Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What shapes can galaxies take?
Episode Date: December 14, 2023Daniel and Jorge talk about the weird, wacky shapes of galaxies and the cosmic story they tell.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
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Hey, Daniel, you like dark chocolate, right? And you hate white chocolate?
It's more than just liking it. It's a way of life, man.
Whoa, that's a lot riding on a flavor.
But I wonder, does the shape of the chocolate matter to you?
Hmm, you mean like if it's a chocolate chip or a chocolate bar or something else?
Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how picky you are.
Well, you know, it is really fun to make chocolate have all sorts of weird shapes,
but I think it all tastes the same.
What if it's pear shape?
As long as it's not a disaster, fruit and chocolate is a delicious combination.
What if it's shaped like white chocolate?
White chocolate isn't a shape, man.
What if it's shaped like a galaxy?
Ooh, that sounds delicious.
Or what if it's the size of a galaxy?
Sounds like I have my work cut out for me.
Hi, I'm Jorge McCartunist and the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I've never run out of my taste for dark chocolate.
I wonder if your dislike of white chocolate is just context-based.
You mean like it's a bad childhood memory?
Yeah, no, well, I mean more like situational, you know, like what if you're in a dessert?
Not a desert.
Well, maybe it could be a desert island, but what if it's also deserted?
But the only dessert available or anything to eat is white chocolate.
Would you starve or would you eat it?
I would eat it.
But as I did, I would understand how much better it would have been if it was dark chocolate.
I see.
You'd be complaining the whole time.
It'd be the only one there, so who's to complain to?
You can complain to the wet chocolate, I guess.
You can paint a face on it, kind of like Wilson.
Complaining makes everything better.
That it does.
But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge,
Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio.
In which we do our best to enjoy all of the flavors of the universe,
the electronic, the muonic, the taonic flavors,
the ups, the downs, the charms, the bottoms, the tops,
everything in the universe that has a flavor and everything that can be explained.
We take a bite out of all of it and explain everything to,
you? Wait, wait. You just said you take a bite out of white chocolate and enjoy it?
That I'm confused. On advice of counsel, I'm going to pass on answering that question.
But aren't you curious what makes white chocolate different than dark chocolate? Yeah, it's the
lack of chocolate. No, it has chocolate. It has cocoa butter.
Cocoa butter is chocolate the way like butter by itself is a whole meal, you know? It's there
to accentuate the flavors. Obviously, you haven't been to Texas where they eat fried butter,
which is where I am right now.
Yeah, exactly.
So not a big fan of deep fried butter or white chocolate.
I put those two things in the same category.
They probably have the same number of calories, to be honest.
Have you tried deep fried white chocolate?
Ooh, that might be a different state.
Sounds like more of an Arkansas thing, maybe.
Keep traveling and report back.
That's right.
I'm on a mission to try all the fried of fats.
But anyways, we do like to wet our appetite
and satisfy our appetite for the universe or curiosity for how things work out there in the cosmos.
Why are things the way they are?
Why are they shaped like the way they are?
And why do they taste the way they do?
Because it's more than just the colors in the night sky, the bright twinkling lights, the reds, the greens, everything else that's up there.
It's also the structure in the night sky that tells us a story about the history of the universe and where the universe is headed.
That's right, because things in the universe aren't all the same.
Some things are shaped differently than others.
They look different, they have a different form, and it all reflects back on how it all came together.
All the structure in the universe was inevitably put together by gravity as it pulls things together and battles angular momentum and other forces.
And the shapes that we end up with and how they change over time tell us about how those forces work together and what the history of the universe is.
If you peer out in the night sky, beyond the stars, you see all these little smudges.
Those smudges are distant galaxies
And each one has its own shape
That tells a story about how it got there
And so to the end of the podcast
We'll be tackling the question
What are the possible shapes
Of galaxies?
Now Daniel, is this like the shape
What it looks like
Or how much do galaxies exercise?
Like are you a fit galaxy
Are you a buff galaxy
Are you a little flabby around the edges?
I'm not selling a
Galaxy workout video. This is not some sort of cosmic grift. No. We're not judging the shapes.
We are just observing and trying to understand how they got there. Do galaxies have names like
P-P-X-39? Isn't that also the name of some workout program?
It is now. Yeah. We're patenting that and we're making that the cosmic workout program. Exactly.
That's right. Yes. It's the Milky Way. Get fit like the whirlpool galaxy. I don't know how that works.
Does it depend on how much dark chocolate the galaxy has eaten?
Collapsing into a huge bar of dark chocolate is the eventual end of every galaxy.
The dream state for all physicists.
But it is fascinating to look up at the night sky and to see all these different shapes.
Some of them are ellipses, some of them are blobs, some of them are stretched out.
There's even one that looks like a question mark.
Almost every possible shape you can imagine is up there somewhere in the night sky.
And there are so many galaxies in the universe that it makes a start.
astronomers wonder how they all got that way.
It makes them want to invent crazy, illogical names for the various categories.
There's a lot of rich signs to do in the shapes of galaxies.
Well, that's kind of a new concept maybe for a lot of people because, you know, we all grew up looking at pictures of galaxies and they all kind of look the same, right?
They look like little swirls.
I mean, if you've only looked at a few pictures, they might all look the same.
But as soon as you look at a handful or a dozen or so, you start to notice, there's a lot of weird shapes out there.
Some of them have more arms, fewer arms.
Some of them have no arms at all.
There's a lot of weird stuff in the universe.
Is it sort of like cloud watching?
Like you look out into the sky and you look at the clouds and they're all different shapes like pie shaped or, you know, a butterfly shape.
Yeah, exactly.
And if you understand the dynamics of water droplet formation and air currents, you can understand why certain clouds look the way they do.
They tell you a story about what's happening up there, what the forces are that are doing battle.
And it's the same for galaxies.
There's enormous cosmic forces pushing on these things.
things and pulling on these things and the shapes reveal exactly what happened.
How much dark chocolate at eight.
How much it's been subscribing to Jorge's new workout video.
That's right.
How many spins it's been doing?
Well, as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had thought about this question
of what shapes galaxies can be.
And so as usual, Daniel went out there into the internet to ask people, what are the possible
shapes galaxies can take?
I'm grateful, as always, to our group of volunteers.
And if you would like to join them to contribute.
your voice to the podcast.
Please don't be shy.
Write to us to Questions at
Daniel and Jorge.com.
Everybody's welcome.
So think about it for a second.
What kinds of shapes
have you seen in galaxies?
Here's what people had to say.
There's spiral galaxies
or barred spirals
like ours.
I don't know, maybe there's just bars.
There's irregular ones
that were disturbed by gliding
with other galaxies
and haven't settled down yet.
I think there's blobs
or spherical-shaped galaxies.
And I hope there's a galaxy shape like Mickey Mouse somewhere out there.
I think they're most often some kind of circular shape,
given that they're rotating around the black hole that's usually at the center of the galaxy.
I think the Milky Way is considered a spiral galaxy,
but I would guess he can probably have most any shape that's possible
that could form around a center of mass.
Now, I did use to take part in Zooniverse.
So I know that you can have spiral-shaped galaxies
and they can have different numbers of arms,
and they can also have a bar feature or not across the center.
Then you also get elliptical galaxies, which, when they're sort of close to the plane,
they're just called lenticular galaxies.
And then you can have globular clusters.
Now there may be other galaxy shapes as well, but they're the main types that I remember.
All right.
I feel like they quickly spiraled out of control.
There are a lot of ellipses there as people were thinking, yeah.
Yeah, they just kept going around and running circles.
I don't know if there is a Mickey Mouse-shaped galaxy,
but if the universe is infinite,
then I guess somewhere there has to be one.
Well, I wonder if there are like three galaxies
kind of crashing into each other right before they do.
They do look like maybe a Mickey Mouse shape.
Well, you know, if you Google Mickey Mouse Galaxy,
you don't get mostly scientific images.
Yeah, or I wonder if you look far enough or long enough at galaxy shapes,
if you'll eventually run into one that's inappropriate.
We're not safe for work.
Not safe for the universe.
Safe for astronomy.
Probably it's sort of like looking at clouds.
You can stare at a galaxy and imagine a creative interpretation.
Interesting.
I see what you'd say.
Maybe it reveals more about your inner space than outer space.
Yeah, exactly.
It's like a Roarshark test.
Yeah, you have a dark mind or a white chocolate mind.
A white chocolate mind is like a brain that's been battered and fried.
Oh, my gosh.
Well, anyways, maybe we should start.
the beginning here. You know, we're going to talk about the shape of galaxies. Like, how do galaxies
form in the first place and what might determine their shape? Yeah, I think people usually think
about the universe in terms of stars. But to me, it's much more natural to think about the
universe in terms of galaxies. It's like the basic building block of the universe. You look out into
deep space and it's mostly filled with galaxies scattered everywhere. You can argue about
whether those galaxies come together to make larger structure and whether the internal
structure of those galaxies is more important. But to me, galaxies are like the basic building
block of the universe. So yeah, it's important to figure out like, why do we have galaxies? Why are they
typically this size? Why does the universe do this kind of thing? I see galaxies are sort of like maybe
the atom for you. Like you know it's made out of things that are smaller. But, you know, to understand
most of what we see around this in chemistry and materials and things like that, you can just sort
of think about the atomic structure. Yeah. To me, it's always really fascinating the size of things
that emerge. You know, we don't know if there's a smallest thing in the universe.
universe, but it's fascinating that like the atom is a certain size, right? And planets are a certain
size and stars are a certain size. Galaxies also are a certain size. And if you poke into the
physics behind them, how they came together, then you learn something about what the universe
likes to do, which somehow maybe bubbles up from the tiniest particles, though that's not a process
that we understand. You mean like galaxies don't vary that much in size, right? Like you don't
see a teeny tiny galaxy and humongas, you know, superstructure spanning galaxy.
They mostly all fall within a certain range, just like planets all sort of fall within a certain range.
Yeah, there is a very wide range of size of galaxies, but it doesn't extend down to like the size of cats.
You don't have like galaxies the size of cats and you don't have galaxies the size of super clusters, exactly.
So there's a certain like size of galaxy that the universe likes to make and not much, much, much bigger and not much, much smaller.
And that tells you something about the balance of the forces.
Sort of like planets too, I guess.
You can have small planets, but you can't have like a solar system.
besides planet. Yeah, if you had something like that, it would just collapse into a star, right?
And in the end, it all comes back to the same original story of like, why do we have any
structure at all? Why isn't the universe just like smoothly filled with particles? Why do things
clump together? And that dates back all the way to the very beginning of little patches where
things were denser and little patches where things were less dense. We think there were quantum
fluctuations in the early universe as particles formed out of this pre-particle goo, this very hot and dense
stuff that we don't understand very well. You've got little fluctuations that were more dense here
and less dense there. And those were the seeds that gravity latched onto that started pulling things
together to make things more and more dense because the denser you are, the more you have gravity
and then you can pull on things, which leads to a runaway effect where things get more and more
dense. So I guess you need these fluctuations to even start something, right? Because if everything
in the universe was evenly spaced, then you would feel the same pull of gravity in all directions
and nothing would ever clumped together.
Exactly.
So the quantum fluctuations get you started,
and then they get blown up by inflation.
The universe expanded super duper rapidly
in the first few moments that we understand,
and those grew these little fluctuations
from quantum size,
something you could never see,
to macroscopic fluctuations.
Things big enough for like gravity
to really grab a hold of
and start to seed structure.
And you have these fluctuations
in the dark matter as well as in the normal matter.
And it's really these fluctuations
that determine everything,
These quantum fluctuations blown up to a specific size, create pools of dark matter, which then create galaxies.
Now, these quantum fluctuations, are these are quantum fluctuations of what?
The matter or the space itself?
I think most fundamentally there are quantum fluctuations in the fields, right?
We don't really know what happens before we have fields, but you can think about the fields before you can think about the particles.
Because as the fields are cooling, it starts to make sense to talk about individual particles.
Before that, it's more like you're talking about waves in the ocean rather than droplets.
But as things cool down and get less dense, then you get particles.
So it's those quantum fluctuations in those initial fields that give you a little bit more energy here, a little bit less energy there,
and that eventually turns into more particles here and fewer particles there.
Because I guess the fields don't scale with the growth of the universe, do they?
They kind of stay at the same scale.
So when the universe was a lot smaller, the fluctuations in those fields were huge in comparison to the size of the universe.
Mm-hmm. Exactly. And then as the universe expands, that energy just gets dilute, right? Everything gets colder and less dense.
And smaller by comparison, I guess, right?
Yeah, and smaller by comparison. And we talked in a recent episode about how different slices of the universe pie evolve over time.
You have the radiation slice, which gets more dilute, but also gets redshifted. So its energy actually goes away faster as the universe expands.
You have the matter portion where the energy is constant, but because space is expanding, it gets more and more dilute.
Then you have the dark energy fraction, which doesn't get diluted as the universe expands.
And so its overall energy fraction increases.
But I guess getting back to galaxies, so how did these quantum fluctuations then result in galaxies?
So these quantum fluctuations give you a little bit more matter here and a little bit less matter there.
And in the very early universe, you had dark matter and you had normal matter and you had photons.
And these things are all sort of sloshing around.
And the photons are pressing on the normal matter.
the dark matter is pulling things back in, and you had this actual ringing of the early universe.
They would be called these barion acoustic oscillations, sort of like the sound of the early
universe. The pressure waves in that initial plasma was sloshing around, and a big component
of that is the dark matter that's pulling things together. At some moment, the universe expands
enough and cools enough that goes from being a plasma to being a neutral gas, like the protons
and the electrons find each other, so they can no longer be pushed by the photons. So that's
sort of freezes the structure into place. And you get places where you had more dark matter
and more normal matter. And that's where you ended up with galaxies today. In the spots it had more
dark matter and regular matter. So some of those spots have more dark matter. Some of the spots
have less dark matter, but more normal matter because it got pushed by the photons. And if you look out
into the universe, you can actually see these spots where you have clusters of galaxies that formed
where the dark matter was denser. And then you have these rings of galaxies that formed where the
normal matter was denser. I actually see these bubbles from the early universe. It's sort of
incredible. But basically you had places with more matter and that means more gravity and that
pulls all the gas together and that's what allows you to create stars. And galaxies are basically
just huge pools of gas with stars forming inside them. So that's kind of what a galaxy is or was
initially with just a cloud of gas. And at the beginning, I imagine it was just kind of a homogeneous,
you know, blobby kind of cloud of gas. No structure or shape at all. Or maybe just kind of
of like a blobby shape.
A big blob of gas that's pulling together and collapsing.
And initially it's almost all hydrogen.
It's like a tiny little bit of helium also made in the Big Bang, but almost all hydrogen.
And then you get these things collapsing into stars and those groups of stars then form galaxies.
But you still have lots of gas in there.
So you have stars embedded in huge clouds of gas and together those things have formed galaxies.
All right.
That sounds like when galaxy started to get into shape and started to start to get into shape and started
to become something.
And so let's dig deeper into that.
What are some of the new and old ideas about how galaxies form?
And then let's figure out if they've been exercising.
First, let's take a quick break.
Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance bro?
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This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards.
If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit.
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When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping
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Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it.
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All right. We're talking about the shapes of galaxies. What shapes can they be? Can they be square? Can they look like a cube? Can they look like Mickey Mouse? Inquiring minds want to know.
Well, one thing we can see initially is that there are different sizes of galaxies. There are smaller galaxies out there. There are bigger galaxies out there.
You know, our galaxy has a few hundred billion stars, but there are galaxies out there with trillions of stars.
stars and dwarf galaxies with only like tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of stars.
So there's a pretty big range of galaxy sizes.
But then I guess what determined the size of the galaxy is it just like how much gas
happened to pool together because of these quantum fluctuations?
Isn't there like a limit to what these quantum fluctuations look like?
That was sort of the original idea that big galaxies were born big and little galaxies were
born little and it just depended on like the scoop of stuff that you got.
And in that scenario, like large galaxies would form all at once.
You know, you have this huge collapse, this monolithic collapse of the gas down into a huge galaxy,
making stars until it was all used up.
But these days, the newer idea is that galaxies don't vary that much in size when they're formed.
They basically only make small galaxies initially.
And then the bigger galaxies are made from mergers of other galaxies.
That's the new idea of how galaxies form.
It's like they were all made kind of like Lego blocks.
and then the Lego block started to assemble into bigger galaxies.
Exactly.
And this newer idea comes from seeing more examples.
You know, initially we could basically only see either nearby galaxies
or very bright, older galaxies that were further away.
But now that we have new exceptional tools like James Webb and even Hubble,
we can see further back in time and we can see more examples of smaller galaxies that were further away.
So we can see those small galaxies forming.
But isn't it kind of a mystery how you go from the smaller galaxy?
to the bigger galaxies, or is it all just like random, you know, collisions out there in space?
I think there are definitely still open questions, but there's also a lot of it that we do
understand. Basically, it's gravity. You form these little galaxies, and then those galaxies come
together because if they're close enough together, gravity will pull them together. Space is expanding
between them. Dark energy is fighting it, but gravity wins at small distances and eventually will
pull those things together. The way the Milky Way and Andromeda are getting pulled together,
overcoming the power of dark energy.
So then I guess as we look out into space and back into time,
that's basically the movie that plays out for you as you look out into the cosmos.
You see a bunch of little galaxies, and as you fast forward in time,
you can sort of see them merge together to form the galaxies that are closer to us,
which are more recent.
Exactly.
And even our galaxy is the product of many, many mergers.
We think that our galaxy is the combination of lots and lots of smaller galaxies,
these which came together to make the Milky Way.
Sort of like Voltron.
Yeah, or Power Rangers or whatever.
I don't think Power Rangers merge there, Daniel.
Oh, no, they don't come together to make one Super Power Ranger?
No, I don't think so.
What?
Is that Pokemon?
What am I thinking of?
I think you're thinking of Voltron, yeah.
I don't even know what Voltron is, so I couldn't be thinking of Voltron.
Is it Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle?
Do they come together?
It's a GI Joe.
It's what it is.
It's not G.
And Barbie.
Like G.
Joe, merged with Barbie, and that's how you get the Milky Way.
Now you're just spreading misinformation about pop culture and about science.
You're giving me too much work to do here, man.
Yes, and that's how we lost the election.
Whoa.
But anyways, getting back to the original question, which is about the shape of galaxies.
You've given us kind of a general picture of where galaxies come from, but what the term is their shape?
Like, what the term is whether they're spiral or blobby or Mickey Mouse?
So let's start with the spiral ones because those are sort of the most natural and the simplest ones.
And when small galaxies form, they tend to be spiral galaxies.
And that's why spiral galaxies are the most common type of galaxy in the universe.
And the reason you get a spiral is that this initial blob of gas is spinning.
Everything in the universe is spinning.
And that spin can't go away.
We conserve angular momentum in the universe, which means if something is spinning, then to stop it spinning, you have to apply some torque to it.
You have to like spin it the other direction.
But an isolated object like in space you started spinning is just going to spin forever.
Something else from the outside would have to come and push on it in order for it to stop spinning.
I wonder if maybe for listeners, we should explain that this idea of just a generic blob of glass out there in space,
that it has actually a spin direction.
Because you might imagine like something that big and that sort of random, like all the particles are actually kind of fly in all directions all the time,
not necessarily in a particular direction, but overall.
all, it sort of has to have a preference for a general spin direction, right?
Yeah.
And this can be a little tricky to get your mind around.
You might think, well, there's lots of particles out there.
Why don't they all just average out to no spin?
And so think about in terms of like every individual particle.
You know, draw a line through like the center of mass of a bunch of particles.
Each particle is contributing to the spin of the overall object in some way.
If it's flying to the left, then effectively it's spinning it one way.
If it's flying to the right, it's effectively spinning it the other way.
So now add up all those little pushes, basically, from all those particles and ask yourself, does it add up to zero?
Well, what are the chances it adds up to exactly zero?
That's like saying, I'm going to flip a coin a billion times.
What are the odds?
I'm going to get exactly half a billion heads and exactly half a billion tails.
Basically, that's impossible.
So while it's possible for some object out there to have zero total spin, it's very unlikely.
The most common thing is for it to have some small amount of overall spin.
It's sort of like I wonder if like you can think about the shape of the blob.
Like it would be almost impossible for this blob of gas to be like perfectly spherical.
Like most likely it has a little bit of a oblongness in one direction.
And so that maybe tells you that the galaxy leans wider in this direction.
I think maybe you can think about the spinning of it is the same way.
It's like that all the particles are moving in all directions.
But overall, it's sort of maybe spinning a little bit more in a particular direction.
Yeah, the distance from the center plays a big role because the angle of momentum varies with distance.
So you're right.
The fact that it's randomly distributed in distances also makes it pretty hard to imagine that it would be perfectly balanced.
So you just like carve out a random chunk of gas from the early universe.
Overall, it's very unlikely for it to be perfectly balanced in spin.
So that means it has some overall spin, even if it's tiny.
Now collapse that gas with gravity and that tiny overall spin becomes a pretty fast spin.
The way if you're like figure skating and you pull your arms in, you spin faster and faster
because the same angular momentum over shorter distances requires a higher velocity of spin.
So now this big, slowly spinning blob of gas has become a denser, more quickly spinning blob of gas.
Right. It's sort of like when you flush the toilet, initially things are spinning slowly,
but then as they flush down the center, things are spinning really fast.
I love how you always go for the toilet analogy that really crystallizes it in my mind.
I'm all about the dark humor.
So then it's spinning.
You have this big cloud of gas.
It's collapsing because of gravity.
Maybe it's kind of squeezes into a pancake first, right?
Because the gravity that not in the direction of the spin tends to just flatten this big cloud first, right?
Exactly.
The spin makes it collapse into a pancake instead of just into a point, right?
Along the plane of the spin, basically angle and momentum needs to stick around.
And so the same way that like the Earth doesn't call.
collapse into the sun because of our orbital angular momentum around the sun, the gas turns into a big swirling orbit around the center of the galaxy.
The same way, like a black hole has an accretion disk around it for all the same reasons.
So it sort of collapses into a disk.
And that's when the stars start to form.
When the gas gets dense enough, stars begin to form.
So it's not like you have a bunch of gas which form stars and then the stars collapsed into a disc.
It's the gas collapsing into a disk that allows the stars to form.
They form in that disc.
Okay.
So now is that why most galaxies are flat, sort of like a, you know, and you don't get spherical
galaxies or do you get spherical galaxies?
You can get elliptical galaxies, which include some spheres and they're also globular clusters
out there.
But these galaxies, the spiral galaxies, that's why they are flat.
They're flat because the stars form in that disk, which is shaped by gravity and angular momentum,
sort of playing against each other.
So here you can see two totally different things in the universe, gravity and angular momentum,
fighting each other on these vast cosmic scales and determining the structure of most of these galaxies.
All these spiral galaxies are basically a balance between these two things, angular momentum and gravity.
Okay, so we had a cloud, it's flattened to a pancake, and now what turned into a spiral?
Who flushed the toilet?
So it's still spinning.
It's got to keep spinning.
That's why it's a pancake.
And then you get these arms that form.
And a lot of people imagine that galactic arms are like your arms.
That you spinning around, your arms are like a collection of mass.
And as your arms spin, that mass moves.
But in the case of galaxies, these arms are not structural.
It's not the same stars in the arm the whole time.
The arms are actually density waves in this pancake.
So some stars get closer together and then further apart and closer together and further apart.
It's more like a wave passing through a stadium.
Those people aren't running in a wave.
It's just a wave moving through the stationary crows.
Yeah, we had a whole episode about that.
I remember it's sort of like a wave in traffic.
Like you were stuck in the highway.
There's sort of these ways that go from the back to the front or the front to the back
where you get these cars kind of clustering together for a while,
but then they spread out after a while, right?
Sort of like a traffic jam almost.
Yeah, it's sort of like a traffic jam.
And it explains why galaxies aren't like really, really tightly wound.
If you stick your arms out and then you spin,
your arms tend to sort of like lag behind you.
Or if you had like a ribbon and you were spinning, you would end up winding it around yourself.
And so people wondered for a while when they thought that these arms really like were structural,
why galaxies weren't all like wound up like a ball of yarn.
So this explains why they aren't.
Because they're actually just density waves.
But you do see a big range of tightness.
Like you see some with looser wines and some with tighter wines.
It's really interesting to see like the variety.
By wine you mean like the spiral.
Some spirals are more spirally than other.
Yeah, some are looser and some are tighter.
They're all spirals, but some are looser and some are tighter.
And sometimes you see multiple arms, right?
I made a listener question about a galaxy with like three arms and why you sometimes have four arms or two arms.
These are density waves that come out of the perturbations of the initial gas cloud as it's spinning.
And so you can get different numbers of arms.
You also typically get like a big central bulge.
So that's the shape of these spiral galaxies.
And they spin for a long time.
And they think that eventually spiral galaxies will merge with other spiral galaxies.
but they don't have to, right?
Sometimes the spiral galaxy is happy by itself
and they can just sort of live out its life.
And the future of these spiral galaxies
is that eventually these density waves dissipate
and you get just sort of like a smooth pancake galaxy.
Wait, what?
So it starts out smooth.
Then you get these density waves
and give it a spiral shape
and then eventually after a while
the spirals flatten out too.
Yeah, I wouldn't say that it starts out smooth.
I mean, the density waves come from
something in that galaxy that was clumpy,
that seeds the density wave.
But eventually, interactions between these stars,
the pushes and the poles and the friction, et cetera,
will smooth these things out and they will dissipate.
You get these things called lenticular galaxies,
which have no relationship to lentils at all
to my wife's great disappointment.
It just means that they're basically smooth.
But I guess maybe we're saying it's that maybe
we've been imagining this original cloud of gas
that started the galaxy as being perfectly smooth,
but maybe it wasn't, right?
Like maybe this cloud of gas was a lops.
sighted or maybe it was denser in one direction and then those weird shapes of the gas then
gave you these weird arms distributions yeah it definitely was not smooth right the reason this cloud
of gas formed not some other cloud is because it was denser it formed around some core that was a little
bit denser that pulled it together and there were other sort of like mini cores within it you know
other little seeds of gravity so it definitely didn't start out as a perfectly smooth structure at all
And so that plays out and forms these density waves.
But because the interaction, things eventually spread out and it gets smoothed out.
So that's the future of the Milky Way galaxy too.
Eventually, we're just going to be a pancake.
If we were left to our own devices, but because Andromeda is going to slam into us,
that's going to change our shape.
And whether we form a new spiral galaxy as a merger or whether we end up an elliptical galaxy
depends a little bit on how much gas we have left when it happens.
All right.
So that's how spiral galaxies get formed.
And so let's talk about some of the other shades that galaxies can take,
including Daniel's Mickey Mouse galaxy.
So let's talk about that.
But first, let's take another 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, got you.
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 had this overwhelming sensation that I had to call her right then.
And I just hit call.
I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick.
I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation.
And I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the
of the very same things you're battling,
and there is help out there.
The Good Stuff podcast, season two,
takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation,
a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community.
September is National Suicide Prevention Month,
so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick
as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission.
I was married to a combat army veteran,
and he actually took his own life to suicide.
One Tribe saved my life twice.
There's a lot of love that flows through this place,
and it's sincere.
Now it's a personal mission.
I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know.
I got blown up on a React mission.
I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg
and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head.
Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff.
Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hola, it's HoneyGerman.
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 audition 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,
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.
But the whole pretending and cold, you know, it takes a toll on you.
Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey, Sess, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance bro,
tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you
pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit
or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do
feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt
consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some
online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to
judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have
this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head
in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just
because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice,
listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
All right, we're talking about the shape of galaxies sponsored by Disney.
No?
The check didn't come through.
Sponsored by Warner Brothers.
Let's talk about Bucks Bunny shaped galaxies.
You want all these children's entertainment companies to be responsible for the not safer astronomy shapes of galaxies?
Well, I'm sure we can censor those out.
Now we are censoring the night sky.
Oh, my gosh.
I feel like the nice guy censors itself.
Why is it so hard to see?
I know most of the universe is already censored.
Maybe dark matter is hidden for us for a reason.
That's right.
It's like the universe using a black marker.
It's not dark matter.
It's bleeped matter.
That's right.
Maybe it's not safe for humans.
It's redacted matter.
Yeah.
We can't be trusted with its secrets.
If you only knew what the universe was hiding.
Oh, my goodness.
You know, you can get in trouble for,
divulging classified information. Have you heard?
I have not.
I want to watch out for that. All right. So let's talk about some of the other shapes that galaxies can be.
We talked about spiral shapes. That's kind of maybe the traditional shape of a galaxy of most people
think about, but galaxies can have other shapes.
Yes, spiral galaxies are the most common in the universe, but the biggest galaxies are elliptical
galaxies. These are often found in like the rich central regions of galaxy clusters.
and they are usually the result of lots of spiral galaxies merging.
And these elliptical galaxies are not nearly as pretty to look at.
Like a spiral has features and you can see it.
It's like a disc.
There's arms in it sometimes.
Elliptical galaxies basically just a big blob.
You know, it's smooth.
There's almost no features in it.
It's just a bunch of stars.
Well, maybe that's pretty to some people.
I'm not saying it's not aesthetic, but it's just a bit of a blob.
Are you trying to shape, shame some galaxies out there?
I'm just creating categories, man.
That's all I'm doing.
An important feature of elliptical galaxies is that they don't have a lot of star formation going on.
And that's why they're elliptical galaxies.
Now, hold on.
What do you mean by elliptical?
Like, it's shaped like an ellipsis, but is it flat?
Or is it, are you saying it's more shaped like a football?
What is this shape exactly?
It's more like a big watermelon.
You know, and an ellipse in general includes spheres, right?
It's just sort of like a more general phrase in the same way that like a circle technically is an ellipse.
It just has its two axes equal.
So an elliptical galaxy is just like a big watermelon shaped galaxy.
It might be longer in one direction or another.
So it's like a blob, like a submarine-shaped blob.
Yeah, exactly.
Like it's a big submarine floating through space.
It's not flat like a pancake.
And that's the overall shape of it.
Is it like denser in the middle?
Is it just all the stars evenly distributed?
Does it have like a shell?
Paint the picture for us.
So elliptical galaxies definitely do have a core where things are denser.
and then they peter out near the edge.
But essentially, there's not that much else to talk about.
They're roughly ellipsoidal, and they have a bunch of stars in them.
And I think maybe the other most interesting thing about them is that they don't have a lot of gas.
They're basically mostly stars, which means that you're not having a lot more stars being formed.
It's the gas that forms the stars.
And in a lot of galaxies, you continuously have more stars being formed.
But elliptical galaxies are almost always quenched, which means no new stars are being formed.
And are the stars in them also really old, right?
If it's not forming new stars, then all of its stars must be old.
Exactly, which affects the color of the galaxies as well.
Because stars that are really big turn out to be really hot, which makes them blue,
and those kinds of stars don't burn for very long.
The colder stars, the smaller stars are redder,
and those tend to be the ones that burn for billions and billions of years.
So if you look at a galaxy and you see only red stars,
that means there are no new stars being formed there.
It's only the long-lived short people who are left.
And so these elliptical galaxies don't have new stars being formed, which makes them redder than other galaxies.
So all the blue stars basically burn themselves out and are maybe just floating there, but you can't see them.
Yeah, exactly.
They have their stellar remnants, but they're no longer burning.
And that's basically why this is an elliptical galaxy.
I mean, imagine two spiral galaxies forming.
If they don't have a lot of gas left, then what happens?
They're mostly just stars.
and then those two spiral galaxies merge
and now you have two planes.
You have one plane of rotation
from each galaxy
and now they've mixed.
So you have some stars moving along one plane,
some stars moving along another plane.
Now throw in another spiral galaxy
and another and another.
Eventually you have lots of different planes of rotation
and what do you get?
You get an ellipse.
So if you add a bunch of spiral galaxies together
without a whole lot of gas to make new stars,
then you just get a big ellipse.
It's like you're just joining
different pancakes at different ends.
and then you just push it all together, you just get a giant cloud of stars.
Exactly.
And that might make you think, well, then every single galaxy that's merged should be an ellipse,
right?
Because you get these spirals and then you add spirals together, you should get ellipses.
How can you still have really big spiral galaxies like the Milky Way or Andromeda?
And the answer is the gas.
When the two spiral galaxies merged, if there's still a lot of gas in the original spirals,
then that gas interacts and collapses again forming a new spiral.
That's how you get a big spiral galaxy.
The gas from the original ones smashes into each other,
forming new stars in a new disc.
Right, but I guess maybe the question is,
like, why don't elliptical galaxies eventually collapse into a pancake too?
Like, wouldn't they also have, you know, an overall spin?
Even if you're adding different mini galaxies,
wouldn't it all have an overall spin?
Wouldn't over time it also collapsed into a pancake
and then maybe also into a spiral?
It might eventually,
but because there's very little gas in those galaxies,
is almost no friction. And so it's really hard for those stars to interact with each other.
You know, they're basically really isolated from each other except for gravity.
What do you mean by low friction? How does that play into a cloud of gas form into a pancake?
It's very hard for these stars to exchange energy in any way. Think about how things can
collapse. Things collapse because they bounce off each other. If everything just stayed in its
original orbit, nothing would ever collapse. Your gas cloud never would have formed a pancake.
In order to collapse down to a pancake, they have to somehow bounce off each other.
and exchange energy.
That's why, for example, dark matter doesn't collapse into a pancake because it has no
interactions other than gravity.
It just stays in a big spherical halo.
So even though it's drawn to the center, when they get to the center, they just miss each
other and keep going.
Yeah, exactly.
But if there's some gas there to sort of slow the stars down and exchange energy, then
things can collapse.
But elliptical galaxies have almost no gas.
And so the stars basically ignore each other unless they come really close in some gravitational
interaction can slow them down.
I think like eventually elliptical galaxies will flatten out for all the same reasons we've been talking about.
But because gravity is so weak compared to the other forces, it's going to take much, much longer than if you actually have a lot of gas in there to facilitate that kind of interaction.
But as we're looking back into time with like the James Webb Telescope gig, do we see evidence of that?
Like in the distant past, is it mostly all pancakes or are there still a lot of elliptical galaxy?
In the distant past, we can see that these pancakes are the ones that are formed.
Like, you don't form elliptical galaxies initially.
You form those spirals, and then if those spirals use up most of their gas and have quenched
and then merge, then you see ellipticals being formed.
So the only way to make an elliptical galaxy is to basically use up the gas in the spiral galaxies
initially and then merge them.
And then they're sort of frozen in their original planes.
So I guess maybe what you're saying is that not enough time has passed
made for these elliptical galaxies to flatten out,
to basically see everything flattened out.
Exactly.
In the far, far future, elliptical galaxies,
if left to their own devices,
will eventually flatten out because of gravity.
But spiral galaxies have flattened because the gas,
because the gas has a lot more interactions than the stars.
All right.
So then that's the elliptical galaxies.
What other shapes can galaxies be?
So there's another category called irregular galaxies,
and these are ones that are basically not elliptical and not spiral.
So astronomers were like, hmm,
let's make a bucket for other stuff and irregular galaxies can be like almost any shape you see stuff
long and thin you see stuff spread out you see stuff in a question mark shape there's a huge number of
these also but almost every single time it's a transient shape it's because something has been like
perturbed two galaxies have smashed into each other or passed really close to each other and torn themselves
apart and haven't yet settled into some new stable shape probably elliptical or spiral so it's sort of
like an intermediate state for galaxies that are interacting.
I thought you made a regular like a toilet reference again.
These should have more fiber of these galaxies.
I mean, really take care of yourselves, people.
Yeah, it's a meta-musele with that dark chocolate.
Maybe dark matter is the fiber of the universe.
It really is making things regular.
All right.
So you're saying that in paint me, paint the picture first again.
These are just like weird shapes out there of galaxies.
Like they look like an L-shaped or like a maybe like a Mickey Mouse.
Yeah. If you just Google like irregular galaxies, you can see all sorts of crazy stuff. And it's basically the result of collisions. So it can be a mess. Just like if you look at simulations of what's going to happen when Andromeda and the Milky Way collide. In the beginning, it doesn't really have any shape at all. It's just like a huge spray. Stars this way and stars that way. And then eventually it settles down into a new shape. But in the intermediate shape, it just depends on the angles and the sizes and how they hit. You can get basically any shape you like.
And you say most of these irregular galaxies are because of collisions of other galaxies.
But can you form an irregular shape galaxy from scratch?
Cool question.
I think the answer is no because you don't get star formation in a spiral galaxy until the gas collapses.
So it's not like you can form a bunch of stars in a random place.
The stars don't really form until the gas is already collapsed into a disk, really.
And so I don't think you can form an irregular galaxy from scratch.
I think it's the combination of other galaxies coming together, sort of chaotically.
All right. So then does that cover all the shapes galaxies can be?
It doesn't. There's one really cool, very strange, spectacular shape of galaxy that's very, very rare.
It's called a ring galaxy.
Whoa. Like it's shaped like a hoop?
It's really cool. It has like a central core, like a blob in the middle. And then there's a big gap.
And then surrounding it is a whole ring of stars. So it's flat.
It's flat. Yeah, exactly.
So it's a flat pancake, but instead of being like a full disc, it's got a core and then like a ring.
So it's sort of like a bicycle wheel.
You have like the tire and then you have the central hub.
And there's a huge gap in between.
Sort of like a Saturn galaxy.
Yeah, exactly, like a Saturn galaxy.
And these are really fascinating.
The center is red.
So like they're older stars and the ring tends to be blue.
So they're really beautiful to look at.
Whoa.
And patriotic.
Yeah.
I guess they're French, they're Dutch, and they're American.
Who else is red, white, and blue?
All of that, all of that, yes.
It's multinational.
How did these galaxies form?
So this was a real mystery for a long time.
We didn't even see one of these until like 1950.
They're so rare.
And they think that these things are formed in a really lucky, spectacular collision.
Basically, when one galaxy passes right through the center of the other one, it creates
this ring from the shock wave of dense gas that's rushing.
out of that collision.
You mean like two spiral galaxies or two elliptical galaxies just totally just head on crash into each other?
Yeah, exactly.
You have like some galaxy punch right through the exact center of another gas-rich spiral galaxy.
It'll create this shock wave in that gas, which will create stars.
And that's why the ring tends to be blue because it tends to be big, fat, young, hot stars that tend to burn bright and therefore blue.
Whoa. Whoa.
No judgment.
It's safe for work.
Does it say for work?
The podcast.
I mean hot in a technical temperature sense, right?
Well, you just got really excited there.
I'm excited to see star formation, right?
Star formation is so exciting.
It's like the thing that makes the universe bright.
It's the reason we can see things in the universe is because stars form.
It's kind of a miracle almost.
And so these collisions create a whole ring of new stars that are sort of moving out away from the galaxy.
So the main stars crash into each other
and the collision kind of exploded all the gas
to the outer edge
and that's where these new stars are forming
but why did it stay in a flat shape?
Well the original disk essentially was flat right
and so what happened was created a pressure wave
in that flat disk.
There isn't gas in those other directions to compress
it's sort of the same reason that like a ripple moves
along the surface of the water.
You slap the water and you get rings on the surface
you don't get rings of water like moving up also.
And that's just sort of where the gas is.
I see.
It's like you had a giant disc flat pancake and you sort of poked the middle of it and it sent the ripple along the pancake.
Exactly.
And that's what we're seeing.
We're like in the middle of watching this.
So this is a pretty spectacular hypothesis.
And people thought, well, if this is true, then we should see like galaxies literally on top of each other.
And also we should be able to like identify the galaxy that caused that ripple.
And now we've seen enough of these things that you can actually spot that.
We have pictures of ring galaxies where you can tell which galaxy has just passed through it,
like, you know, recently on galactic time scales.
And we've even seen one where the galaxy is in the process of punching right through
the middle of the other galaxy.
Well, that's interesting that this is happening not just in one place, but like all over
the universe.
Yeah, everywhere.
And it turns out that's what the question mark galaxy is.
It looks kind of like a question mark because we're seeing one galaxy, which is a spiral.
And then there's another galaxy which is on edge.
So it looks like a line and it's passing right through the middle of it.
So you get this combination of two galaxies forming a question mark.
And in a million years or so, the one that's being hit is going to turn into a ring galaxy.
Wait, wait.
How does it, how does a question mark form?
So you have one which is a disc and you can sort of see the arms of it.
And that's sort of the round part of the question mark.
This is sort of difficult to do over audio.
And then the line part of the question mark is another galaxy, but we're only seeing it on edge.
so it looks like a line instead of a circle.
So instead of looking like a figure eight,
it looks like a figure eight,
but one of them has been twisted down,
so it's like a circle and a line combined.
It's complicated.
Yes, it's complicated.
It's like, I think we're a galaxy, question mark?
I think we're supposed to merge into something, question mark?
I don't know. Yeah, maybe.
It just goes to show you there's questions everywhere in the universe, literally.
Literally, yeah.
All right, well, what does this all tell us about?
like the Milky Way and why we're here and is it weird that we're here or are we a pretty
typical galaxy so we're a pretty typical galaxy we're not one of the biggest galaxies we're
not one of the smallest galaxies we have one of the most common types of galaxies in the universe
but it also tells us that we contain multitudes you know that the Milky Way has lots of little
baby galaxies inside of it some of the reasons we have stars that are not in the disc
that like orbit above the disc or whatever are from those collisions stars that survive those
collisions of galaxies and are still hanging out orbiting in their original galactic plane.
And when we look at the distribution of galaxies, all the different shapes, it forces us to tell
this story, to explain everything we see and to play detective and to understand like what
happened in the early universe.
How did we get here from the big blob of gas from the Big Bang?
And it helps us unravel, you know, the whole history of the universe and also to think about
its future.
But it sort of seems like in terms of shape, there's really only one shape, which is the
sort of like the spiral
and then the other shapes
you get them
by combining spirals together
so it's more like a sequential
category of galaxies
yeah to use your analogy
it's like the spirals are atoms
and everything else
is like a molecule built out of those atoms
and those other shapes
only sort of happen
if two galaxies collide
exactly a cloud of gas
will form a spiral galaxy
if left on its own
and the other ones need
combinations of spiral galaxies
and it also sounds sort of like
the future is a little bit unknown right
like we're maybe not sure
what eventual shape things are going to take in the future?
Yeah, our galaxy and will collide with Andromeda,
and whether we form a new spiral galaxy along that plane depends how much gas is left.
We know that Andromeda is already starting to quench,
and we think that the Milky Way is quenching,
which might mean that we don't have enough gas to make a new spiral galaxy.
It might mean we end up with a big elliptical blob.
Or we might end up with a galaxy?
Maybe?
From some point of view, just before Andromeda plummets into the heart of the Milky Way,
you might be able to make us into a question mark.
Well, here's a question, Daniel.
If our galaxy is called the Milky Way and there's chocolate in our galaxy, isn't all chocolate then milk chocolate?
No, you're ruining chocolate for me, man.
I'm going to have to look forward to importing chocolate from Andromeda.
There you go.
Should have just said, no way, man.
All right.
Well, an interesting view into the cosmos.
all the different things that can happen out there.
And another interesting reminder that the universe is still evolving, still changing, things
are colliding, things are changing shapes, things are asking questions of themselves.
It's an ever-changing universe.
And the past is contained in the present.
If we can dig into it deep enough and think hard about the rules at play, we can figure out
what happened in the universe.
That's right.
Sort of like how white chocolate contains cocoa butter, which technically makes it chocolate.
And you should only eat it.
at state fairs, deep fried.
That's right, or in a desert island.
Only crack open in case of emergency.
All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that.
Thanks for joining us.
See you next time.
For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media
where we answer questions and post videos.
We're on Twitter, Discord, Insta, and now TikTok.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe
is a production of I-Hy-Hy-Hawks.
Heart Radio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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