Let's Find Out - Gravitational Lensing, The Furthest Galaxies, Light, Electrons, and Life in the Universe | ASMR

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

Tonight is a look across the Universe. We begin with the first ever gravitational lensed galaxy found in the 1980's in the galaxy cluster, Abell 370 to another Hubble Deep Field and the size and characteristics of the Universe at the largest scales. Then we go down to the subatomic and see how light interacts with matter and how all electrons are possibly just one single electron moving back and forth through time and space. (that one is seriously fascinating). Last we discuss the possibility of life in the universe using the parameters outlined by the Drake equation. This uses probabilities about stars, exoplanets, life, civilizations, and their technologies to estimate how many other intelligent living and extinct civilizations there might be in the Milky Way Galaxy. Thanks so much for your support Patreon supporters and thanks for the love, likes and subscriptions everyone. Background Music: (In order of appearance) "Pillars of Creation" by Jeremy Vessey @atmoslabmusic "Cobalt Core" by @Zerofuturism *Others in the introduction are originals Timestamps: 0:00 First gravitational lense ever: Dragon Arc, Abell 370 10:53 Deep Field images, Size of universe 35:40 Subatomic physics, Light speed and relativity 46:00 Wheeler, Feynman: Universe has only One electron theory 55:20 Einstein: Photo-electric effect, Photon energy and wavelength 1:21:30 Dark matter 1:32:06 Drake Equation and life in the Universe 1:41:42 Shape of the Universe 1:55:00 black screen and white noise, thanks for watching :) ▸ Want to leave a tip or connect?: https://linktr.ee/letsfindoutasmr #educational #letsfindout #ASMR #relaxing #space #science

In the mid-1980s, a curious arc had been observed near one of the furthest ever galaxy clusters. This cluster, identified by George Abel in 1958, and its curious glowing arc, would go on to become one of the most important objects in astrophysics and cosmology. But as closer observations of Abel 370 were taken throughout the 80s, the 90s and then the 2000s. This primary illuminated arc had taken on the appearance of a dragon. Once the powerful Hubble Space Telescope, or HST, had been commissioned in the early 90s, it was quickly used to train its steady eye on ABLE 370 in the hopes of resolving this mysterious streak of light. After tens of hours,

the dragon's head was resolved. And it emerged as a single background spiral galaxy, amplified and perfectly focused by the massive able cluster its light was traveling through. It was then realized its body and tail were duplicate images of the same distant spiral galaxy, with other galaxies dotted among it. Long before the HST could see,

see such things. Albert Einstein had predicted back in 1912 that the gravity of massive starry objects distorts the spacetime field they exist within, and thus could bend light traveling through them to create such an illusion. Later, he and others thought if only humanity could create telescope lenses large enough and smooth enough. To observe light from these distant regions of the early universe, we might be able to witness them. As the spectrum of light from Abel 370 was analyzed, it was found to be located at a redshift or Z of 0.375, which means that it was coming from over 5 billion light years away. But maybe the more stunning fact about Abel 370

is that the dragon was also measured and its redshift was found to be very different from the cluster. The dragon arc was in fact a mirage, an image of a faint source located far behind and far earlier in the universe than Able 370. This was a source much too faint to have ever been detected by Hubble without the fortunate effect of gravitational lensing. The spectrum of the giant arc was revealed to be at a redshift of 0.724.

This meant that piercing through the curved spacetime around the massive cluster is the focused image of a galaxy twice as far into the recesses of the universe as the cluster itself. In 2014, the HST would again train its eye towards ABLE 370's phenomenal demonstration of Einstein's theory that there exists a gravitational tethering between light, space, and time as the final cluster to be imaged in the Frontier Fields program using 630 hours over 560 orbits around Earth. Hubble peered across 6 billion light years of space to capture Abel 370 in new, unprecedented resolution and stunning detail. The brightest and largest galaxies in the cluster are yellow, white, their massive elliptical galaxies containing many hundreds of billions of stars each.

the spiral galaxies with their distinct bright blue arms like our own Milky Way and what the dragon itself is made of often include younger populations of stars bluer before after billions of years they age into the more yellow orange color characteristic of older stars and generally more ancient galaxies but with such extensive observation time, Hubble was also able to resolve extremely faint features of the galaxy cluster that it hadn't seen before. Abel 370's enormous gravitational influence warps the shape of spacetime around it, causing the light of background galaxies to spread out along multiple paths and arcs and appear distorted and magnified. The lensed background galaxy turn into a series of streaks

curving around the center of the image, the center of mass of the cluster itself. Able 370 is just one of thousands of massive galaxy clusters hiding in the dark depths of space. They act like natural telescopes, giving

astronomers a glimpse of the universe in its infancy. Sometimes only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. entangled among the foreground galaxies are as many as a hundred mysterious-looking arcs of blue light that are themselves the distant galaxies behind it, now resolved in this cluster. Many of them have duplicates caused by this lensing effect. This image shows how powerful Hubble can be at probing for remote galaxies that inhabited

the early universe. The active research into dark matter is significantly boosted by clusters like Abel 370. The objects which are slightly elongated particularly tell a wealth of information about the cluster. The amplitude of the elongation

depends on the position of the sources with respect to the center of the gravitational lens. And their orientation is perpendicular to the the gradient of gravitational potential. The use of all these elongated objects permits to reconstruct the gravitational potential of the lensing cluster and allows astronomers to directly map its dark matter distribution.

By studying these properties, astronomers and cosmologists have determined that ABLE 370 contains two large, separate clumps of dark matter, contributing to the evidence that this massive galaxy cluster, 5 billion light years from Earth, is actually the result of two smaller clusters merging together 5 billion years ago. During the six cluster observations, Able 370 was part of,

Hubble also looked at six parallel fields. These are regions near the galaxy clusters, which were imaged with the same exposure time as the clusters themselves. While one of HSD's cameras looked at the galaxy cluster, another camera simultaneously viewed an adjacent, seemingly sparse, dark patch of sky. This second region, the parallel field, provides a deep look into the early universe without gravitational lensing. but without the light pollution of the bright clusters themselves.

Each cluster and its parallel field were imaged for the first six months in either infrared or visible light, depending on which Hubble instrument was applied to it. Then six months later, the cameras effectively swapped places, with each camera now observing the other's previous location. until the James Webb Space Telescope came online in 2021, the results of the Frontier Fields program released in 2017 produced the deepest observations ever made of galaxy clusters in the magnified galaxies behind them.

These observations are helping astronomers still understand how stars and the galaxies of the early universe emerged out of the dark ages. At a time after the Big Bang and when the cosmic microwave background had cooled and darkened the universe. When space was dark, opaque, and filled with hydrogen.

This is an era of the universe still filled with mysteries about the evolution in the infancy and adolescence of the universe we exist within. in an area of research still teeming with new discoveries to be made. It's an exciting frontier of science and an exciting look into just how much we've discovered about the universe. 8.30 in the morning, but you guys can hear that. I think it's a great day to just browse this universe book here. This one's the, it's called it the universe, the definitive.

visual guide. I just opened this one because this is one of the most impactful types of pictures. The deep field, one of Hubble's many deep fields. This one says it's of galaxies from nine billion, not million or a hundred million, but nine billion light years away. Each one of these, each one of the dots and then the spirals that don't have the diffraction spikes on them are galaxies everyone that does even these small ones here are stars in our own Milky Way that's still pretty incredible to think about there there's not too many of them we could probably count them and maybe we will that's definitely something that

would help me drift off to sleep. I know. It's also incredible. Just forget about just like us. Different phase of evolution than us. It says most of these, this is with an infrared and near infrared filter. The light that is just at a wavelength slightly longer than the reddest light we can see. Infrared is like that setting such a nice mood for browsing through this book right now. Infrared light pierces clouds. That's why the James Webb Telescope is mainly infrared. It goes almost, goes about halfway through, up to the visible portion of light that we can see.

It goes up to about orange, yellow. But the gold reflecting dish of the James Webb Telescope is specifically to collect and reflect into the sensors that record the observed data. It's specifically meant to collect infrared light. Because infrared is the light that allows us to see, furthest into the universe. As galaxies expand, we can see you in our diagram of the universe here. The galaxies, as the universe, this is the origin, the Big Bang here. There was a massive expansion. And then kind of by this light path here, this is our past light cone. I can't see anything beyond this right now. But the light cone, as we...

the y axis is time here we are progressing through time and we're at 14 nearly nearly 14 billion years right now the x axis is distance and this is proper proper distance which includes the expansion of space the growing actual metric of space described by the Einstein field equation and these are Each horizontal line on this graph paper represents the same time. So that's why I have galaxies starting as little baby galaxies, stellar nurseries, evolving over 7, 8, 9, a few billion years into, have coalesced around a central black hole and themselves are rotating around a center of mass. in their local few million or so light year radial area of space.

Later on a few million, a few billion more light years, they might have merged into a larger galaxy. And so now here at 14 billion light years since, as far as we can tell, the universe was at a single point one of the biggest pieces of data that indicate that the universe was at a single point and it's not just an illusion is that we see at the furthest reaches all the way out here what at 14 billion years now if we could see that far back in real time with that area of space is doing the perimeter of our local volume of the universe, which is about 73 billion, or 93 billion, sorry. About 93 billion, it's a sphere.

93 billion light years wide. At the perimeter of that sphere, the material would have already evolved, just like we've evolved out of the hot haze, distributed kind of uniformly distributed, uniformly hot haze and how we matter eventually clumped what they think around dark matter halos which kind of gave the structure of the universe and then ultimately it clumped it to galaxies and clusters and super clusters of galaxies that material if we follow this line all the way back this is material that that is coming to us after being stretched a across a time scale of about 14 billion years and with the expansion of space it was probably only about 40 to 100 million light years from us when that first light

emitted at an age of about 300,000 light years old which is very very early in the universe but nonetheless that light as the matter that that light was emitted from has expanded away from us if we assume that our location in space hasn't changed in things if this graph if you mirror it on both sides or even further if we extrapolate that into three dimensions that's a more accurate idea of what's going on in the universe but all the other material further than 6 billion. It's the, uh, about 6.5 billion light years away.

That's the point in which dark energy is starting to accelerate space away from us. These, the space between the galaxies, the galaxies themselves are moving through space, but also the vast hundreds of millions and billions of light years. between galaxy clusters is also expanding everything outside of our local tiny little few hundred million light year cluster or really even our few million light year local cluster of galaxies it's moving it away from us because gravity is not at those scales of distance Gravity is overtaken by dark energy. But nonetheless, that's why, I guess I brought that out.

Because infrared, this is the infrared view. This isn't visible light. It's close to it, but not quite. And all these galaxies, emitting infrared light as their stars are being born, the most active... galaxies with the most star birth are typically are the youngest galaxies In this little caption here says stars in this image and You gotta remember when these images are taken there have such a small pinpoint patch of sky

From our vantage point I know one of the I don't know about this one in particular But I know one of the Hubble deep fields to give you an idea is like holding a dime at arm's length. Anybody who's seen my web video knows I said this in the beginning, but it's such an astonishing fact. All of these galaxies, these thousands of galaxies, when you look right up, the laser it goes,

the galaxy density doesn't appear to go down, so it just goes and goes on and on. There might be 10,000 dots if you really consider the faintest little dots here. Are in a dime held at arm's length. About three feet away from your face, holding a tiny coin. That is the entire patch of sky. That tiny little patch of sky holds all of these galaxies. And to give you an idea of how many stars are in the Milky Way,

think about how many diffraction spikes we're seeing here. Those all represent stars in our own galaxy. You can still see maybe 30 galaxies or stars in our own galaxy in the Milky Way shining through. I'm not sure if they're able to tell how far these stars are away. but the galaxies generally are able to look at and you're able to look at the fingerprints of what elements lighting light in by telling how those fingerprints those patterns of absorption lines or emission lines have shifted along the electromagnetic spectrum you can tell

how far how much space how much expanding space that light has had to have traveled through in order to cause that red shift towards the red end of the spectrum and so if we know that stars generally we know the pattern of oxygen for example that it points to this star cluster

is 9 billion light years away it says they stand out tiny young galaxies brimming with stars in the process of formation. Some 9 billion light years away in this picture here are seen in this image taken at near-infrared wavelength by the Hubble Space Telescope. It's probably from the early 2000s. They stand out because the energy from the new stars has caused the oxygen and the gas around them. It's not the starlight themselves, but the energy, the ultraviolet, and beyond ionizing energy, it injects the electrons around the oxygen atoms in the gas clouds,

surrounding these new stars and pervading the entire galaxy, to then emit its own wavelength of light. We're seeing the light from the gas glowing from the hot energy of the stars residing within it, kind of hiding inside them. in each of these galaxies here and it says this phase of to represent important stage in the formation of galaxies

for the most numerous type of galaxy in the universe and this um it gets so uh it's so helpful to really look at the perspective on that the true scale the true distance

to the universe or throughout the universe to the objects that we can detect and we're looking at light and we know it's shifted and that's what this letter Z denotes and so we say using this correlation here the Hubble parameter is the

it's like a ratio of how much the universe has grown how much the current universe, how far it has grown. The current distance between objects, divided by the distance between the same objects at the time, oftentimes when you're looking in these deep-field images billions of years ago. And so if the distance between us and, you know, a galaxy residing at Z,

of 0.5 is currently 6.5 billion light years away. We follow the line back and had 7 billion years ago or yeah 7 billion years ago or because the universe is 14 billion years roughly that was also 7 billion years after the Big Bang just happens to be that. That same universe that's 6.5 billion light years away from us now we can't see that light currently. because that light takes time to travel through space. The light from a galaxy, it's something at a redshift of 0.5 or 6.5 billion light years away. That's 7 billion years ago.

That tells us that that galaxy was only 1, 2, 3, less than 4 billion light years away. And the light that we're currently seeing is from extrapolate that. up that line onto our past light cone. We are currently seeing everything that lies on this past light cone. So that galaxy's path intersects our past light cone at about 8.5 billion light years ago. That means we're seeing it as it was when it was 4 billion light years away, 2.5 billion light years closer to us.

than it currently is. Effect gets exaggerated though. Here we have Hubble. The furthest it ever saw was about Z-11, proper distance of 30 billion light years away. Follow that line back just underneath this drawing line right here. That means that it intersects our light going way back here.

And on this graph, because it is blown up to cover the entire age of the current universe, up until the present age, we can't see what goes on here because it's all exponential. And as far as 2022, I haven't been keeping up to date with it. Webb was able to see about 3 or 4 billion light years past that. in just its opening run of deep field images because it also takes tons of other observations from within the Milky Way looking at exoplanets and other nebulae and star clusters and more nearby galaxies as well but yeah these stars the deepest stars into the universe the most distant stars go all the way interstate stars

sector light going well further than just a billion light years after the universe after the Big Bang something like you know just hundreds or even tens something like between a hundred and five hundred million light years after the Big Bang which is you know still quite young on the scale of a 14 billion year old universe One of the reasons, you know, I'm not a physicist, I went to school for engineering and failed, but I've always had a passion for, well, maybe not quite a passion, because then I probably would have become, became an astronomer. But I've had an ongoing curiosity and a fascination for learning about astronomy,

in particular in cosmology. Because to me, it, to me, it is so. so I don't know humbling it's a reflection of whatever you know your concept of God is it's it's it's analogous to that it's the biggest most expansive the longest expanse of the longest expanses of time the largest amounts of energy and space and force and you know gravity and just everything. It's the limits, I guess, of time and space. Outside of having metaphysical experiences within your own head, which are certainly possible. It's looking outside on a clear night, away from light pollution. I don't get that experience often.

If you go down to the keys or up in the mountains, you occasionally get it. you just see the multitude of stars and that is such a close experience to looking at infinity that it just always fills me with a sense of all in a good way so that's the deepest largest scales of the universe and we've already been through this in a couple the past the macroscopic, the microscopic, uh, the macroscopic universe and then four years later followed up with the microscopic universe, just giving general um factoids and very basic outlines of particle physics. It's incredible, you know, just learning about these things. What fuels, You know, the energy we're tapping into nuclear reactors.

In the atomic bombs, none of us hope will go off in the 21st century, is these nuclear forces between the nucleons of atoms and the nucleus. Neutrons and protons were called generically nucleons. And the strong force snapping those things together. As far as we know, as far as I understand, have been there since they snapped together, embound, after the universe cooled off enough in the first couple minutes after the Big Bang. It was this hot explosion and generally the universe as it expanded as gas does when it expands, it cools down. atoms aren't colliding as frequently. They are losing energy.

There weren't atoms to begin with. There were simply energetic forces and fields. They think all four forces, the gravity and then the three other fundamental forces, the electromagneticism, strong and weak forces that govern smaller atomic realm of things. Those forces eventually peeled off into separate forces as the energy of the energy of the universe expanded and settled down. Then the protons, the nucleons, the quarks formed. It's like everything that forms today's matter popped or coalesced to take up actual finite

volume in space and time out of these fields. That sense of time you can't even really be said to exist in the sense that it is matter or material moving from one place to another over a given span of time because there was no matter there was only energy thing to think that

three I guess that make up each nucleon each proton or neutron and here we can see as as the type characteristic of quarks in different trinities

they whether it's a proton and if certain energy is released a neutron can change into a proton and vice versa a neutron can gain a positive charge electromagnetic charge upon certain sort of transmutation is one example of that it's the force that governs a radioactive decay so if you have uranium it will spontaneously decay it'll lose one of of its protons or neutrons and see controls the changing of a neutrino into an electron and the transformation of a down quark into an up quark converting the neutron into a proton a neutrino in organics is far beyond me because time also things characterize it with math because it looks

like some of the the Feynman diagrams explaining the interactions like this have to be analyzed. So instead of having two downs and one up for a neutron, now you have two ups and one down. It's amazing to think that these protons have been bound together for 14 billion years in many cases since the Big Bang. The matter we're made of has been recycled in stars. Is something far deeper going than we understand with consciousness, energy matter exchange throughout the universe, is such a weird phenomenon as, you know, I'm using it right now, I mean, I'm using it in many ways. Transmitting electrical signals to a screen that's emitting light from my eyes to electrical signals, intricately linked with electrons and lights, photons, and electromagnetic fields that propagate.

gate light through space. And then you're looking at your screen, of course, which is that propagation right into your eye and you're stimulating your rods and cones and transmitting more electrical signals to your brain to interpret just all unconsciously. What it is that you're watching, my hand, move across the page and the synchronization between the sound,

somehow able to make sense of these. characters and read them. Characteristics of light that I don't quite understand, but if you take Relativity to its limit Light anything traveling at the speed of light would interpret no Elapsation. What is it? No 3570, 90 billion light years in 14 billion years from our perspective to reach our instruments and anything care traveling a lot of long when that light, if we were to anthropomorphize light particles traveling that great

distance and time, they would experience no lapse in time from their emission to their absorption in our telescopes or our eyes, our rods and cones in our eyes. The universe is an instantaneous formation and therefore everything is connected. And if you don't see some similarity with that in God and something at least worth following up on, then we are not the same. We are not the same, my friend. I'd have been Feynman too, speaking of his diagrams. Him and some other great physicists, maybe it wasn't that,

but there is a theory that because of something along the lines of what I just described, every was it every electron I'm gonna have to look it up every electron there's a theory this isn't consensus mind you so don't yell at me but um that every electron is there is only one electron I think it's a theory might be one electron universe and every electron is the same electron Because they're not bound by space and time in the sense we know. Oh, John Wheeler. Amazing physicist.

Oh, who's Feynman too? Okay. The one electron universe postulate proposed by theoretical physicist John Wheeler in a telephone call to Richard Feynman in the spring of 1940 is the hypothesis that all electrons and their opposites, their antimatter opposites, positrons are actually. actually manifestations, this is in 1940, wow, it's before the Manhattan Project, I don't know about Wheeler, but Feynman was definitely an integral part of, are actually manifestations of a single entity moving backwards and forwards in time, in time, not space, moving backwards and forwards in time. According to Feynman, he said, I received a four words.

telephone call one day at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler in which he said Feynman I know why all electrons am the same charge and the same mass why because they're the same electron a similar quote zigzag world line description of paranoilation end quote the zigzag world line description of pair annihilation has been independently devised by ECG Stuckelberg at the same time a zigzag world line description of pair annihilation hmm the idea is based on world lines

traced out across space time by every electron Worldline is the three-dimensional trajectory through space over a given period of time in that fourth dimension point A to B in time provides the line for the fourth dimension space time. Rather than have myriad such lines, world lines traced out across space time by every electron, Wheeler suggested that they could all be parts of a single line like a huge tangled knot traced out by the one, the one electron. Pose my spiritual inclinations on you guys completely. And I'm not overtly Christian.

I was raised in a Christian household my parents are. Live in the States, which Christianity is the dominant religion, but, you know, I'm still. in the process of learning, you know, that's the nature of this channel really. But I do have a, whether it's because of my Christian upbringing or not, or maybe my personality temperament, I'm fairly open. I do always have an inclination to try to find deeper meaning in things. I don't. Ideas, obviously not rigorously, but it's very hard to read something.

something like that proposed by by consensus the greatest some of the greatest physicists of all time Wheeler John Wheeler and Richard Feynman um saying that rather than such myriad world lines of many you know trillions and trillions and trillions of electrons they could all be parts of a single line like a huge tangled knot traced out by one electron. Any given moment in time is represented by a slice across space-time that would meet the knotted line a great many times. Each such meeting point represents a real electron at that moment. At those points, half the lines will be directed forward, and half will have looped around backwards. Wheeler's suggest that

that these backwards sections appear as anti-particles to the electron, the positron, just intellectually stimulating, I guess. It's so interesting to imagine. Many more electrons have been observed than positrons, and electrons are thought to comfortably outnumber positrons. According to Feynman, he raised this issue with Wheeler, who speculated that the missing positron might be hidden within protons. Feynman was struck by Wheeler's insight that antiparticles could be represented

by reverse world lines and credits this to Wheeler, saying in his Nobel speech, he won the Nobel Prize. I did not take the idea that all electrons were the same one from Wheeler as seriously as I took the observation that positrons could simply be represented as electrons going from future to the past in a back section of their world lines. That I stole. Positrons could simply be represented as electrons going from the future to the past

in a back section of their world line. Later proposed this interpretation. The positron as a moving electron backwards in time in his 1949 paper, the theory of positrons. Yuchero Nambu later applied it, Japanese American physicist and professor of the University of Chicago, and applied it to all production and annihilation of particle antiparticle pairs,

saying that the eventual creation and annihilation of pairs that may occur now and then is no creation nor annihilation, but only a change of directions, of moving particles to future and from future to past. I try to pinch and zoom on the page. Or is that just me?

Another interesting little feature of light. Get the microphone back down here. Is like... There's so many interesting. interesting things about physics and you know science when you look into it and it's way more interesting when you read it and discover it on your own and you're not forced to learn it for a test dictate your entire future red light blue light and ultraviolet light these are symbol well not symbolic but they are symbolic but they are actually representative of region

on the electromagnetic spectrum. We find where that spectrum was. A tiny portion of which, a tiny portion of which, I guess is the right way to say it. Visible light or on which tiny portion, visible light takes up a tiny portion. Where did I put that electromagnetic spectrum? I just passed it.

But, uh, so red light is the longer wavelength than blue light. And those are the ends, the bookends of our visible spectrum. Here it is. There we go. And this is so important because it really does dictate our entire lives now that we are surrounded by electronic technology. From longest, it kind of makes sense that past any given point long wavelengths slowly if you have propagating waves you know like if this is a peak and it travels past this point right here the interval

between peaks is much greater and so at a given wavelength the distance for radio waves it's or sorry yet a given speed if the speed is the same in a vacuum travels at the same speed, the speed of light, about three times ten to the eight meters per second. I can't tell you how many of you guys corrected me. But the interval between peaks is going to be much, take much longer, traveling at the same speed for intervals that are like radio waves being the longest of the electric. electromagnetic waves from one centimeter You know they're they're in the range of human perceptibility in the sense of their their distance we can't perceive radio waves, but

We can comprehend the distance unlike of a meter between one centimeter and so that relates to The the energies of different kinds of light If we look at this it was literally the next So a low energy photon of red light. Gold in particular, it's really interesting that, you know, we think of atoms as being... We have an example, just a nucleus surrounded by, if not a solar system model. It's at least a swarm of electrons. A field probability...

Yeah, we think of this. Combinations of atoms, especially in metals. That field merges with the field of the surrounding atoms into an entire band, just almost a fluid band, like a river of electrons guided whose banks are defined by the nuclei. That keep the structure rigid. And you have the ability of light, some light. That's why I went into the energy here. we start to label it from radio to microwaves and then as it gets even shorter from one one centimeter down to one millimeter and one hundredth of a millimeter at that threshold we start to label it infrared that's long and then short infrared as infrared itself gets down to one millionth of a meter in one millionth of a meter is about the threshold for visible light the longest

wavelength that our chemistry our molecules in our eyeballs can detect and interpret and then we are able to detect things visible light that is ends at about a hundred billionths of a meter hundred nanometers anything less than about 150, 100 nanometers, anything with a shorter wavelength, higher frequency, we just can't detect. And you don't want to look at, that's what UV light is. It starts being called blue and then violet, ultraviolet. It's beyond greater than violet. They exist at a tiny little kind of range between 100 and all the way down to just 10 billionths of.

a meter or 10 nanometers across between peaks and so at the same speed you have billions more peaks crossing a given threshold a given you know sensor at the same speed versus the you know meter or 10 hundred meter wide distance between peaks of radio waves so for every given wavelength if you were to shoot radio waves radio waves of even a moderate radio emitter, you know 10 meters, yeah, you would have billions less travel and reach that sensor and a given amount of time, you know, five seconds relative to ultraviolet light. Ultraviolet intrinsically and then it goes to x-rays beyond you know at that one bit of

billionth of a meter in a tenth of a billionth of a meter and then gamma rays that threshold which is extremely harmful to the body is any wavelength shorter than a hundred billionth of a nanometer or meter these lights of different wavelengths hit the band of electrons and it's the outer electrons that are most manipulated by being hit by energy, electromagnetic energy called light. And it's really fascinating. This was one of the topic of one of Einstein's four Anas Mirabalus papers in 1905. It's one of the fewer known papers.

He published papers on special relativity and how that would imply. the relation or equivalence with a certain factor put in there of matter in energy, saying that matter multiplied by a certain number, specifically the speed of light squared, a massive number, that matter is equivalent to this massive amount of energy. It's a tiny little bit of matter multiplied by a huge number is what the energy contained in that matter equals. For 40 years of the detonation of the first ever atomic bomb. I think it was a plutonium core at the Trinity test site in Nevada there.

And it's so, yeah, it's just, I don't know, almost exhilarating to start making connections. When you see the light, the low energy, it is intrinsically, it doesn't matter how dim or how bright you make the light. It could even be a laser if it's attuned to a specific wavelength. That light, I don't care if it's a thousand-watt light bulb, as long as it's specifically only emitting red light and not any greater frequencies, it will not stimulate any electric current or flow of electrons

in that gold foil, that sea, that river of kind of connected electrons. in the lattice of the gold material, the gold structure. But if you change that light, that light bulb, to a blue light bulb. We see it, the energy shifts. It gets slightly higher. And it's this threshold right around the blue, violet, and then ultraviolet. That is the threshold for what we call ionizing radiation. Ionizing means that it ejects electrons from the outer perimeter of the outer shells.

The outer most electrons are moved. They're manipulated. They are kind of pushed, which stimulates a current, which is what current is, which is why it's an interesting or useful analysis. that you know billions of trillions of gold atoms in a sheet of gold a thin sheet of gold can be thought to have a river when you stimulate it with a high enough frequency of light remember red is too low the wavelengths are too far apart the energy the frequency is too low and therefore the energy is too low the focus emitted from that red light, the photons, the red light photons, I should say, are not energetic enough. It doesn't matter if one or a billion hit the atoms, the gold atoms, the electrons surrounding those gold atoms at once. They are not energetic enough to knock the electrons out of their shells and initiate a current flowing through that river of gold atoms.

however just slightly higher a frequency slightly higher a wavelength slightly shorter instead of around seven or 600 nanometers you go down to maybe two or 300 or maybe 100 nanometers and then now the photons have an intrinsic energy within them this is what's interesting about photons photons carry these packets These quanta carry intrinsic energy. Blue photons, individual photon packets. For energy than red photons, which carry more energy than infrared photons,

which carry more energy than microwaves. And it goes in decreasing energy levels all the way out to radio waves. Conversely, the energy is increased. Every photon from each one of these ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum carries with it more and more energy. The way up here, ultraviolet light represented here by white because we can't detect ultraviolet and they should have put a little, I guess they kind of did,

put a little purple hue to it, to its trails there. is going to stimulate even more energy emission. And that's pure ultraviolet light. Then x-ray and gamma-ray would... They are so powerful at a certain point. Mainly the high x-rays or hard x-rays they're called. The weaker x-rays are called soft x-rays. And the gamma rays.

Those are so powerful, so ionizing, that they... So energetic. that they actually penetrate through the electrons and hit the nuclei, and they can rip apart nuclei themselves, which destroy atoms, can completely change atoms, and if you are a biological creature, that's why x-rays and nuclei, sorry, gamma rays,

can have an incredibly damaging effect, killing you in days with a high enough dose such as from a engineered core of Pluto taken pushed their criticality as in the demon core which I will be doing a video of pretty soon I keep teasing it but it is

coming out because that is an incredibly interesting incident yeah just a little fact like that make learning about science so cool and knowing that that same process that electron stimulation is what's going on in the stars they're remitting these hard you know x-rays gamma rays lots of invisible lots of infrared visible they're remitting light all along the electromagnetic spectrum

but they're emitting enough within this portion, this ionizing portion, that is stimulating literally current, making things glow the way your fluorescent light bulbs glow. The same physics is happening there, making clouds glow, nebulae glow. We can see, that's how we can see galaxies, extremely far away. using the infrared technologies of telescopes like Hubble and in the James Webb now. We have space and time but relativity right now because that really broke my brain when I tried to understand it. Like the electron and the photon traveling at the speed of light. Essentially time and space get distorted.

Things become contracted. Time extends. extends it dilates the faster you move and with general relativity the closer you are to a gravitational source just generally we you can see a light this is greatly greatly exaggerated this would be more like if we were near the Sun maybe the light beam would get pulled down you know a fraction of a billionth of a meter but if you're using a very precisely pinpoint laser you might be able to detect it or also if you're looking at earth or an eclipse you might also be able to see a distant star the light appear to be over here confirmed Einstein's theory of special

relativity or was it general that they confirmed they confirmed they confirmed the legitimacy of it by measuring the variation how Starlight in 1919, so about four years after general relativity was published, which wasn't so simple. It took 10 years of trial and error and getting it wrong many, many times before he and with a lot of help apparently. Or Einstein was able to get the math right and it is for me very very intense math I think there's something like 10 or 11 equations that have to be considered to understand

Space time dynamics between gravity and space time The location speaking of the eclipse I hope you guys are able to see see it, I'm not, but someone went to a, I think it's coming in late April so go out and definitely get outside even if you're only in

partial totality. It's very eerie how everything looks more dim and apparently I'd like to do maybe a little video on it to maybe describe just the light basic trigonometry

of it or something but apparently you're rods and cones. Well, I know this is true, but apparently it's true even at just moderate stimulation. At night, you're, the part of your vision, chemicals that allow vision, they actually aren't activated. So it's hard to kind of tell, but if you're ever in a very dim, you know, at night and dusk, it's getting darker and darker. You'll notice the color. start to drain out of everything. It's because your eyes are,

they don't need to represent color at a low enough light. A low enough level of light. They only need to represent objects and black and white is sufficient to do that. And so if you're in a place with a very dim light or deep into dusk in the evening or morning, you'll notice you can't detect color very well.

And it's interesting. I never noticed that. But, you know, I have a small nightlight in my bathroom and we have... Or we had pink floor mats at one point. Or maybe they were green. Whatever my wife picked out. Thanks, Molly. I clearly loved them.

But I remember being in the bathroom in the middle of the night and just after I learned that, I was like, oh yeah, let me look at this pink floor mat. And I was blown away by the fact that I could not detect what color it was. Even though I knew it was pink. Or I knew what color it was at the time, I promise. And yeah, it's really cool. So get something whose color is pretty strong that you know ahead of time. And, yeah, go in a room and turn like a small light on.

that is just enough to barely see something, you know, that's got to be real, real, real din. And you'll notice all the color gets sapped out of it. And apparently that effect also happens during a solar eclipse. So yeah, I'd like to do a video about that. By the way, guys, I just was thinking about solar eclipse and all the other videos I watched, like from, what is it called? I always know Veritasium because it's so unique but smarter every day. That guy is also his video. How can Mika on my Discord shared that with me?

And I watched it because that guy's so good at presenting science in a very accessible way. And that made me think of YouTube and how I'm subscribed to different channels. and it really does help to, I guess, engage with you guys to remind you to subscribe and like my content if you enjoyed it. So if you do genuinely like this, give it a like. It does help you to know that you liked it and that people liked it and to show it to more people because I guess that's a pretty good indication that people like it. And if you really like it, go ahead and subscribe if you already have. But that's only if you do. So something else, I guess, that it's really...

Yeah, it's just... It's unique, it's bizarre to think about. Is that there's these filaments of dark matter I kind of alluded to earlier. And they are the structure for the whole universe. Apparently, let's make sure we're in frame here. Apparently, in the first few minutes, or at least a few thousand years,

which is almost indistinguishable on a cosmic scale of billions of years, there was these filaments, there is dark matter. We still don't know what it is, what it was, but it is somehow not very reactive with gravity. It's not very, or no, Excuse me. It is, it is and has gravity and is reactive to it because it forms around galaxies,

most galaxies at least, that we know and we have measured. We looked at the starlight we can see and accounted for any invisible gas or extra planets and stars that might be invisible to us. And for some reason, the mass and the dynamic, dynamics of almost every single galaxy, with the exception of only, I think a handful, have indicated that there is about 10 times more gravity, manipulating, constraining,

and confining those stars in each galaxy than the detectable matter, the detectable starlight, nebulae, you know, even the... accounting for black holes at the centers of galaxies. And so we think there is this dark matter, this material whose nature is dark to us. We just, that's why it's dark. We do not know much about it, but we know it pervades the universe, but not randomly. It's dark also because it doesn't react with light, it doesn't give off light so we can't see it, but it also.

see it but it also lets light through it it's like inert to light light actually in the same way it knocks electrons that imparts a force on an object that's why comets can actually be altered their course their trajectory can be altered by passing close to sun and uh mark Zuckerberg and others are planning this project Star Shot where they have a very, very, very massive solar sail but it's very thin and the material is incredibly light and we're going to hit it with lasers because lasers are very precise, travel a far distance

and they pack the biggest punch per unit area. They're the most intense. And anyways, that... is called radiation pressure. What he's going to do, what they're going to do with that, that project is send the solar sails outside the solar system, I believe, to Proxima Centauri, just outside to get as far and as quickly as possible

to possibly send data back and let us know what's outside our heliosphere, our protective bubble. And they're using, radiation pressure from lasers directed power powerful lasers direct them right at these sails and they're gonna accelerate them because there are no humans on them as fast as they can and with enough pressure radiation pressure

over enough time they can accelerate them to speeds approximating at a significant fraction of at least the speed of light and get them going so you know the They will get there within a few hundred years, I think, maybe. Anyways, dark matter. Going back to dark matter here. Dark matter, it is not affected by radiation pressure. And in the beginning, in the beginning,

carrying out my spiritual, my religious theme, inclinations here, I guess. In the Big Bang, the first couple, 300,000 years. There were, it was just a field. It was basically like just a large sun. Not a not a sun, but a large uniform field of glowing extremely hot gas, plasma, very hot gas. And the radiation pressure from that on all the other atoms internally or even, you know, once atoms had formed was in. It didn't let anything collapse and gravitationally form the first seeds of the first galaxies. Because that's what has to happen to form a galaxy.

There has to be some pocket that is just slightly more dense than the others around it, and then that creates a center of gravity towards which an accumulative effect, a runaway what's it called perido distribution of matter occurs all it takes is to have the initial mover the initial movement

the initial seed of a galaxy collapse and that just attracts all the game it gives direction I guess you could say well while ordinary matter like atoms were still being ricocheted and prevented from collapsing and forming these seeds of galaxies dark matter

because it is so inert so unreactive to radiation light radiation pressure it was able to collapse and so even amid this sea of bright glowing hot energetic plasma of matter and the photons that it's releasing back and forth the dark matter is basically undeterred it's basically unmoved by it's not spread out it's not continually buffeted and you know any pockets like normal matter any pockets that would have formed densely would have been blasted and would have just been buffeted away and prevented from collapsing. And so dark matter is able to form these filaments early, early in the universe. It coalesces on itself. And this is representative of regions.

Let's see. 140 million light years. So this isn't some small area here. This is 140 light years square on a side. 140 million sorry so each one of these dots are clusters of galaxies and these knots no so each one of these knots are actually super clusters you're not even able on this scale to make out individual clusters of galaxies everything here are super clusters and connections of superclusters form this network

This early, this network of these filaments of galaxy superclusters that on these scales of 100, 3, 4, 500 million lighters across and on eerily starts to look like networks inside the human brain. Again, this phenomena, this matter, this matter, this phenomena, and that's separate from dark energy, the repulsive energy that itself is dark. We don't know the nature of as well, but it's separate. It's a distinct phenomenon in the universe from that. We do not know what dark matter is and why it attracts galaxies

and why it wasn't affected, why it isn't affected by light. Like what with all our technology? What the hell could dark matter be? it is undetectable still. Even with our, presumably, in our own galaxy that we live within, we are surrounded by a halo of dark matter. So the only known life in the cosmos as of now is on Earth. It's the only known life.

Think about how that's gonna drastically alter our perception of ourselves, in the universe because that means if we ever find new life it's going to change how rare life has this is a general walkthrough of the Drake equation that takes percentages of the key variables kind of mathematics like a pseudo mathematical take on how to how to view the probability of life in the universe we look at the rates of star births you think how many there might be and star birth and the placement of you know where a star is in its life also dictates how habitable planets around that star could be because early stars young stars are you know you still have a lot of debris therefore a lot of comet impacts disrupting any potential

evolution of life so it's not very stable you need to be have an older star who's space debris out of its stellar disc has mostly been you know sucked up cleared up by a situation which i think it's turning out to look like our solar system is incredibly unique because we have Jupiter, we have all these gas giants, these massive planets out there, but mostly Jupiter is the key player in corraling and absorbing and attracting major comets, major potential hazards to life on Earth. Away from us, it absorbs the impact. It's kind of like a shepherd for our little oasis, the inner solar system.

So you need a lot of special circumstances to allow for an uninterrupted evolution of life. You need planets. We think there's a lot of planets. We've found thousands, thousands more. since this book was published, even though this is the updated version, so... I don't know. When was it published and... When was it revised?

Still, that's 12 years ago. We've found tens of thousands more planets since this book was written, so that's incredible to think about. Then you need planets with life. So habitable. You need planets. I guess if we're starting from the beginning, you need stars of a certain age. You need certain so that planets can form without being constantly bombarded.

You need of a certain chemical makeup to allow for life. You need them to be at specific distances not too hot in the Goldilog zone, not too far away where it's on ice. you need them to not have too many so they're not constantly so they have stable orbits so they're

you know they have stable day night cycles they don't have too much variability or else it might be harder for life to adapt it might be too erratic if the orbits in the moon

and, you know, are too unstable. You need life. You need intelligence once life develops, which took, as far as we know, took our planet four billion years to develop intelligence. Then you need communicating, technologically advanced life.

You need a civilization that can allow for the development of that, so you're not just trying to surround, survive, but you actually have enough free time and resources to have at least a portion of your population develop technology to be able to transmit signals, which then we can hear. So using the estimates, estimates above, one might expect there to be about 50 times 0.5, 0.9.1. So a 50% starboard. 0.5% stars with planets be habitable 90% 0.9 of habitable planets develop life. 10% of life. No, 90% of life bearing planets bear only simple life. So 10% 0.1, intelligent life. 90% of intelligent life never talks to the stars.

Hmm. I wonder why that is. Whether it's technological or just philosophical reasoning there. Civilizations might actually laugh. They expect some civilizations die before they can even ever be contacted back. So they might emit radio signals, but they might be dead. About the time we received those signals or they might have. have stopped transmitting those signals due to some sort of extinction, whether by their own hand in weaponry and war or by external issues like, you know, super volcanoes or some

dramatic event like a comet impact or even their star exploding, wiping them out. These values for all these variables here yield 900 civilizations in our own galaxy today. Just 900 out of something like 100 billion stars. 9 hundred, that's it. And given our galaxies on the order of 200,000 light years across, those could easily be so far spread out, so far away from my galaxy's, you know, on the order of 200,000 light years across, those could easily be so far away from us that we we would take tens at least tens of thousands of years to ever reach them by any sort of spacecraft I don't even know of if that would include a manned spacecraft

that might just be the limitations of our own technology so that is though those values for those variables input into that equation and we're not even sure if that's all the variables they're sufficient or if those values are correct so there could be a hundred thousand you know given that there's a hundred billion stars there could be 100,000 civilizations out there could be that we are the only civilization out there in the Milky Way at the moment we don't know and it could be that if we look far enough into the past into the distant cosmos billions of light years away the universe is of such a geometric shape a closed universe a universe that curves in four-dimensional space time in on itself

that we are actually looking back the universe in which we exist at a early Milky Way galaxy and I guess we'd never really have any way of telling because if we look far enough out it's far enough back in time that even if we were to try to map on the Andromeda and our galaxy and some of the Triangulum and some of the dwarf galaxies around it they would look so different there would be so much younger they wouldn't be the same shape have the same general you know illumination patterns of emission lines characteristic you know combinations of elements being emitted by the stars within them they wouldn't even have the same mass so we wouldn't be able to tell

if maybe some of these galaxies that we're looking at out here on the perimeter 30 40 billion light years away are just ourselves and not ourselves but I'll go so those are just some things to think about to distract you from whatever daily worries and pressures and stresses you guys have because sure have a couple But this helps remind me that the universe is far more than school and work and it's a vast territory that we can uncover generation by generation. We can recover, gain a little more and expand a little more motivation and of wisdom on top of that. Or maybe underneath it, we can also expand with more and more taken from a place of humility. Wouldn't that be cool?

If you guys like this, yeah, again, subscribe and you know like, give me a comment. I love talking to you guys. Sometimes I don't get around to it. I'm so darn busy, but I really do enjoy hearing from you guys. So what you liked and what you want to see in the future. Thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next couple episodes. Demon Core. I got one about World War II coming up.

coming up. It'll probably have to make something about that in eclipse coming up in February or April. I mean.