Most Of The Universe Is Missing And Other Space Mysteries | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant org did you know the center of the Milky Way is basically a giant daiquiri scientist studying the Sagittarius b2 gas cloud at the center of the Milky Way galaxy found that it's actually very rich in ethyl formate that the formate is a building block of amino acids which are building blocks of proteins which are our building blocks of life itself but it's also a component that gives raspberries their flavor and it smells like rum so it's basically a giant daiquiri or a bubblegum flavor how does no bubble gum company ever capitalized on this very very Milky Way flavor a bubble sulabha it's a galaxy of flavor and you can only have a four mate with the I RAM radio telescope and the reason why they were able to find it is kind of fascinating what this molecule does is it absorbs radiation and then re-emits it and a different radio frequency which the IRM telescope was able to pick up these kinds of investigative techniques have taught us some very specific things about the universe but it's also illuminated some questions that we still don't have the answers to so here's five of the biggest unexplained space mysteries number one missing baryonic matter you probably already know that the universe is made up is 70% dark energy 23% dark matter and only 4.6 percent is regular baryonic matter as we know it it's called baryonic matter because baryons are the types of fundamental particles that go on to form atoms but did you know that at the 4.6 percent of matter that we actually know about 90% of it is missing this is called the missing baryonic matter problem and it's plagued astrophysicists for years the deal is that when cosmologists measure out how much baryonic matter there should be in the universe it's nowhere near what we actually see right so there's a couple of ways that they've measured this one is called nucleosynthesis and that's basically the process of fundamental particles becoming actual atoms in matter after the Big Bang so the more baryonic matter that's out there the quicker this would form heavier elements like lithium but if there was less baryonic matter it would form lighter elements like hydrogen and helium so by looking at the chemical composition of the universe they can figure out how much baryonic matter there was starting out right after the Big Bang and the amount that they're measuring is nowhere near what we're observing another measurement looks for irregularities in the CMB the idea being that sense baryonic matter interacts with photons and light it would leave some kind of imprint on the CMB now the amount that's missing in each of these different measurements is a little bit different but it is close so where's all the missing matter well this is a mystery that's actually been solved partly 2017 a team from Edinburgh University published a paper that theorized that these missing baryons might be found in clouds of ionized gas surrounding galaxies in the filaments of the cosmic web when you look at the universe on the grandest scale the galaxies don't just float around uniformly they tend to clump together into filaments that interconnect into a giant web a cosmic web and these scientists theorize that the filaments could be filled up with a highly ionized gas called warm hot intergalactic matter or Wims this is a million-degree gas that's very thin but shows up in x-ray observations the scientists did the math and found that these wimps could account for 50 to 70 percent of the missing baryonic matter so we're getting there but there's still a lot to be found number two the source of high-energy cosmic rays I covered this in a previous video on the oh my god particle but cosmic rays are basically high-energy particles from deep space that are 85% of the time just a simple proton a proton being the nucleus of a hydrogen atom but 12% of the time they're alpha particles which are the nuclei of helium atoms the remaining 3% of the particles are made up of electrons and lighter elements like lithium beryllium and boron the thing is those elements are actually pretty rare in the universe but they're very over-represented in cosmic rays so what gives there it's believed that these light elements actually started as heavier elements like carbon and oxygen which are a lot more prevalent in the universe but they got stripped over time as they collided with hydrogen atoms and understand what gas but what's doing that and where is it coming from the paper released last year from the prj Observatory that used data collected over 12 years determined that these cosmic rays are actually intergalactic in origin it was thought once upon a time that these particles could be coming from the center of the Milky Way galaxy but due to these observations we now know that they are coming from a different direction not from our galaxy but from other galaxies now these are just your garden-variety cosmic rays there's also ultra high-energy cosmic rays which are capable of holding ten to the twenty electron volts these are baffling for a lot of reasons for one we have no idea how a particle can be accelerated to this rate it's actually faster than what we do at the Large Hadron Collider and it also breaks a theoretical barrier called the gzk cutoff the graysons that's up in kuzmin limit or the gzk limit says that it's impossible for a particle to have more energy than 5 times 10 to the 19th electron volts due to the eventual slowing that would occur over time as the particle travels against the cosmic microwave background radiation and this would suggest that particles are traveling faster than that limit which are called trans gzk particles would be coming from a point of origin fairly close by but there's nothing out there close by that could be doing this that we can see it's assumed that the most high-energy particles in the universe must be coming from some of the most powerful forces in the universe the kind that you would find at the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy well that's nowhere local although there is a theory that a particle can be ricocheted back and forth inside the shock wave of a supernova giving it extra momentum and flinging it out at this kind of speed but right now all we've got is guesses the origin of high-energy cosmic rays continues to be one of the most baffling mysteries in the universe number three fast radio bursts in 2007 researcher Duncan Lorimer and his team were going over some old data that had been recorded at the Parkes Observatory in Australia when they ran across something really weird an extremely strong radio signal that only lasted 5 milliseconds so take a second and divide it into a thousand this lasted five of those but it was extremely powerful and weirdly only in the radio spectrum this particular anomaly was called the Lorimer burst but since then 17 more of these fast radio bursts have been observed and had been called fast radio bursts the problem with FRB is is that it's next to impossible to figure out where they come from because they're so short and they're also totally random and never repeat each other the first one that we've ever caught in real time was in 2015 because they happen so randomly and frequently they're thought to be the result of some kind of cataclysmic events like supernovae or black holes colliding and because it's only in the radio frequency it's thought that it happened really far away because that energy that came out of has been red shifted into the radio spectrum but this got thrown for a loop recently because they did find one repeating FRB called FRB 12 1102 and because it was able to repeat they were able to watch it in real time and get some really interesting information on it one thing they were actually able to trace a origen a little bit they were able to trace it to a dwarf galaxy in the constellation Auriga three billion light years away the other thing is that this signal was twisted by something called Faraday rotation which basically polarizes the radio frequency and they found that this was 500 times more twisted than normal FRBS the best guess as to what can be doing this was that the radio signal passed to an incredibly dense an incredibly powerful magnetic plasma field like the kind you see at the center of galaxies in fact radio signals coming from the center of the Milky Way galaxy are similarly twisted why would a galaxy be throwing off massive spikes of radio waves at random intervals it could be that it's a directional thing in the center of the galaxy turns and as it turns towards us it kind of swipes past our planet and appears to us like a burst then that might be causing all of them but it just happens to pass us by once and then the rotation of the galaxy never turns back that way again but it still doesn't account for why that one repeating one had 500 times more twists than a regular one it may turn out there's actually multiple kinds of FRBS so there are still many mysteries around the F R bees that we're trying to figure out number 4 rihanna's ation of the universe the Big Bang is just an onion of mysteries every time you peel back one mystery there's an even bigger one underneath and one of the biggest ones is the realization of the universe you know Rihanna's ation that thing this might require an explanation so right after the Big Bang the universe expanded rapidly known as the inflationary period and it was filled with ionized fundamental particles and was fully opaque but then a thing called recombination happened which caused all these ionized particles protons and electrons to come together to form hydrogen gas which basically neutralized the universe this was about 380,000 years after the Big Bang and this was the beginning of the universe's dark ages because there was nothing to create light in the early universe no stars no galaxies just a universe of neutral hydrogen but then between 400 million and a billion years after the Big Bang something interesting occurred this hydrogen gas clumped together in large clouds that became the first stars and quasars and galaxies these released energetic photons into the universe which reaiiy anigh is the hydrogen hence the universe became brian iced the problem is when we look back at the stellar density of the universe of the time that includes both the number and size of the stars there's not nearly enough energy REI annive everything so where did this ionizing radiation come from nobody knows for sure and it's one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics but of course there is a theory and a paper from 2016 a team of physicists suppose that it might have something to do with what's called the Lyman continuum it's a special type of radiation that doesn't normally emit from galaxies because it runs into a barrier of neutral hydrogen but they did find a galaxy they call it a green pea galaxy because it glows green and it actually they think was very similar to the types of galaxies that existed in the early universe and they found that this galaxy coin j0 95-plus 1403 actually emits this Lyman radiation far more than most galaxies do which would allow it to ionize 40 times more gas than a regular galaxy would and if this was a common type of galaxies in the early universe it could be a part of the reorganization puzzle and number five the Himiko cloud sticking with the weird reorganization epoch of the early universe in 2009 scientists found a gigantic object twelve point nine billion light years away dating from the very earliest universe an object that shouldn't exist it's one that oldest objects ever found in the universe and it's huge fifty-five thousand light years across it's a very faint blob with mysterious origins that was found by the Japanese Subaru telescope so the scientists decided to name it the him ago cloud or the himeko blob named after a very mysterious Empress of the same name to this day scientists are not sure what this is or how it got there it might be a huge cloud of ionized gas powered by a supermassive black hole it could be a merging of two different galaxies together or it could just be one massive 40 billion suns sized galaxy according to the team lead Masami og he said I'm very surprised by this discovery we've never imagined that such a large object could exist at this early stage of the universe's history according to the concordance model of the Big Bang cosmology small objects form first and then merged to produce larger systems this blob had a size typical of present-day galaxies when the age of the universe was only 800 million years old only 6% of the age of today's universe other blobs have been found dating from two to three billion years after the Big Bang but these were much much smaller so the fact that Himiko was much older and bigger is a complete mystery over the past ten year cosmologists been hunting for another Himiko sized early galaxies that have come out completely empty-handed Himiko seems to be an absolute anomaly in every way one that challenges our assumptions about galaxy formation in the early universe and the evolution of the universe after the Big Bang often in science it seems that the more we learn the more we learn how much we have to learn it seems like every single question that we answer just brings up more questions so can we ever really fully understand the universe and we're just making it more mysterious I guess if nothing else at least we know what it tastes like the universe is a big ol mystery to you and you want to learn more about it a great place to start is brilliant org brilliant has a whole course on astronomy that shows you the tools astronomers use to calculate the size of objects how far away they are and what they're made of you ever hear me throwing out facts about the universe and ask yourself but how did they figure that out well brilliant walks you through it you'll cover everything from the lifecycle of the star from a cloud of gas to stellar remnant to the likelihood of alien life on other planets you can sign up for free at brilliant org slash answers with Joe and get access to their free weekly puzzles and brainteasers help keep your mind sharp in the first 295 people who sign up for the premium subscription that gives you access to all their courses get 20% off for life I love brilliant I think you will too brilliant org slash answers with Joe links down in the description I want to thank brilliant org for sponsoring this video and as always I want to think that answer files on patreon who are helping to keep the lights on around here your support means the absolute world to me and there's some new people that are joined this is gonna be a long list because I have not done this for a couple of weeks so bear with me but I want to get through all these there's Daniel ow David Mackay Sean vicar in trauma Lama Eva matcha Cova Morton Kelsey Steve rebored Donald C climb Mario 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videos which come out Mondays and Thursdays alright thanks again for watching you guys go out now and have an eye-opening week I'll see you back here next Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 568,633

Keywords: mysteries of space, unsolved mysteries, unexplained mysteries, dark energy, answers with joe, mysteries of space 2018, dark matter, reionization of the universe, himiko cloud, fast radio bursts, oh my god particle, cosmic rays, ultra high energy cosmic rays, missing baryonic matter, baryonic matter, big bang, astronomy

Id: TKkNEtIpX_Y

Length: 13min 57sec (837 seconds)

Published: Mon May 14 2018