The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Surgery For Ants, Hot Sharks, Too Many Galaxies

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

Astrophysicist and folklorist Moiya McTier rejoins the show to talk about how there are too many galaxies out there. Plus, Sara Kiley talks about sharks of yore and Rachel explains how ants are becoming little mini surgeons. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Thanks to our Sponsors! This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month at https://BetterHelp.com/WEIRDEST Get 20% OFF @honeylove by going to https://honeylove.com/WEIRDEST! #honeylovepod Make switching seasons a breeze with Quince's high-quality closet essentials. Go to https://Quince.com/weirdest for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice. work. Now Hank says a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Copilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while

most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm Sarah Kylie Watson, and I'm Dr. Moia McTeer. Welcome to the show. So happy to have you.

Thank you for having me back. Yes. We love repeat guests, and especially you. I would say you're probably one of our favorite past guests. I'm honored. I love everybody equally. I shouldn't say that. But still, you're pretty great.

Also, Sarah Kylie, I realized that, You know, we've been having you on every once in a while, but it's been a while since I had you tell folks what you're up to these days. So before we reintroduce, Moya, why don't you tell people what you're doing? Yeah. So I am an editor at 15C. We are a climate change newsletter that's focused on action and solutions. So I know there's a lot of gloomy stuff out there about climate change, but we're doing our best to, you know, show people. what can be done and how we can change things in our lives and, you know, be mad about the right

stuff. So that's what I'm up to these days. That sounds amazing. That is such a great way to put it. Be mad about the right stuff because there's a lot you can be mad about in an unproductive sad way. So yes, excellent. Definitely recommend that folks check out 15C if you haven't already. And, Moia, welcome back to the show. For listeners who don't recall or who we're not lucky enough to hear your last episode with us yet, would you tell us a little bit about the, like, crazy, wonderful mix of things you do that truly every time I think about, like, your professional portfolio, I'm like, incredible, iconic. How does she do it?

Thank you so much. I am an astrophysicist. That's what gave me the doctor title. I got my PhD in astronomy a few years ago. I'm also a folklorist. So I'm an expert in both space and stories, especially stories that we've been telling about the night sky for thousands of years on Earth.

And I love to combine them through fictional world building. So I do a podcast about that. But I really just am passionate about helping people understand where the science exists around them in their daily lives so that they're not surprised or intimidated by it. So cool. I'm sure I nerded out about this last time, but oh ha, so cool. Thank you so much. Yes, we love. Well, thank you so much for coming back on. I'm excited to get back into the show. Before we do our teases, I made a note in all capital letters at the top of my Google Doc, because I keep forgetting to do this. Hey, folks, in case you forgot, I also

host another show now called Science Quickly for Scientific American. It's on three times a week, and I have been getting some lovely feedback from the folks who already listened to Science Quickly and like that I am now hosting it. So if you have come in that direction from Science quickly to hear. Thank you so much. But listen, I can see the dashboard. And I know that we have not had an influx of weirdest thing listeners to science quickly. It's scientific American. So I guess it's on me for only mentioning it probably literally once. But now it's on you. So final boss of science podcasts. Thank you so much. It's, listen, it's really fun. And it's just so different from we're just thing. So it's really, it's just like more science in your life, but very different,

very, like, newsy, very topical, but still fun. I had one guy on my Patreon. Also, I have a Patreon plug, be like, you in Scientific American, what could go wrong? And I was like, listen, man, just because I talk about poop and curse on this podcast, doesn't mean I'm not capable of being a professional. So anyway, I promise it's still fun, but it's, you know, it's just different. And the last thing to remind folks is that Weirdest Thing now has a subreddit. We have several, you know, very excited, enthusiastic people over there, but there's room for more. And I would love to just, like, have, you know, sort of nice active community chats going on.

So look for weirdest thing on Reddit. Search for me on Patreon and search for science quickly wherever you get your podcast. And now I have done my self-promotion for The Quarter. Yay. So let's get into the show. On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, stargazing, etc.

And decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was in a non-competitive, fun, sassy way. Sarah Kylie, what's your tease? Yeah, so I'm going to talk today about when the ocean got so hot that sharks had to evolve to survive. Dang.

Inspiring. news we could all use, I think. Probably, honestly. Yeah. Moyah, how about you? Yeah, today I'm going to talk about how astronomers may have discovered a concerning number of galaxies hanging around the Milky Way.

Ooh. What defines concerning? I'm so excited. The astronomers are concerned. I need your doctorate expertise to tell me how concerned or not concerned to be about this number of galaxies. Sure. For sure.

Excellent. my tease is that scientists think they've found insects that do surgery on each other. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, it is pretty wild. I'm happy to start. Yes, please, actually. I need to know more about that. It's so rare I get it.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Okay, so a few weeks ago, I talked about self-medicating primates. And I promised that I would circle back to lots more facts. about other animals treating illnesses with like edibles and ointments, et cetera. And I am going to do that eventually because there are so many animals who do weird, wonderful stuff in terms of their own health. And it's really cool.

But a new study came out in the interim that is just so much wilder that I had to just completely pivot and do this. So animals were found performing surgery on one another. And what's even weirder is that these procedures, which the authors say are the first ever evidence of deliberate therapeutic amputations in non-human animals, they didn't take place in our close relatives. They were observed in ants. No. What is this? A surgery for ants?

Yes. They already have so many legs. Yeah. Okay, it's true. I also, my first thought was like, I'm sad that there are ants having their legs cut off. But listen, it turns out this is actually like pretty sophisticated stuff. So while we're not talking about bugs like scrubbing up and using any bitty scalples, which I'm not sure if that image is cute or really horrifying, I think maybe it depends on the director involved. Yeah.

But we're talking about Florida carpenter ants, which is Campanatus Floridonis. They remove the injured legs of their nestmates by chomping them off. So again, the methods, maybe not sophisticated, but the procedure overall, incredibly so. This isn't actually the first time we've seen ants medicating. A recent study by the same team found that Metabelle ants, which live in sub-Saharan Africa, they produce this substance from glands on their backs that contains, they say more than 50 different components that are either antimicrobial or otherwise have wound-healing properties. Yeah, yeah, a really good goop.

And when the ants end up with infections, which happens quite a lot, because they eat termites exclusively, and termites have some, you know, pretty nasty jaws on them, as we've discussed on previous episodes. So they get into real skirmishes with the termites they eat, and they frequently, you know, end up with wounds of battle. And so when this happens, their comrades will lick their wounds and then secrete this healing goo into them.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah, and a lot of ants have the gland that makes this goo. In fact, they think that it's something that most, if not all, ants had and then some lost. And it seems actually like arboreal ants are more likely to have lost these glands in their evolutionary history. And the thinking is that maybe if you're not subterranean, you have like a slightly less of a risk of picking. up germs, you know, you're not literally in the dirt all the time. You are in rotting trees, but I guess, you know, it's just different. So that's just an interesting little theory about

why this difference exists. But, you know, researchers were like, okay, but we know that these ants that don't have these glands still like get in a lot of tussles. They get hurt a lot. So did they evolve some other method for protecting themselves from infection? And this other study, I'll definitely link to it on my Patreon and on popside.com slash weird. But it's super interesting because, like, they knew these glands existed. They knew this behavior existed. And what they were really looking at was, like, the fact that the ants treat infected wounds preferentially, like they can tell it's infected.

And if I'm remembering correctly, they think it's like because. of the chemicals that are produced that can like smell that it's how weird not doing well so yeah and that it's like effective that this compound has all of these this good stuff in it so yeah they were like okay so

this highly effective pretty sophisticated wound treatment exists what about the ants that lost this in their evolution there must be a good reason that they lost it they must be able to do something else and fun fact actually they were going to actually

keep studying the metaboli ants in sub-Saharan Africa more but then the pandemic sent them home. They'd been like on the Ivory Coast studying them and they were like okay so we need to look at some more common ants. We need some ants

that we could get a bunch of in our lab at home. So yeah, enter the carpenter ant, the Florida carpenter ant specifically and yeah, now they're like, well okay, this is a great opportunity to be like what do they do when they don't make like neosporin in their backs, which is wild.

It turns out that their whole solution is chopping the whole thing off. But like the wound treatment with the goop, they're like there is nuance to it. They have like they do sort of diagnostics. They found that when a worker aunt injured the upper part of its leg, any kind of like laceration, nestmeats would perform amputations around 75% of the time. Basically, how this would work is the other ants would gather around and they would lick the wound a bunch and then they would spend an average of six minutes biting at the upper part of the leg until it came away.

And the ants on the receiving end of this were highly cooperative, which is something that the researchers were really, that really struck them. and I'll share a few quotes later about how cooperative they were. But they were like, this is definitely, this is like something that's almost as instinctual to them as like sticking your paper cut in your mouth. Like they were like, this is clearly, this is just what you do. And they said around 90 to 95 percent of the ants who received amputations survived and did just fine without the leg that they lost. they were still productive members of, you know, their colony. So, you know, while this is from a biological perspective, you know, a somewhat altruistic act

because it involves time and, like, energy from the other ants, it does, there is a clear evolutionary benefit. Like, ants get injured often enough that it is worth it to save the ones that they can save to keep the colony going. So they noticed something interesting. I did mention the upper leg. And they found that like this care process, it would go one of two ways. They would either just clean the wound with their mandibles or they would clean it and then amputate. And it seemed like the real distinction was that lower leg wounds wouldn't get amputated. And so they were trying to figure out where that was.

And they ended up looking at, they did scans of the ants because they suspected it might have something to do with circulation. So ants, they don't have hearts like ours, but they do have like heart pumps and muscles that like carry fluid called hemolymph through their body. So they have sort of, you know, somewhat analogous system. and like our blood, you know, this chemo lymph can carry infection through the body. So they knew that many insects, including carpenter ants, have muscles related to the circulation in their upper leg. So they were thinking, is there something about like how the infection is traveling based on where the wound is? So when they did these scans, they saw that basically when there were.

was a wound in the upper leg, it impacted the circulation. It cut off the circulation. I'm sure I can't say that it fully did. I didn't, I was not part of the study. But, you know, to simplify, it cut off the circulation. And when it was lower on the leg, it didn't impact the circulation. None of the muscles that it would hit would stop this fluid from flowing. They also know that the amputations from like start to finish, including all of the licking and the chewing and the like getting them there, you know, they have to like carry them to where the other ants are, could take about 40 minutes.

So what they think is going on is that if it's, a femur amputation, they know they have time to amputate before the infection spreads. If it's the lower leg, the infection is going to be spreading because everything's circulating as normal. There's no impediment to the circulation. So based on the wound, like they seem to have determined what the odds of survival are and like whether it's worth it to do this amputation. Does that make sense? Did I convey that in at all a coherent way? Yeah. As far as ant surgery goes, I think that makes a lot of sense. I love that they're doing these little prognoses in their little ant brains. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, how did the researchers

test this? Unfortunately, they did manually wound some ant legs and performed some of their own amputations. They did say that they, they like put the ants on ice beforehand to like calm them down. And, you know, I'm not going to make an ethical call on amputating ant legs to learn about ant like amputations. But they did find that the survival rates like lined up with with that hypothesis. That lower leg injuries, they would tend to just lick them clean. And that would actually raise their chance of survival. If the aunt was isolated, they would have like a 15% survival rate. And if they were not, they would have a 75% survival rate because their wound had been cleaned. But yeah, that the amputations were just not done for these lower leg things and that, you know,

it probably had to do with the rate that infection could spread. So yeah, they're going to look at other carbineer ant species to see if they also do this because, you know, they also don't have these antimicrobial glands. But the thing that the researchers kept coming back to was like, you'll see these ants presenting with their injured leg. And for like several minutes, their fellow ants are like biting them ferociously. And the injured aunt just sits there. And sits there. Like they it's totally voluntary. They'll like present the new wound once the leg is amputated to another aunt so it can clean it off like it's it's just totally cooperative. It's it's business as usual. So yeah, it's just really fascinating because we don't think

that this is like a sophisticated cognition thing, but it is really sophisticated. sort of social behavior. You know, I think it's just a great reminder of how, like, just because animals aren't, don't have brains like ours that they're using the way we think of as, like, intelligence doesn't mean they're not capable of really sophisticated stuff. They're literally doing surgery. So, yeah, that's all I have to say about the ants today. But we will definitely be circling back to more animal medicine later. So, yeah.

Wow. I love that. That was so weird. Does the spit also have like antimicrobial properties? Is that why it cleans the wounds? Or would our spit also do that? Yeah, you know, I don't think they've tested it yet. I know that our spit does have some antimicrobial properties just a little bit, not like the neosporin from the ant butts. But so it might be like on that level.

But I think that's one of the things they want to test is like, what is it about this like this mouth cleansing that is helping so many of the ants survive with or without amputations. Yeah. Interesting. There's like a lot to continue exploring. You know, I've never designed a bio experiment, but I feel like the next step is to get a bunch of human volunteers to lick some ant legs and see. and see if it has the same effect. So true. Like how big are these ants?

Are they little baby ants? They're pretty small. You know what? I almost had their size in here. And so let me look it up. I want to say they're a couple centimeters. That's huge. They're not like the tiniest, but they're pretty small.

A couple centimeters is huge. That's a bug at that point. Let me see. Oh, no, no. It's, um, okay, they're at most, uh, one and a half centimeters. Okay. Wow. That's like the biggest, their biggest boys. But so yeah, they're, they're not small ants, but they're not like, you wouldn't be like, dear Lord. Speak for yourself, Rachel. Yeah, I mean, fair enough, fair enough. All right, we're going to take a

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Yay, it's shark time. Some hot sharks, some evolved sharks. Things are going crazy in the shark universe. But yeah, so today I have a story about the intersection of climate change and shark evolution. But don't worry, this story isn't about, like, today. climate change induced chaos. We don't really know how sharks are going to respond quite yet to that.

We're taking a journey back 93 million years ago. Oh. So welcome to the late Cretaceous. So this is like the era of like some of the coolest dinosaurs ever, the Ankylosaurus, the T-Rex, Giganaraptor, all of the like spooky, oaky ones that people love. Yeah, all the greatest hits are there in the late Cretaceous. It's like the premier era of dinosaurhood. And it goes without saying that this period was a lot hotter than today's world and it was more humid just to begin with.

And this is because there's a bunch of active volcanoes, like they are also in their prime. Just like the dinosaurs are in their prime. The volcanoes are having a moment. And lots of like seafloor spreading is happening, which basically means like the formation of fresh areas of oceanic crust. And this happens through upwelling of magma at like minimal. mid-ocean ridges and they like scoot out. So there's, there's just volcanoes and dynos everywhere. And it's safe to say there were no like continental ice sheets during this era. Antarctica was like a big forest and dinosaurs were popping around on there like it was nothing.

And the Cretaceous era began with two continents, La Raja and Gondwana. But by the end of the era, most of today's continents had kind of like pulled away from each other. except India was still like floating around in the Indian Ocean and Australia was like cozied up to this like super warm Antarctica. So we're kind of getting closer to the world we see today, but we're still quite a bit off. And so one of the biggest like dinosaur 101 extinction events happens 66 million years ago, the Cretaceous Paleogene extinction event. And it took out 75%ish of the plant and animal species on the planet. And that includes most of the non-avian dinosaurs. But we're not talking about that today.

But we're talking about actually a different big change that was more ocean-focused. And that happened 93 million years ago. So 30 million years prior to the dinosaur's demise. And this story starts like 20-ish years ago when scientists start to make this discovery that lava fountains like kind of erupted deep under the ocean on the seafloor. and this triggered a mass extinction of marine life, and it buried a thick layer of organic matter, you know, from all these dead creatures. And, you know, millions of years later, this organic matter becomes a major source of oil for us greedy little humans.

So a reminder that our fossil fuels are literally fossils. And I found this really fun press release from 2008 when the study came out. So I'm going to use a bunch of quotes from it because there's actually like a handful of really good ones. But basically, one of the authors said it isn't as big as what killed off the dinosaurs, but it was what we call an extreme event in the Earth's history, something that doesn't happen very often. So this is a big deal that we didn't know about until pretty recently. And so because, so this is, again, the researcher, Stevens Turgen, he says that the climate was so warm and the oceanic current was very, very sluggish because of this. And this initially buffered the magmatic pulse, but eventually it all. went haywire and ocean was driven or not ocean oxygen was driven out from the ocean and all of the

organic matter accumulated on the bottom of the seabed and so that's where where these big shale deposits end up with the source rocks or petroleum so within a few thousand years of this big watery volcanic event happening lots of nutrients were released which allowed the mass feeding growth of plants and animals but when those organisms died their decomposition um and fall towards the seafloor, it actually made for some pretty nasty oxygen depletion. And so this made the effects of this eruption and the release of clouds of carbon dioxide into the ocean and the atmosphere. It made it way more dramatic. And this results in what we call a global oceanic inoxic event where the ocean is almost completely depleted of oxygen. So trouble for ocean dwelling creatures. This causes temps and carbon dioxide.

levels on the earth's surface to drop it first, but then they pop back up again within 10,000 to 50,000 years, which, you know, there's a little feedback loop happening and it makes the ocean temperatures super hot. And it's, you know, Turgeon says like, this is a bit of an analogy for what's going on today back in 2008. So what happens when we pump more CO2 into the atmosphere? This tells me that the oceans may have limited buffering capacity for CO2, done, done. So yeah, so, Basically, too much CO2 can cause a bunch of drama for everybody. Fast forward, again, to about a month ago, and a new study comes out discussing how sharks dealt with this game-changing oceanic event. So it starts as so many of these studies start by researchers taking the body length and thin measurements from 500 living and fossilized shark species.

and they found something peculiar. So a little history lesson for the majority of early existence for sharks, their bottom dwellers, benthic. And most sharks, you know, not the ones that we like see in Shark Nuto and the ones that get a lot of attention. Most of them still are. And they're like leopard sharks, cat sharks, horn sharks are all kinds of benthic sharks that still exist today.

But so they start seeing. a little bit of a change. First, 122 million years ago. And this is when the first sharks start to evolve, like kind of moving up the ocean from the floor to the pelagic zone. And the first types of sharks that did this were laminaforms, which include today's big baddies like the Great White. And this trend continues. And around the time of this deep ocean volcanic event, 93 million years to go, another form of sharks, and I'm going to butcher this name. It's like the Carr-Caron forms, and they move into the pelagic as well. And this includes like the hammerhead shark. This is the hammerhead shark family. So you're already starting to see that it's like,

the sharks that we like to pay attention to have this kind of tie back to this crazy warming that happened millions of years ago. And so there's a couple of things that happened. and, you know, the shark's bodies and muscles that made them able to do this. So one of the big things was the pectoral fins. And they change shape. And they're basically the paper first author, Philip Stearns, calls these critical structures basically comparable to, like, human arms. Like, they are essential to doing pretty much anything if you're a shark. Longer and more narrow fins start popping up.

And these fins like make sharks more efficient at moving around the ocean. because on the ocean floor, like sharks just like chill out down there. Like, you know, great white sharks and those big bad ones that we know so much about, like they have to keep moving in order to breathe. Benthic sharks like don't really need the same. Don't. They don't. They're just hanging out down there.

Like, they are not needing the same stuff. So this is a huge evolutionary change from lazy bones to I have to move or I'm going to die. No disrespect to benthic sharks. Y'all are the best. I feel like I'm really trying to like, like through my 20s, I really felt like the sharks that need to keep moving. And now I'm really trying to consciously be the shark at the bottom.

Yeah, I'm trying to de-evolve. I'm trying to move back to the ocean floor real quick. Like, it's fine. But, yeah, so these, the fins, they're kind of like, like, you know, on a plane. Like long, narrow wings are like, they lower your cost of fuel. It's less energy to do all this moving around that you have to do to stay alive on the pelagic zone. And these little short, stubby fighter aircraft wings are what the author called them.

They're not good for long distance travel, but they can kind of turn around pretty quickly. So you can move when you need to on the bottom, but the long skinnies are what you need to move 24-7. So this is a huge change. And these open water sharks get faster. Shark muscle is very sensitive to temperature. And this new data kind of pulled together this correlation between higher temperatures, tail movement, and slowing speed. So we're getting fast sharks.

They're getting skinny arms. They're getting fast. They're moving. But the big thing is, like, why did they do this? And as our earlier lesson kind of told us, oxygen was kind of scarce at the bottom of the ocean as things heated up. Like, you know, when things die, That oxygen said, and all this carbon dioxide was, you know, heating the whole planet. There's all of this circulation of, okay, there's not enough oxygen for everybody.

And in so many cases of evolution, this situation led to a change or die, you know, situation. And for those who couldn't change, especially in the, like, spike of heat in the million or two million year period around this ocean volcano event, it meant extinction. So there you have it. the sharks got busy, got moving, and moved up in the water column to stay alive because there just wasn't enough oxygen. And obviously, I'm the climate change girly. So we're undergoing something that's not exactly like this, but we're going through a super duper fast temperature change here on Earth, and we still don't 100% understand the

relationship between ocean temperatures and the temperature on Earth and what all is going on and what that's going to mean for everybody. for context modern sea surface temperatures average about 68 degrees right now and the Cretaceous they were reaching an average about 83 degrees. So it's not as hot, but things are happening way, way faster without the millions of years of time that we need and that sharks and everybody else needs to evolve and change. And so one of the things that the authors of this most recent paper wanted to kind of get out there is that this warming ocean water is likely to be harmful for pretty much everybody in the ocean, including highly adaptive species, like these sharks that have already done this. They said, I've already seen climate change, but even at the speeds that we're going right now and the unprecedented rate of how much carbon dioxide is just

spewing everywhere, the likelihood that we're going to get like bigger, tougher, cooler, faster sharks is probably like not the case. But I guess we also won't know for millions of years. And if you're listening to this right now, we aren't going to be. going to see it probably. If you're listening to this millions of years from now, I have a lot of questions. Like, please. What are you doing? Break out the Ouija board and talk to me because I want to know.

Like, please communicate with my spirits. I have questions. But yeah. So, I mean, this is just an example of like, we just don't know how things are going to go and things are going to be weird as ocean temperatures rise. So, yeah. That's kind of. That would be a deterrent.

Well, I love that the sharks made it work. We love that the sharks had a situation going on. And, you know, and they did make some of the coolest ones ever, the pelagic sharks. Like, what will we talk about if there weren't great white sharks? Like, imagine how, I don't know what I'd do. What would they put on TV for all those weeks of the year? Like, Shark Week, they'd have to do some deep diving just to see the sharks. And they'd just be, like, sitting there looking at you.

Like, they're like, um. Honestly, that's the shark week I want to see. That would be more terrifying. I'm not the target audience. Like Animal Planet, if you're listening. Throw in a little love to the benthicks.

Just like the Ojis. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're. building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.

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No, no. Scientists are worried. Scientists are worried. This isn't like an existential threat that everyone is going to have to be concerned about. This is just something that astronomers are concerned about because it might point at, you know, a mistake that some astronomers made in the past. and that would just be embarrassing. Ooh.

Yeah. Okay. So it's like academic drama. I'm here for it. It's maybe existential for some scientists, but not for me. Not to the public at large, no. But they are concerned. We are concerned as a group that there might be too many galaxies around the Milky Way.

And this is going back to a historical problem where we used to think there weren't enough galaxies around the Milky Way. So, you know, our little galactic neighborhood is very confused, but let me tell you about it. So when you look at the universe on large enough scales, it looks fractal, meaning it looks like you see the same shapes at every scale. So on molecule scales, on galaxy scales, all the way up to galaxy clusters. And that's because gravity works the same way on all of these scales, and gravity clumps things together. So you see gravity clumping groups of stars together to form galaxies, but also different galaxies clump together to form galaxy clusters. And we see that around the Milky Way. We are part of a galaxy cluster called the local group.

But even the local group is part of a larger super cluster of galaxies called the Virgo supercluster. And even that is part of a larger structure called the Lonie Achaia super cluster, I guess because we couldn't call it the super super cluster. But all of this is to say that astronomers are bad at naming things and also the universe looks the same on all of these scales. Our local group, our little neighborhood of galaxies, has about 50 known galaxies in it. The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are by far the biggest around. We each have, you know, on the order of maybe a trillion stars, we're roughly the same mass. And then all of the other galaxies are called dwarf galaxies. They are, you know, less than maybe 10 percent, a lot of them, the mass of the Milky Way,

and they just kind of orbit around the us larger galaxies. But for decades, astronomers talked about the missing satellites problem, because when they counted the number of satellites observed around the Milky Way, it was way less than the number predicted by simulations. When you run simulations of galaxy formation and evolution, it looks like we should have around 220, small satellite galaxies around us, which is a lot more than the 50 that we see. Whoa. Okay.

Yeah. These simulations that tell us we should have all of these little galaxies, they're based on a model of the universe called the Lambda Cold Dark Matter model. Have either of you heard of this? No. No. I know nothing. Okay. Yeah, space is not my area of expertise. I'm so excited to learn. Awesome. So the Lambda Cold Dark Matter, oh God, that's so. hard to say. The Lambda Cold Dark Matter model or the Lambda CDM model supposes that there are three influential players in the universe. There's dark energy, which is represented by that lambda. It's a Greek letter. And Dark Energy is responsible for making the universe speed up as it expands. Then there's dark matter and barionic matter. Both of those two things are matter,

but they're made of different stuff. And we don't know what dark matter is made of, but for some reason we just can't see it. It doesn't interact with light, but both of them interact with gravity. So the Lambda CDM model says that there are these three parts of the universe. And based on our observation of how the universe behaves, we have constrained the parameters of these different players.

So we have a better idea now based on our observations of how dark energy behaves, how dark matter behaves, even though we don't know what they are. Because this model has been super successful. It matches a lot of our observations, but it fails in this specific area of counting satellite galaxies. So for the last three decades, people have been questioning the Lambda CDM model and trying to come up with alternatives. There are some potential solutions to the missing satellite problem that would let us keep. the Lambda CDM model, it's possible that these very small bubbles of dark matter, which

usually are good at attracting gas and stars and dust to form little galaxies, maybe these very small bubbles of dark matter aren't as good at collecting other material, the baryonic matter, as the very large halos. So it could be that there are the kind of origins of small satellite galaxies out there in enough numbers, but because they haven't attracted all of the gas and stars that we can see, we just can't see that they're out there. Another potential solution is that these small satellite galaxies do form, but they formed very early on, and then they merged with bigger galaxies, so we can't see them now. And we do know that galaxies are merging all the time, and that larger galaxies, like the

Milky Way, they get to their size by essentially eating. smaller galaxies around them. And we see this happening now. The Milky Way is actively drawing in material from the large and small Magellanic clouds, which are two satellite galaxies very close to us. They're snacking. Yes, galaxies are hungry. They're growing boys. Ever growing. Always, yes. And so that was the potential solutions to the missing satellite problem. But now there is this team of international researchers working with the Subaru Telescope, data from the Subaru Telescope that believe they've created the opposite of the missing satellite problem.

So we now have what I'm calling the overwhelmingly present satellites problem. There are too many of them. The Subaru Telescope is an 8.2 meter telescope. So it's pretty large across. The mirror is really big. good at collecting a lot of light, which means it's going to be good at seeing very faint objects. That's important when you're trying to see small, faint galaxies. But the Subaru Telescope also has this instrument on it that's called the Hyper Supreme Camera, and it's good

at taking ultra-wide field images. So together with this mirror that can capture images of faint objects and this instrument that can take pictures of big chunks of the sky at once, they have been able to detect some of the very small, faint dwarf galaxies around the Milky Way. The Subaru, yeah, it's exciting. The whole Subaru Observatory did a big sky survey called the Hyper Supreme Camera Subaru Strategic Program, or HSC-S-SP, for the cool kids. And this program imaged about 140th of the sky, which is a lot of, large chunk and it was taking pictures, long exposure pictures of that chunk of sky so you could

basically keep the camera's eyes open for a long time so that it could collect a lot of light and see faint objects. And when this international team looked through the Subaru data, they found five new faint satellite galaxies in that one patch of sky, nearly doubling the number of known galaxies in that region. Oh my gosh. That's a lot of galaxies. finding so many little galaxies. At this point, we're not even giving them original names. Like, they have designations that are long strings of numbers and letters based on what instrument found them. But the 50 satellite galaxies in the local group, they have real names.

Like, there's the Fornax galaxy, and there's the Boote's galaxy. And a lot of them are named after the constellation that they seem to be in. but they're not even doing that for these new little dwarf galaxies. They're just naming them like Fournax II or Boaties 3. They're just copies. Individualism does not extend out to galaxies in space, I suppose. But the fact that they doubled almost the number of galaxies that we knew of in that region of the sky tells us that probably the whole sky should be similarly flooded with galaxies that we

don't know about. There's this thing called the cosmological principle in astronomy. This has been developed over many years with many observations of the large scale structure of the universe. And it says that on large enough scale, so not necessarily, definitely not on the solar system scale and probably not on the galaxy scale. But when you get to big enough scales, the universe is what we call homogeneous and isotropic. That means that the universe is the same, every, you know, the universe is the same everywhere and it looks the same in all directions. So no matter where you're sitting in the universe, you can kind of rest assured that you're seeing a representative sample of the entire universe.

Wow. That's overwhelming. Yeah, the universe is pretty big. Yeah, that's wild. It's the same everywhere. So it's not like there's that much stuff that you have to get used to in the universe because we're seeing it how it is here, but that's also how it is billions of light years. away, most likely. So we expect that this patch of sky that the Subaru telescope observed was

representative of the entire universe, which means when we extrapolate this data out and try to imagine how many faint satellite galaxies there should be around the Milky Way, it looks like it might be closer to 500 satellite galaxies, which is more than twice the 220 that they predicted using the Lambda CDM model. So we used to have this process. problem where the model was over predicting the number of galaxies that we could see, and now it's under predicting the number of galaxies that we think are there. Because either this Lambda CDM model is wrong or the cosmological principle is wrong and the universe isn't homogeneous and isotropic. So either way, we need to go back to the drawing board and we need to go back to

collect more data to figure out if there are actually this many satellite galaxies. out there. And right now we kind of have to wait for a next generation telescope to come out, but it should go online sometime in the next year or so. Astronomers are kind of waiting for data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, named after the researcher who found the first definitive proof of dark matter out in the universe. And the VRC-Rubin Observatory is going to conduct this huge survey called the Survey of Space and Time, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, and it's going to give us a long-shot view of the entire universe so that we can better understand both dark matter and dark energy. And once we have that big snapshot, we will have a better

idea of how many satellites there are. But also, once we know more about dark matter, will understand these small dark matter halos and whether or not they can effectively gather material to create a little galaxy. So there's so much more to learn. The next five years, I think, are going to be pretty huge for both dark energy and dark matter astronomy, which is not my field. But I'm excited to see what people are doing. Wow.

Yeah. That's awesome. There's just so much space. I like have to sit and stare at a wall for like 15 minutes after even thinking. about space. The breadth of the body don't know. I relate. It's so crazy.

That's how I feel about the ocean. Yes. It's all. Yeah, I was going to say I also feel that way about the ocean. There's just so much everywhere. Wow. What a great assortment of facts today. We've got resilient animals.

We've got ones who chew each other's legs off in a nice way. And the mysteries of the cosmos. Thank you both so much for coming on today. Moya, it was a pleasure to have you. Would you remind folks where they can find all the cool stuff you make? Yes, I am Go Astro Mo on all of the social sites. You can also check out my podcast ExoLore, which Rachel was just on. We imagined a world of genre-bending, corrupt magic.

It's very cool. I got really kooky with it. So thank you for indulging me. You're welcome. That episode is out now so you can go listen to it. I also host a podcast for people who are interested in or curious about space, but overwhelmed by it and find it intimidating. So it's all very cozy. That podcast is called Pale Blue Pod. And the way that Rachel and I met is because we both share the same literary agent. So you could also check out. out a book that I published called The Milky Way, where I kind of personify our great galaxy and write about its story from its own perspective. So it's the Milky Way's autobiography. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos.