What is the great attractor?

What is the mysterious force that is attracting our galaxy to it?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
In, Daniel, I have a great idea for house physicists
should name things in science. Oh, I can feel my
skepticism rising up inside, like indigestion something like that. Yeah. Well,
here's the idea. So the next time you guys invent
something or discover something amazing, just put the word great

(00:29):
in front of it, you know, and just to make
it seem more expressive, because I feel like you guys
don't sell things enough. You mean, like the great Daniel
and Jorge explain the universe? Is that what you mean?
I'm not sure that makes grammatical sense, but I mean,
you know, like you do you have do you have
a model of the universe and you call it the
standard model? You know, Yeah, it could be a little

(00:49):
bit better, you know, the great model of particles. Oh man,
that is a great idea. I am more handmade cartoonists

(01:12):
and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm
a particle physicist, and I only study stuff that's great.
Great or grape flavor. Grape is not one of the
great flavors. I have to say. It's like low on
the list who doesn't like grape juice. It's like the
filler of juice. Right, It's like the banana in a smoothie. Right,

(01:33):
Nobody drinks and juice for the grape. The banana is
a highlight for me in the smoothies. Bananas like the
canvas of smoothie on which everything else sits. You know,
it's just there support everything else. We are totally different.
Wait legs here, Daniel. You go into the smoothie store.
You notice this banana in almost every single smoothie. But
it's not named banana. It's like the orange smoothie, the

(01:54):
raspberry smoothie. Banana just plays like the supporting role there.
No bananas are the foundation upon which smoothies are built.
You're saying they're the underground, sort of concrete basement. That
they're like the standard model of physics, but for smoothies.
But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge explained
of fruit, smoothies apparently, and the universe. Welcome to our

(02:15):
great podcast in which we try to show you how
amazing and bonkers and frankly great the universe is. And
it's great not just because crazy stuff happens, but because
we can't understand it. The human mind is amazingly capable
of penetrating the cosmos and unraveling it. And that's our
job today is to give you a tour of the
cosmos in a way that you can understand and impress

(02:38):
your friends with your knowledge. Yeah, and we're also the
authors of the book We Have No Idea, a Guide
to the Unknown Universe, which apparently a lot of our
listeners don't know that we wrote. That's true. I get
a lot of questions from listeners that ask us about
things that are really nicely explained in our book. And
I'll say, oh, you should check out our book, and
they right back to say, what you guys have a book,

(02:58):
what you guys know how to write? I didn't say that.
I just said we have a book. I see. It's
a book, and it's not just an audiobook. There are
actual words, right, and and letters in it and cartoons. Yes,
it's a really fun book. It's all about the things
you don't know about the universe and what scientists think

(03:18):
they might be. And it's fun for those of you
out there who are curious about the world and want
to know not just what do scientists know, but what
are scientists wondering about? And it features a bunch of
words but also dozens and dozens are really hilarious and
clear diagrams about what's going on, drawn by a hilarious cartoonist.
I know. Oh really, who is it? Oh? I don't

(03:40):
remember what his name is. It doesn't really matter, you know.
It just stole his ours from the internet. Some great
guy probably know. So it's a great book. You guys
should check it out. Yeah, it's about all the things
we don't know about the universe. And there's a lot
we don't know about the universe, right, Daniel. I mean,
there's we know some things here on Earth, and some
things in our solar system, and some things out there
in the galaxy in the cosmos, but there is a

(04:02):
lot we don't know, even kind of where we are
and where we sit in this big giant space. Yeah.
In the book, we make this analogy a lot that
we are sort of at the beginning of an age
of exploration of the universe. Because I think it's easy
for people to imagine back a hundred or five hundred
or thousand years ago, before we even knew like the
shape of the Earth and all the land on it,

(04:22):
it was exciting to go out and exploring to learn
about our our sort of neighborhood and the larger place
we were on the Earth. Well, we're in that place
sort of scientifically, we're still just learning how the universe works,
but also very specifically, it's not like just a metaphor.
We are now exploring beyond the Earth and getting maps
of sort of where we are in our cosmic neighborhood,

(04:43):
and we're really just beginning. And so every year, every decade,
we look further and further out into the universe and
just learn like the shape of things, how things are arranged,
how the stars and the galaxies and those the clusters
of galaxies, how how it all sort of sits in
the inner and where we sit on it, right like
in a kind of a they called the our address

(05:04):
in the universe. Yeah, and just like explorers who are
venturing around weird places on Earth and finding strange stuff,
weird animals and grand canyons and new fruits and all
sorts of stuff, as we look at into space, we
find some weird, weird stuff out there that forces us
to sort of revise our understanding of what's in the
universe and how it's put together. But anyway, so, yeah,

(05:26):
there are weird things out there that people are still discovering,
and in fact, there is a really weird thing out
there in space that is affecting how the galaxies and
the clusters are all moving about that we really have
no idea about. Right, Yeah, we are building sort of
a map of the universe. We look out and we
see our Solar system, and we know where it sits
in the galaxy. We know how the galaxy clusters together

(05:48):
with other galaxies to make this thing we call the
local group, which is a cluster of galaxies. And then
we've seen further out to see how that cluster forms
into superclusters. And we talked on the program once about
how those superclusters line up into these really weird sheets
and bubbles and stuff. But the cool thing is that
that stuff is not static. It's not just like sitting there, right,

(06:08):
This is a dynamic system. If you sped up the
universe on like, you know, really fast time lapse, you
would see stuff smashing into each other and whipping around
each other. This is like a frothing, bubbling foam of stuff,
but in super slow motion. Right that the universe is
not retired. It's still pretty active and moving around and
and restless. Yeah, and you know, the our galaxy is

(06:31):
like heading towards another galaxy. And so one thing that
that's really fascinating to study is not just where stuff is,
but where it's going. Right, what is it going to
look like? And are things going to smash together or
are they gonna fly further apart or are they gonna
stay kind of the same. Yeah, so this is a
fascinating question. And several listeners here I'm counting one, two, three, four, five,

(06:52):
six listeners independently wrote in to ask us to talk
about this particular weird thing that scientists found. Yeah, it's
a very big mystery. And so here's the audio from
Stephen Gonda asking us what this mystery is. Hello, Daniel
and Jorge, this is Stephen from Calgary, Canada. I've read
about the phenomena called the Great Attractor, and I'd like
to learn more. What do we know about it? What

(07:14):
don't we know, and what are some theories regarding what
it could be? Thank you? All right, that's a great
question from Stephen, and he is asking us about this
interesting mystery, which is this idea of the Great Attractor. Yeah,
it's this amazing mystery, this huge cosmic galactic question mark
nearby in our cosmic neighborhood. And not just Stephen, but

(07:36):
also Mike Miller, Neil McLean, Peter McKeever, and Chris Adiquez
all wrote in to asked us to talk about this.
So thanks to those people who wrote to us with
their burning curiosity about the universe. And if you're out
there and want us to talk about something, please don't
be shy. Send us your questions to Questions at Daniel
and Jorge dot com. So I guess they all wrote

(07:56):
the same question similar the same question, which means it's
a very active question or it's a great question. It's
a great question. And I'm also assuming they're not asking
about Brad Pitt, who's also pretty attractive. He has a
sort of gravitational pull on everything in Hollywood, a lot
of gravitized But it's not a mystery, right, Everybody understands

(08:17):
like there's a strong pull there and if everything, all
the projects are sort of sucked towards him, then we
know that he's around. Yeah, So to be on the podcast,
we'll be tackling this big mystery. We'll be asking the question,
what is the great attractor? Is it a what is

(08:38):
or who is this? Another alien episode? Daniel saying it's alien.
I'm not saying it's not not aliens. But you know,
anything weird out there in space could be the beginning
of that science fiction movie where they find aliens, you know.
And so he's some guy in a control room going, huh,
that's weird dot dot dot aliens. Good thing you're not

(08:59):
that person, because it would be aliens every time. It
seems if they put a big red aliens button next
to my desk, I'd be hitting it every single day. Aliens.
But what I have for dinner aliens? I don't have
aliens for dinner. We can't digest aliens. Man, oh, I
want to have aliens over for dinner. We can hang

(09:20):
out with them and ask them, right. So, yeah, so
we don't know who or what this Great Attractor is,
and in fact, it just has a really pretty mysterious name.
It's not even the best named attractor out there. There's
another one out there, even bigger, more mysterious, with a
better name. Is there a greatest attractor? The other one

(09:41):
is called the Shapely Attractor. Really really, that's Angelina Jolie
right in a very not safe cosmic mysteries right here
on the podcast Double Mobile Prize for your heavenly gods.
Just waiting for them to get back together. I mean,
why shouldn't they be? Well, I walked around campus, I

(10:03):
use the irvine, and I asked folks if they knew
what the great attractor was. To think about it for
a second. If someone asked you what or who the
great attractor is, what would you say? Here's what people
had to say, has something to do with magnets. Our
friend who's a physics major. If you mentioned you mentioned
that at some point. If it's a great quantum attractor,
I would think it would have something to do with

(10:24):
sort of a black hole, something attracting everything around it.
Is it the center of galaxies? Probably has to do
with by gravity attracting something I think I may have
in physics in high schooling. I'm not too sure to
be honest, right, Uh, probably not the one you're thinking here?
What are you thinking of? Uh? Something gravitational? Alright, No,

(10:46):
nobody want with Brad Pitt. I guess it's just me
who much pessed with Brad Pitt. Or he's just in
the news so much. You're either a singular genius or
you're just wrong? Well, how do you how do we
know it's not Brad Pitt, Daniel, I have a Brad
Pitt button right here in mind. You hit the Brad
Pitt button. I hit the alien button. The logical conclusion

(11:07):
is Brad Pitt is an alien. We're just banging out
the mystery city. So after all the mysteries of the universe,
if you can make that connection, you've done it. Is
that why they adopted so many children? Actually human? Right?
Who can survive being having so many children? You need

(11:28):
specially well and still and still look as good as
he does. Well, I can tell you that the Great
Attractor is not Brad Pitt because the Great Attractor is
something like two hundred million light years away, and last
I checked, Brad Pitt was on Earth, which is considerably
closer than that. All right, we'll get to talking about

(11:50):
this Great attractor. So it's something that's out there in space, right,
affecting how the galaxies are moving around in space. Yeah,
it seems to be this really misdu source of gravity.
It's out there in space, it's really far away, and
it's pulling on everything, but nobody knows what's there, Like
what is creating all of this attraction? Right, A lot

(12:11):
of people said gravity in their answers, is that do
you think? You know? Do you say great at attractor
and people automatically think gravity, I guess, so, yeah, there's
some connection in their minds between attraction and gravity, which
makes sense. Right, If you're thinking space stuff, then it's
mostly gravity that's doing the attracting. All right, we'll get
into what this great mystery, this great attractor is, and

(12:32):
what it could be or who it could be, and
ask whether it's going to suck us in it. It's
gonna if we're gonna get pulled into its attractiveness once
and for all. But first let's take a quick break,

(12:57):
all right, Daniel. So there's a big mystery out there
in space called the great Attractor. So break it down
for us. What is the great Attractor? Well, as we
said earlier, we're interested in where we are in space,
but also what the stuff around us is doing, where
it's going, how it's moving. We know that the universe
is expanding, right, more space is being made everywhere, which

(13:17):
means that everything is moving away from each other. Right,
Everything we look at is moving away from us, So
it's red shifted. It's red shifted, meaning that the light
from it is shifted to longer wavelengths because it's moving
away from us at some speed. Right, there's sort of
a general motion of the of everything in the universe
being pulled apart. Yeah, I mean pulled apart. But that's
sort of the overall picture, that's the average picture. Then

(13:40):
there's sort of local variations, right, Like, for example, the
Earth is not moving away from the Sun. Why because
the Earth is held by the gravity of the Sun.
And so you can look at at how fast things
are moving relative to each other, they get a sense
for sort of where the gravity is. Like the Sun
is not moving away from the Milky Way for the
same reason. Gravity is holding the Sun as part of

(14:01):
the Milky Way. And then we could ask about like
what's the relative velocity between our galaxy and another galaxy
or other galaxies, right, because we're moving towards the Andromeda
galaxy right, not away from it. That's right, the Andromeda
galaxies moving towards us. And so this is a variation
relative to this expansion. If you imagine like all that

(14:22):
expansion is sort of the baseline, then we can ask
like the stuff around us, How is it moving relative
to what you would expect from that expansion? And some
of the stuff is actually moving towards us, like Andrameda,
because of gravity. And so what they did is they
did this red shift survey. They looked around at all
the galaxies and they asked where are they going relative
to the sort of baseline expansion. So an average, the

(14:42):
universe is expanding and everything is waning away from each other.
But you're saying, sort of locally, what what what are
the galaxies actually doing? Or all galaxies or just the
ones around us? Just the ones around us is where
we begin, and those the easiest to understand and to
see because they're closer. It gives us a pi here
for where the stuff is because we measure what the
gravity is. It's just like the discovery of dark matter.

(15:05):
You look at the rotation of a galaxy and you
understand how much gravity should be there to hold it together,
and then you count up all the stars and you ask,
can all that gravity be explained? The answer was no,
so we assumed, oh, there's some extra matter inside the
galaxy to explain it. This is sort of that same strategy,
but on the galactic scale, where we look at the

(15:25):
motion of the galaxies, and then we ask can we
explain the motion of those galaxies based on all the
stuff we know is there. It's kind of like you
were telling me earlier that if the Sun was invisible
for some reason, we could probably still know that it's there.
It's just from seeing how the planets moving a circle
around something that's right, you can deduce that stuff is

(15:46):
there by its gravitational effects. Just like the Earth moving
around the Sun. You don't need to see the Sun
to know that there's something heavy there that's keeping the
Earth in orbit. And the same way we discovered the
black hole at the center of our galaxy. Initially I
seeing these stars orbited making these patterns that they just
wouldn't make if there wasn't some really heavy, massive, invisible

(16:07):
thing there. Okay, So then you're saying that we have
been doing this kind of we we have done this
kind of analysis with the galaxies all around us, just
to see if everything's moving kind of in a coaster way. Yeah,
we were curious, like where is everything going? And we
did this calculation. We looked at everything, we measured its
red shift, and that gives us a picture for sort
of like where everything is going. You can like take

(16:27):
every galaxy and put an arrow on it and say,
this one's going over there, this one's going over here.
And what we discovered is it. First of all, we
have a velocity. We have a velocity relative to sort
of like the cosmic microwave background that's sort of filling space.
We are getting pulled somewhere. We are not the center
of the universe, is what you're saying. Well, you and

(16:48):
I are, but the whole galaxy it turns out to
just be dragging us down. Oh, we're mosing on somewhere
as a galaxy. As a galaxy, we're moving actually quite
fast relative to this cosmic microwave background. Oh man, you
just gave me whiplash. And I feel felt so stable there,
But now I think that our whole galaxy is moving
and probably millions of miles per hour. It sort of

(17:10):
threw me off a bit. Yeah, and all of the
galaxies together seem to be not just our galaxy, but
all the galaxies together seemed to be sort of sucked
in the same direction. All the nearby ones are getting
pulled in the same direction. I mean, like that there's
a galaxy to our right, and it's also going in
the same direction we are. And there's a galaxy to
our left and it's also going the same way. Now,

(17:31):
individual ones can have variations, like Andromeda, the closest one
happens to becoming right at us. But if you look
at the average sort of flow of the galaxies nearby,
they're all pointing in the same direction, sort of like
there's some huge amount of mass they're creating gravity sucking
everything in wait, and so we're going towards it, or
we're sort of orbiting it. We're going towards it. And

(17:54):
this is the goal, right is to figure out how
fast everything is moving, and to use that to figure
out make sort of a map of where the mass
has to be, and then compare that and say, well,
do we see all that mass? Right, just like we
did when we discovered dark matter, we make a map
of where we think the gravity is, and then we
ask can we explain all that gravity using the mass

(18:15):
from the visible stuff from what we see and also
the dark matter? Did you take that into account as well?
Oh crap, we forgot to account for the dark matter. Yeah, man, no,
we we do. We know, we know that we see
a galaxy that we're not seeing all the mass from it.
We have pretty good ways to measure the or to
estimate the amount of dark matter in a galaxy based

(18:36):
on its type and its age and all this sort
of stuff. There's a little insulting Daniel Well, who was
being insulted because you were like, did you remember the
dark matter? Yes? Thank you? Did you did you carry
the two? Did you carry the ones? Daniel? Because this
is all very suspicious. Are you're gonna come up here
help me with my arithmetic? Did you please? I forgot

(18:56):
it's long division. I haven't done that forever. I need somehow.
I guess what I mean is, how do you know
that you've accounted for all the dark matter? I mean,
you can't see the dark matter. You only have sort
of like mottels of it. That's right. We don't and
that's a possible explanation. But we know something is there,
and we don't think that there are these blobs of
invisible dark matter that are not hanging out with visible galaxies.

(19:20):
And so what we do know is that there's some
region out there that is sucking us all in, that's
pulling us towards it, and we didn't expect that because
we don't see anything there that can explain it. And
and this is like everything. All the galaxies that we
see are just the ones around us, because you know, we,
like you said, we are part of these clusters and

(19:40):
superclusters and gigant and genormous walls and sheets of galaxies.
You know, is everything moving towards something or just sort
of locally local in this context means sort of part
of our supercluster. So all the sort of clusters of
galaxies and those clusters of clusters seem to be moving
in this neighborhood to awards this thing called the great attractor.

(20:03):
So it's like a feature of our super cluster. Yeah,
but if you go even further beyond that, everything else
is getting including that great attractor, is getting sucked towards
something else. It's a bigger attractor called the shapely attractor.
Why didn't you call it the greatest? Well, it's named
after a guy named Shapely. Honestly, literally, his last name

(20:25):
is Shapeley. You aren't you gonna ask me if he
was pretty shapely or he or she? That would be inappropriate, Daniel,
I have I have the broadcast standards. Oh I should
read those somewhere. I'm curious. I thought he would be
surprised that I have standards. But one really mysterious thing
about this great attractor is that it happens to be

(20:46):
in a spot that's very difficult for us to look at. Mmmm, suspiciously, Suspiciously,
it's a coincidence, But why is it hard to look
at it? Well, if you look up in the night sky,
the places that are easiest to see are the places
where you look away from our galaxy. You look sort
of out into deep space. If there's something out in
the sky and it's hiding behind the Milky Way, it's

(21:08):
much harder to see, just because there are a lot
of stars and dust and gas between us and it,
So we sort of have a bit of a cosmic
blind spot. There's a big mass of something, possibly within
our supercluster cluster, and there's an even bigger mass of
something you're saying, out and out in between the superclusters,
or it might be at the like the center of

(21:29):
a bunch of superclusters. The shapely attractors even less well understood.
But the frustrating things that both of them sits sort
of behind the plane of the galaxy, like there if
you look in that direction, if you look up in
the night sky when you're camping and you see the
Milky Way, it's beautiful, it's wonderful, but it means you
can't see what's behind it very well because the Milky
Way is so bright. This episode is filled with great

(21:51):
names because astronomers refer to that whole region of the
sky as the zone of avoidance as then don't even
try to do any signs there. It's just all lit
up and it's a it's a mess. Oh. So it's
a an avoidance not because you shouldn't go there. It's
it's more like, don't don't take your academic career on
that area of the universe. Yeah, it's sort of like
the harder region to observe anything. And so if you're

(22:14):
looking for something clear and beautiful, look somewhere else, because
this is the messy spot. You know, if you want
to record a beautiful symphony, you don't do it, you know,
on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. That's a zone of avoidance
for careful recordings. All right, So, um, these things that
might be really important to the universe and to how
how the universe is moving and changing are pretty much.

(22:37):
It's sort of occluded from us. You're saying, yeah, we
can't really see in that direction, and there's something really
fascinating and interesting out there that seems to be pulling
all these galaxies towards it. All right, let's get into
what it could be or who it could be, and
whether or not we are going to all end up
being fatally attracted. I think you've already attracted a Brad

(22:59):
Pitt that I've already played our fatal attraction with that kid.
He's gonna listen to this episode and now he's never
going to come on the podcast. Or maybe it'll be
attracted coming on the podcast. But yeah, let's get into
whether or not we'll we'll be sucked into it as well.
But first let's take a quick break. All right, Daniel,

(23:31):
the great attractor out there in space is moving galaxies
in a mysterious way. So what what could it be?
If we don't know what it is? Well, as usually,
we'll have an escalating series of possible explanations from like
super boring to mind blowingly crazy and insane? Does it
end with aliens? As usual, it's gonna end with a

(23:53):
movie pitch of course? Is your hand over the alien
button right now, are you itching to press it? I am,
But first we got to go through like the other
possible explanations that could be like much more boring physics. Alright, alright,
so there's something causing all the galaxies to move towards
a sort of an area or a point, and so
what could it be. Is it a big blob of

(24:14):
dark matter or is it um you know, like it's
just a giant rock. Yeah, well it couldn't just be
a giant rock because remember this thing has the mass
of like ten quadrillion sons. It's really big. How many,
like equivalently, how many galaxies is that? Yeah, that would
be like ten thousand Milky Way galaxies. So whatever this is,

(24:35):
it's not small. You know. We went out to sort
of map the universe and see where stuff is and
see its direction. We expected everything to have some relative velocity,
to be some sort of jiggle, you know, think about
like the galaxies is like, you know, some sort of
cosmic gas. You expect them to be bouncing around a
little bit. But we were pretty surprised to discover this
is in the eighties, that everything was really strongly getting

(24:57):
pulled in this one direction. So it's a big deal.
And so it's the equivalent whatever it's pulling us out
there is the equivalent of ten thousand galaxies. It's hard
to imagine, right, And each galaxy of course has billions
and billions and billions of stars and planets. So it's
a lot of stuff. Well, it's not a small mystery.
It's not a small mystery. It's a great attractive it's

(25:18):
a great mystery. Maybe maybe great doesn't sell it enough,
you know, amazing attractor, the unbelievably fantastic and amazing attractor.
But this sort of the simplest explanation is that it
just could be a lot of stuff. It could just
be that there's a lot of galaxies over there and
it's hard for us to see them because they're blocked

(25:41):
by the Milky Way, right, Or they could be dark,
like it could just be you know, matter but it's
not shiny. Yeah, it could be. I mean, it could
be just like normal matter, just like galaxies and that
are bright in the same way, but you just can't
see them very well. And so people, you know, they're
doing this or pointing our telescopes at this at this

(26:01):
location and trying to discover is there anything back there.
We've mostly been avoiding that part of this guy because
it's hard to look at. But now because of this
weird gravitational anomally, there are folks pointing their infrared telescopes
at this thing. Okay, so um, it could it be
like dark matter. It could be a giant blob of
dark matter that we that is just floating out there
by itself. It could be because what we see out

(26:23):
there using infrared telescopes is not enough to explain it. Like,
we definitely see that there are clusters of galaxies out there.
There's a lot of them, in fact, but not enough
to explain this. There are galaxies out there where we're
aware of the greater attractor would be, but there there
aren't ten thousand galaxies. Yeah, and you know this is
hard to measure, and so there's a lot of uncertainty. Still.
It's not like we have a very clear picture. We

(26:44):
have to use infrared light to penetrate the gas and
the dust of the Milky Way. It's easier to get
through the Milky Way if your infrared light because you
get through the gas in the dust, which seems small
relative to your long wavelength right, and you get to
where those cool infrared goggles too. That's basically why people
doing exactly do they wear while they're doing astronomy? I

(27:06):
wonder they do. Yeah, that and the snacks also are
also good, the bananas and these smoothies. But you know,
as we said before, one of the goals is to
sort of make a map of the mass of the galaxy.
And we just can't see enough stuff to explain all
of this mass, all of this gravity. It's not even
dark matter, well not even dark matter, because we expect

(27:27):
dark matter to sort of follow the pattern of visible
matter everywhere else in the universe. Galaxies form and stars
form because there's dark matter there. It makes sort of
these gravitational wells that pull in gas and dust and
form galaxies, and you expect visible matters sort of give
you a map for where the dark matter is. So
it would be really weird to have like a huge
amount of extra dark matter, like a ginormous amount, without

(27:51):
as much visible matter with it. It would be weird,
but not impossible. Maybe like you could thankily maybe have
some dark matter floating by itself. Could Yeah, you could,
and you need some sort of weird event to explain
like why that dark matter hasn't already attracted a bunch
of gas and dust to make galaxies, to sort of
give it away, right, it's like stealth dark community pressing.

(28:13):
I'm pressing the button, all right, and you know you
gotta press that aliens button. But to me, the aliens
button represents something larger, you know, like the things we
don't understand, the reasons we're doing science, the reasons we
are interested in exploring the universe is to find the
new weird stuff to sort of add to our list
of things we have in our great model of the universe.

(28:35):
It's like it's almost like a mental exercise just to
keep your mind open to crazy possibilities. Yeah, exactly, you
want to know what else is out there and you
want to discover something new, and so first you have
to like cross off the list other possible explanations before
you're forced to confront the fact that maybe there's something
new out there that that explains to something you haven't

(28:55):
ever seen before super dark matter, yeah, or stealthy dark matter,
and yeah, we don't know, and so it could, you know,
potentially be aliens. But it's sort of hard to imagine
because this is a really really big lump of stuff. Well,
let's let's take off the other one in your list.
You said it could be maybe dark energy, not just

(29:18):
dark matter. Yeah, remember that dark energy is just our
observation of what's happening in the universe. We see that
the universe is expanding, that space between galaxies is increasing
as new space is made. But that's sort of like
an average thing. We've sort of measured that overall for
the universe. But what we don't know is is that uniform.
Is it the same everywhere? Is the expansion constant and

(29:41):
every point in space or are there like little variations?
Oh you mean we've been assuming that that the dark
energy the expansion of the universe is like even and
smooth everywhere. But you're saying, maybe it's not. Maybe it's
it's like a lumpy, lumpy growth. Yeah. As we first
measure it, we sort of measure the overall expansion and

(30:01):
we were surprised to discover, you know, wow, it's expanding
and accelerating. And then as we get better and better measurements,
we can start to resolve it in more detail and
understand like, is it different in this direction than in
that other direction? Right, the expansion of the universe. Dark
energy is not this kind of smooth even thing. But
maybe it's like it's growing a little bit more over here,
a little bit growing more over there, or maybe it's

(30:22):
even like it's it's like folding the universe in weird ways. Yeah,
this this whole concept of dark flows that maybe dark
energy is not constant, And we've seen other ideas that
relate to that, like this idea of cosmic strings that
in the first moments of the universe when it expanded
really rapidly and cooled, that that cooling didn't happen uniformly
and made these sort of discontinuities in space. So it's

(30:46):
not the first time we've imagined that maybe space is
not uniform and homogeneous, and so it's possible that this
is some weird place where there's less dark energy and
so it's not expanding as much. Interesting pocket of not
dark energy of you know, where the good side of
the force is winning of light energy. That's where that's

(31:06):
where all the jedis are. That planet yeah, yeah, which
full of baby yo. It is where it's so cute
and uh, we're gonna end up attracting everyone anyways, Yeah,
their cuteness is what's defeating. Yeah, that's right. Never underestimate
the power of cute. All right, So it could be
dark matter. It could be just a fault in our

(31:27):
assumption about dark energy. But you're saying it could be
something else. So let's let's go ahead, Daniel, let's press
the aliens present bund. I know you're itching to present
in which in what possible way could aliens be casting
this giant attractor in the in the in the galaxy?
All right? So I have this crazy idea, right and

(31:49):
you know, you know that star we talked about before
Tabby Star where people were speculating that maybe because the
light was dimming and unusual regular ways, that aliens were
building a shield around the sort of gather up all
of its energy at Dyson sphere. That was pretty exciting.
But I have an idea that's sort of like ten
quadrillion times bigger than that. What yeah, what if aliens

(32:13):
are building something and it's just like but it's huge.
It's not just like a spear a star, but it's
like something the mass of ten quadrillion sons. You're saying
the aliens have built like a city or a spaceship
the size of ten tho galaxies. Yeah, who knows what
it is they're building, Like, we have no idea what
aliens would build, but if they were, you know, they

(32:34):
wouldn't build something that's glowing with like giving off light
and shining. It would be dark, right they be they
painted black to try to for some the fairious reason,
you know. Or maybe they're just gonna throw us a
surprise party and they just want to sneak up on us,
and so they just a giant billboard for us, saying

(32:57):
with a huge cuban for Freeman in a smooth Yeah,
there you go for life, for a turn life. But
it's hard to imagine what you could build that would
be that big. But hey, you know, the universe has
filled with crazy stuff and it's been around for billions
of years before our solar system was even formed. So
maybe this is a very old construction project and the

(33:18):
Aliens are out there building something so big that it
sucks in whole galaxies. It's it's bending galaxies to their
whim kind of. Yeah, maybe it's just a big art
project for them. They're like, yeah, we don't like the
way these clusters look. They need a little bit more
shapeliness to them. It's a huge black space banana. Is
that what you're thinking? You have the space banana button

(33:41):
on your desk. Yeah, there you go. I have a
Brad Pitt bun here and a banana button, one on
each side of mine. Don't press them at the same
time across the streams or let's just press all three
at the same time. All right. Um, so, maybe aliens

(34:03):
have build something the size of ten thousand galaxies and
that's what it's um training, but is that even possible?
Could you build something that big and not how it
just collapse into a black hole or or who knows? Well,
you know, I'm sure those alien engineers can solve that problem.
But this is where the movie pitch begins. You know.
I want to see the movie where aliens make something
the size of ten quadrillion sons the city of ten

(34:24):
thousand galaxies. That's the title Star Star Wars, Episode fifteen
of ten thousand Galaxies. Somebody out there, contact our agent.
We are ready to write that movie. We're right, We're
ready to write any screenplay. Really, that's true too. We
just want that option money, alright. So those are all
possibly for what it could be, and it sounds like

(34:46):
we don't really know, But I guess the question is
what's going to happen? Are we all going to end up?
Is the whole universe or the whole cluster of galaxies
gonna end up getting sucked into it? Or we are?
Is this this is going to spell the the end
of of our existence? Or or is there a sunny
side to all of this? Well, it's a fair question
because one reason we're interested in sort of mapping where

(35:10):
stuff is and where it's going is that we'd like
to know what the future of our galaxy is. You know,
we know that we're going to hit Andromeda in a
few billion years, but it's sort of the larger context
of what's going to happen to our local group and
are we all getting sucked into this massive alien vacuum
cleaner or whatever it is they're building. And so the
way to think about it is that there's a sort
of cosmic battle going on. On one side, you have

(35:32):
dark energy that's trying to pull everything apart, that's creating
new space between stuff and making everything further and further apart.
And on the other hand, you have gravity that's doing
its best to keep stuff together. You know, it's keeping
the Earth going around the Sun's keeping our Sun in
the Milky Way, and it's trying to keep our group
of galaxies together. So it's just cosmic tug of war

(35:54):
between the two man it's like the ultimate cosmic struggle,
you know, order it's just us, you know, nothings versus something. Yeah,
it totally is, and we're watching it play out on
this cosmic scale, those sort of super slow motion And
the answer, unfortunately or unfortunately, I'm not sure, is that
dark energy is much more powerful. What is that? Your favorite?

(36:15):
Is that where your money is? Are you? Are you
on the dark side, Daniel? Are you officially stepping into
the dark side? Well, you know, the dark side forever
will dominate our destiny. I mean, we live in a
dark side universe because dark energy is seventy of the
energy budget of the universe and it just can't be
beat by this little piddally gravity. W Well, I do

(36:36):
like the lightning bolts coming out of your hands, my
hands here, So there's a plus to joining the dark side.
You've got lumpy banana smoothies and lightning bolts. Yeah, and
maybe at the same time, yeah, maybe at the same time.
So dark energy is definitely gonna win. It's going to
pull things apart. But you're telling me that maybe we
don't know what dark energy is going to do, right,

(36:56):
Like it could just maybe give up one day and
then gravity will win. You think dark energy has been
like conquering the universe for five billion years and then
it just gets bored of winning. I think it peaked already.
Know so much winning, you're gonna get tired of it.
It's gotta it's gotta to retire at some point, you know. Well,
you know gravity is very patient. It waits around forever
and gathering stuff together. So maybe it's just waiting. It's

(37:19):
biding its time until the dark force gives up. Because
as far as we know, gravity hasn't changed like dark energy.
We know gravity dark energy has changed right since the
beginning of time. But that's true. Gravity has remained rock steady,
that's true. Dark energy, we think is maybe connected to
inflation the first few moments of the universe and cosmic expansion,
and then it's sort of bided its time for ten

(37:41):
billion years while things spread out, and then all the
matter was so dilute that dark energy had a chance
to take over and and drive the expansion of the
universe again. But you're right, we don't know the mechanism
and so we don't know the future of it. But
it seems to me the most likely thing is that
dark energy wins and the universe spreads out and we
end up as the is like tiny little crystalline points

(38:02):
of light, super far away from everything else, and the
night sky just gets darker and darker. Well, I'm trying
to look at the bright side. Maybe you know, if
you were born, or if a civilization starting in one
of those planets where they can only see they don't
see any stars out there, then they would think that
they are the only living beings in the entire universe,
or that their whole universe was just them. Yeah, a

(38:24):
hundred years ago, we thought that our galaxy was the
whole universe. We didn't even know there were other galaxies
out there. It was mind blowing sort of paradigm shift
learning about our context to discover that there were other
galaxies and lots of them. But you're right, if we
came along late enough, we would learn that we would
think that our galaxy was special. Okay, so it doesn't
sound like you're too worried about the great attractor or

(38:46):
the shape lea attractor or the super duper shapelier attractor,
which I just made. All this stuff is going to
happen in billions of years anyway, and so you know
our sun is going to explode in billions of years.
So before that happens, we got other problems to solve. Oh,
I see, I guess maybe, Um, I'm just worried for
the galaxy in general. You're a galaxy stand you're a

(39:08):
Milky Way supporter. Yeah, you know, I'm a fan of it.
It's done good for you. I've grown I've grown fond
of this galaxy. But you're saying it's not it's probably
it's probably not going to get crunched into this great attractor.
You know, it's going to shape the how things move
and how things look, but maybe it's not going to
crunch it all together. Yeah. In the cosmic scale, all

(39:29):
these vectors we're talking about, these velocities or everything is
getting pulled towards a great attractor. These are small corrections
to what dark energy is already doing. It's helpful in
the sense of like using gravity to give us a
map for where the mass and the gravity is in
the universe. But in the end, it's not the most
powerful thing. And you know, our supercluster just doesn't have

(39:49):
enough gravity to it to hold itself together. Dark energy
is going to tear it apart. All right, I'm gonna
press a bunce again, Daniel. I think it's aliens building
something to fight dark energy. Maybe, Yeah, they're like dark energy,
it's spreading everything apart. Let's bring it all back together. Yeah,
it could be. And you know, it could be that

(40:10):
human physicists figure out a way somehow to like tap
into dark energy and use it to build wormholes between
galaxies and so that even if the universe gets really
spread out, we could still somehow travel to other stars.
Who knows. All right, well, we hope that that answers
the question for Stephen and for Mike and Neal and
Peter and everyone who asked this question. Pretty interesting. It

(40:31):
sounds like there are still giant, big, attractive mysteries out
there in space. Yeah, we are only beginning to explore
the universe and discover the weird stuff that's out there
and trying to fit our models for everything we understand
to it and then you know, add to it, add
new stuff to it. New baby Yoda's, new aliens, building
cosmic cities, new banana smoothie flavors, and baby bread pits

(40:54):
are probably also pretty cute. Um. And so it's an
exciting time I'm to be looking out into the universe
and learning about what's out there, because every year, every decade,
there are tremendous mind blowing discoveries to just change the
way we think about what's out there. So stay tuned.
I guess it is the message, because who knows what

(41:14):
the universe will do. Keep funding astronomy is giving us
clues as to where we are and where we're going.
That's right. Donate to the NSFW for to support this
kind of banana projects. It wouldn't be bananas to do.
So see you next time. Before you still have a

(41:41):
question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us
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(42:04):
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