Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What are primordial black holes?

Episode Date: June 23, 2020

Could mysterious black holes have been formed in the first second of the Universe? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years.

Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending, with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dacias Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone, and there is help out there.

The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of one. One Tribe's mission. One Tribe, save my life twice. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple 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 you. your questions for the BAQA. 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.

Hey, Daniel, you believe in the power of words, right? I hope words have power. I mean, this podcast is literally just words. It's our superpower. Yeah, but also, don't you think individual words have a certain energy to them? You know, I think some words are just like inherently funny, you know, words like booger or weasel or podcast. Yeah, those are goofy words, but some words have drama to them, you know, like dragon or chaos. Man, the combination there makes me think of things like dragon boogers or chaos weasels.

Actually, I was thinking more like dragon weasels. That's a scary word. I don't know if that's scary or silly. But what about some science words? Do you think some science words have power to them? I don't know. I feel like this is a trap. You're always making fun of our science names, you know, charm quark, big bang. Those are charming words, indeed.

But, I mean, can you blame me? Do you guys ever come out with dramatic names, cool names? I got something up my sleeve. I've got something out of the dawn of time. All right. This better be good. Oh, yes. It is positively primordial.

I am Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I believe in the power of words to entertain and educate. Welcome to our podcast, Dragon Boogers. Brought to you by two podcasting Chaos Weasels. No, I'm just kidding. Welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe. a production of iHeartRadio. In which we use words to take you on a mental tour of the universe. We take you all the way back to the beginning of time. We take you to the edge of time.

We take you down to the tiny particles and out to the largest things in the universe. And we share with you our wonder, our joy, our curiosity for how everything works and what science is doing to try to figure it out today. Yeah, it goes straight from our brains and our hearts through the internet, into your ears, and straight into your brains.

your hearts as well. That's right. Through that weird system of tubes that is the internet. We should talk about that one day. Daniel Norhe explained the tubes. There are a lot of amazing things out there in the universe to see and to discover and to learn about. And some of those things have been around for a very

long time. I mean, the universe is, it's pretty old or maybe pretty young, depending on how you look at it. That's right. And there are a lot of amazing things out there to understand. Stars exploding, stars collapsing, black holes forming. Some of these things that you're already amazed by might have a very different history from the one that you're

anticipated. Yeah, because I think sometimes knowing the history or something gives you a better perspective about it, you know, like if you know where it came from or what it was like before, it kind of tells you a lot about something. Yeah, well, that's basically the whole game of astrophysics, right? We are looking at the universe, which is nothing but a series of clues as to how the universe was made. And from that set of clues, we try to unravel the mystery of what came first and what came second and what does that mean about what's coming next right so the history of like how things were put together is really central to all of science and and all certainly all of astrophysics yeah and i think one of the things that fascinate most people about the universe is this

idea of black holes i mean black holes are just kind of amazing aren't they they're so they're so weird and so kind of a mysterious i know and in so many ways you know you have the fact that they first started as a theoretical idea like just a solution to equations and pencil and paper. The idea that just this concept, this scratching of graphite on paper, could predict crazy things happening out there in the universe, that's mind-blowing.

And then, you know, the drama in which they are formed, the end of the life of a star, this cataclysmic collapse, the supernova that precedes them. I mean, you couldn't write anything better than that if you were a fiction writer. Yeah, there was drama in how they were discovered and how they were thought of.

I mean, Einstein came up with these, right? in his equations and it literally just came out in like math first. Yeah, it just came out of the math. You know, you look at the universe, you try to understand how it works, you write down some equations that describe what you see, and then you explore the weird edges of those equations. You say, well, what else could these equations predict? What happened in these other weird scenarios?

And then you go out, and if you believe those equations are real, that they're describing something real about the universe, you go out and check those predictions and see, well, Is this just a weird figure of math or is this something that actually happens? And so it's incredible when you've achieved that. When you've really described the universe, you've pulled back a layer of reality and said, here are the fundamental underlying mechanisms and I can prove it by showing that I can predict what they do. Do you think Einstein called them black holes right away or what do we call him when he saw him on the math page?

He saw these sort of singularities and he predicted that light couldn't come out of them. Did he have a name for them? Well, you're right that the modern idea of black hole certainly came out of Einstein's equations, but the concept of a black hole actually predates Einstein. The idea that you could have an object that had so much gravity that light could not leave it, the concept of that predated Einstein. So the phrase black hole was already sort of existing. Interesting.

All right. And we've also now have seen black holes, right? We have pictures of black hole. That's right. We've known for a while that there are black holes at the centers of gas. galaxies. And we've seen that because we look at the way the things swirl around and the gas and the dust that emit from those galaxies. So you can't see the black hole directly, but you can see the sort of swirling chaos around it, you know, the chaos weasel, if you will, of the universe. And we've also seen smaller black holes, black holes that are formed when stars collapse. And we can see those sometimes via lensing when they pass in front of other stars. Wow. So Blackwells are amazing and interesting and mysterious, and there's a lot about them that we don't know.

We don't know what's inside of them. We don't know how big they can get and how the ones in the center of galaxies come together. We also sort of don't know how old they are, right? It's hard to tell because they keep so well. That's right. They stay fit. They are pretty stable. They last a very, very long time.

And you're right that we don't know so much about when they were made. I mean, one mode of making black holes is you have a star and it collapses, and then you have a black hole about the mass of a star or several stars, et cetera. Another is these black holes in the very center of galaxies that are millions of suns. But there's the possibility that black holes might even be older than that. They could even be older than the first stars. Really? Oh, man.

I thought black holes only formed from stars, but you're saying they could be older than the ideal stars. That's right. It could be that there were black holes. Black holes formed before there were even particles. Black holes formed in the very first few moments of the universe. They predate matter. Predate matter. Yes, exactly.

Wow. And so... What? What? What? Well, how could it have anything inside? If matter didn't exist. I know.

We'll dig into it. But these things go by the awesome name of primordial black holes. Wow. That is a cool name. All right. So then that's our question for the episode today. Today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question. What are primordial black holes?

That is kind of a hard word to say, but it sounds cool when you say it, primordial. I know. Primordial. It sounds like primeval or something, you know. It sounds like something is crawling out of a swamp somewhere. Yeah, it feels like raw and like unformed and like, oh my goodness, it predates things. Yeah, it's like from the age of giants, you know. It's like if Thor had a black hole, it would be a primordial one.

for where the wild things come from, kind of. Exactly. I don't think it's a children's book, Primordial Black Hole, but it's a really cool word. And it also, it touches on that mystery, right? We don't know what happened in the first few moments of the universe. We don't know how things worked. And so it'd be amazing if there were things left over

from those very first few moments. Wow. That would be fascinating. So it's kind of a cool concept. And it's kind of also kind of a recent concept, I feel like, you know, like Iceland wasn't talking about primordial black holes, right? No, definitely not. This is definitely a more recent concept.

So as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had heard of these primordial black holes or had an idea of what they were. So Daniel went out there into the wilds of the internet to ask people, what are primordial black holes? That's right. I went out into the primordial internet, which consists of emailing our listeners and asking them to volunteer to answer spontaneous questions. So thank you to our listeners who participated. If you would like to answer spontaneous questions and hear your uninformed speculation on the podcast, please write to questions at danielanhorpe.com. So before you hear these answers, think about it for a second.

Have you heard of primordial black holes or would you know what to answer if asked this question? Here's what people had to say. I've got nothing on that. I would guess that it's from really early in time, really large black holes. I would guess that it's probably the ones that are at the center of the galaxies, but I'm not sure. Well, like, in are the oldest black hole or the first one that was created? Yeah, maybe one of the biggest black holes in the universe or, yeah, the first ones. Primordial black holes are black holes that were created by the original plasma of the early universe

before expansion began to occur. As the matter collapsed and condensed, it became black holes that have persisted since the dot of time. Basically, I think the black hole at the center of our galaxy is a primordial black hole. Black holes in the center of galaxy, the biggest ones. A primordial black hole is a gravitational well created at or just after the initiation of expansion. My understanding is that they consist of mass, magnitudes of order larger than supermassive black holes. Perhaps gravitational waves from these primordial black holes leak through the multiverse and are perceived by us as dark matter.

Primordial black holes? This is really kind of difficult. Like, is it the original black hole? Is it what started the Big Bang? I have no idea about that. Excited to find out, though. Primordial black holes are black holes that formed way back at the start of the universe. just after the Big Bang, once inflation had happened and everything else,

there were pockets of densities left that caused these black holes to be created. Now, due to hawk and radiation, it's unlikely that any of them still exist. However, they could have caused the start of all the other black holes within the universe. I think black holes that were made during the Big Bang, maybe they are still out there. My guess is that it's a cooler black hole that's like more special than your average one. So it got his own name. So I think promoter black holes are black holes that formed shortly after Big Bang.

So they're the really old black holes. But I don't know much more than that. All right. These are pretty good answers. It seems like the war definitely evokes feelings in people. You know, there are like a lot of people say it's before the dawn of time or before the beginning of time. Yeah, the ooze that we walked out of. That was a great answer.

And I think that means that this is well-named, right? Wouldn't you give this high marks? Like, if people could guess what it means? Well, I don't know what they are yet, Daniel. So I don't think the judgment is still out. Maybe this is a better word for it. I'm feeling a little bit of hesitancy to say anything positive about physics naming, but I'm going to come back to this at the end of the episode.

Oh, I see. This is the one you would submit to the naming words. This one's high on my list, yeah. You're like, see, we came out with one good name. We're not looking even for awards. We're just looking for, you know, to no longer be criticized. Geez, I see. Getting a lot of flack here.

He's looking for approval. This is just one approval. That's right. All right. Well, let's jump right into it, Daniel. What is the primordial black hole? And how is it different than a brand new black hole? Yeah, so brand new black holes, the sort of garden variety black holes that you're familiar with,

are the ones formed when stars collapsed. You have a big blob of normal. matter, you know, quarks and electrons and all sorts of stuff, gas and dust. And after it's done fusing, gravity pulls it together and you get this dense spot in space where light cannot escape. So that's your normal black hole. And the critical thing to making a black hole again is having a very dense blob of matter. So much matter that it's bent space.

It's bent space in this way that like the inside of the black hole is cut off from the rest of the universe. It's stretched space in such a way that every path in the black hole goes deeper inside. None of them come out. And so you can visualize it as light cannot even escape because the force of gravity is too strong, but the more modern way to think about black holes and gravity is about bending of space. So these things create these weird structures in space that there's no path out of, even if you're traveling at the speed of light.

They sort of bend space so much that they kind of form a hole. almost like a hole in space yeah they sort of form a hole in space you can think of it like the universe has become separated and there's now this little piece of the universe that there's only a one-way door into and once you go in there you can't come out to the rest of the universe it's just impossible right and like and like you said it takes a lot to form a black hole i mean they're so extreme then you know you can't just like it's hard to pack that much mass into such a small space that you know you need something like a supernova or a star collapsing for that to happen yeah the key thing really is density. You can make small black holes, but you need some very strong force to

squeeze the mass into a very small space. The smaller the mass, the smaller the space, and the denser it has to be. And black holes can vary from fairly small masses to enormous masses, like millions and millions times the mass of the sun. Yeah, those are super duper black holes. I think that's the official term, isn't it? Extra-califragilistic black holes. Thanks, right. With a spoonful of sugar. And this is the kind of thing we've seen in the universe. We predicted it.

We understand the stellar mechanics. We understand the force of gravity. We understand what goes into it. Our numerical simulations make sense. We've observed them. Everything sort of fits together. Right. You can see them like floating around in the center of the galaxy.

These are like well known. These are well-known. They're well-established. Nobody doubts that these black holes exist. And we've counted them and it exists or roughly the rate you would expect. And, you know, it's an awesome field of study, but one that doesn't have that many surprises in it. But those are stellar black holes.

Those are black holes formed from matter that was created after the Big Bang, right? This is this whole other category of black holes, these primordial black holes, that could have been made in the very first few moments of the universe. Right, because thanks were pretty crazy at the beginning of the universe, right? It was like a loud and wild birth for the universe.

That's right. It was hot and nasty. and wet. And you know, you might think, well, what do you need for making a black hole? You need a dense blob of matter. And, you know, early in the universe, there was a lot of matter and it was very dense. And so you might expect there to be black holes made in the early universe. It's not that surprising to think that there would be blobs of matter capable of forming black holes. Right. And in fact, this was a listener question we got a while ago about somebody asked, why didn't the universe just collapse into a black hole at the beginning of time? How are we here?

It's an amazing question. It's like, we're here. How come? Right? Because things were so dense at the beginning of time. Why didn't it just all collapse into a black hole? That's right. It's a great question because things were really dense.

And one of the ways we answer that question is that black holes need to be localized. You can't have the entire universe collapsed into a black hole if everything is perfectly smooth. To form black holes, you need hot spots of density. You need the black hole to form somewhere. To pick where the black hole forms, you need some spot. to be denser than another spot. If everything's equally homogenous, then the force of gravity just cancels out.

It's almost like if you're in a hole, you can't have holes. You can't have a hole in a hole, kind of? Is that kind of the idea? Like, either everything's a hole or you only have little holes? You can't have everything to be a hole because you need extra gravity in one spot. And if everything is smooth, then all the gravity cancels out. I mean, imagine a perfectly smooth universe. Even if it's filled with infinite matter,

there's no gravitational force on you because in every direction, the gravitational force is balanced by matter in the other direction. So to create a black hole, you need a very strong force of gravity, and that can only be created by additional density, by extra density, by hotspots. If it's totally smooth, it doesn't matter how dense it is, you can form black holes. And so the idea is that during the Big Bang, the whole thing couldn't turn into a black hole, but maybe things were so intense that maybe there were hot spots during the Big Bang, the beginning of the Big Bang, and maybe,

black holes did form in those early moments. Absolutely. And there had to have been hotspots. If there weren't hotspots early on in the universe, we wouldn't be here either. What? Because the universe is no longer perfectly smooth, right? A perfectly smooth universe stays perfectly smooth forever.

There's no way to disrupt it. So there had to have been hotspots. And those hotspots ceded the formation of the universe and the structure of the universe as we see it. The reason we have matter here in not a billion light years to the left, is because of some hot spot in the early universe, which very slowly gathered together matter and formed all this structure over billions of years.

But those same fluctuations, which came from quantum randomness at the tiny scale, could also have generated black holes, right? That's exactly what you need for black holes, like an extra little spot of density. And so it's natural to things that you could have also gotten black holes formed in those early moments when you have those hot spots of density.

I see. And we're talking like the first few, like, you know, billions of a second after the Big Bang. Yeah, exactly. This is before you had a chance to even make

matter, right? It's not like a question of is the matter made out of corks or electrons. It's just hot stuff, right? There is no matter at all. There's just like energy,

crazy energy density. We don't even really know what was there. But yeah, this is very, very early on in the beginning of the universe. Wow.

Before even matter was cool. Before matter even existed. And so then you could ask the fun question like, well, of a black hole formed before or matter, like, what's in it, right? What's it made out of? What kind of stuff is there? Right. How can it have anything inside of it? Well, we don't know what it's made out of. It's made out of whatever was in the early universe, which is unfortunately still a huge

mystery. Like what was creating the inflation of the universe, this grand expansion that stretched out these tiny quantum mechanical fluctuations into larger fluctuations that gravity could begin to seed? We don't know. And so we don't know if these black holes were made and what masses they were made at and what's in them. But it's a huge mystery. You know, we don't even know what's inside current black holes. Like if you take a star and you squish all this stuff together to make a black hole, are there corks in there still? Are they turned into something else weird? Like what's going on inside there? It's one of the deepest mysteries of the universe. So if you take a spoonful of like weird early universe stuff and make a black hole versus a spoon.

full of like, you know, normal, boring, five billion-year-old star stuff. Do you get a different kind of black hole? It's not a question we know the answer to. All right, let's get into these primordial black holes, how big they are, what do they look like, and what do they smell like? That's what I'm curious about. But first, let's take a quick break. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. I would love for you to share your breakdown on pivoting. We feel sometimes like we're leaving a part of us behind when we enter a new space, but we're just building. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us, I was joined by Volusia Butterfield, media founder,

political strategist, and tech powerhouse for a powerful conversation on storytelling, impact, and the intersections of culture and leadership. I am a free black woman who worked really hard to be able to say that. I'd love for you to break down. Why was so important for you to do C? You can't win as something. you didn't create. From the Obama White House to Google to the Grammys, Malicia's journey

is a masterclass in shifting culture and using your voice to spark change. A very fake, capital-driven, environment and society will have a lot of people tell half-truths. I'm telling you, I'm on the energy committee. Like, if the energy is not right, we're not doing

it, whatever that it is. Listen to Culture raises us on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Kurt Brown-Oller. And I am Scotty Landis and we host Bananas, the weird news podcast with wonderful guests like Whitney Cummings. And tackle the truly tough questions. Why is cool mom an insult, but mom is fine? No.

I always say, Kurt, it's a fun dad. Fun dad and cool mom. That's cool for me. We also dig into important life stuff, like why our last names would make the worst hyphen ever. My last name is Cummings. I have sympathy for nobody. Yeah, mine's brown oler, but with an H. like brown holer okay that's okay yours might be worse we can never get married yeah listen to this

episode with Whitney Cummings and check out new episodes of bananas every Tuesday on the exactly right network listen to bananas on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts welcome to pretty private with Ebeney the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all, childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the stream to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house.

Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

All right, Daniel, we're talking about primordial black holes. And this sounds like the primordial suit kind of of the universe. Well, I don't know what black holes smell like, but these primordial ones are probably pretty swampy, you know? In the suit. But, you know, that reminds me, have you heard of the black hole no hair theorem? What? Yeah, black holes essentially can't have hair. So if this thing is primordial and swampy, it's also shaved clean.

I'm not making that up. Was this a reference to dinosaurs or something? No, I'm not making that up. There's a theory that says the only thing that you can know about black holes is their mass, whether they're spinning and their total electric charge. That's like the only properties they can have. You can know nothing else about what's going on inside of it, what matter is made to use it, whether it shaves daily or lets itself go hairy.

And I think that's why they call it the no hair theorem. Oh, I see. It's like we only know the bare minimum. Things like hair, we can't know those details. That's right. We know the bare minimum. And that's all the information that exists. You know, one question is like, is there information inside the black hole about what was made? Or is that all the information that exists and somehow the black holes who just like removed that information from the universe?

But that's a topic of another podcast. Maybe they're just born bald. Who knows, right? But, all right. So they're at the very beginning of the universe in the very early micro bazillion seconds of the Big Bang. There could have been black holes. And so this is making me ask so many questions. Like, you know, how were they formed? What were they made out of?

How can you have a black hole without any matter being around? Do they just have pure energy inside of them? Yeah, because, you know, gravity is linked to energy density. When we think of gravity is connected to mass, but really it's connected to energy density. And mass is just one example of how you can store energy. So you can make a black hole just out of super intense radiation, right? As long as you have enough energy density. density. It's energy density that bends space that creates what we call gravity. And so it doesn't

matter what kind of mass or energy it is. It's just energy density. I see. And it has to be more dense than the things around it, right? Yes, exactly. It can't just be like having enough energy. It's like you have to have more energy than what's around you so that you can bend space enough to make these pockets. Yeah, exactly. Because if there's also energy around you to bend space the opposite way, then you don't get that curvature you need. And one thing that's really amazing about primordial black holes is that because they don't have to come from stars, you can make them

in other ways, which means you can make them in a whole variety of different sizes. And flavors, probably. No, there's the no flavor of black holes. There's an equivalency there. That's right. That's right. They only come in dark chocolate fudge. No, because you don't have to start from a star, you can make black holes

that are very, very small. Like, primordial black holes might be as small, like one billionth of a kilogram. Oh, wow. All right, so the Big Bang is banging, and there's fluctuations in the energy there, but it's so intense that suddenly you can pop these black holes into existence, and you're saying that they could be really small or they can also be really big. Yeah, it just depends on the mechanism that gives you the energy density, and that's something

there's just like wild speculation about. One theorist had some idea for how the energy density profile looked, and that gives you a bunch of small black holes. Another one thinks the energy density profile look different and that gives you a bunch of big black holes. Another one, most of them actually think that you get a whole distribution. That if you make small black holes, you should also make big black

holes and intermediate black holes. Down from like one billionth of a kilogram up to like thousands of times the mass of our sun. All right. So these primordial black holes, they sort of make sense, right? Because it was a big bang and why not? But we can't

just sort of go with our What do you mean? There was a big bang and why not. That sounds like you could use to explain anything. Hey, how come you ate all the cookies? Hey, well, there was a big bang and dot, dot, dot, dot. Why not? I ate the cookies.

I mean, it just seems so crazy what was happening then. And, you know, why not form black holes? But we can't just kind of go by what makes us to a cartoonist. Jorge Cham, why did you climb Mount Everest? Well, you know, the big bang, dot, dot, dot, dot. Why not? Why not? All right, I need a T-shirt that says that anyway.

Jorge Chan, do you want to host a podcast? You know, Big Bang, why not? Sure. If it's about the Big Bang, we're still in the Big Bang, so why not? The Big is still banging. Well, well, why do we think they exist, I guess? Is there more than just kind of the speculation about what could have been happening back there? Yeah, I mean, it's a fun idea.

It makes sense that they would exist. But if they do exist, they also might solve a bunch of other problems. And this is a cool way to discover something, is to see, like, have an idea for what might be out there and then think about what else it might explain. And if you can sort of wrap up a bunch of other things that we didn't quite understand and tell a nice story that all clicks together,

then that's the best kind of discovery. Oh, I see. We have these other mysteries in the universe, and so now if we can link them to something like primordial black holes, then it would all make sense. It would all make sense. And one of the biggest mysteries out there is the mystery of dark.

matter. We know that most of the universe is not made out of the stuff that I made out of or you're made out of. Most of the stuff is not made out of corks and electrons. If you take the budget of the universe, the energy budget of the universe, only about 30% of it is actually matter. Most of it's dark energy, which is pulling the universe apart. But of that slice that's matter, right? About 80% of that slice, something like 25% of the whole universe is dark matter. This mysterious form of matter that's holding galaxies together and changing the shape of the universe, but we don't know what it is. Right. It's totally different than our kind of matter.

That's right. Our matter is made out of atoms, which are made out of quarks and electrons. So we call that barionic matter because it's made out of these particles that are familiar to us. And what we know is that dark matter is not made out of barionic matter. It's not made out of quarks in some weird configuration that just makes it invisible and transparent. And so we think maybe it's related to primordial black hole? So one candidate for dark matter is primordial black holes because dark matter needs to be dark and black holes are dark. Dark matter needs to be pretty stable because it's stuck around the whole lifetime of the universe and black holes are pretty stable, right?

They last for a very, very long time, if not forever. And they're hard to spot. And so they're a good candidate for dark matter. All this time, dark matter would just be black holes? It could just be black holes, yeah. I thought we like ruled that out. Well, people have looked for it. You know, we'll talk about that.

But it's a pretty compelling possibility. It was never the number one possibility. People were looking for a weird kind of particle that we call a wimp, the weekly interacting massive particle. But you know, that particle sort of had it today and that's come and gone. We thought it was probably a wimp. We looked for it. We didn't see it.

And now we're like hunting around in the attic for other ideas of dark matter that might also explain it that we didn't look at so carefully the first time around. And now that the Wimp idea has sort of lost its shine a little bit, we're like digging through the attic to find these other ideas and buff them up. So maybe like dark matter is just a bunch of black holes floating around in space. That's right. And they would have to be primordial black holes, not stellar black holes. Because we know they've been around for a long time.

Yeah, because we know they've been around for a long time. And also we know a lot about how many quarks there were in the very early universe. We know that dark matter is not made out of quarks because we're, we know a lot about how many quarks there were because we do these really careful calculations and we see that if you had more quarks or less quarks, you get a different mixture of stuff in the universe like more helium or more lithium or more hydrogen. And that's the kind of thing we can measure really, really well. And then we can back propagate and we say, all right, given that we know how much helium and lithium and nitrogen and neon there is in the universe, that means there was a certain

density of corks in the early universe. So for dark matter to have been around then, it can't have been made out of quarks. It had to be like taken out of the equation before quarks were made. And that's why it would have to be primordial black holes to sort of like scoop all that energy and that matter out of the pie before you got around to making quarks. Put it into these primordial black holes and then wait until humans are confused about the whole thing. Oh, interesting. Exactly. And so nobody's seen these things, right? Primordial black holes still theoretical. Nobody has seen them. We'll talk in a minute about how you could look for them. I see. All right. So then what else do they explain possibly?

Well, the other thing they might explain are these incredible black holes at the center of galaxies. You know, the Milky Way, its very core is really hot and dense and the stellar environment there is choked with gas and dust and activity. But at the very, very core is a huge black hole. Right. And that black hole is called Sagittarius A. And it has, you know, the mass of millions of suns. It's enormous. It's like an incredible. Incredible object. And they're a big mystery because they're so big, there's sort of like no way for them to have come from stars almost, right?

Like to cram together a billion stars that turn into black holes is kind of hard. And it's a lot harder than you might imagine. You might think, well, doesn't a big black hole get really powerful and just suck stuff in? Isn't it sort of like a runaway process? Remember that we are not falling into the center of the galaxy for the same reason that the Earth is not plunging into the sun and the moon is not crashing under the earth. And that's rotation. And you have angular momentum, which keeps you from falling in.

Even a really strong force of gravity cannot overcome angular momentum and suck stuff in. So a really strong black hole, it's not that easy for it to actually grow. It's mostly pull stuff in into a decretion disk to spin around it really fast. But to actually grow, it doesn't happen very quickly. So they do these studies where they say, can I make a Milky Way with this black hole? in it. Let me seed it with a couple of little black holes and let it grow. And when they do those calculations, they don't get a big enough black hole. The black hole we get in our simulations are much smaller than the black holes we see in real life. So is the idea then that

maybe that black hole at the center of our galaxy was there at the beginning? Like maybe it was there before even matter formed around it. Maybe it was one of these huge primordial black holes and that's how it started. It started off big. Exactly. You got to seed it with a big black hole. Maybe galaxies were formed around huge primordial black holes, which then gathered together dark matter and all sorts of normal matter around it, seeding that sort of structure. And if you start from a big enough black hole, then it's much easier to get to the kind of big supermassive black holes that we see at the centers of galaxies. And the other critical thing to understand is that these supermassive black holes are not new. It's not like they've just formed. we see them because they're very easy to spot

because they create intense radiation in the form of quasars that we've talked about some of the brightest things in the universe we can see them from very far away which means we see very far back in time so we know that they were super massive black holes making quasars in the early universe so not only are they huge

but they've been around a long time so you know that sort of smells like there's something else going on out there in terms of making black holes That's a wild idea because that that would mean that galaxies almost formed because of primordial black holes. You know, like galaxies form where they were because that's where the primordial black holes were. Yeah. You know, like they were the pioneers for galaxies.

Yeah, and it makes a lot of sense, right? The seeds of structure of the whole universe come from what happened in those first few moments. And if those first few moments triggered the formation of primordial black holes, then that sort of, you know, made the decision. Like once you create a primordial black hole, it's sort of a foregone conclusion that everything else is going to like gather around. You're not going to start a whole new party when you already have a big one pumping away. Wow. So they almost like where they form determine the shape and the look of the universe. Yeah. And the thing that I'll never stop being amazed by is that those formations come from random fluctuations like quantum mechanical randomness in the very early universe, which means that like this randomness determined the structure of our universe. You run the same rules of physics over and over again.

You get a very different universe. I mean, you might still have black holes and galaxies, but you get galaxies in different places, right? Somebody's rolling a dye out there and making different universes every time. It's sort of amazing. Every time. Every time. Yeah, you know, there's not that many places in the world where you can see the effects of quantum randomness.

Mostly it's just averaged out. You know, there's quantum mechanics everywhere, but mostly it just sort of balances itself out. It's like almost like, we're the evidence of quantum flux. Yes, exactly. If there were quantum fluctuations, there would be no structure at all. So we are all the products of quantum fluctuation. So thank you to quantum fluctuations for having made us. Said the quantum physicists. Made of quantum particles. All right. Well, let's get into why else we think they're there and whether or not they're real and whether we can maybe actually see or smell and touch a primordial black hole. But first, let's take another quick break. Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

I would love for you to share your breakdown on pivoting. We feel sometimes like we're leaving a part of us behind when we enter a new space, but we're just building. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us, I was joined by Volisha Butterfield, Media Founder, Political Strategist, and Tech Powerhouse for a powerful conversation on storytelling, impact, and the intersections of culture and leadership. I am a free black woman who worked really hard to be able to say that. I'd love for you to break down why it was so important for you to do C. You can't win as something you didn't create. From the Obama White House to Google to the Grammys, Belichia's journey is a masterclass in shifting culture and using your voice to spark change.

A very fake, capital-driven environment and society will have a lot of people tell half-truths. I'm telling you, I'm on the energy committee. Like, if the energy is not right, we're not doing it, whatever that it is. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Kurt Brown-Oller. And I am Scotty Landis, and we host Bananas, the Weird News Podcasts with wonderful guests like Whitney Cummings. And tackle the truly tough questions. Why is cool mom an insult, but mom is fine?

No. I always say, Kurt's a fun dad. Fun dad and cool mom. That's cool for me. We also dig into important life stuff. Like why our last names would make the worst hyphen ever. My last name is Cummings. I have sympathy for nobody.

Yeah, mine's brown-olar, but with an H. So it looks like brown-holler. Okay, that's, okay, yours might be worse. We can never get married. Yeah. Listen to this episode with Whitney Cummings and check out new episodes of bananas every Tuesday on the exactly right network. Listen to bananas on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, do this, pull that, turn this. It's just...

I can do it my eyes closed. I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And on our new show, No Such Thing, we get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need

to recognize that they lack expertise. And then, as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. See? Listen to No Such Thing on the I Heart Radio. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, Daniel, we're talking about primordial black holes, and, you know, it sounds like maybe they could explain a lot of mysteries, like how the universe formed the way it did and where dark matter comes from. And so we think they're there because, not just because of these theories and because they could explain these things, but we're also kind of seeing them kind of in a way, or we seeing clues that they might exist. Yeah, we see lots of things that are easier to explain

if primordial black holes exist, which is sort of a very indirect argument, but, you know, the kind of thing you want to see if these things are real. And another piece of evidence is that we sort of see more black hole collisions than we expected. Remember, we turned on this incredible device

a few years ago called LIGO, which looks for gravitational waves, the kind of shaking of space and time that only happens when incredibly massive objects orbit each other and then collide like black holes. And the thing to understand is

when they turned this thing on and they made it powerful, they made it sensitive enough to see this kind of shaking of the universe. They didn't know how often the universe got shook. Like they built this device that could see these waves,

but they didn't know if the waves were everywhere or just like once in a million years. Right. It was sort of built to listening for black holes crashing into each other, but we had no idea how often that happens. Yeah.

And there were calculations all over the place. And the amazing thing is that, you know, they turned this thing on and they found one basically right away. Wow. Like, they were still doing a lot of their calibrations in test run

when they saw a golden, golden collision come in like the first weekend. Wow. It's like the best case scenario for science, you know? So it's like, it's happening more often than they expect it. Like, you know, there's black holes crashing all over the place, kind of.

Yeah, and what that means is that there are more black holes than they thought in the particular sort of mass range that they can see them. They're good at seeing collisions of black holes that are like 10 to 100 times the mass of the sun. And there are more of those than they think. Like, you can get black holes about the mass of the sun or five times the mass of

the sun. But to get black holes like 50 or 100 times the mass of the sun is not that easy, as we were saying before, because there aren't stars that big and black holes have to merge to make them. And so we're seeing more of those than we would expect, which again suggests, hey, maybe maybe these are primordial black holes. Maybe the universe is littered with them. Yeah.

Maybe even in our own backyard. That's right. There could be one here in our solar system. There could be one in our solar system. Now, this is very speculative, but super fun. We did a podcast episode last year about Planet 9. Like, when you look at the orbit of the outer planets, there's some weird things that we don't understand that are sort of suggestive of another gravitational body out there.

Something out there that's tugging on these things, that's making their orbits a little weird. And it's not conclusive at all, but it sort of makes more sense if you add one more planet. Problem is we haven't seen that planet. Like, where is it? You know, even Pluto, we can see. And so one super fun idea is that maybe...

It's like, it's invisible. Maybe it's invisible. Like we can feel it. It's affecting the orbit of the other planets on us, but you can't see it. So maybe, maybe it's a black hole. Yeah. And maybe it's a small black hole.

In this case, to have the right mass, It would have to be really small. I mean, it's still be pretty massive, but we're not talking mass of the sun. We're talking about an object about the size of a tennis ball. And that's orbiting our sun. It's like our solar system you're saying could have a tennis ball black hole orbiting around it

just like it has planets orbiting around it. Yeah. Wow. Exactly. And a black hole that small would still have enough gravitational power to change the orbits of the planets enough to tweak them to make that visible from Earth.

earth. So if there were such a black hole, this is exactly what it would look like. That doesn't mean it's there, but it's tantalizing. And so the idea, I guess, is that this black hole in our solar system didn't form, like after the solar system. It almost predates the solar system and predates, you know, matter itself. Like it's, maybe the universe is littered with these tennis balls black holes and we just happen to like catch one in our solar system. Yeah, maybe we should have called them like indigenous black holes because they were here before we got here, right? They were like, hey, this is my solar system. What do you guys doing? Setting up camp

was colonizing my part of space. It predates the atoms in the sun. Yeah, it predates the atoms in the sun, exactly. And so it could have been here and just fell into orbit around the sun. It could have been captured, and it could be wandering the universe and then been captured. There's a zillion possibilities. But it's got stories to tell.

Yeah, it's seen the birth of our solar system. Wow. Yeah, it was, if it exists. It has embarrassing baby pictures about our son. It knows you when you were small. That's right. All right. So then let's cover really quickly here whether or not these primordial holes are real.

I mean, have we seen them? How could we see them? What are we doing to confirm their existence? Well, we have not seen any evidence for their existence yet, which is disappointing. Except maybe there's Planet 9, right? Or indirectly as a reason for the ones at the center of galaxies. Yeah, we see things that would make more sense if primordial black holes existed, but there could also be other exploits.

It's very indirect. What we'd like to do is see them sort of much more directly. See something which has to be a primordial black hole. And one of the origins of this whole idea was Stephen Hawking thinking about black holes evaporating. And he realized that, you know, black holes might not live forever. They give off this radiation. But the key thing about Hawking radiation is that the bigger the black hole, the less it radiates. So a super huge black hole. Anything bigger than like 10 to the 12 kilos? will take longer than the age of the universe to evaporate. So they basically live forever. Right, because they have so much stuff in them.

They have so much stuff in them. But as a black hole gets smaller, it has much less mass than it actually radiates more. And so if you're less mass, you radiate more, which means you lose mass, which means you radiate even more, which means you lose even more mass. And so black holes around like 10 to the 10 or 10 to the 11 kilograms, they can radiate away and actually disappear on the timescale of about a billion years. Which helps us because... Well, wouldn't you like to see a black hole die?

Not if I have to wait a billion years. Well, but we're 14 billion years in, which means if black holes are living about a billion years, then they should be dying all the time. We should be looking around and seeing this happen. So you're saying we could see a black hole dying? Or what would we see? We would see the sputtering the last few gasps or what?

It will not go out with a whimper. Remember, it evaporates more rapidly as it gets to lower mass. So the last few moments are very spectacular. That's when it's radiating even more than it has before. So they would go out in this big flash of light, essentially. Really? It starts off very gradually, and then it would blow all of its energy in the last moments. You know, in this runaway evaporation, it would be very spectacular.

Oh, wow. Like the last gasp of the black hole. Yeah, and it would be very characteristic sort of radiation. And so we've looked for this and we've sent our satellites out to look in space to see if we can see these kind of flashes and you might expect to see them sort of like in the edge of the galaxy where it's otherwise dark, but we haven't seen any of them. Like we know what kind of radiation they would give off? Yeah, because black holes give off a very particular kind of radiation, this hawking radiation of a certain spectrum. So we would expect to see it. It indicates the sort of temperature of the black hole at the moment.

Oh, I see. So it would look like nothing else. Oh, I see. So is the idea then that, you know, if the universe is littered with. primordial black holes, we should see a whole bunch of them dying all the time. Yeah, that's exactly right. They were all born Big Bang, but if the last, you know, billions of years, we've been around billions of years and so we should see some of them fuzzing out of existence.

But so far we haven't seen, we haven't been seen these. We have not. And we've looked pretty carefully and we haven't seen those. So that tells us that if there are primordial black holes sort of a very low mass, you know, less than a billion kilograms, then there aren't very many of it. We can still have one that size of a tennis ball in our solar system. but maybe it's not common to have small ones. That's right. And the small

ones, therefore, cannot explain the dark matter in the universe. There's just not enough of them. If they do exist, there's not enough of the small mass ones to explain the dark matter. But, you know, maybe there are heavier black holes. Maybe there's really big ones out there. So we have other ways to look for those. Or maybe all the little ones that already died

or something. Yeah, precisely. And so we could look around to see if there are heavier mass black holes. And we have other ways to do that. Like, if these black holes exist, then we should see lensing effects. We should see them like passing in front of stars and galaxies and blocking the light from them or distorting the light from them. Right. Just like dark matter? Wouldn't that account for how dark matter does that? Just like dark matter, exactly. Except dark matter so far we thought is more diffuse. We've only detected dark matter in like really big effects, gravitational effects and

big clumps of dark matter, lensing background galaxies, for example. What we're looking for here is like microlensing, like a really tiny spot of something passing in front of an object and distorting it. Not a big diffuse cloud. If dark matter really is made of primordial black holes, it should be made of these tiny little spots that we can see these microlensing effects. Because I guess you're talking about black holes now that are about the size of a planet or like giant asteroids. Yeah, giant asteroids or larger. Anything larger than that, we should see these lensing effects. And if they're even larger, if they're like really super crazy massive,

then they would have big effects on like the structure of the galaxy itself and the relationship between galaxies. Like if they were just like ginormous, like mind-blowingly, like billions of suns, then they would distort the whole shape of the universe and we would see that for sure. So we know they're not like redonculously big. And we're pretty sure that there aren't really massive primordial black holes out there because we would see these microlensing effect. So we've ruled out.

the very, very, very light ones and the very, very, very heavy ones. Right. And this interesting region sort of in the middle. Well, the very, very big ones might be like galaxies, right? Like, that's where they might be. Right, but we know the size of the black holes in the center of galaxies. And that certainly doesn't account for the dark matter. All right.

So we're looking for them. And how are we looking for them, I guess? With telescopes, with radio telescopes? Well, another way to look for them is to see them destroying other stars. It's like, if you have this sort of intermediate class black holes, something like, you know, 10 to the 14, 10 to the 17 kilograms, then they would occasionally like pass through a white dwarf or a neutron star and essentially destroy it. What? Yeah, because, you know. Yeah, I guess if you have a whole bunch of black holes floating around everywhere, it would be a little bit, you would expect there to be a little bit of a chaos, right?

Yeah, it would be disruptive. And so they would pass through and they would shatter these things. They might ignite fusion in a white dwarf, like kick it up into actually. burning again and they could totally disrupt neutron stars. And we just don't see that happening. Like the population of white dwarfs and neutron stars, it looks as we expect. And so we don't see a big effect. We don't see, you know, something assassinating neutron stars out there. We don't see a whole bunch of chaos weasels running around the galaxy. That's right. But this part is very, is hard. Like this is a hard measurement to do, to find these things, to calculate how

often you would see them. So there's sort of a lot of controversy in this middle region here. People are still really not sure how strong those limits are. I mean, there would have to be these black holes and they would have to run into other stuff, which in space is kind of hard. Yeah. And another thing we can do is we can just look at our own sun. Like our sun is big enough that it would survive having a small black hole just like go into it. And they've done these awesome studies where they show that you could see it happen by looking at ripples on the surface of the sun like sun quakes could be evidence for micro black holes entering the sun like little like that would that would be incredible wow we should get into that like what happens if a black hole goes into our sun it sounds a little

disconcerting well if it's really big then we're in trouble but if it's small enough it just sort of like causes literal waves on the surface of the sun the sun will settle back down and be okay but you could definitely see that so that's kind of the thing we're planning to do in the future to see if we can spot these things. All right. Well, it sounds like an idea that makes a lot of sense. It's definitely a cool idea. But maybe the jury's still out whether or not they're like actually there. The jury's definitely out. We don't know. We're looking. Yeah, we're looking. We don't know if these things are real. If they are real, they would explain a lot. But so far, you know, it's not looking

good. Like the best models suggest that if you made primordial black holes, you should make them sort of all masses. The really small ones, the really big ones. And we haven't seen them at the small masses or the really big ones. So that makes it a little more awkward. So now you have to play some clever game and come up with some reason why you would only make primordial black holes at a certain mass region. So it makes it less fun and sort of less pretty of an idea. But hey, it's still possible. Yeah. Well, yeah, I was getting kind of excited about this idea. It's a primeval idea. It's primordial. Yeah, I should check my primordial. Or Well, I think once again, at this points, I think, to all the things we don't know about the universe.

We don't know what happened at the Big Bang and we don't know whether or not maybe there are still the remnants of before the Big Bang, just hanging out with us, even in our solar system. Absolutely. And it's tantalizing to think that those remnants could be here and they could hold clues as to what happened in those first few moments. They could give us insights into how the universe was made. And if we measured the sort of spectrum of these black holes and the skin, covered their masses and only these were made, not those were made.

They'd really be like a window back in the first few moments of the universe. So I really do hope they do exist because primordial is a cool word and the idea is cool. And I hope that they have secrets in them that they will review. Yeah, because, you know, why not, right? Why not exactly? Big Bang was so much fun. Let's do it again. But not yet.

Why not yet? Yeah, let's hold off on that. We'll put a pin on that. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that discussion. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. Thanks for listening.

And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeart Radio. For more podcasts from IHeart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grasias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews 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'll talk about all that's viral and trending with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dresses Come Again on the I-HeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone and there is help out there. The Good Stuff Podcast Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. One Tribe, save my life twice. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple 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 BAQA. 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. This is an IHeart podcast.