Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Listener Questions 59: Interstellar probes and fractional electrons

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

Daniel and Jorge answer questions about travel to and from other stars and whether scientists have split the electron.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Simone Boyce, host of the Brightside podcast, and on this week's episode, I'm talking to Olympian, World Cup Champion, and podcast host, Ashlyn Harris. My worth is not wrapped up in how many things I've won, because what I came to realize is I valued winning so much that once it was over, I got the blues, and I was like, This is it. For me, it's the pursuit of greatness. It's the journey. It's the people.

It's the failures. It's the heartache. Listen to The Bright Side on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. A quick note to let you know that our preschool science TV show on PBS Kids, called Eleanor Wonders Why, just launched its second season. It's a show about curiosity and exploration and learning to use science to find your own answers to questions.

Jorge and I created the show a few years ago and the second season has just premiered. We're so excited to share this new batch of stories and adventures. Check it out on PBS Kids. Eleanor Wonders Why. Hey, Daniel, what do you think will happen first? that we discover alien life or that alien life discovers us. Ooh, I really hope that they find us first. Why?

Because in that scenario, they're more likely to be smart and curious critters. If we find them first, it might just be that they're like microbial slime somewhere. How do you know they would be smart and curious? What if they're dumb and hungry? Wouldn't we want to find them first and figure that out? If they're dumb and hungry, at least they're smart enough to have found us, right? What if they stumble upon us? In their hunger-fueled stupidity?

Exactly. In which case, then we want to avoid them. We'll just feed them some microbial slime. If they're so dumb, they'll be happy with that. But what if we find them and they're smart and microbial slime? I'll put up with some slime if they're happy to share their knowledge. Yeah, but what if all they have are sticky facts? Stick it to me.

Or slimy data. Hi, I'm Jorge, I'm a cartoonist, and the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm married to a biologist who tells me, quote, microbes run the world. Makes me wonder when aliens come, who they would talk to first, us or the microbes, that vastly outnumber us and outmass us. Wait, your spouse thinks that microbes run the world? I mean, is she talking about politicians? I think she's talking about like the metabolic processes of our ecosystem, you know, moving stuff around, processing stuff, transforming stuff. So are they working for us or are we working for the microbes?

I think that remains to be determined. Maybe the aliens will help us figure it out. But what if the aliens are clean freaks and they don't like microbes? It's hard to imagine even aliens surviving without microbes, you know? How so? Well, of course, we don't know what life might look like on those planets, but at least here on Earth, everything evolved from microbes, and microbes remain an essential part of all of our life processes. We couldn't survive without them. Slime, yes, it is.

We need microbes. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe, a production of IHeart Radio. In which we try to cut through all that mental slime and give you a clear picture for how the universe works, at least as much of it as we understand. We think that everybody out there who's curious and wonders about this incredible, amazing, but kind of bonkers cosmos deserves to have it explained to them. So on this podcast, we did through all of your questions and your curiosity and try to bring you to the latest understanding of our universe. That's right.

We try to give you a gut feeling about the universe and how it works and fill you up with micro doses of knowledge and curiosity as we ponder what the universe is made out of and how we're going to ever. explore all of it. Somehow, amazingly, by taking these tiny little microbytes of knowledge out of the universe, we've built up something of an understanding of how the universe works. But of course, vast, critical, foundational questions remain about the way the universe works, what are space and time, how can we have a quantum understanding of it? How do the universe all begin? And of course, are we alone in it. Yeah, it sometimes seems that there are too many questions for us to ever

answer them all, but asking questions is how science starts and how we start building our knowledge of the universe. And that science is powered by individuals asking questions. There's no monolithic institution out there somewhere turning out science is just a bunch of curious people wondering about the universe and being so passionate about their particular question that they devote their lives to figuring it out, even if that means climbing trees in the rainforests of Costa Rica or spending their lives in labs underground with lasers. It takes dedication. It takes curiosity. It takes perseverance to make progress on these questions. But it's not just professional scientists who power this human curiosity. It's everybody. Everybody who lives in this universe and demands answers about

how it works. And that's because everybody has questions about the universe. We all look around us and we all wonder how it all works and we all learn about what scientists know. And still, we have questions. And we want to hear your questions. When you read something, something in science journalism about a new discovery that was made that doesn't quite make sense to you or when you watch a video that explains thermodynamics to you, but it doesn't quite click in your brain or when you hear us talk about something and you have follow-up questions. Please write to us to Questions at Danielanhorpe.com. We really will answer every question.

And sometimes we answer those questions here on the podcast. That's right. Sometimes the questions are really fun or I think everybody might want to hear the answer. And so we ask folks to record themselves asking it so we can joke. about it and sometimes even answer it here on the pond. Sometimes answer it. Most often not. I don't know how often those answers are actually satisfactory because usually the answer is,

we don't know. It might be this or might be that. I think we do a pretty good job of providing an answer, even if the answer is sometimes just a question. It's entertaining as much as it's educational. So today on the podcast, we'll be tackling. Listener questions. Number 59.

I love how we're still numbering these after all these years. Is there anyone keeping track? Like, what if we skip a number? Would anyone notice? I don't know. Maybe I did. How do you know? Exactly.

That's what I mean. I'm going to start giving these random numbers then. Next time it's going to be listener questions, 6,452,000. We should be like, take. Taylor Swift and put in little codes or secret messages in these numbers. Maybe I have been. I do you know.

Yes. Everybody dig into it. You're the Taita of Science Communication Podcast. No, this is the Da Vinci Code, actually. I'm leaving secrets for future civilizations. Oh, I see. I see. You're not Taylor Swift.

You're Da Vinci. No, I'm the Pope. Yeah. Let's keep going. I don't know where you go from the Pope. So. But yeah, we do like to answer questions here on the podcast, and so today we have three pretty awesome questions,

most of them about space exploration and space probes, but also an interesting question about splitting the electron. And so let's jump right in. Our first question comes from Charles. Hey, Daniel and Jorge. That was a recent listener question about traveling to a different star. And it got me thinking.

Given the state of technology today or in the near future, could we build a probe that could survive long enough to reach another star? A second part of it is when it does reach another star, could it send back meaningful data that we could receive. We do live in a real world, so I think that the answer should be limited to Apollo levels of funding, so about 2.5% of GDP for 10 years. Thanks a lot.

All right, great question. It seems that Charles here wants to know, could we send a probe to another star and would it even survive that long? Yeah, I totally get where this question is coming from. We feel sort of like isolated in our little solar system and we can send probes to explore nearby planets, but we're always wondering like what are those planets look like around other stars and though we have incredible telescopes, the Hubble and James Webb, we still can't visualize those planets and those solar systems.

So the question basically is like, why don't we just send some science instruments to those solar system, snap some photos and send them back. Couldn't that be like revelatory? Couldn't we see incredible things, things we might not even be able to imagine? Right, because I guess so far, we've only been able to see up close six or seven planets, right? Or eight planets? Where are we out in our solar system now?

Eight planets, including Earth. Eight planets, there we go. Including ours, I guess. Those are the only ones we've been able to see up close with probes. And so I guess, Charles's question is, could we send probes? to another solar system to take pictures of other planets, maybe to find one that is habitable or one that has maybe things we haven't seen before on a planet. And Charles is also trying to be reasonable.

He's not like, let's pour all of the resources of humanity into this. Let's limit it to like, you know, two and a half percent of our GDP, which would be an incredible amount of science funding. I would love if we would spend two and a half percent of our GDP on science. Wow. Yeah, that would be amazing. So I guess his question is a two-parter. The first one is, could we send a probe to another star?

How long would that take? Yeah, the challenge here and the reason that this is so difficult and we haven't done it yet is these other stars are sort of like mind-blowingly far away. Like even our solar system is pretty big. You know, like Pluto is very, very far away. It's like 10,000 times further away than the moon. So that's why even sending probes to the outer solar system is an incredible feat. but the nearest star is much, much further away than Pluto.

It's like 10,000 times further away than Pluto. So it's not like the next solar system is like the next town over. It's like we're in a little town and there's another town on the other side of the world. So these solar systems are very, very far away. It's not just like a simple extension of our current technologies that's going to allow us to send probes there. But I guess what is the nearest star to us? The nearest star is Proxima Centauri. It's just under four light years away.

Okay, four light years away. How many kilometers is that? That's 37 quatillion kilometers away. It's 3.7 times 10 to the 13 kilometers. Okay, that's a lot of zeros. But in space, I feel like you can go super duper fast, right? Well, in space, you can go super duper fast if you can get up to high speed, right? The speed of light, of course, is pretty fast.

If you could travel at the speed of light, it would only take four years to get there. But the question is, can you get some piece of... mass, some scientific probe up near the speed of light. If you want this thing to get there and to send us a message back in like less than a hundred years or so, then you need to get this thing up to like 10 or 20 percent of the speed of light. So it takes a few decades to get there. And that turns out to be quite a challenge. Wait, how fast do we need it to go? Something like 10 or 20 percent of the speed of light for it to get there within a few decades. Which is how fast? The speed of light is three times 10 to 8 meters per second.

So 10% of that is three times 10 to the seven meters per second. But in like kilometers per hour? So the speed of light is like a billion kilometers per hour. So we need this thing to go like 100 million kilometers per hour. And that's if we wanted to go there and come back within a few decades. No, that's just if we wanted to reach there in a few decades. And then we're hoping it's going to send us signals. We're not actually going to take samples from that solar system and fly them back.

I think the first thing that would be send probes and then have them shoot the pictures back using messages rather than like actually returning. Oh, I see. So you wanted to go there in a few decades and then it sends a signal back, which comes back in four years. Yeah, exactly. And so the challenges are getting the thing up to that speed, having it survived the journey, and sending us a message back. Whoa. And so I guess it's hard to get up to that speed in space? It is hard to get up to that speed in space depending on the technology you use.

Like if you use the kind of technology we use in like the space shuttle and in most of our rockets, then you run into a really difficult problem, which is you not only need to accelerate your payload, like your science probe. You need to accelerate the fuel that you're using to accelerate it. So you need a lot of fuel to get up to high speed. You're not burning all that fuel initially. It's not like one big boost and then boom, you're going 10% of the speed of light. Which means that a lot of the fuel needs to accelerate the rest of the fuel, which means you need more fuel for that. which means you need more fuel for that.

And then pretty quickly, your ship is almost all fuel. Right. Like to put a rocket or to put even a small satellite into orbit, you need a giant rocket. And those rockets are like mostly filled with fuel. Yeah, exactly. They're mostly filled with fuel. So the practical limit of rocket technology,

like rockets we could actually build and send towards other solar system, it would take tens of thousands of years for those probes to reach those solar systems because we couldn't get them anywhere near 10%. of the speed of light using like solid or liquid fuel rocket technology. Wait, how do you know what's the fastest we could accelerate today? Well, there's not like exactly a fastest speed, but if you think about like simple extensions of the current rockets, you know, doubling, tripling them, this kind of stuff, you don't get anywhere close to 10% of the speed of light.

And so it would take tens of thousands of years. Like maybe for example, the Voyager pros that have now left the solar system, how fast are they going? Yeah, so Voyager is the furthest man-made object currently was launched in 19, 77 and it's only gone a 163 a u like that's the distance between the earth and the sun so it's just out of the edge of the solar system and it's been going for almost 50 years it's traveling at like 3.6 a u per year but that's not really a powered object in the same way like we launched it and we sent it off in a space and it's got a little bit of like nozzle and thruster for control but it's mostly just cruising it's never really designed to go at very high speed well you mentioned sort of an interesting idea Like, what if we gave it a whole bunch of acceleration at the beginning? Like, if we exploded it out of a gun or something? Yeah, so there are other ideas for how to get something to another solar system

other than just like do a dumb rocket. There was a really fun idea in the 50s and 60s called Project Orion, which said, like, let's blow up nuclear weapons behind a spaceship so we can like surf a wave of nuclear weapon explosions. This is called Project Orion. Yeah, I mean, what could go wrong? This is Freeman Dyson's idea And people kind of took this semi-seriously for a while

Until there was a treaty saying no blowing up nuclear weapons in space Which basically killed this whole plan But wait, so that's a political problem That's a political problem, yes And he wrote a paper decades and decades ago Estimating that this ship would take between 200 and 1,000 years To get to Alpha Centauri If it was powered by nuclear explosions

Well, that's a long time. Do you think that's what Charles meant? Do you think that's too long? I think that's too long. I think you want to send this thing and then have it, send you back data. Like in the lifetime of a scientist, you know, you can imagine somebody building this thing as a young scientist, sending it out there, getting the data back before they retire seems like a reasonable strategy. I'm all for multigenerational science projects, but it just seems like too long to wait. Well, for you, because you're not going to see the results.

Yes, exactly. I want the answers, man. Think about your great, great, grand kid scientist and how excited they would be to receive a message from this probe. Yeah, as they're scratching out a living in a cave somewhere when civilization has fallen and that data is beamed back from that other solar system and then just splashes on the ground, totally ignored. I guess that's the other part of it is what can happen in a few hundred years. Exactly.

Like the United States is not even more than 300 years. Exactly. So that's why people have been thinking about faster ways to get stuff to other solar systems. There are other ways to power these rockets like ram jets, which are a technique that scoop up fuel as you go, because, you know, space is not empty. It's filled with protons and protons are hydrogen, and you can use that as propellant. So there are techniques for like scooping up hydrogen and using that along the way. But I think the most realistic is actually maybe the most science fictiony, which is a solar sail pushed along by lasers. And the idea is to escape this rocket trap by not bringing your fuel along at all.

Just have a huge sail and point a laser beam at it. And that'll push the probe along and the probe doesn't have to carry the fuel with it. Well, you'd have to be really accurate though, right? To like shoot this tiny little probe in the middle of space really far away? Yes, you would have to be accurate because these things are tiny targets from like an angular point of view. But in principle, you could also maybe steer these things a little bit. you have like a magnetic fin that you could use, you know, to take advantage of interstellar magnetic fields, et cetera.

So if you do that, how fast can you get a probe going? So they suspect that if you build these things with huge sales, we're talking kilometer-sized sales, and you build a huge beam of lasers like a square kilometer array of lasers that can pump out, like, gigawatt hours of energy, then you could get these things realistically up to 10 or 20 percent of the speed of light, which means they could reach. the neighboring star system in like 20-ish years. Whoa. And would this fit within the budget that Charles laid out? It depends on energy costs mostly. A few gigawatt hours of energy is a pretty big fraction of our

energy output. If we can make energy production more efficient or somehow harness energy from the sun to power these lasers directly or something, that would be more productive. Could you just build like a giant magnifying glass to focus some of the light from the sun? Put it out there in space? Yeah, potentially. It's a funny thing. to try to plan these projects because you never know if you should start building today or wait five years until the technology is improved so that you could actually get your probe going faster. Like which probe would actually arrive first, the one you start building today or the one

you start building in 10 years that might get up to a higher speed. Yeah. Those giant magnifying glasses just keep getting better or better every year. And then, of course, this challenge is in flight, right? While you're flying from here to there, you have to worry about like micrometeure. It's tearing your sail or destroying your space probe or all sorts of stuff. Yeah, it's kind of what Charles asked is the second part of his question is, would the probe even survived that long?

It's hard to say. And one of the current plans I read from the breakthrough Star Shock program is to send a bunch of probes, like not an individual one, but like a whole array of small probes, the idea being you're spreading your risk. But it is tricky because even a tiny particle like a hundredth of a millimeter in size, at very high speed. We're talking, you know, 20% of the speed of light could basically destroy that kind of probe. Even if you put like a shield in front? Yeah, there is possibility to have shields. We talked about on the podcast once that have these whipple shields, like thin layers of graphite

that might make it work. I did read an analysis of how likely these probes are to survive. And the famous Avi Loeb says, quote, we did a thorough analysis, taking all relevant physics into consideration. We didn't see any showstoppers. But, you know, thorough analysis by Avi Loeb, who knows what that means. I'm not sure who Avi Loeb is, but he sounds very sure of himself. Well, remember we talked about him on the podcast before. He's the guy who claimed to have found interstellar material from spherules under the ocean. And then planetary scientists came along, and they were like, yeah, you don't really know what you're talking about.

So why are we quoting him on the podcast? He sounds incredible. So we can dunk on him, of course. But I guess maybe even a bigger question is, even if we could get a probe that far, would it even be able to to talk to us because, you know, sending a signal that far takes a lot of energy. Yeah, it's tricky. And you're fighting the one over R squared. Like, if you just broadcast from Earth, you might think our signals are pretty strong,

but the signals get weaker and weaker. And if you're 10 times further, the signal is 100 times weaker. And if you're a thousand times further, the signal gets a million times weaker. And so broadcast of that strength can't actually be picked up by technology that we have further than like a couple of light years. And so in order to get a signal from another solar system to ours, you don't want to broadcast in every direction. You want as tight a beam as possible.

And so if you have, for example, a laser on board, it in principle could send you a signal which would outshine that star in particular wavelengths that you could pick up. Interesting. All right. So it sounds like the answer for Charles is that, yeah, it is possible for us to send a probe that goes to another planet to the nearest star and sends us back signals.

within the budget we just kind of have to do it right yeah it's an exciting moment because we're like right on the edge of having all these technologies come together where we really could actually do this it would still be very very expensive but mostly i think at this point it's a political and organizational challenge we're in the place we are in lots of scientific fields where we could buy knowledge about the universe we have enough money it's just a question of do we have the will do we want it enough right do we want to buy it or do we want to just leave it in our shopping cart for for a while Wait till the price goes down. Yeah, wait for that sale.

That Cosmo Amazon sale. And the sale on solar sales. But yeah, scientists get on it because, let's face it, Daniel is not getting any younger. And he really wants to, these pigs before he dies. You know, I'm not the only one who's not getting any younger. That's true of literally everybody. You seem to especially to want to see these pictures. I do want to see these pictures.

Absolutely. Yes, Congress, please send us $100 billion. we can spend on this. Or let's freeze Daniel. And when we finally get the pictures back, we'll defrost you. Wake him up. We'll defrost you.

That sounds pretty good. I do have fantasies about freezing myself and waking up every 100 years just to get like updated on physics. That would be pretty cool. Oh, interesting. But just you, not your family. Everybody else has to stay awake so they can do the physics and then I can get updated, right?

That's how this works. Oh, right, right. Yes. I think it sounds like you need to start like a couple of things. cult. Maybe you should start by having a podcast, perhaps. Maybe that was the plan the whole time. Maybe if you read the numbers in our listener question titles, you'll get instructions for how to join, how to join the cult and mix the Kool-Aid. Don't cult leaders usually like solicit donations from their members, though?

We should have gotten on that. Oh, yeah. Maybe that's in the instructions. Or maybe you should have put that in the instructions. Yeah, that's right. It's banking information. All right. Well, thank you, Charles. for that question. Let's get to our next question. This one is kind of also about space probes, but from a different perspective. So let's dig into that. But first, let's take a quick break.

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on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we're answering listeners here today, and our next question comes from Ted. Hi, Daniel and Jorge. Here is my question. I've always been fascinated by the Voyager space probes and their journey through our solar system out into interstellar space. I believe it will be around 40,000 years until Voyager 1 will reach the proximity of another star. I've always wondered, if a another civilization has sent a Voyager-like probe in our direction, and it passed through our solar system, would we, A, even be able to detect the presence of an object that size, and B, if we were able to detect it, would we be able to intercept it and bring it back to Earth so that we could retrieve its gold record or the equivalent audio medium that the alien civilization who sent it had included? Thanks.

All right, pretty cool question. Basically, I feel like that question is, could an alien have probed us? Yeah, this is a fun question. Could an alien have probed us or if alien probes arrive, could we even see them? To me, this is a really dark scenario that like an alien Voyager probe could pass to the solar system and we could not spot it. Oh, my God, what a tragedy. Well, maybe if we assume that you're assuming we want to meet these aliens. I don't need to assume that I want to meet these aliens.

I already know that. Somebody sends us a probe. I want that thing. Oh, my gosh. Wouldn't you want to see it? But I guess the question is, how likely is it that maybe we haven't seen a probe that has come near us or maybe that's the main point? It depends on how close to us it flew.

Well, we're definitely sure we have not yet seen any alien probes. I mean, unless the government has some secret program and is captured an alien probe and is studying it at Area 59 or area 62 or whatever. But let's assume that we have not yet captured any alien probes. I think it's a fun question to explore, like, could we see an alien probe? Like, if 100 aliens shot their probes in our solar system, what fraction of those could we see? Right. And seeing them, meaning like we see them with our naked eye, right?

Or with some sort of radar? Yeah, we have a lot of technology to spot these things. I mean, number one, if they somehow still have power after their 10,000 year journey to our solar system and they're broadcasting, then yeah, we're going to spot them. you know, because any signal like that we will capture. Wait, why would they need to have been space that long? Couldn't they do the same thing we just did in the first question? And maybe the probe is only 20 years old? Yeah, it's possible.

And spacecraft can have like nuclear powered batteries that can last for decades. And so it's certainly possible that, you know, they send a solar sail or they have some even better technology and it gets here and it still has power. But broadcasting takes a lot of energy. And so it seemed unlikely to me. But that's possible. And that would be easy, right? if an alien probe comes and is sending signals in some band that we're monitoring,

yeah, we're going to spot that. I think the harder thing is some, like, dead relic of an ancient civilization that's floating through our solar system. Could we spot that? Well, it's sort of, I feel like it's the same problem. Like, it could also be a probe, but maybe it's sending laser signals back to its home planet that we can't see, right? So it could be silently spying on us, yeah.

Yeah, so I guess the question is, if something that was not naturally occurring like a meteorite was flying around us around the Earth, could we, first of all, spot it and could we tell that it is not an asteroid? One immediate clue would be its trajectory. Like, we monitor a lot of things in the solar system and we measure their orbits, mostly because we're curious about whether they're going to slam into the Earth. You know, NASA has been monitoring asteroids and comets and all sorts of stuff. And most of those orbits are consistent with having gone around the sun a bunch of times.

But sometimes, very rarely, very occasionally, we see something that clearly is coming into the solar system that was not gravitationally bound by the sun. The most famous example is Omuamua, which was a rock that came from another solar system, just like drifted through ours. We spotted that because of its weird trajectory. That's what made it different from all the other rocks in the solar system. Right. Like maybe Omuamua was an alien probe from an alien civilization, right? Yeah. Now you're sounding like Avi Loeb, right?

was his other claim. I'm just saying maybe. I'm not saying after thorough analysis. I can tell what was a alien probe. Yeah, exactly. And that's what makes these things so exciting, right? They're coming from another solar system. Are they just a chunk of ice or rock? Or are they actually a relic from another civilization, et cetera, et cetera? And so we want to study these things. But the exciting thing is that we can usually tell if something is interstellar or if it's part of our solar system. So these things stand out because of their motion. And because we're trying to track things moving in our solar system, we're pretty good at spotting those things. I thought you were going to say that we could tell it's an alien probe because maybe it's not

going in a straight line or maybe not going in a natural sort of gravitational orbit line. Absolutely. That's an important factor as well. Like number one is where do we think it came from? Number two is, is it moving gravitationally? Like if it's moving as if the only forces on it are due to gravity, gravity of the sun and Jupiter, et cetera, then that makes it more likely to do. just be like a rock or a chunk of ice. But if it's thrusting, if it's accelerating, if it's deviating from a gravitational path, then it's almost certainly not natural. Although in the case, again, of Omuamua, that thing was not just moving gravitationally.

There was a little bit of thrust. So now we're pretty sure that was due to ice boiling off the back of it as it left the solar system, which provided a little push. Or I guess, you know, just sort of how we do it with our space probes, we basically only do small corrections every once in a while, right? Like we, when we plan out the navigation of our space pros, we try to make it as natural as possible, right? Because that saves you the most amount of energy.

Exactly. We're very sparing with our use of that fuel because you can't put a lot on board. It makes the thing heavy and you have a long way to go. It's a Voyager, for example, still has a little bit of fuel left, even decades and decades after it took off because mostly its trajectory was determined by gravitational slingshots around solar system objects. So it's possible we may not be able to detect this probe by studying its path. That's right.

Though, if it comes from outside the solar system, I think we would identify it as a non-solar system object, but that depends on whether we can see it. Like we can see stuff in the solar system, but we can't see everything. You know, the sun is bright, but it doesn't light up all of space in the way that you can like see every rock. Rocks have to be like shiny enough and big enough and oriented the right way for the light to bounce off of them and come to Earth. There's a lot of dark rocks in the solar system we've never seen before.

Right. And a lot of tiny rocks that we just can see. They're too small for us to even notice. Yeah, exactly. And most of the stuff we've seen in the solar system is bigger than like the Voyager probe. We can see smaller rocks, but they have to be kind of brighter. So we've seen all the big rocks in the solar system. We're very confident about that. But as the rock size gets smaller and smaller, then the fraction of them we've seen starts to drop pretty quickly. So certainly is possible for an interstellar probe to enter the solar system and if it's dark enough and small enough for us to not notice. Yeah, I mean, oh, Mu, Mu, Mu, was huge and we still can definitively tell, right? We couldn't get a close up picture of it. Oh, Mu, Mu, Mu, was pretty big and we couldn't study definitively.

One reason is that we didn't really identify it until it was already past its point of closest approach, so zipping away from us in the solar system. If we spotted these things sooner and we could identify them before they had their closest approach to Earth, then there's a point. possibility we could like rapidly launch something to intercept it or at least come near it and like snap a bunch of quick photos. But oh muamu was so frustrating because it's basically too late to launch anything to go sample it or take pictures of it. It was already zipping on its way out of the solar system. And ohmumu I feel like we just happen to have seen it. Is it possible we've missed other omuomu us in the near past or will miss them in the near future? It's certainly possible. Omuamu is something we spotted pretty soon after.

we turned on a new set of telescopes, the pan stars telescopes, which are excellent at this. So now that we have those guys operating and we're building more of these things in the future, I think we're just increasing our chances of spotting these things. But there's always a chance that we miss them, right? You have to be looking in the right place at the right time. And we have a tiny number of eyeballs scanning a very large solar system. We should definitely be spending more money on telescopes. Well, here's a question.

What if the aliens design a stealth space probe? Could they do that? Could they design it in a way that maybe doesn't reflect light or reflects it, you know, like maybe it has weird angular mirrors in its surface that would make it super duper hard to spot. Yeah, exactly. You basically just paint the thing black and it's invisible. If it absorbs the radiation instead of reflecting it, then it's going to be very, very hard for us to see it.

What if they paint it infinite black or infinite dark? Then they're going to owe you license fees because that's your shape, man. maybe I sold them to paint Maybe you're an alien And this whole question is just to try to figure out How to sneak by our defenses Yeah, that's my cult Then I'm starting

But I won't hide the code for sending me money Just go to Horheadcham.com And use the Venmo code All right, so it sounds like the answer for TED Is that yeah, it's totally possible Then an alien species has sent a probe to us And taking pictures of us study does, and we could have maybe not noticed at all.

It is possible. I think it's not likely unless they're trying to hide it because we have pretty good telescope scanning the solar system. So I think at least it helps me sleep better at night to think that we have a pretty good chance of spotting an alien Voyager. Well, I guess also, I mean, usually we only have a pretty good view of half of this guy, right? Like what if they're smart enough to come at us from the sun?

Yeah, it would be much more difficult if it comes from behind the sun and then around the sun and then straight at us, you know, like a fighter pilot coming and from the sun. Yeah, exactly. If you're intentionally sneaky, it would not be hard to go unnoticed. But if you're friendly and you're trying to advertise your existence,

then it's not that hard to build something with a good probability of being seen. But technically, I think the answer is it is totally possible. It is totally possible, yes. That we've been probed. Well, I've been probed up the wazoo. Up the intellectual wazoo, yes.

That's right. It's a family-friendly podcast. All right, well, thank you, Ted, for that question. Now let's get to our last question. This one is about splitting the electron. So that's not split hairs about it. Let's get to it. But first, let's take another quick break.

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. 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. 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 podcast. 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 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 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 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 season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA.

Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum,

the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're answering listener questions here today. And our last question comes from Iñaki. Hi, Daniel and Jorge. I was curious about the possibility that in certain special state of matter,

electrons can splinter into a fraction of the hole splitting the electron chart. What will be amazing. Thank you. Very great podcast. All right. Interesting question. It seems to be about this idea that they have in certain fields of physics where you have like fractional electrons, right? Yeah, I think that this question is stimulated by a bunch of news articles that came out that were a little sensationalist about something that was discovered in condensed matter physics that led people to believe that the fundamental electron that we know and love has somehow been split into subelectrons with fractions of an electric charge.

Whoa, that was actually in the news? There was a bunch of popular science news articles describing these studies and giving people that impression. I know because I got like 10 emails from listeners asking about it. What were some of the headlines? Here's one from MIT News that says, quote, electrons become fractions of themselves. Well, that is pretty sensational. And from MIT.

And it says in the article, in very special states of matter, electrons can splinter into fractions of their whole. Whoa, that does sound like you're splitting the electron. So what's really going on here? So first of all, number one, we have not split the electron. Okay. That's not what has happened here. Instead, they've created some new kind of funky material that displays some new weird

properties. And there's like a layer of condensed matter theory interpretation on top of that that says that it's sort of like if you had fractional electrons. I feel like that was a lot of legalese there. in your explanation there. So what was the experiment? What was it that they did? This is the whole field of physics soft matter physics

or condensed matter physics that tries to build new weird kinds of materials in order to force electrons and other particles to do weird quantum stuff. So in this case, they're using graphene which are these regular lattices of carbon. They use it because it has strange electronic properties like the electrons sometimes can only move

basically in two dimensions in between the layers of graphene. So what they do is they make structures of graphene. So they have like five layers of graphene. And you remember to make these layers of graphene is actually quite tricky. You use like scotch tape to pull. Some high-tech stuff. Yeah. To pull like thin layers of graphene off and actually have these super thin like two-dimensional

stuff. And what happens when you build these things is electrons behave in new weird ways. Now this is not changing what the electron is. The electron is not being split. The electron is not new. We're not looking inside the electron. What's happening here is that we're putting a new interpretation on what we're seeing. This is what we call quasi-particles. You know, particles are like ripples in fundamental quantum fields. Quasi-particles are things that obey the same mathematics as particles, but are ripples in things that are not fundamental fields. Like, for example, sound is a ripple in air, right? But air is not like a fundamental field in the universe. It's just a bunch of atoms. But still, you can talk about sound in terms of like phonons, particles of sound moving through the air. So you can use that kind of mathematics to talk about ripples in stuff that are not fundamental quantum fields. So when you make electrons operate in this weird way inside graphene, then what you're

doing is you're making them operate in a way that they create these quasi-particles, some of which have fractional electric charge. But they're not like new fundamental particles we're discovering in the universe is just like a layer of mathematical interpretation on top of the complicated stuff that the electrons are doing underneath. Right. I think we've done a few episodes on this. And the idea is that, you know, sometimes it's sort of like things like bubbles in water, right? Like a bubble in water is not really a particle of something or water. It's just sort of like the absence or a little void of water. And it sort of behaves. It looks like a thing because it's moving through the water and it's bubbling up and you think, oh, there's a little circle that

moves up, but it's not actually a particle or a thing. It's just sort of a void of water molecules that's moving together as if it was a thing. Yeah, exactly. And let's take that example and run with it. Say you try to then measure properties of that void. And you're like, well, what is the mass of it? And you're like, oh, well, compared to the water, there's no mass there. So we could imagine having like negative mass. Could we use negative mass in our mathematics to describe the motion of these things? And that's essentially what's happening here, is that they're adding a layer of mathematics on top of this condensed matter experiment where lots of electrons are swooshing around and obeying weird mathematics of quantum mechanics. And in

that mathematics, they use fractional electric charges. That doesn't mean they've seen any fundamental particles with fractional electric charges. It just means that like when the electrons get together, they do a complicated dance and you can interpret that at a sort of a higher level when you zoom out as if there were these quasi particles with fractional electric charges. Yeah, the way I understand it, it's sort of like you have this layer of graphene, right? And you have these electrons kind of on the surface of that layer. And they're just moving around and like in a two-dimensional table. And sometimes you get these bubbles in that sea of electrons.

And those bubbles then have like a fractional charge of the electrons. Is that sort of a good way to look at it? That's a good way to look at it. They actually probe it using the quantum hull effect, which is a complicated effect that electrons can do when you have an electric current in one direction in a magnetic field in another direction. And so they're observing not just the quantum hall effect, but the fractional quantum hall effect.

That's what this experiment is actually about. But you're right. Essentially, they're looking at the emergent behavior of a bunch of electrons doing weird things. And you know, all these popular science articles that are talking about it, none of them really explain what the quantum hall effect is because it's really complicated and kind of a mess

to understand if you're not deep into condensed matter theory. So I totally understand like why, they didn't dig into the details of it, but I think it's a little misleading to write that they've split the electron into fractional charges because they really haven't done that. Well, I think maybe what they mean then is sort of like they created something that behaves like a particle that has the fractional charge of an electron. Yes, that's right. So then you maybe get into a little bit of philosophy of like, is that actually a thing or not

a thing? How do we even know that electrons are a thing? Yeah, electrons are a thing and they have a certain charge. We don't know that they're a fundamental thing, right? It's totally fine to zoom out and say, look, here's the thing, even if it's made out of other stuff. Like we call the proton a thing. It has a charge, but it's actually made of other charge things inside of it, right? It might also be true of the electron.

And that would be very exciting. If you could take the electron apart into little bits and show that the charge of negative one comes from other little fractional charged bits, that would be very cool. That would fundamentally change our understanding of the nature of reality. That's not something we've done here today. That would be a huge milestone. But I wonder if it's possible that, you know, maybe the electron fields are not quite what we expect. And when they mix together, they somehow do create these sort of things that are fractional charge. And maybe they're just as real as the electrons.

Yeah. And this is totally a fascinating and valuable direction of research. But it's not asking what is the electron field made out of fundamentally what is its nature. it's asking what complicated stuff can the electron field do under certain conditions. This is not telling us anything about the nature of the electron. It's telling us about the complexity that arises when a bunch of electrons come together. And so that's fascinating, totally worthwhile, right? The whole field of condensed matter physics is basically that.

What complicated stuff can a bunch of tiny particles do when they get together? And it turns out, wow, they can do all sorts of amazing complicated stuff. Bananas and ice cream and people and superconductors and all that stuff. It's glorious, but none of that tells us anything about the nature of the electron itself, which is, I think, what this article was suggesting. Could it maybe? Could it, you know, by finding out that, oh, these electron fields mix in a weird way that we didn't think of before, maybe they're not fundamental.

Yeah, absolutely. By exploring what the electron field is doing, you might see some discrepancies from your predictions that point towards clues that tell you that you're understanding the electron field is wrong. Yeah, absolutely. That also is not what's happened here. like the fractional quantum hall effect was predicted. It's understood theoretically.

It had never been seen before experimentally, so that's cool. But again, it doesn't tell us anything new about the electron field itself. That doesn't mean, again, this is not a valuable area of research. And if they see something weird and unexpected, they could lead to a discovery that does help us unravel what the electron field is. But this is more about, like, what do electrons do when we combine them into weird ways than like, what is the electron itself? All right. Well, then the answer for Inaki is that they did not split the electron, or at least Daniel doesn't like that interpretation of the result, but it may be telling us a little bit more about the nature of the electron and what it can do and what it's made out of and whether it could maybe be split in the future. Exactly. And questions of the fundamental nature of the universe are not the only valuable science questions. We can do science at the tiniest scale to try to reveal what are the basic units of the universe, but there's still. still a lot of really important open questions about what those basic units do when they come

together and how they make the complexity of our world. Science is valuable at all sorts of different scales from like psychology all the way down to particle physics. All of it is teaching us something about our wonderful universe. Now does that include cult studies also? Absolutely. Yes. Can two podcasters raise millions of dollars to fund their interstellar probe? That's a fascinating question of science. Yes. And the answer is hidden. and the numbers of our listener question titles. And in Jorge's Venmo code, yes. That's right.

I'll give you the answer if you pay. How about that? Oh, man. You better come up with the answer then. All right. Well, thanks to all of our question askers for these great questions. And thanks to all of you for listening to our listener questions. Thanks to everybody who writes in with their questions.

I love reading them. I love answering them. Please don't stop sending them. Don't stop being curious about the universe. It's your personal curiosity about science and about the universe that's pushing forward the whole human project of science and exploration of our cosmos. That's right, Diana, I think you're saying, don't stop believing. Just listen to that feeling.

All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media, where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Insta, and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio.

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My worth is not wrapped up in how many things I've won. Because what I came to realize is I valued winning so much that once it was over, I got the blues. And I was like, this is it. For me, it's the pursuit of greatness. It's the journey. It's the people. It's the failures. It's the heartache.

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