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August 5, 2021 46 mins

Daniel and Jorge answer questions from listeners like you! Have questions? Send them to questions@danielandjorge.com

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Jorgey, I've got a space ethics dilemma for you.
Oh I am definitely not qualified for that, but glad
all right. So imagine that aliens come and they insist
on destroying one planet in the Solar System, and they
make you choose which planet are you going to sacrifice?
That's not a dilemma, really, you already have a least

(00:31):
favorite planet picked out. Oh yeah, I'm totally happy to
lose Uranus. It does nothing for us except, you know,
make things a little uncomfortable. Wow, I thought you were
going to drop Pluto. But Pluto is not technically a planet,
and I imagine the aliens are smart enough to know that.
I guess there are benefits to being demoted from planetary status.
Maybe it could be an oderb for them, or you know,

(00:53):
just an upper teeth and the moves alien. Hi am
or handy cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics. Hi.

(01:14):
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I would never
give up any planets in our Solar System. We are
all one, really, you love them all. I just feel
like it's a slippery slope, and you know, first you
give up Ranus and then you go up Neptune. Then
what are you going to say to protect Saturn in Jupiter?
What about the asteroids? Do you feel fondly about the
asteroids to We're all part of one gravitational disc man.

(01:39):
I see, So if aliens came and wanted to eat
something in our solar sysm, you'd be like, no, We're
gonna fight eat to the death. I'd be like, can
we just talk about it and you know, get some
answers to physics questions first? There you know I would
trade Saturn for some physics cancers. Oh really, so you
would give up a planet to be eaten. I'm not
giving up. I'm trading I'm getting something invaluable in turn

(02:00):
for the human species. I see, what did they say,
If we don't need lamp tune will eat Earth? Then
you're you're trading something there. I don't negotiate with terrorists,
even aliens, especially hungry aliens. But welcome to our podcast.
Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I
Heart Radio in which we imagine all of the crazy

(02:21):
scenarios out there in the universe. We prepare you for
crazy legal, ethical diallemmas, and we also prepare you for
what we might learn about the universe. We take you
on a ride to the very edge of scientific understanding,
and we invite you to speculate, to ask questions, to
think about what the answers might be to the biggest, deepest,

(02:41):
most fun most consequential questions in the entire universe. That's
right because there is a lot to discover out there,
a lot of answers to find. It's a big universe,
and we are here to talk about the answers and
the questions. Would you that's right because those questions are
really what drives science forward. Science wouldn't happen if, as

(03:01):
a species, we weren't all collectively curious. If we all
just really deeply and desperately want to know the answers
to questions about how the universe started and where it's
going and how it all works. It's not just scientists
being curious. It's all of us. It's all of humanity
collectively wondering about the nature of the universe. And that
includes you. Yeah, because that is how our search for

(03:23):
knowledge begins. It It starts with questions, right, Daniel, Physics
doesn't start with statements. You're not big on statements. Physics
usually starts with coffee. Actually, look at well, that's kind
of a statement that caffeine is the most important kind
of matter in the universe. No, it's a question which
kind of coffee would you like today? No, but you're right,
we do. We start with questions because science is all

(03:44):
about those questions. It's about wondering how things work. It's
about trying to unravel the greatest mystery in the history
of humanity. Yeah, and sometimes, Daniel, you even have questions
about your questions that you have nested questions or even
question your questions like are these good questions? Is to
ask why do we ask so many questions? Meta questions?

(04:05):
And it's not just physicists and scientists who ask questions,
it's everybody. It's an inherent part of being human to
wonder about the universe, to think about and ask yourself
how it all works. That's right, and that's what we're
hoping to do with this podcast, not just to give
you the answers to questions people are wondering about, but
to inspire your questions, to get you to think about

(04:25):
what it is that you want to know about the universe,
because in the end, science is personal. It's not a
big institution somewhere where everybody's wearing lab coats and eye protection.
It's just people, people wondering about the universe, people just
like you. Well, you actually wear eye protection was second
to stop the high energy particles that might be coming
at your face. I'm wearing eye protection right now to

(04:47):
protect me from bad jokes that come across the audio.
Nothing can protect you, Daniel. I got two or three
pairs on right now. They're coming for you, dad. Joke
proof eye protection, you were lead glasses with that help you?
You've seen new three nos maybe, but you know they
might not help you read. The best defense is a
good offense and go after the power things. That's right,

(05:08):
here's some antimatter of them. Maybe. But we do like questions,
and we like to listen to questions from people like you,
and sometimes in our podcast we like to feature these
questions and try to answer them or at least talk
about them live in front of an audience, like, for example,
this great question we got from Hugo, who is five
years old. Hello, my name is Hugo. How big the

(05:30):
black hole has to be to suck me up? And? Oh,
so great question? How big does a black hole need
to be to suck you up. I feel like I
wonder if he's concerned about that. I don't know. Yeah,
do you think he's like planning a visit to black
holes and he's wondering, like what size the black hole

(05:51):
he should visit in order to be safe? And he's
trying to get one as a pet, and he's wondering,
like should I get a big one or a small one?
What are the d us? Maybe he wants a black
hole to suck up his sister and he's like, you know,
really he's asking about that. Now, that is a mystery
that would be make for an interesting novel there. But
what's the answer, Daniel? How big does a black hole

(06:12):
need to be to suck a small five year old child?
There is no minimum size to a black hole that
could eat Hugo. Like any black hole, no matter how small,
would successfully eat up a five year old child. Really,
even like a microscopic black hole would work. Even a
microscopic black hole. The issues here are that really small
black holes tend to evaporate because black holes evaporate more

(06:34):
quickly as they get smaller, which is why, for example,
we're not too worried about maybe making black holes at
the large Hadron collider because they would evaporate really quickly.
But if you made a really small black hole and
you put it near a small child really quickly before
it evaporated, it would eat parts of that child, and
then it would grow and that would protect it. And
so a very small black hole would grow quickly if

(06:56):
you fed it, and it would get bigger and bigger
and eat a child, and then that child sister, and
then the entire apartment block and eventually even us. Oh
man here, please please don't do it. So it wouldn't
evaporate like faster than it could maybe absorb some of
the mass from Hugo. It depends on how quickly you
start feeding it. If you create the black hole and
immediately start feeding it, it doesn't matter how small it is.

(07:17):
It will just grow. If you create the black hole
and leave it by itself for a little while before
you feed it, then it might evaporate before you get
back to it. See, don't you need to feed it
at a faster rate than it's evaporating at. Yeah, you do.
But you know, if you put it right next to
a small child, it's gonna gobble that energy pretty quickly.
Let's not imagine this scenario too much. It makes me

(07:38):
a little uncomfortable. There might be some laws against this.
But let's you say to Hugo that it's very unlikely
you will ever visit a black hole, and if somebody
is trying to sell you a black hole online, it's
not a real one. So don't worry. That's right. And
it's easier just to make up with your sister and
you know, appreciate them because in later years they will
be your best friends. That's right. You don't want your

(07:59):
siblings to avo operate over to be eaten by a
black hole or by anything I guess in general. But anyways,
we love questions like this one from Hugo and so
to be on the podcast will be tackling listener questions
Number sixteen. This is our sixteenth episode in which we

(08:21):
do and talk about listener questions. That's right, which means
we're getting up on almost answering fifty of these things,
which is pretty awesome. And I want to encourage anybody
out there who has a question about the universe, something
they'd like to hear us explain, or something they can't
quite figure out just by googling to write to us
with their questions two questions at Daniel ian Jorge dot com.

(08:42):
We answer every email, we respond to every tweet. We
might even put your question on the podcast. That's right,
this is our Sweet sixteen episode. It's almost ready to drive.
It can get a driver's permit, then what does it
need us for anymore? Can just take itself around the
country or pilot a spaceship? Maybe? Do they do? They
give permits for that? Not it? But Amazon is selling
them for a billion dollars each. I think, really, do

(09:04):
you think to let you drive the spaceship if you
pay a billion dollars? I think everything is for sale
at Amazon or for a billion dollars. So yeah, So
we have three amazing questions here from our listeners, and
they have to do with space photography, about antimatter stars
and what would happen if you ate a giant planet? Again?
Do you think these are practical questions, Daniel, or maybe

(09:25):
just born out of curiosity? I'm gonna go with born
out of curiosity because I'm really hoping that there are
no evil villains in their layers. They're typing out questions
to us. I don't want to be a part of
anybody's plans to eat Neptune or even to sell Jupiter
to the aliens. You don't want to be a villain enabler.
I do not want to be a scientist working for
an evil villain, or a scientists working on some kind

(09:48):
of particle collider then might create small black holes that,
if put into contact with children, might be bad. Or
a scientist helping a five year old child plot the
demise of his sister. Let's focus on the positive here, absolutely.
So we have three questions, and so do They will
be tackling those, and we'll start with this one first
from Simon from England, and he has a question about

(10:12):
taking photos and speace. It's Simon from Nottingham, England. My
question is one that's bothered me for some time. On Earth,
of course, we can look at the sky at night
and see starlight during a clear day, some particularly bright stars,
these celestial bodies of Venus visitor the naked eye too,

(10:36):
and also telescopes on Earth pick the stars up as well. Uh,
and the incredible deep space images by by the whole telescope.
But what I don't understand is how the critical footage
captured joining the Apollo missions and later space missions don't
show any starlight. Examples being Apollo eleven docking footage and

(10:56):
the images of the Earth and the Moon. I'll just
imagine that being in space without atmosphere, stars will be
even brighter instead of inky blackness. Sure it was a
simple answer, but I would love to know what that is.
From you. Thank you. It's a brilliant loving every episode.
Thank you, all right, thank you. Simon. His question is

(11:17):
why don't we see stars in space pictures, and specifically
he mentioned the ones from the Apollo mission to the Moon.
Do you think he's maybe thinking there's a conspiracy going on.
There's definitely a conspiracy theory about how people didn't actually
land on the Moon and how these pictures were taken
at a sound stage in Burbank. Of course that's all nonsense, right,
It was in Hollywood, obviously, or Glendale. They do a

(11:38):
lot of filming in Glendale. You can tell by the humidity.
And one thing that people often quote when they say
these ridiculous things is that you can't see any stars
in the backgrounds of those pictures. And that's true when
you look at these photographs of astronauts on the moon.
You see the Moon, you see the astronauts, you can
see the Earth sometimes in the background, but you don't
see the stars out in space. I guess even today

(12:00):
when they show pictures of the International Space Station or
a picture of the Earth from space, like, you don't
see the trillions and trillions of stars and we know
are out there in space. I mean, technically we should
see like the whole sky lit up with light from
stars because there are, you know, bazillions of them. That's
true for most photographs because of the way those photographs

(12:21):
are taken, and we'll dig into that in a moment,
But there are times that you can see the Earth
in a field of stars, like the famous pale blue
dot picture is a picture taken from Jupiter of the
Earth and you can see the Earth is just one
of many dots in that picture. Yeah, I guess you know,
it makes sense when we're here on Earth, Like if
we're here on Earth covered with an atmosphere which is

(12:42):
blocking a level light, that would make sense why we
wouldn't see the trillions of stars that are out there.
But I guess this question is like if you're out
in space going to the moon and you look out
into space, why can't you just see all the maybe
infinite number of stars that are out there. Yeah, And
the answer doesn't really have to do with atmosphere. The
atmosphere does absorb some light. It's not infinitely transparent, but

(13:02):
that's not really an issue. That doesn't really stop us
from seeing stars. And the reasons we have telescopes out
in space, it's not because the atmosphere absorbs light. It's
because it makes the pictures fuzzier. It just sort of
like shuffles everything around, so we can get crisper pictures
out in space then we can down here on Earth.
The real issue is not one of the atmosphere. It's
the issue of the sun. It's the issue of having

(13:23):
other sources of light that are really really bright. Like
you can see the stars just fine from down here
on Earth as long as the Sun is not blinding you,
long as the Sun is on the other side of
the Earth. So you're saying, like, the reason I can't
see more stars with my eyeballs, it's the sun. It's
the sun. Like if you go outside right now and
it's daytime and you look up at the sky, there
are stars there. There are photons coming through space, through

(13:46):
the atmosphere and hitting your eyeball from stars. You just
can't see them because the sun is there and it's
overwhelming everything. You know. It's like trying to hear a
really quiet noise while you're at a super loud rock concert.
You can't even tell that it's there. You're saying, the
light actually is hitting my eyeballs, and maybe is hitting

(14:07):
my you know, photoreceptors and and sensors in the back
of my eyeball, but they're getting so much more light
from the sun that basically doesn't register. Or maybe my
eyes have calibrated not to notice these small things. Yeah, exactly.
It's about the range and your eyes respond. During the day, right,
if you look up at the sky and it's bright out,
then your pupils will close a little bit. Right, the
little hole in your eyeball that lets in the light

(14:29):
will shrink because it's very bright and you don't want
to damage the very sensitive stuff on the back of
your eyeball. So during the day that shrinks, and so
you're actually less sensitive to really dim objects. And then
if you go into a dark room, it takes a
little while over your eyes to adjust, they relax, and
they open up and they let in basically every single photon.
That's why you can see dimmer things at night because

(14:49):
your eyes have opened up to let in more photons.
So it is actually harder to see those stars during
the day because your eyes are protecting you from the sun.
If you looked up at the sky in the middle
of the day with your eyes on like night vision mode,
you could damage the back of your eyeballs. Yeah, don't
look at the sun, people, please. This is not an
experiment suggestion here. So it's all about relative intensity. Right.

(15:12):
The stars are there, they're just very dim relatives to
the other things you're seeing during the day, namely sunlight. Right,
but what about during the night, Like, if I look
up at the sky at night, why can't I see
the trillions of stars that have been we know are
out there. You can see the trillions of stars that
we know are out there. You can see lots of stars.
It depends a little bit on where you are. If
you're near a city, then you're seeing a lot of

(15:33):
light pollution that's washing out a lot of those stars.
If you go to the very very dark woods or
a place where they protect the night sky. Then you
can see an incredible number of stars. It's really amazing.
So for those of you who have always lived in
the city and never been camping, find a way to
go out into the woods at night and look up,
and you can see an incredible number of stars. They
really are out there. You just mostly don't see them, right.

(15:56):
You just need a telescope and some bear scrape and
if you want to see even more, you just need
to accumulate more light. Like the more distant ones, the
ones that are hardest to see, they are dim because
they are not sending you as many photons per second
right there further away, so fewer of their photons are
coming to Earth. But if you set up a camera
and you leave it out there for hours at a

(16:17):
time so it can accumulate those photons, it can see
things that you can't see with your eye because it
can take like an eight hour exposure, and so then
you can see incredible stuff. You can see Andromeda, the
neighboring galaxy. You can see very very distant objects. Right.
I think maybe that's the key to all of this
and to this question, is this idea of aperture and
like how much time your sensor is out there receiving photons.

(16:41):
Because maybe something that people don't think about is that
when something is dim, like a light is dim, it
doesn't mean that the photons are somehow less powerful. It
just means that they're less frequent. Right, that's right, because
light is broken up into pieces, and every photon travels
at the speed of light, and an object that is
dim just means fewer photons per second, right, not less

(17:01):
energy per photon. The energy per photon tells you the
color the frequency of the photon. But if something is dim,
it just means you're not getting as many photons. The
way I think about it is like imagine some star
out there. It's pumping out a huge number of photons
every second, but as you get further and further away,
you have a smaller and smaller slice of this big
sphere that surrounds that star. So you get a smaller

(17:24):
fraction of those photons. And the further way you are,
the fewer photons are going to come and hit your eyeball.
Mostly they're gonna go to the left or to the
right of the earth. And so ye dimness comes from
smaller number of photons, And so that's also the answer
to what's going on with the pictures taken in space. Yeah,
because the camera sort have worked like your eyeballs, right, Yeah,
cameras work just like your eyeballs. And when you're in space,

(17:47):
most of those photographs are basically the equivalent of taking
a photograph during the daytime, because it's hard to hide
from the sun in space, right. The Earth is not
usually between you and space. So most of those photographs,
like the ones in Apollo eleven, are taken when the
sun is beaming down with its full brightness on the Moon,
and so the stars are there, but you just can't

(18:07):
see them the same way you can't see the stars
when you take a picture in full sunlight here on Earth, right,
because the film and the camera sort of adjusted to
get the light from that's bouncing off the Moon. It's not,
you know, a set up to kind of be sensitive
to the light that's coming from the background in the stars. Yeah.
And if you did that, if you open the aperture
wide and took a long exposure, then you would be

(18:29):
totally washed out by the sunlight. You just get a
huge white blob, the same way you did if you
took a picture here on Earth and you left your
camera shutter open for too long, it would just get
all washed out. If you're on the part of the
Moon where the sun isn't shining right, then it would
be dark, and you could take a night sky photograph
from the Moon and it would be clearer than the
one you take on Earth because there wouldn't be any
atmosphere fuzzing it up. Right, you can take a picture

(18:52):
where the sun don't shine and you might see a
lot of interesting things, and it might even be p
g rated. And you can actually see these because the
International Space Station right orbits the Earth, and so sometimes
it's in the shadow of the Earth. And so if
you google these, you can see photos from the International
Space Station that do show stars. They really are there,
right right. I guess you don't need to be in

(19:14):
a shadowy or dark place. Can you just point your
camera away from the Sun or not in the direction
of the Sun or anything like the Moon or Earth
bouncing light? Yeah, there's definitely an advantage to being in
space because you don't have the atmosphere bouncing off the
light everywhere like here on Earth. You can't do that
because the Sun's light is hitting the atmosphere and then
coming down to your camera basically from every angle out
in space. You're right, it's only direct sunlight. But the

(19:36):
moon itself is bright, right, the moon is reflecting. The
reason we see the moon down here on Earth is
that the Sun's light bounces off the Moon and then
comes back down to the Earth, so you don't have
the atmosphere messing up your photograph. But still there's ambient
light from lots of other places, like the moon itself
is basically reflecting the Sun. I guess the main answer
is just that you know, light from far away stars

(19:57):
is very rare. The photos are rare. They might not
becoming directly at your camera or your eyeball. If you
want to see them, you need to leave your eyes
open for a very long time or your camera shutter
open for a very long time, which usually doesn't quite
work exactly. To see those stars, you need to avoid
any other bright source of light so that you can
effectively make out very dim sources. Great. So, hopefully that

(20:19):
answers Simon's questions and um may puts away another conspiracy
theory about the Apollo program. All right, let's get into
these other questions about antimatter stars and eating Jupiter. But first,
let's take a quick break. All right, we're answering listener questions,

(20:46):
and we just answered one about space pictures, and now
we also have a new question here from Petrie, who
has a question about anti matter stars. Daniel Hory, my
name is Petrie, and I have some questions about antimatter stars.
I recently read an article which described possible observations of
antimatter stars by an instrument aboard the International Space Station.

(21:08):
I wonder how likely is it that antimatter stars exist?
If they do exist, what would happen if two galaxies
collided and one of those galaxies contained antimatter of stars?
Would we be able to tell I know that during
galactic collisions, the odds of two stars colliding is small,
but what about the interstellar dust? Would non antimatter interstellar

(21:29):
dust annihilate when interacting with an antimatter star? And could
we detect this? Thanks for all the great podcasts and
keep up with good work. That's definitely a supervillain network
right there, plotting a way thinking about antimatter, like how
can I create the biggest exclusion a whole galaxy of
antimatter that does sound pretty dramatic. I'm gonna pop some

(21:50):
popcorn when you make that happen if you used antimatter
of colonels that they would pop X for fluffy gut here.
But thank you Petrey for this question. And this is
a pretty interesting question. I guess this question is are
there antimatter stars? Like, we know that antimatter might exist,
and we know that there are stars, and so can
you put the two together and can you make a
star out of antimatter? Yeah, it's a really fun question.

(22:14):
And I love these combination questions, you know, like let's
combine too crazy things and make a crazy thing squared?
Can I make an antimatter black hole? Daniel, It's like
an anti question. I'm not against it. So the cool
thing about antimatter is that it's basically exactly the same
as matter, except it has all of its quantum numbers flipped.
By quantum numbers we mean like electric charge and the

(22:36):
other kinds of charges like weak hypercharge and color charge,
all the charges that have to do with forces. But
as far as we know otherwise, it's the same, which
means that you should be able to build things out
of antimatter the same way you can build things out
of matter, like you should be able to take an
anti proton and combine it with an anti electron to

(22:57):
make anti hydrogen. And we've done that, and we've seen
that anti hydrogen behaves exactly the same way as hydrogen.
It has the same energy levels as all the same physics,
and so we suspect that antimatter works really the same
way as matter, And there's no reason why you couldn't
build elements and molecules and all sorts of complex stuff,

(23:18):
even up to stars out of antimatter. You can make
anti people perhaps or anti antifa's. So it's not theoretical,
it's like an actual I mean, it's it started out
as a theory, but you've been able to make it
in particle colliders. But I think maybe you haven't been
able to study it quite that thoroughly, right, because it's
kind of hard to make and it's really hard to handle,

(23:39):
so you can't sort of test it the way you
can normal matter. Yeah, it's not easy to make anti matter.
You've got to smash particles and other particles are really
high energy to make heavy, unstable particles which then sometimes
decay into antimatter. So we sometimes can make it, and
we have produced it at CERN, but it's like pico
grams of antimatter. It's very, very difficult to make large quantities,

(24:01):
and as you say, it's difficult to deal with because
it comes into contact with normal matter and boom, it annihilates.
Like if an electron meets and anti electron, they like
to interact, and they interact and turn into a photon.
So that's turning all the mass of those particles directly
into energy. By e equals mc squared. And because C
squared is a big number, when you're multiplied by mass,

(24:23):
you've got a big energy. So combining matter and antimatter
into energy releases a huge amount of energy. So yeah,
it's difficult to handle and it's difficult to do big
experiments on, Like we've never made enough antimatter to do
even simple tests like does antimatter feel gravity the same
way matter does? We don't know because we've never made

(24:43):
enough of it. Right, Like you could maybe make a
ball of antimatter and find that it floats or something right,
or like have feels anti gravity and so we shoot
off into space, I know, and that seems ridiculous, but
we just don't know, and stranger things have been true
in the universe, So it's possible that antimatter feels anti gravity.
You know. It's just the kind of thing we've got

(25:03):
to go out and check. But it's difficult to do
because the universe seems to be made almost entirely of matter.
As far as we know, everything in the Solar System
is made out of matter, as far as we know,
everything in our galaxy is made out of matter, though
we're not right. So it's sort of like regular matter,
and that it sort of looks the same like an
anti electron looks like an electron. It just has a

(25:24):
lot of these quantum numbers flipped, and so you don't
know everything about it, but you do know that it
it could probably and it has formed atoms with antimatter, yeah,
and we have constructed those atoms, like they've done these
experiments at certain where they put an anti proton together
with an anti electron and they made anti hydrogen and
it survived for a while and they studied it. So
that's not theoretical, that is real. And we see antimatter

(25:47):
all the time also in cosmic rays, like it's produced
when stuff hits the atmosphere. Creates these big showers. These
one really high energy particle bumps into a bit of
the atmosphere and creates two part goals with half the energy,
which then creates four particles with the quarter of the energy, etcetera.
And you get this big shower of particles, and a
lot of those have antimatter particles in them that don't

(26:08):
last very long. They pretty quickly annihilate with stuff in
the atmosphere. So most of the universe is made out
of matter, but antimatter is something that we can create,
and we can also find it occasionally in nature. Right,
And so if it feels gravity the same way that
matter feels gravity, then it is technically possible to make
like hydrogen antimatter, and then a bunch of those up
to make an antimatter star, right, Like it would be

(26:30):
fusing at the core just like a regular star wood,
but it would all be antimatter. Yeah, And there's a
little bit of subtlety there, like, if it feels gravity
the same way that our matter feels gravity, then yes,
it would accumulate. If it feels anti gravity, then it
would depend on exactly the kind of anti gravity, like
it might be that it feels attractive gravity with other antimatter,

(26:53):
but repulsive gravity with matter, in which case it could
still again accumulate into a star. But if it feels
some sort of weird anti gravity where it repels any
other kind of mass, then you wouldn't be able to
gather it together. It would always like repel itself. But
if it feels any kind of accumulative gravity where it
pulls itself together, then in principle you could pull it

(27:14):
together and you could accumulate a lot of it, and
you could make a star. Because we think that the
strong force and the weak force and all these things
treat matter and antimatter very similarly, So the fundamental processes
that go on inside a star should also work for
antimatter fusion. For example, you should be able to fuse
anti hydrogen together to get anti helium. Interesting, and would

(27:35):
it give out the same kind of light as our
sun or would it give some sort of like anti
version of light. Yeah. The cool thing about light is
that it is its own anti version, Like the anti
photon is just the photon. The photon is its own
anti particle. And that has to be the case because
what happens when antimatter meets matter, it gives off a photon,
right that one particle. The photon unifies matter and antimatter.

(27:58):
It's like the gateway between them, so it has to
be the same particle. And so we think that if
there are antimatter stars out there, they should shine in
real light the same way normal stars do. So just
by looking at a star, it would be hard to
know if it's an antimatter star. But stars don't just
create light, they also create particles, like our star creates

(28:19):
the solar wind, and the solar wind is mostly matters, protons,
and electrons, So an antimatter star would have an antimatter
solar wind, which consists mostly of antiparticles and like many
more anti new trinos than new trinos. So there are
ways to tell if a star is a matter star
or an antimatter star. Oh, you could get wind of

(28:39):
its matterness or on its pocisition on matter. You know
what happens if anti wind blows into uranus. I wanted
on the record that it was a physicist who made
that joke, not the cartoonists. Even I wouldn't go to that.
You walked me to the ledge, man, You walked me
to the ledge and then I nudged you. I see,

(28:59):
I blew some antimatter windland you and it puts you over. Well.
I guess I'm a little disappointed because I would have
thought maybe like an antimatter star would I don't know,
to the opposite of light, like it would suck in
life or something. That's a black hole. Man, that's our
black holes antimatter stars, Daniel, let's misinformed the public know.
The cool thing about antimatter is that it could have

(29:21):
been matter. Right, as far as we can tell, there
really aren't many differences between matter and antimatter, and so
one of the deepest questions in physics is why is
our universe made out of this kind of matter and
not the other one? Obviously, if it had been made
out of antimatter, we would have called it matter and
the other one antimatters. There really the question is like,
why are there two kinds and why did one get

(29:42):
left over? Because we think that in the very beginning
in the Big Bang, there were equal amounts of matter
and antimatter made, but now there's only matter left because
a lot of the matter and antimatter annihilated itself and
disappeared in two photons. But why is matter preferentially left over?
Was there a little bit more antimatter made in the
the universe? Or is there something out there that prefers

(30:03):
to go to matter instead of antimatter. It's not a
question we know the answer to, and it really like
sets the stage for everything. It's it's like, why are
we even here? Right? And I think that was part
of Petrie's question, which is like, if there was an
antimatter star out there, would we be able to tell
the difference? Or like if there was a whole galaxy
made out of antimatter, would we be able to tell
that it is an antimatter galaxy? And so I guess

(30:24):
maybe a follow up question is like how do you
know there isn't more antimatter in the universe? Like, how
do we know the galaxies we see in the night
s guy aren't made out of antimatter? Yeah, it's a
great question, we're not. We have two ways to look
for it. One is that we expect if there are
antimatter stars out there, or antimatter galaxies or antimatter regions
of the universe, that they will be putting out antimatter radiation.

(30:48):
And when that antimatter radiation hits the radiation from the
matter parts of the universe, it will annihilate. So like
halfway between a star and an antimatter star, or between
a galaxy and an to matter galaxy, you should see
like a whole wall where particles are hitting each other
annihilating and turning into photons. So these like flashes of
light in the middle of space. And so we've looked

(31:10):
for these kinds of flashes, and we even know like
what energy they should be at, but we don't see them.
We don't see those anywhere, and that rules out there
being like significant antimatter stars in our galaxy or in
our galaxy cluster, and probably even further than that. That
it gets difficult because now you're looking for like low
energy photons from pretty far away. So we can't, for example,

(31:32):
rule out there being a huge antimatter region of the
universe out beyond the observable universe because we just can't
see it. But we can pretty much rule out there
being big antimatter regions of the universe because of these
photon flashes that we would see if they were there.
I guess maybe if the universe does have a matter
preference over antimatter. Maybe it couldn't those antimatter particles turn

(31:53):
into matter by the time they get to other galaxies. Well,
there is a conservation of electric charge, and so for example,
a positron anti electron can't just turn into an electron, right,
you have to conserve electric charge. And so these things
are pretty persistent. And that's the other way we look
for antimatter stars or antimatter galaxies is that we look
for those antimatter particles coming from them. So Petri mentioned

(32:16):
this really cool experiment on the space station. It's called
a MS and it's on the space station. It's basically
a big magnet with a particle detector and it takes
particles that shoot through it and it bends them so
we can tell are you positively charged or negatively charged?
And it measures their mass and stuff. And the really
cool thing is that they think they have seen to
anti helium particles coming through in the last few years.

(32:41):
What do you mean they you can actually detect that
it's anti helium. Yeah, you can detect that it's anti
helium because you measure it's charge and you measure its mass.
You can do all sorts of studies on it. Now
it's not exactly conclusive. It's not like they trapped and
took pictures and probed it, so it just passes through
their detector. So there's a chance that what they've seen
is actually something else. But it looks a lot like

(33:01):
anti helium, and that's pretty amazing because anti helium is
not just something you expect to be around, like we
see anti protons occasionally in cosmic rays, we see anti electrons,
but anti helium that's the kind of thing that would
be made in the heart of an antimatter star. And
so seeing one you could shrug that off. Seeing two

(33:22):
that's pretty weird and interesting. So we don't know if
this means that this is like a messenger from an
anti matter star somewhere in the milky Way. Whoa, it's
just from an anti balloon that it escape. But I
guess how do you catch an anti helium? Wouldn't it
annihilate with the stuff that you're trying to detect it
with when it didn't create any an explosion? Yeah, but

(33:42):
that's what we do with particles, was that we explode them,
right the way we detect particles as we destroy them,
you know, we have them interact with stuff and deposit
their energy. And so the way MS works has a
big magnet and it sucks stuff in and it bends
it and then it gets it to interact with the
matter of that detector. And it doesn't like blow up
the detector because we're talking about tiny little particles, so
it's not like a bomb or anything. You know. We

(34:04):
create anti matter all the time. It's a large hadron
collider and it flies through our detector and interacts you know,
positrons and anti muans and stuff. We detect them the
same way did we detect other stuff, just by getting
them to interact with our matter. Cool. Well, I guess
my question now is if you if you breathe in
anti helium from a balloon, will it make your voice
deeper or higher pitch like regular helium. Nobody knows the

(34:27):
answer to that question. Hey, And that's the first experiment
will do when we make enough anti helium. All right,
all right, I'll put my name on the waiting list there.
But there was one more little part to his question,
which was what would happen if we collided a galaxy
with an anti galaxy. I'm guessing um a lot would happen. Yes,
a lot would happen, big explosion. Yeah, because, as he says,

(34:48):
stars are pretty diffused and so they wouldn't necessarily collide
with each other, but they're also pumping out a lot
of stuff, and the dust and the gas would also
be antimatter, so there would be a lot of collisions,
just sort of like with the Bullet cluster. When we
saw those two collisions. The stars mostly passed through each other,
but the rest of the stuff, that gas in the
dust definitely collided. So it would be pretty dramatic, right,

(35:08):
I guess galaxies are pretty sparse, and so it's like
throwing a bunch of sand at another bunch of sand,
and most of them would just go through itself. Yeah,
most of the stars would, but the gas in the
dust would definitely interact. And you're saying, we haven't seen
that kind of you know, event, So maybe that's kind
of evidence that there aren't antimatter galaxies or antimatter stars. Yeah,
but we can't really explain this result from a MS

(35:31):
like two anti helium particles. There is a lot more
than you expect to see if there are no antimatter stars.
On the other hand, it's preliminary, so it could just
be a fluke, could be a mistake. We're not exactly sure,
but it's a tantalizing clue. All right. Well, then, to
answer Petrie's question, are there antimatter stars? Um, we don't
quite know, right. I mean, it's theoretically possible from what

(35:53):
we know about antimatter, but we don't see a lot
of evidence for antimatter stuff out there in the universe,
except for maybe these two anti helium particles that the
space station just found. All right, well, let's get into
our last question of the day, and this one it's
about aliens eating Jupiter, which hopefully hasn't happened. I don't think,
but let's get into it. But first let's take a

(36:14):
quick break. All right. Listen to question number three for
the day, comes from Joe, who has a question about
hungry aliens. Hi. I wanted to ask a science fiction question.

(36:39):
I was wondered if aliens were, for some reason just
to make a pit stop on our solar system and
steal off all our gas giants too U to use
this fuel, would that affect our orbit at all? Would
Earth's climate be affected by that? I have a follow
up question as well, Um, if they were to remove

(37:00):
those gas planets. Would that also have any kind of
effect on our ability to leave the Solar system? Would
that take our ability to fuel some kind of warp
drives or whatever away from us? All right, interesting question
from Joe and his baby. I'm guessing it's the one
feeding him the questions and was really impatient to hear

(37:20):
the answer. I don't know, but apparently asking us these
questions is more important than whatever his baby needed. Well,
maybe the question is somehow related to the baby. Maybe
the baby is the alien and the baby is really hungry,
so he's like, what if I feeded Jupiter would stop
crying for the rest of his life? Uhh, And when
the mom gets back, what did you feed our baby

(37:42):
a lot of gas? Or maybe he's just thinking about
the future that this baby will inherit and wondering how
we will deal with the inevitable galactic empire that's going
to come and visit us and pose us these difficult questions. Yeah,
I noticed he had a follow up question, which I think,
you know, tells me that he's he's thought of this through,
like he's thought about it and he thought about the
implications of it. All right, So well, the question is

(38:04):
what if aliens aide Jupiter, And I think he means
more like, what if Jupiter suddenly disappeared, Like what would
be the consequences with it throw our Solar system into chaos?
And his follow up question was, will it sort of
take away a huge source of possible fuel for us
to go see the stars? Yeah, it's really cool to
think about Jupiter versus the Earth, and it gives you

(38:26):
a sense of like the scale of these objects because remember,
Jupiter is like much much bigger than the Earth. They
like dwarfs the Earth. On the other hand, Jupiter itself
is dwarfed by the Sun. Right. The Sun is like
points something per cent of all the mass in the
Solar System. Jupiter is like the rest of it. But

(38:46):
the Sun is like a thousand times more massive than Jupiter.
So when you're doing like gravitational calculations to ask like
what's tugging on the Earth. What's important for the Earth,
it's mostly the Sun. Everything else you can ignore because
not just is the Sun more massive than Jupiter, it's
also closer to us than Jupiter. Like Jupiter, it's pretty

(39:08):
far out there, and so the gravitational force on the
Earth from the Sun is twenty five thousand times more
powerful than the gravitational force on the Earth from Jupiter.
You're saying, Jupiter is big, but it's far away, and
it pales in comparison to the Sun. Now at one
and twenty five thousand seems like very little, But I

(39:30):
don't know. Maybe in space, these small differences make a
huge difference. It does definitely affect the trajectory of the Earth.
So if you've got rid of Jupiter, it would have
a small effect on Earth trajectory. You know, it would
change like the elliptical nature a little bit, but we
would still have a stable orbit and it wouldn't affect
us in a way that we could measure, like, it
wouldn't affect the radiation we're getting from the Sun, etcetera.

(39:51):
All right, so it would maybe change or weather a
little bit, but it wouldn't like throws off of the
Solar system. Yeah exactly. We would still be stable. And
you know, people have done these calculations and it depends
a little bit on where Earth lands. But if you
just like delete Jupiter, you definitely get a stable orbit
and most of the times it's almost essentially unchanged from
its current orbit. Whoa people have done these calculations, like

(40:14):
people are planning for this, somehow we're expecting this. I
actually assigned this as a problem in one of my
programming classes to do like numerical simulations of the Solar
System and consider what would happen if a new planet
came in or if you deleted a planet. It's pretty
fun to see, like the chaotic events that transpire when
you mess with the Solar System. So interesting. I see

(40:35):
you've been outsourcing your villainy to your students. I've been
inviting young scientists to participate in these intellectual explorations in
your intellectual villany. Yes, that's what I'm saying now, I'm
just kidding. So it would have a small effect on Earth,
but maybe would it have a ripple effect on the
rest of the Solar System. Like you know, one thousand

(40:55):
seems small, but if you added up to all the
other things happening in the Solar System could throw it
into chaos. It definitely would affect the rest of the
Solar System because there's stuff out there that's much closer
to Jupiter, and that is where Jupiter is basically the
dominant gravitational effect, like the asteroid belt is huge collection
of rocks. Some of them are between Mars and Jupiter,

(41:17):
and they're very very strongly affected by jupiter gravity, and
some of them are actually in orbit with Jupiter. They're
like part of Jupiter's orbit. They're like co orbiting. So
Jupiter is the big boy out there and it is
definitely in charge of what's going on. And if you
deleted Jubiter, then it would totally disrupt the asteroid belt.
They would would become chaotic very quickly, and they would
get all new trajectories, right, and maybe that could disrupt

(41:39):
things and maybe throw on asteroid our way, right, it
could maybe spelled doom for us that way. Yeah, because
what Joe didn't specify also is what would happen to
the moons of Jupiter. Like if they just delete Jupiter
and leave its moons, then those moons are suddenly flying
through space without the gravitational force needed for their orbits.
So depending on their angles, like they could plummet into

(42:00):
the Sun, they could shoot out of the Solar System,
or they could like start orbiting the Sun on their own.
And you know, some of those things are pretty big,
Like they're bigger than mercury and so we'd have like
a new planet. You know, Io could be a new
planet if you deleted Jupiter. Whoa, that would be the
ultimate poking the eye for Pluto. If like a moon

(42:20):
got upgraded, well it got downgraded, yeah, I know, talk
about promotion or you know, one of them could plow
through into the inner Solar System, disrupting the asteroid belt,
and that would not be great for the Earth because
a lot of those things could end up hitting the Earth.
You know, most of those are in stable orbits and
NASA is monitoring them and we don't think any of
them are on trajectory to hit the Earth anytime soon,

(42:41):
but a big charac event like that could definitely shake
that up. Alright, well, I guess the answer to the
first part of the question is that it wouldn't affect
us that much gravitationally, but it might who knows, trigger
some kind of a random fluke event that could kill
us potentially. So if the aliens come and you offer
them to better, remember that still has consequences for the

(43:02):
Earth because we're all one solar system. Man. Yeah, maybe
point them to the nearest solar system and get them
to eat those over there. We hear that Alpha Centauri
is really really nice and chewy this time of year. Yeah,
they have a better buffet. Ye have better desserts. What
about the second part of his question though, like would
it rob us of potential fuel for space exploration, Like

(43:26):
we know Jupiter is full of you know, gas that
we could maybe use for some sort of fusion power
space engine. Right, it's true, and if the Aliens are
coming because they want to fuel up, then it's definitely
a resource and it would suck to lose it. But
you know, space is filled with these resources, Like there
is water and hydrogen and all sorts of elements all

(43:47):
over the Solar System. A lot of the things that
seem rare and difficult to find on Earth are difficult
to find only because you're on the surface of the Earth.
You know, there's like asteroids that are huge chunks of platinum.
So whatever you really need out there in the the system,
you can pretty much find it even if you lost Jupiter.
So I'm not too worried about that, But there are
some consequences of losing Jupiter, Like we use Jupiter and

(44:09):
Saturn the big planets right now, is like gravitational slingshots.
You want to get out to Pluto, for example, one
good way to do it is to aim at Jupiter
and swoosh around it and have Jupiter like sling you
out into the outer Solar system. And so we do
these maneuvers. I think we had a whole podcast episode
about how they work, and that's pretty helpful. So you'd
be bummer to lose Jupiter for that reason. Also, Yeah,

(44:31):
like you aim at Jupiter and then let Jupiter pull
you out to where it is, and then once it
pulls you in, you swing around and use that momentum
to shoot off into the stars. Yeah, exactly. So it's
a way without burning any fuel to gain some speed
because you're stealing a little bit from Jupiter, and also
to change direction. Ie, we wouldn't lose any important fuel

(44:51):
because this solar system has other resources, but we would
lose kind of like a nice step in stone to
get out of this solar system. Yeah, could you use
our a new moon io, I mean the new planet
io instead. I suppose you could, but it doesn't have
nearly the power gravitationally that Jupiter has. All right, Well,
that answers the question for Joe, what if alian's a

(45:13):
Jupiter not much, at least for now. So either way,
aliens is what you're saying, Daniel, That's what I'm saying.
Give us physics and then you're dig in. All right. Well,
that answers are three amazing questions from our awesome listeners.
Thanks again to Simon, Petrie and Joe for submitting their
questions and recording them. If you have questions, at least

(45:33):
email Daniel. That's right, and thank you everybody for using
your curiosity to power this podcast and all of science.
The reason that we're doing this stuff, the reason we
are looking for answers to questions about the universe, is
because we want to know, and we know that you
want to know, Yeah, and we are happy to give
you answers and also anti answers, which sort of behave
the same way as answers to right until they collide

(45:55):
with answers, right, and then they annihilate into pure mental energy.
All right, Well, thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed that.
See you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that
Daniel and Jorge explained the Universe is a production of

(46:16):
I Heart Radio or more podcast from my heart Radio.
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