Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Is all of space magnetized?

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

Is it possible that there are magnetic fields.... everywhere? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I know how overwhelming it can feel if flying makes you anxious. In session 418 of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, Dr. Angela Nielbornet and I discuss flight anxiety. What is not a norm is to a lot. allow it to prevent you from doing the things that you want to do, the things that you were meant to do. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Jorge, I have a cool idea for a totally new gadget.

Ooh, is it an automatic banana peeler? That's you. You're an automatic banana peeler. No, it's a space compass. Oh, nice. Does it tell you where to find bananas? You're a refrigerator. No, like a compass on Earth, right, tells you where north is based on magnetic fields, right?

Uh-huh. So this space compass would use the sun's magnetic field to tell you where you are in the solar system. That sounds cool, but isn't that just like a regular compass? That's the genius part. There are no engineering or design costs. Just cost two bananas. Anything I can do to cut out the engineers. Hi, I'm Jorge, I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm moonlight as an inventor of ridiculous things. And ridiculous podcasts. Right. Let's see what I can make in a particle collider that I could sell on Etsy. Let's see if we can collide, signs, and bad puns, and see if anyone will listen. Maybe I should list mini black holes on my Etsy's shop and see if anybody buys one. Well, are those for sale? Can you buy one from the LHC? Everything has a price, right? You give me $100 billion. I will give you a black hole. You would totally do it, wouldn't you? The LHC would totally do it. They'll take that money.

Well, after the check cash is yes. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge. Explain the Universe, a production of I-Hard Radio. In which we talk about all the things that we can do in the world and all the things that we can't do in this world, even if we have $100 billion. We zoom out into space and think about what's there, what's missing, why are things here?

Why does the universe work the way that it does? Why doesn't it work some other way? All of the things for sale and that you can get for free at CERN gift shop. Can you get a free superconducting magnet that you don't use anymore? No, we do not give those away. I think you can get a sticker, though. A sticker? Is it a superconducting sticker?

No, it might have a picture of a Higgs boson collision on it. So it's pretty fun. Yeah, we like to talk about all the amazing things out there in the universe, all of the things that are here on Earth, and then we can discover and look closely at, and all the things that we can quite see that are out there. That's right, because humanity is taking a mental voyage of exploration. We are stuck here on Earth for the time being,

but we'd like to understand what's out there, how do things work. So we use our telescopes and our clever ideas to probe the cosmos. And every time we do, we find something weird, something that shakes the very foundation of our understanding of how the universe works and what it's filled with. Do you think humans have a kind of a version of phomo, like fear of missing out? So we're always looking out into space, trying to find cooler things. Yeah, maybe we're just stuck in a boring corner of the universe.

And the real party is happening somewhere else at the center of the galaxy. another galaxy. And if only we were there, we could be part of it. Well, you know what they say. Be careful about having an interesting life. Well, maybe the aliens are gathering together in some sort of like universal physics conference and revealing the secrets of the universe and we just weren't invited. Oh, man, you do have FOMO with aliens. I totally have FOMO. I have fear of missing out on alien physics. What's the acronym for that? A-FOMO. But yeah, we'd like to talk about all the amazing things out there. And it turns out that there are a lot of very interesting things out in space, things you can't see, but that we can

potentially feel. That's right. And humanity is busy building new kinds of eyeballs, ways to look at space, ways to hear messages from outer space to give us clues as to what's out there. And every time we do, we find something weird. Of course, there are planets, there are stars, there are galaxies, there are supernovas, but there are also other amazing things we can listen to. So today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question. Does space have a magnetic field? Now, Daniel, we have a magnetic field here on Earth, like the Earth, has a magnetic field from the North Pole to the South Pole,

and it's how compasses work, and it helps protect us from cosmic rays that are coming from space. And so I guess the question is, does space have a magnetic field, too? Like, is there, you know, like a universe-wide or galaxy-wide magnetic field? Yeah, it's a great question. And if you ask people this question, you know, maybe 20, 30 years ago, they would have said, how could the universe be filled with a magnetic field? Magnetic fields need sources, right? They need magnets or spinning loops of charge or something.

So what could possibly generate universe-wide magnetic field? That's absurd, right? And my favorite thing about physics is that things that were absurd 20 years ago become reality and then accepted wisdom and then later eventually obvious. And you're like grumpy at students for not understanding it. 10 minute explanation. And the cutscene montage of physicists throughout history would be like, that's ridiculous. Wait, never mind. That's ridiculous. Wait, never mind. Yeah. Yeah. That can't be true. Oh, actually it is. And then to the students, why don't you understand this? So you're saying that there are

magnetic fields in space. Yeah. And there's this wonderful history of discovery. As we look further and further out into space, we discover magnetic fields where we didn't expect to see any. And we're forced to come up with more and more ideas for what could be generating them. And this is giving us a fascinating window into how the universe was constructed and maybe even like solving deep problems and concerns we have about understanding how the universe expands. Oh, wow. Sounds deep.

It's quite a magnetic topic. Deep answers about deep space. I'm magnetically attracted to this topic. Well, I feel kind of positive and negative about it. But yeah, I guess the idea is that, you know, we have a magnetic field here on Earth. You know, I have a compass. It tells me which way is north. But as I imagine myself floating out into space,

I would imagine that that compass doesn't work. Like, you know, if you're way far from the Earth, where would it point to you? It wouldn't point to the north or the south. But you're saying that a compass in space would be pointing somewhere. Yeah, a compass in space would be pointing somewhere. And I think it's useful to sort of take a mental journey from the Earth

and think about the magnetic fields as you get further and further away from our Earth and solar system and galaxy. And think about where those magnetic. fields come from, and that'll help us understand where they're not coming from or what we're confused about. So as usual, Daniel was wondering, how many people out there knew that there are magnetic fields in deep space? That's right.

And so I asked folks to pontificate on this question. And if you'd like to participate and answer questions you are unprepared for, please write to us at questions at daniel and Jorge.com. Think about it for a second. If there are magnetic fields in space, where do you think they would be coming from? here's what people had to say I guess this could be a definition problem of what deep space is if you mean

like nothing in the space or quote unquote nothing possibly not but if you mean like are there magnetars out there then yeah there's magnetic fields in deep space I guess so

as long as there are electromagnetic forces there are magnetic fields I would say yes because I think you mentioned on a previous podcast about muons that photons travel through the electromagnetic field. I think Earth has one, right, for protection, but in deep space, would it be like a field that attracts or repels objects? Possibly, but they would probably be extremely weak.

Yes, of course. 100% should be magnetic fields. I don't know by deep space, like if it's in a void, probably not, because I think. think magnetic fields require like matter and energy to be there, but around nebulas and stuff, then yes, I would say there's magnetic fields. All right. A lot of very cautious answers. The Romans seem to think that there are magnetic fields, but Nodi seemed to have an

idea where they come from. Yeah, people think that there are things out there like magnetars and stars, et cetera, that create magnetic fields, but we're talking about out in deep space far from any concrete source, things that aren't obviously generated by some spinning little particle or moving current of charge. Oh, I see. We're talking about like way out there where there's nothing around you. Yeah, exactly. Because I imagine if you're near Earth, then there's a magnetic field here and maybe other planets have them and maybe other objects have them. But like if you're in space with nothing around you, would there still be a magnetic field? Yeah. And anywhere you find

a magnetic field, you get to ask the question, where did it come from? What's made? making it. And that lets you investigate the source and the history and the understanding of what's going on inside. You know, like when you discover the earth as a magnetic field, you get to ask, well, what's making it? And that reveals a fascinating picture of what's going on inside the earth. It's not just like a cold static blob. It's got like massive currents of liquid metal. That's a pretty cool realization. So discovering magnetic fields is an awesome clue that leads you to understanding what's going on around. Because it's cool to think that the earth isn't just like a, you know, like your average kitchen magnet that, you know, it's static and it's just,

it just has a magnetic field to it. Like the one from Earth, it's because we have like a generator inside of the Earth, like a living, moving, you know, dynamo. Yeah. There's energy there, right? Those liquids are flowing and they create a magnetic field. And then that magnetic field makes the liquids flow more because they're charged and they get pushed by the magnetic field. And so it builds on itself. Yeah, we call that a dynamo. So that's pretty awesome. We have a little magnetic engine inside the earth that's powering this magnetic field and that lets you wonder every time you find a magnetic field you can ask like where's the energy coming from to create this magnetic field so it's like finding out that there's something happening in an empty room and you're like well what's

going on in the walls and so that's kind of what's happening out in space so Daniel step us through maybe for those who are not super familiar with what a magnet is remind us where they come from and what do we know about magnetic fields yeah so magnetic fields are fun and in our universe we don't have pure sources of magnetic fields like you have a peer source of an electric field which is just an electric charge like an electron or a positron they can just create an electric field around them but we don't have that in our universe that would be called a magnetic monopole instead we can only create dipole fields and these are created by like moving electric charges spinning in a circle for example so a ring of current can make a magnetic field

that's an electromagnet. You can also have metals that are magnetized, and there the magnetic field comes from the spin of the electrons. There's the electrons moving around in a circle around the nucleus, or actually having weird quantum spin themselves. So fundamentally, magnetic fields always come from some electric charge that's in motion. And maybe that's the motion of the liquid inside the earth, or convective plasma in the sun, or something else.

But they always have this same kind of source, as far as we're aware. Like, it doesn't seem to be like a fundamental property of the universe or of matter or of charge. It's like you need something to be happening to have a magnetic field. Yeah. Now, all of space has the capacity to have magnetic fields, right? All of space we think of has quantum fields in it. Those fields are like possibilities for charge. It's like, you know, there are slots there.

And at any point in space, you can put energy into the magnetic field or the electric field or the Fermion fields or the Higgs field or whatever. Every point in space has these fields, but sometimes they have zero value. And some of the fields can actually go down to zero and the magnetic field is one of those. So all the space has the capacity for a magnetic field, but we're interested in like what's creating energy in that magnetic field. Where is that coming from in cases when there is a magnetic field like around the earth? Wait, are you saying that there's a quantum magnetic field? Just like there's an electric field for the electron? Absolutely. All these fields are quantized. And in fact, there's a very close connection between electricity and magnetism.

And in quantum field theory, we just treat those two as one. But yes, absolutely, the magnetic field is quantized. And one quantum of the electromagnetic fields is, of course, a photon. Oh, of the electromagnetic field. Yes. Because in quantum mechanics, we think of electricity and magnetism is just two sides of the same coin. Classically, we see they have slightly different phenomena, but we understand they're very closely related. So we think of them as one.

And a photon actually is an electric field and a magnetic field sort of oscillating and supporting each other. It goes from a magnetic field to an electric field back to a magnetic field, creating each other. A photon is sort of this amazing cycle of energy flowing between one of the fields and the other. I see. But I think what you're saying is that, you know, unlike a matter field or like a force field, magnetic field can't just like have energy on its own. Like you're saying it kind of needs activity in another field, another for it to have. any kind of activity.

That's what we've seen so far. All the magnets that we have seen have a source, right? They are not constant. They're not fixed. The magnetic field comes from the motion of a charged particle. We'll talk later about whether it's possible for space to just sort of have a magnetic field on its own. That'd be fascinating.

All right. So we know that the Earth has a magnetic field and we know that the sun has a magnetic field, right? Because I guess it has kind of stuff inside of it flowing and in circles and creating some sort current. That's right. In the sun, we think that similar to the earth is just like flowing currents of charged stuff creating the magnetic field. And the sun's magnetic field is very, very powerful, much more powerful than the earth's magnetic field. And if you are on the surface of the sun, your compass would be much more effective than the compass on the surface of the earth. Don't recommend doing any hikes on the

surface of the sun, of course. And you'll need more than a compass if you do. Yeah, being lost in the surface of the sun is the least of your problems. That's right. And the sun's magnetic field is actually really fascinating. We have a whole episode planned about that because it's all sorts of weird mysteries like, unlike the Earth's magnetic field, it flips also, but it does so on a very regular cycle. Like every 11 years, boom, it flips over the North and the South. The Earth's magnetic field flips very irregularly and much more rarely, but the sun is like clockwork. It's got a fickle field. And also the galaxy has a magnetic field, I guess, because the galaxy is kind of spinning, right? It's got a lot of stuff going around in a circle. Is that what's generating

the magnetic field for the galaxy? So we have some understanding of the Earth and the sun's magnetic field. The galaxy's magnetic field is where we start to be a little bit confused. Like we don't really understand why the galaxy has such a strong magnetic field. You know, if you give the galaxy sort of a seed, a magnetic field that begins, then the spinning, you're right, can make that magnetic field stronger because you're sloshing around big, heavy stuff that can support it. But without that seed, you don't get a very strong magnetic field just.

from the spinning. See, magnetic fields are interesting that way that they can be enhanced more easily than they can be created. I see. Like you make a magnetic field, it organizes the magnets around it and builds on itself. But you need that initial seed. And we don't know where that initial seed for the galaxies came from. It's actually very similar to the problem we have with super massive black holes.

It's like you can have a big black hole in the center of a galaxy, but how does it get that big? And we have the same problem with the galactic magnetic fields that we don't really understand how they got so strong, how they started, and then got strong. Are there galaxies without a magnetic field? No. Or do they all have them? They all have them. And they're actually important for forming stars because the magnetic field helps channel

all the gas and dust and keep it together and not as diffuse. And that helps, of course, collapse it into forming stars and all that kind of stuff. And so it's pretty important part of being a galaxy is having a magnetic field. It helps you evolve in the way that we expect. And there's some variation, of course, in magnetic field, galaxy to galaxy. but they all have them. And then having stars makes you more attractive too

and magnetic. Yeah, exactly. All right, so let's get into what else has a magnetic field out in space. 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 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 Story Time 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. And 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 the meets. 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. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students

who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it, if it's going to be beneficial to you. Because it's easy to say, like, go you, go blank yourself, right? It's easy. It's easy to just drink the extra beer. It's easy to ignore, to suppress, seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just, like, walk the other way. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials is easier. drinking is easier, yelling, screaming is easy. Complex problem solving, meditating, you know, takes effort.

Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Daniel, we're talking about magnetic fields in space. And we know that things have them, like the Earth. and the sun and the galaxies. But the question is, does space, like empty space, like the space between where there's nothing, does that have a magnetic field? And so we were at the point of galaxies that have magnetic fields,

but then do galaxy clusters have magnetic fields too? Yeah, it's amazing. You take your compass, right? You're on Earth that has a field. You zoom out. The sun controls your compass. You zoom out to the galaxy, and the galaxy then controls where your compass points.

But then as you leave your galaxy, You can ask, like, are there magnetic fields between galaxies in these galactic clusters? And so there's a very recent paper where people were studying this and trying to measure magnetic fields between galaxies. And to their frankly, great surprise, they found that there are magnetic fields between these galaxies. There are these like filaments of gas between the galaxies that they used to understand whether they're magnetic fields.

And there are magnetic fields there. And nobody knows why. Meaning kind of like iron filings, like we're seeing things move around in between galaxies that seem to be moved around by a magnetic field? Yeah, it's really hard to measure magnetic fields for something else you're looking at, right? We can't take a compass and go out there and say, what's the magnetic field here between the galaxies? Because we can't get there. We can't send a probe. So all we can do is try to understand the impact of the magnetic field on the stuff we're looking at.

And so like you say, you can look at iron filings on the table and see the magnetic field lines. But here we can't toss iron filings between the galaxy. So we have to find something that's already there and use it as our indicator. Like if it aligns or it falls into some sort of funny pattern, then that would tell you there's a magnetic field there. Yeah. And actually our best indicator are not objects like that, but electrons. Electrons as they whizz through space are bent by magnetic fields that tend to curve or around magnetic fields.

Just like particles that hit the Earth, they hit our magnetic force field and they're spiraled up around those lines towards the North Pole and the South Pole, which is what causes the northern and southern lights. In the same way, these electrons out there in deep space, if they feel magnetic fields, they tend to bend. And anytime a charge particle bends,

it gives off a photon, it radiates a photon. It's sort of like a signal for how it's happening. And we can capture those photons and say, oh, look, electrons over here, are bending, so there must be a magnetic field. Interesting. But how do you tell if they're bending? Like, can you see it on a telescope, or do you have to somehow measure their spin? Or how do you tell they're bending?

We can't see the electrons directly at all. These are electrons that are like a billion light years away or millions of light years away. We don't ever see the electrons. We only see the photon they give off when they bend. And those photons have sort of a characteristic signature that have like a certain energy you would expect. And you look at patterns and if there are magnetic fields, you expect to see like a coherent pattern of electrons all giving off

this same kind of photon when they go through this region. What do you mean? How does it change the light that it's emitting? Just from its velocity or it's fundamentally different, these photons? When an electron gets bent, right? When it changes direction, how does it do that? To do that and conserve energy and momentum, it has to sort of push off by shooting off a photon.

And so a magnetic field induces this. it says, all right, electron, kick off a photon and change directions. And that's how, like, all the energy and momentum of the original particles preserved. And we see that photon. And can we distinguish those photons from, like, any other random photon? Well, a photon is a photon is a photon. They're all just photons. Yeah.

Boy, that was a pretty deep statement, huh? But these tend to happen at characteristic energies. Like, we know how fast electrons tend to be moving and how strong these magnetic fields are. And so that predicts the energy of those photons. And again, we expect them to be sort of coherent. We expect to see like these kind of photons all coming from the same direction if there is a big magnetic field there. But I'm glossing over a lot of technical details. It's a really hard problem.

They build this amazing antenna to try to capture these photons. And it took them years of data analysis to like remove all the noise and understand if these are really photons from electrons far away. It's a difficult problem. But I guess the main point is that you look out into the sky, into space. Yes. And the way that we look out into space is sort of awesome. I was talking earlier about every time we open a new eyeball, we see something amazing in space. Here we're looking into space, not with visible light.

These aren't telescopes or eyeballs in a literal sense that we're using to look out into the universe. These are radio frequency antennas. But there's still photons, right? It's still light is used to a higher frequency. That's exactly right. Radio waves are electromagnetic radiation, which means that pulses in them are photons. And so these are just photons with really, really, really. long wavelengths. Too long for you to see with a visible eye or for us to see with Hubble. So the way they do it is they have 20,000 antennas that they spread across Europe. What? You need a really big device because these wavelengths are so long. They can be like kilometers in wavelength. You need a really big device to capture them. 20,000. That's a lot. It's a lot. Do you need a grad student for each one? How do you keep track of them and how do you keep them clean? It's a lot of work, right? And these things.

are just like sitting out in a field somewhere, anywhere they can put one, basically they put one. It's a really awesome distributed device because you would never take like all of Europe and turn it into a telescope, though. I'm sure some astronomers wish you would, but you can just sort of like embed these telescopes across the continent and then stitch it together into effectively a virtual telescope that size. Do they try to disguise them as cell phone towers disguises trees, fun? Do they disguise them as like satellite TV on rooftops? No. It's a great program. It's called Lofar, L-O-F-A-R. And they have this awesome program. And they really did a lot of work. And one of the hard things is that when radio waves come through the atmosphere, they get fuzzy because the atmosphere interacts with radio waves. And so basically the picture was like crystal clear across millions of light years. And then it gets to our atmosphere and boom, it gets fused. So they have to solve that problem, which is pretty cool. They put like things up in the sky or they used sources of radio. in the sky, they saw how those were fuzzed, and then they tried to unfuzz their signal in the inverse way. So it's a really clever data analysis, just to see this picture of the magnetic

fields between galaxies. Did you say the project is called loafer? Lofar, yes. It sounds kind of apt for an astronomer, don't you think? I love my astronomy colleague, and so I were refrained from criticizing their acronyms. But I guess maybe a question is, how strong are these magnetic fields? Like, you know, I know the one here on Earth, this is enough to move a compass and deflect cosmic rays. But how strong is the one from the sun or the galaxy? Or are the, how strong are these fields that you see between galaxies? These are not really very strong compared to the kind of things we feel on Earth or from the sun. We're talking a few micro gals, which is a million times weaker than the Earth's magnetic field.

These are really very weak magnetic fields. But, you know, there's a lot of space there. And so if you add them all up, it's a lot of magnetism, even though it's spread out pretty thin. All right. I guess the big question then is where are these magnetic fields coming from? Like if I'm out there between galaxies, there's really literally nothing around me, right? Like there's no rotating black hole or there's no planet or electrical current. So how could it possibly have a magnetic field? So let's get into that question. But first, let's take another 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, 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 iHeartRadio 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. And 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. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast.

Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring here. human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you. Because it's easy to say like go you go blank yourself right? It's easy. It's easy to just drink the extra beer. It's easy to ignore to suppress seeing a comment. who's bothering you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier

denial is easier drinking is easier yelling screaming is easy complex problem solving meditating you know takes effort listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts all right daniel so space has a magnetic field Like if you go out there in space, between galaxies, far from anything, and you took out a compass, it would move. It would point somewhere. It would point somewhere, yeah. The space between galaxies has a magnetic field. And this is something we only recently learned.

Like, this is a paper from this summer 2020 and kind of mind-blowing. And, you know, the history of this research is like, well, let's check over here. Oh, there is a magnetic field. Okay, well, let's check over here. Oh, my gosh. There's a magnetic field over there also. And so we basically never fail to find a magnetic field wherever we looked, which of course raises two questions.

You know, one is like, how far out does it go? If you go out into like the massive voids in between super clusters where there's just nothing and nothing for billions of light years, are there magnetic fields there also? And what could be generating all these magnetic fields? Are there magnetic fields out there in the middle of nowhere? So we don't know yet. We've looked out there between galaxies and we've seen magnetic fields between galaxies. like inside a galactic cluster.

But it's pretty tricky to see things where there's nothing. Like our strategy for looking for magnetic fields relies on there being at least some matter there, some like thin filaments of gas, like the ones that connects galaxies. You know, the space between galaxies isn't totally empty. There are few particles there that we can use to trace the magnetic fields in the way we talk about.

If we're looking deep into the void, it's much harder to tell if there are magnetic fields there. So we don't know the answer to that. that question yet, if there are magnetic fields deep, deep out there in space, really far from anything in the mega voids. But we have ideas for how to look for them. Like there are no iron filings out there in the middle of nowhere, so you can't tell. That's right. We need to come up with another technique for measuring those magnetic fields. And people have ideas. But to me, the big question is like, what could be making those magnetic fields? Like, what's the possible source?

Yeah. You mean the ones between galaxies or the ones in deep space? Both, right? And it might be the answer is the same. We have some understanding for what causes the magnetic field inside the galaxy, though we don't quite know how it got started. We think the galaxies are powered by the spinning. But between the galaxies, like what could make those magnetic fields? It's just too

big, too strong, too consistent between the galaxies to be coming from the galaxies themselves. Could it be like from the spinning of the galaxies? You know, like galaxies in a galaxy cluster could be spinning around maybe a common point and that's what's generating the field.

It might contribute, and also like particles and gas ejected from the galaxies and all that craziness, but the cluster magnetic fields are too strong to be explained by all of those. Sometimes they're even stronger than the galactic fields themselves. And also remember, the galaxies take a long time to orbit the galactic center. And there's all these particles between the galaxies, but those aren't, again, not enough to make these magnetic fields. And so we really have nowhere to look to say what's creating. did this magnetic field. Where is the dynamo or the mechanism that's powering this thing?

Is there a pattern to these fields inside of the clusters? Like, do these fields kind of point everywhere? Is it kind of random? Or like, you know, like if I were out there in space between galaxies, would my compass go wild? Or would it be like, hmm, I think I know where the center of the cluster is?

Well, we've only begun to map this out. And we can only see it so far where there are particles in these very thin filaments of particles that stretch between the galaxy. So we don't have a great map yet. We're really only beginning to explore this. And so what we need is a better technique to give us a map for where all the magnetic fields are, even like far away from any of the galactic clusters. And based on the shape of those, we might get an idea for where it could be coming from.

Within a cluster. But out between clusters, we don't know even if there are magnetic fields. We know that galaxies have fields and galaxy clusters have fields. And now we've learned that there are fields between clusters, but beyond that, we don't know. There could be magnetic fields out there in deep space. We don't know. So far, everywhere we've looked, there have been magnetic fields. All right. So that's a big mystery. So what could it be? Where could these magnetic fields come from? Well, nobody really has a great idea, except for there's one sort of super bonkers idea, which might explain it. And it's a fun idea because it also sort of solves another puzzle along the way. And that idea is that magnetic fields were created all through the universe during the Big Bang.

Like when things were hot and nasty and crazy in the very early universe, when there was just a lot of energy all around, some of it got dumped into the magnetic field and it just sort of never went away. And so this is energy left over in the magnetic field from the very early moments of the universe and now it's just stretching through the whole universe. Like maybe back when the universe was super dense and small, maybe it had like a spin to it or it had a little bit of a magnet effect into it that then got blown up just like, you know, space itself or the energy of the universe during the Big Bang. That's right. And today we only can make magnets by moving electrical charges. But, you know, the magnetic field is just a quantum field. If you can somehow get energy into it, then that energy can just stick around.

Like magnetic fields don't decay. They just stay. Like if you pour energy into a magnetic field, it doesn't necessarily leak out into another kind of energy. It can just hang out. And so the question is like, is there some way in the very early universe for energy to have like poured into this magnetic field bucket and then just gotten stuck there? I think you're saying that maybe the universe itself, the fabric of it is magnetized.

Yes, exactly. That's the really deep question. And people have always thought like, of course not. how could you have a universe spanning magnetic field? But it could be that one was made in very early times. And now it fills all of space, even where there's nothing. There could be magnetic fields left over from the Big Bang. Wow.

And people have been working furiously on this called magnetogenesis on ideas for how, in those very early moments of the universe when there was energy sloshing around and, you know, bubbling around and so much energy that you couldn't even really think of like particles being formed. It was just like these hot fields. bouncing around that some of it could have sloshed over into the magnetic field and got stuck there. Wow. Magnetogenesis. I like how you guys have a need to name it. You know what I mean? Like somebody was probably writing a scientific paper and they kept having to write the phrase where the

magnetic field of the universe comes from. And so they said, you know, let's just give it a two-word, cool sounding name. Oh, no, it's one word, man. It's a single word. Oh, it's a single. Is it hyphenated? No, it's just one. It's just one long word to describe your idea. Oh, wow. All right. And so the idea is that maybe the whole universe has a magnetic field. Does that mean that maybe you could use a compass to make your way around the universe? Yeah, exactly.

It could give you like directionality. It could be like primordial flows and directions just left over from, you know, whatever randomly was happening in that moment in the early universe. And really the only way to tell is to look where there is nothing. Like there's already magnetic fields here on Earth. So we can't search for these like primordial magnetic fields. What we need to do to look for them is to get really far away from everything, so far away from any physical source like moving charge

that the only way to have a magnetic field would be if space itself had left over magnetic fields. Wait, you're saying that's the only way we could tell? That's the only way we can tell. We have to remove all the other sources. We have to go into these voids and look for magnetic fields there between superclusters of galaxies far away from any source. Because there's nothing there for us to look at. That's right. And so there's nothing there to cause magnetic fields.

fields in a conventional way. And so if we find magnetic fields there, then we can say, oh, they're probably left over from the Big Bang. So that's really the leftover question is like, are there magnetic fields deep in the voids of space? Can we measure them? How can we figure that out? All right. So I guess the question is, how could we figure that out without going out there? And we can. We have some clever ideas. It's a lot harder, right? If you don't have particles that are getting bent and shooting us radiation, then what you can do is look for the impact on folks. Like photons that fly through these voids, photons are magnetic objects, right? They're wiggles in the electromagnetic field.

Right. And so if they move through a magnetic field, it changes their polarization. You know how light has different kinds of polarization? Basically, like how its phase is spinning. And you can block some with your sunglasses and it changes when it reflects, et cetera. Right. Well, the photons have this little, like, track for how much magnetic field they have gone through. And so we can look at these photons.

and try to understand, like, how is their polarization changed? Oh, I see. Because photons, they're not bent by magnetic fields, but you're saying they do sort of align to the magnetic field. Yeah, exactly. They align with the magnetic field. And they think that maybe these voids aren't totally empty. There might be a few sort of dust grains that get aligned with the magnetic field

and help support it and could enhance it. And that as the photons fly through, they don't change direction. It just changes their polarization. basically you can think about like the photon spinning we talk about how the electron has a spin it can spin up or down the photon also being a quantum particle has a spin and so its spin can change as it flies through these magnetic fields this is even harder to do than the lofar measurement that was looking for like characteristic photons from electrons bending this is even more subtle and actually can't be done with low far they have to build something totally new to do this needs to be done with high far not low far they're built to be done with high far not low far they're built to an array that's an entire square kilometer dedicated just to radio antennas. And that's going to be really good for this measurement. It's called the square kilometer array. It's going to come online in 2027.

And it's going to look at photons that have passed through these voids from, you know, galaxies on the other sides of these bubbles to see if their light is spinning in a way that tells us whether there are magnetic fields there. So like if you see them all align one way, it would be suspicious. Yeah, exactly. Or if you see patterns or something. Yeah, if you see patterns. Well, we don't know the directions of those magnetic fields, right?

If the magnetic fields are aligned, it tells you that maybe it was made in the early universe during this moment. Or maybe if they're like curved up like a ball of yarn, it tells you they were made in a different way. Or if they're all aligned like a corkscrew, the patterns of those magnetic fields are like a fingerprint that tell us how and when they were made in the early universe. So that would be fascinating data. If you could like know right now the direction of all the magnetic fields all through the

universe, that would tell us. us a lot about what happened during the Big Bang. Really? Because these fields could be different depending on something that happened in the Big Bang? Like, are there different kinds of magnetic fields? They're not different kinds of magnetic fields, but depending on how the energy and when the energy got into the magnetic field, they would arrive in different patterns. You know, like did it sloshed in there before there were particles or maybe after protons were formed or even maybe billions of years later? There are different mechanisms for

sort of getting the energy into the magnetic fields and they leave different fingerprints on those magnetic fields. It's like clues at a crime scene. It's like a picture. It's like having a picture of what happened. Yeah, exactly. And you know that picture of the cosmic microwave background radiation. It tells us like where the photons were that came out of that hot plasma. That picture has so much information about the nature of that plasma, what was going on inside it and how things were bouncing around in it. We extracted so much knowledge from that. This would be like a magnetic equivalent, but it might look back even further. That plasma we're talking about is like 400,000 years after the beginning of the Big Bang. This magnetic picture might tell us about things that were

happening, you know, milliseconds or nanoseconds afterwards. And so it could be very fascinating. It would be a big clue about the origin of the universe. Yeah, exactly. And there's another really fun way that we might be able to see magnetic fields. We look at these weird stars called blazars. Blazars are stars that have really high-energy gamma rays. And these gamma rays, sometimes when they're flying along through space, remember, they're just high-energy photons. Sometimes they split into an electron and a positron. And then they go back to being a photon, which is a thing that photons do. They sometimes split and then come back.

But electrons and positrons are charged particles. And so if there's a magnetic field there, then when the photon splits into the electron and positron, it's more likely to get broken apart, to separate, to get pulled apart by the magnetic field and not recombine. If it's going through a magnetic field to separate them. If it's going through a magnetic field, exactly. So what we do is we look at blazars, and that can tell us whether there's a magnetic field between us and the blazar. If we're sort of missing some of the high energy gamma rays from these blazars,

that suggests that they're basically getting filtered out by a magnetic field that's between us and them. It's sort of like magnetic lensing. Wow. I guess the overall strategy is, since there's no stuff there, is to look at how these magnetic fields would affect light itself. Yeah. Yeah, light that's passing through it would get affected in all sorts of weird different ways. And that's going to carry information about where the magnetic fields are. So these are like, you know, crazy ideas people are having to answer a question that 10 years ago or 20 years ago people thought was crazy. You know, like, why would you even worry about magnetic fields in the voids? Well, now it's a deep and fascinating question, and it seems frankly kind of likely that there are magnetic fields there.

I feel like we have to update now the Boy Scouts training to not just include reading a compass in Earth. Now they should be trained about how to read a compass in space. What to do if you are lost in a super void? You know, be prepared. You never know. Give up. Give up. Are you saying give up?

For your billions of light years from Earth, you have no chance. A compass is not going to save your life. Let's be realistic here. Step one, build 20,000 telescopes out of twigs and merit badges. Hamburger meat, yeah. All right, well, let's say that they do find a magnetic field of the universe out there in the voids of space between galaxy clusters. And let's say it has a pattern. What does it mean?

What would it tell us about, I don't know, what we know about the origins of everything? Well, it would give us sort of a picture as to the early universe, which I'm sure can answer all sorts of questions. we can't even imagine asking right now, you know, about how the universe went from like super duper hot to only just super hot to only just hot and all these transitions. And we broke that down in an episode recently about the first 200 seconds of the universe. There are all these transitions where you go from like too hot to have particles to having these kind of particles, to having those kind of particles. And a lot of that is just speculation.

So it would be really awesome to have like an image captured from one of those moments. Yeah. You know, like an ultrasound to the whole universe as it was a baby. We all like to keep those pictures of when we were hotter, for sure. Mine are photoshopped, yeah. But also, it's a really cool idea because it solves an outstanding puzzle we have in cosmology. What's the puzzle? Well, the puzzle is how fast is the universe expanding?

You know, we look out into the universe and we see that galaxies are moving away from us and that they're moving away from us faster and faster every year. That's something we call dark energy. This is the accelerating expansion of the universe. And we use that to measure something we call the Hubble constant, which tells us basically how fast a galaxy is accelerating away from us. It's like a kilometer per second per millions of light years, how fast that velocity is increasing.

Right, because it's changing, right? The expansion is changing. Yeah. And the interesting thing is that when you look and you try to measure this rate of expansion and you measure it today using like the expansion of galaxies, And they use clever tricks to try to measure it in the early universe, you get a different number. And this is interesting because it tells us, like, well, we don't really know how fast the universe is expanding. And we don't know if it's expanding at the same rate now as it was before or is there more dark energy than there was before.

And we had a whole podcast episode about this. It's called the Hubble Tension. Like, how fast is the universe expanding? We get two measurements that disagree. Right. But like 10%. Yeah, they differ by about 10%. But that's statistically significant.

Like, their two teams are both pretty confident in their measurements. And so the question is like, well, what explains it? And, you know, one measurement uses the expansion of the universe. That's the late times measurement. And the other one looks at the very early universe, those blobs we were talking about in the cosmic microwave background, and looks at the shapes of those blobs and the distances between them. And because the speed of the expansion sort of controls how many blobs you get and how far apart

they are. And they make a measurement. So it's like the early day. measurement versus the late days measurement, and they don't quite agree. Oh, I see. So maybe they're saying that if there is a universal magnetic field, maybe that's kind of where the difference went. Yeah, exactly.

The folks who analyzed their data from the very early universe assumed no magnetic field. But if you add a magnetic field to the very early universe, then it turns out you can have a larger Hubble constant, but it looks smaller. And so essentially, they did account for that in their early measurements. Oh, interesting. So if the Hubble constant is actually the one we've measured in the late universe, it would give you exactly the picture you see in the early universe if there was a magnetic field. And so it sort of like solves for that it corrects the tension in this very nice way.

Wow. Now who would be right then? The late measurers or the early measurers? Who would get bragging rights? I'm sure everyone would find a way to brag. But this would suggest that the measurement by the expansion team, the folks who are looking at the actual expansion in the universe right now, and sort of the late measurers would be correct.

All right. Well, and coincidentally, they're the ones funding these new experiments. Everybody just wants to know the answer. But, you know, that's exactly what we hope for when we do a measurement two ways that we think should agree. When we see a discrepancy, we think, well, maybe you made some silly mistake. But once you crossed all those possibilities off, then the other possibility is maybe there's some new science going on here we didn't account for. You make two different set of assumptions. One of them must have a mistake.

if the results don't agree. And that's exactly what we found. And so it's not like anybody screwed up here. It's just revealed something new about the universe. And so, again, this is still an idea. Like, we don't know that there are magnetic fields all through space. But if there were, it would solve this problem very nicely. All right.

Well, I think it seems like the answer is stay tuned. The answer is that there are magnetic fields here on Earth and the sun and the galaxies and the galaxy clusters, which is already pretty amazing. but there might be an even bigger universe-wide cosmic magnetic field. Yeah, exactly. It's incredible that we keep finding magnetic fields everywhere we look despite our expectations. And that's pretty fun.

It's fun to see surprises out there in the universe and then to have to try to explain them. To me, that's much more exciting than finding what you expected. It's finding what you didn't expect and then having to change your concept of the universe, bending your concepts to the data itself. I guess my question, Daniel, is that if the universe, has a magnetic field, does that mean it has a north and a south pole?

And would you find a universal Santa Claus in the North Pole? That would be quite a gift. Jokes aside, though, we don't know the pattern of that magnetic field, and so we don't know its orientation or if it's totally balanced or if it's curled up in all sorts of ways. But that's exactly the kind of question we'd like to ask. We'd love to see that picture so we can ask those questions. We need a special array, like a Santa array, to finally determine that.

All right, well, again, it's just another. one of these crazy measurements and ideas that tell you that there are invisible things out there in the universe that we can't immediately see but are there and are part of the history and origin of how things came to be the way they are. That's right. And so the universe is filled with mystery. So there's lots of room for your creativity and your curiosity and vast enigmas waiting to be solved. You just need a compass to help us find them. Thanks for joining us. We hope you enjoyed that. See you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio.

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