Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What are fermi bubbles?

Episode Date: October 3, 2019

What do we know about fermi bubbles? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you. I'll take it all! 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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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 Neal-Barnett and I discuss flight anxiety. 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. to listen to therapy for black girls on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast do we really need another podcast with a condescending finance brof trying to tell us how to

spend our own money no thank you instead check out brown ambition each week i your host mandy money gives you real talk real advice with a heavy dose of i feel uses like on fridays when i take your questions for the b a qa whether you're trying to invest for your future navigate a toxic workplace I got you. Listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. If I told you that today we're talking about bubbles, what comes to mind? I'm thinking of bath time. Are you in the bath as we're recording this? I'm just worried. I listen to the Higgs boson. I think that rubber duckies might destroy the universe. All right, well, I want you to think bigger than just your bathtub.

Okay, like those hula hoop bubbles that you make with your kids in those plastic bathtub. That's the right direction, but go bigger. Okay, bigger than that, then you've got to be talking about like our atmosphere or something as a huge bubble around the whole Earth. Even bigger. Can a bubble be that big? Can you even think about a bubble that big or is it going to blow your mind? Hi, this is Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and the co-author of the book, We Have No Idea, a guide to the unknown universe. My other co-host and co-author is Jorge Cham, a cartoonist and a friend of mine.

Jorge is not here today, so we have a guest host. Professor Matt Georgiani of the University of Maryland. Say hi to everybody, Matt. Hello, everybody. Yeah, I'm Matt Georgiani, and I'm a biologist, so I don't know anything about physics unless it meeks animals. Biology is basically just big physics, though, isn't it? It is.

I mean, it's biology is what physicists wish they could study. Oh. I just want to lay the gauntlet down now. Wow, I thought you were admitting that biology is nothing but an emergent phenomenon of physics, but now it seems you're trying to turn the tables on me. It won't be the first time. So tell everybody a little bit about yourself, Matt. Why are you a biologist?

What do you study? What do you find fascinating? I loved mathematics early on in high school and in college, but I got really taken... Loved as in past tense? I still love, but I got really taken with evolution. And I loved how big animals evolved into different shapes and beings and how all of life on Earth came to be.

I just find it utterly fascinating. You mean the theory of evolution, right? The theory of evolution, yes. But what a wonderful theory. Right up there with the theory of gravity is two of my favorite theories. Oh, snap, snap, all right. I will take that blow, touche. So do you study evolution in your research?

I do. I study rattlesnake venom, actually, and how that has evolved across different types of snakes. Wow. So how many years until humans evolve venom that we can squirt out of our teeth? Man, I keep waiting. Every day I check my teeth, and I haven't done it yet. What do you mean waiting?

If anybody's going to develop that technology, it's going to be you. We are all waiting for you to develop it, Matt. Well, I'm working on it. I'll get there. Have you tried getting bitten by a radioactive rattlesnake? I feel like now this is why I called you. Now I can finally complete my research. All right.

Well, I want authorship or at least acknowledgement on the paper where you announced that discovery. I'll give you my first bite. How about that? That's a deal. That's a deal. All right. Well, welcome. You are our co-host today, our guest host on the podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, featuring today Matt Georgiani. So I guess it's Daniel and Matt explained Daniel and Jorge's universe, or I'm not sure what the temporary name should be. Or maybe I can just murk up what you guys explain. That's right. Daniel tries to explain the universe and Matt confuses everybody.

That's right. And our podcast is a production of I-Heart Radio. Today we're going to be talking about all those amazing things that you do go into. science to discover. You went into science to talk to discover evolution and unravel the secrets of the history of life. And I went into physics to reveal a deeper truth about the nature of the universe. And as always, when you jump into something scientific, you never know what you're going to discover. And today's episode is going to be all about that, about unexpected discoveries. What's the most interesting or famous unexpected discovery in biology or in rattlesnake venom?

I can only say that one of the things about biology is that as we keep discovering things, the conclusion is always that everything is way more complicated than we ever thought it was. Oh, I see. So we're like, hey, we evolved from primates. There must be a straight dotted line between us and some common ancestor of chimps. And then we dig up a bunch of fossils and they don't make a nice dotted line. I think human evolution is one of these great cases where we did kind of think maybe there would be a sort of simple line. And all we keep learning is that populations of early humans and different hominids were intermingling and mixing. And that the modern human that what we envision is actually this really complex mixture of a bunch of different populations of humans and early humans. And we're just way more complex than we ever thought we were. And do you think that's like a really fun moment when you're digging up a skeleton that doesn't look anything like the one you expected to find?

because that opens the doors to crazy new ideas? Or do you think it's like frustrating? You're like, look, I just got to graduate. I want to write this paper. And now this data doesn't make any sense to me. I think it's a little of both. I think the first time you realize it's not the answer you expected, you think, oh, great.

I was really hoping I could wrap this up. And then your mind starts to click and you start to think of all the other new questions you suddenly have. And then all of a sudden the world just becomes that much bigger. And that's really a fun moment. Yeah. And I think there's an analogy there. I think like the progress of science in general is something like the weird, complicated mess of human evolution.

You know, we make progress in this direction, and we got to back up and go this other way. And then we stumble across this thing. And then in the end, we draw some conclusions based on this big, messy combination of ideas, this population of discoveries. Yeah. And so today on the podcast, we'll be talking about an amazing discovery that was made very recently within the last 10 years, something which totally changes what we know about the very galaxy we live in. I love that physics is still discovering things. You thought physics was used up like 100 years ago?

I thought that Einstein and Newton had figured it all out. So this is great. No, no, not at all. So today on the podcast, we'll be answering the question. What are the Fermi bubbles? When we're talking about bubbles, we're not talking about Matt having a soapy bag. or making hula hoop bubbles or even the bubble of our atmosphere. We're talking about something on an enormous scale,

something basically the size of the galaxy that was only recently discovered. And we talked about recently on a podcast about how stuff at the center of the galaxy is still a huge mystery. Like, we know there's a big black hole there. We have lots of questions about black holes. There's a bunch of stuff swirling around that black hole and questions about how those black holes were made and all sorts of stuff. It's a big, messy swarm of goop there in the middle of the galaxy, and even Gwyneth Paltrow can't give us any insight. Yeah, well, maybe she's in this Fermi bubbles, so we'll see. That's right.

And so today we're going to be talking about an amazing discovery that they made recently. They found these huge blobs of gas. They're like basically the size of the galaxy, and they call them the Fermi bubbles. And before we dig into talking about what they are and what they mean and what they might reveal about the nature of our galaxy and the universe in general, I was wondering, had anybody heard of this? Because in my field, in physics, everybody knows about it because it's a big discovery made pretty recently. Somebody was recently awarded a big prize for it. But I wasn't sure if it had sort of penetrated into the cultural zeitguise, if people had been talking about this. And so I walked around campus

at UC Irvine and I asked people, hey, have you ever heard of the Fermi bubbles? Do you know what they are? Before you listen to these answers, think to yourself, do you know what the Furbyn bubbles are? If I had asked you randomly on the street, what would you have said? This is actually my favorite part of your podcast when we're asked to just quietly listen and think about our own answer. I love it. And I'm never right. So I love the good time. All right.

Well, listen to these answers and hear what people had to say. Have you ever heard of the Fermi bubbles? No. No. No, I have them. No. No, I have not. No.

I've heard the name, but the definition escapes me. All right, Matt, what did you think of people? people's responses. Well, I have to say that I also had not heard of Fermi bubbles, and I wasn't really aware of them. I know who Fermi is because I was in Chicago. However, I didn't really know what these were, and it seems like the people at Irvine did not really know much about them either. No, pretty much nobody had ever heard of them. You hear some clever guesses, right? People like, oh, I think I know who Fermi is, or, you know, maybe there's some connection to particle physics with the bubble chamber. That was clever. But basically, zero percent of these people had ever heard of

the Fermi bubbles. And God, that blows me away because we're making these huge discoveries. This is like when we talked about on the podcast about the hexagon on Saturn. You know, everybody's heard of Jupiter's Red Spot, obvious thing, fascinating mystery. But very few or almost nobody had heard of the fact that there's a huge hexagon on the top of Saturn. Like, people just don't know that there are these big mysteries out there, these recent discoveries. And so I hope at least after today, people will know a little bit about what the Fermi bubbles are, why they're such a fascinating discovery. All right, so we'll dig into what the Fermiubbles are, but first, let's take a quick break.

I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about it. emotion regulation like you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you because it's easy to say like like go you go blank yourself right it's easy it's easy to just drink the extra beer it's easy to ignore to suppress seeing a colleague

who's bothering you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denial is easier drinking is easier yelling screaming is easy complex problem solving, meditating, you know, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, Puzzlers. Let's start with a quick puzzle. The answer is Ken Jennings' appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs. The question is, what is the most entertaining listening experience in podcast land? Jeopardy Truthers who say that you were given all the answers believe in...

I guess they would be conspiracy theorists. That's right. Are there Jeopardy Truthers? Are there people who say that it was rigged? Yeah, ever since I was first on, people are like, they gave you the answers, right? And then there's the other ones which are like, they gave you the answers and you still blew it. Don't miss Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings on our special game show week of the Puzzler podcast. The Puzzler is the best place to get your daily word puzzle fix.

Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Adventure should never come with a pause button. Remember the movie pass era where you could watch all the movies you wanted for just $9? It made zero cents and I could not stop thinking about it. I'm Bridget Todd. Host of the tech podcast, there are no girls on the internet. In this new season, I'm talking to the innovators who are left out of the tech headlines. Like the visionary behind a movie pass, Black founder Stacey Spikes, who was pushed out of

Movie Pass, the company that he founded. His story is wild, and it's currently the subject of a juicy new HBO documentary. We dive into how culture connects us. When you go to France, or you go to England, or you go to Hong Kong, those kids are wearing Jordans, they're wearing Kobe's shirt, they're watching. Black Panther and the challenges of being a black founder. Close your eyes and tell me what a tech founder looks like. They're not going to describe someone who looks like me and they're not going to

describe someone who looks like you. I created There Are No Girls on the Internet because the future belongs to all of us. So listen to There Are No Girls on the Internet on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Right. So what I've done is I've looked at a picture at Google search for Fermi bubbles. Is that how you biologists do research? You just type stuff into Google. 99% of the world of the answers are pretty much already out there. So I'm looking at these Fermi bubbles. And what I've seen is this really great picture of our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy. And I see two big purple bubbles, I guess, that are extending out from the plane, perpendicular to

the plane of our spinning disc. So I guess I can start with my first questions, which is, what am I looking at? Yeah, it's amazing. You visualize the galaxy. Most people think of something pretty flat like a disc, and it's got these swirling arms of stars. And that's correct, right? But in this image that we're looking at and that I hope that folks out there have a chance to Google, if they're not currently driving, you see these huge balls, these big purple balls. And the most important thing for people to know is these things are basically the same size. of the galaxy. They're like 25,000 light years above and below the galaxy. They're basically the biggest feature of our galaxy, and nobody even knew they existed until 10 years ago.

Right. The disc becomes this little belt that our ball of the galaxy has. Yeah, exactly. All the planets, all of life, all of the stars are kind of like the feature around the balls. I know, exactly. It's like we are the side note to this enormous feature, right? And for those of you who don't know, the whole galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, is about 100,000 light years across. So to have something that's 50,000 light years wide, that's a pretty big feature, right? That's maybe the dominant thing. And so there are these two giant blobs, and they're basically circular also. Like, they're tight at the center of the galaxy, and then they sort of expand out and then taper off a little bit. So they look basically like two huge basketballs, one above

and one below the galaxy, touching right there at the center of the galaxy. I tried my belt really tight on my waist. Okay, I just got a very disturbing mental image. Yeah, let's back that out. Let's go back to the galaxy. It's very beautiful. And there's two of them, right? There's the north one and the south one.

And they're about the same size, right? There's a lot of symmetry here. So let's just start with. What are they made of? We don't even know the answer to that question. We think that maybe they're made of some sort of hot gas, which in this case basically means protons, right? Remember that gas, most of the gas in the universe is hydrogen,

which is a proton and an electron, but a lot of it is hot, which means it's ionized, so the electron has escaped. So basically just protons. So one idea is maybe it's just a huge number of protons. And the thing to know is like, it would be a huge number of protons. Like if you took all those protons and like used them to build stars,

which is something our galaxy is good at, you could make two million stars, right? This is not a small amount of gas. So one idea is maybe they're protons. The other idea is that maybe they're electrons, right? Maybe they're like really fast-moving zippy electrons. And I think the things to understand is what we're looking at. What we're seeing, of course, is light, right?

We have a telescope out in space that can see these things. So we're seeing photons from these objects, right? You know, when we see like stars that are really far away, we're not seeing the star. We're seeing the light from that star. So things that, we only see things that give off light, right? There could be something out there like a big black rock or a black hole. We wouldn't see it because it's not giving off any photons.

So how did we just discover this then? I know, right? How did we not see this before? Well, the story is that, you know, we didn't have a telescope that could see these things before. People, I think, imagine that we've looked out into the universe, that we've basically seen the whole universe. But that's not true, right? We've looked at a very tiny fraction of the universe. just recently we had an episode about like how many stars have we seen in the sky and we talked about how the Hubble which can see really deep into the universe has only looked at a tiny patch of the sky most of the sky has not even been examined by Hubble and if you could look out there and find this crazy amazing stuff nobody's ever seen before there could be huge surprises there so i think the lesson is like every time we turn on a new astronomical device we see crazy stuff that we didn't expect because the universe is filled with crazy stuff and we just got to open

lots of new kinds of eyes. And the key is not that we're not pointing it in the right direction, that we're not looking with the right, or we're not using all the wavelengths or something. Yeah, exactly. So these things are called Fermi bubbles because they were discovered by the Fermi telescope, which is named after Enrico Fermi.

So it's a bit of a double misdirection there. People thought Fermi might have discovered these things, but no, the telescope named after him discovered it. So I think it's cool that he sort of gets credit for stuff he didn't discover because, like, you know, if you become a famous scientist and then they name something after you and then that device is used to discover stuff, you get like secondary credit for it. I think that's pretty cool. But yeah, that telescope was the first one that could see these photons. These are very high energy gamma rays, like above 50 or 100 giga electron volts.

And we just didn't have a great space telescope that could see these things before. And so essentially the first time they built one of these things, put it in space, and then looked out into the universe with it, they spotted these things. It was pretty quick. I only took a couple of years of data before they noticed these things. So we just hadn't been looking at the right energies before. So there are more of them? Well, our galaxy has only these two. Yeah, there's the one, the north one and the south one. And there's a lot of really weird things about them. Like, if you look at the picture, you notice, there's like a really strong cutoff. Like, they're not these like amorphous blobs. They're not like, you know, sort of gradually fading out. They're pretty crisp. Like the

edges are kind of sharp, right? And that's really interesting, because they're trying to understand, like, what are these things made of like you were asking? And so either they're protons or they're electrons, or, you know, they could always be something totally weird and different. But the thing that's happening is that, you know, there's photons out there all over the universe, this cosmic gray background and, and other sort of soft photons. And then these really high energy particles, the protons or the electrons in these

bubbles, what they do is they basically give those photons a boost. like they interact with those photons and the photons like get pushed and then they become really high energy gamma rays and they come to earth and that's what we're seeing so we're not literally seeing the gas or the photons or the electrons directly we're seeing the photons that got boosted by those high energy particles in these bubbles so it's almost like this little chamber that's everything that comes into it just shooting it out or it's uh i guess that's the high energy part of it yeah exactly it's like a little accelerator right everything that comes in gets zoomed out. And that's what we're seeing. We're seeing that photons in this region of

space are getting pushed or getting boosted up to some really high energy. And that's the mysteries. Like what? Why are these things here? What are they doing? What's causing it? Where do they come from? And do we think it's a cloud of gas or is it like a bubble with a perimeter and then a hollow center? Now that's a really interesting thing is that it seems to be sort of smooth. It's not like there's an edge, like a bubble, right? Where mostly it's happening on the edge. And it's also not really much more intense closer to the center of the galaxy. We see the same intensity basically all the way across it, which is really hard to explain physically. We'll talk later about the possible things that could have made these things, but none of those hypotheses explain what we see

because none of them can generate a bubble that's smooth all the way through it. It's really weird. I can't believe you're going to make me wait for an answer. Matt, at least you have to listen to the rest of the podcast. You're on the podcast. Don't tune out. Should I tell everybody to skip forward 10 minutes? No, let's not do that. This might be one of these moments, right? So when these things were first discovered, can actually, what was it like if it was recent, then what was it like in the physics community? It was a big surprise, right? Because the Fermi telescope was not launched to find the Fermi bubbles because nobody knew they were there. It's one of these moments when you build a device to look for something and you find something totally different. You know,

a famous example is like the cosmic microwave background. These guys built a radio telescope to do radar testing and listening to other stuff from the universe and they found this weird buzz background that they couldn't explain and it turned out to be this amazing discovery cosmic microwave background we got a podcast schedule for that next week i think and this is the kind thing that happens a lot you build a new instrument you look out in the universe you expect to see something you see something totally different so this one was designed basically to discover dark matter I mean, this also has other intentions, but in my community, we're most interested in the Fermi telescope because it could see dark matter.

You might wonder, like, how can you see dark matter, right? And the idea is that dark matter could bounce into other dark matter and annihilate, and maybe sometimes that would produce photons, and you could see those. So this device, the Fermi telescope, it's basically it's like a big particle detector in space. It can see high energy photons. It turns them into electrons and positrons, splits them. and then it can measure their energy. And so essentially it's like looking out into space

with a very, very high energy light, right? You know, the Hubble, for example, looks at visible light. But this looks at really, really high energy photons. Did they think there would be anything near the center of the galaxy like this, above and below it? Yeah, great question. There was another instrument recently called WMAP,

and it saw sort of like a fuzz. They called it the WMAP Haze, above and below the center of the galaxy. And it was more in the radio waves. And nobody understood what that was either. And so these guys were interested, like, well, let's look at that. But also, they were looking more specifically at the center of the galaxy to try to understand whether they could see a signal of dark matter from there.

And, you know, when you do that, you got to understand the deity. You have to say, like, what are we seeing? Do we make sure we understand what we can see so then we can look for the thing we're looking for? It's like, you know, you got to understand the backgrounds before you can look for your signal. But they couldn't. They were like, what is this? You know, this doesn't make any sense. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's one of those moments. which where they're like, it's an obstacle because they wanted to answer this other science question, but then potentially that obstacle is a whole new avenue for discovery. And so they released this paper and it was kind of a bombshell. People were like, what? Are you telling me that the galaxy is a totally different shape than the one we always imagine and always draw? Like there's this huge new structure, which basically changes the way you should think about the shape of the galaxy, right?

So it was a pretty big deal. Did you find it annoying because you were really hoping to know about dark matter? and now all of a sudden it was that you knew that everyone was going to be focused on these bubbles. Yeah, why can we just turn those bubbles off so we can get back to the dark matter studies? Somebody get rid of them. Yeah, exactly. No, it's frustrating in that respect. It does obscure the dark matter signal a little bit, but it's also fascinating because every time you see something that you don't understand, something that you don't expect, it's a clue, right?

It's a clue that tells you where to look for a new answer, where to find something new. because by definition, if you didn't expect it, it means there's something, either a new kind of object out there in the universe or something you knew about doing something weird, right? Like, oh, I didn't know that stars could do that, or I didn't know black holes could make this kind of feature. So you're guaranteed to learn something new.

So presumably, this is going to teach us a lot about black holes, presumably, right? Since it's near the center of our galaxy and... I knew you were either... You were either going to go for black holes or for aliens, right? because those are your go-to explanations for weird stuff in space. I wish it was aliens. That would be fun. Hey, well, you know, aliens is my go-to explanation when we don't understand something.

You can always explain it using intelligent life, right? Yeah, so let's talk about that. Let's dig into like what these might be, how we might explain it, what the various ideas are, and why none of them actually work. But let's take another break. I'm Dr. Scott Barry. Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling

from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you. Because it's easy to say like go you, go blank yourself. Right? It's easy. It's easy to just drink the extra beer. It's easy to ignore, to suppress, seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just like walk the other way. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials is easier. Drinking is easier. Yelling. Screaming is easy. Complex problem solving. Meditating. You know, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Adventure should never come with a pause button. Remember the Movie Pass era, where you could watch all the movies you wanted for just $9?

It made zero cents and I could not stop thinking about it. I'm Bridget Todd, host of the tech podcast, there are no girls on the internet. On this new season, I'm talking to the innovators who are left out of the tech headlines. Like the visionary behind a movie pass, Black founder Stacey Spikes, who was pushed out of Movie Pass, the company that he founded. His story is wild and it's currently the subject of a date. juicy new HBO documentary. We dive into how culture connects us. When you go to France, or you go to England, or you go to Hong Kong, those kids are

wearing Jordans, they're wearing Kobe's shirt, they're watching Black Panther. And the challenges of being a Black founder. Close your eyes and tell me what a tech founder looks like. They're not going to describe someone who looks like me and they're not going to describe someone who looks like you. I created there are no girls on the internet because the future belongs to all of us. So listen to There are No Girls on the Internet on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, Puzzlers. Let's start with a quick puzzle.

The answer is Ken Jennings' appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs. The question is, what is the most entertaining listening experience in podcast land? Jeopardy Truthers, who say that you were given all the answers, believe in... I guess they would be Ken Spiris. see theorists. That's right. Are there Jeopardy Truthers? Are there people who say that it was rigged? Yeah, ever since I was first on, people are like,

they gave you the answers, right? And then there's the other ones which are like, they gave you the answers, and you still blew it. Don't miss Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings on our special game show week of the Puzzler podcast. The Puzzler is the best

place to get your daily word puzzle fix. Listen on the Iheart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Why are they the center of our galaxy? Is that important? It's definitely a clue, right? We think that they must have been generated by something at the center because they're

touching sort of the disc of the Milky Way only there at the center. So they must be related to something crazy happening at the center. the galaxy and remember that the center of our galaxy we have a really big black hole and so you might think maybe like it's a burp right maybe the black hole like ate something really big and remember when things get sucked into black yeah it's a galactic black hole belch indigestion from the black hole because remember when black holes eat something things don't just like trip and fall into the black hole and they're totally gone they swirl around the black hole because they still have angular or momentum, they get torn up into pieces, and most of it goes in the black hole, but some of it

gets flung out, right? It gets shot out from the black hole. And so when you see black holes eat something big, often there's like a big jet of gas or something that gets emitted. So you like to think maybe that's what's remarkable here too is that I often think of the sci-fi black holes where you're looking at the black hole and the spaceship circling and about to fall into it. And I I often think of then, for some reason, black holes as being one-sided. But I guess when I see these two bubbles in the symmetry here, it really tells me more that the black hole exists potentially as a disc, I guess, and it's belching out of both ends.

Well, remember, black holes are not like looney-tunes black holes, right? Where anybody, you'd like roll them up and drag them around. Don't spoil this for me. Okay. All right, you're a biologist. You're allowed to have a totally unreliable. No, black hole is more like a sphere, right? It's not even really a hole.

It's a dense blob of stuff, right? So it's more like a really black rock, you know. But you can fall into it from any direction. So you're right. It's not preferring the north or the south side of the galaxy. Either way, it's happy to gobble stuff from either direction. You would expect if the black hole created some sort of feature, it would appear in the north and the south. And in fact, some galaxies do have features, like they have these jets of material that

it's shot out exactly in these directions, like one north and one south, right from the center of the galaxy. But those look very different. Those are really collimated. They're long, they're thin, they're about the same size, but they don't look anything like this.

And most importantly, they're really intense close to the black hole and then they sort of spread out and slow down, which is what you'd expect. But these bubbles, they don't look like that, right? Like we were saying before, they have these crisp edges and they're smooth. They look the same on the very top,

the very farthest part from the center the galaxy as they do close to the center of the galaxy and in the middle. So that seems like an important clue about how they were made or what made them, right? They don't look like they were spewed out from the center in that way. I mean, it really seems like I think the image it also invokes is one huge bubble that's been cinched in the middle, presumably because of it's the spinning of the Milky Way. But I guess that would make you think that the center should be more dense as well. Yeah, yeah, precisely. That would, you would see a density there from the, from the cinching, right? So, but we don't know what made it. We don't know. And, you know, other galaxies have jets,

but the Milky Way doesn't have jets, right? It doesn't have these huge jets, it spewed out. So, though maybe it did in the past, right? We don't really know what the history of the Milky Way is. We can't look back in time at it and understand if it had jets in the past. But this can't really be explained by the same mechanism that creates those galactic jets. And then given our perspective on the arm of the Milky Way, would we be able to see if a big bubble was shutting out, towards us? Are you worried? In the same way?

I don't know if we're in a bubble or not. When I listen to the news, they tell me I'm in a bubble, but I don't know if that lies here. You're in a biology bubble. You're in a rattlesnake bubble. No, we are, we're on an arm in the Milky Way, so we're not in the middle of one of these bubbles. We are separated from it. So you can take off your tinfoil hat.

You do not need protection. I just, yeah, but we would be able to tell if it was. So the bubbles only extend sort of perpendicular to the plane of the dead. of the Milky Way. Yes. Now that we have this Fermi telescope, we can see these bubbles, we can see where they are,

and we can see where they aren't. We are not in a bubble. And we could also point this telescope at other galaxies and be like, hold on, if our galaxy has these bubbles, does every galaxy have bubbles? And we don't know the answer to that question yet, because these bubbles are a little bit tricky to see.

First of all, you need this telescope, and you need a bunch of data, because the picture you might see if you Google, that's after like years of data. data and background subtraction. It's not this kind of thing you can see with a naked eye in five seconds of data. And the other galaxies are really far away. So we've pointed it at Andromeda, and we've looked for these bubbles, but we just can't

tell if they exist in other galaxies or not. So we don't know the answer to that question. In fact, we haven't, so we haven't seen any of them or have we? No, there are other galaxies that are much bigger that have really big black holes and they have jets. And some of them have like bubble-like features, but they're not the same as. these kind of bubbles. They're like lower energy photons and also they're much, much bigger. So we've never seen a galaxy like this one before. But again, we don't know if there are other

galaxies out there like this one because we only recently discovered the ones that are like around the corner. So the ones that are in another galaxy really far away will be harder to spot. So that's, you know, for future astronomers to discover. Now are future astronomers looking in one direction or another? Yeah, future astronomers want to look everywhere, right? Because the universe is jammed full of crazy stuff. And, you know, the next person who's trying to answer this question, are there Fermi bubbles in another galaxy? They're probably going to find something else weird and crazy and get distracted and never answer that question because they're going to be studying, you know, the Fermi bicycle or the, you know, whatever next

crazy thing they find out there. Probably more hexagons. But there must certainly be scientists now that are looking for these, right? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. They announced this paper in 2010. And there was some folks at MIT. It was Tracy Slatcher and Doug Finkbiner at Harvard and other folks. And people have been following up and people are looking for these things at other galaxies. And people are also spending a lot of time having fun coming up with various ideas to explain it. One of my favorite is this starburst hypothesis. They think that maybe I love candy, so this is a good one. Is your mouth watering right now? Yeah. All right. And we're going to charge starburst for this plug, right?

Anyway, the idea is that maybe 10 million years ago, the Milky Way went through a period of star formation because a bunch of gas slammed into another bunch of gas. And when gas creates these collisions, you get these density, that you get these pockets of density, and that's how stars formed. And maybe when those stars were formed, that kind of event could have also jetted out a bunch of gas in either direction. It could have been these big gas outflows from a big burst of. star formation, you know, and that would have happened like 10 million years ago. Hold on. You said

10 million years ago. 10 million years ago. And remember the galaxy, that's nothing. It's like by an evolutionary standard, that's nothing. I know. There were things and people crawling around on Earth, right, at the time that this happened. And remember there were rattlesnakes biting things 10 million years ago. This is recent. Yeah, even on biological time scale. And remember, the galaxy is super old. It's almost as old as the universe. It's 13 billion years old. So this is a very new feature. And we also don't know how long it's going to last. Maybe it'll dissipate. And in a few million years, it'll be gone, right? Could just be a blip. It could just be a blip, right? Something we tell our grandkids about, you know, when I was a kid, we had these big mubbles and

shut up, grandpa. Or one of many blips. I mean, presumably this might be a feature that's happen for the entire lifestyle, life of the galaxy. Yeah. And none of these explanations, like the gas outflows from star formation or the black hole burps or, you know, anything else, none of them explain this really weird feature that the bubbles are smooth, right? All of those hypotheses predict something more intense close to the center and then sort of fading out.

So the real answer is something that nobody's thought of yet. The real answer is something that some future scientist will discover. and you know it could be something really deep like there's a new kind of object there in the middle of the black hole or in the middle of the galaxy or it could be like you know very rarely black holes have indigestion and fart out these weird bubbles and you know we just happen to see one in which case like how weird and lucky that our galaxy did this like right now basically but if these bubbles are smooth it makes me it makes it hard to believe that they're it's emitting out of almost from this black hole is it possible that these bubbles are pulling being pulled into the galaxy from elsewhere? Whoa, that is such a good idea. I'm going to write that down and take credit for it. Good. I would expect nothing less.

You're so smart. It's like you got bitten by a radioactive rattlesnake or something. I'm beginning to feel it now. No, that's a great question. But then where would they have come from, right? Like maybe if they're sucking up something from the outside, then it'd have to be a symmetric source, right? you need something on the north and the south to get to create these bubbles from outside the

galaxy. That seems pretty unlikely because they're so symmetric that are the same size on both side. Sure. Yeah, I don't understand it. I just have to pose the ideas. You're supposed to explain it for me. All right. Well, on our, the biology version of this podcast, I'm going to expect some answers from you. All right. Well, so this has been very informative. And I have to say, physics, you're doing a good job. But I think, you know, these are kind of amazing. I think it's amazing that we have these new, I mean, really young clouds of gas that are just essentially stuck at the center of our universe, our center of our galaxy. The fact that we don't know what they are, I think is just fascinating. The fact that the science behind it is only not even 10 years old is really fascinating.

So it seems like the kind of thing that we might actually get some really cool answers for in the near future. yeah 20 years from now people are to look back and they're going to know the answer hopefully and it's going to seem obvious to them right whereas right now we're standing at the forefront of human ignorance not knowing where it's going to lead but the favorite place to stand well the my favorite thing about this kind of thing is that it's a hint right it's a hint about how many more amazing discoveries there are out there if every time we open a new kind of eyeball into the universe we see something crazy and unexpected, that tells you that there's a lot more crazy stuff out

there waiting to be discovered. And so we should build as many kinds of scientific eyeballs as we can, especially astronomical ones, because there's so much out there in the universe waiting for us to find it and to go, what the F is that? More eyeballs is absolutely what we need. All right, get on it, physicists, engineers. More telescopes now. Yeah. I don't mean rattlesnakes with more eyeballs. They have plenty. What I'm talking about

is new scientific instruments. All right. Thanks everyone for tuning in. That was our podcast about the mystery of the Fermi bubbles. If you have something you'd like us to rattle on about ignorantly, then please send us a suggestion to feedback at danielanhorpe.com. Or if you have a question about something random about physics, we answer all of our listener emails. Send it to questions at danielanhorpe.com. Thanks, Matt, for joining us on today's podcast. Thank you. It's been marvelous. All right. So go solve. All right, Mrs. Maisel, go off and solve your rattlesnake venom problem, and we don't want to hear back from you until it's done. I will. You solve these problems. Sounds good. Thanks everyone for

tuning in. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. 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'll take it all!

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