Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What Happens When Galaxies Collide?

Episode Date: January 3, 2019

Will our lives be affected when the Milky Way collides with Andromeda? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier.

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And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 a little bit of. achievement and a whole lot of laughs. And of course, the great bibras you've come to expect.

Listen to the new season of Dacia's Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You get your podcast. Hey, Daniel, what keeps you up at night? Oh, I worry about a lot of things. Financial crises. My kids growing up to be just like me. sorts of stuff. I worry about that too. For them. You worry about my kids growing up to be just like me?

We can't have more of him in the world. Okay. But like on a galactic scale, on a universe scale, what's something we should be concerned about? Well, we do have a lot of things to look forward to in terms of our galaxy. If we survive the sun exploding and the waters of the earth boiling off, then we have something pretty dramatic to look forward to, which is that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is going to collide with their nearest neighbor Endromeda. Meaning right now there's an entire galaxy Andromeda heading towards us at this very

moment. That's right. It's like somebody shot it at us with a slingshot and it's zooming right towards us. It's going to hit us smack on. Hi, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel. And this is our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe. On the episode today, we're going to talk about... What will happen when galaxies collide? Is this something we should all be worrying about and packing our bags about,

building our underground shelters, or are we all screwed, or is it just going to be like a big nothing? Yeah, how much should I pack? You should definitely be stocking lentils no matter what. Lentils are a good investment for any of these end-of-the-worlds. Lentils, not just beans. No, no, lentils. I mean, lentils are a kind of legume. For a galactic emergency, that's the one to go with.

Yeah, absolutely. I would invest in lentils heavily. It's not just because I happen to purchase lentil stocks just before we recorded this podcast, and I'm trying to drum up the lentil futures. I'm sincerely worried about our listeners, and I encourage you all to go out there and stockpile lentils. Well, that's a whole hill of beans worth of advice right there. That's right.

And so this is the question in today's podcast, what will happen when our galaxy, the Milky Way, collides with the neighboring galaxy? And this question I love, not just because it's huge and dramatic and galactic and all this sort of stuff, but because it was suggested by one of our listeners. That's right.

It's Blake from Australia, who listens to this podcast on her commute to work every day. That's right. And she didn't tell us what she uses to commute. Maybe she rides in a beautiful pickup truck. Maybe she's in the back of a limo. Maybe she's sitting her a kangaroo. Who knows.

That's right. A kangaroo with a really nice sound system. Yeah, but she had some interesting feedback for us about our podcast, right? What did she say? Yeah, she said that she likes listening to me, explain things, but she also likes when you interrupt me. She said that often you interrupt me just the same moment when she has a question and you pose the same question that was bouncing around in her head

that she was shouting at her limo sound system or kangaroo speakers or whatever she's using to listen to. And so I was glad for that. that because, you know, I like when you interrupt me also. It breaks the flow and it keeps me from just droning on and on and on. So thank you, Blake, for suggesting this topic, and thank you Jorge for occasionally interrupting. Yeah, I know I'm happy to be rude. It seems to come naturally to me. Yeah. Yeah, and so that's the topic of today's podcast. And we thought, first, before we dove into it, we would walk around like we usually do and ask people, are you worried about a galactic collision, what do you think will happen when our galaxy collides with a neighboring galaxy?

So put that image in your mind, two giant galaxies, full stars running into each other, what do you think is going to happen? Here's what people had to say. Big explosion, we'd probably all die. It is going to be mostly nothing because of all the empty space around the worlds, although there will be some crashes and so on in the way. Probably somewhere between a glacial, slow. event that we won't even notice and nothing at all. Maybe leaning toward nothing

at all. I think it would probably be a big explosion with something pretty crazy happening. All right, that was a little anti-climatic. People seem to have very low expectations of this event. What do you mean? It seems like half the people are like, it's going to be nothing. And the other half are like, big explosions,

we're all going to die. Well, why do you think Blake asked this question? Do you think this is something she's concerned about or is something she's curious? about, you know? I think Blake is probably deciding whether or not to stock up on lentils, you know. She's probably right now a story she asked. I think it's part of just trying to be sort of a citizen of the larger universe, you know,

wondering where we stand and trying to think bigger than just our planet, you know, because there's so much going on out there. It's so easy to just walk around on the surface of this planet, never really look up and remember that there's an enormous amount of stuff happening out there. And then you wonder, like, well, how is that relevant? to me and is it going to ruin my life or can I go on ignoring it? So I think maybe she was just sort of thinking into the deep future and wondering like how long can this whole ridiculous, beautiful thing we call life on earth go on.

Right. Is it going to change from how it is now, right? Yeah, exactly. Do I need to change the way I live? Does it affect any decision making? On the other hand, it could be that Blake, like many people, is just a thinker and likes to think about these scenarios. And she probably heard that the Milky Way will collide with Endromeda and wondering, like,

what's that going to be like? You know, this this other side of me that likes to smash stuff together. I mean, I'm a particle physicist, but then we have the whole universe to play with, right? And so you might wonder, like, what happens when planets collide? What happens when solar systems collide? Oh, my gosh, what if we could build a galaxy collider and shoot them against each other and smash them into each other, right? So it just comes out of like a curiosity to see stuff break by smashing it together.

Yeah. Well, let's take a step back and just kind of think about why even galaxies would collide. Is this a relevant question that, is this something that happens a lot, galaxies colliding, or is it something that's incredibly rare? It turns out galaxies colliding happens all the time. It's like a totally natural thing. Really? And our galaxy, yeah, not only will our galaxy collide with Enjomeda in a few billion years, it's currently colliding with other smaller galaxies that are right. What?

Yeah. We're in a collision right now. Yeah, that's right. And remember that galactic timescales are very different. You know, the galaxy takes about 200 million years just to rotate once. To go around once? Yeah, so one galactic year is 200 million Earth years. But it looks so swirly.

It looks, you know what I mean? Like, it looks like it's in motion, but it's actually super slow. It is in motion. It's just very slow, right? And so all these things are dancing around each other, and sometimes they bump into each other. And the thing I think is amazing is that, you know, until like a hundred years ago,

we didn't even know there were other galaxies. Like we looked up at the night sky and we saw stars and we thought, oh, there's just stars that go on forever. The universe is just filled with stars. The universe is just like a giant mess of pinpoints, right? Just stars. Yeah. Yeah, like somebody had scattered stars across the cosmos, right?

And it was Hubble, the guy for whom the telescope and the constant are named, he's the guy who figured out, oh, some of those things that are really far out there are not stars. there are other galaxies, right? So the universe is filled with other galaxies. And of course, there are more galaxies than stars. And then each galaxy, of course, contains hundreds of billions of stars. And so the numbers pretty quickly blow your head up before you can understand them.

But the point I wanted to make was that we didn't even realize there were galaxies until recently. And now we're realizing that galaxies are in motion relative to each other and they're moving. These galaxies that we see out there in the sky, they're not just like hanging there in space, never to change, right? They are moving, their dynamic things and they're constantly in motion and they have huge gravitational attraction.

Well, let's break it down. What exactly is a galaxy? I mean, I know it's like a collection of stars, but, you know, why do stars clump together like that, first of all? And what makes a galaxy special? Like, why is it more than just

a clump of stars? Well, what makes our galaxy special is that you're in it, Horny? There's no other galaxy. That features such a good-looking, funny cartoonists. Thank you. Me and lentils. We make it habitable.

Right. Okay. So what's the recipe for a galaxy, right? Well, the thing that the galaxies have the most of, remember, is dark matter. In general, there's about five times as much dark matter as there is any other kind of matter. You know, the stuff that makes up gas and dust and stars and people and cartoonists and ice cream. So it's mostly dark matter. So that's the stuff we can see or touch. I mean, we did a whole podcast episode on dark matter. But it, just in case somebody didn't listen to it, it's like this weird, invisible, dark, gravity thing that's hanging out that every galaxy has.

That's right. Yeah, we call it dark and matter because we can't see it, so it's dark. And we know it gives gravity, so therefore it's matter. And the crazy thing is that until, you know, a few decades ago, we didn't even know it existed. And now we know that galaxies are mostly made up of this stuff, right? So number one ingredient when you want to make a galaxy is you have to have dark. dark matter. It's like five times more than the stars, right? Yeah, exactly. It's like a galaxy is basically a clump of dark matter with a few sprinkles of stars in it. That's right. Yeah, if a galaxy was a

cupcake, right? The dark matter would be the chocolate cake and, you know, everything else would be the frosting and the sprinkles. The gas and the dust would be the frosting, the stars would be the sprinkles on top. Oh, I see. Okay. That's kind of the right proportions. Yeah, something like that. Wow. So you start with a big blob of dark matter. Okay. And that's most of it. And then after that you have huge amounts of gas and dust, right? And that's the stuff that's left over from the Big Bang or left over from stars exploding. And those are the ingredients you need to make planets and stars and all sorts of stuff that you're familiar with, right? And so you have dark matter, you have gas, you have dust, you have planets and stars. And black

holes, right? Like there's not just little black holes sprinkled throughout, probably, but there's a huge, giant black hole at the center of every galaxy. That's right. I can't believe I forgot the black hole. The black hole at the center of almost every galaxy is huge. It's like millions of solar masses, and it's sitting there at the center of the black hole. And it's got a lot of stuff to it also, right? It carries a lot of mass, and so it contributes. So that's what a galaxy is.

And a galaxy couldn't really form without all those elements. Like, you couldn't really have a galaxy without dark matter, because dark matter provides the gravitational attraction to suck all this stuff together. You know, they do these simulations of the universe. They say, what would the universe look like if you never had dark matter in it? And it would take a lot longer for galaxies to form because dark matter has pulled all this stuff together. It's like it's made a well in the rubber sheet of the universe

so everything rolls together more closely. Okay, so that's a galaxy. It's a black hole surrounded by dark matter and sprinkles of stars. And gas and dust. And lentils. And lentils, exactly, yes. And so they're not just hanging out in space, they're moving around. That's right.

Each one is spinning, right? Which is why you see a lot of them having these spiral features. Each one is spinning. And then they're also moving around each other. They each have gravity, and they're moving around each other. And they have these, each galaxy is a member of a cluster of galaxies. And so these guys are orbiting the center of the cluster. And then the clusters are members of super clusters.

So these things have a lot of gravitational interactions everywhere. It's like a system of galaxies. They all can interact with each other. and they all spin around their common center of mass. Exactly, right, and they're all spinning around that center. So it's sort of like a big slow-motion tornado, right? If you looked at it really, really slow, you're like, oh, nothing's really moving. I mean, I guess a little bit, but you watch it at natural speed, a tornado, and obviously it's going

really fast. And so a galaxy is that sort of that same way. The system of galaxies is sort of that same way, but they're all moving around each other. And then occasionally, you know, they bump into each other. Wow, that's so weird to think that gravity works that way. We are, you know, moving around the center of the Earth. The Earth is moving around our solar system around the center of gravity, which is mostly the sun.

But the sun is also moving around the center of gravity of the galaxy. And the galaxy is also moving around center of gravity of its cluster of galaxies. That's right, yeah. And on and on and on, like a bunch of nested Russian dolls, you know. Yeah. Until you get to the biggest structures in the universe, you know, which are the superclusters and then the filaments of superclusters. And beyond that, we don't know anything about whether there are

bigger and bigger structures. That's as far as we've seen. So we're moving around, and sometimes these two galaxies can just run into each other. In the giant vastness of space, all these moving galaxies can sometimes cross-pass, right? Yeah, and there's another thing I want to say about that before we talk about what actually happens, which is that it's incredible to me that gravity is the force that's dominant on these scales, right? Like, the thing that's controlling how galaxies form and how they dance around each other and that's pulling them all the way through the universe and forming these crazy structures. It's all gravity, right? But gravity is the weakest force of nature. It's weaker than

electromagnetism. It's weaker than any of the nuclear forces. It's pathetically weak. But it's the only one that operates on these huge scales and it can't be balanced out. And so, because it's only an attractive force. There's no repulsive version of it. And so that's why, like, on these huge scales, gravity is a thing that dominates. Gravity determines the structure of the solar system, the structure of the galaxy, the structure of the clusters, gravity sort of wins in the end. It's like, you know, revenge of the nerd forces, right? It's like the weakest force in the end controls the universe. It's like slow and steady wins the race. That's right. It's the turtle of forces, yeah. Anyway, we need to do a whole other podcast on why gravity is so weird and

weak and whatever, and we'll get to that. Okay. So we have clusters and galaxies are moving around space and sometimes they collide. So yeah, let's talk about what actually happens when two of these things collide. But first, let's take a quick break. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools,

they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasias Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition?

No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest. actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success.

I feel like this is my destiny. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vibras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community.

You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. Yeah. But the whole pretending and cold, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Has Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Athea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal.

Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstyles play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss Session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett,

where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, so we're sitting in a galaxy. And we are moving inside of this galaxy, and this galaxy is moving in space. But there's another galaxy nearby called the Andromeda Galaxy, and it's kind of an intercept course with us, right? Like we're going to run into it in about four and a half billion years.

Yeah, not kind of. They've measured it. They can measure the velocity of endromeda relative to us, and they can see that it's getting closer and closer every year. And they can also measure the lateral velocity. Like, is it going to shoot by us or come right at us? And for a while, they weren't sure. They were like, oh, it's heading our way, but it could miss.

You know, like every time they say there's an asteroid coming within, you know, a certain thousands of miles of the Earth and usually it misses. For a while, they weren't sure. But now they're pretty certain. They've taken enough measurements. They've seen it moving. They can project confidently that these two things are going to collide. Also, Andromeda and the Milky would have a lot of gravity.

And so you don't have to aim perfectly to get a collision, right? They're going to pull each other closer and closer. They want to collide. You know? Do you know what I mean? Like, it's not like a random asteroid. It's like we're pulling towards each other. Yeah, well, I don't know if you can really say they want.

Like, do you understand the psychology of a galaxy? Do you know what galaxy wants in life, you know? Hey, galaxies have feelings, right? I don't know. I think I read that science fiction novel, right? Every galaxy is actually a living thing. And we were just like the tiny moats on an island of red blood cells inside of galaxy. Anyway, yeah, so you don't have to shoot perfectly and they're going to collide.

So to think about what happens in the collision, you probably think. about each individual piece separately. Like, we're a cluster of things. Like a galaxy is not a solid object. It's like a word, almost like a cloud of things, right? Is that kind of what you mean? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, imagine two crowds, right, passing into each other.

Like, one gets off the train and one's coming down the stairs and they pass each other in the platform. What's going to happen? Well, it depends on how they interact, right? And how dense they are. Oh, I see. So we can start with something of the obvious parts, like the stars. Okay.

So you might think, oh, my gosh, there's a hundred billion stars. coming right at us, that's going to be a big deal. Is that the right size? Is it drama right about the same size as the Milky Way? Actually, I think it's bigger than the Milky Way, but, you know, factors of 10 here are not important. So it's hundreds of billions of stars. And each star, of course, is really big. And you might think, well, they're heading right at us, you know, this is going to be a big deal.

But remember that the stars are really far apart also. Like, galaxies are huge, not just in terms of the number of stars, but in terms of the amount of space they take up. Oh, I see. And, you know, you look around you in our galaxy, there aren't that many stars nearby, right? And the closest stars are light years away. I like this crowd analogy. That's pretty interesting. Like, we're a crowd of people getting off the subway.

There's a crowd of people coming down the stairs to get on the subway. It's going to be a disaster, potentially. Potentially. But if it's not rush hour and the crowds are pretty light, you know, there's like enough space, the two crowds can just pass right through each other. Like if the stairways and the hallways are huge and people are pretty strong. spread out, it may not be like a riot, you know, it may just be like a busy intersection. Right. It's like two people leaving Yankee Stadium at the same time as somebody else is trying

to come in. Like, there's plenty of exits. Nobody's going to bump into each other, right? Okay. And that's sort of the case with stars. I read this one comparison where if you imagine a star is the size of a ping pong ball, on average, the nearest star is three kilometers away, right? So like if you were going to throw a ping pong ball into a cloud of ping pong balls where the space between them, we're three kilometers away. You'd be lucky if you hit anything, right? Even if you were trying. Oh, I see. Okay. So our galaxy is actually pretty sparse, meaning the stars are pretty far apart from each other. We're not sort of clumped together. Yeah, exactly. Astronomically speaking. Astronomically speaking. And so there's going to be very few or probably zero direct collisions, you know, where one star like actually slams into another one. You get stellar explosions. I mean, that would be pretty awesome. I would pay for front road seats for sure. But I think it's pretty unlikely that's going to happen.

Oh, but, you know, there's 100 billion stars running into 100 billion other stars. Surely some of them are going to hit head on, isn't it, aren't they? I mean, there's always a non-zero probability. You could get lucky or unlucky, depending on which outcome you're reading for. But if they're diffuse enough, right, if they're far enough apart, then all of them could pass through without hitting. I mean, I think probably the most likely scenario is that maybe you get one. The stars also don't have to hit directly to affect each other. Each one is a big blob of mass, which means it has gravity.

And so they can jostle each other. I mean, if another star came by near our solar system and passed nearby, it could affect the orbits of all the planets. You could like nudge a planet out of orbit. He didn't have to hit the star directly head on nor to affect our lives. It could maybe pull us out of orbit or suck us into that other star. That's right. It could steal planets, right, exactly. Or one of our planets could get ejected out of the solar system.

or it could even kick our star out of the galaxy. Our star is an orbit around the center of the galaxy, right? And if another star comes near enough, it could get pulled so that it gets out of that orbit. An orbit is sort of a delicate thing. You have to be the right radius and the right velocity for it all to work. You start going too fast and you reach escape velocity.

And our star could even get kicked out of the galaxy. So we could be sort of evicted from the Milky Way, It's loading in intergalactic space just our star with the planets and everything. Oh, I see. So when two galaxies collide, we don't have to worry about things running into each other, but it is going to be pretty chaotic, right?

Like suddenly there's going to be twice a number of stars and that's just going to change everything, right? Yeah, exactly. So things are definitely going to get mixed up. The stars won't necessarily smash into each other, but they definitely mix each other up and disturb each other. Yeah. So are these two masses just going to kind of

go towards each other, mix a little bit, and then keep going, or are they, you know, slam into each other and then become this giant mega galaxy? It depends a little bit on their relative velocity. If they're going fast enough relative to each other, then they'll pass through each other, right? But if they're not, and it doesn't seem like they are, that the most likely scenario is that they merge, that they come together and there's a little bit of sloshing and whatever, but eventually becomes one big galaxy. What does that mean? It's like the other stars from the other galaxy, they're going to come, but then. they're going to kind of go past us a little bit and then they're going to get pulled back in kind of thing like it's going to like a giant jelly out in space like it's going to go blue

you know what I mean but in slow motion yeah or sort of like things getting flushed down the toilet you know they come closer and closer and circle each other faster and faster cosmic swirly you know we might circle each other the two galaxies yeah and sort of a wall being on top of each other you know

so come together past a little the centers of mass might pass a little bit and then turn and come the other direction and spin up faster and faster until the center is a mass align. So being flushed down to toilet, that doesn't sound pleasant. Like, that doesn't sound like it's going to be easy.

Do you know what I mean? Like, it doesn't sound like it's going to leave us... Unscathed. It might, though, you know. Our sun could be totally fine, and it could be that the planets are not distorted. Their orbits are not distorted. And we could just have a front row seat

to a pretty amazing event. And the other thing is that we see this happening all the time. Like, you look out into space with the Hubble, you zoom in on other galaxies. There's lots of galaxies. out there and lots of them are in various stages of merging. And you can see galaxies that are just starting to merge. You can see galaxies that have been merging for a billion years. You can see galaxy that obviously merged a long time ago and there's sort of like an uncomfortable blob

of two galaxies. Like one spiral arm is sort of knocked off over here and there's another one over there. And so we have a lot of catalogs of examples of galaxies that have merged. That's how we know so much about it. If you look at, there's a bunch of crashes that you can study. Yeah, exactly. So you want to know what galaxy collisions look like, you don't have to build a galaxy collider. This is one thing I love about astronomy. You just have to Google it. That's right. Cosmic Googling, otherwise known

as telescopes. You just look out into space and eventually you will see that thing happening. You want to imagine some crazy scenario or this kind of galaxy hits that kind of galaxy and then from behind comes a third one, that's happening somewhere out there and you just need to find it and watch it. And so that's the amazing thing

about astronomy is that all these cosmic experiments are happening. We just need to look for them. Wow. Okay, well, we processed that. Let's take a quick break. Hola, it's Honey German. And my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah.

We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vivras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switch?

I won't say white watch because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. But the whole pretending and cold, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Has Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases. But everything is about to change.

Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha.

On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, and in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls,

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

That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually. free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

All right, so that's what might happen to the stars in the galaxy. What's going to happen to all these other parts of the galaxy when these two galaxies collide. Right. And I like that we started with the stars, because that's like the most important thing to us, because we're sort of star-centric, right? Because we think stars are the most important element of the galaxy. But the biggest element of the galaxy, remember, is dark matter. And so you might ask, well, what's going to happen to all our dark matter? And just like with the stars, what happens there depends on how much it interacts. Currently, we don't really know anything about how much dark matter interacts. We know

that it doesn't interact with normal matter, we think it doesn't interact with itself, or if it does, it doesn't interact very strongly. But it does have gravitational attraction. So if the galaxies are going to hit each other, and they're not moving too fast, that they just basically pass right through each other, then the gravity from dark matter

is going to affect the gravity from the other galaxies dark matter just the same way the stars are. And the two will sort of merge eventually and become one big dark matter halo. And it's the kind of thing I would love to watch, But you can't really see the dark matter. It could be just another version of the cluster of stars. It's like one blob goes into the other blob, and then they kind of slosh around, and then

just becomes a bigger blob. Yeah, you can think of the stars as sort of like a collisionless liquid, right? It's like a, you have a liquid of stars that don't interact with each other, the same way the dark matter does. So dark matter and stars are basically operating this under the same principles. The only relevant interaction that we know about is gravity. So everything we said about stars is also going to affect the ball. big blobs of dark matter.

Now, dark matter is much more continuous. We think it's smooth. It's not like there's just dots of it here and there. But because it hardly interacts with each other, it doesn't matter if it rams smack into itself, right? It only effect is gravitational. It may not interact with itself, meaning it could just pass by itself and not really kind of explode or collide or do anything besides pull itself gravitationally.

Yeah, exactly. And we don't even know what dark matter is made at us. We can't say things like dark matter particles can do this. dark matter as far as we know is just smooth collisionless blob of something and we know it has gravitational interactions and that's really about all we know about it so we think that that's what's going to happen and you know we've seen dark matter in these gravitational collisions and we see that it basically sticks with the galaxies right sticks with the stars okay so then the last part is the black hole at the center of each galaxy what no no don't forget the dust right this gas there's dust which a lot of people

overlook and this is actually the most exciting part because the dust is the most is the coolest part that's how you know you're listening to a nerdy podcast and they get excited about dust oh my god the dust no if for those people who are like expecting dramatic events and explosions this is where you get them okay because dust is not diffuse right spread everywhere like you have a big blob of dust it's not like little clusters of mass the way stars are it's a huge extended blob of dust. And when it smashes into another blob of dust, you're going to get fireworks.

Like those clouds of dust interact with each other the way dark matter doesn't, and they're spread everywhere, the way stars aren't. And so you get huge collisions. And what happens when you compress gas and dust, what happens when you collide, huge blobs of gas and dust is you get more dense,

and then you get stars. And so you could see like new stars being born where these two huge clouds of gas and dust bang into it. literally like fireworks like that's right cosmic fireworks I mean what's more dramatic

and what's a better cosmic firework than seeing stars be born yeah so this one is going to be like two you know you know two liquids kind of running into each other it is going to be kind of dramatic you know like it is going to be like with the sound effects and everything

in space no yeah exactly it's just like two water balloons hitting each other right you're going to get initial shop wave and you know you don't get stars born when you fire water balloons at each other because the density isn't great enough obviously but yeah you're going to get a shock wave you're going to get friction between the fluids and you're going to get stars being born it's going to be pretty dramatic oh so you don't want to be there you don't want to but we are aren't we surrounded by gas clouds and stuff oh I think you need denser stuff I mean the the Milky Way definitely has big clouds of gas and dust yeah oh I see but when those clouds run into the other clouds then that's where this stuff happens but we're not necessarily sitting in one of those clouds that's right yeah okay the last element is the black hole right and so our galaxy is a huge black hole at the center and other got almost every other galaxy is a huge black

hole at the center and there it's going to be mostly dominated by gravity right um because they're going to pull each on each other really hard and they're going to pass by each other a little bit perhaps because they're probably not going to hit dead on and then they're going to swing around they're going to pull on each other. So there'll probably be, you know, some sort of a near miss, and then they'll turn around and come back, and then they'll just circle each other faster and faster and faster. And if you remember the episode we did on gravitational waves, or if you heard about the discovery of gravitational waves, you know that what happens when black holes get close to each other is they start to circle each other faster and faster until eventually they spin really, really fast,

and the distance get closer and closer and then they merge and they become one enormous black hole. They like eat each other. Right. And it's not a peaceful event. It's like a pretty violent thing, right? Like they've been super, super fast. There's energy spewed out everywhere. And then suddenly you have these huge cataclysmic gravitational waves.

Oh yeah. When black holes fight, it's a big mess. Absolutely. You don't want to be anywhere near that. Wow. Because huge amounts of radiation, not just gravitational waves, right? Yeah, you make gravitational waves, which are pretty awesome from a physics point of view. But, you know, these things tear up into each other and emit huge amounts of radiation.

And so you don't want to be anywhere near that. Yeah, I mean, that's going to, like, sterilize life on any nearby star system for sure. But anyway, there probably isn't any life in the center of our galaxy for that same reason that the galactic black hole is already emitting huge amounts of life-killing radiation. So you don't want to get too close anyway. It's like the eye of a storm. There's nothing living in the middle of it. That's right.

I don't know if it's calm inside the black hole. Though we did a whole episode, actually, on what it's like to be inside a black hole. So you guys should go listen to that. But, yeah, everything is swirling around that central black hole. probably what will happen is they'll merge and the new milk the new galaxy i wonder what that galaxy would be called actually how would you combine andromeda and the milky way like andromedi dromedici i don't know endromeda i don't know endromeda way the undromeda way there you go the enjomeda way yeah the the new galaxy would have a huge super duper

massive black hole at its center yeah and so i think that basically sums it up you'd have the black holes would probably merge, huge violent eruption of radiation there. The gas and the dust would have a lot of friction. It caused star formation. Big explosions. Fireworks. Yeah, exactly. Friction. Yeah, just all the kind of stuff you

expect to see in the next Transformers movie. And then, but the rest of the stuff, he'll be there for sure. He's involved in everything. He'll be there. If there's money to be made, he'll be there. And then the stars and the dark matter will just have a gravitational effect. But they'll eventually settle down, and in a few more billion years, the new galaxy will have its

own shape. It'll sort of settle into its own new shape. But it kind of sounds like every part will do something different. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, they will, because they follow different rules, right? They all interact differently. But so then kind of the nice structure we have now is going to be pretty much obliterated, right, when it merges with the other one. Yeah, exactly. You shouldn't count on your real estate being the same value after the galaxy collision because everything's going to be shook up, right? Absolutely. So it's going to disrupt the entire, both galaxies are going to be totally disrupted, fireworks, collisions. But you're saying it's possible we may survive it, right?

Like it's possible nothing will actually happen to our solar system. I think that's the most likely outcome, yeah, is it will just be sort of interesting. Most likely. Yeah, most likely. Most likely thing, I mean, we're a star. We're basically part of our star, right? You think of the solar system is just one big blob. And the most likely thing is that nothing gets close enough to disrupt our orbit around the star.

And you know what? even if our star gets like ejected from the galaxy so what we don't need the galaxy we could live just fine just a star with a bunch of planets in the middle of intergalactic space we don't need anything else we just need a star to provide energy for life so so we don't i mean just in the same way we were talking about the beginning of the episode like you don't really notice what's going out in space because you don't usually have to and if uh all those if all those stars disappeared and all we and we were in the middle of of intergalactic space it wouldn't change your life at all you would still still need to stock up on lentils for the coming apocalypse,

you know, it wouldn't save you or change your plans at all. You wouldn't mind getting kicked out of town. Like, that's kind of what it would feel like. Like being exiled. The whole town, our whole town would just get kicked out, you know, and we just go on living the way we did before. But things will definitely change for us. Even if we survive this galactic collision,

the night sky will look very different. I mean, as Andromeda approaches in the next few billion years, it will grow in the sky and eventually look really big. And then after the collision, right, when things have settled down, the night sky would look totally different because all the stars will have been rearranged. And we won't see that band of the Milky Way anymore. Well, that makes me feel better. I was sweating what was going to happen four and a half billion years from now.

But now I feel better. And I hope, Blake, you also feel a little bit better. Yeah, that's right. Blake, chill out. Don't worry about it. You have nothing to worry about when you put on riding that kangaroo to work. I think it's fun to think about things. things happening deep into the future and also even further into the future.

You know, the universe has been around 14 billion years, right? And that's just sort of like the initial bits, not before we get to the interesting part. But it could be that we're not even at the interesting part, you know. Thinking about galaxies in this way reminds you that they're spinning, they're dynamic, they're swirling around each other. What's going to happen? We don't know, right? They could continue to swirl and form crazy new structures that the universe has never seen before

because there hasn't been time to make them. And so this is the kind of thing makes me think about the universe like on the trillion or two trillion life year cycle. Like if life is still around 10 trillion years into the history of the universe, they'll think about these first few moments of galactic formation as, you know,

or almost irrelevant or just warming up. Yeah. The best may be yet to come, huh? That's right. I'm an optimistic person, so I'm always hoping that the best thing is yet to come, exactly. Well, great. Thank you so much, Blake, for sending us this question. We really enjoyed answering it.

That's right. And check out our book called We Have No Idea. It's a guide to the unknown questions of the universe, all the things that physics wants to know the answer to, but really hasn't got a clue about. And thanks for listening. Yeah. And if you're hungry or want to stock up,

just don't forget to get Daniels spicy lentils. Now available at your local grocery store. 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.

That is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases.

Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott. I'm not Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, we're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier.

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