True Darkness of The Universe // New MOND Evidence // SETI Symposium

farthest star and the farthest Galaxy seen by jwst measuring the darkness of the Universe from deep space and new evidence for modified gravity all this and more in this week's space bites in 2022 astronomers found the most distant star that had ever been seen and this was found using the Hubble Space Telescope in the name of the star Irondale which is the old English name for Morningstar isn't like some kind of Tolkien reference too anyway this star was seen at a time when the universe was less than a billion years old so the light has been traveling to us for 13 billion years one single star here's a picture of the star no not that one this one how is the Hubble Space Telescope able to see a star that is this far away it did it of course with a gravitational lens you've got the gravity of an enormous Galaxy cluster here that is multiplying the light from this more distant Galaxy by a factor of 4 000 but a star this far this early on in the universe this is the perfect Target for the James Webb Space Telescope and of course astronomers book time on jwst to be able to do follow-on observations of this star and this week got an announcement that they had performed their analysis not only did they see the star with more clarity than it ever been seen before they also maybe detected a companion object to this star it's believed to be a b type star which is a star that's much more massive and hotter than our own sun and the plan with Fallen observations is to try and get enough Spectra that they can actually measure the chemical composition of the star is it a second generation star one of the older star is the universe or is it a third generation star like our own Sun so more information coming and this is the current record for the most distant star but of course this record is going to be broken as more gravitational lenses are found image by jwst and more individual stars are picked out of the picture and speaking of distant objects let's talk about the most distant Galaxy seen by jwst just a few months after jwst launched astronomers were making claim after claim that they had found the most distant Galaxy scene so far galaxies that were between 200 and 300 million years after the big bang but that was a very quick analysis we needed more time and now astronomers have spent the better part of the last year analyzing the data and they know for sure for sure that some of the most distant galaxies that they're seeing are about 390 million years after the big one of these for example is called maisie's Galaxy it was named after one of the astronomers daughters so once again this is just one of the galaxies seen in some of the first images as part of jwst's survey of the sky there's going to be many more distant galaxies they're going to pop up and this record will be broken and broken again and broken some more wait for a gravitational lens to see a Galaxy to really break it maybe even see the first galaxies ever formed maybe even the first Stars so this is going to be exciting I think it's also important to sort of think back to the rant I had a couple of weeks ago how you've got this tension between astronomers wanting to quickly release results that they find out of the jwst data but also people who want to take more time to do the good science and do proper analysis of what they're looking at and so from those initial announcements you got a dramatically earlier time after the big bang and with longer more sober careful analysis with more time you got a much more accurate picture that doesn't match that first announcement so it's back to this idea you know should jwst data get out really quickly and then we get some perhaps incorrect estimates for things or should we wait give the scientists who booked time on the telescope the whatever time it takes for them to properly analyze their information and release their data in a peer-reviewed fashion in a journal in a way that then we don't have to do some back and forth in that it's not a race to get a announcement out as quickly as possible I'm still on the fence but this is just a great example of sort of what this looks like in reality the second annual seti symposium now one of my favorite conferences is the seti Symposium and there's only been two of them and it's already one of my favorites the first time was held by NASA this is the second one this was held at Penn State and you had dozens of astronomers many of the people who I've interviewed here on the Channel all showed up together and gave presentations to what they had been discovering what they're thinking about what their methods are we've got a big article that sort of goes into an overview of what happened at the Symposium but there were so many cool talks there that I'm going to be dismantling this and booking as many interviews as I can with people I'd give you some examples what if you need oxygen on a planet to reach a certain level so that fires can be burned and that how can you get a technological civilization if they can't lay fires if they can't have combustion so could the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere of a planet Define the level of technological advancement that a civilization can reach what are some ways that aliens might be looking at Earth and so can we use those same techniques to look for them there's a great paper which listed 42 different ideas in searching for technological civilizations based on various kinds of techno signatures that they might give off are we seeing the heat from a Dyson Sphere are in the midst of a nuclear war um uh you know are they attempting to send us radio signals are they communicating with each other as part of some Interstellar internet a lot of great ideas so this is just like a warning a threat maybe that I am going to be doing a ton of interviews with a lot of the people behind the scenes on this and try to bring as many of the cool ideas for how we could be searching for evidence of extraterrestrials out there in the universe evidence for modified gravity what's dark matter like this is the Eternal question we're always bringing this back up here on the channel and there are two main camps to explain Dark Matter there are the people who think that it's explained by some kind of particle that's very massive but doesn't interact with regular matter in any way and there's a lot of evidence for that I mean you've got gravitational lensing that you can map out the clusters of dark matter there's observations of it in the cosmic microwave background radiation there are plenty of lines of independent evidence that tell us that dark matter is some kind of particle but then the other possibility is that dark matter is some effect of gravity which works differently over long distances than the small distances that we're familiar with and so for example when you drop a rock here on Earth and it you can measure the rate of the rock falls to the ground you are using Newton's calculations to measure how quickly the rock is dropping and use that to get a sense of how gravity works and then you can layer on Einstein's predictions for Gravity based on relativity and that gives you a pretty good understanding of the way the universe works but maybe just maybe at the largest scales where you've got galaxies interacting with each other other that gravity Works a little differently than what works at the smaller scales and there has been other evidence that is pointing towards this as being a possibility and one result that came out this week came from a Korean researcher who had been studying wide binary pairs he got the data for over 20 000 binary stars on wide orbits out of the Gaia data and these are stars that are so far apart that the acceleration that the Stars experience as they orbit around each other fits in between the smaller accelerations that we see that are explained by Newtonian Dynamics but the large-scale structures that we see in cosmological distances coming that could be you know explained by modified gravity and he found that when you change the distance between the stars at varying levels of acceleration they experienced motions that matched modified gravity and started to depart from Newtonian gravity it's a really clever idea because you can use these wide binary stars like they can be a thousand astronomical units apart but really far away and you can sort of dial in the distance of these binary stars to get good information at each level but there's a problem these stars are so far apart that you're not actually watching them orbit one another it would take decades hundreds of years to see appreciable distances in the movements of these binary stars in Gaia data and guy has just not been operating that long and so instead it's a snapshot of all of these stars and what the researcher did was then added together twenty thousand results statistically analyze them and the result he said was a fairly accurate measurement of the effect of modified gravity in the movement of these binary stars but it's not actually the motion of these stars and another paper found a like 16 Sigma result that it is perfectly matches Newtonian gravity and doesn't at all match modified gravity and so there's going to be some controversy and other people have to look into it and think through it but I do love the idea of looking at that maybe just because I love Gaia we've got some coverage on this story at Universe today but the one that I really think you should read is by Ethan Siegel it starts with the bang he does a really in-depth coverage of this and provides what I think is a really nice kind of balanced skeptical view of this result so I'm going to link to that in the show notes measuring the darkness of the universe now I get a question quite a lot here for the question show which by the way is returning in September where people want to know does it make more sense to put a telescope out to the very edge of the solar system so that you've got a much better view to the universe and I always say no there's no point right once you've reached space then you've gotten rid of all of the light pollution on the surface of the Earth you're not experiencing any of that atmospheric Haze and from water vapor in the atmosphere you've got the best possible view of the cosmos but that's not true there is another form of light pollution in the inner solar system and that is dust this is dust left over from the formation of the solar system it's zodiacal dust which appears to be coming from Mars and so there's just this dust in the solar system that is slightly obscuring your view to the cosmos so yes indeed the best place to put a telescope if you want the most pristine view of the universe is way out beyond the orbit Pluto but that's really far and really hard to get to but good news a telescope has already gone out beyond the orbit of Pluto now of course there were the Pioneer spacecraft but they're dead there's the Voyager spacecraft but they don't have their instruments all turned on to make these kinds of scientific readings but NASA's New Horizon mission is really far away from the Sun out Beyond this inner solar system dust and it's able to make a very special kind of observation which is to measure the darkness of the universe so what astronomers did was they pointed New Horizons at a blank spot the darkest spot of the sky that they could find and they were looking to see if the darkness of the universe matched the predictions that they found and the answer was no that in fact there is this diffuse glow coming from the universe itself what's the source of this we don't really know it could be dust it could be it's probably dust it could be dust it could be dust it might also be dust but the next step is to do more observations and so the team with New Horizons while they're waiting for the next Target like they're waiting for their next Kuiper Belt object to fly past they're going to point their telescope at 15 different locations and try to confirm that yes they're seeing this glow in all directions and whether this dust could be coming from the solar system from the Milky Way or from the universe itself this will give us a really good idea to measure just how dark the universe is every week we do a vote on the community tab on our YouTube channel where the viewers get to tell us which they thought was the biggest story of the week and this week's story was a landslide and this was that it looks like LK 99 isn't a superconductor so the previous week it was that it might be a superconductor and now that it's not a superconductor so that was consistent in fact just moments before we recorded this episode there's like new evidence that in fact okay99 is probably an insulator not a superconductor a team of German scientists were able to synthesize the exact crystals that they needed without the impurities and they found that it was definitely not a superconductor and so like one possibility is that maybe it's the impurities that the Koreans had developed were giving some of these weird results anyway it's a mess come back in a couple of years and we'll see it all get sorted out so again if you aren't already subscribed to the channel when our new episode drops we will release a poll so that you can vote on what you thought was the best story and help give us that feedback to see which stories you're most interested in and which ones you're not so into more results from the muon G minus 2 experiment if you remember there was this big announcement from fermilab scientists that they had been measuring the Magnetic Moment of the muon particle in their particle accelerators they had gathered years of data and they'd found that the measurement of this moment didn't match the predictions made by the standard model of physics and this was surprising like so far each one of the particles that scientists have found have fit beautifully and perfectly into the model just as you were expecting think about the Higgs boson it was predicted it was found it fell in line with the rest of the particles but for some reason muon isn't quite doing what it's supposed to so this month they made an announcement they've got even more data they've been able to narrow down the error bars they're still seeing this differing from the prediction which means that this is probably true they've still got an enormous amount of data so they're planning another data release in 2025 when they're going to provide all of the sigma levels that the scientists are expecting and now we can know yes indeed the muon doesn't match the predictions made by the standard model and so what does that mean now if you want more background information on what this discovery is what it means what could be going wrong check out this interview that I did with Dr Paul Matt Sutter and so that'll give you all the background information if you want more information on this SLS will be able to handle bigger cubesats now we put a lot of reporting into the Artemis 1 mission of course that flew out to the moon and back to Earth robotically and the mission was a complete success except for the cubesat several of the cubesats that have launched failed to deploy failed to communicate and so it was a real partial success on deploying all of these cubesats they fly as passengers in this ring in between two of the stages on the rocket but the cubesats were one of the smaller varieties of cubesats you don't get a lot of space to pack in a lot of electronics and redundant systems and propulsion systems and things like that for the upcoming Artemis 2 mission it's going to be flying a different trajectory it's going to be going into orbit and then it's going to make a free return trajectory up to the moon and back and this will give the astronauts who are going to be on board a way to get home but this trajectory is bad news for any cubesats that are flying on Artemis 2 because they're going to be on a ballistic trajectory tree they've got about eight hours before they burn up in the atmosphere and so they've got to be able to have some kind of propulsion system on board the cubesat they can fire and they can get out of Earth's low earth orbit so NASA said they're putting larger mounts on the payload adapter of the space launch system this will be able to handle larger cubesats ones that could have built-in propulsion systems so they can escape that fiery demise when Artemis 2 launches but we don't know what secondary payloads are going to be on the spacecraft yet if you want all the details about Artemis one we did a summary video here and if you want to see my interview with les Johnson who was the principal investigator for one of the cubesats on Artemis one the Nia Scout that failed you can watch that interview here I'm going to talk about patreon now but don't skip because I'm not gonna ask you for any money um did you know that you can actually follow our work on patreon and you don't have to be one of our patrons if you go to our page at patreon.com University today there's a follow button you can click that and you will now get announcements by email of all the new posts that we make public through patreon and we make most of the posts public and all the videos WE Post there are posted with no ads and so if you just like even the beginning ads at the front of YouTube videos just enrage you and you want a way to not even have to see those and just be notified when our new videos go live you should follow us on patreon and it's free so check that out go to patreon.comuniverse today and obviously if you want to support us that would be awesome too Antarctic Ice has never been this low climatologists have been studying sea ice loss in the North Pole for decades and it is declining and declining and like now like Hudson's Bay is ice free during the summer that's here in Canada uh like the the North West passage has opened up and you can sail a ship from like above North America but strangely the sea ice around the South Pole around Antarctica had been increasing steadily by about one percent per decade for as long as scientists have been mapping it from space since 1978 but then in 2016 things changed and the amount of sea ice around Antarctica started to drop and this year in 2023 winter of 2023 for the southern hemisphere the sea ice has dropped an enormous amount so normally the CI surround Antarctica measures about 15 million square kilometers and this year it's down to 13.5 million square kilometers and that's a lot and scientists don't know why there's been this much of a sea ice loss I mean obviously there's the background effect from global warming the climate apocalypse that we are living through every day but there could be other factors going on we know that we're entering an El Nino year and so the oceans could be warmer we know that shipping was required to change its fuel to produce less emissions across the Atlantic Ocean the rate of Glacier loss coming off of Antarctica has changed so there's a lot of factors and this is one of those things that scientists are watching but like I've never seen climatologists so stunned by a rapid drop in sea ice like this it's really something all right I'm going to rant a little bit more about dark matter in a second but first I'd like to thank our patrons special thanks to Joel ganty Antonio lofi Lara Dustin cable just Paul Davis Vlad shiplin Jay Dennis David Gilton modzo George Jeremy Madden Jordan young Tim Whalen Dave veribioff Andrew Gross and Josh Schultz who support us at the master of the universe level I read the comments of course I do thank you for all the kind things that you say and all of the skepticism that you have and all the polite conversation that goes on there but there is a thread of kind of grumbly angry comments about Dark Matter whenever we talk about it and you know I've talked in the past about this really wonderful video produced by Angela Collier that dark matter is not a theory it is an observation and it's like the perfect way to encapsulate this the dark matter is an observation and that observation could be caused by a particle or it could be caused by modified gravity either one is possible and when I talk to astronomers they are agnostic they don't care they don't care whether it's a particle whether it's modified gravity either one is fine all they care about is which one matches the observations that they're making and you know like the most likely result you know and this is me predicting the future of science is that it's a combination that there are forces that we don't entirely understand there are forces that we don't even know exist there are particles we don't understand particles we don't know exist and that when you add all those up it could be primordial black holes it could be particles it could be gravity and that the sum of all of these effects is causing the differences in observations based on the theories and it's going to require an enormous amount of detailed very careful full work to be able to tease out each one of these factors and the closest example we have to this is the missing matter in the years like Not only was there missing dark matter but just missing regular matter that astronomers know had to be there and over the course of decades they were able to find it Bit by Bit by Bit they're able to realize that some of it is missing gas in the galaxies some of it is missing material that is in between galaxies that they were finally able to see through Quasar light so this is a long process each piece has to be done very carefully and scientists are truly agnostic they don't care what is the result they just want to understand nature better but you have to listen to Nature to reveal its Secrets one by one and stay curious all right we'll see you next week

Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 83,238

Keywords: universe today, fraser cain, space, astronomy, space news, superconductor, Euclid, esa, James Webb, just, room temperature, lk99, LK-99

Id: c_Sr5ID4wog

Length: 22min 51sec (1371 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 18 2023