#351: Wormholes & Quantum Breakthroughs: Unravelling Space-Time Secrets

00:00:00
Hi there, thanks for joining us on this the latest edition of Space Nuts Episode 351, which is

00:00:05
close to my heart because I used to be a Ford 351 fan back in the day when they raced around

00:00:11
bathest. On today's episode, we will be looking at experimenting with wormholes and other quantum

00:00:19
stuff that's way too hard for my brain to decipher and we'll be upgrading SLS rockets. They

00:00:26
asked Fred and I to do it and I brought a pen and that should help. Other than that, we'll be

00:00:33
answering some questions. Paul is a follow-up question from last week or is a follow-up answer

00:00:39
to Paul's question from last week about black holes. Buddy wants to know about dark energy and Dave

00:00:45
is looking at the huntsman, not the spider. My son found a big one in his bedroom the other day

00:00:52
about as big as your hand, huntsman's spider is a huge. No, this is the telescope. We'll talk about

00:00:57
that and much, much more today on Space Nuts. 15 seconds, guidance is internal. 10, 9, ignition sequence

00:01:07
5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Space Nuts. And joining me to unravel all of that stuff,

00:01:21
particularly wormholes is Professor Fred Watson, astronomer, Adla Jell-O, Fred. Hello, Andrew,

00:01:27
it's so good to see you today through this wormhole of... Yes, through the fiber optic system that is

00:01:35
the National Broadband Network. Yes, that's right. That's how we get together. I don't know what they call it

00:01:40
in other countries. They probably call it better, but anyway. Don't knock it. It's doing your case.

00:01:47
It's working very hard though. But yes, we've managed until now. I think the problem with NBN

00:01:57
services in Australia and probably other services around the world is they build them and then the

00:02:03
demand just gets too big for what they've built and they have to keep trying to expand it. And it's

00:02:07
just not that easy, which, yeah, I think create... There are limitations to how much bandwidth can fit

00:02:15
into the tube and that's always the struggle, isn't it? Indeed. Yes, what's going on in your life, Fred,

00:02:22
since I saw you last? It shouldn't take long to tell me. A lot of space, nothing.

00:02:31
A lot of putticking because of the forthcoming trip. Oh, yeah, yeah. But that's what happens.

00:02:38
And, Judy and I have got a forthcoming trip or a fifth coming trip. And we just never get the

00:02:44
weather right when we go away. Oh, they get it right. So, anyway, we were the manage. We think we

00:02:50
might not either because there's a cyclone. We're going, oh, yeah, well that'll do it. That'll do it.

00:02:57
Okay, let us get started and we're going to begin with something very complicated that you have

00:03:04
managed to decipher and solve. And you can write your paper and win a Nobel Prize. It's all about

00:03:09
experimenting with wormholes and quantum breakthroughs. It is. This is such an interesting piece of work.

00:03:20
That was pieces of work because there's quite a lot of research that's going on in this field,

00:03:25
which we haven't really talked about before. We've certainly talked about wormholes in space.

00:03:29
Well, we get questions about that. And we get questions about them because the beloved of science

00:03:33
fiction writers is a way of getting from one bit of the universe to the other without going to the

00:03:39
you know, the intervening. I used 64 miles in the year to my book Parallax.

00:03:43
I know you've been vlogging your book for the last five weeks. I thought I'd throw one in there.

00:03:49
Six weeks now, isn't it? No, no. Could be 70 if I mentioned it again. That's not Parallax. It's

00:03:57
the tyranny and enigma. Oh gosh, I got the wrong book. You're not the first person to do that. Got the

00:04:04
wrong book. Yeah, actually, there's a there's a, oh gosh, probably shouldn't go on about this, but

00:04:09
in the early history of the telescope, there's some, and I Jai Giovanni Battista Delaporte, his name

00:04:17
was he wrote a book in the middle of the 16th century. And later on when the telescope was invented,

00:04:25
somebody wrote to him and said, what do you think about this? So he said, oh, I wrote about that 20 years ago

00:04:29
in my book. And he gave the title of his book, but he actually got the wrong book. So it's not, it's

00:04:35
not just you that's not just you. Yeah. Well, you know, maybe both have got references to wormholes,

00:04:44
but the the tyranny and enigma is it's it's much more obvious. It's a very useful, I hope, in the

00:04:50
in the narrative and the plot. Oh, it was essential. Yes, it is. So, so what we've got, so wormholes are

00:05:00
a theoretical prediction of general relativity, the theory of gravity that Mr Einstein developed in

00:05:10
1915 and spent the rest of his life kind of thinking about and trying to reconcile with quantum mechanics,

00:05:17
which sort of emerged around about the same time as relativity a little bit later. But the two,

00:05:22
quantum mechanics says that weird things happen on very small scales, like things can be in two

00:05:27
places at once or in two different states at once. So two completely incompatible sets of

00:05:39
information and Einstein spent most of the rest of his life after 1915 he died in pools in 1955.

00:05:46
Think that's correct, right? And spent most of the rest of his life trying to reconcile quantum

00:05:53
physics and and relativity. And that quest still goes on, but we now have a new tool in this game,

00:06:01
which is the still in its infancy, but it is the developing world of quantum computers.

00:06:10
And quantum computers, it seems, can come to the aid of people trying to undergo this reconciliation.

00:06:20
And in particular, they are looking at the relativistic phenomenon of the potential of wormholes.

00:06:31
We've never found a wormhole, by the way, in space. Tell us through the fabric of space time,

00:06:36
which relativity predicts, but we've never we've never found one. It's actually, it's 1935 that

00:06:44
Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen described the first idea of wormholes. Now, this

00:06:55
some work that came, had its origins by in two very, very well known enable physicists back in 2013,

00:07:05
worked on by one, the Maldivesena and Leonard Suskind, who published stuff that were

00:07:11
speculated that wormholes are equivalent to quantum entanglement. Now, we've talked about

00:07:21
entanglement many times as well, where you take to entangled particles, move a long way,

00:07:29
do something to one, something happens to the other one immediately. And that's, so in a sense,

00:07:35
you can see the link there because you're talking about things that can somehow bypass our normal

00:07:41
ideas of space and time. So this has been carried on. And we now have some work

00:07:51
done in Caltech, which actually, essentially, and I'm quoting here from our good friend Fizz.org,

00:08:01
this work explores the equivalence of wormholes with quantum teleportation.

00:08:11
And so a lot of this stuff comes from Caltech. There's also a British component to this research

00:08:19
to which I'll get to in a minute. But the theoretical framework of wormholes being equivalent to quantum

00:08:27
teleportation is the foundation of this work, let's say, laid down by Caltech, that actually

00:08:38
suggests that you could do experiments in quantum computers that might be equivalent to a wormhole,

00:08:47
if I could put it that way. And so that takes us now. This was work that was published, what I've just

00:08:54
described was published back in November last year. But there has been some more work produced

00:09:00
because of quantum, basically a quantum, I don't know what you call it, it's an experimental setup

00:09:08
has been carried out at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom in their,

00:09:16
they're in the quantum engineering technology labs. It's extraordinary, it's an extraordinary world

00:09:23
that the world of quantum computing, because there's so much happening. And it, you know, it clearly

00:09:29
impacts on our world of the big stuff in the universe when you start thinking about the equivalence of

00:09:39
pentanglement, sorry, let me get it right, entanglement and wormholes. And so the, I'm going to go back to

00:09:48
another Fist.org article. And once again, you can find these on the Fist.org website, which always

00:09:55
gives references to the original papers. I have to say I've looked several times at this stuff and

00:10:02
I'm not still not sure that I understand it, but the University of Bristol has actually,

00:10:09
although one of the physicists working there, Hattim Sally, who's an honorary research fellow at

00:10:15
that quantum engineering technology lab, has talked about counterportation. And it's a way of

00:10:25
building a quantum computer that essentially creates a wormhole that will actually bridge base.

00:10:34
So the, this is a remarkable stuff. This thing's basically a simulation of a wormhole

00:10:45
on a, on a, on a computer. That has been done before, but this takes you to step further,

00:10:54
because they are working to actually demonstrate that you can, within a quantum computer,

00:11:01
you can bypass space and time. In other words, you simulate a wormhole. And what they're saying about

00:11:08
this is not that it's ever going to take us to different bits of the universe because this is all

00:11:13
happening inside a computer. But what it might well do is, is actually allow us to on pick the,

00:11:24
that, that probably, and I think I mentioned this in last week's show, that the underlying reality

00:11:30
that is something more basic than quantum physics or, or general relativity, there, there is

00:11:38
a, there's some nice quotes, if I may, from, from Dr. Hattim, who actually is Dr. Sally,

00:11:48
Hattim Sally is his name, he says, not much. No, I'm, I'm looking for the bit I want to read.

00:11:59
Okay, this work, sorry, no, the goal in the near future, this is a bit of a tragedy, sorry, I'm

00:12:08
lifting all through the article, the goal in the near future is to physically build such a wormhole

00:12:14
in the lab, which can then be used as a test bed for rival physical theories, even ones of quantum

00:12:20
gravity. So the work is, we'll be in the spirit of the multibillion ventures that exist to witness

00:12:27
new physical phenomena like the laser into ferrolytic ground gravitational wave observatory,

00:12:32
LIGO, and the European organization for nuclear research, that's certain, with the large

00:12:37
Hadron collider, but the diffraction of the resources, in other words, we're doing it on the cheap,

00:12:42
a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. Our hope is to ultimately provide remote access to local

00:12:47
wormholes for physicists, physics hobbies and enthusiasts. Thank you very much. A coffee time?

00:12:54
Yes, it's coffee time, and to explore fundamental questions about the universe, including,

00:13:00
here we go, the existence of high dimensions. So it's all about really poking into this hidden

00:13:06
world that we think unifies relativity and quantum physics, and about which, at the moment, we know

00:13:13
very little. It's fascinating science, because we've talked in the past about trying to reach

00:13:19
the speed of light to get somewhere in space faster than we're capable of now, but the energy required

00:13:26
makes that impossible. But if we were to perfect this kind of science and do it on a large scale,

00:13:36
do you foresee a day where we might be able to create wormholes to move across vast distances

00:13:43
in space instantly, like they do in science fiction? No. Okay, good answer. And the other thing,

00:13:52
the other thing I found interesting in this article was how they describe Google's involvement in

00:13:59
this. Google is heavily involved in quantum computer research. Now, the reason

00:14:06
I said no, Andrew, is that it may be the wrong answer. If you can do it with bits of information,

00:14:15
which is really what this is all about. It's about qubits, which are the information bits in a quantum

00:14:22
computer. It's about sending them from one place to another, because information is in many ways,

00:14:31
it is reality. And in fact, some physicists actually think that information really underlies it.

00:14:40
When we start really digging into the unifying links between relativity and quantum physics,

00:14:46
we might find that information is actually the common ground. So it's one thing to send qubits

00:14:52
through a wormhole. It's quite another to send a spacecraft full of people through one,

00:14:58
which certainly in rather tovistic terms needs you to walk space time to such an extent that you

00:15:05
need almost the total energy budget of the universe to do it. So still the same problem.

00:15:10
Yeah, it's the same problem. That's right. But what is it all this bit?

00:15:14
I was going to say the other problem is that it based on what I've read briefly,

00:15:19
what comes out the other end is a duplicate of what went in. So it's,

00:15:25
you send people through a wormhole in space, it's not going to be them coming out the other end,

00:15:28
it'll be their carbon copies. Yes, not quite as good either.

00:15:32
That's it will be a carbon copy, but I think in the process the original gets destroyed.

00:15:37
Yes, that's right. That's what I read. Yeah. So probably not a good plan.

00:15:41
No, that's right. No, I think information is fine. Humans maybe don't so fine.

00:15:48
No, definitely not. Yes, if you'd like to read up on that story,

00:15:52
most certainly go to the fiz.org website, PHYS. This is Space Nuts Andrew Duncley here with

00:16:00
Professor Fred Watson. Well, hi everybody. It's Steve from Down Under here.

00:16:05
I wanted to let you know that today's episode of Space Nuts is brought to you by Curiosity Stream,

00:16:11
the streaming service perfect for people who want to know more. With exclusive award-winning films

00:16:16
and shows Curiosity Stream has the deepest collection of top quality documentaries from around the

00:16:22
world. Now, Andrew and I can tell you that in our household growing up,

00:16:25
Mum and Dad didn't care what we were watching on TV, so long as we were watching documentaries,

00:16:32
and I wish we had Curiosity Stream back then. Now, whether you're interested in science,

00:16:36
history, nature, technology, travel or more, Curiosity Stream has something for you.

00:16:42
And with new content added every week, you'll never run out of things to watch.

00:16:46
It's a big favourite in our household, and I know it will be in yours too.

00:16:50
Curiosity Stream is available on all your favourite streaming devices, including

00:16:55
Roku, Xbox, Smart TVs, Apple TV, Amazon Fire and more. Plus, you can watch the it on the web

00:17:02
and on all your mobile devices, best of all, it's available worldwide,

00:17:06
so you can explore the world's top documentaries no matter where you are. So why wait?

00:17:11
Go to CuriosityStream.com/SpaceNuts for unlimited access to the world's top documentaries and

00:17:18
non-fiction series. And for our fans here at SpaceNuts, use the promo code SpaceNuts

00:17:24
and save 25% of your subscription, of course. There is really something for everyone on Curiosity Stream.

00:17:30
So, click the link in the show notes or go to CuriosityStream.com/SpaceNuts and save 25% right now.

00:17:39
Enjoy the world's best documentaries, just like Andrew and I did growing up with Curiosity Stream

00:17:45
these days. And now it's back to Andrew and Fred with SpaceNuts.

00:17:49
You're listening to SpaceNuts, the podcast about astronomy and space science with Andrew

00:17:59
Donkley and Professor Fred Watzis. It's good that we had a little NASA link there because

00:18:05
we are going to now talk about one of the most amazing pieces of hardware that NASA has

00:18:11
developed and that is the Space Launch System, the SLS Rockets, which have been around for a while,

00:18:18
but they're still proving to be incredible workhorses. And now they're looking at an upgrade.

00:18:24
That's right. So it's the rocket motors themselves that we're talking about here.

00:18:29
We discussed this last year in November when Artemis I was being launched on the first

00:18:41
flight of the new SLS, the Space Launch System, NASA's SLS System. It's still the world's most

00:18:49
powerful rocket. It might not be for long, but it still is. And so the engines of the Space Launch

00:18:57
Systems Corps, if you remember, it's got a sort of standard rocket body core, but two huge boosters

00:19:05
bolted on the sides. And those boosters are effectively the, they're derived from the boosters that

00:19:14
used to be used with the Space Shuttle. They're chemical solid fuel rockets. You like the fuse

00:19:21
and off it goes. And in fact, on the launch, they provide, together they provide something like

00:19:29
80%. No, something like 75% of the thrust. The rest of it comes from these RS-25 engines,

00:19:40
which were developed for the Space Shuttle. These engines were first certified in 1979, Andrew.

00:19:48
So this is-- Wow. Excuse me, stuff that goes back a long way. Yes. Followed two years later by

00:19:54
the first Space Shuttle launch, which used them. So they are really quite incredible machines, half a

00:20:03
million pounds of thrust each. If I am reading my figures correctly, that's right. So half a million

00:20:12
pounds of, of maximum thrust each. And they are, of course, they're controllable, they're throttleable.

00:20:19
So you can, you can actually, once you've thrown off the boosters, which just, you like them,

00:20:24
and they just go, you can control what the spacecraft is doing. There were three of them in each

00:20:30
Space Shuttle. There are four of them on each Space Launch System core. There's some really

00:20:40
quite extraordinary facts. NASA have produced, as they do so well, some fact sheets about these engines.

00:20:53
So 135 launches in the, in the 30 years of Space Shuttle launches, a lot of adaptation work that's

00:21:02
gone on. And they've started off the space, sorry, the SLS, the Space Launch System, with 16 of

00:21:11
these RS-25 engines. So that would be enough for launches. Because unlike the Space Shuttle, which

00:21:19
came back to Earth at the end of every flight, the SLS gets dumped in the, in the Atlantic. So it

00:21:25
doesn't come back. But now what's happening is back in, I think, 2017, the company that built them,

00:21:33
which is Rocket Dine, effectively. It's actually Air-Ejet Rocket Dine now. They used to be

00:21:42
just Rocket Dine. Air-Ejet Rocket Dine, they started up again to build their new engines back in 2017,

00:21:50
and they've got a contract now to build 18 of them. So these engines are actually the new

00:21:57
shiny version of the RS-25 with the thrust upgraded, 111 percent more than it originally was in 1979.

00:22:06
Sorry, yes, but 10 percent, sorry, 11 percent more. It's quite an amazing thing. One fact that I

00:22:14
loved about these engines, Andrew, is that the gases that are coming out of the exhaust when it's

00:22:20
full thrust are traveling at 13 times the speed of sound. Wow, which is why you get that,

00:22:27
you know, it's a sonic boom that you're getting when you stand and watch a launch and sort of feel

00:22:33
the vibration, which I've never done. But yeah, quite extraordinary. I love the way they crackle

00:22:40
these engines. Yeah, they do, don't they? And that might be that might be it. That might be the

00:22:46
sonic boom's basically doing exactly those. I guess we're going to see these things in action

00:22:55
for some time to come. They recently announced the crew for the out of transmission that's going to

00:23:01
go around the moon with humans in it. Yep. And there's a lot of milestones being met there.

00:23:09
But these engines are just going to keep on keeping on until they can come up with something

00:23:14
better. And I guess time will be a factor in that. But they're just so powerful. Do we do we at this

00:23:22
stage need anything better, especially given these are being upgraded? So those are depends

00:23:31
what we're going to send up there. If we're going to need to put heavier payloads into space and

00:23:35
things like that, if we build a, if we got to build into stellar spacecraft, we'll probably need

00:23:40
some heavy lifting to be done. That's correct. We will.

00:23:46
So it kind of highlights the the difference in philosophy. If you think about the

00:23:59
space X is ventures in this game, the Starship Heavy, which is very near to having test launches.

00:24:07
And that works on the same philosophy as they've, as space X has used for their Falcon

00:24:15
rockets where you have a relatively small number of engines. If I remember rightly, they're the

00:24:21
Raptor engines. I think I'm right in saying that. You have smaller engines, but you put lots of them

00:24:27
in. So I can't remember how many rocket motors are Falcon 9 has. It may even be 9. It's quite a lot,

00:24:36
but it's many, many more in the in the Starship. You know, it's probably 20 or 30 of these things

00:24:43
all firing together. Yeah. Whereas the philosophy that's been adopted by NASA is, and it actually

00:24:51
highlights another conscious, really, I get to it in a minute, but it's to use bigger engines, which are

00:24:57
probably much more high tech. These are, I think, if I remember rightly, the, I think they're called

00:25:06
staged combustion engines. They're a particular type, which actually gives them this extraordinary power.

00:25:16
And they, you know, each one of these engines is about the size of two cars, one pile,

00:25:21
on top of the other. They're huge. They're massive. And you've got four of them on the space shuttle.

00:25:27
And so, sorry, on the space launch system. So, yeah, it's a different philosophy. What I was going to

00:25:32
say was it highlights back to the 1960s, Andrew, when, yes, Saturn V had engines, which were very

00:25:41
similar to these, and five of them on the first stage. Yeah. I stood under one at that, that

00:25:50
can have a, that must be quite, oh, it's, I think that's rough. You know, you see it on TV and you

00:25:55
think that is enormous. And then you go and, and you know, TV makes things look bigger. Yes.

00:26:00
The Saturn V is an exception. It's even bigger. When you see it, you go, I was going to swear,

00:26:09
holy cow. Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah. It is, it is staggeringly huge. They've got it hanging

00:26:15
from the roof in a Saturn V exhibition center, and NASA. And it fills the whole place up. And they've

00:26:23
got the stages broken up. So you start, I started at the back and moved forward, but you could stand

00:26:30
inside one of those exhausts. And you wouldn't, you still wouldn't be able to reach up and touch the top.

00:26:37
It's fungus. Yeah. Very, very exciting to have been able to do that a lot of

00:26:43
years ago. And how, but yeah, if you're ever at Round Cape Canaveral Florida, do it. You've got to

00:26:49
do it. It's just so brilliant. Hopefully I'll be doing it next year, because we're only, we're

00:26:55
in the tour there. Oh, exciting. Yes. But what I was going to say, so the five big engines of the

00:27:02
Saturn V, contrast with the Soviet Union's equivalent at that time, which you and I spoke about before,

00:27:09
because they were building their own version of a Saturn V quite different in shape and structure.

00:27:15
That was the N1, it was called the Soviet Union's N1 rocket, which had I think 32

00:27:21
smaller rocket motors. Yeah. And finally, didn't they blow up a lot? They'd never managed to get one

00:27:29
to fly successfully. And it certainly never, nobody ever got him one. I think there were four test launches

00:27:35
and they were all, none of them really succeeded. And one of the problems I think that they found was,

00:27:40
you know, when you've got lots and lots of smaller engines, you've got the sort of interplay of

00:27:50
vibrations between them. It's not just the, you know, the vibration of one engine or a small number

00:27:56
of engines shuddering through the rocket. It's all these things competing with one another in

00:28:02
vibrations. And if you get resonances, you know, things where vibrations build up,

00:28:06
and then disturbance. Exactly. That's right. The sort of the same thing that happens with sound.

00:28:11
To Koma Rapids Bridge. Yes. Exactly. And harmonic disturbance. Yeah. That's right. So that's the sort

00:28:18
of thing that would destroy a rocket. And maybe one reason is one reason why the Soviet

00:28:24
unions and one was never successful. Well, that was also the demise of the

00:28:29
comet aircraft. I think it was the comet passenger plane, which threatened bowing for many years

00:28:39
until they had a few inexplicable crashes. It turned out to be a metal fatigue caused by

00:28:46
those vibrations. No, it was, it was, it was, no, it was the square windows square windows.

00:28:54
I remember, I remember all this really well. Wow. So, it's a doggo about it. Yeah. Well, I saw it.

00:29:00
Wow. Yeah. So, you're absolutely right. It was the world's first turbojet aircraft, a passenger

00:29:08
aircraft. And did threatened to give Boeing a wrong for its money. The word design differences,

00:29:16
the comet had four engines, which were partially built into the wings. And of course,

00:29:22
Boeing went the other way, had them slung under the wings, which turns out to be a much, much better idea

00:29:27
or an old kind of different counts. But what, what essentially scuppered the comet, they had,

00:29:33
I think, three, as you may be four accidents, where the aircraft was lost. It was traced to be due

00:29:41
to sudden decompression of the fuselage, right? And it was because of metal fatigue in the corners

00:29:47
of the square windows. Yeah. The windows were square. And you metal fatigue came into

00:29:51
it somewhere. Yeah. So, you were right there. I mean, it may be vibration had an impact, but it was,

00:29:56
it was the fact that the square corners of these windows were a critical point of failure. And

00:30:03
that's where the metal fatigue sat in. And in fact, it led to rapid depressurization and many,

00:30:10
many lives were lost. And of course, it scuppered the British aircraft industry. They were built by

00:30:15
the Havilland, which was one of many, many British aviation companies post-war, all of which wound up

00:30:25
being part of British aerospace. And which is now, you know, nothing like Boeing in terms of scale.

00:30:31
Well, that explains why all aircraft windows are essentially round now. They're all round corners.

00:30:38
That's right. Absolutely right. And to answer one final point, there are 27 engines on the Famicom Heavy.

00:30:46
There you go. Okay. That wasn't far off. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, but that's really interesting. But

00:30:52
quite exciting to watch the future of rockets and rocket science with the RS-25s continued development.

00:31:03
This is Space Nuts Andrew Duncan here with Professor Fred Watson.

00:31:07
Space Nuts. Okay, Fred, let's go to our Q&A section. And we've got a follow-up from last week.

00:31:18
Paul messaged us. Paul's from Melbourne, Victoria. I'll repeat his question because you've

00:31:25
done a bit of research on this. There's been talk recently about the energy that causes the

00:31:29
universe to expand coming from black holes. If this is so, then wouldn't we see the time space around

00:31:36
or near a black hole expanding at a faster rate than that further away from black holes, for example,

00:31:42
between galaxies or that in between in spaces between filaments of the cosmic web? Wouldn't the

00:31:50
filaments of the cosmic web be expanding faster? And we tried to answer, but we thought we thought

00:31:58
it deserved a little bit more homework. Yeah, I couldn't remember the the the link that had been made

00:32:06
between black holes and dark energy. Yeah. And what it is and there's a very nice article on space.com

00:32:13
entitled Black holes, maybe the source of mysterious dark energy by Stephanie Woldek.

00:32:22
And it kind of explains where this research is going, but unless you sort of into the mathematics

00:32:32
of the original research, you probably still feel like as I do, there are questions remaining. So,

00:32:42
by the way, this research was published in the astrophysical journal letters on February 15th.

00:32:50
I think you mentioned last week when we were talking about it, Andrew. So the research in question

00:32:58
has looked at the mass of supermassive black holes through the history of the universe. So,

00:33:07
remember that we think all galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center. Yep.

00:33:14
You can by using the trick of look back time, you can investigate these black holes as you look backwards

00:33:22
in time. And it turns out and this was the work is actually led by the university scientists at the

00:33:29
university of Hawaii at Manoa in Oulu. It's they've they've looked back over time. And what they found

00:33:39
is that the black holes, sort of early in the universe, they are more massive than they ought to be

00:33:54
if all they're doing is a creating stars. That's how we think black supermassive black holes grow

00:34:01
by gobbling up stars and another dayberry gas stars that matter probably. That makes them acquire

00:34:10
mass. But the this imbalance in the mass of black holes that suggests that they're more

00:34:20
massive than they should be if all they're doing is is chewing up matter has led these

00:34:27
scientists to believe that the the sort of missing, if I can put it this way, the missing mass in the

00:34:37
black holes is actually dark energy. So let me read as I often do a quote from one of the authors of

00:34:46
this study and and actually that that's space.com page that I mentioned has got a couple of very

00:34:52
nice videos about about this stuff. But Duncan Farah who's at the university of Hawaii he says

00:35:00
we're really saying two things at once that is evidence that the typical black hole solutions

00:35:08
and by that means that what the theory of relativity tells you will work for you on a long long

00:35:15
time scale and we have the first proposed astrophysical source for dark energy. In other words

00:35:23
they think that black holes have something to do with dark energy. Now I think what I said a few

00:35:31
minutes ago I think I said it the wrong way around because I think I said the younger galaxies have

00:35:40
more than they should have but it's actually the other way around it's the older galaxies.

00:35:44
They're bigger than they should be right if all they've got is stars that they're gobbling up

00:35:51
and so now the the link between that they're sort of kind of dark energy component within black holes

00:36:01
and the dark energy in the universe is the one that I am still struggling with

00:36:07
because I'm not actually sure how you get from one to the other and the reason is the black

00:36:14
holes are discrete objects there are objects in space dark energy as according to our best

00:36:21
understanding is the same everywhere it's not in blobs and that was the thrust I think of Paul's

00:36:27
question. You know why don't we see distortion of space around black holes where we do but why

00:36:33
don't we see more than we should with this dark energy if dark energy is something to do with

00:36:39
black holes and I don't really see the link I think it comes out in the mathematics and I probably

00:36:46
ought to have another look at that paper which is right in front of me now and it is entitled

00:36:56
observational evidence for cosmological coupling of black holes and its implication for

00:37:02
astrophysical source of dark energy right and it's got a lot of big words in it and some big

00:37:12
equations actually it's not too bad for equations it's not as bad as I remembered

00:37:17
yeah so interesting paper I will read it again it's the sort of thing you really have to dedicate a day

00:37:25
to to sit down there's a large list of authors don't confire is the lead author from the university

00:37:32
for why but yeah if you have a mathematical bent addressing now I'll listen to it I know you don't

00:37:40
and true but that's a paper's the read of a look so the the basic answer to Paul's inquiry is that

00:37:48
dark energy is even throughout the universe therefore the effects he's describing wouldn't occur

00:37:56
that's correct okay that's a beautiful summary I wish I said that did that without an equation

00:38:03
for us there is an equation that links all this together that's the equals mc squared because

00:38:10
of course that tells you the energy and muscle equivalent yeah yeah thank you Paul again and

00:38:16
I'm glad we could follow that up and fill in some of the blanks let's now go to Oregon it's our good

00:38:24
friend buddy hello space miss buddy from Ontario Oregon hey uh since they think dark energy is

00:38:30
coming from black holes why aren't they losing their mass if they're losing their energy is being

00:38:36
redistributed out into the universe are they I don't get it could that possibly be just let's

00:38:43
push in our solar system back our galaxy back together keeping it from flying apart is the

00:38:48
illusion energy in the local area and it's being redistributed over the entire universe and so we're

00:38:54
only getting a little piece of that energy back in our piece of the universe so it's kind of pushing in

00:38:59
just thought guys hopefully Fred can get my head straight on this one give him a good work

00:39:06
it kind of relates to Paul's question it's yeah yeah it does I just thought it was a good question

00:39:15
because it is the one that's got a lot of people scratching their heads at the moment me included

00:39:20
yeah so no but what buddy says is exactly right um but the in fact the observation is the opposite

00:39:31
of what he said he said well they're losing mass the observation is that they're they're you know

00:39:36
they're fatter than they ought to be they've got more mass which is being interpreted as dark energy

00:39:43
but it's the trick of getting that stuff out of the black hole and into the wider universe that is

00:39:51
the missing link in my understanding of this issue so buddy you and Paul together are challenge

00:39:57
you know raising questions that are basically the same as the ones I've got I will once again

00:40:02
have a look at this paper in the astrophysical journal letters and if I can see the breakthrough

00:40:08
I'll I'll I'll we'll raise it again because it is such an interesting topic oh he's you know especially

00:40:14
if he does solve the problem and I'm sure there must be other scientists working on this

00:40:22
that paper was published back in February I'm not sufficiently close to the gossip

00:40:27
within the cosmology community to know what the story is but in fact my one of my links into

00:40:37
that world is currently on sabbatically in Oxford so I can't ask him very easily so yes we'll we we

00:40:46
will see as time goes on and no doubt this will crop up again in space now so why is this based

00:40:51
the best that can do thanks again buddy and Paul for your questions yes and I suppose when you're

00:40:58
talking about relatively new science it's always going to spawn questions and at the moment we

00:41:03
don't have an absolute definitive answer we're still trying to figure it out and that's where

00:41:11
you know people send us questions and say well you know what's a white hole well we don't know

00:41:17
we've never seen one don't even know if there exists so it's the same with dark energy dark matter

00:41:23
we know they exist we don't know very much at all about dark energy we've got a bit more of an

00:41:28
idea about dark matter but again they are still puzzles to to be solved I would venture to say

00:41:35
thank you buddy thank you Paul sorry go on no I'm just I'm reading through the abstract of that paper

00:41:41
again yeah so there's a crucial sentence in here which says the continuity equation then requires

00:41:51
that black holes contribute cosmology as a vacuum energy so there you go all right I understood that

00:42:01
yeah it's yes yeah fair enough thanks buddy thanks Paul one final question before we wrap up this episode

00:42:09
comes from Dave in Colorado high Andrew and Fred I found your podcast about a year ago and I've

00:42:15
gone back and listened to every episode are you still married I love the podcast and can't wait

00:42:23
for the next one to come out each week the question I have is about the Huntsman telescope

00:42:27
at Siding Springs Observatory I was watching an Instagram short about it and I saw Professor Fred's name

00:42:33
on a plaque on the outside of the dome it resides in I was wondering if you could explain what science

00:42:39
the telescope is doing since it's such a unique telescope or a group of telescopes technically I've

00:42:46
tried to find out what it does and can't seem to find out much about it thanks for your work thanks

00:42:52
for the work you do and keep this podcast going and growing Dave it's called the Huntsman telescope

00:42:59
because it doesn't do very much but it's really good at killing Huntsman spiders yeah probably

00:43:05
bring them over they had with it if you do that yeah you would it's quite heavy so it's so it is

00:43:10
unique Dave's right it's a telescope that uses a 10 commercially available telephoto lenses they're

00:43:20
they're very high-end telephoto lenses their Canon lenses made for principally for sports photography

00:43:29
so you know when you when you watch a football game or something like that see these guys with

00:43:33
these long lenses on sometimes on tripods sitting by the sitting by the the ground they're the ones

00:43:40
that they're using that kind of lens and but it turns out this is work that was probably kicked off

00:43:48
I think by a colleague of mine at McQuarrie University here in Sydney Dr. Lee Spittler in fact I think

00:43:54
he's I think he's associate Professor Lee Spittler and I'll show him a bright thing which is very

00:43:59
well deserved they they have used these lenses to oh well the the thing that makes these lenses special

00:44:11
is that they've got very low scattering characteristics in other words you send light through a normal

00:44:17
mirror lens which is probably what you'd want to use and you got not just the reflection but you

00:44:23
get light scattering and what that does is if you form an image on a very sensitive electronic

00:44:28
detector you spreading scattered light all over the image and that means that the very faintest

00:44:35
objects that you might want to look at including sort of wispy tendrils of stars in distant galaxies

00:44:41
yeah they're swamped by the scattered light from the brighter bits of those distant galaxies so what

00:44:47
you want is a you know a lens that will have very minimal scattering characteristics in fact it the

00:44:57
I know that Lee took his idea for this telescope from something I think in the US called a dragonfly

00:45:02
telephoto array and Huntsman is a telephoto array it uses ten of these lenses and the the sorts of

00:45:10
research that it's involved with is stuff that needs to you to look at very faint extended objects

00:45:17
and by an extended object I mean something different from a point source now Andrew you might

00:45:24
be surprised as I was decades and decades ago to know that the sensitivity of a telescope to an

00:45:33
extended object something like a nebula rather than a point source doesn't depend on the dimer

00:45:39
of the telescope it's actually a function of the focal ratio which is something well known to

00:45:45
photographers the faster the focal ratio in other words the smaller the f number if I can put it

00:45:50
that way yeah the more sensitive you are to extended objects it doesn't matter how big your lenses

00:45:56
which is kind of counterintuitive but that of course explains why astrophotographers your hobby

00:46:03
astrophotographers these days can produce images of the universe that rival the ones David

00:46:08
Maling was producing with the Anglo-Strilean telescope 30 years ago it's because of the focal ratio

00:46:14
dependence of extended objects it's a fabulous stuff and it's great science so anything so

00:46:20
huntsman is really good but things where you've got very faint extended objects and I'm reading now

00:46:25
from the huntsman website the sorts of questions that it will help to answer about galaxy formation

00:46:35
and evolution including star disk formation galaxy growth through the coming together of satellite

00:46:41
galaxies understanding gas turbulence in the galactic interstellar medium understanding the

00:46:48
relationship between star gas assembly and cold neutral hydrogen gas assembly and it's also got

00:46:56
a role in long period in looking for exoplanets as well the number of long period exoplanets around

00:47:03
test stellar systems is another of their declared interests it's a great telescope and I was very

00:47:10
able to be asked to open it last year that hence the plaque Dave hence the plaque yeah thank you Dave

00:47:17
and I hope that helps you understand a bit more about what the huntsman's guy to do the only

00:47:23
major inaccuracy you said it had Ted cameras 10 lenses 10 yes it's yeah a huntsman spider only has

00:47:32
eight eyes it does I know this this one has 10 eyes so it's a super huntsman it's a super huntsman and

00:47:39
one of it's one of its other advantages that by strapping on more lenses you can make it into a super

00:47:44
duper huntsman yeah and I think there are plans of foot to try and increase the number but yes it's

00:47:49
10 lenses at the moment awesome thank you Dave thank you everyone who's sending questions keep them

00:47:54
coming because we love to hear from you you can do that via our website space nads podcast dot com

00:47:59
or space nads dot i o that's for younger people and just click on the links there's a link called AMA

00:48:07
we can send audio and text questions or just hit the tab on the right hand side of the home page

00:48:12
send us your voice message you've got a device with a microphone that's all you need tell us who you

00:48:16
are where you're from and ask your question and we will do our best to put it in there we get a lot

00:48:20
of questions that are almost the same so we tend to not run them all but well we did today with

00:48:27
Paul and buddy they were basically talking about the same thing but they fit it in with the discussion

00:48:32
but yeah please send us your questions by all means and if you thought about it and never got

00:48:37
around to it well yeah we'd love to hear from you especially if you're a newbie we haven't had

00:48:41
too many newbies lately but we get them occasionally and that's nice we'd love to hear from everybody

00:48:48
all over the world and while you're on the website don't forget to check out the shop because Fred's

00:48:54
got books in there which I'm not gonna mention at all and this the astronomy daily newsletter and if

00:49:04
you want to find out about how to support space nuts there's a little little link there as well if

00:49:08
you're interested okay Fred that wraps it up for another week thank you so very much it's always

00:49:14
a pleasure Andrew and we'll talk a danceoo we will indeed professor Fred what's an astronomer at

00:49:20
large and back to you in the studio yep the usual response and from me Andrew thank you for your

00:49:27
company catch you on the very next episode of space nuts bye bye

00:49:31
thanks you'll be this to the space nuts podcast available at apple podcasts google podcasts spotify i hat

00:49:42
radio or your favorite podcast player you can also stream on demand at bites.com this has been another

00:49:49
quantity podcast production from sites.com

00:49:53
[BLANK_AUDIO]