Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Can we see planets in other galaxies?

Episode Date: January 14, 2021

Daniel and Jorge talk about how astronomers are trying to detect planets in far away galaxies! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone.

Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen.

I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Daniel, do you remember the first time you saw an x-ray of yourself? I do, actually. I once broke a time. tiny little bone in my wrist the first time I went snowboarding. And were you amazed to get to see the inside of your body?

I was really excited about it. But then I was kind of underwhelmed. It was sort of like a big whitewash. It was hard to actually understand like what was going on inside there. But the doctor could read it, right? Oh, yeah. To him it was like crystal clear. He was like, oh, this bone, that bone, the other bone.

He knew exactly what was happening. He spotted this tiny little break. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? how, you know, the knowledge of an experience eye, how they can pull out data that other people can't see. Yeah, exactly. It makes me wonder how X-ray astronomers see the universe. Yeah. As long as they don't go snowboarding, they're probably safe. I hope the universe doesn't break its wrist. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, but I am no longer a snowboarder. Were you ever, Daniel? It doesn't sound like it went well. I was a snowboarder for about five minutes and then I retired. But no, it didn't go well. You achieve what you wanted to achieve in that area of activity and then decided to focus on physics. Yeah, exactly. I crossed it off the list. Well, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeard radio. In which we don't talk about snowboarding and skiing, but instead we focus our

energy on trying to understand the universe. The vast reaches of space, the crazy explosions going on inside stars, the weird things planets are doing whizzing around stars in our galaxy and other galaxies and in far reaches of the universe. And we try to explain all of it to you without making too many banana jokes. Although there is snow out there in space, right? There is Galactics, no, technically. There's a lot of ice. Yeah, we have ice giants in our solar system. There's a huge amount of frozen water all over the solar system and all over the universe.

Water, it turns out, is not actually that rare. It's only rare to be liquid on the surface of a body like it is here on Earth. Who do you think will be the first person to snowboard on Neptune? Probably an astronomer. Definitely not me. Hopefully we're a risk card. That would be my advice, because there are some crazy mountains out there and some crazy different kinds of snow. Like, I wonder if methane snow is good for snowboarding on or not.

Do you think aliens have a lot of different words for snow like we do here on Earth? I don't know. Maybe if aliens have a lot of risks, then they don't go snowboarding because, you know, it's too easy to break one. They're at increased risk. Exactly. If they have like eight wrists. Increased wrist risk. Yeah.

Well, there are a lot of interesting. interesting planets and asteroids and comets out there in the universe. And we've talked about a lot of the ones that we can find here in our solar system on our podcast. And also we've talked about finding planets in our galaxy. But it's a big universe and who knows what's out there beyond our galaxy. And a deep question we're always asking about the universe is how unusual is our neighborhood? You know, we spent most of the time on this planet just looking in our immediate neighborhood. understanding our planet, our solar system, and then wondering, is this weird or is this typical?

Are other stars out there? Do they also have planets like ours? Or are we the only solar system out there with multiple planets? Or maybe other solar systems have like dozens of planets. And so in the beginning, we usually just wonder and we speculate. And now we're in an era where we can actually start looking. Yeah, because we have spotted planets in other solar systems within our galaxy. I think, you know, right now we not only know that there are thousands and thousands of them out there, but we've also started being able to actually see them and even like check the weather on them. Yeah, it's really pretty amazing. We are living in an extraordinary era because for thousands of years, people have wondered about that question.

Are there planets around other stars? And now just in the last 25 years, we know for a fact the answer to that question. And the answers are kind of exciting, right? It tells us that there are a lot of planets out there. And there are a lot of them that are probably like Earth. And so that's exciting to actually know for a fact the answer to questions people have been wondering about for thousands of years. Yeah, but most of the ones we've seen, or at least have detected so far, we've seen by looking out into the stars at night, and most of them are in our galaxy, right? It's pretty much all of those thousands of exoplanets that we found are in the Milky Way.

Yeah, that's right, because the Milky Way is sort of our galaxy. neighborhood. It's about 100,000 light years across, and so it's the best place to look at other stars because they're the ones that are nearby. But then, of course, our imagination reaches further and wonders like, well, maybe the Milky Way is unusual. Maybe the Milky Way is weird, or maybe it's typical. And it makes us wonder, what is it like to be a planet around a star in a far away galaxy? Yeah, because the Milky Way is not the only galaxy, right? There are hundreds of billions of galaxies that we can see or know about. There might be maybe a, maybe a infinite number of them.

Yeah, I think the last count is in the observable universe. There are more than two trillion galaxies, right? Each with hundreds of billions of stars. And as you say, that's just the observable universe. We have no idea what fraction of the actual universe that is. It could be literally a zero volume fraction because the universe could be infinite. Yeah, and it is sort of possible now that you mentioned it is, it would be weird, but it is maybe possible that maybe the Milky Way is, it is strange, right?

Like maybe our galaxy is the only one that is stable enough or calm enough or something enough for it to have stars with planets with life on them. Yeah, absolutely. And it's one of my favorite kinds of questions because any answer to this question is mind-boggling. Either the Milky Way is weird and it's the only one that has the conditions to make these kind of planets. Whoa, that would be weird, right? Or it's not. And then all those other galaxies are also teeming with planets, which makes the number of Earth-like planets in our universe a huge number that's hard to hold in your head.

And it makes you really suspect that the odds of life are high. Yeah, but I guess the question is, can we confirm this? Do we know for sure there are other planets in other galaxies besides the Milky Way? And so to the end of the program, we'll be asking the question, Can we find planets in other galaxies? Far, far away, a long time ago, Daniel? That's literally true. Every galaxy we look at is far, far away,

and the light is coming to us from a long time ago. So they're basically all the setting for Star Wars. Yeah, you know, that actually did blow my mind. Recently, I was watching the Star Wars movie, and, you know, when those words come out at the beginning, a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, it did sort of made me think about some of our conversations where it's like, oh, that means, you know,

it's sort of happening in real time. It's just that the light is just getting to us now. Yeah, well, it could have happened a long time ago, and the light could still be arriving. So you can imagine that instead of watching it on your TV screen, you're just looking through a telescope, watching these battles play out in a faraway galaxy. Of course, you know, the events have already occurred,

and you're just watching them. But that's sort of just like watching a movie, right? The movie is totally filmed before you watch it. It's not like they're acting it live or anything. But it's fun to imagine. Yeah, but even a movie like Star Wars, if you think about it, They only hang out in one galaxy, you know? It's the galactic empire.

They only go around the galaxy. They never go to different galaxies. Yeah, that's right. And I think they use that sort of as a mechanism to suggest this is impossibly distant. This is somewhere we could never go. This is a different part of the universe. Because galaxies are crazy far apart. They're not just really big, right?

They're like 50 or 100,000 or 200,000 light years across. The space between them is much, much bigger than the size. of the galaxies, right? Galaxies tend to be millions of light years apart. So it's like, you know, if your house was out in the deep woods and the next house wasn't for miles and miles away. Yeah. Yeah, I think galaxies are like hundreds of thousands of light years wide, but there are millions of light years apart. Yeah, they're like little islands. Yeah, there's a lot of variation in the size of galaxies, but roughly that's correct. They're like basically 10 times further apart than they are wide.

All right, well, then the question is, are there planets in those other galaxies? And if there are, how could we ever find them or maybe even see them? That's right, because we want to move beyond just speculation. We don't want to just wonder if they're there. We want actual facts. We want data. We want observations.

We want to know. Because science is not just about guessing and speculating. It's about asking nature questions and hearing the answers. And the best moments are when those answers are a surprise. Yeah, so as usual, we wondering how many people out there in the public and in our audience

know if we can find planets in other galaxy. It seems impossible. I'm going to put my money on impossible, but we'll see. So Daniel went out there and solicited answers from people on the internet. And so thank you everybody who participated as usual. And if you would

like to give a shot to answering tough physics questions without any preparation, without any Googling, without any background knowledge, please write to us to questions at Daniel and Jorge.com. We would love to put your baseless speculation on the podcast. So think about it for a second. If someone asked you, if you thought you could find planets in other galaxies, what would you say? Here's what people had to say. I was under the impression we had already found planets in

other galaxies, but maybe not. That does seem very far away now that I think about it and say it out loud. That really depends on the time scale, because someday we, we, totally could find those planets. For example, if we launch robotic probes, maybe with self-replicating capabilities, they could go on and on for a billion years and catalog everything they come across. But since the universe is expanding, I don't think we will ever be able to reach the other galaxies. Yes, we can. My guess is that we probably don't yet have any method to detect exoplanets in other galaxies directly. I would imagine that the only way to detect them would be indirectly, possibly from gravitational effects on their stars.

Sure, eventually we can, but I don't think we can now. The distances are just too far for us to see the wobble of the star with a planet orbiting around it. Well, I can think of a way that with the current technology, we could do that. All right. A lot of optimism here. Somebody just said, yes, we can. See, se puo. Was that Obama?

Didn't sound like him. Yeah, exactly. I think there's a lot of good optimism here. And also some great ideas. I like, you know, launching robotic probes to other galaxies, though. That would take a long, long time from them to get there and then report back. So graduate students don't propose that for your PhD. Yeah.

And also, it seems like somebody here thought that, we had already found planets in other galaxies. I guess, yeah, it's sort of hard to remember that distinction between stars in our galaxy and stars in other galaxies. Yeah, and remember that when you look out in the night sky, you see stars, all of those stars are stars in our galaxy. To the naked eye, a distant galaxy is too faint for you to make out the galaxy by itself. It takes like a telescope or a good camera and you have to like build up that light over

several hours or days in order to see those galaxies because they are so far. away. Yeah. And if you do see a galaxy on a telescope or on a photo, it really just looks like a little smudge from Earth, unless you have like an amazing super telescope. It's really almost impossible to make out the individual stars in them. For most galaxies, that's true because they're really distant. For the closest galaxies, they're actually quite large in the night sky, like Andromeda. If you could see it, it was bright enough for you to see it, would be larger in the sky than the full moon. Oh, really? Wow. I didn't know that. Yeah, it's pretty incredible. So if you look at a picture of Andromeda, it's taken over many, many hours or sometimes many nights just

to build up enough photons for you to see it. It's just so far away. It's not very bright. But it's huge. And so it takes up a big fraction of our sky. Wow, that's pretty cool. All right, well, let's get into this topic then of how we would find planets in those other galaxies. And I guess we should start by maybe recapping how we know about planets in this galaxy. How can we possibly know there are planets around us? Yeah, it's pretty cool. And these, are techniques that were developed again just in the last couple of decades. You know, for a long time, people have wondered about this, but planets around other stars are hard to see because those stars are pretty far away. We're talking about light years and light years away. And then the planets are really

close to their star in comparison to the distance from here to there. I've heard you say before, and I like this analogy, that it's sort of like looking for a tennis ball around a street light on the other side of the country. It's very difficult to see. see a very small thing next to a very bright thing. Yeah, because suns are pretty bright and planets don't. They don't glow. They just reflect light. That's right. They just reflect light. And so it's very, very difficult to see them directly. So people came up with a few really clever techniques to try to deduce the presence of planets.

And these days, we actually have a few that are pretty successful. Historically, though, the first one that really worked is something called the wobble method. And this is based on the idea that the planet doesn't just orbit the star. the planet and the star sort of orbit each other because while the planet is moving around the gravity of the star, the planet is also a big massive object and it tugs on the star. So the planet and the star together actually orbit the center of mass of those two objects. What this means is that if a star has a planet around it, it wobbles a little bit. It moves a little bit. It's sort of like shakes in the sky.

It's not stationary relative to us. And this is something we can see. So we can see the gravitational effect of a planet on its star by watching it wiggle. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. We tend to think of our sun, for example, as being stationary and all the planets are going around it. But the sun is actually kind of wiggling and getting pulled this way and that way by Jupiter, by us a little bit, by Mars. It's not like fixing space. Yeah, it's mostly by Jupiter, though.

And, you know, this is not a huge effect. It's a subtle effect because the star is usually most of the mass of everything in the solar system. Like in our solar system, the sun is 99% of the mass of the solar system, and Jupiter is about 99% of the rest of it. So if you were looking at our solar system from really, really far away, you could probably detect the effect of Jupiter as a little wiggle on the location of the sun. But it wouldn't be a huge effect. It's not like the sun is moving around Jupiter, the same way Jupiter is moving around the sun. It's a much smaller effect because the sun has so much more mass. Yeah.

Okay, so you can look at a star, and if you see it wiggle, you know that it has a planet around the sun. but that doesn't tell you much about the planet itself, right? So there are other ways to tell that? Yeah, you can basically just tell the mass of the planet by the amount of the wiggle. And you can't see the wiggle sort of side to side, right? We don't have enough angular resolution or like see stars moving at that resolution. But what you can do is see the wiggle sort of back and forth as the star moves away from us and then comes closer. It changes the frequency of the light that the star is sending us.

It's a little bit of a Doppler shift. So that's how we see it actually wiggling. You see a wiggle in the color, like the star looks a little blue, a little red, a little blue and a little red. And if it looks regular enough, you think, hey, there's a planet there. Yeah, and that can tell you the mass of the planet because you have to know how heavy the planet is to pull on the star at that amount. And they'll tell you a little bit about sort of the rotation of that planet around the star, or at least the star's rotation around the center of mass, because that affects like how long it takes to go back and then forth. But it doesn't tell us something really key, which is how big is the planet. And we're interested in knowing, like, are these planets really hot and dense?

Are they big, fluffy blobs? You know, we're interested in, like, planets that might have life on them. So this method can't tell you the radius of the planets. You don't really know what's going on with the planet. But, yeah, there are other methods. Yeah, it just gives you a wobbly estimate. Yeah, exactly. All right, well, let's get into some of the other ways we know that there are planets in other stars in our galaxy and beyond.

But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay.

Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio. app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit.

Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up, isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating.

He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane.

Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, do this, pull that, turn this. It's just, I can do my eyes close. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devon. And on our new show, no such.

thing, we get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the runway. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to no such thing on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking about finding planets in other galaxies. We know there are planets here under our feet and in our solar system. And we've seen thousands of planets in our galaxy, in other stars in our galaxy.

But the question is, are there planets in other galaxies? Have we seen them? Can we see them? Is that impossible? What can we know about them? Nothing's impossible. What we think is impossible in a hundred years will be like an undergraduate research project. You know, that's what I love about the progress of science. Only the impossible is impossible.

Yeah, what's impossible today is boring next week. It's an iPhone app in the future. Exactly. Yeah. And so we were talking about ways to learn more about these planets around stars in our galaxy. Yeah, and they all sort of involved looking at the star that the planet revolves around, right? That's mostly the idea because the star is so bright. It's really hard to see the actual planet.

Yeah, exactly. So mostly we're looking at the effect on the star of the planet. And so one effect is that it shakes the star. The other is that we can actually have a little bit of an eclipse. Like if it's lined up perfectly so that sometimes the planet passes between us and this other star. And that just has to be by chance that the plane of that solar system is aligned. so the planet passes between us and the other star, it will block some of the light of that star.

And not completely, of course, because the planet is typically much, much smaller than the star, but it will pass in front of it, and you will see a dip in the amount of light you're getting from the star. And you can see this regularly. You can go dip and then back up and dip and then back up. And so that's a really good sign that there's something, some sort of dark mass orbiting that star.

Right. It's kind of like when you're watching a movie and someone stands up in front of you, You know, they temporarily kind of block the light from the screen. That's kind of how it is, right? It's like a big source of light and something moves in front of it. The overall light from that will sort of go down. And if they did that, you know, every two minutes or so, you would get pretty annoyed.

But that's the scenario here is that we see this regularly. So this is a really awesome method, not just because it's harder to fake, because you're seeing this thing like happen all the time. You see it regularly if you watch the star long enough. But also because you can tell the size of it. the planet. The bigger the planet, the more light it blocks. The smaller the planet, the less light it blocks. So you can measure the radius of the planet, which is super duper cool. Because if you know the mass of the planet and its radius, you can tell its density. And that gives you a lot

of clues about what it's made out of. Is it mostly rock? Is it iron? Is it just a big loose ball of ice? Is it just a fluffy collection of gas? That tells us so much more about what the planet is. all right so that's another way to tell if a star has planets around it but there also has some negatives right like you can only see the planet if it happens to go in front of you between you and the sun

and the star and there are other things that could maybe be causing this right yeah exactly other things could be passing in front of it doesn't have to be a planet it could be some other weird kind of star you know like a brown dwarf or you know some sort of neutron star or something so you don't necessarily know but you can get a lot

of information about the composition of it So you can rule a lot of that kind of stuff out. And this is really our workhorse method. This is the method we've used to find a lot of planets recently. And even though you can't see every planet, you can do calculations. You can extrapolate. You can say, well, if I've seen a bunch of them, I know how likely it is for everything to be lined up perfectly right for me to see it.

So I can estimate how many solar systems are there out there that aren't lined up perfectly. And you can make guesses about those planets. So it's pretty effective. Yeah. And there's a big telescope in space that's doing most of this, right? Yeah, exactly. The Kepler telescope is basically launched just to do this. And so it's just like churning out these candidates. And, you know, in the beginning, it was rare. We had like one or two and they had like special fancy names. And now there are thousands of these things and more discovered every week. And so now it's like a statistical game. Now we're able to ask questions like how unusual is Earth or how weird is it to have a hot Jupiter that's close to your star or how unusual is it to have nine planets or eight planets. So that's really fun. Do you think they will run out of names? Like, I know they use letters and numbers now, like, you know, A, B, 739.

They sort of remind me of license plates. Like, you know, all these names are just like random collections of digits. And so I think they can just keep adding digits and they're never going to run out of names. Do you think when they get to like R2D1, they'll skip a number just to avoid, you know, infringing Star Wars is right? I'm sure Disney's lawyers have already written those letters. All right. So those are two good ways to know if there are planets around. other stars, but there's also kind of a more direct way, right?

Like, I've seen pictures of planets around other stars. Like, it is possible to kind of look at them, take pictures of them. And now we have super powerful space telescopes and clever techniques. You could actually look at fairly nearby stars and see light off of those planets directly. So we have like direct images, actual pictures from those solar systems. And not very many of them, just a few because everything has to be like lined up just right. And the planet has to be really big. kind of far away from its star

and the whole star has to be pretty close to us and you have to line up this coronagraph to block the light from that star just right. But we've done it and that's pretty exciting. Yeah, but most of what we've done is within our galaxy and it sounds like it's already really hard

to see planets around other stars within our Milky Way galaxy, which is our neighborhood. And so now the question is, how could we possibly ever see planets around other galaxies? I mean, when we look at a galaxy, just kind of looks like a fuzzy cloud, like a fuzzy collection of stars. Yeah, the problem with all these methods is that they start to fail as the star gets further

and further away, right? A star that's further away wobbles less. And the light that comes from it is harder to look at and harder to separate from the nearby stars. And so these things start to fail as the stars get further away, which is why, for example, we haven't even seen planets all through our own galaxy. There are parts of our galaxy where we have not detected any planets. The furthest planet we've ever seen is about 27,000 light years away, whereas the whole Milky Way is 100,000 light years across, right? So now it seems almost impossible to imagine going to another galaxy millions of light years away. But there are some very cool techniques people have come up with recently that will let us do this. Wait, you said a while ago

that stars wobble less the further they are away? Why is that? Wouldn't they wobble the same? Or is it just gets lost in the noise? No, you're right. Stars, if they're far away, they actually wobble the same way. It doesn't really matter how far away we are. And of course, the sideways wobble is not what we're looking at. But the back and forth wobble, that's the red shift and the blue shift. We could still see that for stars that are further away. But they're harder to see. You're looking through lots of other stars. They're further away. They're more dim. And so it's just harder to study these things that are further away. It's like harder to make out the wiggle. Yeah. And so it seems almost impossible to do this

with stars in another galaxy, just because it's so far away. And, you know, You know, they're probably drowned out by all the other stars in that other galaxy. But you were saying it is sort of possible to look at planets there. Yeah, people have come up with crazy ideas to do this. And so there's sort of three ideas that I think are pretty awesome. The first one is called gravitational microlensing. And he also uses gravity, but it's not the wobble of the star that it's using. It's looking to amplify the light of a star by another star passing sort of in front of it.

Hmm. That's kind of how we look at dark matter, right? And black holes too. Like if we look for that kind of lensing effect. Exactly. Because mass doesn't just like create gravity. It actually bends space. And so if something passes between us and another object, it will bend the space between us and that object. So the light from the object in the background gets distorted, just like if you had a lens in the sky. But now it's a gravitational lens. It's bent space. So it changes a path of light. But you can use all of your intuition for how a lens works to understand how a gravitational lens work. The principle is the same, even though the bending mechanism is different. So what happens here is you have a star in the background, and then some star in the foreground passes between you and that star. And as it passes right through that line between you and the background star, it creates this lensing effect and it distorts the background star.

That's cool. That's gravitational microlensing. But if there happens to be a planet around the star that's, doing the lensing, then as the planet is going around the star, it will change how that lens works. And so it'll sort of like distort the distortion in a particular way. So it changes how the background star looks. Like there'll be a wiggle in the lensing, basically, right? Like the lensing effect will be wiggly. Yeah, exactly. Just like if somebody stands in front of you in the movie theater and blocks your path, if they have like a little toddler running around them

the whole time, they'll create a different shadow, right? And so it's the same idea. Yeah. And if the parent is like, you know, chasing after the child, you would notice that from the lensing. Yeah, you would notice that. So it changes the pattern of the brightening and the fading that you get from gravitational lensing. And it doesn't in a particular way. You can even enhance it, right? You can get like a flare from this planet if it's just in the right spot to exaggerate and enhance the light of the background star. And so this is pretty cool. Yeah. But you still need a background star to sort of see and be able to like see the light for. met and be able to tell it apart. Can we do that with stars in other galaxies? Like, can we see individual stars in like Andromeda?

You can't always see individual stars, but you're right. You need something in the background. It's not critical that you have just one star in the background, right? You just need some source of light. And then you need to have a model for how that light will be distorted by a foreground object. And so if you have some sort of source in the background, you can mimic, you can model how that light would be distorted by gravitational lensing, even if it doesn't just come from one star, even if it comes from like a background galaxy. Interesting.

Okay, so then the star we want to measure would be in another galaxy, and now we need like a light source behind that other galaxy. Yeah. Behind that star in the other galaxy. Yeah. Or in or outside the galaxy? It doesn't have to be in that other galaxy.

It can be like in another galaxy, even behind it. Just anywhere behind the star that we want to look at. We need this perfect lineup of the star we're looking at and then the star behind it. So the background star can get lensed by the foreground. star. So that's a big disadvantage. Another big disadvantage is that it usually just happens once. It's like a chance thing. These two stars are not like usually in a binary system or anything. So it's just like by chance that one happens to pass through the line of sight to the background star,

which means you can't repeat it. You just get like one observation. And that's kind of hard to like really base a claim on if you only see something once. And this works with stars in other galaxies? Like we can tell this wiggling in the lensing for something that. far away? Yeah. At the end of the program, we'll talk about some examples, but it really can work. And the really cool thing about it is that it can detect stuff that's pretty low mass, because the gravitational lensing is very sensitive to the mass of the planet. So we can even work for like planets down to the size of Mars. Cool. All right. Well, that's one way. What's another way we can look at planets and other galaxies? Another way is more similar to the transit method in that you're

looking for in eclipse. Here you have a star you're looking for in the other galaxy. And you try to to find a star that's in a binary system with something that's producing really bright x-rays, like a black hole or a neutron star or something. Then the star you're looking for sometimes will eclipse that x-ray. It will like block those x-rays. And this is something we can see in other galaxies because x-rays are more rare than other light and they're really intense. And so it's possible to see these things in other galaxies. So this lets us see planets around binaries, meaning like solar systems with two stars in them. Yeah, exactly. You have one star that maybe has a planet around it,

and the other star is a really strong emitter of x-rays. And maybe it's a black hole, maybe it's not a star, but some really bright sorts of x-rays. And if those two things line up just right so that the star you're interested in studying blocks the x-rays from the other one, then you can see that. You can see this sort of like dip in the x-ray pattern. Wow. And we can tell like, you know, if I look at a galacina and I sense some x-rays, I can tell that it's coming from a particular star. Like, we have that resolution? Yeah, because X-ray emitters are more rare. So there's a lot of stars in a galaxy, but not that many strong X-ray emitters.

And so that makes it less likely to happen, but it also makes it easier to separate them, right? So there are fewer of these things. Also, X-ray emitters tend to be really, really small. These are very compact objects, a black hole or a neutron star. And so it's more precise, right? You can, like, block the entire X-ray emitter with your star or with your planet. Cool. All right, so there's one more way in which we could detect planets in other galaxies,

and then let's talk about what we've actually found. Have we found planets in other galaxies, and what can we know about them? But first, let's take another quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their nuclear. Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass.

The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice. system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota.

It's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age.

It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he not. wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this.

Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the point. with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, and so this, pull that, turn this. It's just, I can do my eyes close. I'm Manny.

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Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to no such thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking about exo-galactic exoplanets. Do I need to repeat the exo? Or can I just say it once? Like exo-galactic planets.

I think it's like sergeants at arm, right? It's exo-galactic planets. planets instead of planetary exo-galactics or something. Planetary one. So planets and other galaxies that are not the Milky Way where we're at, and we talked about a couple of ways in which we can actually maybe see these planets, and you were going to talk about the last one. There's one that involves pulsars. Yeah, this is my favorite one because it's super crazy in science fiction-y, and this involves

pulsars, right? And so pulsars are neutron stars that give off a really, really intense beam of light, but they're also spinning. And if the beam is not perfectly aligned with the spin, then it sort of sweeps across the galaxy and gives us a pings. So every time it passes across us, we see light from it, and then it goes dark. Then it passes

across from us, and it goes dark. These things are crazy and amazing, but also because they're super, duper precise. They spin at a very precise speeds, and they don't seem to change. So we see like a ping from them, and then a gap, and a ping from them, and the time between those pings,

is very, very regular. And so that makes them really awesome clocks. And it means that we can do things like measure their speed relative to the Earth. And in particular, we can see whether they're moving back and forth because that will change how often we get the ping from them. Yeah, so it's kind of like the Doppler effect. But instead of light, you're looking at the frequency of the pulsar blinking. Yeah, exactly.

When the pulsar is moving like away from the Earth, because it's getting wobbled by a planet that's around the pulse are, pulsar, then the time between the pulse becomes a little bit longer. And then when the pulsar swoops around and it's coming towards the earth, the time between those pulses gets a little bit shorter because it's sort of closer to us when it emits the next pulse. So if you watch the pulsars timing and you see this wiggle where it's like the pulses are getting longer and shorter and longer and shorter, that tells you that the pulsar is wobbling.

And because pulsars are so precise, you can measure these from pulsars in other. galaxy. Right. And pulsars are very kind of noticeable, right? Even within the big galaxy. They are. Yeah. They're very noticeable. And they're sort of rare. And that's the disadvantage of this method is that like there aren't that many pulsars. And so you can't really like find all the planets this way. But you know, if you're just looking to find a planet, this is one technique. Another disadvantage is that pulsars, you know, they're the remnant of the death of a star. You had a big star which then collapsed and made a neutron star. And so it's not always like. that planets will like survive this process that they won't just get like blown up when the star

goes red super giant and so it's not that common to have pulsars with planets around them right but it's possible so it's a dead star spinning really fast and hopefully it still has a planet circling around it that's powerful enough to make it wiggle yeah noticeably and then then we could maybe tell if there's a planet but but again we couldn't tell anything about the planet could we? Well, we could tell that if there's life on that planet, it must have had a really good sunscreen because it survived a very traumatic event, right? So it's not, they're all under underground bunkers with air conditioning. Yeah, exactly. Watching TV shows. Yeah. They're Netflix and chilling on that planet. Yeah. Well, these are all cool ways. I guess the question now is, do they work? Have they

worked? Have we actually found planets with them? So what do we know, Daniel? Have we found planets in other galaxies? We actually have seen planets in other galaxies, which is so much fun to say and to know that we've achieved this huge breakthrough in terms of our like actually factual knowledge about stuff going on super duper far away. Right. And by way you mean like the royal we. I mean we being me sitting on my couch reading news articles about astronomers doing the actual work. You're like, I did that. We did that. Yes, we could. It's like quantum mechanics. What's the point of doing signs if nobody's reading your papers. And so I'm participating just by reading their papers. Does a paper exist if nobody ever reads it? Exactly. Exactly. I'm collapsing the wave function of these

papers. All right. So we found planets and other galaxy. Yeah. So we have two that are sort of like preliminary haven't been confirmed that come from gravitational lensing. And these are tough because you can't repeat them. And so like it seems like a planet, but who can really tell and you can't really do any follow-up studies and one that seems really pretty solid using the X-ray eclipse method. All right. So step us through. What's the first one we found? So the first one we found is from this crazy system called the twin quasar. So remember, gravitational microlensing requires you to have something in the background, right? You're studying a star. You want to know if there's a planet around it, but first you have to have something behind it that's going to get gravitationally lensed

by your star. So it turns out that there's a quasar super duper far. away. Remember, a quasar is basically just a huge source of light. It's very bright. It's probably the accretion disc of a black hole and all that gas is really hot and giving off a lot of light. So some of the really brightest sources in the galaxy. And right between us and this quasar is another galaxy. So you have the quasar really far away. And between us and the quasar is a galaxy that's right between it. And it's gravitationally lends that quasar into two pieces. So we see basically two copies of this quasar. It's split. So it's called the twin quasar because it's already sort of constantly being gravitationally lensed in two bits. Right. And we're pretty sure it's not two

quasars. We're pretty sure that it's the same, but it's just a lens distortion that makes it look like they're twins. Yeah, because they're basically identical and you can see correlated fluctuations in the two. So sometimes you'll see something happen in the A part of it and it'll also happen in the B part at the same time. So you're pretty confident we're seeing like two images of the same quasar. But we can't see the actual galaxy in between, or can we? Well, what we can do is we can see the effects of that galaxy. And so this is exactly what happened is that we saw a fluctuation in one half of the twins and not in the other. And we think that's an effect of the galaxy that's doing the lensing because it only appeared in one of them. And what we saw was like a little dip in the light. And this is consistent with some

big planet in this foreground galaxy, sort of like changing the lensing of the quasar behind it. What? That seems implausible to me. So we have a point source of light that got distorted into two by a whole galaxy. And you're saying that a tiny little planet in that galaxy can affect that lensing? That's exactly what they're claiming. And again, it's hard to confirm. Like, what they're seeing is consistent with.

that hypothesis, but like it could also be other things, right? It could be just like you're changing the arrangement of the stars in that galaxy, and that changes the gravitational lensing. And so it's consistent, you know, with a planet, but it's not a confirmed observation. Right, because you're saying that the whole galaxy is wiggling because of this one planet. Is that what you're saying? The whole galaxy is shaking because of this one planet going around?

We're saying that the light from the quasar is going through that galaxy in a way that's sensitive to how that planet is moving. And this would be a big planet, so it would have to be large to affect this. But yeah, you know, the photons that we're seeing are gravitationally lens by that galaxy and we're saying that it would be changed by the motion of this planet.

But how do you know it is a planet? Couldn't it be like a little black hole in that galaxy or couldn't it be a star or something, wiggling? It could be, yeah, and it could be a rogue planet, right? So we don't really know very much. We just know, like, something happened in this planet between us and the quasar. So, as I said, it's not really like a very well-confirmed detection of an exo-galactic planet.

It's just sort of like an early candidate. All right. And this was back in 96, but we have more recent events. Yeah. So then people tried to do the same thing for a closer galaxy. They said, well, let's look at Andromeda. Andromeda is only two million light years away. And what they did is they said, what would it look like if we had a gravitational microlensing

event in Andromeda? Now, Indromeda is pretty close when it comes. comes to galaxies. And so you can't make out individual stars very well, but you can like make out clusters of stars. You can say if one of the stars in that cluster was gravitationally microlensed by another star, what would it look like? You can sort of like calculate what that would look like and say, oh, you would get a dip or a change in the brightness of the star in a certain way. Then they looked for that and they saw it in Andromeda. This is in 2009. They see this sort of like thing that looks like a microlensing event in Andromeda.

Wow. And we think it is a planet? Like how big of a planet? If it's a planet, then it would have to be like six or seven times the size of Jupiter. Wow. In order to cause the effect that they saw. So that would be a big. That's big. That would be a big planet. Isn't that almost a star? Like wouldn't something that big collapse into a star? Yeah, something much bigger than that would turn into a brown dwarf. Like about 10 times the Jupiter with the right composition would turn to a brown dwarf.

And about 100 times the mass of Jupiter would turn into a star would start to fuse. So this could still be a planet, but we don't really know. And, you know, again, it can't be confirmed. It was a one-time thing. We saw this one wiggle. It's characteristic of a planet. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it definitely was a planet. So again, it's like it's a candidate.

It's exciting, but, you know, it's not the best evidence that we have. Right. But it turns out that more recently, last year, we got a pretty good candidate. 2020 was a difficult year, but it was a pretty good year for exo-galactic planets. Yeah. Somebody made this x-ray eclipse method work. They found a pair of stars that are binary system. One of them is giving off a bunch of x-rays.

And the other one sometimes blocks those x-rays. And it blocks it in this way that you can tell that there's something else going on with this star. The star that's doing the blocking must have something around it that's changing how it's doing that eclipse. And we can see that. And we can see the effect on the eclipse. And so we're pretty sure that there's a planet around that star. And this is in the Whirlpool Galaxy, which is like 23 million light years away in the constellation Ursa Major. So something is emitting x-rays and something is blocking it regularly.

And we can see the eclipse and then we can see variations in that eclipse. If it was just an eclipse from another star, you would see a regular pattern. But we see a pattern on top of that, which means there's something orbiting that. that star changing how it's eclipsing it. And from that pattern, we can tell actually some really interesting information about the planet. We think it's like just about the size of Saturn, maybe a little bit smaller. And it orbits that other star around 10 times the orbital radius of the Earth around the sun. So 10 A.U.

Wow. That's crazy. Precise. It seems like a lot of detailed information about something so far away. Yeah. Well, because we can take repeated measurements, right? So we can study these patterns. We can understand the people.

of this thing. We can look at all the dips and the flips and the wiggles. And so that's what gives you a lot more confidence that this really actually is a big object orbiting that star and to make these kinds of measurements. So this technique is much better than gravitational microlensing because it allows for repeated observations. But I guess these would be planets orbiting weird things, like maybe not a regular star, but like a black hole or a neutron star, right? Like the source has to be something special. Well, it has to be a little weird because it has to be in a binary system. You can have a pretty normal star with a planet around it, but then you have to be in a binary system with something that's giving off x-rays,

so you can then eclipse those x-rays. So, like, our star wouldn't be visible from the whirlpool galaxy using this technique because our star is not in a binary system with a neutron star or with a black hole giving off a bunch of x-rays. Right, right. So it feels like a lot of these really distant methods for other galaxies only seem to work in really strange situations. Yeah.

You know what I mean? Like we can find planets in our galaxy, pretty much any star, we can sort of check to see if it has planets. But in other galaxies, we have to rely on these weird kind of phenomenons or arrangements. So far, we don't have a way to just check all the stars in a galaxy. No, we definitely. And even for the ones in our galaxy, right? And it comes down to coming up with clever ideas. But that's what I love about astronomy is that they have to come up with these clever ideas.

They think, well, this seems impossible. What if there was a really weird configuration and this happened to be attached to that which was swinging around this other thing, then maybe we could figure it out. And then we bootstrap our way up. We figure that out and then we come up with other ways. And so it's just an opportunity for creativity.

I mean, somebody needs to figure out more ways to see these things because there are a lot more planets out there to look at. Yeah, yeah. There's room for improvement or new technology. Or room for us actually going to these other galaxies and looking. yeah of course the direct observation would be fascinating but that would take millions of years we think unless of course you know we could just build that wormhole highway and then we could get to those other galaxies pretty quickly but yeah there are opportunities out there this is a young field

we only recently saw the first observation of a planet around any other star and so studying planets around stars and other galaxies is a whole open field out there so for you enthusiasts thinking about school and becoming a physicist this could be your big discussion There's lots of exciting stuff left to do. This could be your PhD that might take millions of years, but you know, you're to hang in there. Yeah. Unfortunately, you can't get the posthumous Nobel Prize. Well, I'm going to wait for a new film starting called the Exo Universe Galactic Planets.

We need for us to be able to detect things in other universes. And then we'll zoom in on those planets. We'll see people snowboarding down weird slopes filled with weird kinds of chemical snow. Yeah. All right. Well, I guess it's kind of interesting to think about planets. in other galaxies because it doesn't seem likely that we'll ever visit them. Do you know what I mean? Like in our galaxy, when we see a planet, it's like, you know, 20,000 or 27 light years away, that's sort of doable for a human colony.

But, you know, other gasey, that is really far away. Like, we may never get to those other galaxies. No, you're right. And it's more about like asking these questions about whether our galaxy is typical and whether it's usual. Like when we're studying our galaxy, are we getting misled about how the universe works? is our galaxy like a pretty good test case for understanding the whole universe? So it's more about like understanding the broader context than actually like finding other homes for humanity. Yeah, I guess it would be pretty cool to know what those planets are like and how many they are and if we can pretty much expect all galaxies to have as many planets as we have

because that would be pretty mind-blowing. That's a big number to hold in your head, but it makes a lot more sense than thinking that there are no planets in other galaxies or fewer planets in other galaxies. most likely the Milky Way is pretty typical. It's also cool to think about maybe there are civilizations in those other planets in other galaxies and they're trying to look at us. Yeah, I hope so.

Unfortunately, there's nothing really weird enough about our star to make it extra visible from other galaxies, right? We're not like eclipsing an x-ray source or whatever. But maybe physics students in those other galaxies have come up with a crazy, clever way to discover planets in our galaxy. Yeah, stay tuned.

Let's just listen to their podcast. Yes. Yeah, wait a few million years. Or maybe it's arriving now, like the Star Wars movie. That's right. All right. Well, hopefully that gives you something to think about when you look at the night sky and wonder how many planets there are and how many people are in them. Thanks for joining us. You hope you enjoyed that. And stay safe on the slopes. See you next time. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order, criminal justices. on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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