What mysteries are hiding in the extra-galactic background light?

Daniel and Jorge explore the challenges of detecting light from outside the Milky Way, and the secrets it might reveal.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Daniel. When you look at the night sky on
a good night, how many stars can you see?

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Well, if it's a really good dark night without any
light pollution, you might see several thousand.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Stars, thousands in Los Angeles.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Maybe forgotten Joshua Tree.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
But that's it. Only a thousand stars and the night
sky aren't there like trillions of stars out there?

Speaker 2 (00:30):
There are oodles of stars out there, but most of
them are too dim to see even though they're out.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
There, like their photons are not reaching us, or they're
too weak.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Photons can travel in infinite distance without ever getting tired,
but their photons are just so rare that you need
like a really big eyeball, maybe Hubble or James Webb
to capture one of them.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
Or just like a long exposure too.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Right, Yeah, if you set up your camera for months
and months, you'll probably see one of those dim stars you.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
Need, like a slow eyeball.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
A big or slow eyeball or both.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
So I guess what else is out there? Like, what
else would you see? Would you see stars and anything else?

Speaker 2 (01:08):
We don't know. What's out there could just be stars
and galaxies, or there could be like chocolate bars and
frozen bananas waiting for us to discover them.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
WHOA, sounds delicious? But will we see those things? Wouldn't
they have to glow somehow? Would these be glowing frozen bananas?

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Glowing or reflective?

Speaker 1 (01:24):
Which case? Do you want to eat them?

Speaker 2 (01:25):
I'm glowing with excitement to try them?

Speaker 1 (01:28):
I do. I know it sounds a little slippery. Hi.
I'm Jorge make, cartoonist and the author of Oliver's Greek
Big Universe. Hi.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at
UC Irvine, and I'm so excited to see what's hiding
out there in the universe waiting for us to discover it.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
Yeah, there seems to be a lot out there. But
do you think it's hiding or we're just not good
at seeing I.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Don't think it knows or cares about whether we are
seeing it. But it has not yet been revealed, so
in that sense, it is concealed.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
Oh yeah, yeah, But is it really the case that
it could anything could be out there? You think then
we have a pretty good sense from what we can
see around us.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
There's still a lot of big questions about what's out there,
the stuff nearby, the stuff far away the stuff in between,
and we should never make the assumption that the stuff
that's close to us is typical and that it could
be used to explain the whole universe.

Speaker 1 (02:30):
Well, I guess there could be things hiding within our
own galaxy that we can't see it, right, Like we
haven't seen all of the Milky Way galaxy.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
Oh absolutely, And the center of the galaxy, the most
interesting place, is the hardest to see. But the Milky
Way itself is so bright and so big, and that
it makes it really hard to see beyond it to
other galaxies.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
And these other galaxies could be totally different from.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
Ours, right, They could be very different. They could have
a very different history. There could be all sorts of
stuff going on out there deep in the universe that
we haven't yet figured out. Most of the photons that
come to Earth we don't gather. We mostly ignore them.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
You mean, like we're getting all this information from all
the cross the universe, but we're not doing anything with it.
We're not paying attention.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
Yeah, the universe is screaming at us in photons. Everything
that's out there in the universe is telling us all
about itself. So we have like the whole history of
the universe is out there being literally beamed at us,
but mostly we're not paying attention. Mostly those photons just
like splash on the sidewalk.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
I wonder if that could be a good thing. Like
I wonder if at some point it's like TMI Universe.
There's some things I don't want to never TMI.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
With science, you always want more data so you can
know more about the universe. I want to know the
Universe's deepest, darkest, most embarrassing secrets.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
I see, you're more of an any person.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
Not enough information, Absolutely no information is too embarrassing.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
Well I hope that's true. But anyways, welcome to our podcast,
Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of Our
Heart Radio.

Speaker 2 (04:00):
In which no question is too weird, too gross, too
icky for us to explore it. We want to know
all of the embarrassing details about how the universe was born,
how it grew up, and all the messes it made
along the way. We want to unravel the deep history
of time and understand how the universe got to be
the way that it is and why it operates in

(04:20):
such an incredible, amazing and beautiful fashion.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
Man, you make it sound like crazy fans of the
universe we are, or as the kids say these days, stand.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
I totally stand our universe absolutely. I will defend it
online against haters.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
There you go until you turn on it.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
If in season seven it does something really weird, then yes,
I will turn on it.

Speaker 1 (04:43):
But so far, if it jumps the shark, if it
jumps the galactic shark, you're like, I like the earlier
seasons better.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
So far, it's been pretty awesome, and everything we've learned
has blown our minds and revealed incredible things about the
way the universe works. Not only are the law that
it follows really fascinating and incredible and have weird philosophical
consequences for what the nature of reality is, but the
stuff that bubbles up from those tiny laws, the huge,
the big stuff, the black holes, the galaxies, the quasars,

(05:13):
the blazars, all that stuff is just so mind blowingly awesome.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. As we said before, how much
we've been able to figure out about the larger universe,
even just about our galaxy and beyond, just from sitting
on this little tiny rock in one corner of the galaxy.
It's pretty incredible. If you think about the scale things
and how much we know about what's out there.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
But we've only really just begun to observe our universe.
We have a few eyeballs capable of picking up really
distant objects, but most of the light that's out there,
billions and billions and trillions and trillions of photons that
contain super fascinating important information about the history of our universe,
we're not capturing them. They're mostly drowned out by bigger,

(05:57):
brighter stuff like the lights of Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 (06:00):
We're sort of washed with information from the universe and
we're not really I guess we are capturing it, we're
just not recording it, is maybe what you mean. We're like,
we're getting night light, starlight, you know when I step
outside tonight, but I'm not going to be thinking about
it or recording it or trying to figure out what
it says.

Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah, most of it just hits the earth, and unless
some like Gecko is looking up at the night sky,
there's no being that's gathering that information. It just like
gently warms some rock or some like gum wrapper that's
lying on the ground.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
But do you think we're missing stuff? Like if I
just point a telescope there every once in a while.
Am I really going to miss anything?

Speaker 2 (06:38):
I think there's an incredible amount of deep history out
there in the night sky. And if we build zillions
of telescopes and point to them in all those directions
and just let them accumulate information, we would learn so
much about the history of the universe from these really
faint sources.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
But ironically, if you cover the night sky with telescopes
and you wouldn't be able to see the night sky.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
See it in a different way.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
Well, I guess that's true. We can see it on
our phones. It's a little less poetic, and we can
see it scientifically. But anyways, it's kind of interesting what
is out there and what kind of information we are getting,
including even the stuff we might consider being in the background.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
Yeah, that's right. The night sky is chock full of
stars from our galaxy, but there's a lot of really
useful information in the background, information we're mostly missing.

Speaker 1 (07:27):
So today on the program, we'll be tackling the question
what is extra galactic background light. It's a lot of
syllables there for one term.

Speaker 2 (07:42):
Yeah, astronomers, you know this one. I think they actually
name pretty well.

Speaker 1 (07:46):
We'll see, we'll see. You've always promised that, and most
of the time it disappoints.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
You have a very unrealistic standard.

Speaker 1 (07:53):
If I have to say so, I'm just saying, you know,
take a minute to think about it, all.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
Right, all right, I'll suspend my judgment.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
But yeah, it's an interesting question. A lot of words here,
extra galactic background light, which should have sounds self apparent,
but maybe the extra it throws me off a little bit,
like it's extra, like we don't need it. Or is
it extra like like you get a bonus, Like you know,
I pay for a certain amount of galactic background light

(08:23):
and I'm getting some extra serving of it.

Speaker 2 (08:27):
Or maybe it's just like a bit much universe Like
why are you so extra? Yeah, that's how my teenage
daughter would interpret it.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
Mmmm, you're being too extra?

Speaker 2 (08:35):
Yeah, Dad, you're so extra.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
Oh my god, that's better than me. Mid, that's like
the that's not the worst insult from a teen right now,
that's kind of Mid. Oh boy university, Mid, I've seen
better life existence, Mid. But yeah, I guess we'll dig
into what all these turns mean and why it's interesting
to think about the extra galactic background light us you'll

(09:00):
be for wondering how many people out there know about
this or have any thoughts about what it might be.

Speaker 2 (09:06):
Thanks very much to our panel of volunteers who comment
on these well named astronomical phenomena and offer their opinions
without the chance to google about it. If you would
like to play for a future episode, please don't be shy.
Write to me two questions at Danielandjorge dot com.

Speaker 1 (09:23):
So think about it for a second. What do you
think is the extra galactic background light? Here's what people
have to say. It must be all the light coming
from outside our galaxy, either that or one of those
LED sets that you can use to make your bedroom
lighting extra galactic.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
Extra galactic background light is the light produced by Club
Andromeda when the Aliens are having a rave. I don't
know something to do with our galaxy and there's too
much light for what there should be by some theory
that's calculating, Uh, you know how it fits within the
light it should get from other galaxies or our sun,
and somehow it's being amplified.

Speaker 4 (10:00):
I've heard of it, but I'm thinking that our other
galaxies out of our galaxy and there it's a large background.
Most of the stars we see is the background galaxies,
and that's the range of galaxies we see in their lives.

Speaker 1 (10:15):
Yes, all right, a lot of creative answers here. Some
people think extra means party.

Speaker 2 (10:21):
I was wondering if anybody was going to say, it's
like breaking news, like extra extra, read all about it.

Speaker 1 (10:27):
Oh right, that's another use of the word extra. Yeah,
if you're from the nineteen twenties, I.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
Got a jaunty cap on. I'm standing on a so
far I'm selling newspaper.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
You get a vest on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're on
the street. I got on my cheeks hanging out scientific papers.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
That's how we distribute science these days. We passed it
out to OHI g mister, have you read white since
latest paper? It's a hoot.

Speaker 1 (10:55):
But yeah, that's one way to think about it. But
a lot of creative answers here. I guess it's sort
of stelf a. But like I said, there's some ambiguity
in the terms.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
Yes, as always.

Speaker 1 (11:03):
All right, well let's dig into it, Daniel. What is
the extragalactic background light?

Speaker 2 (11:08):
Basically, the extragalactic background light, or EBL, as astronomers like
to call it, is all the light emitted by everything
else in the universe except for the Milky Way, during
the entire history of the universe. So it's like all
of the photons in the universe not emitted by our galaxy.

Speaker 1 (11:28):
Wait what but also not emitted by the background microwave
background radiation.

Speaker 2 (11:33):
Now the CMB, the cosmic microwave background is part of
the EBL. The EBL is like the super general version
of the CMB. CMB is only at one wavelength, that's
the cosmic microwave background. The EBL is like, well, what's
the background in all of the wavelengths?

Speaker 1 (11:50):
Oh wait, wait, so the EBL is part of this CMB.

Speaker 2 (11:53):
No, the CMB is part of the EBL.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
Oh okay, but it doesn't come from galaxies, does it.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
It doesn't have to come from galaxy. This is the
light emitted by everything else in the universe other than
our galaxy. So extragalactic means not the Milky Way. So
any other star, any other object, any frozen banana floating
out there in space, any primordial soup of gas and plasma,
everything in the whole history of the universe except for

(12:19):
the Milky Way.

Speaker 1 (12:20):
Oh I see, this is not galactic light. It's like
extra galactic in the sense of being outside of our gutsy.

Speaker 2 (12:26):
Yes, take all the photons in the universe and subtract
the ones emitted by our galaxy the ones left over,
that's the extragalactic background light. So like most of the
photons in the universe are the EBL photons I see.

Speaker 1 (12:40):
So any photon that we see out there in space
that doesn't come from a star within or any other
source within our Milky Way galaxy exactly.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
And the estimate is that there's like ten to the
eighty four extragalactic background photons in the universe. So there's
a whole lot of them.

Speaker 1 (12:57):
Ten to the eighty four.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
Or ten with eighty four zeros in front of it.
It's a lot.

Speaker 1 (13:04):
It sounds like a lot, But I don't know how
many come from our galaxy.

Speaker 2 (13:08):
I mean, the whole history of the universe, the tiniest
fraction come from our galaxy. Almost every single photon in
the universe doesn't come from our galaxy. So almost every
single photon in the universe is an EBL photon.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
Interesting, and this comes from other galaxies, or as we
talked about, maybe directly from the Big Bang, right.

Speaker 2 (13:28):
It comes from the whole history of the universe, and
that's what's super fascinating about it. Some of these photons
were made before there were galaxies. Some of them were
made before there were stars. Some of them were made
during reionization, when these big clouds of neutral gas first
started to clump together to form stars. The whole history
of the universe is written in these photons. They're out there,

(13:49):
they're floating around. They contain all of this information, but
they're very, very tricky to see.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
Right, So, like we're getting the lighte from Andromeda, which
is close to us, but we're also getting light from
super far away, which also happens to be really a
long time ago. That's all mixed in with this in
this micro background.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
Like that's right, all that counts as EBL because it's
not coming from the Milky Way.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
Maybe should be like extra Milky Way background light, right,
because it's not just like extra galactic like in the
general sense, it's just like our anything outside of our galaxy.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
Yeah, extra our galactic background light.

Speaker 1 (14:25):
Yeah, there you go. Yeah, because do so many in Andromeda,
the EBL would be different.

Speaker 2 (14:29):
Right, Yeah, that's true. Those astronomers would argue with our
astronomers about how to name this thing. That would be fun.

Speaker 1 (14:36):
Yeah, there a cartoonists would call my cartoonists. We would
duke it out, and then I, you know, I would
take them out and then I get to name it
for the whole universe.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
You know, you wouldn't be the first cartoonist to actually
name something scientific. You know, Gary Larson actually had an
impact on science.

Speaker 1 (14:52):
Oh yeah, what did he name?

Speaker 2 (14:54):
Yes, this hilarious cartoon of a caveman giving a name
to those four pokey spikes on the back of a
status He calls it the phagomizer, after thag who was
killed by a stegosaurus. And it turns out that nobody
had actually named that before. So then scientists actually started
using phagomizer in their science papers. And now it's the
official name for the stegosaurus table.

Speaker 1 (15:14):
Whoa. See, Now that's a well named thing in science.
You should put cartoonis in charge of everything.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
Right, Yes, we should name everything after the caveman that
was killed by it.

Speaker 1 (15:26):
Yeah. No, I'm just saying trust cartoonists, you know, with
anything science.

Speaker 2 (15:32):
That's the lesson I learned from that. Yeah for sure.

Speaker 1 (15:35):
All right, So this seems like a really broad concept
all the light. Basically, it's all the light and universe
we're getting from outside our galaxy. It seems like a lot.
Can we make any sense of it? Or is it
all just like a wash?

Speaker 2 (15:46):
It's a lot, and it contains an incredible amount of information,
and it's really varied. It varies across the spectrum from
like super high energy gamma rays produced by really distant
active galactic nuclei like blazers, all the way down to
like really long wavelength radio that might be produced by
like dark matter decaying. There's an incredible amount of information

(16:08):
across the spectrum, but we want to see across the spectrum.
But we want to see it all the way across
the spectrum, and we also want to see where it's
coming from in the universe. So it's not just like
let's just see it. Let's see where it's coming from
and what the energy distributions are. Let's use that to
learn about the history of the universe.

Speaker 1 (16:25):
Because I guess I wonder, like, how do you tell
the difference if it's how do you know it's coming
if it's coming from our galaxy or from outside of
our galaxy.

Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yeah, that's really tricky because our galaxy turns out to
be really bright. You might think, well, can't you just
point your telescope in the night sky and gather some
EBL photons. Yeah, but it's sort of like trying to
see the Milky Way. If you're in times square. Times
Square is so bright you can't even see any stars
in the sky. So our Milky Way is so bright
that we can't see the distant dim things that are

(16:53):
hiding behind it. So there's a lot of competition from
the Milky Way, and the Milky Way is not something
we understand super well, so it's difficult to disentangle which
photons come from the extragalactic background light and which photons
come from our own Milky Way. There's an interplay there
where if we knew really, really well what the extragalactic
background light was, it would help us understand the Milky Way,

(17:14):
Or if we understood the Milky Way better, we could
subtract it from what we see in the night sky
and understand better what the extragalactic light is. We would
learn so much either way, But right now, the Milky
Way outshines everything, and the whole thing is kind of entangled.
It's a big mess.

Speaker 1 (17:28):
So when you look at the stars of the nice Guy,
every star he sees is in the Milky Way galaxy, right,
you can really see stars that are outside of the
Milky Way. So any pinpoint you see out there is
in the Milky Way galaxy. So if I wanted to
see something outside of our galaxy, I would maybe point
my discope at a spot between the stars. Absolutely, do
you get raw light from outside of our galaxy or

(17:49):
is there still like dust from our galaxy there that
is maybe polluting that light?

Speaker 2 (17:54):
So the answer depends on the frequency of light that
you're looking for. You're always looking through the Milky Way,
and there's always going to be dust that interferes, But
it depends on the wavelength. Some wavelengths of light can
penetrate that dust, some wavelengths of light can't. So it's
really a different puzzle at different wavelengths, from GAMER rays
to X rays to ultraviolet light. There's different sources of
photons that get confused between the Milky Way and the

(18:17):
extragalactic background light. A big factor is the zodiacal light
scattering of dust from within our solar system, which makes
everything very tricky, all right.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
It sounds like we need to parse it by frequency,
and so let's break down the spectrum of light from
outside of our galaxy and see what it tells us
about what's out there. But first let's take a quick break.

(18:48):
All right, we're talking about the extra Milky Way background light.
I just renamed it. I called the extra tag tag
is a sizer background light.

Speaker 2 (18:59):
I'm not even gonnam. It's all up to you at
this point.

Speaker 1 (19:02):
I'll just called the extra larsen or here here we go,
we'll call it the extra far Side background line because
and that is both true and a homage to Gary Larson. Yeah,
absolutely right, because anything outside of our galaxy is technically
on the far side of the universe.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
That's probably what he meant when he was talking about
the far side. He meant the other galaxies.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
Yes, well, no, I don't think so. I'm saying in
this context it seems like an appropriateate. But anyways, let's
break it down by frequency, you said, because we're getting
a wash by all this life from outside of our galaxy.
We don't even know if it's coming from outside of
our galaxy. But if you break it down by frequency,
you can get a better handle on what's going on.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
And the main challenges are that most of this stuff
is really dim because the sources are really distant. Everything
we're talking about is coming from outside our galaxy, which
means it's probably millions or billions of light years away,
So it's photons have been spread out. They don't get tired,
but they do get spread out. So everything out there
is really really dim, or there are sources in the

(20:01):
milky Way that are brighter than it, or there's like
dust and stuff interfering. The challenge is change as you
go through the frequency, just the same way that the
night sky changes in frequency. If you look at the
night sky in the optical or in the infrared or
in the UV, you see a very different picture.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
All right, let's break it down, and let's start maybe
with the higher frequencies. What do we see at the
high frequencies.

Speaker 2 (20:22):
So at the very highest frequencies, the highest energy photons,
we call these things gamma rays for silly historical reasons.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
Related to the Hulk, right, That's where it started.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
It started because in the early part of the century
we didn't really understand quantum mechanics or radiation, so we
just started naming things like alpha rays, beta rays, gamma rays.
We had no idea what gamma rays were. Then later
we understood, oh, they're just high energry photons, but they
already had this name. So you can't just say, oh,
gamma rays and X rays are really the same thing.
There's artificial distinction between them. We just sort of.

Speaker 1 (20:55):
Stuck with it, and so they had the Hulk back
at the Court of the century.

Speaker 2 (21:00):
Hulk was actually the one doing these science experiments. Remember,
Bruce Banner is a scientist man. You should read his
paper right now. They're great stuff.

Speaker 1 (21:07):
It's the famous correspondence between Bruce Banner and Albert Einstein
right where they're like, pal come them.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
It was in German, though, right, wasn't it in German?

Speaker 1 (21:17):
I'm just messing with you, all right? Sorry, I keep going,
keep going. What do we see in the gamma rays?

Speaker 2 (21:20):
So the gamma ray night sky is mostly surveyed by
a space probe called Fermei LAT, which is basically a
particle physics detector in space. Photons hid it and they
convert into a pair of electrons and positrons and we
track those. We can use that to measure the energy.
This is our best way to see the night sky.
In gamma rays. And if you look out in the
night sky you do see a bunch of gamma rays.

(21:42):
You see a huge source coming from the center of
our galaxy. Like the center of the galaxy emits a
very large number.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
And that's from the black hole there, right.

Speaker 2 (21:50):
That's from all sorts of crazy processes happening in the
center of the Milky Way. There's pulsars that emit gamma rays.
These are point sources. There's also just a lot of
diffuse emission of gamma rays from like really high energy processes,
like electrons getting accelerated really really hard and emitting gamma
ray photons. The problem is that we don't really understand
the center of the galaxy. So if you just look

(22:11):
at like the distribution of gamma rays in the center
of our galaxy, we don't understand it. We can't explain it.
There's lots of mysteries there, and so that's a real problem.
If you want to subtract out the Milky Ways contribution
and look at the rest of the universe, you don't
really understand what to subtract out.

Speaker 1 (22:27):
You just like point your telescope at the center of
the galaxy and then point it away from the center
of the galaxy to kind of get a sense of
what's coming from the center and what is not.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, you can measure what's happening at the center, but
then you also want to understand how that varies across
the night sky. To do that, you really need some
sort of model so you can interpolate, so then when
you're looking at some other place, you can say how
much of this is from the center of the galaxy
and how much isn't. You can't just like turn off
the center of the galaxy in nature and see the
rest of it, or turn it back on or vary it.

(22:56):
So we need some sort of like understanding of the
center of the galaxy in or to extrapolate away from
it and like subtract it out from underneath the extragalactic background.

Speaker 1 (23:04):
Light, so we can study the extragalactic background, or so
we can study the center of the galaxy or both both.

Speaker 2 (23:10):
Because mostly the extragalactic background light in the gamma rays
we think is coming from the centers of other galaxies.
Right other galaxies we think are also emitting gamma rays
at high rates, and the extragalactic background light in the
gamma rays is then mostly from those other galactic nuclei,
and so if we could see those, we could understand
our own galaxy better, or if we understood our own

(23:30):
galaxy better, we could subtract it out and then understand
those other galaxies. So it's sort of a chicken and
egg problem. We don't really know how to pull this.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
Apart, all right, So then what can we see in
the gamma rays when we look around us.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
Well, there's this long standing mystery, but the center of
our galaxy, whether it's sending us signals of dark matter
like dark matter, we know this a lot of it
in the center of the galaxy, and we wonder if
sometimes when two dark matter particles bounce off each other
they actually annihilate, Like there might be dark matter and
anti dark matter, and it might be possible for it
to annihilate and actually produce photons. This is counterintuitive because

(24:03):
you think of dark matter as dark, not shining in
any electromagnetic spectrum. But there are theories where dark matter
will annihilate itself and make very high energy photons. And
in fact, there's a signal from the center of the
galaxy that we don't understand that a bunch of people
think is from dark matter. So we don't understand that
very well, and we'd love to look for that signal
in the centers of other galaxies, basically see if we

(24:24):
can reproduce this in the extra galactic background light. But
so far we have themen able to pull those things
apart and understand which photons come from other galaxies.

Speaker 1 (24:34):
Wait, wait, wait, First of all, are you saying dark
matter is not maybe really dark?

Speaker 2 (24:38):
Yeah, dark matter might be shining brightly from the center
of our galaxy.

Speaker 1 (24:41):
Oh boy, And then can't we just point our telescope
at another galaxy to see what kind of signal we
get from.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
Then, yeah, we can do that, and we can see
some other galaxies that are very clear, like galaxies with
quasars in them or blazars, you know, quasars that are
pointed right at us. Those are shooting really high energy
photons right at us, and that we can tell like, Okay,
it's definitely there. It's definitely there. So that's a part
of the extragalactic background light that we can tell. But
not every galaxy has an active nucleus, and we're interested

(25:09):
in studying those that aren't active because those are the
best ones for studying dark matter, but it's not always
clear which photons are coming from our galaxy in which
photons are coming from other galaxies, because remember we're inside
the Milky Way, and not all of the gamma rays
come directly from the center. Some of them are emitted
along the galactic plane, and those are still brighter than
the emissions from other.

Speaker 1 (25:29):
Galaxies emitted by what we are we this would be
emitted by dark matter in the rim of the galaxy
or what.

Speaker 2 (25:38):
Maybe dark matter in the room the galaxy. But anytime
an electron is accelerated, it's going to emit a photon,
and so there's some emission of photons from electrons in
the galactic plane that cloud our observations.

Speaker 1 (25:50):
MM interesting. So looking at these gamma rays might reveal
the what's going on with dark matter.

Speaker 2 (25:56):
Yeah, it would be super cool if we could make
like a map of these gamma rays from other galaxies
and then cross correlated with our understanding of like where
the density of matter is, Like we have a pretty
good understanding of where the galaxies are and the whole
cosmic web. If we could cross correlate these gamma rays
from like clumps of dark matter, then to be really
powerful evidence that maybe these gamma rays really are coming

(26:19):
from dark matter and not just from other sources of
gamma rays.

Speaker 1 (26:22):
WHOA, would they have like a special signature if they
came from dark matter?

Speaker 2 (26:26):
Unfortunately not, they're like energy distribution of these things is
not that different from the energy distribution we see from
other sources, which is what makes it so challenging and
why it's so important to understand all the other sources
of gamma rays so we can figure out which ones
might be coming from dark matter. It's like you're trying
to explain the spectrum with a few different blobs, but
the blobs aren't that different, so it's hard to tell

(26:48):
how much of each blob you need to use to
explain the spectrum that you're seeing.

Speaker 1 (26:52):
WHOA. So, then if it turns out dark matter is shiny,
would you need to change the name of it.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
Yes, and we'd come to you first.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
I'll call it dark light as ray star war Z.
All right, Well, that's gamma rays, it might tell us
about dark matter. What about the next range of frequencies
in the spectrum of this background light?

Speaker 2 (27:12):
So taking a step down and energy, you get to
X rays, and again there's just an arbitrary distinction between
gamma rays and X rays, but X rays are lower energy,
and here the technology is sort of like a bridge
between particle physics detectors that see gamma rays and more
traditional telescopes that see lower energy light. Here we have
X ray telescopes, and these use like weird X ray

(27:34):
optics because X rays are really energetic and really hard
to bend using optics, So there's all sorts of weird
tricks they use to try to gather and focus X rays.
But we have a couple of cool space telescopes and
New Star and Chandra up there observing the sky in
the X ray What do.

Speaker 1 (27:49):
You mean they are hard to bend like that, You
can't focus them. You can focus them with a lens.

Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah, exactly, because of the super high energy, they just
don't bend very much through a lens, and so you
need special techniques to shape these things, basically like wave
guides and weird constructions. We had a whole episode about
X ray telescopes and Chandra. Check it out for more
details on how to build your own X ray telescope.

Speaker 1 (28:09):
Right, you can make them out of bones, right this,
X rays don't go through bones.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
Yes, and we're calling the next one the Fred Flintstone Telescope. Exactly.

Speaker 1 (28:20):
Yeah, there is.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
We're gonna have a Stegosaurus.

Speaker 1 (28:23):
Operator after Hanna Barbara.

Speaker 2 (28:24):
Of course, if Hannah Barbera wanted a fund one, we
would name it after them, for sure. There you go.

Speaker 1 (28:30):
I'm not sure there's still a.

Speaker 2 (28:31):
Round somebody owns that iph.

Speaker 1 (28:35):
Well you should follow the application.

Speaker 2 (28:37):
But the night sky in the X ray is really
fascinating because this mostly comes from electrons. We were talking
earlier about electrons emitting super high energy photons. They also
emit X rays and this is a really cool German
name for it. It's called bremstra Lung, which means breaking light.
Since you have an electron it changes direction because it
HiT's like a magnetic field or something, it has to

(28:59):
give off a photon in order to do that, and
based on the energy of those electrons the amount of curvature,
how from, we give off X rays. So a lot
of the night sky in X ray comes from these
electrons giving off bremstralag.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
I mean, these are electrons that are just floating out
there in space and if somehow they change direction, they
emit an X ray.

Speaker 2 (29:18):
Yeah, exactly, electrons can change direction when they hit a
magnetic field or if they like zoom around the black
hole or something. Any sort of change of direction or
change of velocity, an electron will emit a photon.

Speaker 1 (29:29):
And so the universe is just full of these electrons
or what They're just floating out there like dust or
are they like in galaxies or is this the stuff
between galaxies?

Speaker 2 (29:37):
Electrons are everywhere, man, just thew way protons are. You know,
most of the universe is hydrogen, but by that we
mean protons and electrons, and often it's in plasma form.
It's not neutral hydrogen, so there are also clouds of
neutral hydrogen. But there's also just a lot of protons
and electrons flying out there, both in galaxies and between galaxies.

(29:57):
Remember that between galaxies is not as bright. There aren't stars,
but a huge fraction of baryonic matter in the universe,
meaning protons and electrons, is actually between the galaxies, not
in the galaxies. So yeah, electrons are everywhere, and they're
emitting X rays whenever they change direction.

Speaker 1 (30:13):
Do you consider this noise or is this part of
what you want to see or is this getting in
the way of the interesting things you want to see.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
This is definitely something you want to see because you
want to understand all the sources of it. But it's
really hard to pin down these sources. Some of it
we can associate with the centers of galaxies, so like
active galactic nuclei are pumping out these high energy X rays,
but a lot of it we can't. I read one
study that said that one percent of X rays can
be associated with known objects. The rest of it, we're

(30:42):
just like, we don't know what made this. So something
out there in the universe is like shooting out X
rays and we don't know what it is. Maybe it's
just a bunch of more active galactic nuclei that have
been like red shifted and are faint, but it could
also be other weird stuff like early universe black holes,
direct collapse black holes that formed during the early universe

(31:02):
and emitted X rays.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
What do you mean only one percent, like one percent
is coming from these electrons floating around, or we're just
getting them from things that might have existed in the
universe a long time ago that we can't sort of
see it with their naked eye.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
Yeah, we can't associate them with anything we've seen, so
We don't know what's making them. They could just be
diffuse electrons. It could be a big chunk of it.
There could also be a bunch of new astrophysical objects
out there emitting X rays that we've just never seen
before because we haven't been able to measure the X
ray spectrum outside of our galaxy. So there could be
these like direct collapse black holes that formed. Like remember

(31:39):
we were talking about having the early universe with this
famous moment when the universe became neutral. Protons and electrons
came together to make hydrogen, and that was the Dark Ages.
You have all this neutral hydrogen floating around, but there
were no stars yet. At the end of that, there's
a moment we call reionization, when the universe is then
pulling those atoms apart again. That's when we think stars
started to form. All possible that black holes formed at

(32:02):
the same moment. They didn't just collapse into massive stars.
Some clouds might have collapsed directly into black holes, and
those formations we think left their imprint in the X
ray spectrum. So if we could measure really really well,
we might see hints of direct collapse black holes from
the early universe.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
Oh I see like, this is stuff happened that happened
a long time ago, but it happened so far away.
We're only just now getting the evidence of these things
that happened a long time ago, exactly.

Speaker 2 (32:28):
And it's very dim, much dimmer than X ray sources
in our galaxy, and it's very hard to pull apart.
So if we understood the X ray spectrum super duper well,
we could ask questions like is there evidence in there
for direct collapse black holes or not? But right now
it's a big question mark. We don't know which photons
come from our galaxy, which photons come from outside the galaxy.

(32:48):
So we're like looking for a really tiny signal and
we have big question.

Speaker 1 (32:52):
Marks, right, big ones. It ninety nine percent. We don't
know what it is, question exactly. All right, let's go
down to the next frequency. This is ultraviolet.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
Yeah, so ultraviolet photons are super interesting, and our best
measurements of the ultraviolet extragalactic background light actually come from
the voyager probes. Remember those probes we sent out into
the Solar System to take pictures of the planets and
then just continue on out into space. They had instruments
on board for measuring ultraviolet photons because they were interested

(33:22):
in the atmospheres of those planets and seeing ultraviolet light
emitted from those planets to like study atmospheres and all
sorts of planetary physics.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
WHOA. So even today we're still getting data from that spacecraft.

Speaker 2 (33:35):
I think actually Voyager just shut down. It ran out
of power and we're no longer hearing from it. But
until very recently we were getting measurements from Voyager. It's
a really long lasting probe and it's one of our
best ways to understand the UV night sky.

Speaker 1 (33:50):
Now what else can we see in this UV light?

Speaker 2 (33:52):
So we can't see very much unfortunately, because the galaxy
is pretty bright in this UV light. Like planets emit
in the UV. Neutral hydrogen in our galaxy absorbs this
stuff and emits in the UV. But it's important for
understanding the distribution of matter, Like we'd love to know
more about the baryonic matter, the hydrogen that's between the galaxies.

(34:13):
That's where most of the hydrogen in the universe is.
If we could separate the UV light that's coming from
within our galaxy from the UV light that's coming from
outside the galaxy, then we could understand this better. But
we don't really have great measurements here, Like Voyager was
not set up to measure the extragalactic background light in
the UV spectrum. It's just like the only thing we have.
So it's if you look at the whole spectrum of

(34:34):
extragalactic background light, there's like a big gap there in
the UV because we really have almost no published studies
at all. It's just like a big blank.

Speaker 1 (34:43):
But I guess what's making these you raise within our galaxy?

Speaker 2 (34:47):
So mostly it's clouds of neutral hydrogen. Hydrogen, Remember, is
an atom, and electrons in the atom have certain energy levels,
and one of those energy level transitions corresponds with the
ultraviolet spectrum, and so neutral hydrogen tends to glow in
many different spectrum but one of them is in the UV.

Speaker 1 (35:04):
UH just closed from being hot.

Speaker 2 (35:06):
Yeah, exactly. You think of space as cold, but a
lot of this interstellar gas and intergalactic gas is actually
quite hot in the sense that it has high velocity
and each atom can have a significant amount of energy.
Even if we know that if you went out there
you'd freeze to death, you'd be surrounded by very sparse
hot gas. And when we study this stuff, there's a
lot that we don't understand, Like we can try to

(35:26):
subtract the Milky Way contribution in the UV, and then
there's all sorts of hints that other galaxies are emitting
in the UV in ways that we don't understand, Like
the Coma cluster is a famous puzzle. We don't understand
the UV spectrum from the Coma cluster. What's going on there?
Are those galaxies different from ours? Is there something else
between us and that galaxy? Are we just not understanding

(35:48):
the Milky Way contributions? It's a really open field to study.

Speaker 1 (35:52):
All right, pretty cool. I guess I wonder if it
was healthy we stopped putting sunblock on all of our telscipes.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
Or directly on our eyeballs.

Speaker 1 (36:02):
Yeah, that never helps.

Speaker 2 (36:03):
I think that's a bad idea. Don't do that people.

Speaker 1 (36:06):
That's right, good health advice here on the Physics podcast.
All right, let's get into our maybe more interesting frequency spectrum,
the optical or visible light spectrum and infrared to see
what is out there beyond the bounds of our galaxy.
But first, let's take another quick break. Or we're talking

(36:38):
about light that comes from outside of our galaxy, which
turns out is like most of the light that we
can see.

Speaker 2 (36:45):
Yeah, most of the photons in the universe didn't come
from our galaxy. And yet those are the photons that
are hardest to see because they're overwhelmed by the light
from our galaxy.

Speaker 1 (36:55):
Right, because we're so close to our galaxy, we're in it.
But also I feel like it's hard because like it's
a big universe out there that's been around for a
long time. So we're getting stuff at the same time,
stuff that's closed, stuff that's far, stuff that's happening now,
stuff that's happened, you know, fourteen billion years ago. So
it's sort of like this big wash of light that
we're getting that you're trying to sift through.

Speaker 2 (37:16):
Yeah, it's sort of amazing that you can understand any
of it, you know, But the tricks we use are
pretty basic. Look at the direction that came from, study
it over time, study it as a function of energy.
Using all those ideas, you can try to pull this
apart to make a consistent picture of what's out there
in the universe generating all these photons, and in the end,
that's the goal. Come up with the whole history of

(37:36):
the universe that can explain all the photons that we
can see. But first you got to see those photons.

Speaker 1 (37:42):
Right, or I guess you can see them, you just
don't know which what it is that you're looking at.

Speaker 2 (37:47):
Yeah, we see a bunch of photons. We'd love to
explain them all, and we're hoping that some of those
photons give us hints about what's outside our galaxy, not
just what's inside our galaxy.

Speaker 1 (37:56):
Right. Well, so we've been going through different frequency rate
and just in the light that we get from outside
of our galaxy and how they can reveal different things,
and we're down to the visible light spectrum, like what
you could see with the naked eye.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
Yeah, exactly. And so in the optical of course, we're
very curious about what's out there in the universe, and
a lot of the light that's in the optical spectrum
comes from stars. Right. The optical spectrum exists because we
evolve to be able to see light from our sun,
which makes us also able to see with our eyeballs
directly light from other stars, and of course there are

(38:29):
stars outside the Milky Way, and so a lot of
the optical light that's in the extra galactic background light
is emitted by stars in other galaxies.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
Right, because our sun is a pretty typical star in
the universe. Like, what the kind of light that our
sun puts out is pretty tychopical all stars in the universe.

Speaker 2 (38:46):
It's not that unusual. Our star is actually on the
larger side compared to your typical star. The most common
kind of star in the universe is a red dwarf,
which is a little redder and dimmer than our star,
but it's not a big deal. Red dwarfs are still
mostly in.

Speaker 1 (39:00):
Optical Like, if we had been born under a red sun,
we would maybe you have different eyeball right.

Speaker 2 (39:07):
Yeah, exactly, life could be very different if we evolved
around a red dwarf. We have a whole episode about
like how unlikely it is for life to have evolved
around a weird star like the Sun.

Speaker 1 (39:16):
All right, So you're saying most of the visible light
that we get from outside the galaxy comes from stars
that are outside the galaxy, and these are mostly in
other galaxies, right, Like, there aren't a lot of stars
floating around, not in galaxies.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
Yeah, there aren't a lot of stars out there, but
there are some, you know, there are stars in like
extended halos of galaxies or that were stripped out from
the galaxies during a merger or something and are now
just like floating out there in space. And that's something
we'd really like to understand. How much light is coming
from outside our galaxy, but also outside the galaxies we

(39:49):
can identify, you know, from between galaxies.

Speaker 1 (39:53):
WHOA wait, you mean there could be a sun out
there in between galaxies all by itself with maybe a
planet orbiting around it with life. And what would they
see in the night sky?

Speaker 2 (40:04):
They would only see galaxies, right, so their night sky
would be much much darker. They would only see smudges,
no pinpoints of light. Oh, they wouldn't see stars. They
wouldn't know that their sun is maybe just another star. Necessarily,
it's maybe unlikely because a star that experiences those kind
of forces would probably also lose its planets and then
to the extreme gravity being like tossed out of a galaxy.

(40:26):
But it's possible that the planets come along for the ride.

Speaker 1 (40:29):
Yeah, it makes me a little sad because they wouldn't
be able to wish upon a star.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
So you might think that this is like the easiest
extragalactic background like to see because you just like point
the hubble or point your eyeball between galaxies and see
what's there. But our galaxies actually really bright in this
kind of light, not just from the stars, also from
the scattering of dust. We talked about zodiacal light that
you can see from Earth. It's like at sunset you

(40:55):
can see this like a cone of light, like a
hazy pyramid just above the sunrise or sunset. But this
is the scattering of light off of dust in our
Solar system, and it's exactly at the frequency we want
to use to observe the extragalactic background light. So it's
a big problem.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
You mean, like the dust that's out there in space
reflects visible light exactly, but it must reflect other kinds
of lights as well, doesn't it, Or only does it
reflect visible light especially well.

Speaker 2 (41:22):
It reflects visible light especially well. It has to do
with like the size of these dust grains that are
like usually one to a few hundred microns, and these
are a huge cloud of dust all through the center
of the Solar system. It extends out we think, like
just past Mars, and it might all be Mars's fault. Actually,
dust storms on Mars might be kicking up a lot
of this stuff, but it reflects light typically in the

(41:44):
optical and also in the infrared, and it makes it
really really hard to see the extragalactic background light.

Speaker 1 (41:51):
Well, this is it, I mean it. This makes it
hard to see even the galactic light, right because all
this dust pollution is within our solar system.

Speaker 2 (41:59):
Yeah, exactly, it's a big problem for seeing outside of
our solar system. You're right, Even understanding our galaxy, the
zodiacal light is a big.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
Issue, all right, Well, what can we tell from the
light that is coming from outside of our galaxy in
the visible spectrum?

Speaker 2 (42:13):
Well, if you look at all the light that's coming
from outside of our galaxy, we can't explain it. Like
there's a bunch of photons that are out there that
just don't match our predictions. Like if you try to say, here,
I understand what's in the universe. Let me predict all
the photons we'll see in the optical spectrum, and then
you compare that to what we do see, there's a
big gap. Like there must be something wrong with our

(42:33):
modeling of what's out there in the universe or how
it emits. Like the data and our predictions do not agree.

Speaker 1 (42:40):
But what do you mean the gap like we're missing light.

Speaker 2 (42:42):
Yeah, there are more optical photons in the extragalactic background
then we can explain. So that means either there's something
else out there emitting photons we haven't accounted for it,
or maybe we've underestimated the amount of scattering from this
dust the zodiacal background light. But there are photons out
there that we can't explain.

Speaker 1 (43:00):
Well, meaning like we look out there and we were
getting light, but there's no object there to see.

Speaker 2 (43:06):
Yeah, a lot of this stuff is diffuse, right, We
don't know what's out there emitting it. We can't associate
it with any points source, and so we don't know
what diffuse sources of this light there are out there
in the galaxy. Maybe there are more of these like
rogue stars out there in the middle of the galaxy
and all their light like adds up to this big
diffuse component to explain it. Or maybe it's something simpl
or like misunderstanding the Milky Way.

Speaker 1 (43:27):
Whoa wait, So maybe this mysterious light is just Milky
Way light. It's not necessarily extra galacti.

Speaker 2 (43:34):
Yeah, exactly. We can't quite pull it apart. But there's
a really cool recent technique they're using to try to
get a sense for what's outside of our galaxy. So
they're can to help pull this thing apart, and that's
by using even higher energy photons that come from quasars.
So like the super high energy gamma rays we were
talking about earlier that are emitted from the centers of
very distant galaxies. We think we understand the spectrum that

(43:55):
should be coming from them, but as they travel through
the universe, sometimes they inter with lower energy photons they
can get like scattered or reabsorbed or change to another energy.
So if you look at the spectrum that comes from
those distant blazers and you see how it's modified from
what we expect, you can use that to try to
like map how many extragalactic background photons they ran into

(44:18):
along the way.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
Wait wait, wait, light can run into light. I thought
light couldn't collide with other light particles.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
No, you're exactly right. In general, light does not interact
with light because photons do not have electric charges, so
they don't interact directly, but they can interact indirectly, like
a photon can pair produce turn into an electron and
a positron.

Speaker 1 (44:37):
Momentarily like randomly.

Speaker 2 (44:39):
Yeah, every photon has a probability to pair produce at
any moment, and so there's a probability for two photons
to interact. We did whole episode about light beams crossing
and how you can actually study this. It's a rare process,
but it does happen. It requires this indirect process through
the electron field.

Speaker 1 (44:54):
Okay, So then by looking at a source like equasor
that we know kind of pretty well and see how
the light is modified when it gets to us. By
the time it gets to us, you can sort of
get a sense of what's out there in between.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
Yeah, you can try. It's tricky, like, first of all,
you have to be very confident that you understand the
unattenuated light, the light that was emitted by the quays are,
and then compare it to what we see. Then you
also have to convince yourself you understand everything else that
could happen to those photons be absorbed or influenced by
other things in the universe. That's why they like to
use these very high energy sources because they tend to

(45:27):
interact less than other photons, so they're more pristine.

Speaker 1 (45:30):
Oh. Interesting, And again it's sort of weird that we're
getting all this light and we don't know where it's
coming from.

Speaker 2 (45:36):
Yeah, exactly, But it's cool to be using these like
pencil beams of super high energy photons to get a
measure of like the other low energy photons along the way.
It's like we're getting information about photons that would never
have reached Earth.

Speaker 1 (45:48):
Pretty cool, all right.

Speaker 3 (45:49):
Now.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
The last frequency range is the low frequency range of light,
and that's the infrared.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
Yeah. The lowest frequency range is interesting because you know,
it's dominated by the microwaves, which we've studied very very
well and talked about and it's sort of like a
good example of what you can learn just by looking
at the night sky in the microwave. We've learned so
much about the early universe because there were microwaves emitted
in the very early universe, this moment when protons and
electrons came together in the universe became transparent again. Those

(46:17):
photons are still around and we've captured them and measured
things about the early universe. Really revolutionized all of cosmology.
That's just like a taste of what we could learn
from the other spectra. The microwaves, though, were like thirty
or forty times brighter than every other wavelength. For the
extragalactic background light, it's like the brightest part of the spectrum,
which is why it's sort of like the easy thing.

(46:39):
The microwaves are like the first by the d apple, But.

Speaker 1 (46:42):
We skipped over i infrared though, didn't we? In terms
of frequency, infrared is higher frequency than microwaves.

Speaker 2 (46:49):
Yeah, absolutely, Infrared is higher energy than microwaves. And the
cosmic infrared background is also super fascinating and we'd love
to study it in more detail because it might have
might be rich with information. Infrared light has lots of
really interesting point sources, like star forming regions and galaxies
at very high redshift that have been red shifted into

(47:09):
the infrared. Super interesting to study. And this was actually
studied by the same satellite that measured the cosmic microwave
background light. There was an instrument on board that was
capable of picking up infrared light, but it's much dimmer
than the microwave light, and so it's much more difficult
to study.

Speaker 1 (47:24):
Well, I wonder if all these things just kind of
get smooched together, because you know, I know we've talked
about that things that are really far away. They might
emit light, but by the time that light gets to it,
because of the expanding universe, that light gets red shifted,
it becomes more red er. So like if you get
red light, it could come from basically anything, right.

Speaker 2 (47:43):
Yeah, absolutely, you could have super high energy galactic nuclei
emitting very high energy photons and by the time they
get to us there infrared like even the cosmic microwave
background light. Those photons are super long wavelength, but when
they were emitted, they weren't. The plasma that made them
was super high energy. They were admitted a very very
high frequency. It's only the expansion of the universe that

(48:05):
stretched them out all the way down to the microwave.
So you're right, everything is piled on top of each
other a minute at one way.

Speaker 1 (48:11):
Is this like the messiest kind of light we're getting?
Do you know what I mean? Like, because everything piles
onto that frequency spectrum as opposed to like the higher frequencies. Thinks,
don't get bluer.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
Yeah, it's a beautiful mess down there at the long
wave lengths because everything's red shifted down there into the
dustbin of the universe.

Speaker 1 (48:26):
Now, this gets us into the microwave range, which we
talked a lot about before. The cosmic microwave background, which
you said is included in this idea of the extragalactic background.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
Exactly because it's generated by plasma that's outside the Milky Way,
and so it's definitely extra galactic. It's also the brightest
part of the spectrum, and so it's easiest to tackle,
and it tells us a lot about the very early universe.
So that's why it's sort of the best well known
and the best well studied.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
So then the stuff we get that we call this
CMB the cosmic microwave background, we know for sure what
it is. We always say it's light from the beginning
of the universe. How well do we actually know that?
Wouldn't it be kind of confounded or mixed together with
you know, distance, stars exploding and things like that.

Speaker 2 (49:11):
Absolutely, there are other sources in the microwave, including sources
from the Milky Way, but everything is easier when you're
looking for a bigger signal, right, it's easier to establish,
it's easier to subtract a way. Uncertainties in the Milky
Way can be larger without affecting your measurements because you
have a larger signal you're looking for.

Speaker 1 (49:28):
What do you mean it's a bigger signal, Like it's
more powerful, or just a wavelength is bigger.

Speaker 2 (49:32):
I mean it's more powerful. There are more photons, like
there are forty times as many photons in the microwave
than there are in the radio or in the UV
or in the optical. The universe is brighter in the
microwaves than they are any other spectrum.

Speaker 1 (49:47):
Yes, because of the Big Bang, because of the Big
Bang was a huge source of it?

Speaker 2 (49:51):
Or is it because of this early universe plasma? Yeah,
not technically the Big Bang, but there's a lot of
emission in the very early universe, and that and then
an and that got slid all the way down by
the expansion of the universe to the microwave. And so
it's sitting there as a very bright.

Speaker 1 (50:06):
Signal and we sort of know what it is. But
then that means it also mean that one big source
the beginning of the universe is drowning out anything else
we might want to see in the microwave.

Speaker 2 (50:16):
Absolutely, and that's why we've been studying into great detail
and trying to understand all the ripples in it and
the other sources of it. Again, when you have a
brighter signal, just everything is easier scientifically. You have more
data to play with, so you can do more tricks
like extrapolating from one region to the other. You have
better ways to validate all of your models. It's much
much more difficult when you're dealing with faint sources that

(50:36):
you're not even sure you're seeing. So seeing that in
the microwave and seeing it exactly the temperature we expected
was a great confirmation of our understanding of that whole process.

Speaker 1 (50:45):
Mm interesting and it also heats up barburritos, all right.
So then the last frequency range is the radio waves,
which is like the lowest frigency, longest wavelength light that's
out there exactly.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
And these are really cool experiments to see radio emissions
from the deep universe. We have these balloon experiments. Well,
you have like a radio antenna, but you cool it
down using liquid helium, and then you'll launch it up
like thirty seven kilometers above Texas or sometimes above the
South Pole, so we can gather radio signals from space.

(51:21):
You shield it so that it's not just like getting
your local NPR station, and you cool it down so
it can pick up the most faint signals, and then
you try to gather radio signals from deep space. We
measure a lot of these things, but we don't understand
all the radio waves that we see. Maybe some of
them are from dark matter colliding and emitting in the
radio Maybe there's some other diffuse emission of radio. Maybe

(51:43):
it's just something in the galactic foreground, something else in
the galaxy that's emitting in the radio waves we don't
yet understand. So we don't actually know if these photons
that we're seeing are EBL radio photons or just vanilla
milky way photons.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
If they have an actual like source generating them, or
they're just kind of like noise. Is that what you mean.

Speaker 2 (52:05):
Yeah, if there's a point source generating all these radio
frequency photons, we probably would have figured that out, could
identify it with like the center of the galaxy or
some black hole or some pulsar or something. So that
would have been easy, and we haven't been able to
do that, which means probably it's something diffuse, like maybe
dark matter and the whole halo colliding with itself or
something else. We don't really understand the sources here. WHOA.

Speaker 1 (52:29):
All right, So to recap we're getting a lot of
lights from the universe. Only about one percent of that
light comes from our galaxy. Ninety nine percent of the
light that we see that when you look at the
nice sky comes from outside of the galaxy. And it
seems like ninety eight percent of that is all mystery light,
Like we don't know what is making that light, where's

(52:50):
it coming from? Right, That's kind of what it seems like.

Speaker 2 (52:52):
Well, most of the light in the universe is generated
outside our galaxy, but most of the light that we
see is generated inside our galaxy because we're inside our galaxy.
So most of the light that we see in the
night sky is coming from the Milky Way. But that's
a tiny fraction of all the photons in the universe,
and so the rest of the universe is quite dim
in comparison to the Milky Way. But that's most of

(53:12):
the interesting stuff, and these photons contain the whole history
of the universe, but they're mostly outshined by the brightness
of the Milky Way, which just you know, happens to
be nearby.

Speaker 1 (53:23):
Oh, I see, there's a lot of light out there,
but we don't get all of it is what you're saying.
Because we're so close the Milky Way galaxy, most of
the light that we get goes from the Milky Way.

Speaker 2 (53:32):
Yeah, it's like you're standing right next to a lighthouse,
and so you can't really see anything that's far away.
Even if those photons are coming to you, they're mostly
outshined by the local sources.

Speaker 1 (53:41):
But well, we can't see the cosmic background outside of
our galaxy. It's all sort of shrouded in mystery, it seems.

Speaker 2 (53:47):
Yeah, it's tricky to disentangle the Milky Way from the
other sources. There's a lot of photons we don't understand,
a lot of question marks. Over the next few years,
we're hoping to turn on more sensitive instruments that can
disentangle these things make at our measurements. Maybe this extragalactic
background light's gonna come into sharper relief, and it might
teach us things about the universe. It could reveal all
sorts of weird stuff going on in the deep reaches

(54:10):
of space and in the deep history of time.

Speaker 1 (54:13):
Yeah, and about the makeup of the universe as well.
If it tells us about dark matter and maybe dark energy.
I think Daniel. Maybe the only solution here is that
you're gonna have to leave the galaxy to get a
good look at this light. I'll pack a lot of children.
Do we have an ex make an extra Daniel, extra
galactic Daniel adventure here.

Speaker 2 (54:33):
That's going to take a very very long time.

Speaker 1 (54:37):
I'll report we got time, We got time, right.

Speaker 2 (54:39):
I gotta make it back before next week's episode. Man,
I better build a fast ship.

Speaker 1 (54:43):
Yeah, there you go. Well, first of all, invent the
faster than light space ship, and then then we're talking.
Sounds good, all right? Well, another reminder of how much
of the mystery we still have to observe and discover
and figure out. There are still lots of mysteries out there,
even in the light that bathes us every night, every day,
all around the Earth.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
That's right, There is so much of the universe we
have not yet observed or understood, so much left to
discover for you young scientists out there, the next generation
of curious explorers.

Speaker 1 (55:12):
Or the old ones, do right.

Speaker 2 (55:15):
I'm just going to retire and let everybody else figure
it out and explain it to me at this point.

Speaker 1 (55:20):
Well, hopefully they do it in time, because come on,
we're not getting any younger. Daniel, all right, well, we
hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See you
next time.

Speaker 2 (55:34):
For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media,
where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, This, Org,
Instant and now TikTok. Thanks for listening and remember that
Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

(55:55):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.