Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Listener Questions 40: Ways our Universe could end us

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

Daniel and Jorge answer questions from listeners about the dangers of our Universe and whether engineers could save us. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you. I take it all. I'm Mani. 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 it? 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. I'm Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford, host of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast. I know how overwhelming it can feel if flying makes you anxious. In session 418 of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, Dr. Angela Nealbarnett and I discuss flightings.

What is not a norm is to 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. it makes me feel small and insignificant, which I guess is less safe. Me too. The forces out there are just so crazy and powerful. It's like it would take nothing to squish us and wipe us out of existence. But I hear there's a silver lining. Oh yeah? What's that? You know, as science progresses, maybe we figure out ways to protect ourselves. Hmm, that sounds like a job for the engineers, not the scientists.

Yeah, that's right. The scientists learn how we might die and engineers save us. I'm totally happy with that division of labor. Are you saying that engineers are superheroes? That's no problem for me. I mean, I hate wearing spandex. Awesome. I have my cape rating. Hi, I'm Jorge.

I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Dan. Daniel, I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and science is my superpower. But wait, you're not a superhero. You're a supervillain almost, kind of, like you're trying to figure out how everyone might die. Yeah, but I'm not shooting laser beams out of my eyeballs and actually killing people. There's a distinction there. But are you plotting?

Are you plotting how to do it, though? I mean, if someone offered to make my eyeballs in the laser beams, I would seriously consider it, I guess. Yeah, I wouldn't make cooking easier, right? starting a fire when you're camping also easier doing the dishes you know frying that crusty stuff off the bottom of pans no need to soak it anymore that's right super villains have it easy but i do think it's incredible that we have this power do understand the universe and unravel its true nature even if that does sometimes reveal great danger although we always say that everyone is a physicist which technically means everybody has that superpower which maybe makes it not a superpower just makes

it a skill. Is that like Superman on his planet Krypton is not really super at all, even if it's a planet of Superman? Oh, man, Daniel, we've had this conversation. Everyone in Superman's planet doesn't have powers because of the sun. Oh, that's right. That's right. But if all of them came to Earth, would they all then be superheroes? Is there a limit to the number of superheroes you could have? They would be super compared to us. Technically, yes, they would be super. This is all very philosophical conversation. What is super? Well, then we're all superheroes compared to to like cats and dogs. I can't do any science.

Yes, I imagine so, yeah. To your dog, you probably are a superhero. I mean, you give it food, magic food that just appears every day, twice a day. And I don't even have to wear a cape. And you also pick up their poop. I mean, that's like, that's like the best kind of superhero. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of I-Hard Radio.

In which we dig into the deepest questions of the nature of the universe, such as who is picking up Daniel's dog's poop and what's inside a black hole and can we use one question to solve the other one. That's right. Although I'm guessing that the answer to the first question who picks up Daniel's dog's poop is Daniel? I mean, it is your dog. It is my dog and I'm very conscientious about it. But yeah, it is an amazing universe full of interesting and crazy phenomena and mysteries and things for us to discover and figure out with our puny little human brains. And many times when we explore the universe, we discover fascinating facts about the way that it works. Sometimes we can even put those facts to work to improve our lives. Maybe one day someone

will invent a black hole-powered dog poop picker-upper. But sometimes we discover that the universe is crazy and powerful and dangerous, that our lives are a little bit more precarious and fragile than we ever imagined. Yeah, I guess if you think about it, we're just tiny little squishy beings living in a little thin layer of air on a giant rock curling through space barely not falling into a giant ball of fire called the sun. Living right on the edge

between being burned up and being frozen to death. We are riding that knife edge into infinity. Yeah, it sort of makes you appreciate how precious life is, right? Or the fact that we're here to talk about the universe. And how amazing that it's gone on for so long that the earth has been habitable for

billions of years, even under vastly changing conditions that over all that time it's been possible for these little squishy things to make more squishy things yeah and I guess it also makes you think about how precarious our existences and what are all the things out there in the universe that could maybe end our existence and even if there are crazy dangerous things out there in the universe I still want to know what they are not just because I have a deep curiosity for understanding the nature of the universe but because I'm hopeful that if we can characterize what's going on out there in the universe Eventually, the engineers will save us.

Yeah, I guess that's the only way you might save ourselves is if you know what's coming for you, right? Then you maybe we'll be able to do something about it. Exactly. That is why we track all the asteroids in the solar system and try to keep a handle on where the comets are so that we can see one coming with enough time to maybe divert it. That is why we try to understand the nature of space and time so that if a black hole does approach our solar system, we'll have some ideas for how maybe to handle it. Yeah. And it all starts with questions. And it's not just scientists who have questions. It's everybody. Everybody has questions about what's out there, what might affect them, what might change the way you live out there in the universe. Everybody has questions. That's right. And we love hearing your questions. If you have thoughts and questions about the nature of the universe and its future and how we might live in crazy future times or strange corners of the universe, please don't hesitate to write to us. We answer all of our questions. Just email us at question.

at Danielanhorpe.com. So today on the podcast, we'll be tackling. Listener questions. Number 40, Ways the Universe Could Kill You, Edition. I just happened to notice when I was putting these together that all today's questions have something to do with very powerful forces

that could extinguish humanity. Isn't that every physics question ever? I mean. Is there physics questions about something that would not totally annihilate humanity? Sometimes it's just about everyday objects. Remember, we had people asking about, like, why does my truck look blue? And how does the sun bleach my clothing and stuff like that? Though I suppose there are cancer risks there.

Yes, radiation and chemicals. I mean, maybe the more you know, the more afraid it makes you. I think it's something like a Rorschach test, you know, the way you look at the universe, do you see it as dangerous and crazy? or do you see it as fragile, but still wonderful and lovingly supportive of our existence? I see. Like, is the universe half dangerous or half safe? Like, if you have a 50% chance of surviving.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Yeah, is the universe half trying to kill you or half trying to save you or both? I guess it depends on, like, what it's like for dogs and cats and if it's better, worse than us. I think my dog, at least, has a pretty good life. But it is a pretty interesting topic, I guess. People are curious about what's out there and how it might, you know, you know, change our existence and what can suddenly happen to change our existence. That's right. And so we're very excited to answer today's questions, all about the nature of

space and time and the whole universe and storms and dramatic supernova. Yeah, we have three awesome questions here. And so let's jump right in with the first question from Steve. Hello, Daniel and my name is Steve and I have a question about dark energy. You've mentioned on your podcast previously that since we don't really understand what drives dark energy, it may be possible that the current rate of expansion could at some point in the future slow down and maybe even reverse, so that space starts contracting rather than expanding.

If this scenario did happen, my question is, how would we first detect this? Interesting question. I think Steve is saying that we know that right now the universe is expanding, and it's expanding faster and faster every day, but could that change? Could somehow the universe start?

Stop expanding faster and faster and maybe even start shrinking, in which case, when and how would we even notice that? That's right. Could it be happening right now? And how could we tell Steve wants to know whether he should sell his Bitcoin or not? Or real estate, right? Should we buy more planets because the universe is shrinking and real estate is going to be at a premium in the future or not? The universe is just going to keep growing. It's going to be worth less and less. Well, this is a really pretty dark question because I don't think there's anything the engineers could do to save you. I mean, if the universe decides it's going to turn around and crunch back to a super dense state, it's pretty hard to imagine anybody surviving that. It is a dark question also because it involves dark energy. It does involve dark energy and one of our favorite topics, the expansion of the universe and our almost total lack of understanding for how it works, which makes it pretty hard to predict what's going to happen.

in the future. All right. Well, let's dig into the answer to this question. Daniel, I guess, first of all, how do we measure that the universe is expanding? Right. So Steve makes a good point, which is that we're measuring the current rate of expansion and then we're extrapolating into the future. And we're wondering about whether that's going to change and wondering about how we're going

to know that. So yeah, let's think about how we actually measure the expansion of the universe. And so what we mean when we say the expansion of the universe is we mean the increasing distances between galaxies. So we look at our galaxy and we look at other galaxies and the best way to measure it in principle would be to pick a galaxy, measure our distance from it and our speed relative to it, and then come back a billion years later and say, okay, where's that galaxy now and how fast is it going? We can't do that because it would take a billion years. And so instead we do something different, which is that we look further back in time for other galaxies. And we say, well, galaxies at a certain distance, which is a certain distance back in time.

because of the propagation of light are moving away from us at some velocity. And galaxies that are further away, which is further back in time, back in the history of the universe, how fast are they going? So we can sort of read back the expansion of the universe, the velocity of galaxies relative to us versus distance,

which is also reading it versus time. Right, but I guess the basics of it is that we're measuring how fast galaxies are moving away from us. They'll look like they're moving away from us, and we attribute that to the expansion of the universe, And then you want to check whether like that, that speed that the galaxies are moving away from us, whether it's faster now than it used to be or whether it's slower than it used to be, right? Exactly. And to draw those conclusions, you need two pieces of information per galaxy.

One is you have to know how far away is it. So you basically know how far back in time are we looking. And you have to measure its velocity. How fast is it going relative to us? You know, something to understand also is that when you look out into the sky, everything is moving away from us. Except for Andromeda, which is gravitationally dominated and moving towards us, the overall picture is that everything is moving away from us. And this is something that Hubble first noticed like a hundred years ago, that if you look out into the sky, everything is essentially red shifted because the light that comes from these objects,

its frequency is shifted towards the red side of the spectrum. And that's how we measure the velocity of these things. We look at the light from a distant galaxy. We see how much it shifted from the light. It should be sending us. and we use that shift to measure its relative velocity. Right, because if it's moving away from us, the light it sends us gets a little bit stretched out into the red spectrum, right? And if something is moving towards us, the light gets a little bit compressed as it moves towards us into the blue spectrum, right?

So the red or the light looks, the faster it's moving away from us. Exactly. And there's two different ways to think about that. One is that these galaxies have velocity relative to us and things that are in motion relative to us. and things that are in motion relative to us, their light will be shifted. This is called the Doppler shift. The same way that like a police siren sounds different as it passes you

because when it approaches you, its sound waves are blue shifted to higher frequency and when it passes you, its sound waves are red shifted to lower frequency. You can do the same sort of thinking about the light from these galaxies. That's not 100% really the right way to think about it because these galaxies are so far away

and it gives you velocity greater than the speed of light. The way cosmologists think about it instead is that space is expanding between us and those galaxies. And so instead, what's happening to the light is that it's getting stretched out by space expanding. So the wavelengths get longer as the light travels through space. And so that's why we'd see it redshifted. So it's two different ways to think about it that end up giving you exactly the same prediction. Either you're measuring the expansion of space or you're measuring the velocity of those galaxies relative to us. it's the stretching of space itself that is changing the color of the light

yeah that's the way cosmologists think about it because they think about each galaxy is having like its own little inertial frame you could think about physics happening in those galaxies and in between them space is expanding and that's why the light gets red shifted and that avoids anything being like faster than the speed of light because you can't really compare velocities in one frame to velocities in another frame in general relativity it gets really Harry. All right. So then you said that we can look back in history, in the history of the universe, by looking at galaxies that are further and further away from us. And what we'd notice is that galaxies that are really old move at a different rate away from us than galaxies that are younger.

Yeah, exactly. We can look at the velocity versus time. And from that, we can see how the velocity is changing versus time. And so basically we're seeing whether the universe's expansion is accelerating, speeding up, or whether it's decelerating, whether it's slowing down. So we can see like the history of the expansion velocity of the universe by looking further and further back in time. Nearby galaxies are very recent. They tell us about the expansion rate now, very, very far away galaxies. The light from them we get is very old, it's very out of date.

But it's sort of like looking at the fossil record. It's seeing what was happening in the universe a long time ago. So we can see the acceleration or deceleration history. of the universe. Now, do Fasos also turn red, the older they get? Is that why, like, when you go to a museum, all the boats are brown? Or am I totally misinforming our public here? You've got to get a paleontologist on here to answer that question.

I'm not qualified. We need a paleophysicist. Paleo physicist, wow. A phrase I don't think I've ever heard before. And who is picking up dinosaur poops, really? Nobody was cleaning up after that at all. Yeah, maybe it was dinosaur physicist. Dinophysicists.

Paleo physicists should have been picking up those paleo poops. But one thing I think is super fascinating and not really widely enough appreciated is that the universe has not always been accelerating. Like the universe has always been expanding, but it hasn't always been accelerating. Right. There's been like periods when the universe was getting bigger at a bigger rate or a slower rate, right? Exactly.

The sort of brief version of it is that you have this very, very super rapid inflation in the very early universe that we don't understand at all. But it gives you this huge universe with hot, dense plasma. That's what we call the Big Bang, right? Sort of, or like right after the Big Bang? So there's a bit of a disconnect in the terminology here. What most people think of as the Big Bang is that inflation, the really rapid expansion, very early on.

What scientists call the Big Bang is actually what happened after that. Once you start from a very hot, dense place and then you evolve that forwards in time, that's what we mean when we say the Big Bang. We don't know how we got that original, very hot, and dense state. Maybe it was inflation. Maybe it was something else we really just don't know. Big Bang starts from sort of the Plank era when the universe already existed and was super hot and dense and we evolve it forward in time. That's sort of what we mean by the Big Bang. It's sort of different from the popular conception of the Big Bang. Okay. But you're saying there was an initial period where the universe was expanding super fast? Yeah. So we think probably inflation is this very rapid expansion from quantum primordial soup to some very hot dense state. Then general relativity takes over and gravity and things. cool and expand and we end up with the universe we have today. Between that very hot and dense state and where we are today, the universe has expanded a lot, but it wasn't always accelerating.

It was always expanding, but for the first seven or eight billion years or so, that expansion was slowing down. But there was enough matter and energy in the universe to start pulling stuff back together. Gravity was working hard to pull stuff back together because of all that mass has gravity yanking on it. But around eight billion years after the universe started, something changed. Dark energy took over. This expansion of the universe flipped from being decelerating to being accelerating. The expansion used to be sort of slowing down, but then it turned over and it started accelerating. So the last six or so billion years of the universe, we've had an accelerating expansion of the universe. It's been going faster and faster. It's like the universe

hit the accelerator button or pedal. Yeah, and it all comes down to the nature of dark energy. Like as the universe expands, matter gets more dilute. It gets more thinned out, right? You have the same amount of matter, and you have more space, and so things get more dilute. But dark energy, we don't think is like that. Dark energy is a constant in space. And so as the universe expands, you get more space, you get more dark energy. So dark energy increases in its fraction of the universe because everything else is getting

more and more dilute. And so eventually it takes over because as the universe expands, it starts to win. and it drives the expansion. And so eventually it just takes over and it zooms so far ahead that nobody can catch up to it. But if you look back of the history of the universe and you look at these diagrams and the expansion,

you'll notice that there was a time when the universe was decelerating a little bit and before it started to zoom off. Interesting. Yeah, we've often talked about how dark energy, the acceleration of the universe changed. But I think what I'm getting is that nothing really changed, like dark energy didn't suddenly turn on

or some fundamental parameter of the universe. universe suddenly flipped. It's more like the density of the universe got so sparse at some point that dark energy just became more significant because dark energy, its power, is sort of proportional to how much space there is. Matter and energy, its power, gravitation is proportional to its density, which drops as space gets bigger. And that doesn't happen for dark energy. So you're right, the rules didn't change. And what we think of as the amount of dark energy in the universe didn't change. It's just that things got so cold and dilute that eventually dark energy sort of wins the tug of war.

But I wonder, like, if the universe had started with more stuff, like more density of stuff, is there a universe in which things are so dense that dark energy always loses and things always compress? Yeah, it's possible to have a closed universe like that, universe where you start with enough stuff that dark energy doesn't win. Absolutely. You can start with different initial conditions and you might end up with different outcome. Absolutely.

All right. Well, so Steve's question is, why did that acceleration of the universe? slows down and even reverses, like the universe starts to get smaller, there's less space every day. Could we detect that? And when would we detect that, right? That's a big question. A super good question and motivated by the fact that everything we've said about dark energy so far is kind of a guess. Like we do not understand what dark energy is. We have no like real theory for it. What we've talked about so far, dark energy is this constant in space and time. That's just really like a hack. We just like put a number into the equations and said,

the number you got to put in to make the equations work. We don't know where that number comes from. We don't know why that number would be constant. We just like use the number because that's the simplest description. And the point is that that could change. And what if in the future it does? And it changes to another value and it changes to a smaller value. It goes away so that gravity then does win and the universe does take over. Or if it changes in such a way that it like works in the opposite direction to compress the universe. Basically, because we don't know what's going on, we can't make any predictions about what's going to happen in the future. And so Steve's question is great.

It's like, how would we observe a change? How would we notice that things deviate from this simple prediction? And it would be hard. The first clues we would have would be for nearby stuff, right? Stuff that's really, really far away. We're not going to get messages from that for a long time. But closer by stuff, nearby galaxies and galaxy clusters, those are the ones that are telling us about the recent history of the universe, about how things are expanding right now,

or at least in the very recent past. So if we watch very carefully the closer stuff, that's where we could see like a change in the slope, like if things are accelerating less or more or if it even started to decelerate. Oh, I think you're saying that like if the universe starts to decelerate, right, expand slower, it's going to happen all throughout the universe at the same time. And so it's going to happen now and it's going to happen to the galaxies

that are really, really far away. So if it all happens at the same time, then the fractal. news we would get of it would be from the nearby stuff. Yeah, and that's also an assumption, right? There could be like weird bubbles. Maybe it doesn't happen everywhere in the universe. But the simplest model is like, let's assume that something changes in the whole parameter of the universe everywhere at once. And so we wouldn't notice it from really far away galaxies very quickly.

We'd notice it from nearby galaxies. As you say, that's the freshest news. And so we'd have to notice a change in the relative velocities of nearby galaxies, that their velocity away from us is decreasing instead of increase. Like if things nearby start to blue shifts instead of redshift, we'd be like, whoa, that's weird. Right. But I guess if you're assuming that it all happens at the same time, wouldn't it already have happened to stuff that's really far away? If it's happening all at the same time, then it happens also to stuff that's really far away. We wouldn't see any evidence of it for a long time.

Like we can't see right now what's happening for stuff really, really far away. We won't see that for a long, long time because it's so far away. So that's good. We would know right away if the universe was slowing down. Yeah, that's true. Although the nearest galaxies are even not that nearby. And the closest galaxies are dominated by gravity, like Andromeda and the Milky Way are actually approaching each other because of their relative gravity. So what you'd have to do is look far enough away that you're looking at stuff where

dark energy is really dominant. That's like between galaxy clusters. So it wouldn't even be that nearby. So now we're talking about like tens or hundreds of millions of light years away, these galaxies, which means if the universe starts to turn around, and compress, we wouldn't know for tens or hundreds of millions of years. Right. But I guess there's some comfort to know that, like, we're looking at galaxies that are,

you know, 13 billion years old. And so far, it doesn't look like the universe is compressing, right? So, like, why would it suddenly change now? Yeah, we have no reason to suspect that it will. We also don't understand what's going on really at all. So you're right. The simplest model is to just extrapolate continued accelerating expansion. So don't worry about this if you're an anxious person.

But the truth is that we don't really have a reason to believe that. And so the universe has surprised us many times in the past. Remember, this whole idea of accelerating expansion was also a surprise. Nobody expected that at all. So there probably are more surprises in store. I think what you're saying is that engineers could say it was in the future. We don't know yet. We should keep finding engineers.

Yes, I totally agree. That's right. Keep us around, please. All right. Well, I think that answers Steve's question. How would we first detect it? Well, we would detect it in the galaxies that are closest to us. If there is sort of a universe-wide shift in how things are expanding, we would know right away from where, if the things around us are expanding faster or if they're starting to creep in a little bit more each day, then we would know. All right, let's get to our other two questions. We have an awesome question about supernovas, or I guess kind of a deadly question about supernovas and about dangerous storms in our solar system. Let's get to those. 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. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot.

He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't. 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 okay Storytime podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Afea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation. and observation of our hair, right?

That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us.

Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Get fired up, y'all. Season 2 of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon,

Megan Rapino, to the show, and we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino. Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athletes? athlete. The final. The final. And the locker room. I really, really, like, you just, you can't

replicate, you can't get back. Showing up to locker room every morning just to shit talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college superstar AZ Fudd. I mean, seriously, y'all, the guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. All right, we are answering listener questions, and I guess these are very worried

listener questions. Our listeners are worried about how the universe might end human existence. Or they're just in awe about the crazy power out there in astronomical and after-physical objects. They're shocked and awe. All right. Our next question comes from Christov, and it's about supernovice. Dear Daniel, I have always wondered what would happen to the Earth if there was a supernova nearby. Thanks. We would all die.

Done. Next question. Oh, let's give them a little bit of hope. Come on. That's right, yes. It depends on which side of the Earth you're in, maybe. Hopefully, it's like nighttime or you're sleeping when it happens. That's only if the supernova is brief enough to only last during somebody else's night.

All right, let's dig into it. I guess the question is, what would happen if a supernova if a star explodes nearby us? Would we have a chance of surviving? Or I guess also how likely is that to happen to us? Yeah. So to understand the amazing, incredible power of a supernova, you have to understand what we're talking about here. what is a supernova? Where does its energy come from? And a supernova is essentially the end point of

really massive stars. They burn their hydrogen to make helium. They burn their helium to make heavier stuff. They burn carbon. They burn oxygen. They burn nitrogen. Eventually, they get really, really heavy. They have accumulated all this really heavy metal in their core. And gravity gets so powerful inside these stars that it can no longer be resisted by the pressure of that fusion. And all that energy flying out has been puffing up the star, keeping it from collapsing. So you get this million or billion year-long struggle between gravity trying to compress the star and fusion resisting it.

But eventually, gravity is going to win that battle and you get this incredible compression of the star, this collapse of the star. We call it a core collapse, which leads to very, very high temperatures inside the star, which triggers this brief moment of super intense fusion, which then explodes the star. So you get this gravitational collapse

followed by this very dramatic explosion, and in that explosion, the supernova gives off so much energy that it can outshine the entire galaxy that it's in, right? A single supernova can be as bright or brighter than like 100 billion stars in the galaxy that it's in. Yeah, it's a big explosion. It's a big explosion. And it's basically like it's sort of like if a building collapses,

but the building is full of dynamite, kind of, right? Like it collapses, and then when it crunches down together, things get exciting and they explode. And then everything flies out. Yeah, it's actually a pretty good model for how hydrogen bombs work. Hydrogen bombs are fusion bombs, but the conditions for fusion are created by a fission bomb, which implodes the fusion fuel. So you get this fission bomb, which blows up and then squeezes the fuel for fusion,

which then triggers the more dramatic fusion bomb. And that's basically what's going on inside a supernova, except the fuel pellet is like the size of a star. And so that's what we call a type two supernova. There's also another kind, which are even brighter, even more dangerous and more deadly to life on Earth, which is a type 1. That's a kind of star that originally wasn't going to go supernova. It burned and accumulated these hot metals at its core, but not enough so that gravity would take over and actually collapse until some other source of fuel comes by, some like red giant in a binary star system with this white dwarf, and the white dwarf steals a little bit more fuel, which gets it heavy enough. for gravity to overcome this threshold and then trigger a collapse. That's a type 1 supernova, and they can be like 10 times as bright as a type 2 supernova.

That's interesting. I guess the question is, why is that? Why is it brighter and more explosive if it's sort of like the same amount of stuff being exploded? So we don't really understand very well exactly what's going on inside supernova. So this is sort of an area of current research. People speculate that like the amount of cobalt inside these things might be enough to trigger more dramatic reactions, it release more energy. But it's really sort of an area of fuzzy understanding so far. You don't even understand exactly when a star will go supernova. So the exact

thing that triggers this collapse is not something that we understand very well yet. So this is something we're still trying to figure out. A lot of this stuff is just descriptive. We're like, we see these kind of things in the universe. And we so we describe these one way and we describe these another way. We don't always understand the mechanisms in the underlying science. I guess maybe a follow question is like, how do we know that they're different? I mean, I imagine we saw some things blow up in the sky and we saw somewhere more bigger and smaller than others. How do we know like, oh, this is a totally different kind of explosion? Yeah, it comes down to categorizing. We are like looking at these things and we're tracing their light curves and then we're looking back through

our records to find the progenitor. Like, what was the thing that led to this? Was it a big red star or was it a white dwarf? And we don't know what's going to go Supernova. So you can't just like watch one and see it happen. You have to go backwards. You see, oh, we saw a supernova. Now let's go back and see what used to be there in the sky. And so if it was a red giant, then you're going to call it a core collapse. If it was a white dwarf and there was a red giant nearby that it was stealing matter from, you're going to call that a type one supernova. And then if it's really particular about every little detail of the explosion, then it's a type A supernova, right? If it's just got to be the biggest supernova in the galaxy, no matter what, then yeah, exactly.

It's a super dupernova. It's a tiger supernova, exactly. All right, well, let's get to Christoph's question, which is what would happen if one of these stars, either a red giant or a white dwarf, if it explodes near us, what would happen to Earth? Like, first of all, what are the chances of that happening? It's very unlikely because supernova, first of all, are very rare. Like, we think that maybe one in every few million stars will go supernova.

Just because massive stars, stars big enough to have this happen, are pretty rare. rare. Most of the stars in the universe are colder and smaller than stars that will go supernova. They're even mostly colder and smaller than our star. So most of these stars are red dwarfs and they will end up making white dwarfs and they will not go supernova. In fact, they're so rare that we haven't even seen a supernova in our galaxy in 400 years. They're that rare. So they're not likely to happen, but I don't think that's why it keeps people up in night. I guess maybe let's think about it like What's the closest star to us and what's the likelihood that it will go supernova? Yeah.

So the closest star to us is Proxima Centauri and it's a pretty low mass star. It's much more typical than our star. It's like 12% of the mass of the sun. So that thing is definitely not going to go supernova. Right. Like a star needs to be a certain size for it to go to even think about going supernova and like our sun and Proxima Centauri are not, don't qualify for supernova status. To really even have any chance to go supernova, you need to have like eight to

10 times the mass of the sun. Remember, the sun is already an unusually massive star. And so 10 times the mass of the sun is even less likely. The more mass of the star, the much less common they are. There are some sort of nearby stars. For example, there's a star named Spica, which is 80 parsecs away. That's like 250 light years. And this mass is a little uncertain, but in order of magnitude about 10 times the mass of the sun. And so that's a candidate, you know, but it's a candidate. But it's 250 light years away. Right. There's some sort of a list out there, right? Of the stars

that we can see that are closest to us, which of these stars are big enough to maybe go supernova? There's like a list out there, right? There is a list, exactly. And so Spika is one of them. Another one is Beatlejuice, right? Beetlejuice is like 600 light years away, but is a pretty massive

star. It's like maybe up to 20 times the mass of the sun. And so these things are candidates. And again, because we don't know exactly what triggers the supernova. Like what are the conditions to make this happen? We can't look at Beetlejuice and be like, oh, this one is 10 years to supernova or this one is 10 million years to supernova. But all of these things are pretty far away. So you don't have to be too worried about it. Right. They're far away, but it maybe depends on the size of the explosion. Like if something is

super duper massive, could that explosion affect us? Or is the distance going to keep us safe? So really the danger zone is something like 25 light years. Anything like 25 light years a or closer is going to do some significant damage to the earth. Anything further away than 25 or 50 light years is so far away that things are not going to be so dramatic. Remember that all the radiation that comes out of a supernova and all the particles and all the energy drops very quickly as the distance gets larger because there's this one over distance squared rule in physics.

So if you are 10 times further away, then the amount of radiation is one over a hundred. And if you're a thousand times further away, then the radiation drops. by a million. So every time the distance doubles, the danger drops by a factor of four. All right. So that means we're safe, right? Like the nearest star to us that could even go supernova is 250 light years away. So we're good, right? Maybe. I mean, there's this other star called IK. Pagasy. It's about 150 light years away. And it's actually kind of small, but they think it's a candidate to be a type 1a supernova because they think it's probably going to end up as a white dwarf and there is a red super giant nearby that it could draw on so it's like a candidate to be a

type 1a supernova and those are the most dangerous ones right those are the 10 times as bright ones yeah that's what i meant earlier it sort of depends on how big the explosion so is a type 1a explosion 150 light years away from us safe or would that totally burn us to a crisp well let's do the math at 150 light years away it's like six times as far away as the danger zone we said of like 25 light years And so to be as dangerous at 150 light years away as another supernova is at 25 light years away, since it's six times as far, it would have to be like 36 times as powerful. So if it's only 10 times as powerful, then we'll be all right. Okay. So that's good news then. That is good news, exactly.

We're safe. We're safe. But, you know, a lot of this depends on the uncertain physics of supernova. We just don't really know which stars are going to go supernova or not. So we could always be surprised. You mean like if we're totally wrong about this limit for star, like if we're wrong like and our star could suddenly go supernova? Is that even a possibility?

I think that's what you're saying, right? Like what if we're wrong? What if like any star can go supernova? Or are we pretty sure it's not going to go supernova? We're pretty sure our star is not going to go supernova. I'm just saying don't take financial advice based on the uncertain physics of supernovas. Don't take financial advice from physicists in any circumstance. That's right.

Nova or not. Exactly. That's why we had the whole crash in 2008. Too many physicists working on Wall Street. Because they were too distracted looking at stars and not paying attention to the economy. Because they were building silly numerical models that didn't make any sense. Because clearly they don't care about money if they went into a career in physics. But if there was a supernova nearby, it is interesting to think about exactly what the danger is. In one sense, we're fortunate because most of the energy of a supernovae's actually put out in the form of neutrinos, like 99% of the crazy energy of a supernova comes out in the form of neutrinos, which the universe is mostly transparent to.

So it's not actually dangerous. A huge flux of neutrinos could pass right through you. You wouldn't even notice. It's happening right now. The sun puts out lots of neutrinos. You don't even notice. So it's like that 1% of the energy of the supernova, which comes out as like very high energy photons, gamma rays, that could potentially damage us.

So it would be bad news. It would be bad news. Like if it's high enough intensity that actually makes it down to the surface, like gets through the ozone layer in our atmosphere, which is mostly opaque to these very high energy photons, then they would just directly fry you, right? And it would fry the Earth. And these supernovas, they are very short-lived, but, you know, we're talking about like days, weeks, months. So even if you're on the other side of the Earth, eventually the Earth is going to rotate and you're going to be exposed. So unless the supernova is super short-lived, it's going to fry both sides. the earth. That's pretty unlikely. It would have to be super close to like literally actually

fry the earth to a crisp. More realistic is if the supernova is close enough to bathe us in high energy radiation, but the atmosphere absorbs that. Even that would be pretty dangerous because it would basically deplete our ozone layer. It would fry all the oxygen and nitrogen the atmosphere into other oxides and basically strip us up protection, exposing us to UV radiation from the sun, which would basically kill all the plankton in the oceans, which would undermine the ecosystem and things would be bad. Things would be bad. Things would be bad.

Well, I think that answer is Chris's question directly. Like, he asked, what would happen if there's a supernova nearby? And the answer is bad things would happen. We would get fried or ozone would get fried. It would be not good. But the bigger answer is that it's not likely to happen. Like, as far as we know, there are no stars near us enough that might go supernova to really harm us. That's right.

So for the near future, we're pretty safe. Remember that the stars were nearby change as the galaxy is rotating and we move up and down through the galactic disk. And so this is sort of like an answer for right now or the next few thousand years. You want to project forward to like hundreds of millions of years, then things might change and other stars might get closer to us that are more dangerous. They estimate when they look back that maybe 20 supernovas have happened within a thousand light years of Earth in the last 10 million years. But remember, a thousand light years is pretty far away. That's well out of the danger zone. But don't we sort of know, like, all the stars are neighborhood, like how it's going to change over the next, you know, maybe several hundred million years?

Can we, you know, do that math? We can do that math in some cases, but measuring these stellar velocities can be challenging. We have these awesome new satellites, the Gaia satellite, for example, which is cataloging the exact location of these stars and tracking them. And so we're getting better and better at modeling these things. But it's kind of chaotic, right? Stars pull and tug on each other. you have a very high number of objects. We can't really even solve equations for three objects.

And then we're talking about like hundreds or thousands or millions of objects. So there can be chaotic predictions. You can never really be sure what's going to happen deep into the future. All right. So, Christoph, the answer is bad things might happen, but you don't have to worry about that. But maybe check back again in 100 million years just to double check. Keep making those retirement deposits, though. I think he's good for now.

All right. Well, let's get to our last question of the day. And this one is about storms in our solar system. We'll get into that. 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 6th, 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. 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 to 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. Joy Harden Bradford. And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Othia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal.

Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are. your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel. It's how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us.

Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, Don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show. And we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancée Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino. Take a listen.

What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final. The final. And the locker room. I really, really, like, you just, you can't replicate, you can't get back. Showing up to locker room every morning just to shi-talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college superstar A. Z. Fudd. I mean, seriously, y'all. The guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. All right, we're answering listener questions here today about the ways that the universe could put an end to human existence, perhaps. And so our last question comes from Jane, who is in fifth grade. Hi, I'm Jane. I'm in fifth grade, and we're learning about our solar system,

and I would like to know what is the strongest storm in our solar system. Awesome question from Jane. Thank you, Jane, for asking that question. I wonder if she's asking, so whether she knows to bring an umbrella to school the next day. Or maybe she's planning a trip and she wants to know if she should visit Venus or Mars or Jupiter. Because she wants to see the storm or avoid the storm. She sounds like a very curious person. She does sound like it.

Yeah, exactly. Let's send Jane on our next trip to visit the sun. Give her a lead umbrella just in case. I guess her question is like actual storms, like weather storms that happen not just on Earth. They happen in other planets, right? Other planets have atmospheres with gases and things like that. and clouds and weather. And so her question, I think, is, like, out of all the planets in the solar system,

who has the biggest storm that we've seen? Yeah, because there's this tendency to imagine that things out there in the universe are sort of like they are here on Earth. But as you look around the solar system, you discover, wow, Earth is pretty different, right? We have liquid water on the surface. We have clouds. We have very different kind of situation. And the storms we have here on Earth are actually not very representative of what's going on in the rest of the solar system.

It's actually quite nice and calm here on Earth compared to the stormy solar system we live in. Yeah. So let's do a recap of all the storms in the solar system. Starting with, I guess, the sun, right? The sun has storms. The sun has really big storms, right? It's not just a ball of plasma. It's like throbbing and pulsating.

And there's these tubes of plasma controlled by magnetic fields that we don't even really understand. And occasionally big loops of plasma are ejected from the sun and travel towards the earth. These are called coronal mass ejections. And when they happen, they're very dramatic. Like these loops of plasma can be bigger than the entire Earth. And so some of the biggest storms in the solar system are in the sun itself. I guess maybe let's take a quick step back here. And what do you define as a storm?

Like what counts as a storm and what is just the regular things moving around? Yeah, it's a good question. I guess I would call a storm sort of an unusual high energy, like high speed or high velocity event. Right. Like, that's what we think about on Earth. There's wind every day. There's a storm when the wind is sort of like unusually high or there's unusual amount of rain. Okay. So like when things get exciting in the atmosphere or something. Exactly. Exciting or dangerous, depending on your attitude. And so basically we're thinking about like unusual events, like tales of distributions. And it's even fun to think about like the strongest storms here on Earth. The strongest typhoon on Earth or equivalently hurricane, depending on which ocean you're in. was in 1979. It's called Typhoon Tip. And this lasted for weeks, and it was a thousand miles

wide. It's like big enough to cover like half of the United States, though it was actually in the Pacific. So this is a weather event here on Earth that was a thousand miles wide. And here in Earth, I guess, storms happen because, you know, there's air currents moving around because the air heats up from the sun and moves into the cold sides. And I guess sometimes, In all of this air moving, sometimes you get like these pockets of things where things get intense. That's kind of what a storm is on Earth. Exactly. And they get spinning because of the Coriolis force, which is why these storms spin differently in the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere.

You know, it's a myth that toilets flush differently in Australia than they do in the U.S., for example. But it's not a myth that storms spin differently in the northern and southern hemispheres. How do you know it's a myth, Daniel? Have you flushed every toilet in Australia to make that statement? I have not gone on a toilet flushing tour of Australia that's still on my to-do list, but I've relied on listeners who've written in verified this for us. But it is true that it affects like if you drain a giant waiting pool, it is going to affect how the water swirls, right?

Maybe just like in toilets it's too small. If you have a hurricane-sized toilet, then yes, that will definitely affect you. I'm not exactly sure what the minimum-sized toilet has to be to see this effect. Sounds like an experiment. A physicist should do. I'm going to go ride a great. proposal after we're done here.

All right. So then on Earth, that's the biggest storm in recorded history, a thousand miles wide a couple of decades ago. Lastered for weeks and had winds up to like 600 kilometers per hour, which is pretty dramatic. And then, of course, there are storms on our neighboring planets. Venus has storms. And in general, the weather on Venus is generally pretty terrible. It's like very high air pressure, very strong winds, sulfuric acid rain, lightning storms driven by volcanic eruptions.

And it's super hot in Venus too, right? And it's super hot, exactly. It's the reason that when we talk about colonizing Venus, we think about like creating floating cities above the cloud layers. But there are also some really cool storms on Venus at its poles. Like the pioneer Venus spacecraft in 1979 saw this really incredible hurricane on Venus's North Pole that had two eyes to it. The storms on Earth usually have one core, right?

There's an eye at the center and it's a big swirl. But this one on the north pole of Venus has two eyes. Well, it sounds like somebody flushed two toilets at the same time in the north pole of Venus. And then they went back to Venus in 2006 and the Venus Express saw what looked like a double vortex at the South Pole. And the scientists were like, whoa, maybe these crazy double hurricanes on Venus are stable and permanent. But as they watched, they saw that it sort of shifted and morphed and didn't really survive. Didn't become a viral video of business going, whoa, double storm. But it's interesting because Venus has these like very high wind speeds and the weather changes a lot from the poles to the equator where the winds, for example, very greatly with altitude.

The wind speeds can vary by like a factor of two. Anyway, it's really crazy weather on Venus as well. All right. What's there in the next planet on the list? Mars, does Mars get storms? Mars does get storms. Mars has a very sparse and. Yeah. And so they can look very dramatic, but they're not actually that powerful. Like there are maybe once per decade or so a dust storm that can engulf like the entire planet for a whole month. That's pretty dramatic. And people who saw the movie The Martian will have noticed like, oh, wow, these storms are dangerous and they can knock stuff over. But as you say, Mars does not have a very dense atmosphere. It's like 1% as dense as the Earth's atmosphere. And so like you couldn't really fly a kite on Mars very easily. Or,

The helicopter that they recently landed on Mars was really amazing that he could even fly because the air is so sparse. So even the wind and like the largest dust storm on Mars could not really tip over or rip apart like major mechanical equipment, not the way storms here on Earth do. But isn't it the case that scientists think Mars had an atmosphere in past? So maybe Mars did have bigger storms before. Yeah, Mars probably lost its atmosphere because of solar winds and the lack of magnetic field. and also it's just lower mass, and so it's not as good as holding onto its particles. So in its past, it may have had more dramatic storms. These days, they look dramatic, but they're not actually very intense.

All right, let's get to some of the bigger planets. What about Jupiter? Jupiter has, of course, the famous Great Red Spot. This is a huge storm a few times the size of the Earth, right? So, like, we're talking mind-boggling sizes here. Though, again, it's small compared to Jupiter, which is just much, much bigger than the Earth. The great red spot goes around Jupiter once every six Earth days. And it's like a couple hundred miles deep.

And it's really impressive because it's lasted a long time. Like we've been watching this storm on Jupiter since Galileo, basically, since the 1600s. And so it's hundreds of years old, which makes it incredibly stable. Yeah. And it's shrinking too, right? Like it's been getting smaller. Yeah, it is stable in that it's like lasted a long time. But in the last 40 years or so, we've noticed that it has been getting.

smaller. Now it's like maybe just one and a half times the size of the earth. And you know, not something we understand very well. These chaotic things, turbulence and vortices are very difficult to model and very difficult to understand. But it's still a huge storm. Right. And we don't know why it's red, right? Like we don't know for sure. Yeah, that's right. And we did a whole episode about the Great Red Spots to dig into that if you want to learn more about that crazy storm. All right. How about Saturn? Saturn is super cool because it has really weird storms on the poles. Like Venus does, remember with its double hurricane, except Saturn has this six-sided storm on its poles. It's a hexagon. It's like 30,000 kilometers wide and like

100 kilometers deep. First discovered in 1981 by Voyager. And then when Cassini flew by, took really beautiful pictures of it. And now they think it's probably like a complex set of vortices and different layers of clouds. But it creates this incredible hexagon effect, which looks really weird. It's almost like it's wearing a hat. Yeah, exactly. Or a Yarmulco, right? Yeah, but it's sort of a stable feature of Saturn, we think. On the other hand, Saturn also has unusual features. Like, it has these storms, which crop up like every 20 or 30 years. And sometimes they can encircle the entire planet. So there was one in December of 2010 that was like 10 times the size of the Earth. So like much bigger than even the great red spot and lasted for like

10 months. Whoa. It's a big storm and how fast were the winds moving? The winds in that storm we think move around 100 kilometers per hour. So pretty dramatic stuff. Right. What about Neptune? Well, the strongest winds in the solar system might be on Neptune. So maybe the biggest storm it was that one on Saturn, but the most powerful winds are probably on Neptune. So in Neptune, we saw this great dark spot in 1989, this huge spot on Neptune, which they now think are methane, ice clouds, which are forming crystals, probably about the size of one Earth. This storm had wind speeds of 2,000 kilometers per hour. 2,000 kilometers per hour.

That's super fast. Is that faster than the speed of sound here on Earth? Yeah, the speed of sound here on Earth is about 1,200 kilometers per hour. Whoa. So this was a supersonic storm. That's pretty awesome. Although the speed of sound depends a lot on the density. and the temperature and all sorts of stuff.

So I don't know what the speed of sound is in those methane ice clouds. But yeah, it's faster than the speed of sound in air on Earth. So that's pretty incredible. And it's also the most powerful storm because it's made out of methane, which means it smells like farts. And that's why we're glad it's on Neptune and not on Uranus. Yeah. He who stormed it, smelled it, I guess.

I'm just glad there are no supersonic farts here on Earth. Yeah, or a supersonic storms of farts. That would be even worse. All right. So maybe to answer Jay's question, those would be maybe the candidates we would put up as the strongest storms in our solar system. There's the one at the top of Saturn, which looks like a hexagon, which is 30,000 kilometers wide, which is like 10 times the diameter of Earth or something like that. And then there's the storm we saw Neptune about 30 years ago that had 2,000 kilometers per hour. wins. I don't know if you want to study those or avoid those, but either way, pack some boots

and a raincoat. But I guess the Neptune one is gone now, right? When we looked at it again in 1994 with Hubble, they didn't see it and it has not come back. So maybe the most awesome storm right now is Saturn until we see something else, which can happen because all of these things are happening right now and they can change at any moment. That's right. And these aren't complex effects. Remember, we can't even predict the weather on Earth very well. And so when it comes to the weather on Neptune, we are all left guessing. All right. Well, thank you, Jane, for your question. I guess she's maybe asking because, like, if we go to another planet, we want to avoid these

storms, right? Because they can also end us. Exactly. Or maybe she's just in awe of the incredible conditions out there in the rest of the solar system and grateful that we don't have such crazy storms here. And that we can look at them from a distance. All right. Well, that's all of our questions for today. Thank you to everyone who sent in their questions. And hopefully we answered them a little bit. And I hope we give you confidence that whatever the scientists uncover about the crazy natures of the universe, eventually an engineer will save us.

That's right. That's super engine. They're all superheroes in my book. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next night. Thanks for listening. And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeart Radio. For more podcasts from IHeartRour,

Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Philadelphia, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon.

This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of your take it off. I'm Mani.

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. This is an IHeart podcast. Thank you.