Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What is the great attractor?

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

What is the mysterious force that is attracting our galaxy to it? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone.

Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In sitcoms, when someone has a problem, they just blurt it out and move on. Well, I lost my job and my parakeet is missing. How is your day? But the real world is different. Managing life's challenges can be overwhelming. So, what do we do? We get support. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have mental health resources available for you at loveyourmindday.org.

That's loveyourmindtay.org. See how much further you can go when you take care of your mental health. Hey, Daniel, I have a great idea for how physicists should name things in science. Uh-oh, I can feel my sense. skepticism rising up inside me. Like indigestion? Something like that, yeah. Well, here's the idea.

So the next time you guys invent something or discover something amazing, just put the word great in front of it. You know, and just to make it seem more expressive because I feel like you guys don't sell things enough. You mean like, the great Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe. Is that what you mean? I'm not sure that makes grammatical sense. But, I mean, you know, like you have a model.

of the universe and you call it the standard model, you know? Yeah, it could be a little bit better, you know, the great model of particles. Oh, man, that is a great idea. Hi, I'm Jorge, I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I only study stuff that's great. Great or grape flavor? Grape is not one of the great flavors, I have to say. It's like low on the list. Who doesn't like grape juice?

It's like the filler of juice, right? It's like the banana in a smoothie, right? Nobody drinks the juice for the grape. The banana is a highlight for me in smoothies. Banana is like the canvas of smoothie on which everything else sits, you know. It's just there to support everything else. We are totally different wavelengths here, Daniel. You go into the smoothie store. You notice this banana in almost every single smoothie,

but it's not named banana. It's like the orange smoothie, the raspberry smoothie. Banana just plays like the supporting role there. No, bananas are the foundation upon which all smoothies are built. You're saying they're the underground sort of concrete basement, right? They're like the standard model of physics, but for smoothies. But anyways, welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain fruit smoothies, apparently, and the universe.

Welcome to our great podcast in which we try to show you how amazing and bonkers and, frankly, great the universe is. And it's great not just because crazy stuff happens, but because we can't understand it. The human mind is amazingly capable of penetrating the cosmos and unraveling it. And that's our job today is to give you a tour of the cosmos in a way that you can understand and impress your friends with your knowledge. Yeah, and we're also the authors of the book. We have no idea, a guide to the unknown universe, which apparently a lot of our, Listeners don't know that we wrote. It's true.

I get a lot of questions from listeners that ask us about things that are really nicely explained in our book. And I'll say, oh, you should check out our book. And they were out back to say, what? You guys have a book? What? You guys know how to write? I didn't say that. It just said we have a book.

I see. It's a book. And it's not just an audiobook. There are actual words, right? And letters in it. And cartoons. Yes. It's a really fun book.

It's all about the things you don't know about the universe and what scientists think they might be. And it's fun for those of you out there who are curious about the world and want to know not just what do scientists know, but what are scientists wondering about. And it features a bunch of words, but also dozens and dozens of really hilarious and clear diagrams about what's going on drawn by a hilarious cartoonist, I know. Oh, really? Who is it? Oh, I don't remember what his name is. It doesn't really matter. You know, it just stole his art from the internet. Some great guy, probably.

No, so it's a great book. You guys should check it out. Yeah, but all the things we don't know about the universe. And there's a lot we don't know about the universe, right? Daniel? I mean, we know some things here at Earth and some things in our solar system and some things out there in the galaxies and the cosmos. But there is a lot we don't know, even kind of where we are

and where we sit in this big, giant space. Yeah, in the book, we make this analogy a lot that we are sort of at the beginning of an age of. exploration of the universe because I think it's easy for people to imagine back 100 or 500 or 1,000 years ago before we even knew like the shape of the earth and all the land on it, it was exciting to go out and explore and to learn about our sort of neighborhood and the larger place we were on the earth. Well, we're in that place sort of scientifically. We're still just learning how the universe works. But also very specifically, it's not like just a metaphor. We are now

exploring beyond the earth and getting maps of sort of where we are in our cosmic neighborhood. And we're really just beginning. And so every year, every decade, we look further and further out into the universe and just learn like the shape of things. Yeah, how things are arranged, how the stars and the galaxies and the clusters of galaxies, how it all sort of sits in the universe and where we sit on it, right? Like kind of a, they call our address in the universe. Yeah. And just like explorers who are venturing around weird places on Earth and finding strange stuff, weird animals and grand canyons and new fruits and all sorts of stuff. As we look out into space, we find some weird, weird stuff out there that forces us to sort of revise our understanding of what's

in the universe and how it's put together. But anyway, so yeah, there are weird things out there that people are still discovering. And in fact, there is a really weird thing out there in space that is affecting how the galaxies and the clusters are all moving about that we really have no idea about, right? Yeah, we are building sort of a map of the universe. We look out and we see our solar system. We know where it sits in the galaxy.

We know how the galaxy clusters together with other galaxies to make this thing we call the local group, which is a cluster of galaxies. And then we've seen further out to see how that cluster forms into super clusters. We talked on the program once about how those superclusters line up

into these really weird sheets and bubbles and stuff. But the cool thing is that that stuff is not static. It's not just like sitting there, right? This is a dynamic system. If you sped up the universe on like, you know, really fast time lapse, you would see stuff smashing into each other and whipping around each other. This is like a frothing, bubbling foam of stuff, but in super slow motion. Right.

The universe is not retired. It's still pretty active and moving around and restless. Yeah. And, you know, our galaxy is like, heading towards another galaxy. And so one thing that's really fascinating to study is not just where stuff is, but where it's going. Right.

What is it going to look like? And are things going to smash together or are they going to fly further apart or are they going to stay kind of the same? Yeah. So this is a fascinating question. And several listeners, here I'm counting one, two, three, four, five, six listeners independently wrote in to ask us to talk about this particular weird thing that scientists found. Yeah.

It's a very big mystery, and so here's the audio from Stephen Gonda asking us what this mystery is. Hello, Daniel and Jorge. This is Stephen from Calgary, Canada. I've read about the phenomena called the Great Attractor, and I'd like to learn more. What do we know about it? What don't we know? And what are some theories regarding what it could be. Thank you. All right. That's a great question from Stephen. And he is asking us about this interesting mystery, which is this idea of the Great Attractor. Yeah, it's this amazing mystery, this huge cosmic galactic question mark nearby in our cosmic neighborhood. And not just Stephen, but also Mike Miller, Neil McLean, Peter McKeever, and Chris Adikis all wrote in to ask us to talk about this. So thanks to those people who wrote to us with their burning curiosity about the universe. And if you're out there and want us to talk about something, please don't be shy, send us your questions to questions at Danielanhorpe.com.

So I guess they all wrote the same question, similar or the same question, which means it's a very attractive question. Or it's a great question. It's a great question. And I'm also assuming they're not asking about Brad Pitt, who's also pretty attractive. He has a sort of gravitational pull on everything in Hollywood. A lot of gravitas. But it's not a mystery, right? Everybody understands.

Like, there's a strong pull there. And if everything, all the projects are sort of sucked towards him, then we know that he's around. Yeah, so to the end of the podcast, we'll be tackling this big mystery. We'll be asking the question. What is the great attractor? Is it a what is or who is? Is this another alien episode, Daniel? I'm not saying it's not aliens.

I'm not saying it's not not aliens. But, you know, anything weird out there in space could be the beginning of that science fiction movie where they find aliens. You know, it's always some guy in a control room going, huh? That's weird. Dot, dot, dot, aliens. Good thing, you're not that person. Because it would be aliens every time, it seems. If they put a big red aliens button next to my desk, I'd be hitting it every single day.

Where's my pen, aliens? What's what I have for dinner, aliens. I don't have aliens for dinner. We can't digest aliens. Oh, I want to have aliens over for dinner. We can hang out with them and ask them questions. So they can eat you, right. So, yeah, so we don't know.

know who or what this great attractor is. And in fact, it just has a really pretty mysterious name. It's not even the best named attractor out there. There's another one out there, even bigger, more mysterious with a better name. Is there a greatest attractor? The other one is called the shapely attractor. Oh, really? Really. That's Angelina Jolie, right? In a very not safe. You have solved two cosmic mysteries right here on the podcast today. There you go. Double They are heavenly gods, just waiting for them to get back together. I mean, why shouldn't they be? Well, I walked around campus at UC Irvine, and I asked folks if they knew what the great attractor was. So think about it for a second. If someone asked you, what or who the great

attractor is, what would you say? Here's what people had to say. Is something to do with magnets? A friend who's a physics major. He mentioned that at some point. If it's a great quantum attractor, I would think it would have something to do with sort of a black hole, something attracting everything around it. Is it the center of galaxies? It probably has to do it by gravity attracting something. I think I may have in physics in high school. I'm not too sure to be honest.

Probably not the one you're thinking of. What are you thinking of? Something gravitational. All right, nobody went with Brad Pitt. I guess it's just me who I'm obsessed with Brad Pitt or he's just in the news so much. You're either a singular genius or you're just wrong. Well, how do we know it's not Brad Pitt, Daniel? I have a Brad Pitt button right here next to my desk. You hit the Brad Pitt button, I hit the alien button. The logical conclusion is

Brad Pitt is an alien. Wow, we are just banging out the mysteries today. Solved all the mysteries of the universe. If you can make that connection, you've done it. Is that why they adopted so many children? Hmm? Because he's not actually human? Right. Who can survive being having so many children. You need a special power. And still look as good as he does. Well, I can tell you that the great attractor is not Brad Pitt because the great attractor is something like 200 million light years away.

And last I checked, Brad Pitt was on Earth, which is considerably closer than that. All right, we'll get to talking about this great attractor. So it's something that's out there in space, right, affecting how the galaxies are moving around in space? Yeah, it seems to be this really mysterious source of gravity. It's out there in space. It's really far away, and it's pulling on everything.

But nobody knows what's there. Like, what is creating all of this attraction? Right. A lot of people said gravity in their answers. Is that, do you think, you know, do you say great attractor and people automatically think gravity? I guess so. Yeah, there's some connection in their minds between attraction and gravity. Which makes sense, right?

If you're thinking space stuff, then it's mostly gravity that's doing the attracting. All right, we'll get into what this great mystery, this great attractor is and what it could be or who it could be and ask whether it's going to suck us in. It's going to, if we're going to get pulled into its attractiveness once and for all. But first, let's take a quick break. 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed.

There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop.

Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her.

Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor. and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them.

I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio 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. 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 hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right?

That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a real. It's how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstylist play in our communities, 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, Daniel, so there's a big mystery out there in space called the Great Attractor. So break it down for us. What is the Great Attractor? Well, as we said earlier, we're interested in where we are in space, but also what the stuff around us is doing, where it's going, how it's moving. We know that the universe is expanding, right? More space is being made everywhere, which means that everything is moving away from each other. Everything we look at is moving away from us, so it's redshifted. It's redshifted, meaning that light from it is shifted to longer wavelengths

because it's moving away from us at some speed. Right. There's sort of a general motion of everything in the universe being pulled apart. Yeah, being pulled apart. But that's sort of the overall picture. That's the average picture. Then there's sort of local variations, right? Like, for example, the Earth is not moving away from the sun.

Why? Because the Earth is held by the gravity of the sun. And so you can look at how fast things are moving relative to each other they get a sense for sort of where the gravity is. Like the sun is not moving away from the Milky Way for the same reason. Gravity is holding the sun as part of the Milky Way. And then we could ask about like, what's the relative velocity between our galaxy and another galaxy or other galaxies? Right, because we're moving towards the Andromeda galaxy, right?

Not away from it. That's right. The Andromeda galaxy is moving towards us. And so this is a variation relative to this expansion. If you imagine like all that expansion is sort of the baseline, then we can ask like the stuff around us, how's it moving relative to what you would expect from that expansion?

And some of the stuff is actually moving towards us, like Andromeda, because of gravity. And so what they did is they did this red shift survey. They looked around at all the galaxies and they asked where are they going relative to the sort of baseline expansion. So on average, the universe is expanding and everything's moving away from each other.

But you're saying sort of locally, what are the galaxies actually doing? Or all galaxies? Yeah. Or just the ones around us. Just the ones around us is where we begin, and those are the easiest to understand and to see, because they're closer. It gives us a picture for where the stuff is, because we measure what the gravity is. It's just like the discovery of dark matter.

You look at the rotation of a galaxy, and you understand how much gravity should be there to hold it together, and then you count up all the stars, and you ask, can all that gravity be explained? The answer was no, so we assumed, oh, there's some extra matter inside the galaxy to explain it. This is sort of that same strategy, but on the galactic scale, where we look at the motion of the galaxies, and then we ask, can we explain the motion of those galaxies based on all the stuff we know is there? It's kind of like you were telling me earlier that if the sun was invisible for some reason, we could probably still know that it's there just from seeing how the planets move in a circle around something. That's right. You can deduce that stuff is there by its gravitational effects. Just like the Earth moving around the sun, you don't need to say. see the sun to know that there's something heavy there that's keeping the earth in orbit. And the same way we discover the black hole at the center of our galaxy initially by seeing

these stars orbited, making these patterns that they just wouldn't make if there wasn't some really heavy, massive, invisible thing there. Okay, so then you're saying that we have been doing this kind of, we have done this kind of analysis with the galaxies all around us just to see if everything's moving kind of in a kosher way? Yeah, we were curious, like, where is everything going? And we did this calculation, we looked at everything, and we measured it to redshift,

and that gives us a picture for sort of like where everything is going. You can like take every galaxy and put an arrow on it and say, this one's going over there, this one's going over here. And what we discovered is that, first of all, we have a velocity. We have a velocity relative to sort of like the cosmic microwave background that's sort of filling space. We are getting pulled somewhere.

We are not the center of the universe is what you're saying. Well, you and I are, but the whole galaxy, it turns out to just be dragging us down. Oh, we're mosing on somewhere as a galaxy. As a galaxy, we're moving actually quite fast relative to this cosmic microwave background. Oh, man. You just gave me whiplash. I feel felt so stable.

But now I think that our whole galaxy is moving and probably millions of miles per hour. It sort of threw me off a bit. Yeah. And all of the galaxies together seem to be, not just our galaxy, but all the galaxies together seem to be sort of sucked in the same direction. All the nearby ones are getting pulled in the same direction.

You mean like there's a galaxy to our right and it's also going in the same direction we are and there's a galaxy to our left and it's also going the same way? Now individual ones

can have variations like Andromeda, the closest one, happens to be coming right at us. But if you look at the average sort of flow of the galaxies nearby, they're all pointing

in the same direction. Sort of like there's some huge amount of mass there creating gravity, sucking everything in. Wait, And so we're going towards it or we're sort of orbiting it?

We're going towards it. And this is the goal, right, is to figure out how fast everything is moving and to use that to figure out to make sort of a map of where the mass has to be. And then compare that and say, well, do we see all that mass, right? Just like we did when we discovered dark matter. We make a map of where we think the gravity is. And then we ask, can we explain all that gravity using the mass from the visible stuff? From what we see.

And also the dark matter? Did you take that into account as well? Oh, crap. We forgot to account for the dark matter. Yeah, man. No, we do. I mean, we know we see a galaxy that we're not seeing all the mass from it. We have pretty good ways to measure the, or to estimate the amount of dark matter in a galaxy based on its type and its age and all this sort of stuff.

That was a little insulting, Daniel. Well, who was being insulting? Because you were like, could you remember the dark matter? Yes, thank you. Did you carry the two? Did you carry the ones, Daniel? Because this is all very suspicious. Are you going to come over here, help me with my arithmetic?

Could you please? I forgot. It's long division. I haven't done that forever. I need some help. I guess what I mean is how do you know that you've accounted for all the dark matter? I mean, you can't see the dark matter. You only have sort of like models of it.

That's right. We don't. And that's a possible explanation. We know something is there. And we don't think that there are these blobs of invisible dark matter that are not hanging out with visible galaxies. And so what we do know is that there's some region out there that is sucking us all in, that's pulling us towards it.

And we didn't expect that because we don't see anything there that can explain it. And this is like everything, all the galaxies that we see are just the ones around us. Because, you know, like you say, we are part of these clusters and super clusters and gigantic and ginormous walls and sheets of galaxies. You know, is everything moving towards something? Or just sort of locally... Local in this context means sort of part of our supercluster. So all the sort of clusters of galaxies

and those clusters of clusters seem to be moving in this neighborhood towards this thing called the Great Attractor. So it's like a feature of our super cluster. Yeah, but if you go even further beyond that, everything else is getting, including that Great Attractor, is getting sucked towards something else.

It's a bigger attractor called the Shapley Attractor. Why didn't you call it the greatest attractor? Well, it's named after a guy named shapely, honestly. Oh, no kidding. What? Literally his last name is shapely. Oh. Aren't you going to ask me if he was pretty shapely?

Or he or she, that would be inappropriate, Daniel. I have broadcast standards. Oh, I should read those somewhere. I'm curious. I thought he would be surprised that I have standards. But one really mysterious thing about this great attractor is that it happens to be in a spot that's very difficult for us to look at. Suspiciously.

Suspiciously. It's a coincidence. Why is it hard to look at it? Well, if you look up in the night sky, the places that are easiest to see are the places where you're looking away from our galaxy. You look sort of out into deep space. If there's something out in the sky and it's hiding behind the Milky Way,

it's much harder to see just because there are a lot of stars and dust and gas between us and it. So we sort of have a bit of a cosmic blind spot. There's a big mass of something. something possibly within our super cluster and there's an even bigger mass of something you're saying out in between the superclusters. Or it might be at the like the center of a bunch of superclusters. The shapely attractor is even less well understood. But the frustrating thing is that both of them sits sort of behind the plane of the galaxy. If you look in that direction, if you look up

in the night sky when you're camping and you see the Milky Way, it's beautiful, it's wonderful. but it means you can't see what's behind it very well because the Milky Way is so bright. This episode is filled with great names because astronomers refer to that whole region of the sky as the zone of avoidance. As in, don't even try to do any signs there. It's just all lit up and it's a mess.

Oh, so it's an avoidance, not because you shouldn't go there. It's more like, don't take your academic career on that area of the universe. Yeah, it's sort of like the harder region to observe anything. And so if you're looking for something clear and beautiful, look somewhere else because this is the messy spot. You know, if you want to record a beautiful symphony, you don't do it, you know, on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. That's a zone of avoidance for careful recordings. All right.

So these things that might be really important to the universe and to how the universe is moving and changing are pretty much sort of occluded from us, you're saying. Yeah, we can't really see in that direction. and there's something really fascinating and interesting out there that seems to be pulling all these galaxies towards it. All right, let's get into what it could be or who it could be and whether or not we are going to all end up being fatally attracted to this great attractor. I think you're already attracted to Brad Pitt. I think that's the conclusion to this episode.

I've already played a fatal attraction with that, too. He's going to listen this episode, and now he's never going to come on the podcast. Or maybe he'll be attracted. attracted to coming on the podcast. But yeah, let's get into whether or not we'll be sucked into it as well. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th,

1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay.

Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides employees. plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious well wait a minute sam maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend

has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating.

He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio 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. Afea 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, your spiritual belief.

But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation 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 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.

So what could you get your podcast? All right, Daniel, the great attractor out there in space is moving galaxies in a mysterious way. So what could it be if we don't know what it is? Well, as usual, I have an escalator. series of possible explanations from like super boring to mind-blowingly crazy

and insane. Does it end with aliens as usual? It's going to end with a movie pitch, of course. Is your hand over the alien button right now hovering? Are you itching to press it? I am, but first we've got to go through like the other possible explanations that could be like much more boring physics.

All right, all right. So there's something causing all the galaxies to move towards a sort of an area or a point. And so what could it be? Is it a big blob of dark matter, or is it, you know, like it's just a giant rock? Yeah, well, it couldn't just be a giant rock because, remember, this thing has the mass of like 10 quadrillion suns. It's really big. How many, like, equivalently, how many galaxies is that? Yeah, that would be like 10,000 Milky Way galaxies. So whatever this is, it's not small. You know,

we went out to sort of map the universe and see where stuff is and see its direction. We expected everything have some relative velocity, it's to be some sort of jiggle. You know, think about like the galaxies is like, you know, some sort of cosmic gas. You expect them to be bouncing around a little bit. But we were pretty surprised to discover this is in the 80s that everything was really strongly

getting pulled in this one direction. So it's a big deal. And so it's the equivalent, whatever it's pulling us out there is the equivalent of 10,000 galaxies. It's hard to imagine, right? And each galaxy, of course, has billions and billions and billions of stars and planets. So it's a lot of stuff.

Well, it's not a small mystery. It's not a small mystery. It's a great attractor. It's a great mystery. Maybe Great doesn't sell it enough. You know, they should have called it the amazing attractor. The unbelievably fantastic and amazing attractor. But the sort of the simplest

explanation is that it just could be a lot of stuff. It could just be that there's a lot of galaxies over there and it's hard for us to see them because they're blocked by the Milky Way. Right. Or they could be dark. Like, it could just be, you know, matter, but it's not shining.

Yeah, it could be. I mean, it could be just like normal matter, just like galaxies, and that are bright in the same way. But you just can't see them very well. And so people, you know, they're doing this. They're pointing our telescopes at this location and trying to discover, is there anything back there? We've mostly been avoiding that part of this guy because it's hard to look at. But now because of this weird gravitational anomaly, there are,

pointing their infrared telescopes at this thing. Okay, so could it be like dark matter? Could it be a giant blob of dark matter that is just floating out there by itself? It could be because what we see out there using infrared telescopes is not enough to explain it. Like we definitely see that there are clusters of galaxies out there. There's a lot of them, in fact,

but not enough to explain this. There are galaxies out there where the greater tractor would be, but there aren't 10,000 galaxies. Yeah, and, you know, this is hard to measure, And so there's a lot of uncertainty still. It's not like we have a very clear picture. We have to use infrared light to penetrate the gas and the dust of the Milky Way. It's easier to get through the Milky Way if you're infrared light

because you get through the gas and the dust, which seems small relative to your long wavelength. Right. And you get to wear those cool infrared goggles, too. That's basically why people do infrared astronomy. Exactly. Do they wear it while they're doing astronomy? I wonder.

It's to look cooler. They do. Yeah, that and the snacks also are awesome. good the bananas and the smoothies yeah but you know as we said before one of the goals is to sort of make a map of the mass of the galaxy and we just can't see enough stuff to explain all of this mass all of this gravity not even dark matter well not even dark matter because we expect dark matter to sort of follow the pattern of visible matter everywhere else in the universe galaxies form and stars form because there's dark matter there makes sort of these gravitational wells that pull

in gas and dust and form galaxies. And you expect visible matter to sort of give you a map for where the dark matter is. So it would be really weird to have like a huge amount of extra dark matter, like a ginormous amount without as much visible matter with it. It'd be weird, but not impossible maybe?

Like you could, thankfully, maybe have some dark matter floating by itself. Yeah, you could. And you'd need some sort of weird event to explain like why that dark matter hasn't already attracted a bunch of gas and dust to make galaxies to sort of give it away, right?

This should be like stealth dark matter. I'm pressing the button. I'm pressing the button. All right. And you know, you got to press that aliens button. But to me, the aliens button represent something larger, you know, like the things we don't understand.

The reasons we're doing science, the reasons we are interested in exploring the universe, is to find the new weird stuff to sort of add to our list of things we have in our great model of the universe. It's almost like a mental exercise just to keep your mind open. to crazy possibilities.

Yeah, exactly. You want to know what else is out there and you want to discover something new. And so first you have to cross off the list other possible explanations before you're forced to confront the fact that maybe there's something new out there that explains this, something you haven't ever seen before.

Super dark matter. Yeah, or stealthy dark matter. Stealthy. Yeah, we don't know. Spy matter. We don't know what it is. And so it could, you know, potentially be aliens,

but it's sort of hard to imagine because this is a really, really big lump of stuff. Well, let's take off the other one in your list. He said it could be maybe dark energy, not just dark matter. Yeah, remember that dark energy is just our observation of what's happening in the universe. We see that the universe is expanding, that space between galaxies is increasing as new space is made. But that's sort of like an average thing. We've sort of measured that overall for the universe, but what we don't know is, Is that uniform?

Is it the same everywhere? Is the expansion constant in every point in space, or are there like little variations? Oh, you mean, we've been assuming that dark energy, the expansion of the universe is like even and smooth everywhere, but you're saying maybe it's not. Maybe it's like a lumpy, lumpy growth. Yeah. As we first measure it, we sort of measure like the overall expansion. And we were surprised to discover, you know, wow, it's expanding and accelerating.

And then as we get better and better measurements, we can start to resolve it in more detail and understand, like, is it different in this direction than in that other direction? Right. The expansion of the universe, dark energy, is not this kind of smooth, even thing, but maybe it's like it's growing a little bit more over here

or a little bit growing more over there. Or maybe it's even like it's like folding the universe in weird ways. Yeah, there's this whole concept of dark flows that maybe dark energy is not constant. And we've seen other ideas that relate to that, like this idea of cosmic strings that in the first moments of the universe when it expanded really rapidly and cooled that that cooling didn't happen uniformly and made these sort of discontinuities in space. So it's not the first time we've imagined that maybe space is not uniform and

homogenous. And so it's possible that this is some weird place where there's less dark energy. And so it's not expanding as much. Interesting. A pocket of not dark energy. Yeah, of, you know, where the good side of the force is winning. of light energy. That's where all the Jedi's are. This is the Jedi Temple is. Yeah.

Yeah, there you go. Full of baby Yoda's who are so cute and we're going to end up attracting everyone anyways. Yeah, their cuteness is what's defeating dark energy.

It's causing. Yeah, that's right. Never underestimate the power of cute. All right, so it could be dark matter. It could be just a fault in our assumption about dark energy. But you're saying it could be something else.

So let's go ahead, Daniel. Let's press the alien button. Can I press the button? Yeah, press the button. I know you're itching to press it. In what possible way could aliens be causing this giant detractor in the galaxy? All right. So I have this crazy idea, right?

And you know that star we talked about before, Tavi Star, where people were speculating that maybe because the light was dimming in unusual regular ways that aliens were building a shield around this sort of gather up all of its energy, a Dyson sphere. That was pretty exciting, but I have an idea that's sort of like 10 quadrillion times bigger than that. What? Yeah, like what if aliens are building something and it's just like, but it's huge. It's not just like a sphere and a star, but it's like something, the mass of 10 quadrillion suns. You're saying the aliens have built like a city or a spaceship the size of 10,000 galaxies?

Yeah, who knows what it is they're building? Like we have no idea what aliens would build. But if they were, you know, they wouldn't build something that's glowing, that's like giving off light and shining, it would be dark, right? They painted it black to try to, for some nefarious reason. You know, or maybe they're just going to throw us a surprise party and they just want to sneak up on us. It's just a giant billboard for us saying,

Happy birthday. It's a huge coupon for free banana smoothies. Yeah, there you go for life, for eternity. But it's hard to imagine what you could build that would be that big. But, hey, you know, the universe is filled with crazy stuff. And it's been around for billions of years before our solar system was even formed. So maybe this is a very old construction project. And the aliens are out there building something so big that it sucks in whole galaxies.

It's bending galaxies to their whim kind of. Yeah, precisely. Maybe it's just a big art project for them. They're like, yeah, we don't like the way these clusters look. they need a little bit more shapeliness to them it's a huge black space banana is that what you're thinking you have the space banana button on your desk

yeah there you go I have a Brad Pitt bit button here and a banana button one on each side of my don't press them at the same time and cross the streams let's press all three at the same time down here ready

the universe can't handle it no all right So maybe aliens have built something the size of 10,000 galaxies, and that's what it's a trend. But is that even possible? Could you build something that big and not have it just collapse into a black hole or who knows? Well, you know, I'm sure those alien engineers can solve that problem, but this is where the movie pitch begins. You know, I want to see the movie where aliens make something the size of 10 quadrillion suns. The city of 10,000 galaxies.

That's the title. Star Wars Episode 15, the city of 10,000 galaxies. Somebody out there contact our agent. We are ready to write that movie. We're ready to write any screenplay, really. That's true, too. We just want that option money. All right, so those are all possibilities for what it could be.

And it sounds like we don't really know. But I guess the question is, what's going to happen? Are we all going to end up, is the whole universe, or the whole cluster of galaxy is going to end up getting sucked into it? Are we are, is this, is it going to spell the end of our existence or, or is there a sunny side to all of this? Well, it's a fair question because one reason we're interested in sort of mapping where stuff is and where it's going is that we'd like to know what the future of our galaxy is. You know, we know that we're going to hit Andromeda in a few billion years, but there's sort of a larger context of what's going to happen to our local group and are we all getting sucked into this massive alien vacuum cleaner or whatever it is they're building. And so the way to think about it is that there's a sort of a cosmic battle going on.

On one side, you have dark energy that's trying to pull everything apart. It's creating new space between stuff and making everything further and further apart. And on the other hand, you have gravity that's doing its best to keep stuff together. You know, it's keeping the Earth going around the sun. It's keeping our sun in the Milky Way and is trying to keep our group of galaxies together. So it's this cosmic tug of war between the two. man it's like the ultimate cosmic struggle you know order versus chaos you know nothing is versus something yeah it totally is and we're watching it play out on this cosmic scale though sort of

super slow motion and the answer unfortunately or unfortunately i'm not sure is that dark energy is much more powerful what is that your favorite is that where your money is are you are you on the dark side daniel are you officially stepping into the dark side well you know the dark side forever will dominate our destiny. I mean, we live in a dark side universe because dark energy is 70% of the energy budget of the universe. And it just can't be beat by this little piddly gravity. Wow. Well, I do like the lightning bolts coming out of your hands, my hands here. So there's a plus joining the dark side. You got lumpy banana smoothies and lightning bolts. Yeah. And maybe at the same time. Yeah, maybe at the same time. So dark energy is definitely going to win. It's going to pull things

apart. But you were telling me that maybe we don't know what dark energy is going to do, right? Like, it could just maybe give up one day and then gravity will win. You think dark energy has been like conquering the universe for five billion years and then it just gets bored of winning? I think it peaked already. So much winning, you're going to get tired of winning. It's got to retire at some point, you know? Well, you know, gravity is very patient. It waits around forever and gathers stuff together. So maybe it's just waiting. It's biting its time until the dark force gives up. Because as far as we know, gravity hasn't changed, like dark energy.

We know gravity, dark energy has changed, right, since the beginning of time. That's true. Gravity has remained rock steady. That's true. Dark energy, we think, is maybe connected to inflation, the first few moments of the universe and cosmic expansion. And then it sort of bided its time for 10 billion years while things spread out. And then all the matter was so dilute that dark energy had a chance to take over

and drive the expansion of the universe again. But you're right. We don't know the mechanism. and so we don't know the future of it. But it seems to me the most likely thing is that dark energy wins and the universe spreads out and we end up as these like

tiny little crystalline points of light super far away from everything else. And the night sky just gets darker and darker. Well, I'm trying to look at the bright side. Maybe, you know, if you were born or if a civilization starting in one of those planets where they can only see,

they don't see any stars out there, then they would think that they are the only living beings in the entire universe. Or that their whole universe was just them. Yeah, a hundred years ago, we thought that our galaxy was the whole universe. We didn't even know there were other galaxies out there. It was mind-blowing sort of paradigm shift, learning about our context to discover that there were other galaxies and lots of them.

But you're right, if we came along late enough, we wouldn't learn that. We would think that our galaxy was special. Okay, so it doesn't sound like you're too worried about the great attractor or the shapely attractor or the super duper shapelier attractor, which I just made. All this stuff is going to happen in billions of years anyway. And so, you know, our sun is going to explode in billions of years. So before that happens, we got other problems to solve. Oh, I see. I guess maybe I'm just worried for the galaxy in general.

You're a galaxy stand, you're a Milky Way supporter. Yeah, you know, I'm a fan of it. It's done good things for you. I've grown fond of this galaxy. But you're saying it's probably not going to get crunched into this great attractor. You know, it's going to shape the, how things move and how things look, but maybe it's not going to crunch it altogether.

Yeah, in the cosmic scale, all these vectors, we're talking about these velocities or everything is getting pulled towards a great attractor. These are small corrections to what dark energy is already doing. It's helpful in the sense of like using gravity to give us a map for where the mass and the gravity is in the universe, but in the end, it's not the most powerful thing. And, you know, our supercluster just doesn't have enough gravity to it

to hold itself together. Dark energy is going to tear it apart. All right, I'm going to press the buttons again, Daniel. I think it's aliens building something to fight dark energy. Ooh, maybe. Right, yeah. They're like dark energy, it's spreading everything apart. Let's bring it all back together. Yeah, could be. And, you know, it could be that human physicists figure out a way somehow to like tap into dark energy and use it to build wormholes between galaxies and so that even if the universe gets really spread out, we could still somehow travel to other stars.

Who knows? All right. Well, we hope that that answered the question for Stephen and for Mike and Niel and Peter and everyone who asked this question. Pretty interesting. It sounds like there are still giant, big, attractive mysteries out there in space.

Yeah, we are only beginning to explore the universe and discover the weird stuff that's out there and try to fit our models for everything we understand to it. And then, you know, add to it. Add new stuff to it, new baby Yoda's, new aliens building cosmic cities, new banana smoothie flavors, all sorts of new stuff. Some baby bread pits probably also pretty cute. And so it's an exciting time to be looking out into the universe and learning about what's out there because every year, every decade, there are tremendous mind-blowing discoveries to just change the way we think about what's out there.

So stay tuned, I guess is the message because who knows what the universe will do in a few billion years. Keep funding astronomy is giving us clues as to where we are and where we're going. That's right. Donate to the NSFW for, to support this kind of banana projects. It wouldn't be bananas to do so. See you next time. 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,

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