Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What's The Biggest "Thing" in The Universe?

Episode Date: March 28, 2019

Planets, stars, galaxies, clusters, then what? What defines a "thing" and how big can they get? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We're tiny compared to this giant ball of rock we're standing on it. It's true. We are really small compared to the Earth. But then on the other hand, the Earth is tiny compared to like the other planets. But even the biggest planet is dwarfed by the size of the sun in our solar system. Yeah, like 99% of the stuff in the solar system is just the sun. And the sun, our sun is not even one of the bigger stars out there. It's like a mini star, right?

Yeah, there are some Mongo stars out there. And then, of course, like all the stars together, the galaxy, is just enormous compared to like our solar system. Yeah. And as big as the galaxy is, it's really just one little tiny drop in the vast ocean of galaxies. There are building some galaxies out there.

That's right. But the galaxies aren't just an ocean. There's really interesting structures there which get bigger and bigger and bigger. There are things bigger than galaxies? Oh, yeah. The galaxies are just tiny dots in the end. It's fascinating, actually,

because it gets bigger and bigger, and then it stops. And at some point, there isn't anything bigger. Well, there is actually a biggest thing in the universe. That's right. And it's not my ego. Ha ha ha ha. And I'm Daniel.

Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge explain the universe. In which we tackled the small and today, the very, very large things in the universe. That's right. Today on the podcast, we're going to ask the question, What is the biggest thing in the universe? That's right. I thought this is a pretty fun idea. like the universe is big, but it's mostly empty, right?

Like most of the stuff in the universe is just emptiness. It's space, right? If you took an average chunk of the universe, it would mostly be pretty empty. But it's also filled with really big, big things. You know, I love the contrast in the scales between the different stuff in the universe. Right, yeah. And it's all about context, right? Like something that you think is big, like, you know, the Empire State Building, it's big.

but it's only sort of big in a certain context, in a certain scale. Exactly. You can always zoom out from wherever you are, and whatever you were amazed at, how big it was, then just becomes a tiny dot. And there's some other new structure. You're like, wow, look at that. Look how big America is.

Or look how big the world is. Or look how big the solar system is. It's incredible how many different scales the universe operates on, right? Right. Because it could have been different, right? It could have been like the universe is just a bunch of rocks. And each rock is a meter in length, and that's it. And there's no structure, and they're not organized,

they're just sort of distributed through the universe, right? It could have been like that. Just like a haze of rocks. That's right. In which case, you would only be able to say that the biggest thing in the universe is like a one meter rock. That's right, yeah. But the universe seems to like to organize.

I mean, I don't want to say like, obviously, in a literal way because the universe doesn't like or dislike anything, but the universe does tend to organize stuff, right, into bigger and bigger objects. And whenever it's done organizing something, then it groups those together into objects and grows those together, right? So it's pretty amazing what it's managed to accomplish

in only 14 billion years. Yeah. So these structures of the universe keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger forever? Or does it at some point stop? Yeah, so that's what we're going to dig into today. It turns out that there is a biggest thing in the universe. There's a point above which there is no more organization.

Everything is just sprinkled evenly through the universe. Wow. So the question is, what is the biggest thing in the universe? That's right. Something out there currently reigns supreme is the biggest thing in the universe. That's a pretty impressive title, right? That's not one, something that you can just pick up any day. It takes billions of years to work up to it. You've got to train, you got to practice, you know. You got an afternoon's endeavor. Yes, right. Lift weights, make stars. I was thinking more like eat a lot of pizza, you know, this kind of stuff.

You've got to gather mass here. We're not trying to lose. it, right? The biggest thing in the universe. Yeah. So we were wondering how many people out there knew the answer to this question. What is the biggest thing in the universe? And I think, Daniel, you sort of imagined that most people would say that galaxies are the biggest thing, right?

Yeah, I actually started out asking people just what's the biggest thing in the universe, because I was thinking about, you know, organizational stuff, like groups of things, solar systems, galaxies. But the first answers I got were mostly about, like, you know, biggest stars and stuff. So then I started asking a slightly different question, which is like, do you think the galaxies are organized in any way, or are they just sort of sprinkled evenly through the universe? So we got a variety of answers. Yeah. So as usually, you went out there into the streets of UC Irvine or the pathways of UC Irvine, and you ask people this question.

The very beautifully cultivated Orange County campus of UC Irvine, which, by the way, if you haven't visited, really is gorgeous. Full smart and beautiful people, right? That's right. Everybody down here is smart and beautiful. Exactly. Here's what people had to say. I think it would be the sun. I think because it has like the strongest impact on a lot of the different planets.

Thanks very much. I know I guess a lot bigger, but I don't know like the terms of it. The galaxy. The galaxy? Yeah, it's as far as I know. It goes. No, I don't. No idea?

Okay. Don't know that. I know what it's usually referred to as like planetary neighborhoods. So that could be groupings of multiple galaxies, but I don't know the term for it. Okay, great. It's just like open space. You know, it's like our universe and then a larger, I'm not sure what it's called, but a larger area. And then there's more universes like trillions and, you know, almost an infinite amount of like universes.

Okay, great. I'm not sure. Okay. All right, it seems most people say the galaxies, right? Someone said the sun was the biggest thing in the universe. You know, they probably weren't thinking very big. But galaxies, I think most people think about, right? Like, there's nothing bigger out there than a galaxy.

Yeah. And, you know, I think it's interesting to compare that to sort of historical understandings of what people thought. Remember, like, a hundred years ago, people looked out into the sky and they saw stars. And like, okay, there are stars out there just like, there's our star. And they thought for a long time that the universe was just a bunch of stars. sprinkled through the universe, that there was no organization to them, right, that that was all there was.

Basically, that the universe was one big galaxy. So to them, a star was the biggest thing in the universe? Yeah, a star, or you could say a solar system, but that's really a small difference. So to them, a star was the biggest thing in the universe. And then about 100 years ago, they looked at some of those really faint smears in the sky and discovered that those aren't far away stars.

They're actually far away galaxies, right? Whole other clusters of stars. And that must have been a mind-blowing moment because they realized, one, that stars do form structure, right? They turn into galaxies, and two, that there are other ones, right? And the universe has lots of galaxies in it. Right. That they're not sort of spread out evenly in the universe.

They cluster into things. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They form these big structures of galaxies. And so now people, most of the folks we talk to, and maybe the people out there listening, probably imagine that the universe is just sprinkled, evenly with galaxies, right? That's the next logical assumption.

Yeah. That instead of just stars sprinkled everywhere, it's just galaxy sprinkled everywhere. So I think that's probably what people think they've heard of galaxies. They haven't heard of anything bigger. So they just assume the universe is evenly sprinkled with galaxies. Right. Well, let's think philosophically here for a second. Is a galaxy a thing?

You know, technically it's just made up of stars. What makes something a thing? What makes something a thing? Yeah, I think there must be a lot of philosophers who debated this, right? what is thingness you know it's probably a whole like a branch of philosophy about defining

objects and all sorts of stuff and they have seminars and argue about it and smoke banana peels and stuff but from the physics point of view I think we can answer that and say that a thing is something that is gravitationally bound that is essentially held together by gravity right

it's something that holds together I was thinking like that's a good definition of a thing like you and I were made up of a Billions and trillions of molecules and atoms. And there's sort of spread out a lot, right? There's just a lot of space between atoms and nuclei of atoms. But generally, they were sort of held together into this thing that I call Jorge and for you the thing that you call Daniel.

Okay. Are you talking about us individually or us as a pair? Because that's a different question. I'm definitely a thing. You're a thing. Are we a thing? Is that what you're asking? Daniel, are you asking me out?

Are you doing this on air? Hey, you raise the question, you know, like, what's a thing? Are we a thing? So here we are. You know, Daniel Jorge, explore their relationship live on the tape. Well, I mean, I like you, Daniel, but I would say that I'm a thing and you're a thing. Ouch, man, that's cold. That's just the way the universe operates, though.

If you don't have a strong bond, then you're not a thing, right? Well, you know, I think we're just talking philosophically here, right? I think philosophically we're not a thing. No, philosophically or even scientifically, I think a thing is something that holds itself together. And like, is a solar system a thing, right? Well, yeah, the solar system is a thing because the Earth doesn't have a different path than the sun, right? It goes around the sun. It moves together as a single object.

It's bound together gravitationally. Just like maybe an electron, you know, sort of trap going around a nuclear of an atom. Together they make a thing, which is an atom. yeah exactly so you could say like the solar system is a thing and so a galaxy that's made out of a whole bunch of solar systems you could also call that a thing because all of those galaxies all of those solar systems are being held together and also like you and the earth are a thing right because you're held down to the earth and together you form an object and you know you have the same fate as the earth gravitationally speaking you move around the sun together right so collectively we are all a thing with the earth right and so yeah i think that's a pretty good definition so when we say things like when we ask the question what's the biggest thing in the universe we're kind of asking like what's the biggest structure or what's the biggest thing that you can say is being held together differently than other things in the universe that's right the thing that has thingness that is also the biggest okay

so that's a good thing we got that way um i think we've think about thinging enough yes all right let's get into the size of things, like the scale of us and the earth and the solar system. 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.

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0.0.1.8 kilometers tall. All right. That's not a lot of kilometers. I mean, you're a tall guy, it turns out, but that's actually not a lot of kilometers, right? And in comparison, like the Earth, right, is thousands of kilometers in width. It's about 8,000 miles in diameter.

Yeah, that's right, which would make it about, you know, like 14,000 kilometers in diameter. So compared to the Earth, you're just like, moat. You're like irrelevant. You're like negligible, right? Which is incredible. Right. We're like a little speck of dust next to the earth. Which makes me wonder sometimes like

what's the minimum size for a planet that could hold life, right? Is it necessary? Because you know that book The Little Prince? Right. Or the guy is this little guy and he's like on a tiny asteroid. And I love that because I think it'd be really fun to be alive on a really small astronomical object

where you could like run laps around it or something. Right? When you float off at some point if you were that much bigger than your planet? Exactly. You need enough gravity, not just for you to stay bound to it,

but also to have an atmosphere. If your planet isn't big enough, it can't hold on to gas on its surface so you can't breathe. So there really is some sort of minimum size for a planet. Like Mars is probably too small. And, you know, it lost its atmosphere.

For life as we know it. I mean, there could potentially be something out there that can live without an atmosphere, right? Yeah, right. You can have an asteroid which is alive inside of it, like the organization of the flows of lava,

or hot rock inside some object could be alive, certainly. But yeah, life as we know that lives and breathes and uses water, liquid water and stuff like that, probably none of those things evolved on a planet that were much smaller than Earth. So the Earth is pretty big. So then what's the next biggest thing in our solar system? Well, if you want to scale up to planets,

Jupiter is about 10 times the radius of the Earth, which is huge. And you might think only 10 times, but remember that volume goes as radius cubed, right? So if you're 10 times the radius, then you're, you know, a thousand times the volume, which means you could fit 1,000 Earths inside Jupiter, which makes Earth like tiny. We're 1,000th of the size of Jupiter. Yeah, we're like a rounding error for Jupiter, right? It's incredible how small we are compared to Jupiter. Like we'd make a good moon to Jupiter.

Exactly. I should look that up, but there might even be moons of Jupiter that are comparable to the size of Earth. Oh, wow. It's amazing. So this is where I did some math. So I calculated that the size of the Earth is, as you said, about four kilometers in radius. You just said it's four kilometers in radius.

Oh, sorry, 4,000 miles. You didn't mean. Sorry. What's the fact of 1,000 between France? my error. Watch out people. Jorge's doing math. That's right.

Don't trust a cartoonist to do math. 4,000 miles. Sorry, 4,000 miles. But if the Earth was the size of a pinhead, like it was the size of the pin, the head in a pin, that means Jupiter would be about the size of a marble. Wow.

So if Earth really was a speck, Jupiter would still be pretty substantial. Yeah, yeah. And by that scale, the Sun, which is about 430,000 miles in radius would be about the size of a cantaloupe. Wow. I think it's really pretty interesting that the Earth is one-tenth the radius of Jupiter,

which is one-tenth the radius of the Sun, right? It's like powers of 10 right all here in our solar system, each one dwarfing the next, you know, like we are the size that the Earth-to-Jupiter ratio is about the same as the Jupiter-to-Sun ratio, right? the sun dwarfs Jupiter exactly the way Jupiter dwarfs us. Like if Jupiter was a bully pushing us around the playground and then the sun just sort of like trots up like, hey, pick on someone your own size, you know. Yeah, like you could fit a thousand Earth inside of Jupiter and you could fit a thousand Jupiter's inside the sun.

Yeah, we'd and do some math. That means you could fit a million earths inside the sun, right? Yeah. Like we could plunge into the sun and it wouldn't even notice. It'd be like a little like a mosquito bite. Exactly. Exactly. Like a millionth of you,

let's like, you know, every time you blow your nose, you lose a millionth of your mass, right? So we're like a little bit of snot compared to the sun. Right, yeah. Okay, so then if we keep going, if the Earth is a pinhead

and Jupiter is a marble and the sun is a cantaloupe, okay, so the right scale would be, if you hold the pinhead in your hand, the sun would be, which is a cantalob, you would have to put it about 100 feet away. Yeah, yeah,

because not only are these is the sun really big but it's really far away right yeah like imagine like holding a pinhead then walking 100 feet and sending down a cantaloupe that's how far the sun is yeah all these things these we these things we think are huge are dwarfed by just the sheer emptiness of space right like take the earth to sun relationship like most of that volume is just nothing right yeah it's incredible and it kind of shows you how powerful gravity is at those scales right like we go around the sun. That's our life. That's how we exist. That's what makes our existence possible. And yet, it's like, it's a pendant revolving around a kennelope 100 feet away. That's right. Well, we're glad we're not any closer, right? Or we'd be a pretty toasty pinhead.

Yeah, exactly. And then all of this, of course, is just dwarfed by the galaxy. If you look at the galaxy, you can't even find the sun, right? It's just a tiny dot. How big is the Milky Way, Daniel? The Milky Way is hard to even describe in these units, right? We've been talking about miles, and the Earth is thousands of miles, and the Sun's radius is hundreds of thousands of miles, right? The Milky Way is 50,000 light years across, right? It takes light, 50,000 years to cross the Milky Way.

If you convert that to miles, it's three times 10 to the 17 miles. So three, and then 17 zeros, right? I actually looked up the scientific prefix for that, because I don't even know. And the Milky Way is one-third of an ex-a-mile. An ex-a-mile. Ex-a-mile, isn't that pretty cool? That sounds like a medical condition.

I have an ex-mile. I'm so sorry to hear that. You should get that cream they have for it. So I did the math on this one, too. Okay, so if the Earth is a pinhead and the sun is a cantaloupe 100 feet away, the galaxy is the size of our solar system. Whoa. I thought you were going to say like a blue whale

or like some other like really delicious food or something. But the solar system, that's pretty incredible. Yeah, yeah. It's about, yeah, it would be about 1.18 times into 11 meters. Wow. Yeah, that's how big the galaxy is. So imagine like a pinhead and a cantaloupe in our solar system. That's how big the galaxy is.

And we are like a tiny thing on that pinhead. Yeah. So, as we were saying, it just gets a dwarfed, right? And some of you guys out there might be wondering, like, well, are these things typical? Like, are the planets in our solar system typically the size you find in planets? Or is our sun normal? Is the Milky Way, like, an average kind of a galaxy? So we did a big bit of digging there.

And it turns out that the biggest planet that they found in any solar system anywhere is about 10 times the size of Jupiter. Right? So, like, there's a planet out there that's huge. That's almost the size of the sun. Almost the size of the sun, yeah. So that's like a big planet. That's like a planet that's almost a sun in of itself, right? It's like literally a million times bigger than the Earth around in that order of magnitude.

Mm-hmm. That is a big honking planet. Right. And stars also get really big. And stars change also in size in their lifetime, right? Like our sun is going to get bigger as it gets older. It's going to burn, and then the outer layers are going to get cooler, and they're going to expand.

We did a whole episode on how the sun is going to die. But there are stars out there right now that are like 1,000 or 2,000 times as big as our sun. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's huge. If you had that in our solar system, it would like enveloped Saturn. You know, like, it would be no room for interplanets at all.

It would be pretty crazy. So we would be inside the sun. Yeah, exactly. We'd be inside the sun. And we will be. In a few billion years, our sun will also get huge and envelop the Earth, right? Oh, great.

Let's talk up on that sunblock and or rockets to other planets, galaxies. But there's one other thing. Galaxies are not just stars with planets around them, right? There's other stuff. And there's the stuff that makes the stars, right? There's these huge clouds of gas and dust, which are like the leftovers from blown-up solar systems

and blown-up stars that eventually coalesce to make these stellar nurseries where new stars are formed. and those things are really big. How big are they? They can be like 1,000 to 2,000 light years across, right? So that's much, much bigger than any individual star. I mean, this is where stars are born, right? There's like fields of stars being created in these things.

But still, they're small compared to the Milky Way, right? The Milky Way was like 53,000 light years across. The biggest nebula or gas cloud we've seen is like 2,000 light years across. So so far the galaxy is the biggest thing. No, but it's interesting to think that there are objects kind of be in the scale of things between our sun and the Milky Way galaxy. I mean, there's bigger stars, bigger planets, and these clouds of gas that you meet that you talked about. Yeah, and the wonderful thing about these clouds is that they look like something that's dynamic but is frozen in time, right? It's like, you know, if you see a picture of a steam engine and there's these puffs of clouds coming up from it, right?

It's frozen in time, but you can tell that there's motion there, right? that it's like in the middle of chugging and puffing and boiling and churning, right? These clouds look the same way. And they are boiling and churning, but just on very different timescales. You'd have to do like a crazy time lapse, like watch it for a billion years to see it roiling and toiling and bubbling and all that stuff. But it is. It's just that on our time scales, it hardly seems to be moving. Yeah. And in that distance scale, because it's a thousand light years across. Yeah, exactly.

So it really makes you feel insignificant and it's really impressive like how dynamic the universe is. It's just on huge distance scales and huge time scales, right? It's like if there was a whole civilization that was birthed and then died in the middle of one puff of that steam engine.

Wow. And for it, the steam cloud was frozen, right? It's hardly moving. You know, and so that's the way we are. We're this tiny dot suspended in a sunbeam surrounded by all this crazy, very slow action. Wow. Yeah. And there are stars being born inside of that, like popcorn. Like pop-pop-pop-up.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. New stars still being born, exactly. Okay, let's keep going and see what the biggest thing in the universe is. But first, let's take another break. 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.

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The offspring. Tim McGraw. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. your tickets to J-A-X-S.com. I had this overwhelming sensation that I had to call it 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 very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff Podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a nonprofit 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 IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're building our way up to the biggest thing in the universe. And so far, we've gone from the Earth through the solar system to gas clouds to the milk away galaxy.

And so a lot of the people you talked to on the street thought that galaxies were the biggest. things in the universe, but that's not actually true. That's right. And they're pretty big, right? And our galaxy is, we said, 50,000 light years across. And some galaxies get pretty big. They get up to like millions of light years across, right? Millions. Galaxies can come all different sizes, yeah. It would take you millions of years going at the speed of light just to go from one side of that galaxy to the next. Yeah. So if you like forgot your lunch at home and you work on the other side of the galaxy, like forget it, man. That's a 10 million.

year round trip forget it that's right the commute is terrible and that's you know and that's when there's no traffic when there's traffic forget about it oh man yeah yeah but so a lot of people thought that galaxies are just sprinkled everywhere through the universe

but you know galaxies have been around for a while and so what's going to happen when you have stuff hanging out for a while is that gravity is going to start to pull it together right it's not perfectly smooth there's slight differences and there's a little bit more mass here a little bit more massed there.

And so over billions of years, Galaxy will start to pull stuff together. And that's exactly what happened. They started to kind of self-organize. Yeah. Or as you would say, form a thing, right? And so the next level up from galaxies is that we found that galaxies are organized into these things,

not very cleverly called clusters, right? So galaxy clusters. Like nut clusters. Like... Yeah, I think, again, you should have had a snack before we recorded this episode. I had my banana. A galaxy cluster usually contains about 50 galaxies,

and it's like five or ten million light years across. And again, remember, a galaxy itself is like, you know, 50 or 100,000 light years across. So this is much bigger than one galaxies. It has 50 galaxies, which are themselves pretty far apart. But they are organized, right? They're not just like, it's not an arbitrarious assignment. They're orbiting each other.

It's like a separate group of galaxies. Is it interacting and kind of holding together separate from other groups of galaxies? That's right. They're all orbiting the center of mass of this cluster, right? The same way everything in the solar system is organized is orbiting the center of mass of the solar system, which happens to be the sun, and everything in the galaxy is orbiting the center of the galaxy. Everything in this cluster of galaxies is orbiting the center, which doesn't necessarily have anything in it at this point, right? Wow.

So that's the next biggest thing, is a cluster of galaxy. structure. Like if you zoom out far enough, it would look like a thing. It would look like a... Yeah, exactly. Like a blob. Exactly. And they're separated from other clusters, right? The distances between things in the cluster

is small compared to the distances between the clusters. The same way, the distances between the planets is small compared to the distances between solar systems, right? It's like chocolate chips flowing in a cookie dough. Tasty. Yeah, this is a tasty galaxy we're living in.

And then you keep going, And the clusters themselves are organized into basically clusters of clusters. Okay, so the cluster is not the biggest thing in it. So, okay, so if galaxies have been sprinkled out evenly, you would say galaxies are the biggest thing in the universe, but they're not. They're organized into clusters. And if those clusters have been spread out evenly,

you would say the cluster is the biggest thing in the universe, but there's another structure above clusters. That's right. And, you know, this is just things that people discovered as they looked out into the universe, and they did sort of the 3D mapping, right? They're trying to understand, like, where is stuff around us and how is it organized. And as we get better and better at measuring distance scales and better telescopes, we can see further out.

We can build this sort of 3D map around us. And then we notice these patterns. We notice that things aren't just distributed. And so the clusters themselves are organized into clusters of clusters, which we call superclusters. And I feel like these objects got, like, kind of a bad rap, you know, because cluster is not a very creative name. I mean, the galaxy is not just called, like, a star cluster, right? It's got its own cool name, galaxy, right? But nobody named, nobody named the, you know, cluster of galaxies other than cluster of galaxies.

And somebody named it's superior as supercluster, which means the cluster is, like, not super. It's like saying, this is Daniel and this is super Daniel. Imagine how poor Daniel feels. Are you saying I'm not super? I think you're saying I'm not super. I'm getting a lot of rejection here on today's podcast. I'm saying you're the super Daniel, Daniel. There's another Daniel.

I got to go find the sub-Daniel and make it. I love Daniel, yes. Exactly. The under Daniel. What I need really is a cluster of Daniels. You know, that would be pretty awesome. What is the biggest Daniel in the universe? That's really the question of today's podcast.

Well, let's come up with a name. Let's you and I christen clusters of galaxies. Let's do it. Okay, well, you're the creative one. Go ahead. I don't know. A banana of galaxies. Benaxis.

It's a benaxis of galaxies. A benaxis of galaxies. That really rolls off the tongue. That's beautiful. In some alternate version of the multiverse, you were definitely a poet. Well, I'm technically the first person, and if there are any scientists out there, you technically have to quote me now when you refer to these. You shouldn't just reach for the snack that's on your table, but you should go deeper.

you should think about like, you know, Greek mythology or some sort of a, you know, historical event or something to motivate you. I think they had bananas in Greece. Come on. How about the union? Let's give it a political name, right? Let's call them the Union of Galaxies.

The Union of Concerned Galaxies. Right, because they're organized. There you go. There you go. Stand together. Speak as one. Orbit together. Yes, we can.

So the galaxies form clusters and the clusters form superclusters. What does that mean? So, like a... Well, the same way that, you know, stars organized into a galaxy and galaxies organized into a cluster, galaxy clusters themselves.

You just think of each of those as like a little dot. Then about, you know, a hundred of those together, which spans about 100 million light years across, form what we call a supercluster. Oh, my God. It's giving me a headache to think about these scales. Yeah. So this is a cluster of clusters

of galaxies which have billions of stars and each star has planets and each planet might have little people like us exactly and so these super clusters I mean they're enormous

it's hard to even really think about these distances you know 100 million light years you mean super benaxis super unions yeah exactly and so that's pretty incredible and people figure that out they thought wow that's pretty big stuff

you know so you said there are 100 million years across. Yeah, they're 100 million light years across. And so then people started to look to see like, well, are those organized in some way? Are those the biggest things in the universe? Yeah, are those the biggest thing in the universe? And so that's when people, that's when the real shock arrived because they started, it started to sort of look like they were just sprinkled evenly. But then they noticed that in one direction, it went on, superclusters just sort of went on for a long way. And another direction, they stopped. And, you know, they're sort of building this 3D 3D picture around us

and it turned out that we were in sort of a thick sheet. Like there's like a great wall of super clusters as far as we can see. Like we are one supercluster sprinkled with a bunch of other superclusters but it's not as thick as it is wide.

It's organizing to like a sheet, like a table. Yeah like a sheet. And then people started to look like well what's in that spot where the super clusters run out right? So they built the map further and further further and further. And then they discovered, oh, it's not a sheet of superclusters. It's more like a bubble. Right? And so the superclusters are organized into these like massive bubbles that

surround these huge voids in which there's nothing. Whoa, whoa, whoa. So like the superclusters of clusters of galaxies form a bubble. Like they're on the surface of a bubble. Yeah. And you know, it's not like very regular bubbles. It's more like there are these filaments and sheets and empty spaces They're not like the bubbles are spherical or anything. But it's like if you zoom out far enough, it's like a froth, right? It's like a froth of these little bubbles. And each bubble, the surface of that bubble, like the thin skin of that bubble, is thousands and thousands of super clusters of galaxies.

Oh, my God. It's pretty crazy. And so we live on the edge of some little bubble. And in that void, I mean, those voids are billions, of light years across with nothing in them. Nothing. Nothing. I mean, empty space, which of course is

never really empty. And, you know, maybe like one rock got kicked out of a cluster one day and wandered into those, the voids, but essentially nothing. And those bubbles are about billions of light years across. They're billions of light years across, exactly.

Wow. And that's pretty incredible. And then, you know, that's it. Wait, so that's the biggest thing in the universe. The bubble of super clusters of clusters of galaxies of stars of planets of people exactly and if you zoom out far enough as far as we know then it just looks smooth there's no more organization uh it's just more bubbles yeah the bubbles are just sprinkled evenly it's not like there the bubbles form circles or form sheets or form

groups or anything like that we think that they are just organized um they're just sprinkled there the universe is frothy yeah and it really is frothy and the thing i like thinking about the most is where that froth came from, right? Like, and it's really, it's connected to the first few moments of the universe. For those of you who remember, like, talking about the Big Bang and the cosmic microwave background, we've looked back in time also, and we've seen the early few moments of the universe, and what we see there are, is froth, right? It's like quantum randomness, which generated the initial seeds for all the structure of the universe. That's this structure we're talking about. So little random fluctuations in the early universe led directly to

these huge structures that we're seeing now. Why do we have a bubble here and not there? Because of some random quantum particle fluctuation 14 billion years ago. At the Big Bang in a space, in a really small space. Yeah, exactly. And then it got stretched out by inflation and became the seed of structure in the universe. And that's the structure we're talking about. Wow. So these bubbles, you might say, kind of came first, right? Like the universe, the biggest thing in the universe has always been a bubble. Well, you know,

there were those sort of quantum froth, and I don't know if you could really call those bubbles. They were just like areas where there's more density and less density. But I just want to make the connection and have people understand that the structure that we see in the universe today was determined in some sense by that quantum froth

that happened in the early universe. It just scaled up and scaled up and scaled up. And that's what gives does the biggest things in the universe. Yeah, exactly. Super Benax's bubbles. Exactly. And the fascinating thing is thinking about why there isn't any bigger structure.

Like, why don't those bubbles form structure? I said earlier, like, anytime you've got stuff hanging out, gravity is going to start to organize you, right? And that's true, but also it takes a while. Gravity's not very strong, remember? It's the weakest force by orders and magnitude. And so even though it's the dominant thing in the universe, on these scales and these timelines, it's not very powerful.

So it takes a long time. It takes billions of years to form this structure. But wait, do we know for sure that these bubbles and this froth of super duper clusters, that's it? That's the biggest thing in the universe. We're pretty sure there's nothing bigger? We're pretty sure. We know nothing for sure.

We've been building this map, this 3D map of the universe, and that's all we see. Yeah. And it could be that we haven't just seen far enough, but we've seen pretty far. And it just looks like these bubbles and filaments and strands and shapes. sheets, you know, these superclusters in form these surfaces, but that's about it. You know, there's no organization to those bubbles or sheets as far as we know. And I think the reason is that there just hasn't been enough time, right? The universe is old, and it's, but it's done a lot in those 14 billion years. I mean, that's a lot of galaxies to make and a lot of superclusters

to organize, you know, a lot of bubbles and filaments, right? A lot of bananas to make. A lot of bananas, yeah. And, you know, earlier in the universe, there was less structure, right? And so these structures have formed gradually over time. You know, in the first billion years after the Big Bang, we didn't have any galaxies, right? And so it takes a while for these structures to form. So it might be that you wait another 50 billion years and then you make something else. Something new is crowned is the biggest thing in the universe. And then we call on you, Jorge, to give it a silly name after some fruit you like.

A bigger one, bigger Jorge. A bigger fruit, exactly. You mean like in the future, billions of years from now, maybe these bubbles will form into something. like a megabobble or a giant smiley face, who knows? It might be. On the other hand, we've also talked a few times about dark energy. That's this mysterious force that's pushing everything apart, right? That's creating new space between galaxies.

So that's making that actually harder to make new structure because it's spreading everything out. It's ripping everything apart. Exactly. It's ripping everything apart. So it might just be that we are living in the moment when we will have the biggest structures ever in the universe, that this is like a tipping point, and that actually, After this, things just get shredded, and this is like the biggest we ever got. Like in the future, everything will just be spread out evenly with no discernible structure.

Yeah, it could be, right? And that's always weird when you come to the realization that you're living in a special moment. It makes you skeptical. You're like, well, that's sort of, I mean, how could that be? We just be lucky. Seems like a coincidence. Yeah, exactly. Seems like a coincidence.

And in science, we don't like coincidences. I mean, they happen. But every time there's a coincidence, it's an opportunity to ask why and to maybe get a revealing answer. So, you know, there's a lot of speculation and a lot we don't know. It's like every generation thinks that they live in the peak of their culture. Every generation thinks they have the best music ever. Yeah, exactly. Just down, just downhill from there.

Kids today, man, they don't know what good music is. That's kind of what you're saying. They don't know what a super cluster is, exactly. That's kind of what you're saying is that you're saying we live in peak universal structure. Like things are just kind of might be just downhill from here, and this is the most structure we'll see ever. Like these big things in the universe might at some point kind of get ripped apart and dissolve. Yeah, and I want to emphasize again,

this is a lot of this is speculation because we don't know what the future of dark energy is, right? And there could be other things we don't know about how the universe is organized. We're still really babies when it comes to understanding this stuff. But that certainly could be. We don't see any bigger structure and we have reason to think that dark energy

really could prevent more structure from being formed. It could even shred the structures we have. So, yeah, we could be living at peak structure. Right. Wow. So be glad that you were alive right now when you could look out into the stars and see the biggest thing in the universe.

Well, that's the answer to the question we set out to talk about, which is what is the biggest thing in the universe? And right now, the biggest thing in the universe are these bubbles of superclusters of galaxies. Yeah, and it also might be the biggest thing ever in the universe. In the infinity of time, they might be the biggest thing ever.

Exactly. Exactly. In the history of the universe. in this infinitely long podcast. All right, so I think we answered the question. I hope we took you on a fun mental trip from mind-blowingly small to mind-blowingly huge and made you realize where you are in our cosmic neighborhood.

We hope you had a very large time thinking about these huge scales. And Jorge is over there doing some math to figure out what fruit associates with the cluster of superclusters. how big would that banana have to be to fit inside of a gal if you added up all the bananas you've eaten over your life how big would that banana be horny it would be a galaxy of potassium probably probably all right everyone thank you for listening to this biggest podcast ever 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, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com.

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