Science Friday - Euclid Telescope’s First Images | A Black Hole That Came From Gas

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

A new ESA telescope could help us understand how dark matter and dark energy influence the structure of the universe. Also, using both JWST and the Chandra Observatory, astronomers discover the oldest known black hole.Euclid Telescope’s First Images UnveiledThis week, the European Space Agency unveiled the Euclid space telescope’s first full-color images of the cosmos. The telescope has a wide field of view and is designed to take images of large swaths of the sky in both visible and infrared light. The telescope’s designers hope that they will be able to create a detailed 3D map of the cosmos over the next six years and, with that map, begin to sort out the influences of dark matter and dark energy on the basic structure of the universe.Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American, joins Ira to talk about the first images from the Euclid telescope and other stories from the week in science. They’ll try to explain the recent conversation about ultraprocessed foods and discuss steps toward regulating AI coming from the Biden administration and a host of other countries; a move to rename some North American birds; and the tale of a fish that uses electrolocation and some shimmies to get a 3D map of its environment.Not Just Dying Stars: A Black Hole That Came From GasThis week, astronomers confirmed that they had found the oldest known black hole, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The supermassive black hole formed when the universe was still a toddler, just 470 million years after the Big Bang. But its age isn’t the only thing that makes it unusual.Astronomers long thought that the only way a black hole could form was through the collapse of a star. But this week’s discovery confirms a theory that some black holes at this early stage in the universe formed from the condensation of clouds of gas. The theory purports that such black holes would produce superheated x-ray-emitting gas. Now, data from JWST and Chandra have helped confirm these x-ray signals from the newly discovered black hole. The findings are available via preprint and have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.Ira sits down with Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan, a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale who helped develop this theory, to talk about how these unique black holes change our understanding of the early universe.To stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Astronomers found the oldest known black hole this week, and it's huge. It completely changes the game in understanding how these objects form and that all of this action starts really early on. It's Friday and November 10th and just double-checking my notes, and yep, it's Science Friday. I'm sci-fi producer Dee Peter Schmidt, so we used to think that the only way you could get a black hole was through the collapse of a dying star, but as of this week, astronomers confirmed a theory that some of the earliest black hole, holes were made through the condensation of clouds of gas instead, thanks to confirmation from

Chandra Observatory and the relatively new JWST telescope. We'll get to that story in a bit, but first, Ira and guest Sophie Bushwick talk about the biggest science stories of the week. Highly processed foods, ultra-processed foods, have been getting a lot of attention recently, but exactly what are they? And what's the research linking them to your health? Here to help digest that, sorry, with other selected shows. short subjects in science is Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American. She's here in our New York studios. Welcome back. Thank you. How do you define ultra-processed food? Well, that's the tricky thing because different researchers define it a little bit differently.

But in general, if something's ultra-processed, it's something you couldn't make at home. It's got an additive to maybe increase its shelf life that you wouldn't be able to find in your standard grocery store, or it was prepared using an industrial process that you couldn't handle in a regular kitchen. So a lot of foods are processed, but ultra-processed goes a step beyond that. Oh, so let's take us, take us from the food to the ultra-processed, the steps that you get there. So if you have just like a raw ingredient, that's a, you know, an unprocessed or a minimally processed food. Then there's a type of culinary preparation foods, so like the oils you cook with or maybe sugar. And processed foods are foods that are a combination of those first two.

It's got the raw ingredient and then you've prepared it. So maybe you've cooked, you've fried, an egg in oil. You've processed that egg. But ultra-processed goes a step beyond that. So ultra-processed is like you go to the frozen food aisle and it's a food called egg poppers and it's got eggs and then a list of chemicals after it and extra sugar and it bright colors on top. There's a lot of extra ingredients you don't have in your pantry. Exactly. That's in there. So how much the scientists know about ultra-processed foods to our health? Is there a connection? There is.

Ultra-process foods have been linked with issues like developing type 2 diabetes, with obesity, and with some other health problems, including even slightly elevated risk of certain cancers and things like that. So the problem is we're still trying to figure out just what that connection is. What is ultra-process foods? What do they do to us that is responsible for these differences? Because we know we eat a decent amount of them. Like adults in the U.S., roughly 60% of our calories are coming from ultra-processed.

60? Yeah, yeah. It's a lot of potato chips. Right, right. So it's something that's a big part of our diets. But there's such a range of what you mean by ultra-processed. So ultra-processed, I mean, technically something like canned vegetables, they often have additives in them, and they've been processed in an industrial setting.

Technically, that's ultra-processed. But obviously, eating a can-a-vegetteas isn't doing the same thing for your health as eating like a deep-fried corn dog. Right. Well, you've actually put it right in perspective. Let's move on to some other news. There's a new telescope in operation by the European Space Agency? That's right.

The Euclid telescope sent back its first images, which means it's been calibrated and it's ready to scan the sky. Wow. And what can it do differently, let's say, from Hubble or Webb? So the Euclid takes sort of larger, big swaths of the sky in a single image, as opposed to a lot of other telescopes that take a bunch of little pictures and then those are that are that are composited together into a single image. And Euclid's goal is to create this really detailed map that doesn't, it doesn't just capture a large swath of sky, but it also looks

back, it looks into a great distance. It can go 10 billion light years away is where it's looking, which means it's also looking 10 billion light years back in time. Well, you know, maybe it will help find some of my favorite subjects, dark matter, dark energy. Yes, that is one of the goals. By looking at where matter is in the universe, the matter we can see. By seeing how it's distorted or how it's distributed in space, that helps researchers calculate how it's being affected by things like dark matter and dark energy, which we can't spot directly. This next story came as a bit of a surprise to me. I feel like I'm always surrounded by distractions, but this story says that researchers say we're getting better at paying attention. I would think that's just the opposite.

I know. I know. But despite our expectations, yes, since about 1990 to 2021, researchers looked at a bunch of different studies that had been done using a test of attention, a particular kind of test. And they found that scores have gone up in general in adults in that 30-year period. What kind of test could you give somebody for paying attention? Right. So this is a test where you have to pay attention, but it's also kind of boring. So you've got a line of letters, P's, the letter P or the letter. letter D, and above them you've either got one, two, three, or four markings. And your job is to go through this line and cross out every letter that has two markings above it. So you've got to be paying attention, but it's the same letter each time, so it's kind of boring. And you don't want to make mistakes, but you also want to go as fast as possible because you've got a time limit.

So by doing this line after line after line, it's a good way of assessing how well people are able to pay attention. Speaking of people, are we talking everybody, all age groups, doing the same thing? No, so the adults who took the test seem to get better over time, but children's scores have stayed roughly the same. Really? Do we know why that might be? Well, kids seem to have gotten a little bit faster at doing this test. They've kind of rushed more, but at the same time, they've gotten less accurate. So they make more mistakes because of that rushing. Let's move on to another subject that's getting our attention, of course, and that's AI.

There's been some movement recently on regulating AI. Tell us about that. That's right. Last week there were two AI events. One was that President Biden signed an executive order on AI. This is a really big piece of, this is a really big rule. It's like 20,000 words. And it's the biggest piece of the biggest regulation for AI we've seen so far. And it's got requirements, for instance, that if a company is developing an AI model of a certain size, like something very large, larger than GPT4, which is Open AI's current big model, big large language model, then they have to tell the government and they have to be transparent about where they got the training data for it and the type of thing they're doing. Another requirement is that federal agencies have to make their own regulations. So it's sort of like a regulation telling other people to make regulations with the idea that any AI the federal government uses. It has to be vetted. It has to be tested to make sure it's not a security threat and that kind of thing. And then a couple days after he signed that order in the UK, there was an AI safety summit at a place called Bletchley Park.

A famous Bletchley Park. That's right, the famous Bletchley Park. And dozens of countries signed on to what they called the Bletchley Declaration, which is basically it's another rule saying we need to make rules. It's essentially an agreement that we should do something to regulate AI, but it doesn't actually have any specifics. But the Europeans have always been ahead of regulation. That's right. Yeah. So at the same time, this was countries even not that this included countries that weren't in Europe.

But at the same time, the European Union is coming up with its own AI legislation. And just like they were with passing privacy legislation, they seem to be ahead of the U.S. on this. Right. What did they decide? Is it going to change anything? I mean, is it all voluntary? Anything with teeth in it? So the Bletchley one, not really toothy.

Not really toothy. Bidens, it's got some teeth, but a lot of it is sort of setting up future rules. And because it was an executive order, it's a lot of experts say that they still think it's important. for Congress to pass legislation about this to make sure it's not something that can be just repealed by the next person in office. Let's move on to recently a birding group. This was really interesting. Suggests changing the names of some North American bird species.

That's right. What is going on there? So, as you know, a lot of birds are named after humans. And the American Ornithological Society has said that they want to change all of those names to descriptive names that don't include humans in them. And some of the humans who birds are named after are totally non-controversial, but some of them actually have nothing to do with birds or in mythology. And others have bad histories.

Like, for instance, there's one kind of sparrow named after a historical figure who was a slave owner and who was a vocal opponent of abolition. So a lot of people are like, we don't really want to honor this person by having the the bird named after him. Why not have the bird named after its habitat in style? And there were other birds there thinking the same way. Exactly. The idea is they don't want to go through and just like say, this person is bad, this person's good, this person's bad, this person's good.

They're just throwing all the people out and going to replace all of those names with more descriptive ones. Any names, you know, that are descriptive of the birds, not the names of people, but how they describe the birds changing? So the tricky thing is some birds look a lot alike. So, you know, if you've seen one sparrow and you're not a birder, it might be kind of difficult to tell it apart from a different sparrow species. So that's why they're thinking maybe this could be the pine woods sparrow named after its habitat. instead of named after its appearance. And then other ones, you might have something like the long-tailed duck because of the little bird this or the little bird that. Let's talk about this story about the senses of the elephant-nosed fish.

What makes that so interesting? So the elephant-nose fish has this really cool ability called electro-location, and it essentially is emitting a weak electric field in pulses from an organ near its tail, and it has sensors all over its skin that can sense distortions, in that field when objects move through it. So that lets it sort of detect what's nearby. But now researchers have found that would just let it detect things in 2D. In order to bring that picture into 3D, it does a little dance.

So by moving around and doing this like shimmy back and forth in space, it changes how its skin receptors are angled. And it allows it to build a more accurate picture. Because it lives in water that's what, cloudy water. Exactly. It lives in this very murky habitat. So electro-location lets it defy the poor visual input. Now, I understand there's a very importantly named body part in this fish. So the elephant-nosed fish's elephant-nose is this protrusion that's actually growing out of its chin.

It looks like an elephant trunk, and it is called a schnazin organ. Schnazan-organ. Schnaz-an-organ. And it's filled with these electrical receptors so it can wiggle it around, and it can use it to dig in the silt of the bottom of the river and try to find something good to eat. Wow. How did you find this?

How do you find these stories? I mean, I just waggle my schnaz and organ around. And they come to me. You know, I think somewhere Jimmy Durante must be. People of a certain age will remember Jimmy Duranty. He had a giant nose as he was a comedian. And he was called the schnaz. So somewhere in the world.

He would have gotten along well with the elephant nose fish. Elephant nose fish. Could have had some for pets. He could have. You know, when you search for stories, where do you look for your stories? How do you find them? So some of it is scientific journals. And some of it is, you know, if there's an event in the news, what is the science angle on it?

Is there something I can explain from a tech point of view? So for instance, you know, nobody was publishing an academic paper about Biden's AI executive order. But I thought that's something that's techie, that's, you know, people are going to be interested in the future of AI. Sophie, thank you for hanging out with us today. It's been a pleasure. Sophie Bushwick Technology Editor at Scientific American. She's here in our New York studios. It's time to talk about one of my favorite subjects on this show, Black holes, because there was really some intriguing news about a discovery reported this week. Astronomers confirmed that they had found the most distant black hole by X-ray telescope. A supermassive black hole formed when the universe was just a toddler. just 470 million years after the Big Bang.

And what makes this discovery so cool is the size and origin of this black hole. It's super massive. And its existence confirms a theory that the earliest, most massive black holes, called seed black holes, did not form from the collapse of dying stars, the usual way we think of black hole formation. No, but through the condensation of clouds, of gas. Wow, this is exciting. I want to find out more. So joining me is an astronomer who helped formulate and publicize this idea in 2017, and she's no stranger to our show. Dr. Priya Natarajan. Delighted to be here, Ira. Are you excited by this? Very excited. Because for me, you know,

things have come full circle. This has been an idea that, you know, theoretically we proposed in 2005, six. It was considered a bit crazy. speculative, slowly kind of marched along building up, and then we got to the stage of making concrete predictions in 2017, as you mentioned. And then bam, we find this object. Well, tell us, tell us what makes this discovery unique. So what is really unique about this X-ray quasar, right, is the simultaneous detection by James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra. So I think we believe that there may be only one reliable pathway, as you mentioned, in the opening to make the first black holes, the seeds, and from the death of the first stars. And that would make light seed black holes,

but that would be a challenge for these light seeds to grow into even a million or 10 million times the mass of the sun so early on in the universe, like 470 million years. So it was speculated there ought to be other pathways to make seeds, heavier seeds from the get-go. And so in the early universe, we worked out a scenario where you could potentially form heavy seeds from direct collapse by gravity of gas into proto-galaxies. And this object has a mass that is about 10 million times roughly the mass of our sun, and it's roughly 10 times more massive than the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. And what is special here is the relationship between the mass of this black hole and the stars in this galaxy UHZ1. In the Milky Way, for example,

right, the stars vastly outweigh the black hole. Even though the black hole dominates the gravity right around the center of our galaxy, stars really kind of outweigh the black hole. And they outweigh by four orders of magnitude in the Milky Way. But for this outsized black hole galaxy, the stars are only roughly, maybe 10 times more massive, roughly than the black hole. And this is predicted if the original seed from which this black hole that we detect came from started life as a heavy seed, you know, 10 to the four times the mass of the sun. Right, right. So how does this change how astronomers think about our early universe?

Well, I mean, I think what it does, it shows us that there is more than one pathway to make the first black hole seeds. So, you know, universe appears to be littered with black holes of all sizes and everywhere. early universe, you know, middle-aged universe, late universe. And so the fact that this is the first evidence that ratifies that one new additional channel to make black holes is really important because it completely changes the game in understanding how these objects formed and we know that they form in tandem somehow with the assembly of galaxies and there are correlations in the properties of the black holes.

and that all of this action starts really early on. So I think it's kind of resetting the clock on our expectations for when the first stars and the first black holes form. Well, Priya, I want to congratulate you and your fellow astronomers and astrophysicist for this exciting discovery. I can see you're a little more than just excited about this. Very excited. You can't get me to stop talking about it.

And I think, you know, what is really cool is this object was actually found behind a kind of object that I also love and work on, which is, you know, galaxy clusters that have a lot of dark matter and they behave like magnifying lenses. Wow. This object was found by good old Chandra. What a wonderful telescope, right? The X-ray telescope is 20-plus years old. It's going strong.

And, you know, so to have my two interests kind of collide in this beautiful way, it's just a dream. It's a dream. It's a dream. It's a dream to have you on, Priya. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you. Dr. Priyana Rajan, Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

And that's about all the time we have today. A lot of people help make the show happen, including Annie Nero, Emma Gomez, Charles Bergquist, Danielle Johnson. And many more. On Monday, we're going to be talking about ChatGPT's impact on one college a year after it was released. How are students and faculty adapting?

We'll catch you then. But for now, I'm sci-fi producer Deep Peter Schmidt. Have a great weekend.