StarTalk Podcast: Cosmic Queries – Dark Matter, Aliens, End of the Universe

[Music] this is star talk neil degrasse tyson here your personal astrophysicist got with me my co-host jack nice hey hey hey neil what's up all right i love having you out there chuck i love being here man for all my star talk needs you're there and and and beyond and beyond and and beyond my friend we're going to knock out another cosmic queries but this one we have to grab the ones that don't fit any categories so this is just i think you coined the term galactic gumbo that's my favorite we we call it grab bag we'll call it a bunch of different things but my favorite is the lightning gumball that outfit so we should go to louisiana and see if we can get galactic gumbo on somebody's menu oh wow that's oh that's a great i mean why not yeah who's going to say no to that right exactly yo that's a great idea oh that would nothing would make me more uh happy than to go into everything yeah so these are all uh patreon uh questions and uh you know they're getting it good parent i'm just looking at it they are but this time we actually let uh we have more people than patreon well you let in some others in this round oh yeah this round okay because it's it's ask anything okay okay so and if i don't know i'll just say i i don't know go on the next question that's right it could be anything that they want to know from you you know so um including you know why is this guy blue but we already did that we already did that we got that yeah we did and you know the more content we post chuck right in explainer videos and things the uh the whole cosmic queries could just be go to this link right when we're done explaining everything and we we got it oh by the way i i have to i'm compelled that this format inspired a book a star talk book called cosmic queries it's it's uh march 2021 so actual queries from people no so what happens is there's some queries that are just so deep and and they spill out over this format someone says what is the meaning of our existence or why is the universe here those are real questions that real people have right they don't lend themselves to our repartee right so we collected the deepest questions ever asked and we put them in the cosmic query's book so it's like um how did life get here what is the universe made of what's like why can't i wear brown shoes with a black tuxedo or can i wear white after labor day those are the questions the burning questions okay cool start so start it out what you got all right let's let's go with uh um um or um but says chuck if you're reading this please just call me sarah okay okay well there you thanks sarah thanks for telling me after you make a fool of yourself right you could have just put that as your name okay all right could dark matter be uh the effect of another universe is gravity on our own gravity that's what i want it to be i so badly want dark matter to be regular matter in a parallel universe whose gravitational force is spilling into our space-time i want that to be true but none of my colleagues are leaning that way and they're like deep in it and it's their expertise and i'm just looking over the fence what you up to today picking it up so i can share it with all you good people so the the the what's the over under the odds on favorite is that there's some other kind of particle family of particles that are not the electron proton neutron the ones we're familiar with that do not interact with our particles and if they don't interact in any sort of chemical way then light will pass through them you know they all you'll feel is their gravity and so i i don't have a problem with that it i just don't i don't think it's as fun as thinking there could be another universe now i the only reason why i think this is i spoke with some top folks about uh field theory this is a class i never took in in graduate school and i regret it but feel fear you study you know fields these are fields that that generate forces on objects basically okay okay it turns out not the kind you play on not the kind you play on okay all right these are force fields a concept introduced by um who's our guide to mid-century mid-century of faraday michael faraday in the mid 19th century because no one imagined describing something you can't see that has an effect on other things all right and so he had to invent this concept this field concept where you draw lines that take the shape of that field and that's what the iron filings do for the magnetic field right right yeah before him it was just oh the the the they're just that's just what they do but he he gets magic so he gave it so he anchored it in in physics speak so that we can actually calculate with them and do other things so so these are fields so in field theory you apparently and i can't demonstrate this to you i can only repeat it others have told me that light and all the forces that surround it electromagnetic forces cannot exit your space-time they're trapped within it but gravity can gravity can spill out of your universe and move between universes that's what i heard and i i think i got that right okay but i'd so if that's the case then a nearby universe in this higher dimensional um construct could have gravity spilling into our universe and there we are mystically touching it thinking it's a magical invisible thing when it's just real and it's just something sitting on outside the door wow so now let me just ask this uh on top of what she's you talked about sarah what sarah says thank you sarah sarah sarah um so you say that some think it would that they might want it to be these particles that we cannot interact with yeah it's not so much that they i think there's good reason to think they could be those particles and their experiments now designed to try to capture them and see if one in a zillion encounters with our particles maybe they'll have some uh there'll be some exception to that rule that'll render them visible gotcha because that's my point it's like what why make that postulate in the first place yeah yeah i mean what you know why not just little gremlins you know i mean there's an invisible particle you can't see it right you know so you have theories guiding these experiments and they're suggesting if the dark matter is of this kind it should interact with this regular particle in this way this rarely or this frequently and so you do this so we have these huge experiments trying to detect dark matter particles okay that's all that's going on there all right so i'm with sarah on this it'd be cool if it were okay very cool by the way if that's the case yes since we have since we have five times as much dark matter in our universe as regular matter don't matter that means there's a [ __ ] ton of regular matter in this other universe right they're regular matter right yeah if our dark matter is their regular matter that universe has at least six at least six times the mass at least but it turns out to escape your universe and enter another one the strength of the gravity drops off precipitously so it has to be even stronger than just a factor of six so it's a honkering universe and wouldn't it be weird if one day we learned we're just some small gnat on the among other gnats on the back of a much larger more powerful universe and we're just a satellite universe to it well that's in a way very humbling and in a way i kind of want us all to get together and just make a very loud sound so that we are not boiled in a pot of water as the dust speck that we are or to get swatted off the back but it gets bang all right wow okay cool all right okay okay here we go um uh also from patreon sarah was a patreon patron and for those of you interested go to patreon.com and support us and uh and then you know you can be part of um actual private patreon cosmic queries where neil answers your questions almost personally yeah these would just only be posted behind the the the behind the curtain behind the patreon curtain all right fernando uh gomes says this our gomez or gomez you know it's g-o-m-e-s so maybe it's gomez but it's i if it's if it's freddy then fine but it's fernando give me some okay all right let me i'm sorry let me allow me to recalibrate here we go this is from fernando gomez now starring [Laughter] maybe gomez needs a z and gomes is that i don't know maybe i don't know but anyway he says our own pocket of the universe is expanding will it exceed the speed of light i guess when he's saying expanding he's also uh including the uh acceleration as well uh and if so will that mean uh will no more be able to detect anything coming from outside of our universe two first of all that is already the case okay snap okay and as time moves on and as you correctly added chuck with the acceleration of the universe what will happen is things that used to be within our horizon simply expand faster than the light that they're sending us can reach us and then they basically disappear beyond the horizon and as the universe continues to expand things that used to be nearby will now find themselves on this extreme limit of the expansion and then disappear beyond the horizon such that there will be a day that arrives by the way there's a whole section of one of the chapters in the cosmic query book on this by the way it's not out yet it's like march so don't don't don't worry about it yet not out yet so so i don't even think it's listed yet so i shouldn't even be talking about them so pretend i i didn't say anything hey you're getting a sneak peek don't worry okay so there there comes a time when the our galaxy will merge with the andromeda galaxy of becoming one one galaxy twice the size and it will become only us in our pocket of the universe and all other galaxies would have receded beyond our horizon and the night sky as seen from earth would contain only stars and nothing else in the universe so we would have a universe that people thought it was before hubble discovered other galaxies there was a time what is it ask anybody before 1926 they say tell me about the universe well they're just stars stars in the night sky and stars just go on like forever and then we learned all the stars you see are in our one little galaxy and there are island universes if you will which was a term u retraceable to immanuel kant and others back in the 18th century could there be island universes out there so other galaxies you can think of them that way and so everything we know about the history and origin of the universe is because we can see these other galaxies out to the edge of the universe but in the distant future when they all recede beyond our horizon gone is any record of the history of the universe the big bang the expansion everything there'll be no indicators left to tell us it'll be an entire chapter of the history of the universe ripped from the book and there you are any post-apocalyptic civilizations will say yeah the universe is just the stars in the night sky and they won't have any way to disprove that and chuck i lose sleep wondering whether we today are in some kind of state of existence where a chapter had been removed from our attempt to probe our place in the universe and here we are without that chapter trying to make sense of it oh that's terrible terrible what a terrible terrible thought i have these thoughts and it delays slumber that's just awful that's an awful thought oh my god yeah and so is the distant future thought that's not good either right uh yeah i got another one you ready suppose you grew up on venus you'd be vaporized but let's ignore that complication venus i got some really good sunscreen if you if you that won't help you from high temperature this is true that's only a uv sunscreen ain't stopping you from right that's not 900 degrees that's not it yeah i got an expec i got an asbestos bathing suit go ahead so uh if if civilization arose on venus right there would be no culture of the night sky there would be no night sky because it has such a thick cloud cover no one has ever seen the night sky oh wow all you would know is that half a year because venus rotates very slowly half a year it's just kind of light and then it gets dark for most of you and then it gets that's all you're gonna know and so someone would have to figure out how to travel in space to even know there's such a thing as traveling in space build a spaceship and then imagine emerging from those clouds the cloud tops for the first time and you see the sun and stars and other planets oh my gosh so are we buried under some cloak preventing us from getting an accurate understanding of the world around us wow that's that's uh that that's very um very profound and and thought-provoking yeah that's fernando there you go fernando look at look at you buddy we gotta take a quick break when we come back more cosmic queries uh galactic gumbo edition we're back jack yeah chuck do you get to do stand up during covet how does that work okay so it's so funny that you asked that i have done a few zoom shows to be honest uh and they feel weird um and i yeah because so much of your of your business model as a comedian is interacting with people and seeing them and feeling them right you can't do comedy in a vacuum no it's weird and uh but on zoom that that's kind of fun because depending on who's hosting the show they sometimes they let you you know you can see into these people's homes and so that you don't you smack talk what's going on that that that is so much fun there's so so much fun it's like it's it's like you know if i were doing a zoom right now in a comedy show and i'm looking at neil degrasse tyson i'd be like oh look at that there's dr tyson who apparently has uh pictures of alien sperm on his wall that's great that is fantastic this guy's clearly been off the planet okay so you know that's the fun part but it's it's not nearly as fun as doing stand-up live with the energy of a live audience there's a there's a real human connection that comes with a live audience there's nothing like that so just for those only listening i have two works of art from an inuit artist yes and it is a bird that has just consumed a a fish and one is a black and white version the other one is a white and black version of the same print and they flank my desk for these recordings and they they look they do look a little alien yeah they do they agree with you they look a little alien but they're cool and if you're interested in these you can find them on on our postings uh the name of the artist and the and a little bit of the history of the inuit culture is there so and and i thank her for giving me permission to show these uh i mean they're actually our real art my wife is from uh was raised in alaska and so she has sort of an awareness and a sensitivity to the whole region and inuit art and this sort of thing so that's cool yeah anyhow so let's keep going give me some questions yeah let's let's get back into uh let's do another patreon another patreon from jet thomas what a good name he's a he's a he's a space hero uh hello neil and chuck if gravitational waves can bend the fabric of space-time wait wait by the way jets don't work in space just so you know you need rockets but go on okay you're right because you need to air in through the air you need air inflow to to to make a jet i'm just saying i i got you i got you okay okay listen i'm not i will i will take that correction i'm gonna be all up in your face about it i won't let stuff go by i know who i'm talking around okay that's why i don't go to the movies with you all right here we go so jet thomas says this if gravitational waves can bend the fabric of space-time could it potentially be utilized to communicate with life in other universes in principle could a device use gravitational waves instead of the way we use uh radio waves to stream information outside the bounds of our universe now you just said in our previous answer that light is bound to this universe trapped so now gravitational waves yeah so each one of these is an entire window to the universe i mean let's think back for a minute when the telescope was sort of pioneered by galileo he's thinking oh my gosh look what i can now see and i can look at i can see ships farther in the distance i can look up at the milky way and i see stars where you thought it was just a cloud and he's imagining that the telescope is the way to see everything your eyes can't okay right but then give me a couple hundred years on that and then what happens william herschel discovers infrared which is also light but your eyes can't see it and in fact is in his original research paper he called it light unfit for vision wow and so wait a minute if all your telescopes are only giving you visible light but why even call it visible light it's just light right you don't have any other you know there's no reason to qualify that it's visible light if you don't know any of the light that you can't see the moment we discover light you can't see you now have to constrain how you call the light your eyes detect and we call that visible light infrared is not visible ultraviolet is not visible neither are x-rays gamma rays radio waves none of that yet it's all light traveling at the speed of light so we open up telescopes to these windows to the universe and that's how we discovered the birth of the universe and black holes and and and jets all kinds of things in the universe that's how we discovered them but now we can go a step beyond that and say all of these collectively in a way is just one kind of window to the universe the window that uses light are there other kinds of windows and yes gravitational waves is a kind of window neutrinos is a kind of window the neutrinos everywhere we just need special telescopes to detect them and so if gravity if gravity can escape your universe if that can happen then there's no reason why we can't send a signal i i agree entirely that's a long answer to just say no i agree but but i got a question that again i'm i'm an idiot when it comes to field theory so if the ripple of a gravitational wave it requires or its effect in the space-time continuum is this wave when it leaves the universe what is it jiggling i mean i don't know what is it maybe it's just the graviton the the quantum particle that corresponds to the gravity wave in this same way a photon of light corresponds to the wave of light right these are sort of parallel constructs all right we speak of light waves they're carried by photons gravity waves carried by gravitons maybe the graviton busts out goes through comes enters the other universe and we don't have to worry about the wave warping the fabric of space and time so yeah i don't see why not but i would need higher expertise to answer that with some precision wow that well god how much higher expertise can you get yeah that's his thing that's right yeah that was a great answer though man no that's that's fantastic yeah i love it and the windows to the universe that's an excellent yeah so what it is it's a window so the electromagnetic spectrum is a window of windows right right and then we have another kind of window over here on the other side of the house see oh man i love that i love that that's just god that's if you went back in time and said galileo you're practically blind right and he said no i'm not look what i can see he was like do you not see what i'm looking through what the hell is wrong with you that's exactly how he would have said it too yeah you know that's how he dude to you what he he was colloquial by the way he didn't he he hung with the with the common folk oh really he might have spoken in the italian vernacular of the day whatever that would have been yes the italian equivalent of child please so okay cool job you know i am better at the telescope from the inner cities oh that's hilarious okay here we go here we go uh i love that the window the different windows of the universe love it okay let's go to eric allen eric allen also from patreon and then we're going to jump into other people outside of patreon i'll make eric the last patreon question hi there i've been listening for years and i finally have the nerve to ask a question he says we know that the force of gravity bleeding into our universe from another universe would drop off at the rate of one over r cubed he says yeah okay uh hypothetically if the other three forces were somehow able to bleed into our universe uh from another would they be affected the same way now i don't know if i said his equation correct i got it no we're good we we we good here okay so let me just say what's going on here yes please okay um if i have a water pistol okay and i shoot it right at your face right then all the water that exited the the vessel in the water pistol goes in a stream and it all lands on your nose right okay if you're a good shot there's no there's no dilution of as long as the stream is is tight and narrow there's no dilution of it of what came out of my water gun before it hits your face so now let me say i'm now instead of gonna do it in a straight line that's one dimension i'm gonna spray it horizontally okay okay but it's the same amount of water same amount of water okay so if i if now i spray it then it has it's quote diluted by the area over which it has to travel okay so if that's the case then it drops off as um one over r is what one over the distance so if you're twice as far away you're getting half as much as you would have if you were closer okay that's how that dilution would work so that's in two dimensions okay now let's say you're now spraying it in all three dimensions so that now it's now it's like this this wave the spherical wave emanating from the water gun of course you'll hit yourself in the face yeah because it's going in all directions right right right so it turns out if you go in all these directions then it's being diluted by the area of the surface of that sphere okay that's it so now it's being delete and it's the the formula for the surface of a sphere is four pi r squared so it's being diluted by the square of the size of the the surface and so this is the famous one over r squared law that light experiences that gravity experiences because whatever is the source it goes out and it's filling all of space and as it moves out the intensity drops off as the square if you're leaving your universe you're going in a direction that is not accessible to anything you have seen or know because you're exiting these dimensions and now you're exit and you're leaving our universe crossing into another universe the strength of the gravity when i'll drop off by the cube of the distance and that's significant okay if i'm two feet away and now i go to four feet i now have one eighth the strength right not half the strength not half the strength because it's a factor of two away and you cube that two times two times two is eight right i have one one-eighth the strength okay so i don't know any reason to think why other forces wouldn't have this extra dimension of dilution associated with him exiting your universe and coming into the uh another universe right okay cool wow yeah so you're subject to a higher dimension of dilution by leaving a universe and so yeah so so that's why i think i said in an earlier question it's not only the six times our gravity that it has going on for itself it's got to make up for that extra dilution to leave its universe and come in here so it's a honkering universe wow okay cool if that's if that's how if if that's what we're feeling if that's what dark matter actually is yeah well i got to tell you eric after waiting years you actually came up with a damn good question good for you buddy uh yeah yeah we'll see in a few years with another great question let's keep it going with uh oh i love this this is from instagram the most happy boy 11 is the handle neil how does it all end oh and that's it that's it that's the whole question how does it all end uh let me tell you what that is when we return we got to take a quick break and when we come back the third and final segment of cosmic queries galactic gumbo gravity on star talk we back star talk cosmic queries yes all right uh if we let we last left off last week's episode we the question was asked by who was it little boy 11 or something what is it uh yeah most happy boy 11. most happy boy 11. yeah i wanted to know how will it all end yes the universe will end not in light but in dark not in fire but in ice not with a bang but with a whimper oh oh that's terrible okay or a poor universe beyond that little bit of simple language okay there's an entire section of the cosmic queries book that specifically addre addresses all the scenarios of how we will end and so i'm going to be i'm going to pull rank here and say buy the damn book when it comes out oh wow there you go what i will do i hate doing that but it's a lot of effort went into those chapters are going to pluck for me the scariest ending of them all okay good i like that all right wait okay hold on let me get my flashlight all right chuck imagine he's around a campfire in the dark but he's in a completely lit room right okay exactly right so here you go this expansion of the universe this acceleration there's no reason for any of us to think it will ever end it will keep accelerating in its expansion so it as we described earlier the galaxies the distant galaxies will expand beyond our horizon then the nearby ones will no longer be nearby because they would have been stretched to the edge of the universe then the power of the stretching will overcome the gravitational binding of stars with other stars and stars with their planets so we would see our galaxy systematically get stripped apart with stars being cast beyond the horizon as it expands and this will continue at so not only will every star get cast asunder to beyond our horizon such that our sky will contain only one star and that is the sun except the sun won't live that long let's pretend it's still there then the stretching of the universe will rip the planets away from the star so that we will then become alone in our own bubble within our own horizon in the universe then it will keep stretching and it will begin ripping the earth apart and by the way this is happening at a faster and faster rate and you can calculate when the expansion of the universe rips apart the very particles that comprise matter itself and and the very the very um the what's called a plank length the very um the granularity of the quantum universe itself gets ripped apart and in fact this is called the big rip oh my oh the universe split its pants oh my goodness i mean literally yeah it split everything wow it bent over it split its pants i chuck i love that description and that if the universe goes that way it'll happen between 10 to the 30 and 10 to the 35 years around there okay so that's a lot that's a lot of years in the future so there you go happy boy i hope you lose sleep over there and we ain't happy anymore well by the way there was an episode of doctor who where there was a tear in the face in the space-time fabric and that tear would show up and you would like see it and so that was particularly scary for me because i know what you know what what the theories tell us but yeah so the big rip freaking me out the big rip all right let it freak you out too so i'm not the only one there you go all right oh by the way and that's just one of a dozen scenarios given in that chapter oh cool okay excellent all right and read it to your kids people bedtime stories it's a wonderful bedtime story wonderful all right here uh this is chloe wagstaff chloe wagstaff says this uh how can artists in your opinion contribute to science they already are oh my gosh so first of all historically before we had cameras the especially the naturalists but also astronomers too if you saw something you just drew it all right and not all scientists are good at drawing so you see galileo sketches they're not too bad right in his notebook they're pretty good better than i can do i think but if you had a real artist they could totally rock the scene and put what is actually out there on the page and all the naturalists who are who are documenting flora and fauna of the world as they traveled the world to record all the manifestations of life on earth every one of those were either artists themselves or carried an artist in in the back you know in the wagon with them and so one of the most famous of these are the audubon paintings all right you know we hold them up as art but this is this is a scientific record of birds and until photography could do that or do it well or capture the color of them that was the only thing we had so we owe it a tremendous debt of gratitude to artists the scientific illustrators of the day but then when photography came it sort of relaxed that requirement and but there were still some things you had to draw because photography wasn't all that sensitive to light so if it was really really dim you still had to draw it early astronomical images were still drawn even though photography was available well let's fast forward to today so no we don't sorry i don't need you to draw my hubble uh photo because we got really good imagery of it sorry however you know what i need you for you know what i want you for design graphic design they're artists okay i like some things better than others even if they have the same functionality because some objects are just beautiful to behold or to touch or to to to carry with you i value that i think that's you know we can have a utilitarian world but is that the world you want to choose to live in no you want the world where that's a beautiful space that's a beautiful architecture now that's a beautiful um building a beautiful room it's been organized beautifully what's the feng shui of that room those aren't scientists thinking that up those are artists so you just described apple computers i tried not to mention the name because you know we're we're not paid by apple or anything yeah but but there's still time there's still time so in that way artists i think make a beautiful world in which scientists function but but otherwise no i don't see that happening there's a big push to get a in steam right science technology engineering and math you put an a in there and stem becomes steam and with the urge that if you train scientists to be artists it can boost their creativity and i don't know how successful that will be yes you have to be creative as a scientist but the number of scientists who said you know i thought about this new discovery after i looked at this work of art or after i painted this that those numbers are not high and i know of one case a guy named ed belbruno who looked at starry night by van gogh and it got him thinking about orbits transfer orbits between earth and the moon because of the swirls of the paint so it got him thinking i think that's great does it mean he would have never had those thoughts without seeing the painting i don't know i do know however that science and engineering greatly affect art right when when neon was invented or discovered you could have neon glowing tubes artists were all over it with neon sculptures and things and and so when we make chemical that's uh uh discoveries or discoveries in material science or in computing the artists are all in it and all over it there'd be no modern special effects were it not for artists exploiting the computing foundations that were created by basically um math geeks 60 years ago so there is a there is a two-way street but most of the traffic really goes to towards the artists rather than towards the science but based on my read of the history of this well there you have it um uh artists you guys you're not we don't need you now you know that's a joke don't know let me say let me say differently maybe if more scientists took art class then there would be more creativity expressed than they believed possible right okay but i want to see that tested and i think it's worth an experiment yeah i think i want to see scientists take communications classes more than i want to see them think we need people to listen to scientists um you know more than anything and one last then one last bit of that i don't want to eat up this whole segment on this but if you look at beethoven's ninth symphony or even van gogh's starry night if they didn't create those no one ever to be born will ever create them they are singular expressions of the creativity of those artists whereas if einstein had never discovered relativity somebody else would have or some combination of people would have and they would have discovered it in exactly the way he showed it to us and so the creativity of a scientist is not existing in a in a in a free thinking way because ultimately nature passes judgment on whether what you invented works at all so the creative process has different landing zones no that makes sense that makes sense because science is bound by laws where it's like laws that we didn't create they're actually create yeah creativity is about breaking laws i like to very nicely put exactly cool all right yeah let's go to lightning round see how many questions we can get in okay here we go um all right i don't know if we're going to lightning round with this question because it's a great question this is ms kell 88.93 what questions are we not and should be asking about the universe damn oh yes i mean that's really cool all right i got one you ready go ahead okay the question that we should be asking and we're not have not yet manifested because the discoveries necessary for us to occupy the new vista which enables those questions to then be in sight of our curiosity have yet to be discovered oh my god you thought about this before next question oh my god okay i'm just going to say that was a really good answer man okay next question all right next question here we go vitesh sinha who says uh do you believe in a borderless world um and how could we possibly make that happen uh borderless earth no countries no countries yeah okay okay so this is borderless earth okay so i don't mean when world i was i mean the universe but earth yeah i think borders are embarrassing they're just embarrassing if an alien came down and said are you all human yeah so well then why is this guard right here why are you why is there a war oh because even though we're all human we're finding reasons to kill each other uh these slight differences that we tried hard to find found them and invoke them as reasons to mistreat each other to kill each other to enslave people to round them up into concentration camps and so uh yeah we have to somehow tell that to the aliens as they look at us befuddedly like what the hell is wrong with you they'll go back there's no sign of intelligent life on earth um often a common enemy brings people together kovid should have been that enemy where we'd say let's put down the you know our differences and fight this because it will attack us all no matter who we worship or who we have sex with or who we all the other things that creates fights among us we have a common enemy people let's fight it together and that didn't even happen i gave us a d plus on that okay uh the only reason i don't give it an f is because some progress was made in the effort to make um the vaccines right so uh i don't have hope i think deep down within our dna our tribalism will forever prevent that from happening and i wish i could sound more positive but based on my read of history i can't well a sobering answer to say the least you know chuck i think we have to i think we gotta end there chuck no get out of here all right wait wait one last one very one last one okay go okay sour uh pandov says this uh has humankind ever seen in the night sky a supernova good one so first we discover hundreds of them are the year with dedicated telescopes dedicated telescopes that go from galaxy to galaxy looking for something that blew up since last night okay uh supernova lasts you know visibility last weeks and into the months so you wait so we have dedicated experiments just for that purpose but for the unaided eye the first exploding star visible since kepler in the 1600s was in 1987. there was a guy in the observatories in chile in the andes mountains who is looking through his telescope and he sees this bright object and what he's looking at and he says no there's something wrong with the telescope so he says let me just walk he goes outside the telescope looks up there's a bright object okay so this is a case where he's using his eyes to verify the machine rather than the machine to verify his eyes and that was discovered i think in february in the year 1987 it was the first supernova discovered that year and is the famous 1987a and it is the most studied supernova in the history of the world and all our telescopes we have a very good communication system among us all the telescopes around the world abandoned whatever research projects they were on at the time slewed in the sky over and found this object and even when it was below the horizon the telescope's waiting for it to rise so you can get all kinds of data radio waves infrared ultraviolet visible everything every everything we could throw at it we did and there are thousands of research papers on that exploding star visible to the naked eye well there you have it yeah google that 1987 capital a it's all there all right beautiful question we chuck that's it we got it we got a wrap all right all right that was fun yeah yeah yeah yeah very good so all right chuck ah i'll be looking for you i love your twitter feed especially when you live tweet live events yeah yeah not much of that going on now but i'll be i'll be tweeting the super bowl that's the super bowl i'll be looking for that yeah because you you don't you don't play with the c you don't give cut anybody slack no they're all jokes everybody should be able to take it [Laughter] all right this has been star talk cosmic query is a gumbo galactic gamboa with spice on this version uh so i've been your host neil degrasse tyson as always keep looking up

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 256,396

Rating: 4.9372702 out of 5

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, Chuck Nice, dark matter, aliens, end of the universe, field theory, expanding universe, Andromeda galaxy, history of the universe, gravitational waves, Venus, electromagnetic spectrum, window to the universe, The Big Rip, 1987a supernova, science and art

Id: SAFpJkdWUgo

Length: 45min 15sec (2715 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021