Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - The biggest collisions in the Universe

Episode Date: December 24, 2022

Bonus episode: Daniel and Jorge visit the metaverse to discuss what happens when particles, stars, galaxies or superclusters collide!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, everyone, Daniel here. We have a little bit of a special treat for you today. Earlier this year, Jorge and I recorded a special episode with audio and video for premiering in the Metaverse. And today, we are bringing it to you on the feed as a special bonus episode. It's a bit different from our usual episodes, but we thought you'd enjoy it. Thanks for listening. Hey, Jorge, is this the way to the Metaverse? I'm meta don't know. Where is the Metaverse?

I don't know. I was supposed to meet you there to do an episode. Are we in the right place? Let me see. Are you saying we're inside a simulation right now? Is this a virtual conversation? It might be a simulation within a simulation. That's so meta.

Well, that is the most interesting theory I've ever metta. Maybe in the end, none of it really met us. Hey, we made it to our heartland. On our podcast, Daniel and Jorge explained the universe, we like to talk about planets and galaxies, but we never thought we'd get to do it from another world. And here we are in our heartland. How cool is that?

So cool. Now, on our podcast, Jorge and I typically talk about some of the biggest, most amazing, unanswered questions in the universe. And today, we have some really fun stories about the biggest collisions in the universe. Planets colliding with other planets, stars colliding with other stars, even galaxies, hitting other galaxies. But before we start, we want to give a shout out to our partners, State Farm, and, of course, Fortnite for having us here.

Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I love to smash things together to figure out what they're made out of. Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio. In which we try to smash your brain together with the whole universe. We think that there are so many interesting things to understand out there. We want to bring your brain together with all of those questions and give you some understanding of how things work. So today we'll be breaking down some of the biggest collisions in the universe.

Now, that's kind of a tricky word to use biggest, because especially in physics, that can mean a lot of things. Like, it can mean biggest in size, it can mean biggest in speed, or biggest just in terms of the impact that it may have on our planet. Or biggest in drama, right? Oh, I see. We're doing, we're going for drama. So what would you say are some of the biggest collisions in the universe? Well, we do some pretty fast collisions here on Earth. We accelerate protons to almost the speed of light and smash. them together underground in Switzerland. So you've got a proton going at the speed of light

this way, proton going at speed of light this way. That's a pretty dramatic collision. That's pretty big stuff. That's the big, you mean one of the biggest experiments humans have ever done. Yeah, absolutely. It's one of the most expensive and one of the biggest experiments. So I'm here, I'm basically a shill for big collision because it's my day job. And you said you smash protons together, which are tiny little particles that are part of the atom. So every, we're all made out of atoms, of course. And the atoms are made out of stuff inside of them, including electrons and protons. Yeah, so we take hydrogen, which is a proton and electron, we pull away the electron because

we're not interested, and then we just smash the protons, the hydrogen nuclei together. And sometimes just like proton debris comes out and sometimes weird new stuff comes out. What even weird new stuff? Well, one of the amazing things about collisions with particles is that what comes out doesn't just have to be a rearrangement of what went in. You can actually annihilate it and turn it into something new. like a Higgs boson or a photon or a Z boson or something you didn't even know existed. Now, how do you smash these protons together?

Do you have like slingshots? Do you pull back and the two scientists stand in front of each other and then pull back and smash the protons together? How does that work? We take the protons and we push them really hard with electric fields and then we bend them with magnets so they go around in a circle. We do that over and over and over again until they're going really, really fast. And we have another beam going the other direction and then we cross them.

So that's one of maybe the fastest collisions that we know about as scientists in the universe. And it's weird because we actually are making that collision. But it actually doesn't even compete with what the universe is already doing all the time. Wait, what? You mean, there are things in the universe smashing close to each other faster than twice the speed of light. Absolutely. The universe is filled with huge particle accelerators that are throwing particles at us that are colliding with the Earth much faster than the particles are moving in the Hadron Colleges.

Okay, so that's maybe another type of collision of things smashing together that we can talk about is cosmic rays coming from space. Exactly. Cosmic rays are a fancy word, but they just mean particles in space zipping towards the Earth and then smashing in the atmosphere like tiny little meteors. Now, these things normally would be kind of dangerous, right? Like if you're hit by one of the, even though they're tiny particles, if it's going fast enough and it hits you, it can actually kind of not be good for you. If the atmosphere is like a blanket that protects us, they hit the atmosphere and they

bounce against particles in the atmosphere and they lose a little bit of energy. By the time they get down to the surface, instead of having one particle with a lot of energy, you have like trillions with a little bit of energy. So we see these big showers of particles hit the surface of the Earth. All right, so then it's a good thing we have our atmosphere to protect us from these cosmic rays. Yeah, it's like a shield. Yeah, it's like a shield. Exactly.

And if you're an atmosphere, you go out into space. You really need to think about shielding because there's a lot of crazy stuff out there in space. Maybe you think about space as being empty, but really it's filled with high energy particles whizzing all around. It's quite dangerous. Asteroids, rocks from space that come flying towards the Earth, they kind of get burned up in our atmosphere because they hit that air and then they create all that friction and then they burn up before they hit the Earth, right? Yeah, the atmosphere is like a big buffer. And if the rock isn't too big or going too fast, then it melts in the atmosphere.

Sort of the way like spaceships, when they re-enter the atmosphere, they get heated up. The same thing happens to asteroids and meteors that hit the atmosphere. But I just said speed and energy are really important, right? And sometimes we want to create these collisions. Like the ones we talked about, I know you were doing to study things and also what we observed up there in the sky, but sometimes we want to create these collisions, maybe even to save the planet Earth. Yeah, this is pretty cool.

I don't know how many of you know this out there, but NASA, the Space Agency of the U.S., has a program called the Planetary Defense System, right? Like, that's somebody's job, is to literally, like, stand there and be ready to save the Earth. I'm glad somebody's doing it because it's not my job. You're not worried about. You're trying to save the Earth on a daily basis. And so this work. This happened recently.

They sent the – what did they send, like a spaceship, like a little spacecraft? And then they just accelerated it and aimed it towards this asteroid. Yeah, the spacecraft, it's like the size and weight of a refrigerator. So they basically slammed a fridge against a big rock in space. Not like an actual fridge. That would have been pretty cool. I mean, they stocked it first. You know, it's filled with good drinks and all sorts of stuff, like a normal fridge.

No, it's like a huge cube of metal, and they just slammed it right into the asteroid to see if they could change its course. And it did, right? They measured where it was going before, and they hit it with the fridge spaceship, and they noticed that the asteroid kind of changed course, right? Yeah, yeah, it really did. So as a university professor, it's my job to add a pop quiz to every single. situation. We'll ask multiple questions and you answer by jumping on the square with the right answer. You get it right, you win rewards. If you get it wrong, you'll get bounced out. Ready? Good, because it's time for how fan are you? What happens when black holes collide?

Is it A, they explode, B, the universe ends, C, you get one big black hole, or D, nobody knows. The correct answer is C, nothing can destroy a black hole. They just get bigger when they eat other things, including other black holes. So we're talking about the biggest collisions in the universe, and we talked about the fastest ones that we know about. But you could also maybe think about biggest in terms of impact, right? Like how it can affect us here on Earth. Well, the Earth is getting hit by this stuff all the time.

We can't deflect all of it. A lot of it gets melted by the atmosphere. But in our history, we have been smacked by some pretty big asteroids. Like the dinosaurs were not as on point as NASA is in terms of planetary defense. So they got smacked by a pretty big rock about 65 million years ago. It killed off like 50% of all the species on Earth, actually, in about an afternoon. And it changed life on Earth forever, right? Like, we're here because dinosaurs are not.

That's right. It made room for us mammals. So thank you, alien asteroid tossers, or whoever was responsible for that. Is that an awesome theory, but then asteroid was thrown by enemies of the dinosaur species? No, but one of my favorite theories is that they have reconstructed the path of this asteroid before it hit the Earth, and they think it made two passes around and came near the Earth before it actually hit, which means that dinosaurs could have looked up into the sky and seen it like 10 years before it hit the Earth.

So they had their chance, right? they were warned. If they had their science together, they'd still be here. They'd be doing this podcast instead of us. If that happened again, do you think we'd be able to survive it, do you think? I mean, if, like, it gets past the NASA defense system. It would be pretty challenging. What actually happens depends a lot on where it hits.

If it hits in the water, then you're getting a lot of vapor in the atmosphere. It hits on land, then you're getting smoke or getting volcanoes. None of that is going to be very easy to survive. In order to remedy that, you need planet-wide geoengineering projects that I just don't think we're capable of today. So start building those bunkers, folks. You might want to start investing that in big beans. I hear those last also a long time. Question two.

What particles are collided in the large hadron collider? A, large hadrons. B, protons. C, photons, D, electrons. The correct answer is B, protons, which are a type of hadron, and they are used in a large adron collider. But that's also not the first time an asteroids hit Earth. Yeah, we think there's a whole history of these collisions,

dating back millions and millions of years. But we also think that very early in the Earth, Earth's formation, there was an enormous collision, a whole planet hit the early Earth. What? Yeah. Actually, we do think that there were other planets in the solar system, which got ejected by Jupiter's gravity early on. Wow, kicked out.

Kicked out of the island. Voted off, exactly. Voted off by Jupiter. We're the survivors. So far. But we think that a Mars-sized planet probably hit the early Earth and created an enormous collision, basically vaporized the whole surface, and what came. out of it turned into the Earth and our Moon.

So we're like our Earth right now is actually Earth 2.0. Like it wasn't Earth before that got obliterated and then it reformed again and that's the Earth we have now which you know feels like an upgrade, right? I mean I think it's pretty good. I got no notes.

So then a comet can hit a planet. We saw it in the 90s it hit Jupiter and it could hit us and those are actually kind of more dangerous, right? Those are more dangerous because comets go really, really fast because they come from much further away, so they have more time to, like, gather speed as they come towards the Sun. And because they have long orbits, you might not see

them until they're basically headed right towards you. Like, there could be comments out there right now that take 500 years to go around the Sun, and we just haven't seen them yet. Now, I was around in the 90s when that collision happened. That's when the comments smashing to Jupiter. But I don't think I was kind of paying attention, but you were, you were like... What else were you doing, man? You were watching the live broadcast of it, right? I was. I actually had a telescope focused on Jupiter and I was taking video myself because I wanted to like see the explosion. Yes, at home. Did you see it through the telescope? Like it actually hit it? Like did it happen fast or in slow motion? It happened pretty fast. And you could see these fireballs be created. And each fireball is like the size of the Earth. We're talking about incredible collisions here.

Fireball like it hit Jupiter, but Jupiter is gas. So let's get into that. But when it hit Jupiter, it created a fireball like that impact. was that crazy. Yeah, there's so much energy. Jupiter is basically a huge ball of cotton candy, like you were saying, but you hit it with enough energy with a big enough rock, and the rock gets vaporized in the atmosphere, and you create a huge ball of fire. As big as the Earth.

As big as the Earth, exactly. So sorry Jupiter, but we're glad it didn't happen to us. Yeah, that would be bad news. Question three. What collided with the planet Jupiter in 1994? This is A, a banana, B, an asteroid, C, aliens, or D, a C, a comet. Correct answer is D, Comet, Shoemaker Levy collide into Jupiter in 1994. All right, so that's maybe the biggest, in the sense of the biggest collisions in the universe,

But we said we would talk about the biggest collisions in the universe. Let's go bigger. Okay. Like, can you smash stars together or suns together? Now you've got the trick of it, right? What would happen if you could smash stars together, right? Yeah, we're all sides of right? Yeah, yeah, I'd love to see that.

It turns out that's actually quite rare. Our stars in the galaxy are all swirling together around the center of the galaxy, sort of like a big, lazy river. So it's not very typical for stars to smash into each other. I see. But sometimes things do smash into each other. It does happen. Now, what would actually happen if two stars collided with each other?

Yeah, it depends entirely on the velocity. If they're going really fast, then they're going to obliterate each other, just like what happened with Proto Earth and the other planet. Like a huge spray of stuff. It's weird to think about it, because you think of the sun as like a ball of fire, right? And so, like, if you take two flames and you smash it together, and nothing really explodes. But the sun is actually kind of pretty meaty, right?

Like, there's a lot of mass in the sun. I mean, it's almost all of the mass in the solar system. in the solar system in. And it is stuff. I mean, it's on fire, but it is stuff. Yeah, it's a huge ball of plasma. It's burning hydrogen. And 99% of the mass of the solar system is in the sun.

And so a sun-sun collision could obliterate both of them. It could spray out a lot of this burning stuff. And the temperature would be really incredible. So it would be super bright because what's happening inside the sun is fusion to create all that light. And that pressure and temperature would make a fusion happen to like a supercharged rate. It would be like much brighter than the sun. has ever been. Wow. So you basically see a giant spark from the collision and then it would

spray out and then it would turn off or with this cloud of stuff debris keep burning? It would go out, right? The cloud of debris would probably reform back into either one big star or two smaller stars, but it would take a little while. It would take, you know, a few hundred million years probably to re-coeless into something else that could burn. Right, let's go bigger, Daniel. What can be bigger than two stars colliding? Well, instead of just colliding one star, what if you've collided, like, whole groups of stars, right? A group collision, okay?

Are you talking about, like, colliding galaxies? Yes, exactly. Let's go really big. So, like, our galaxy, the Milky Way, has hundreds of billions of stars in it, and the neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, is even bigger. It's much more massive than our galaxy, and it's headed right for us. Wait, what? Yes, exactly.

Somebody throw it out of us? Is this another concern? Alien conspiracy theory. Like if the light race didn't work, if the asteroids didn't work, now they're throwing a galaxy at us. Somebody's just making sure there's a lot of drama in the universe, right? We got lots of sequels lined up. That's right.

One season two, three, four. Question four. What galaxy will collide with the Milky Way in four and a half billion years? A, Canis Major, B, the peanut butter galaxy, C, Omega, or D, Andromeda. Andromeda. The correct answer is the Andromeda will collide with our galaxy in four and a half billion years. But the good news is that the collision

will not actually be that dramatic. Okay, so the whole galaxies colliding, that's not that exciting, you're saying, because galaxies are actually kind of empty, right? I mean, they're big. They're big. They're bright. But they're kind of like clouds almost.

Like, they're not that meaty. Yeah, exactly. It's like throwing two handfuls of sand towards each other. Mostly the sand doesn't hit other bits of sand. Mostly they just miss. Can we go bigger then? Can you smash things that are bigger than a galaxy? Of course you can.

Of course you can. You can always go bigger. There's no limit to science. And this is where you go, wah-ha-ha-ha. But it's part of a big group of galaxies that all orbit each other. So it's like a big object that's gravitationally bound together. It's a cluster of galaxies.

A cluster of galaxies. That's like a lot of galaxies that have kind of moved together, right? Exactly. Gravity is holding them together. And then the universe is filled with these clusters of galaxies. Do we know if our cluster is heading towards a collision with another cluster? Do we know that? Or is it just inevitable?

It's just inevitable. Eventually you're going to bump into somebody else. Yeah, just like the Milky Way and Andromeda, the universe is trying to push them apart, but gravity is so strong between them that it's pulling. pulling them together so that eventually they will collide. Can we go bigger, Daniel? What's the biggest thing we can, let's just wrap this up, what's the biggest thing we can collide

that we can smash together in the universe? So galaxy clusters organize themselves into something we call super clusters, which are basically like clusters of clusters. And these are huge, enormous things like mind-bogglingly big, like 500 million light years across. 500 million, so like a ray of light would take 500 million, million years just to like go from one side of the other. This is like a pretty big chunk of the universe.

So we call this a supercluster and we're part of a supercluster of course. And so superclusters can smash into each other, right? And we actually think that our supercluster is sort of headed towards another supercluster. Really? Yeah. We can track it. We can track it. There's this thing out there called the Great Attractor, which is a huge source of gravity

far out past our galaxy. We don't understand it. We don't really know what's going on. We notice everything is moving towards it, and other superclusters are moving towards it. So, like, deep in the future, supercluster collision. Oh, man. And it's all being pulled together by a mysterious force, right? Like, we don't know what it is.

We can't see anything there that's pulling these things. We think it's probably gravity, but we can't see what's causing that gravity. So, yeah, we don't understand what the great attractor is. Question five. Where is Daniel a professor? Is it A, UC Irvine, B. UZ Berkeley, C, U.S. Berkeley, C, University, or D, CERN. Great Master is A, UC Irvine.

Daniel is a professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine. University University. You know you, yeah, I remember. That was awesome. I love that. Right now, the universe is kind of, like you said, organized in galaxies and clusters and superclusters, and these are like form kind of like branches out there in the universe. If everything smashes together, does it all become like a giant ball of stuff or like a giant black hole or like a giant star?

You know, like what's the eventual, you know, event or consequences of two of these giant things smashing. Yeah, what's the ultimate spoiler of the universe? Yeah. Well, you've got two big forces at play. You have the universe trying to pull itself apart. dark energy is like accelerating everything further and further apart, then you have gravity pulling itself together. So the question really is like,

how much can gravity pull stuff together before dark energy tears everything apart? Because the far future is we have these like islands of stuff separated by space. And so gravity is like trying to gather as much together as possible before the universe tears it apart. So all this stuff is going to end up in a super black hole eventually. What?

Yes. So all the stuff that's close to us We'll eventually smash together, you're saying, like, that's inevitable in a way, will form tiny black holes, and then those black holes will crash into each other. That's another interesting collision, black hole on black hole. Yes, exactly. And we've seen that happen already. Black holes hitting each other, swirling around each other, and creating bigger black holes. They make these amazing ripples in space time.

But that's the future. Everything falls into a black hole, which is then separated from the nearest black hole, and the universe keeps those apart. But everything in our little, like, sort of gravitational well nearby is going to end up inside that black hole. Oh, cool. Well, like you said, I think that watching collisions, thinking about collisions, imagining collisions, sometimes simulating collisions, is a big part of how we understand the universe, right? Because that's kind of how you test things and see what happens. That's how you learn how things actually work. Yeah, you can see what's inside stuff.

You can see how they react with each other. These are great experiments for understanding the basic nature of the universe. universe. So that's why we do the underground on Earth when we can and we watch them in the sky when they happen for us. That's how you crack open the secrets of the universe. Yes, exactly. Did you get a smash this together? Yeah, that's when the spoilers all come out, right? So that's when we're paying attention. I see from the drama. Yes. Because I guess you can't just ask the universe how it works. You got to learn from the drama. Well, I've been asking, but nobody's answering. It's like a mystery, right? You just got to pay attention to the clues.

It is a big mystery, the universe, and we are slowly learning more and more about it every day. Thanks to scientists and thanks to smashing into each other. Thanks everyone for joining us on this episode of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe and keep asking your own questions about what's out there. Yeah, we hope we smashed to your brain with some new knowledge and blew your mind or not or just merged it with a little bit more with the cosmos and the universe. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.

Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you. I'm take it off. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called No Such Thing, where we get to the bottom of questions like that.

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