Science Friday - Migraines, Galaxy Formation. Jan 10, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: January 10, 2020

The Mysteries Of Migraines What do sensitivity to light, a craving for sweets and excessive yawning have in common? They’re all things that may let you know you’re about to have a migraine. Of course each person’s experience of this disease—which impacts an estimated 38 million people in the U.S.—can be very different. One person may be sensitive to light while another is sensitive to sound. Your pain may be sharp like a knife while your friend’s may be dull and pulsating. Or perhaps you don’t have any pain at all, but your vision gets temporarily hazy or wiggly. This week Ira is joined by two migraine experts, Elizabeth Loder, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and Peter Goadsby, professor of neurology at the University of California San Francisco, who explain what’s going on in the brain of a migraineur to cause such disparate symptoms. Plus, why some treatments work for some and not others, from acupuncture and magnesium supplements, to a new FDA approved medication that goes straight to the source. How Do Galaxies Get Into Formation?  The Milky Way and distant galaxies are a mix of gas, dust, and stars. And while all of this is swirling in space, there is a structure to a galaxy that holds all of this cosmic dust in order. A group of researchers discovered a nearly 9,000 light year-long wave of “stellar nurseries”—star forming regions filled with gas and dust—running through the Milky Way, and could form part of the galaxy’s arm.  The study was published in the journal Nature. Astronomers Alyssa Goodman and Catherine Zucker, who are authors on that study, tell us what this star structure can tell us about the formation of our galaxy.  Plus, astrophysicist Sangeeta Malhotra talks about one of the oldest galaxies formed 680 million years after the big bang, and the difference between these ancient galaxies and our own.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A few weeks ago, I was sitting here at my desk in the radio studio, reading something off a page, and all of a sudden, some of the words on the paper at the end of the sentence on the left side got a little fuzzy and gray, and the effect lasted just about five minutes, and then everything went back to normal. But it got me worried. So I went to my neurologist who said he suspected what I had experienced was actually a type of my migraine? I didn't have any pain. How could this have been a migraine? It was only my vision that was impacted and it lasted just a few minutes. Well, it sounded a lot like what David from Anchorage called in about on our Science Friday Voxpomp app. I have a form of migraine that does not

lead to a massive headache, but to a visual aura that grows over my visual field. It appears as lines and triangles that rapidly shift between black and white. And that's what my doctor called an ocular migraine, something that happens in your eye. And if you're a migraine sufferer or a migrainer, as we are called, your experience could be totally different from mine or David's. You may be sensitive to light or to sound. You may have a pain that's sharp like a knife or dull and pulsating. Migraine triggers. run the gamut, too. From eating too many sweets to drinking red wine to not getting enough sleep, migrainer will speak of all kinds of triggers. So how can each person's migraine be so different?

And can there ever be a treatment that cures all migraines? Well, the FDA recently approved a new drug for treating acute migraine attacks called Ubro-Gpan. It's one in a new class of medications that targets a critical receptor in the migraine pathway in the brain, and could it be the miracle drug migraine suffers? Well, we've been waiting for. Well, we've got a lot of questions about migraine, and if you experience them, you probably do. If you do, we want to hear from you.

844-8255, or you can tweet us at SciFRI. Tell us what your migraine feels like. Have you had any success in treating them yourself? We can't really prescribe anything for you, Personally, that's just unethical and we really don't know who you are. So we will try to answer as many questions about the different symptoms of migraine, whether a universal treatment may be on the horizon. And to answer those questions are my two guests.

Dr. Peter Goetzby, Professor of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, and King's College in London. Welcome, Dr. Goadsby. Hi, thank you for having me. You're welcome. Dr. Elizabeth Loder, Professor of Neurology at Harvard Med and Chief of the Division of Head in the Department of Neurology at Brigham. and Women's Hospital. She's here in our New York Studios. Welcome.

Thanks for having me. Dr. Loder. Let me begin with you, Dr. Loder. The very basic question, what exactly is a migraine? There's so many different symptoms. Is there a universal definition for it? There are widely accepted criteria for making the diagnosis of migraine and features that we look for in order to diagnose migraine. It's a common, costly, and long-lasting illness where people are susceptible to repeated, attacks of head pain that can be severe. And some of the things we look for to make the diagnosis include head pain that is predominantly on one side of the head, pain that is moderate to severe in intensity, pain that is usually lasting four to 72 hours, makes it impossible to be physically

active and is throbbing in intensity. Not everybody has all of those features, but most people in addition to that, head pain will also have nausea or vomiting, sensitivity to light or sound. So those are some of the things we ask about when we're trying to make a diagnosis. And then there's my kind that I had. There's your kind as well. About 20 to 30 percent of people who have migraine also experience migraine aura. They don't necessarily have it with every headache, and they don't necessarily have a headache with the aura. It's very noticeable.

And so when it happens, as in your case, people typically will go. go to the doctor or to the emergency department and get a diagnosis. I've been told that migraine runs on the female side of families. Is that correct? I'm not so sure that's true. It's not entirely clear. The genetics of migraine are a focus of intense study right now. It is true that about half of people with migraine have a family member with the illness, and it's very clearly something that is genetically influenced. Some very rare single gene types of migraine exist. But for the majority of people who have a family, have common garden variety migraine.

It's almost certainly a polygenic disorder where there are a number of genes contributing to risk. Dr. Goseby, I mentioned in the introduction how many people talk about all the triggers that there are from migraine. Some people say they're triggered by light. Some people can be triggered by eating sweet things, not getting enough sleep.

Why are these triggers, Dr. Gotsby, so different? Well, one of the things we're learning about triggers. Firstly, they're variable because humans are variable or migraine manifestations, while there's a very clear core that Dr. Loder just pointed out, there's considerable variability in the individual manifestation of the disorder. The same thing applies to the triggers. An important thing we found out, I think we've understood better in perhaps the last decade, is that not all triggers are triggers.

And what I mean by that is that there's a phase of the attack before the pain comes, the so-called promontory phase when someone might start to feel a brain fog, concentration problems, some mood change. They feel sleepy, tired, they might yawn. Oddly, they might pass more urine, or they might crave sweet or savoury things. And this may go on for hours or days before their pain starts. It's clear that some of the, some of the things that have been attributed to triggers are actually the promontory phase or the attack starting. So, for it's a very thing. So, example, if you're sensitive to light in the promontory phase, and that happens hundreds of times, you might come to the conclusion that after light exposure, because you're sensitive and you notice

it, then your headache develops. Actually, what's going on biologically is the attack already started, and that's why you're sensitive to light. So some of these triggers aren't triggers at all. They're an invitation to understand the disorder better. You know, when I was talking about this on Twitter, I was tweeting about this, the number of reactions you get, you don't realize how many people have migraines until you start talking about it. And people will come up with all different things that they've tried, that they've done. A lot of people said that once they've had migraines their whole lives, once they got menopause, they went away, Dr. Loder. Well, we hear all kinds of things. And no one thing seems to be true for absolutely everybody.

we tend to hear about it when people have sudden remission of their attacks. And if it happens in association with something that's very noticeable like menopause, it often is attributed to that, whether that's true in any individual cases, somewhat difficult to tell. You're absolutely right, though, about the number of people who have migraine. And it's interesting that you got so many reactions on Twitter. You should try being a headache specialist and going through a party or any sort of gathering. We hear a lot about it.

And the reason is it's so incredibly common. It is, by conservative estimates, something that affects 38 million people in the United States. It's long-lasting, and the majority of people who have it have onset before the age of 35. You might be an exception. That's amazing. Dr. Goatsby, do we know what is happening in the brain that causes or when a migraine takes over? We know quite a bit about it. It is a brain disease, as you've said.

It's what you'd call a network. brain disease. So there are areas in the brain that are interacting with each other and they start to interact in a pattern that's abnormal or dysfunctional. Much of it starts from a deep part of the brain, a part called the hypothalamus that's involved in very primitive, driving very primitive things, are wanting to eat, wanting to sleep, wanting to pass urine, for example. These areas dysfunction and the pattern with which they dysfunction determines much about the manifestation of the disease. Yes, brain imaging's helped us a lot

in nailing down, beginning to nail down, some of the important biology and dispelling any myth that migraine is anything other than a serious and biologically determined problem. Dr. Godspell, let's talk about this new class of FDA-approved drugs that have been coming out. Tell us what they are

and how are they different from earlier generations. of migraine drugs. The new class you're referring to are called G-Pants or G-PANCE. It depends which side of the Atlantic you probably want to sit on. Any pronunciation at the moment's fine. They're called CGRP, as you said, calcitonin-gene-related peptide to its closer friends. Receptor antagonists.

They block that receptor, as you said. They've been developed because CGRP is involved, importantly in parts of the signaling process, the network abnormality that's going on in migraine, and they stop the effect of CGRP. Can they be used both for treatment and prevention? Well, you specifically asked about Eubrogypant, which has been developed and has a product label, a label in an FDA label for acute treatment. It has a cousin called atogipan that is being developed for prevention.

One of the probably most disruptive things that's happening in our thinking is that, as one understands the biology better, you can manipulate the medicine, you might say, to suit the patient needs rather than trying to squeeze a patient into the boxes that we have for them so far. So let's be clear that Ubrojipan is not a preventive, but the concepts being evolved that. Dr. Loder? Is it working? I mean, I've heard miraculous stories about these drugs. Well, I haven't used you brojapan. It's been recently approved by the FDA, so I haven't had a chance to use it yet. But in the clinical trials, I think you link on your website to an article that reports on some of the clinical trials. And if you look at how many people who take the medicine have improvement of their pain at two hours, 49% of people who took placebo had improvement compared with 61% of the drug. So clearly it's more effective than placebo. It doesn't work for everybody, but nothing we have does. It's wonderful to have medicines that work in new ways because every new treatment provides an additional option that we can offer to patients,

and some of them have important attributes like fewer side effects and so on and so forth. Well, we're going to take a break, and as you can imagine, when I mentioned before, when you start talking about, we have you, we don't have you at a dinner party, we have you here right in the seat to answer all these questions. Our number 844-8255. Talking with Dr. Elizabeth Loder of Harvard Med School and the famous Brigham and Women's Hospital, and she's here in our studios. And Peter Goatsby, UCSF, King's College, London.

Our number, again, 844-724-8255. Also taking your tweets at SciFRI. Stay with us. We'll be right back after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking about migraine this hour with my guest, Dr. Peter Goatsby.

and Dr. Elizabeth Loder, our number 844-8255. When we left, we were talking about medications, especially one new form that was being okayed by the FDA to come out, but there are some ones that are still out there. And that was an orally administered one. And Dr. Loder, you were talking to me about one that's injectable. Yes, we have other treatments that also work on calcitonin, related peptide. These are antibody treatments, biological treatments, so technically not really

drugs at all. And three of them are currently available and in use, and one is about to become available. So these are injections. They're intended to reduce the number of attacks that people have. They're taken on a regular schedule. And the first was approved in mid-2018, the others later in 2018. So we have a fairly good amount of experience with these treatments now, and it's nice to have, as I said earlier, additional things to offer patients. Many people like the convenience of a once-a-month injection. For many people, these have relatively few side effects, although nothing is side-effect-free, and some serious side effects have emerged, and there have been some updates to the safety labeling. But overall, it's wonderful to have new options. Can people go and ask their doctors for these things?

They certainly can. Now, preventive treatment, treatment aimed at reducing attacks isn't necessarily the right approach for everyone. Some people have relatively few attacks, and they do better just treating the attacks when they come. It's also the case that often less expensive, other medications that for many people work equivalently well to these new treatments should be tried first. And of course, I can tell you from my phone board lighting up here, everybody. has their own little method of getting rid of their migraines. Some work, some better than others. Yes, that's right. And, of course, people who have many attacks and have migraine for a long period of time become experts on their own illness, as you might expect. And we hear a lot of interesting things in the clinic. Almost every day I hear something I've never heard before. Well, let's see if we can give you one you haven't heard. That's from Lynn in North Carolina. Hi, welcome to Science Friday.

Yes, hi. Hi there. Hello, doctors. I suffered with migraines three days to four days out of every single week for about 10 years. And as a surgeon, I was volunteering the few good days that I had at a community surgery project. And it changed everything because I quickly found out when I started pairing when I got the migraines to what I was doing, that I was super sensitive to cornstarch. When I used powdered gloves, I got the migraine. When I stopped the powdered gloves and I started avoiding all sorts of starches in my diet. I couldn't lick stamps.

I couldn't lick envelopes. I mean corn starch and tapioca starch and rice starches and everything. But when I seriously looked into it and I started avoiding it, now I may have one migraine once a month. Wow. Dr. Loda, there's something new for you, right? That's exactly right. And first of all, I'm really glad that your headaches are better. I mean, your situation illustrates how disabling they can be.

People who have that many attacks every month are in a category called chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month. And I'm glad that in your particular case, you were able to identify something and able to avoid it. That is a new one for me. Well, let's see if we can get one from Karen in Gainesville, Florida. Hi, Karen. Hi, how are you guys? Fine.

Go ahead. Well. God. So I'm 40, and I've been getting migraine since I was 17. And I was curious about if anything is known about hormonal effects during pregnancy. I typically only get about four a year. They're very classic visual aura, nausea, nausea, vomiting, needing to be in a quiet space. They last four to seven hours.

But when I was pregnant with my two children during the first trimester, I was getting them maybe every other day. And, of course, I didn't want to take anything because I didn't want to harm the babies, so I just sort of suffered through them. But I was curious about pregnancy and migraine. Dr. Goudsby, can you advise what's going on? Is there anything you can do? Obviously, you can't take drugs when you're pregnant. I'm happy to advise you have one of the recognized experts in the world sitting next to you.

So I'll give my simple view. I mean, starting in late adolescence and problems till 40, hormonal effects in pregnancy. In the generality of things, pregnancy, certainly in the second and third trimester, is more likely to reduce migraine than not. It's probably the most effective, preventive that one could have, although it's obviously not something one can practice on too regular a basis. The first trimester can be worse and can be quite troublesome and can be quite difficult to manage. our best understanding of the changes in pregnancy are the changes in female hormones that occur,

particularly estrogen, which elevates and then becomes quite stable in the second and the third trimester. Let me go to the world expert, Dr. Lodden. Well, the situation that this particular person is describing is not all that uncommon. The good news is that for the majority of women, though not all, migraine does eventually improve during pregnancy when, as Dr. Godesby says, the estrogen levels become high and stable. But the first trimester can be a problem, perhaps partly because people are not sleeping terribly well. Many women are quite sick to their stomach, and those sorts of things can make migraine worse. We do try very hard to minimize the use of medication during the first trimester and throughout pregnancy,

but there are some medications, which in conjunction with your doctor probably would be reasonable to use. We also, when we know that pregnancy is likely, and it is wise to plan your pregnancies if you have migraine, we like to get measures in place such as training people in biofeedback or other measures or helping them cut back on work or home responsibilities that can minimize attacks, too. Well, related to this, Kiko tweets, can you speak to migraines and birth control? It seems there is limited options for women, Dr. Lutter. Well, it's a very complicated subject. It is the case that women who have migraine with aura, who have that visual aura, about 20 to 30 percent of people have it, are usually advised against using hormonal contraception that contains estrogen. There are other forms of contraception, hormonal and non-hormonal, that are reasonable for them, and there are individual situations where it still might be reasonable to consider that. As a general rule, though, we recommend that women who have migraine with aura should avoid

estrogen-containing contraceptives. And then depending on which group is making the recommendations, sometimes there also is a recommendation to avoid estrogen-containing contraceptives in women over a certain age. Only a couple of minutes left, Dr. Goadsby. What is the frontier of research in combating migraine? I mean, are we happy with what we have, and where do we go next? Oh, we're not happy. for all the medicines that we have, there'll still be millions of people who are not doing well, who are disabled, but reversibly disabled is the important thing.

If we get it right, we can improve them. The frontiers are in understanding the inherited component of it, the genetically determined parts, so we understand how it starts, understanding in detail the parts of the brain that are involved, so we can understand the chemicals, the transmitters that are involved. So eventually we can make bespoke,

We can make our treatments more bespoke, better suited to the circumstance of the patient. I think the frontier is biology. Understand the disorder and we'll be able to fix it much better. How close is it genetically related, or a gene? Can you look for a single gene that causes migraine? As Dr. Loder mentioned earlier on, there are some very rare inherited, what are called, weakness down one side of the body, hemiplegic migraines, where the genes have been identified. But that's a very, very small group.

We generally think it's a polygenetic problem where there's a number of genes that are involved, not one. So, yes, it is something that almost invariably runs in families. And with enough investment in migraine, and there isn't enough investment in migraine research, I'll say that, we can understand this and we can really bring new hope to the millions of people who have this very troublesome problem. Why do you think there's not enough investment in migraine? Well, I think there are many reasons. First of all, it's a pain disorder. Pain is subjective and historically hasn't been paid as much attention to as other maybe more compelling illnesses such as cancer.

It's also a disorder that principally affects women. And I think that until women moved into the workplace, the disability associated with migraine was largely hidden. It was easier for people to rearrange their days and less noticeable when people were disabled by the illness. So many reasons. And there's reason to be helpful then. Now that women are out there, they're going to be paid attention to a little more. Oh, absolutely. And we have groups like the Alliance for Headache Disorders Advocacy that every year run headache on the hill

where they go lobby Congress to spend more money on research and do other things that will be helpful to people with migraine. Okay. I hope we have moved the ball a little bit toward the goal line. Dr. Peter Goadsby is Professor of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, in King's College, London. Elizabeth Loder, Professor of Neurology at Harvard Med, chief of the Division of Headache, Department of Neurology at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Thank you both. You're welcome. Thanks for having. For enlightening us today. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,

there was a cosmic battle between hydrogen and its electrons. By removing the electrons, the atoms were being stripped of their negative charge. This event would end a period that astronomers called the Cosmic Dark Ages. And closer to home in the Milky Way, stellar nurseries, regions of dust and gas that give rise to stars, these nurseries align to form a 9,000 light-year-long wave spanning a part of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. This would come to be called the Radcliffe Wave. No, this is not the plot of the next Star Wars movie, but is the synopsis of two presentations from this week's American Astronomical Society meeting. presentation on the Radcliffe Wave was also published this week in the journal Nature.

And I want to bring on two authors from that study to talk about their findings and ideas about how galaxies form and the structures inside of them. It's all kind of really interesting stuff. Lisa Goodman, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard, Catherine Zucker, an astronomy PhD student also at Harvard. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks, Howard. Nice to be happy to speak right up there. Let me get to you first, Catherine. The Radcliffe wave that you all described connects a stellar nurseries.

What is a stellar nursery? What's going on inside there? Yes. So a stellar nursery, it is a cloud of gas and dust, and parts of this cloud will become so cold and so dense that it will collapse under its own gravity and form new stars. And the Radcliffe wave is in the Milky Way? It's close to our solar system? Not only is it close, but it's right in front of our noses.

it's only 500 light years at its closest point. And if you compare that to the diameter of the Milky Way, 100,000 light years, it's closer than we could have ever imagined. And we've, let me ask you, Alyssa, we've had to change our ideas about how nurseries and are connected and things that surround our sun to understand this new idea. Yes, absolutely. So Catherine and her other PhD advisor, Doug Finkbiner and his group have been working on ways to measure distances in the galaxy much more accurately to these clouds of

dust. And so before we kind of knew that these stellar nurseries or star farming regions were around us kind of nearby, but they were sort of scrambled because there was big uncertainty in their distance. And what happened is we put these distances, these accurate distances into a 3D picture, and we saw this gigantic wave that we certainly didn't expect was there. We knew that there was roughly some kind of spiral arm, and maybe there was this goulds belt thing of expanding regions, that region expanding around the sun, that didn't seem to really be right. And anyway, so instead, there's this gigantic wave that apparently is our section of the local arm of the Milky Way. Am I Refleado, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

So let me see if I can understand the picture. We have our Milky Way. It's got a nice spiral going around it. But if you look closer, there's this giant wave going through it. Is that correct, Alyssa? Yes. Importantly, the wave is perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy, so up and down, out of the disk. And what's even else is super weird is that if you did look from the top down and you expected that spiral arm, our local section of that spiral arm seems unusually straight, very, very straight.

If you look at pictures of what's called spiral galaxies outside of our own galaxy, you look very careful. You'll notice there are large straight sections of the spiral arms. It's more like a dashed line of straight things, making what almost looks like a spiral. And so from the top down, the Radcliffe wave looks like one of these very long dashes. And it's from the side, which is our vantage point from in the disk at the sun, from the side that it looks like a giant sign you saw the wave. And so no one thought that this was here. I mean, we were just tootling around and thinking that, well, suddenly there's a wave here. Somebody's doing the wave here in our galaxy.

Yes, we had no idea. And so as Alyssa mentioned, there was this paradigm called the Goulds Belt, where we thought all of these stellar nurseries were arranged in a ring around the sun. and that's existed since the 1870s. And so by mapping these clouds to very high accuracy, we've overturned that theory, and we found that there is this sign wave instead, which is a shape, as Alyssa said, that we have never seen before in our galaxy

or in other galaxy exactly. How did it get here? Oh, that's a really good question. So part of the reason it's called the Bradcliffe wave is because a great deal of this work was done by Chihuahalves, who unfortunately can't join us today, the first author of the Nature paper and Catherine and some me at Radcliffe. But in honor of that, we're having a conference, a very small conference later this year called the Radcliffe Wave at Radcliffe,

where we bring all the theorists who think they have ideas about how this could have formed and try to figure that out. So you'll have to ask us again. But the ideas that people have proposed have to do mostly with collisions of something falling onto the disk of the galaxy from what's called the halo of the Milky Way, So the stuff right around the Milky Way or the collision of a very small galaxy from outside. But we have some constraints on the motions of these things that means that whatever fell in had to do it in a kind of very vertical way, not in a sort of super crazy collision from the side way. But there's other theories that have to do with not understanding the gravitational potential of the galactic disk and dark matter and explosions. But we don't know. I love that we don't know, line.

And I'm going to use this opportunity to invite our listeners to ask their what's going on questions. Our number 844-724-8255. We're going to take a break, but when we come back, we're going to expand our conversation to everything about the galaxy because there's so much stuff going, literally stuff going on in there. 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFRI, SCI, FRI, because, you know, one of my favorite subjects is dark energy and dark matter, and I'm going to, you know, get into what all that dark matter might be doing inside the wave. Is it doing the wave? You brought the dad jokes out

of me about the wave, the Randcliffe wave. So our number, again, 844-24-8255. You can tweet us at Cy Fry. We'll be back with Alyssa Goodman and Catherine Zucker. And we're also going to bring on a researcher from Goddard in Greenbelt. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato this hour. We're talking about the galaxies, how they form and some crazy things going on on our own galaxy with Alyssa Goodman, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University. Catherine Zucker, an astronomy PhD student also at Harvard.

And we were talking about this 9,000-year-long wave, flight-year-long wave spanning our home galaxy. It's like the surfs up in our home galaxy. You've heard enough of these, right? No, it was kind of fun because it was in Hawaii the announcement, and so there were a lot of surfing jokes. And the best thing about that surfing joke is we actually think that it's possible that we're surfing the wave. Our son has potentially crossed this structure about 13 million years ago, and we have the potential to cross it again in the future. So people are actually, we think, surfing the wave. I'm just speechless about this.

What you mean, oh, let me see if I understand this. So this structure has been here. It sits here in space, and as our galaxy rotates around the universe, it just comes across the wave. It surfs the wave. As our, no, no, as our sun rotates around the Milky Way, it crosses the wave, because they're both in the Milky Way, right? So the wave is in a feature, you know, in the arm of the Milky Wave that we're almost in. And because the orbits are not exactly concentric and not exactly the same shape, they cross through each other very gently and slowly. you know, on tens of million year time scales, which is very small for the age of the galaxy.

So how long will we be continuing to surf this wave? Probably for as long as it exists and as long as the sun exists. And so the wave is likely to exist far less long than the sun. The sun has, you know, four billion years to go or something. But the star-forming regions that are in the wave are, you know, probably at most 100 million years old, just as a guess. So they're much younger. And so we don't know what caused this, and so we don't know how long it will last. But another student of Harvard Joshua Spiegel worked with Catherine and others to do very careful fits,

mathematical fits of the shape of this. And it shows that it's damped. So in other words, a damping wave is indicative of it dying out at some level or something else forcing it. And so it may just die down and turn into something else in the future and not in the very distant future on the scale of the lifetime of the galaxy. But one thing that we do know following up on Alyssa is that, so this structure is forming new stars, and those new stars will be our travel companions around the galaxy as we rotate around the center of our galaxy, but they're probably going to live longer than our son. Wow.

Wow. You sound very excited. Yeah, we are frailed. We're also excited that we had the opportunity. Catherine did a fantastic job of putting all of the data that we used online. So there are two other papers that she wrote and all of the data that we're. that present these distances and all the data from that and the nature paper and all kinds of interactive figures and the software is all open source and available. And so this is a wonderful example of open science in addition.

And so people who are listening go out and play with the data themselves and tell us what caused the Radcliffe wave. And one of my favorite things about this structure is that it's gigantic in 3D, but also if you look up in the sky in 2D, you're probably looking at some piece of the Radcliffe wave. it spans almost 150 degrees on the sky. And so famous regions like the Orion Nebula, that is part of the Radcliffe wave. So when you see Orion, think of the Radcliffe wave, please. Whoa, my favorite constellation, you know. So, you know, at nighttime we try to go out and see the Milky Way on, you know, the plane of the Milky Way. Are we looking also, if I look at Orion, am I looking at the Radcliffe wave?

The crazy thing is that when you look at the plane of the Milky Way on the sky, it looks very narrow. And this thing is so big in terms of how far out it's out of the plane. So it's 500 light years above and below the plane where it is. And because it's so close to us, that means it's a big angle away from that band that you see on the sky. So there are some beautiful images. We have a website, tiny URL.com slash rad wave. So people can go there and look and you can see, Catherine made a lovely animation that shows you where on the sky this is. And because it's so wavy out of the plane, Orion is.

is quite far off that Milky Way that you see on the sky. And it's the extreme of the wave at one end. And so it's a big angle. So actually, no, it's the answer to your question. When we look at the Milky Way, part of it crosses the Milky Way that you see on the sky, but a lot of it is out of the Milky Way. And it would have been impossible to identify the whole thing, only looking in 2D. And it's funny because it wasn't until the reporter from the Guardian asked us what this

looks like on the sky that we added that image to show that because we as astrophysicists think about it in 3D and think about what caused this and think about it in the causes of the galaxy, not about the sky. So we're glad somebody asked us that so we can tell you that, yes, it's all over the place. Well, to even increase our fun with galaxies we're having this hour, I want to bring on another guest who studied some of the earliest galaxies that were formed just 600 million years, 680 million years after the Big Bang. Sangita Malhotra is a researchist astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. I think that's the oldest NASA site. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you, Ira. It's great to be here. Now, you were able to observe one of the oldest galaxies that formed right after the Big Bang. Tell us, what did that galaxy look like? What features did it have in such a young galaxy? It's not just one galaxy, it's three. Three? So it's a group of galaxies. And what's amazing, unique about this group, that it's a disruptive group of galaxies.

What we see is actively disrupting the gas around this group of galaxies. And these were the sort of signatures we were looking for because we're looking for this cosmic change called reionization where most of the gas that's in between galaxies gets disrupted by light particles coming from within the galaxies. And what does it look like a galaxy or these groups of galaxies? Do they look like something we would recognize in older galaxies like our own Milky Way? Oh, they're tiny, and they're so far away, they're tiny.

I wish I could tell you there was a huge wave. No, but we see three small dots. And then we confirm those dots. And then because we see this special light called, Lyman Alpha, which is a hydrogen light, and then we are able to see it from all of that, it's like seeing specs and inferring everything. We infer that the gas around these galaxies has been ionized. And this is the signature we've been looking for for a while.

You know, I want to bring all of my guests in here. Let me bring back Alyssa and Catherine. You all seem very, very excited about studying galaxies and your astrophysicists. Sangita, do you share that excitement? Yes. Why? Why this is so exciting? You know, I spoke to Vera Rubin many years ago when she was still here. And she talked about her excitement in studying galaxies.

Do you share that kind of excitement, Sangata? Oh, absolutely. Yes. I gave a talk at Vera Rubin's Institute once about these very sort of searches we are doing. And she was like, afterwards she told me, Sangita, you're going to. to be studying these galaxies all of your life. And I was like, okay, no problem. Well, let me bring in one of my favorite topics, which is, I won't talk about dark energy. I'm going to talk about dark matter because it was Vera Rupin who sort of, right, got all that data that sort of said there's a lot of dark matter in all these galaxies. The stuff you were

discovering, does it give us any more hint, even the wave? Does that tell us anything more about Dark matter? It could someday. So there's yet another student at Harvard's name is Gus Bean, who, while he was an undergraduate, did some work simulating the collision of the Sagittarius dwarfs, tiny little galaxy, colliding with the Milky Way, and it makes these big waves. The wavelength of what he published is a little bit too long, so it's the wrong magnitude, but it's kind of the right sort of phenomenon.

And so I am not saying that it definitely is something having to do with dark matter. but if we have the amount of dark matter either in the halo or the disc of the galaxy wrong or the distribution of it, like how clumpy it is, that could ultimately have something to do with the explanation. So there are hints that this probably has something to do with a collision. There are not hints that we definitely need dark matter to make everything work out mathematically, but it's not nuts to think that that might have something to do with it, but it's a big might. All right. I'm going to get very geeky now and go to the phones because a lot of lot of astrophysics geeks are on the phone.

Let's see if we can understand. All my audience can understand what they're asking. I'll start with Lon. Hi, welcome to Rob in Nevada City. Let's go to you. Yes. Yeah, hello. I have a question about the harmonic series

that we experience in our everyday life, especially if we're musicians, I guess. But does that apply to this wave and also, do they have an idea of where the origin of the harmonic series? Good question. Oh, actually, that's a really good question. Gus, the student who I mentioned who did that simulation of the collision, he's mentioned already that higher order harmonics,

and for those of you who don't know what that means, if you pluck a string, there's one sort of major sine wave that's given by that pluck, but then there's a lot of smaller vibrations that are these so-called higher-order harmonics. that would also happen. And so it's possible that there's a phenomenon that happens on many scales at once that has these harmonics in that we're just seeing one that happens to manifest in the dust, in the gas. There could be something else going on on different timescales or in the stars,

and we're looking for all of that. So the next release from Gaia, Catherine maybe can talk a little bit more about that. We'll come later this year and we'll have even more information about the velocities of stars. So this wave is seen in the gas and the dust, but we don't know exactly, not for all of the stars anyway, what they're doing. And so it's a really good question. And yes, the reason we're so interested in a collision is because that might be like plucking a string-like thing that was the,

and I don't mean super string. I don't mean that kind of string, I mean like analogy string, you know, something that sort of was this region of the galaxy and had kind of an like structure. And if you pluck it, it will wave. Well, let me ask you this question then from our caller. Our caller was talking about harmonics, which in music we know are different frequencies. If you have found this big wave, does that mean there are harmonics of it? Other smaller waves or different frequency waves somewhere else, or maybe we haven't found them yet?

Very possibly. One of the other papers in the meeting, the meeting this week, was actually talking about a much larger scale wave in the stars from Gaia. And so what I'm saying is that this could be a harmonic of something even larger or smaller. In other words, there could be a whole set of waves at different frequencies. and this is just one of them, but we don't know. And so we think this happened because of a collision. Is that what you're saying? I think that's the majority opinion.

Catherine, what would you say? Yeah, I would say that's my favorite scenario, but it's not the only scenario. And so that's why we need to bring all these theorists together from all over the world to figure out exactly how you form this structure. And then we can start to answer those questions. I have another question after that, but I want to go to Justin and San Antonio. Hi, Justin. Hey, how's it going?

Hey there, welcome. Yeah, I was actually just about to ask about that, whether that was a structure that maybe we ran into and then drug along with us with our gravity from the galaxy, or if it was something maybe left over no man's land material that hasn't formed into stars yet. Yes, so that's a great question. And so what we do know about this structure is that it's three million solar masses, three million times the mass of our sun and gas. and about 1% of that mass is in young stars. So tens of thousands of young stars across the structure. And so this material is a lot younger than the type of material that formed our sun, which is a lot older. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Sangheeda, when you study these very young stars, do you expect to find a wave going through them yet?

I wish we could see that wave. but what we see actually is one small galaxy. And these galaxies are typically 100th the size of the Milky Way. They haven't fully fledged yet. And the stars are extremely young. We are looking at a few million years young stars. And a whole lot of star formation, star burst even going on in this very small size.

Right. And the stars, the universe started out with a lot of hydrogen, right? That's still the most abundant element in the universe. How have you figured out in these young galaxies, how that hydrogen sort of turned into galaxies? Well, that's a very good question, and that's why we are observing them. I mean, any guesses? It's important, though, I think it's important to point out to your listeners that there are many, many generations of stars in the universe. And so the process of star formation is ongoing all the time.

And so some stars do live for billions of years, but a lot of young stars, like the ones you really like in Orion, only live for millions of years. And so there's been many generations of those. And so the early galaxies have maybe the first stars, but our galaxy has hundreds, thousands of generations of stars. Well, while we're talking about Orion, I want you to weigh in on Beetlejuice. Where do you stand and it's going to become a supernova or not? I'm passing that to San Gita. Okay, Sankeyta, you're, you're, you've got the spotlight on you. Who are you going to pass it to?

Oh, I wish it would explode. I'd love to see that in my lifetime. What would it look like? I heard it would be as bright as the moon. Is that right? There would be something during the daylight time that would be bright in the sky or only in the evening? Yes, yes, yes. I want to see that too.

Yes, we want to see that. The problem in astronomy is that there's these little uncertainties, you know. But the little uncertainty is when you multiply a small percentage by a really big number, that turns out to be a large number of years that you're not sure about something. So unless it's some process that has to do with, you know, gravity at extremely high masses, like it's the black hole at the galactic center where the time scales involved are years. It's really hard when the time skills could be years, could be tens of years, could be hundreds of years, we're not really sure.

So that's why I'm not answering your question. You're such a party pooper. Sorry. No, but this is great. I mean, as Alyssa mentioned, there's stellar birth and death, and all of this happens in galaxies. And the dark matter that you mentioned maintains the sort of stable place where all of this stuff, the heavy elements that come out of stellar deaths, they stick around because dark matter makes this stable place for galaxies and these gas to stick around, and then they get into the next generation of stars.

So it's a lot of recycling. It's a lot of exciting stuff happening. Well, we have to put a little pause on our excitement because we've run out of time, but we're talking about one of my favorite subjects, and I want to thank you all for delighting us today. Sangita Malovedra is a research astrophysicist at Gideard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.

Lisa Goodman, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard, Catherine Zucker, astronomy PhD student also at Harvard. Thank you all for talking about astrophysics. Love it. Thank you for having us. You're welcome. Thank you for having us. Have a good weekend.

If you missed any part of our program, you can, you know, hear it again, subscribe to our podcast, or you can now ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday, and you'll get our podcast right there on our smart speaker. You know, Alexa and Google every day now is Science Friday. Science Friday Vox Pop app, we're talking about the Great Lakes and how this massive natural resource has been changed forever. We want you to tell us your memories of how the Great Lakes have changed. Just your favorite memory of the lakes. That's our Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get. get your apps. Charles Berkowitz is our director, senior producer Christopher and Taliatta.

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