got the guia mission you've got you know any of things at the L2 that's close enough to the Earth you know when you think about how you got the Sun the Earth and L2 L2 is on the far side of the earth and so if they tried to look at Bal juice as well they would have to be looking past the Earth at the sun they'd have the same problem so L2 isn't going to do you any good but we have other places in the solar system where there are telescopes we have spacecraft in orbit around Mars we have spacecraft on the surface of Mars perseverance curiosity and although they are not designed to look out into space I'm sure if balj juice went off somebody would be able to task one of them to look in that general direction we also have New Horizons which is out Beyond Pluto and would be able to you know it has a really nice telescope on board it would be able to take a look and there's probably other spacecraft around the solar system system the solar Orbiter there's the Parker solar probe like they would be able to do some initial astronomy waiting for bju to leave the glare of the Sun but in general it would be a disaster because the most important time to look at Bal juice going off is in those first few moments when it is going from a red super giant to whatever are the remnants of Bal juice you want to watch that process happen in real time and we would have just like an absolute front seat view of the explosion going off but the other thing we' also get is the nutrino blast and we've got nutrino observatories on Earth that would be able to detect the neutros that are coming from Bal juice they would go right through the sun no problem and they could be picked up and so we would get that detection in fact we would probably get that detection first astronomers would be get the detection of Bal juice going off and then theyd be like hey everybody Bal juice just just exploded okay where is it oh it's behind the sun oh no so I really really hope it doesn't go off behind the Sun that would suck MTN hermit do you think we have a second star a brown dwarf a small black hole if we had a second star we would see it because it would be the brightest star in the sky uh after the sun of course so we definitely don't have a second star like we're not in Alpha centari with two stars orbiting around each other now could we have a stellar companion that's on incredibly long orbit that comes by the Earth every 10,000 years no we've got really incredible space telescopes like Gaia which are detecting the position of every star in our vicinity and their motions and if there was a star that was in some kind of binary system with Earth it would have caught it and it didn't do we have a brown dwarf that is in our vicinity and the answer to that is also no for sure 100% no how do we know that one of the telescopes that I mentioned earlier in this episode is called wise and it was an infrared telescope that was launched and one of its jobs was to scan the vicinity around the solar system looking for any infrared companions Brown dwarfs and it did this complete survey of the entire sky and it didn't see a brown dwarf in the vicinity and so was able to rule out the existence of a brown dwarf in fact wise was able to rule out any Jupiter sized objects within I'm going to say 50,000 astronomical units so about a lightyear away it was able to rule out any Saturn sized objects a little bit closer than that so all really left like when you think when you go back to that answer about planet 9 all that we're left with that's possible is some kind of Neptune sized Uranus sized object that is within a few thousand astronomical units of the earth and beyond anything closer than that would have already been observed anything farther than that that's bigger has been ruled out and all you're left with is like Uranus Neptune earth-sized objects in the outer solar system so if Planet 9 is out there it has to be one of those is it a black hole probably not this has been an idea that maybe you can explain Planet 9 as a primordial black hole but like the chances of it actually being a black hole and not just a planet like we have tons of planets here in the solar system are pretty remote so uh we don't have a second star we don't have a brown dwarf we don't have a small black hole we might have a Uranus Neptune or earth-sized world or a few in the outer solar system Billy Smith do you like the idea of going to the Moon first and then to Mars yeah I am quite against say sending humans to Mars first it's incredibly dangerous it's very far away uh astronauts are going to have to spend 9 months in transit to get to Mars they may have to spend up to 18 months on the surface of Mars then they're going to have to get in a spacecraft come back another nine months we don't know how to keep human beings alive in that kind of environment for any length of time we've barely set humans down on the surface of the Moon for a couple of days and brought them safely back to Earth so there is an enormous laundry list of to-do items that should be done and we are incredibly fortunate that we have this large moon right next door to us here on Earth that you can get to and from the Moon in a week that you can communicate in almost real time and so if people need help or they need something explained or someone has to talk somebody through surgery or something like that that you can do this and that there are so many lessons that we have to learn in attempting to live temporarily on the surface of another world that really makes sense for us to do them on the moon which is really close and you know this is NASA's plan this is the Chinese space agency's plan which is let's go set up some kind of research station on the moon let's learn how to work in the lunar environment and then over time as we've gathered enough knowledge then let's figure out how to send humans to Mars I mean I totally get that Mars is this kind of romantic Vision that it's this whole other planet and it looks like a desert and it's got an atmosphere although not very much and it's got water ice at the poles it's got all of these interesting things about it but a lot of our understanding and enthusiasm from Mars comes from our education in science fiction and that's not the best education science fiction can help can help Inspire but it is doing a really bad job of giving us the realism of of what's out there and so I am you know I'm a huge proponent of us sending humans to the moon and to Mars and asteroids and why not let's go to Titan but let's do it carefully one step at a time safely building our technology as we go and doing as much science as we can as we get there one of the big outstanding question question that we have about Mars is what will long-term onethird gravity do to the human body we don't know we don't know if it's safe for people to gestate uh human beings to term in Martian gravity but if we do a lot of these low gravity experiments on the moon where it's one sixth gravity that's even less forgiving and so if it turns out that you we take a bunch of of mammals to the moon base and they gestate and they're safe and they're fine and over long periods of time you know maybe there's a cat that lives on the moon base it's been there for 17 years and it's still doing fine maybe it's even healthier then we know that Mars will be fine but until you know until we have that knowledge it's just not safe for us to spend long periods of time on either the moon or Mars since it's Grim Reaper it seems telescopes are making determinations on objects that are one or a few pixels especially deep deep object how do we know the telescope's findings are accurate and not error or noise you're absolutely right that many of the objects that telescopes are looking at are single pixels so any planet that has been directly observed by a telescope like James web or anything you're pretty much just seeing one single Pixel any Galaxy that's being seen at the near the beginning of time you're just getting a pixel or a couple of pixels and so how can astronomers learn anything from a single Pixel well the key is spectroscopy the key is the light and so about 100 years ago astronomers realize that if you take the light from well from anything really if you burn things then you're going and then you take the light that comes from the thing that you're burning and you put it through a prism you get this rainbow but embedded in the rainbow you get these lines which are called absorption lines and they correspond to to different chemicals that are in whatever it is that you burned and so you can take some object you can burn it you can look at the light coming from it and you can know what it's made out of and so just like that astronomers realized that they could go and look at the light coming from stars from planets from asteroids from galaxies as long as they're getting enough photons long as you're getting enough light and they are then turning it into this rainbow this spectroscopy rainbow then they can actually know what are the chemicals that are in that object and so they can know that a star has uranium in its upper atmosphere or they can know that that there is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet that's orbiting around a star that is hundreds of light years away and spectroscopy is like easily the most important discovery made in astronomy you know maybe there's a bunch but I think it's hard to argue that spectroscopy isn't one of the most important things that you can just learn so much by being able to expand the light from something and so like when James Webb first came online and astronomers started to see galaxies that were just a couple hundred million years after the big bang you got this race to discover what was the most distant Galaxy and you got a lot of really quick observations that were being made where they were saying okay we've got you know this galaxy is only 230 million years after the big bang and this one's only 310 or whatever but then they took James web and they made these really long very careful observations so they could do the spectroscopy so they could get enough light coming from that Galaxy that they could produce the rainbow and when you produce the rainbow then you see the absorption lines that are in that Galaxy that tell you that match a Galaxy and then from there they were able to tell exactly how far that Galaxy had been red shifted away from us that tells you how old you're seeing that Galaxy and so at any point like one pixel is all astronomers each just give them one bright pixel and they can tell an enormous amount of information from that one pixel Pete Martinez so I was hearing about the sun switching its axis can this happen so the sun switches its magnetic poles on an 11year cycle so uh the Sun starts out where where imagine say the North Pole of the sun is at the top and the South Pole of the Sun the magnetic South Pole is at the bottom and then over the course of 11 years the sun's magnetic field kind of spreads out and gets kind of wibbly wobbly very confused and complicated and then it comes back around and then now what was the North Pole of the the sun is now the South Pole and what was the South Pole is now the North Pole but it's only the magnetic pole not the actual physical pole it's not like the sun flips over upside down it's just that its magnetic field switches places and this is a very well documented thing it's an 11-year cycle we are actually on our way towards the solar maximum so we're about to Crest probably in mid 2025 we'll reach the top of the solar maximum where the magnetic field is sort of very strong we're getting a lot of flares coming out of the Sun a lot of coronal mass ejections and then things will start to dial back down and a few years from now we will get to solar minimum where there's like no sunspots on the surface of the Sun there's very little coronal activity we're not getting a lot of these Mass ejections there's not a lot of auroras and then the activity will build again and the sun will be in the process of flipping its poles and then it will uh things will pick up again and this magnetic flip is a thing that the Earth does as well although the cycle seems to be a lot longer like something on the order of 800,000 years on average for the for the earth to flip its North and South magnetic poles and I'm sure you're wondering like is this dangerous well you know we don't seem to have any mass extinction events that are tied to the same time as the Earth's magnetic pole flips that have happened in the past so probably not you probably want to know how we know that the Earth's poles flip magnetically and so when you have these lava flows the lava flows can have a lot of iron in them and as this lava is still molten you get the little crystals of iron as they're forming they align themselves with the Earth's magnetic field and then a later lava flow comes along and maybe the Earth's magnetic field is flipped around and now the next batch in the lava flow are turned in the opposite direction to match the new orientation of the magnetic field and so it's a field called paleomagnetism and so geologists can can do a core sample of lava flows and they can just track each one of the magnetic field line flips in the Earth's history so it's amazing all right those are all the questions that we had this week that we had this season so thank you everybody who put your questions into YouTube comments and everybody who joined us for the live show um we do this every Monday at 5:00 P p.m. Pacific time but of course the next one's going to be in two months so as we get closer I will put the next event onto the YouTube channel and you can come and join the live show it is twice as long with lots of extra information now I want to tell you a secret about how you can access the content that we've done so on our patreon page which you can follow us completely for free when we post the question show I will also post a link to the full unedited live stream and so if you want to go and just watch the whole live stream there's a link there so all you have to do is just go to patreon.com universetoday follow us for free you don't have to become a patron and then you'll get a notification every time we release a new episode and then you can go and watch the full uned live stream for like how to get that content this is the way to do that now I'm going to talk about a book in a second but I'd like to thank our patrons thanks to Abe Kingston Adam schaer andream gross Bill David guilan David Matts Dennis alberty Dustin cable Jeremy M Jim Burke Jordan young Josh Schultz mod Paul Robo step kraki Stephen fer Munley and Vlad chiplin who support us at the master of the universe level and all our patrons all your support means the universe to us all right so I've got a new book series that I have begun and this is the machineries of Empire and you know many of you know that I really like the kind of Grand sweeping types of Science Fiction space exploration stories like the culture series like Revelation space Mass Effect you know dealing with Empires that have been around since the dawn of time and and humans venturing out into a cold unfeeling universe so uh yeah so now I'm reading this book called The Nine Fox Gambit by Yun Hal and this is the first book in the series and there's three total and it is really weird and really complicated but it is also tickles a lot of the same kinds of uh you know entertainment that the culture series and the Revelation space do the book is about uh a military leader who has to defeat an enemy in space and she makes the recommendation that they bring out of Cold Storage one of the greatest generals that was ever in their empire but was also a mass murderer and so he's a very dangerous guy but he's really tactically good and yet he doesn't remember why he um wiped out his his whole Army and she agrees to have his personality implanted into her mind while she attempts to win this battle and he is her advisor but also you know it's kind of dangerous so anyway the but the but the but the writing is very good the concepts are sort of in that same vein as the culture series very complicated technology you're trying to kind of wrap your mind around how this universe works and it's very satisfying as you make progress in the book so check out the nine Fox Gambit by uh Yun all right we'll see you next season

Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 28,736

Keywords: universe today, fraser cain, space, astronomy, novae, comets, nancy grace roman

Id: 9CsBzBMfPu0

Length: 43min 25sec (2605 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2024