Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Kids questions about the Universe!

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

Daniel and Jorge answer questions from kids about black holes, diamond planets and faster-than-light travel! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the powerful stories I'll be mining on our upcoming 12th season of family secrets. We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories.

Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do we really need another podcast with a condescending finance brof trying to tell us how to spend our own money? No thank you. Instead, check out Brown Ambition. Each week, I, your host, Mandy Money, gives you real talk, real advice with a heavy dose of I feel uses. Like on Fridays when I take your questions for the BAQA. Whether you're trying to invest for your future, navigate a time. toxic workplace. I got you. Listen to Brown Ambition on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast,

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 how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials is your complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey Daniel, do you think kids think about the world differently? Oh, I'm sure they do because they aren't tied down by all of our crazy misconceptions.

Actually, I meant because they have smaller brains. But I think you're right about the misconceptions. Do you think that makes them smarter than us? I don't know, but I think there's a reason that it's rare to have like a brilliant insight or crazy new idea after you're 30. So just because I'm older than 30, that means I'm never going to win the Nobel Prize in Physics? Oh, no, no, you might still, but it would be for an idea you had when you were 29. Ah, you mean like when I decided to leave academia and become a cartoonist? Yeah, maybe the best idea you ever had.

Do they give Nobel prizes in bad career choices? Hi, I'm Horham, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I was once stumped by a question from a six-year-old. Really? Wow. Was it a question about physics? Or just about life? It sort of was. I was doing demonstrations at an elementary school about how cool liquid nitrogen is. And some kid asked me, if lightsabers were real, would they be made of liquid nitrogen? Oh, interesting question. It's like it's blending fiction and reality and some imagination there. Yeah. I was literally stumped. I had no idea how to answer that question in the universe, in which lightsaber.

Like, is a khyber crystal made out of liquid nitrogen, really? It could be, right? Yeah, yeah, I suppose it could. Can you make a crystal out of liquid nitrogen somehow? I guess that would be crystal nitrogen, yeah. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of I-Hard Radio. In which we try to summon that curiosity we all had when we were children

about the way the world worked and extend that to everything in the universe and wonder about the nature of the universe, the origin of the universe, explanations for how everything works and dig into the mysteries for the things that we still don't understand. We apply our innate curiosity to everything in the universe because we think that everything is understandable and that if we bang away at it long enough, eventually we will figure things out. Yeah, because it is a big universe and there are enough questions in it for all kinds of people, young and old. You might be eight years old and still have questions about the universe,

or you might be 99 and also have questions about the universe. The universe seems to never run out of questions. That's right. And some of the questions that we are asking suggest that, like, we as a species are quite young. You know, the way the kids ask very basic questions. You know, like, where does the sun go at night? Stuff like that. We are still asking really basic questions.

How old is the universe? What happened before it? How big is it? What's past what we can see? Really just like novice initial questions you ask as a species coming into this universe and wondering about our place in it. Are you saying our species is like in its teenage years, you think? Or are we tweens?

No, I think we're basically six-year-olds. Intellectually, as a species, I think we're six years old. We're asking really basic questions. We're still in the kindergarten of the galaxy? Exactly. We're asking questions that reveal the way we think about the universe rather than the way the universe works. You know, we're asking the questions we think are important

and that reveal our misunderstandings about how the universe works. Well, we definitely don't have our wisdom teeth yet as a species. We're definitely lacking any wisdom, it seems, these days. But there is a lot that you can ask about the universe, and it's for all kinds of ages. Yeah, and sometimes it's fun to dig back into that. You know, as a researcher, I'm working at like the very edge of knowledge asking very specific questions. What's inside a quarker? Are electrons made of something smaller?

But it's fun to go back to the questions that five-year-old, six-year-old, 10-year-olds ask. And remember that we still don't have answers to that. those big questions and like the whole context of our exploration is that we're trying to answer these really big, basic, deep questions and that all the specific work we're doing at the edge of knowledge in the end is motivated by trying to get back to those basic questions. I think trying to make a lightsaber is at the edge of knowledge, did you think? I mean, have you seen those YouTube videos where people try to recreate lightsaber? It's hard. It's really impossible almost.

What motivated you to watch those, Jorge, when you're trying to build one yourself? I was curious as a kid. Yes, to watch YouTube videos. You're going to slice your way out of your childhood situation. No, I've not gone down that particular rabbit hole. But, yeah, there's a lot of really fun questions we ask there. Yeah, and sometimes we get those questions here in our inbox. And specifically, we get questions from little kids, not just adults or young people, like the people listening to this podcast right now.

But we get questions from little kids. That's right. Sometimes folks have their 7-year-olds or their 10-year-olds listening with them, and a podcast will inspire a question. And then they'll write to us and say, hey, my kid asked me this question. I don't know the answer. Maybe you guys can help out. Which makes me glad about all the jokes we don't say in this podcast. All those jokes about dark matter and.

Yeah, that's right. All those racy browser histories that we don't like to talk about. But exactly because we hope that you are out there listening with your kids and that inspires conversations. I'm always really happy to hear when somebody writes it and says, hey, I was listening to your podcast with my 11 year old. And then we spent an hour talking about what's inside a black hole or just on the way to school, wondering about the nature of the universe. Our whole goal here is to share our joy of our

ignorance and wondering about what's in the universe and helping you talk to everybody in your life about it. Yeah. So if you're a kid listening to this podcast right now, we want to thank you for listening. We're glad that you're here. And I'm sure you have a lot of questions as well as well as a lot of other kids. And we have a whole inbox full of questions from kids. That's right. So don't be shy to ask your parents questions or to send your questions to us. We'd love to tackle them. So to the end of the podcast, we'll be tackling. Kid questions about the universe. At least are questions about kids or by kids.

These are the biggest questions from the littlest people. These are questions about the whole universe, about black holes and about how things work, you know, the kind of things that go through the minds of an eight-year-old. And these are all spontaneously generated, right? Like kids just sent this question in with their parents. That's right. I don't know if the parents put the kids up to it

or if these are actually child actors. I can't vouch for the veracity of these. But they are good questions. And so I thought it would be fun to talk about on the podcast. Yeah, as long as you didn't go around soliciting little kids for things on the Internet, I think we're safe. No, I try to stay as far away as I can from the child acting industry down here in Southern California. Yeah, so we have all kinds of awesome questions here from kids about black holes, about diamond cores, about the expanding universe. And we have a whole bunch of them.

So let's dig into them, Daniel. What's our first question? Our first question comes from Joey. He's seven years old. What are the newest and the oldest black holes in the universe? Interesting. Approbately, a question about youngest and oldest something in the universe. I wonder if there's a relationship there with like grandpa black holes and grandkid black holes.

Yeah, like maybe the younger black holes and more attitude maybe. They think they know everything in the universe. I was thinking the other direction. Like maybe the little black holes look up to the supermassive black holes. and they're like, that's going to be me one day. I'm going to have my own galaxy of stars swirling around me. I'm going to devour millions of stars and planets and potentially civilizations. And then get bigger or something.

I'm going to be huge and round one day. I'm going to have a whole galaxy revolving around me, just me. Yeah, so it's a great question because black holes weren't all made at the same time. I guess it's one thing that people may not know that black holes are not all the same age. That's right. And part of the reason is that we have several different categories of black holes. We have different ways that black holes could be made. So different processes that are capable of creating this crazy density that you need to create this craziest and most mysterious of universal objects. Yeah. So there are black holes being born right now. And there were maybe black holes that were made in the Big Bang.

So let's get into what we know. Daniel, what is the youngest black hole that we know about? So we think, as you say, that black holes are being made all the time, right? Because black holes come from collapsing stars, at least one category do. So at the end of life of a star, we think that they collapse and they form a black hole if they have enough mass. And that should be happening basically all the time around the universe. I mean, not like 10,000 every second per cubic light year, but at a certain rate all over the universe. So there should be a black hole being made right now, another one right now, another one right now. Every 10 seconds, a black hole is born.

Yeah, it's like asking who is the youngest person on earth. It's a constantly changing answer because new babies are constantly being born. But as you say, we can ask the question, what is the youngest black hole that we have seen, right? And then there's another twist there because, you know, the things that are further away from us are a little older. So we're naturally going to have seen things that are younger, that are closer to us just because the light has had a chance to reach us. Oh, I see. So there's kind of a delay between when something happens and when we find out. out about it. So what we think might be the youngest, might not be the youngest. It's just the

youngest that we know about, that the news of which has gotten to us. Yeah, precisely. And so the youngest black hole that we know about is about 26,000 light years from Earth. It's called W49B, because astronomers are so creative with names. And we think it's about a thousand years old. We think that it was formed in a supernova that happened about a thousand years ago. A supernova black hole. Now, not all stars go supernova and become black holes, right? Like there's lots of stars that never become a black hole. Like our star is not going to become a black hole.

That's right. And our star won't even go supernova. And the whole thing is determined just by how much stuff there is in the original star. The more stuff there is, the more likely that it's going to have a supernova collapse. And then only the heaviest of stars have enough mass to create a black hole. Because remember, to create a black hole, you have to have gravity overcome all of the the things that are pushing back against gravity's pressure. Gravity is trying to push everything into the smallest space possible because it's just attracting mass to other mass. But things prevent

that like our star is burning and shooting out radiation, which prevents it from collapse. When that burning stops, then there are other things that will prevent it from collapsing, like just the atoms pushing against each other or eventually just like quantum mechanical effects. But if you have enough stuff, you have a big enough scoop of the original hydrogen serving, then you can overcome that if you're above a minimum threshold. So you're right, not every supernova becomes a black hole. And so the youngest supernova and that became

a black hole that we know about happened, we think, a thousand years ago, 26 light years from Earth. 26,000 light years from Earth. 26,000 are light years from Earth. What did I say? 36,000 miles. 26 light years. But hey, what's three orders of magnitude between friends? Yeah, it's right here.

But it really, it must have been then that it was maybe born 25,000 light years. or something like that years ago. Like it can't be a thousand years old, but then it's 26,000 light years away because it would take 26,000 years for the light to get to us. That's right.

What we mean by that is the supernova should have been visible here on Earth a thousand years ago, right? And so a thousand years ago, we should have seen a supernova indicating the formation of the black hole, but of course that would have happened 27,000 years ago. I guess how do we know that it's there? How do we know it's age? Like black holes are black,

so they're kind of hard to see in space. How do we know it's there and how do we know how old it is? So these are tricky to identify, right? Every time you see a supernova, you don't necessarily get a black hole. And so you can't actually see these black holes directly. You always have to infer it indirectly. And so you see, for example, an accretion disk forming, but you don't see any object there at the core.

Or perhaps you can measure the mass because there's something else nearby and you can measure the radius because things are passing near it. And so you can tell what the density of the object is, and it's denser than a neutron star could be. And so as we talked about on a recent episode about black holes, we're never 100% sure about a black hole. We're always inferring it. The argument is usually something like,

this is denser than a neutron star could be or anything we know, therefore it must be a black hole. There's always a bit of a leap there. We don't know anything other than a black hole that could be this small and this dense. So therefore, we think it's a black hole. And that's sort of the argument we make when we look at these nebula.

Right. You sort of look at a black spot in space and you see things moving around in orbit. And so you must infer that there's something like a black hole there. But I guess how do you know it's a thousand years old? Like how do you know when it happened? Like we weren't looking a thousand years ago. That's right. But these things have clouds.

The supernova is an active process. And so there's a big explosion and a lot of the stuff gets thrown out to form this nebula. And some of it collapses into the black hole. But we can watch the process of this nebula. And it's going to like create new planets and have all sorts of dynamics. And so that's sort of a thing that we can watch and we can look at and we can say, well, this nebula looks like it's about 1,000 years old because we think it looks like about a thousand years worth of like gravitational reformation has happened. You can see the wrinkles. You don't have to check the ID.

You can just guess by looking at them. You can, you know, measure the velocity of things in the nebula by seeing the red shift. And so you can sort of tell where it is in this process of having exploded and then reforming something. Sometimes you'll get like new planets forming around the neutron. star or the black hole at the core. Well, that's cool. So then that's the youngest black hole we've ever seen. Like, we haven't seen one in the last thousand years or we don't think one has come into existence in the last thousand years. Isn't that weird, given how many stars there are in

the galaxy and in the universe? It is kind of weird. And there's a couple of things going on there. One is that there aren't that many supernova in our galaxy. Like, there's a lot of stars in our galaxy. And we expect only like a few supernova per century because not many stars actually end up turning into supernova. And one of the weird things is that we haven't seen a supernova in more than 400 years. Like the last supernova in the Milky Way that we saw,

we see lots of them in other galaxies constantly, hundreds every year. But the last one that we saw in our galaxy was in 1604. Kepler saw the last supernova any human has ever observed in our galaxy. Whoa. Really? How do you know we didn't miss it? In like in the 1800s, was everyone looking? Was everyone looking diligently?

Like, what if we kind of like, one happened and we were looking the other way? Or, you know, the French Revolution was happening so people were a little busy. Or World War II was happening. And so there are other things we were attending to. Yeah, there are a couple candidates where we see in Nebula and we're like, hmm, this looks like it should have been a supernova about 100 years ago. We should have seen it. Why didn't anybody notice it?

There are a couple of candidates, but even still is kind of weird because we expect a few per century and we haven't seen a single one in 400 years. We're actually going to dig into that in a whole podcast episode about the formation of supernova and why we haven't seen any in the Milky Way pretty soon. But basically we haven't seen a lot of supernova in the Milky Way recently and you need a supernova to form these black holes.

All right, so then the answer is stay tuned. But that is the youngest black hole we've seen. It's 1,000 years old, 26,000 light years from Earth. And so what's the oldest black hole we know about? The oldest black holes we know about are ones that formed at the hearts of galaxies in the very beginning of the universe. Remember that after the Big Bang,

stuff flew out, and then gravity started doing its job and made stars and galaxies, and that took about a billion years for the universe to look familiar. You know, 800 million, maybe a billion years before we had the first galaxies. And the interesting thing is that we already have supermassive black holes at the hearts of those galaxies. Now, those galaxies are billions of years old, which means we can only see them if they're very, very far away because the light from those far away galaxies is just now hitting Earth. So if you look deep out into space, you're looking back in time and you're looking at the very, very early galaxies. And the crazy thing is that at the heart of those galaxies, there are these very bright emissions, these things we call quasars, which are light from the gas

that's surrounding those huge black holes in the very early universe. So we think that black holes were formed at the heart of these early galaxies, you know, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Interesting. So we can see these black holes because they're actually really shiny, or at least the what's around them is really shiny. It's in fact super shiny, right? It's like it's brighter than the whole galaxy that it's in. That's right. They are crazy shiny. These things are called quasars. And when they were first discovered, people didn't really understand. They didn't believe them. They thought there must be something wrong because you're looking at something super distant and yet super bright,

which means that at its source, it must be like redonculously bright. And people thought that just must be wrong. What could power that? Then they discovered that, oh, it's the energy from these black holes that's like squeezing and pushing on all this gas around it that creates this very intense radiation. Again, not from the black hole, as you say, but from the gas that's around it. And so you're saying that we see these quasars, these super bright black holes in galaxies that are really, really far away, which means that they're really, really old, which puts their age at around 13 billion years old. We think the black hole is 13 billion years old. Yeah, we think the black hole is 13 billion years old. Now, we haven't seen them.

recently, right? We are looking at very outdated information. So we're looking at a black hole which is fairly young, maybe a few hundred million years, but 13 billion years ago. So now we're assuming that those black holes are still around because we don't know of any mechanism for super massive black holes to disappear. The only way a black hole can shrink is through hawking radiation, but that happens very, very gradually for very large black holes. And these things are probably still eating. So they're probably even bigger now than we are seeing them. from 13 billion years ago. Wow.

It's like getting a photograph of someone from the 1920s and, you know, assuming they're still alive that would make them really old just because you have a photo of them when they were young but the photo is really old.

Yeah, exactly. So these things have been around basically the entire history of the universe. Right. Almost though. Almost by like, what, 100,000 years, you said? A hundred billion?

A few hundred million years. Yeah. 100 million. What's an order of magnitude between a podcast code. That's right, exactly. So those are pretty old. 13 billion years old is pretty old, but there might be even older black holes.

That's right. We don't know, but it's possible that there were black holes made before there was even matter. Before the universe cooled down so that the energy in the quantum fields could even be described as like particles, as you know, like corks and electrons flying around. When the universe was still so crazy, dense and intense that you couldn't even describe things as particles, we think there might have been black holes made in that state. of matter. And those we call primordial black holes. I see. Because you don't necessarily need matter to make a black hole, right? You could also make

one out of pure energy. That's right. Because general relativity treats matter is just another form of energy. And it's really energy density that curves space. And so you can accomplish that with matter, of course, but you could also accomplish that with energy. Like, if you take powerful enough lasers and overlap them, you can create a black hole out of light. How about liquid nitrogen lightsabers? What if you cross those beams? Can you cut a black hole in half with a lightsaber? There's a physics question. I don't have the answer to.

Only if you're Yoda. Only after 900 years of training, yeah. So these primordial black holes would be the oldest black holes in the universe, but we don't really know if they exist, right? We definitely do not know if they exist. If they did exist, we should be seeing them because they should have been created all sorts of different sizes, really large ones, really small ones.

It's nice to imagine that they might exist because they might explain how supermassive black holes got so massive, so young. Like, you might ask, how do you get such a big black hole after only a few hundred million years? Well, they could have been seeded by primordial black holes. They could also explain what the dark matter is. Maybe dark matter is just a bunch of these primordial black holes floating around in the universe. But if they were created all sorts of different sizes, then some of them should be just the right size to live around 14 billion years and then evaporate, to disappear. And when black holes evaporate, they're giving off their light.

It happens more rapidly. They get brighter and brighter as they're about to disappear. So we should be able to see them sort of like flashing out of existence. But we've never seen that happen. And so it's sort of hard to understand how you can have primordial black holes. Maybe they fizzle out, you know, kind of silently. Maybe they don't fizzle out with a bang. Is that possible?

It's possible. But our current theory of black hole evaporation suggests that when they evaporate, they turn into photons and all sorts of other creatures. crazy particles and we should definitely be seeing those like at the edges of the galaxy or something. But we've been looking and we haven't seen a single one. We've never seen a black hole evaporation. And so that suggests that probably they're either just not formed in the right sizes. Like maybe they're only formed really, really small and really big.

That's possible. Or they just weren't made. But if they were made, then they'd be essentially as old as the universe. They would be made like less than a second after the Big Bang. Interesting. But isn't it a theory that some of those super massive black hole? in the middle of galaxies maybe were made by primordial black holes? It could be. Yeah, because as we said, we don't understand how those black holes got so big, so fast.

If you try to model the formation of galaxies in the early universe, stars coming together, forming a black hole, etc. You can't get black holes that are like billions of solar masses so quickly. So we just don't understand how that happened. And as you say, one idea is maybe they got a jumpstart because they were seated by a really big primordial black hole. So that's a possibility. So it sounds like the oldest black holes in the universe are 13 billion years old, at least. At least. They might be older.

All right. Well, thank you, Joy, for a great question. I think that's your answer. The youngest and the oldest black holes in the universe are both still older than your parents, apparently, by many billions of years. Or at least 1,000 years and maybe billions of years. That's right. These black holes make your parents seem like children. All right.

Thank you, Joey. And so let's get into more questions from kids. But first, let's take a quick break. 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, until this. Do this, pull that, turn this. It's just... I can do it my eyes close. I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devin. 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.

Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grazacus Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition.

I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start.

We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing Vibras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding. from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable.

Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding. it, and in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Your entire identity

has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories, I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new series.

of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. These are questions that people didn't have the answers too, so they wanted me to answer them. If my kids ask me questions, I just answer them. Or if I don't know the answer, I try to look it up. But I don't send them to the podcast. I see. You're like a pinch hitter for parents when it comes to physics questions. Yeah, I try to be.

I think that's a lot of fun. I just love hearing the kinds of questions that other kids are asking because it tells you something about how they see the universe. And, you know, I feel like my brain is sort of like stuck in the modern physics view of how things work. And I'm sure that I have all sorts of, like, misconceptions that have sort of fallen into and been thinking about for 20 years. So a kid quest, you can really stop you in your tracks and ask you, like, how do we know this? Or why do we think about it this way? It's really refreshing. All right.

Our next question comes from Anthony, who has a question about diamond cores. Hi, Daniel and Jorge. My name is Anthony. I am eight years old. And why does 55 King Crying E have a diamond core? Looking forward to hear your answer. Please and thank you. Hey, thanks, Anthony.

What a polite little young person. I know. They said please and thank you. Some of our listeners apparently are teaching their kids' manners in addition to science. Can Anthony talk to my kids, please, and run a little etiquette class? That's right, Andy. We'll trade you some physics answers for some manners lessons. Now, this is an interesting question because, to be honest, I didn't quite understand it.

It almost sounded like a Star Wars reference. Like, does this kind of lightsaber model have a crystal core? It's a great question. It's about an exoplanet. This is a planet around another star that we are trying to understand. Because, you know, we are looking at our own solar system and wondering, are these the only kinds of planets you can have? Or are there other weird kinds of planets out there? As always, when we venture out from our little corner of the universe, we expect to be shocked.

We look forward to seeing things that we couldn't have imagined. And so this is a planet around another star. understand what it's made out of and you know like what it's like to walk on its surface. And so there was a recent paper suggesting that maybe the entire core of this planet could be one huge diamond. And that's what Anthony's asking about. Whoa. Yeah, because we've seen now thousands and thousands of planets in other solar systems, right? Like we've detected them. We've even sort of sort of have pictures of them. We can tell what's in their atmosphere. Are we down to the point where you can tell what's inside these planets out there in space? We sort of can. And you know,

we have very limited information about each one of these things. And so we're trying to do as much science as we can with a very basic information. And here, for example, we have like some knowledge about the mass of the planet and then some knowledge of the radius of the planet. And that lets you do really basic stuff,

like ask what's the density of the planet. And if you know what the density is, then you can ask questions like, well, what could make a planet of that density? What materials are consistent with that? So no, we can't like go and drill into the planet and say, oh, look, we found diamond. But we can ask questions about what it might be made out of based on what we do know.

Interesting. And Anthony was asking about a specific planet that has been found out there. And he had a name for it. It was 55 something. Yeah, the official name of the planet is 55 Cancree E. And so sometimes abbreviated 55 C.E. Cancred E. That does sound like a Star Trek name.

Yeah, it's a planet that's orbiting the star 55 Cancrete A. And so Cancree E is, you know, like one of the things are. I see. There's a B, A and a D, but we're talking about the E thing around that star. That's right. This is the one that's most interesting. And it's got a really interesting history to it because it was first discovered in 2004 using the Wiggle Method. The Wiggle Method says that a planet moving around a star should tug on the star. It's not just that the star is pulling on the planet. The planet is pulling on the star. And so if you have a planet moving around the star, you should see the star moving also.

And you can measure that by measuring the velocity of the star by seeing how much it changes the light that's coming to us from the star. So these Doppler shifts. Right. Just like the Earth is making the sun wiggle a little tiny bit. And if you were, you know, smart enough and had pretty good tuscos in another galaxy or another planet, you could tell that we were here. And so you can tell if there's a planet there because it's pulling on the star.

And you can tell something about the mass of the planet. because you can tell how much it's pulling on the star and you can tell something about its period because you can tell like when the star wiggles one way and the other way. But this wiggle method doesn't tell you anything about the size of the planet because you know you don't know

if it's like a big fluffy pile of styrofoam or a tiny little black hole. They would have the same gravitational effect on the star. Right. They would wiggle the star in the same way. And so that was 2004. All we knew about this thing was how long it took to go around its sun

and how massive it was. But then like seven years later, we got better telescopes and we trained them on the star and we were able to measure the size of this planet by seeing it eclipsing its star. Like, you know, if you go out and you watch an eclipse, you see the moon passing in front of the sun

and it blocks it out. It's very dramatic. This is very different because the planet is much, much smaller than the star. And so it's sort of like watching a moth walk in front of a light bulb from like thousands of miles away and then measuring how much the light bulb dims because of the moth.

And you can use that time. measure the size of the planet because the larger planet would dim the star more than a smaller planet. Right. Or if you were like looking at the moon at night, for example, and a little fly between you and the moon, you would sort of see the light from the moon, you know, get a little bit dimmer, but it's just a little tiny bit. Just a little tiny bit, but if you watch, you can see it and you can see it happen periodically also, which really helps. It's not just like one blip and you say, oh, was that noise or mistake in my data? If it happens periodically, regularly and it matches up with the velocity measurements you're making of the star,

then you can be pretty confident that that's what you're seeing. So then you know the size of the planet also. From that, you can make measurements of its density and you can know like something about what it's made out of. So you can tell the mass from the wiggle and you can tell the size from the shadow it makes in front of that star. And so we have a measure of its density and I'm guessing it must be pretty dense if we're thinking it might be made out of diamond core.

Yeah, this thing is like nine times the mass. of the Earth, but its diameter is only twice the Earth, right? And so it's definitely denser than the Earth is. By how much, like three or four times? Yeah, well, the diameter of twice the Earth means that its volume is eight times the Earth, right? And it's got a mass of nine times the Earth, so it's actually only a little bit denser than the Earth is. So it must be like a rocky planet or something, but it's just a little bit more dense than the Earth. And the Earth is pretty dense, right?

Like, Earth is a rocky planet with lava and rock, right? It's not, we're not made out of a con candy. Exactly. But this planet is very different from the Earth because it's so close to its sun. And it has an 18-hour orbit. Like it takes 18 hours for a year to pass on this planet. Like it goes around its sun every 18 hours. Every 18 hours, there's a birthday party.

It's been basically all of your time shopping for presents. Yeah, an opening present. Half the time shopping. The other have opening them. That's right, an eating cake. And that makes the surface of this planet very, very high. hot like 3,900 degrees Fahrenheit or 2100 C. That's hot. That's pretty hot. You don't need to light your birthday candles. Exactly. They're already on fire. So I recommend a pool party. And that's

important to understand because when you're building models of these planets, you have to understand like what state the materials that you're putting into your model of the planet are. So for example, they started off by assuming that this planet like Earth has a lot of oxygen in it. Like Earth is a lot of oxygen. It doesn't have a whole lot of carbon in it. And if you're, you're going to have a planet this size and with a lot of oxygen in it, it should have a lot of water on it. But it's sort of weird to have all that water on the surface. Like this planet would be like 10% water. 10% of the mass of this planet would be water to get the right size and the right density.

But if you have that much water, you're basically talking an ocean planet, but that much radiation on the surface would split all the water and put it in a super critical state. So sort of a weird idea to begin with. Right. It's not a good assumption to think it's just like the Earth. Yeah. So then what happened to convince them that maybe this planet was different was that they learned something about the star. They looked in more depth at what the star was made out of, and they noticed that it had a lot of carbon in it, a lot more carbon than our star, for example.

Remember that these solar systems are formed from leftover materials from other generations of solar systems. So you have still mostly hydrogen, but like some of them have more oxygen, some of them have more carbon, some of them have more of this, some of them have more of that. this solar system seemed to have been formed out of materials that were richer in carbon than our solar system. So they think, okay, that star has a lot of carbon in it. Maybe the planet has a lot of carbon also. Maybe our assumption that this planet was oxygen-riched like the Earth was wrong. And they said, well, what model could you build if you started from carbon instead of from oxygen? I see.

To get the right sort of like size and mass and to make it sort of carbon-rich, you would have to make the planet have a lot of carbon. Yeah. So they say, well, maybe the planet's like one third carbon. And then they started playing with models. Like, what would happen if you had a planet that was one third carbon and this big, right, at this certain density? They realized that would create an incredible pressure at its core and that in some circumstances, you would get an enormous diamond. You know, like we're talking a diamond that's like thousands of kilometers across.

Because I guess you're assuming all the carbon would sort of fall to the middle? or like it would push all the other stuff out as it forms the diamond? Mm-hmm. And this incredible pressure, you know, it would essentially turn all of this carbon at the core into a diamond. And obviously there would be impurities, right? You'd have heavier metals like iron also. So it wouldn't be just like one pure, perfect diamond grade triple A or anything.

But it would be like mostly diamond. Wow. And so we're talking, how big do you think this diamond is? Like the size of Manhattan or the size of Australia? How big do you think this diamond core is? You know, this thing would be a third of the planet. So it's huge. Yeah, I mean, we're talking thousands of kilometers across.

Wow. Like bigger than the moon. Bigger than the moon. Much bigger, like almost the size of Earth. Exactly. So what kind of ring would you need for a diamond bigger than the moon? Yeah. So I guess if you like it, you better put a ring on it, right?

Exactly. There you go. A, can't create a better step up. All right. Well, thank you, Anthony. That's a great question. And I think that's the answer. we think that this planet that's out there orbiting another star

has a lot of carbon in it. And if you have that much carbon in a planet under that much pressure inside, it might form into a diamond. And so, yes, there might be a giant diamond inside of that planet. That's right. But this, of course, is all hypothetical. We have a very few pieces of information. We're playing a lot of games about what might be possible. And in coming years, we'll be able to image these planets

and see more about the light that's reflected from the surface off of their stars and learning more about their atmospheres, we'll get a lot more information about these planets. And then we'll figure out what's out there and probably what we learned will be even more shocking than anything we hypothesized. I guess the hard part would be mining this giant diamond. Like, first of all, how do you like break it apart?

And the other part is how do you get it out of the core of a giant planet? How do you polish it, right? You need to shine this thing up if you're going to sell it at market value. All right. Well, let's get into our last question from kids today. And it's about the expanding universe. But first, let's take another quick break. 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, until this. Pull that, turn this. It's just, I can do my eyes close. I'm Mani.

I'm Noah. This is Devin. 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 run right.

I'm looking at this thing. See? Listen to No Such Thing on the. iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call, said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation, and I just wanted to call on and let her know. There's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling, and there is help out there.

The Good Stuff Podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice.

There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart

Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's Honey German and my podcast, Grasias Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters, sharing their real stories of failure and success.

You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vivas you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. But the whole pretending and cold, you know, it takes a toll on you.

Listen to the new season of Grasas Has Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro.

And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths,

and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of family secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We are taking questions from kids today And our last question comes from Adi, who is eight years old. Hi, Daniel and Jorge. My name is Abby. And I am eight years old. My question is, since the universe is expanding faster than the speed of life, can it go back in time? Thank you. Whoa, this question just blew my mind.

Can the universe itself be traveling back in time? That's crazy. But first of all, I have a question for you, Daniel. Why do kids always identify their age? Like, at what point do we as adults stop saying how old we are? I think the point where we stop remembering how old we are. I introduce myself and I'm like, oh, I'm 44. My kids are like, no, you're 46, dude.

Yeah, yeah. But it's great to know. Thank you, Adi. This is a great question. I think Adi is putting a couple of ideas here together, right? Like we know and we've talked about the idea that the universe is expanding and it's expanding at its edges. or at least as far as the furthest from us as you can,

faster than the speed of light. And we've also talked about how nothing can move faster than the speed of light, but if it does it would mean it would sort of go back in time or break the rules of time. Yeah, these are two really fun ideas. I love hearing kids put these ideas together. And your first, you're like, no, that's crazy.

And then, hold on a second. That's a good point. Maybe he's right. Maybe the universe is going back in time. It's not just kids. I'm like, yeah, yeah, what's the answer here? Is the edge of the universe going back in time? It's a great question.

And, you know, he's right that the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, but there's some important subtleties there, right? Like, what is happening? It's not that things are flying out through the universe and that they are traveling relative to each other faster than the speed of light. You know, like no object is looking at another object and saying, oh, your velocity is greater than the speed of light. However, that doesn't mean that distances can't increase faster than the speed of light.

right? It all depends on sort of who's asking the question. It's like nobody's moving faster than the speed of light, but things are, the space itself is growing faster than the speed of light overall. That's right. Because new space is being created. Between galaxies, new space is being created and there's no limit to how fast space can be created. And you might ask like, well, hold on a second, who's creating new space and how does it work? And surely there's somebody in charge of it and there's limits, right? We don't know the answer to any of those questions.

We just see that space is expanding. This is what we call dark energy. And so we know that something out there is capable of expanding the universe itself of stretching space or of making new space. And that's happening everywhere isotropically. The whole universe is expanding. But it only happens a little bit over a short distance. So between me and you, for example, wherever you are in the earth, space is expanding a very, very tiny bit every year. But, you know, the Earth holds us together.

Between us and the sun, space is expanding a little bit more every year, but the sun holds us together. But between us and other galaxies, there's a lot of space there. So all the new little bits of space add up and it becomes pretty significant. And across the whole universe is huge amounts of space. So you add up all of those expansions and you actually do get speeds that exceed the speed of light. It's kind of like maybe for Audi here, it's almost like you can't run faster than the speed of light in your house. but your house is sort of growing a little bit. So you stand on one end of the house

and you look at the other end of the house on the other side, you would see it sort of growing faster than light could move. That's exactly right. And so we can measure the distances to things. We see that those velocities do seem to add up to be greater than the speed of light. But you know, if you looked at any one thing

and you asked how fast is this one thing moving relative to me, you would never measure a velocity greater than the speed of light. Because remember, you can't measure velocity relative to space. Space doesn't have like a reference frame. There's no absolute frame there. You can only measure velocities relative to an object. All right. So then the universe is expanding faster than light can travel,

but nothing's actually moving faster than light. And so the other idea they put together is this idea that going faster than light somehow breaks time or makes it go backwards in time. Yeah, that's a really fun conclusion. And it's sort of meant to tell you that you can't go faster than the speed of light. You know, we have these ideas of how the universe works, of how information can propagate and how there's a maximum speed of information that no information can move faster than the speed of light. No object and no information, no particle, no wave can ripple faster than the speed of light.

And what happens if you ask like, well, what happens if an object does move faster than the speed of light? Well, then you get a paradox, you get contradictions. You get things like, well, if it could move fast in the speed of light, that would be equivalent to it moving backwards in time, which we know to be impossible. And so it's sort of just like another way of saying that you can't move fast in the speed of light. Sometimes people interpret it as saying like, oh, if you want to go backwards in time, all you got to do is go fast in the speed of light. But it's sort of like saying, no, that's impossible. Right. Like Superman and Superman

the movie. But I guess maybe I'm wondering if it's maybe a little bit of a circular argument. Like you're sort of assuming you can go it faster than the speed of light and then you say, but if you can, then it would break the rules. It's almost like you make an assumption and then you say if you break the assumption, then it doesn't work. Yeah, absolutely. And you're right. And we don't understand this limit at all. You know, we observe this limit. We say the speed of light is constant. It doesn't depend on who is sending the message or their velocity. It's always the same speed. And if you start from that, then you get to consequences like you can't move faster than the speed of light and all sorts

of things about how time varies. All of special relativity is based on that one observation. We don't know why that thing is true, but everything flows from that thing that the speed of light is constant for all observers. And so that's what limits you to going faster than the speed of light. And so you're right. If we observe the scenario in which that wasn't true anymore, then maybe it would, you know, change all these other rules. Or maybe that's wrong and we just don't understand.

So if you see somebody going fast in the speed of light or going backwards in time, that suggests that the speed of light is not constant for all observers. Interesting. It's like from what we can see about the universe, we came up with this speed limit of the universe and then breaking that speed limit. and suddenly breaks everything we know about time and everything else. But it is, I guess, technically possible that you could. We'd like go faster than light.

It's technically possible in the sense that, you know, we've never observed it. And everything we have observed suggests that it is impossible. But, you know, that's just physics. These are theories. We make an observation here. We infer about the universe from it. We draw conclusions. If those conclusions are wrong, then either our inference was wrong or the observations we made were

wrong. And, hey, that would be awesome because that would be, you know, a childlike dream to overthrow something so basic as like the fact that the speed of light is the same as measured by everybody. But you know, it's some experiments we've been doing for more than 100 years and we've seen it very concretely and very stably for a long time. So we're pretty confident in this observation that the speed of light is always the same no matter who measures it. And the implication of that that means you can't go fast in the speed of light is also pretty solid. So I think it's pretty airtight, but hey, we haven't made mistakes before. Right. And so where does this idea

that going faster than the speed of light would make time go backwards somehow? Well, it comes from the idea that time is sort of fungible, that like the order of events that happen depends on your speed. Like if you're watching two things happen, like Alice eats a pie and then Bob eats a pie and you're sitting there with them and you're watching, maybe you think Alice finishes first. But if I'm going at really high speed, I can find some scenario in which I see the order of events happening differently. So like Alice finishing before Bob is not like a universal truth.

It depends on who's asking and how fast they're going. And so this idea that, you know, you can change the order of events depends on your velocity, tells you that you can sort of play with time and that velocity and time are connected. But it's not necessarily the case that if you are going faster than the speed flight, let's say it was possible that somehow time would flow backwards or like your clocks would would suddenly start going the other way or you know you would travel to a different time and that's sort of so far kind of not really establishing the math well what the math suggests is that

if you go faster than the speed of light then you can invert the order of things that you otherwise shouldn't be able to like you can switch who wins the pie eating contest alice or bob by going faster or slower going in some direction because those things aren't like causally connected doesn't really matter which one happens first but if you go fast in the speed of light then you might see weird things like Alice arrives in the piting contest before she leaves her house. You can switch the order of things so they're like reversed in time. So in that sense, you're sort of like going backwards. You would maybe experience things backwards is what you're saying, which is sort of like

the whole universe is going backwards and it's sort of like you're going back in time is what you're saying. And we have a whole interesting episode about this theoretical particle called a tachyon, which in principle moves fast in the speed of light. but you know if it exists it would break all sorts of special relativity but it has really weird properties like you see it as if it's leaving even if it's arriving because the later light arrives first because it's moving faster than light I see so if this particle is real it'd be very tacky right it would be breaking everything in the universe and that's just not cool that's right

you'd invite it to your birthday party and it would look like it's leaving your birthday party you're like hey man yeah hey man all right well it's a great question from Adi is the universe expanding faster than light, can it go back in time? And the answer is kind of yes and no. Like, yes, the universe is expanding faster than light. But for you to sort of break the laws of time, you kind of have to travel faster than light, which is not what the universe is doing. The universe is expanding faster than light, but it's not traveling faster than light. That's right. Nothing is moving faster than light relative to any other thing. And so that doesn't break the laws of special relativity. Well, things are growing in

distance from one edge of the universe to the other edge faster than light, but nothing's actually, you could say, is traveling through that space faster than light. Yeah, that's right. All right. Well, those were three awesome questions from kids. Thank you, kids, for sending in your questions. And thank you parents for encouraging your kids to think about the universe and ask deep questions because it's those kids that we hope are going to one day figure out the answers to these questions. They're not so entrenched in today's ideas about how the universe work. And they might have crazy new ideas about how to use lightsabers to cut open black holes

and solve the mysteries of quantum gravity. I don't think we need to thank the parents, Daniel. Everyone knows it's a thankless job. You don't really get credit. But thank you to all of our listeners, young and old, for having questions about the universe, being curious, for wondering about this amazing and mysterious cosmos that we live in.

And if you have questions, please feel free to send them to us. We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Thanks for listening and remember that 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. Why are TSA rules so confusing?

You got a hood of you. I'm take it off. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called No Such Thing, where we get to the bottom of questions like that. Why are you screaming? I can't expect what to do. Now, if the rule was the same, go off on me. I deserve it. You know, lock him up. Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

No such thing. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone, and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. One Tribe, save my life twice. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your life. podcast. From tips for healthy living to the latest medical breakthroughs, WebMD's Health

Discovered podcast keeps you up to date on today's most important health issues. Through in-depth conversations with experts from across the health care community, WebMD reveals how today's health news will impact your life tomorrow. It's not that people don't know that exercise is healthy, it's just that people don't know why it's healthy, and we're struggling to try to help people help themselves and each other. Listen to WebMD Health Discovered on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast.