#410: Stellar Puzzles & Galactic Gold: Space Nuts Unpacks the Universe's Riddles

Hi there, Thanks for joining us on another edition of Space Nuts our Q and a edition. I'm Andrew Dunkley, your host, Great Behavior Company, and on this particular episode, we're going to be looking at black holes. Shocker. We never get black hole questions, but this one's pretty involved and lots of sort of moving parts to this question, so it might take a little bit of unraveling. We also have a question about supernova and the elements they create. Why is it so? How is it so? The Fermi paradox has been brought up, and we're going to talk time travel and make Nito spheres. All coming up on this episode of Space Nuts fifteen in Channel ten nine ignition sequence Space Nuts or three two more review on Space Nurse as when I reported Neil Goods and clearing his voice to get things going. With this addition is Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large. Hello, Fred, I should learn whether the mute button is shouldn't I for that sort of thing? You know? Even enough, if I've got a mute button, hang on, I think I have no I have to oppress it. We might not get your back. Yeah, I'm not game. I'm not game. That's the problem with digital technology. Hey, it's been since I saw you last five seconds ago. Your work very well, thank you still still had in the clouds because of our North American tour of all the spacy things you could think of in North America. Yes, a lot of spacey things there, and now there's plenty of them all over the world these days. It's yeah, that's true, this big growth industry, we've got this, Yes, very true. Yeah, we've got some questions to try and answer, and I use the word try loosely. Let's get stuck into the first one. Now, this is a pretty involved question, so we'll be back in twenty minutes. But this comes from Jose. Hello, fellow space nutters. Jose here from California in the United States. I love your guys' podcast and listen to it every day at work. I know, I got to get a life, sorry, but I was listening to an episode one day where you guys were talking about possibly or a theory that you guys were talking about where possibly universes could exist inside black holes, and it got me thinking that, you know, this would have explained a lot of the mysteries of the universe, for example, the Big Bang, The Big Bang could have just been in a supernova explosion from a star in an alternate universe which gave existence to our universe. And I was also thinking that as a black hole, I guess as the event horizon grows, that is actually our universe expanding. And the reason nothing can escape a black hole is because you would have to be traveling faster than light, which is not possible unless you're you know, the expansion of space. I guess that travels faster than the speed of light, and the material that gets sucked into a black hole, that all gets converted into dark energy, which is the energy that we can't see, or I guess the expansion of the universe that we could see. But you know, I just I was just thinking about all this and I was completely sober, mind you connds and doing anything. But you know, I know there's all speculative. I trying to get your guys' point of view on this. Do you guys see this as possible, impossible, feasible, or you know, I'm just completely crazy, but also wanted to get your guys's opinions on what you guys believe is beyond the event horizon of a black hole. You know, just speaking without any proof of anything, just ideas. What you guys believe. Do you guys believe you know there's a white hole at the other side? Do you guys think there's nothing? Maybe you just you know, you just die if you go inside a black hole. I don't know, but let me know you guys think. I'd love to hear your guys answers. Keep up the great work and I will be listening to you guys NonStop. Go spaceness. Oh that's lovely. I can't help it. I've got to do it. The answer is no, why howse I of course good? And help myself dreadful. There were lots of bits and pieces in that one, Fred, I've sort of written down some notes. Big Bang created by a supernova, which created our universe. I venture to say that's probably yeah. I think that theory has been put forward before. But it was the Big Bang caused by a supernova, which means there had to be a preceding universe before ours. I imagine, what do you think? I'm so I'm thinking that I can tell I can tell you thinking what has described sounds a lot like some of Roger Penrose's ideas. Nobel Laureates who got his basically got his Nobel Prize for proving that black holes can exist. So he's, you know, he's well and truly in tune with this, but also has a theory of a kind of cyclic universe which does involve the Big Bang effectively coming from a black hole. Now, I'm just looking online there to see if I could find some, you know, pithy words from from Penrose that talk about this. I do remember some years ago I ventured into his book on this topic, the kind of multiple black hole universe theory, which is the same shape as a brick andrew. It's very very thick book, indeed, and he's in two halves. The first half is all the mathematics you need to understand. The second half. Yeah, so it left me not exactly really, but I you know, I'm always confronted by hard mathematics. It nearly cost me my degree back all those decades ago university the So, I yes, I didn't plow into it very deeply. But Penrose is I think what Jose is talking about and very similar to some of Penrose's ideas. He is, it has to be said, a maverick in his view of this kind of cosmology. His his work is I would say, viewed with certainly his work on the multiple universe and the idea that that you know, big bangs spawn universe, sorry, black hole spawned big bangs. I have to say that that is at the the sort of more speculous event of the way astronomers view our understanding of the universe. We really don't have any direct evidence of there being any other universes, and in the in the Penro theory, and I suspect in the ideas that Jose is putting forward there what you end up with is multiple universes because you're inside a black hole, and black holes are ten a penny, you know, the commonplace, as we know. So he asked what our view of this is, and mine is, uh, it's as I am on many things, open minded, but with you know, recognizing that mainstream cosmology does not see us as being within a black hole that was spawned in some sort of higher dimensional space or in some kind of multiverse scenario. So I, yeah, follow this with interest. I probably should have read up a little bit more on Penro's theory than I did, but I, I, you know, encourage chose to go online and check out what Roger Penro's model of the universes. There will be fairly easily digestible versions of it online. Don't go and buy the brick that. Yeah, you know it takes you twelve years to read because you spend the first six trying to understand the mathematics. I think that indeed much. What about the dark energy theory as to where that comes from? You and black holes creating dark energy? Yeah, well, feeling I heard some theory or some study that came out that said there's some relationship. Apparently we actually covered it on Space NOTTS. Yes, so, and once again, that is an interesting idea that I can't remember the details. It's kind of about the equation of state and things of that sort. But it was suggesting that black holes are the source of dark energy and the mechanism don't remember. But let me just put one other issue into into the you know, the conversation about this, because it looks as though with really very recent studies of the geometry of the universe, looking back over millions of years as we can do, that maybe the dark energy is not behaving in the way that we thought it was. In fact, we covered this as well on space dots, and that is this is to do with the equation of state that the number is not you know, it was thought to be minus one, which means that the dark energy is what we call the cosmological constant. It's constant throughout the history of the universe. So every space gets bigger, so does the dark energy. But that relationship between the volume of space and the amount of dark energy is constant throughout throughout the history of the universe. It may well be that that's not true because the new evidence point to it not me and that might once again feedback into theories like the one that jose is talking about, where you where you postulate the idea of a black hole being the or the universe being within a black hole. My issue with that is where does it all come from? You know? Yeah, if you've got stuff being sucked into a black hole from outside the universe, where's it coming from? And that naturally leads you to ideas of multiverses, which, as I said, are definitely not mainstream at the moment, although people are open to them, including indeed the astronomer Royal in the UK, who I think kind the term multiverse quite some time. Yeah. Yeah, and his final point beyond what's beyond the event horizon could be a white hole maybe. I mean, you know what, That's what I'm just saying. In order to have something. If the whole universe is is within an event horizon, you've gotta have some thing beyond it. Yeah, And that leads you into multiverse theory. White tools might Yes, a gigantick white tool might be another kind of universe that doesn't have dark energy in it. Great thinking, because Ela, you're thinking very nicely put in your in your recording. Thank you, jose lovely to hear from you. We've got a question from Alan. I've been reading about the gigantic super nova detected by the James Webb Space Telescope and how it has cast doubt, amongst other things, as to whether supernovae are always or at all, the creators of heavy metal elements like gold. This has revived a long standing question I've had in relation to gold and other elements found in distinct, extracable concentrations on Earth. How did such concentrations form out of the totally chaotic molecule soup of a supernova? Nice question, Yeah, it was beautifully written to be honest, just covering the first bit of that. Yes, you know, we now think that gold might be produced by neutron star collisions as well what are called killer overs, things that are a bit less than super and overs. So gold. So, but the bottom line either way, whether it's super and ova or neutron star collisions, you've still got exactly as Alan says, this chaotic distribution of these elements throughout space. When when a super and over explodes, you've got them being created in a mishmash with lots of other elements. And so the way we find them in concentrations is as we do on Earth. We find gold in you know, not just at one atism at a time, but we find it nuggets at the time sometimes or in other forms. The way the mechanism to create that really involves planet formation. So you've got this cloud of dust and gas, which is much of which is enriched by elements like gold. In the cloud of gas that condenses to form a star and its planets. So the important thing is here is that gravity now plays a part in it, because gravity is pulling the heavier elements together. If you've got what we call protoplanets and planet isimals, which are their precursors. Planet isimals are basically baby planets in a swirling disc of dust around a star, which we call the protoplanetary disc. So those planet isimals are pulled together by gravity. And so if you've got gold that tends to concentrate as it's pulled towards the middle, all the heavy elements are pulled to the middle. And this is a process we call differentiation. And then what happens is another planet sysemal bashes into this one and it's smashed into smither Eaves and then goes to form another, you know, slightly bigger body, and eventually you've got a planet. And eventually you've got a planet with stuff in its crust that has come from these concentrations within planetism. So I think that's the process that Alan is looking for. Why we get concentrations of these materials in them in the crust of a worldlike planet Earth. There you go, Thank you, Alan, and a fantastic question, thanks for sending it in. This is space Nuts Andrew Antley with Professor Fred space Nuts. Now we'll go to our next question, and this one comes from justin. Hey God, I'll listen to your show, and I think it's do a great job. My questions about Fermi paradox and from what we can see, every planet that we every new discovery of every planet that we find, every planet seems to be so much different from the last one, and the next one is different. Then we're finding things that we've never seen before all the time. So isn't it becoming more and more rockly the more planets we find that aren't like Earth, that Earth is taping unique in the universe? Is that becoming more and more of a possibility the more we look. Thanks guys, Like I said, great job, love your shirt. Thank you. Justin I love this question because it does throw up that possibility that every planet could be unique. And you know, and the more exoplanets we find, the more weirdness we seem to witness as a consequence of that. However, then you look at some of the moons that are within our Solar system and the similarities between some of them are quite stark, like Europa and Enceladus. So it stands to reason from my perspective that there probably are other planets in the universe that are maybe not identical, but quite strikingly similar to Earth or Mars or Venus or Jupiter or you name it. It. Just I think there'd just be too many for them to all be absolutely and utterly different from one another. What do you think, Fred, Yeah, yes, so we we we've just we have discovered sorry I just out of coffee delivery that, yeah, I saw. We have discovered planets that are earth like in the in the you know, in the sense that the size of the planet, it's mass, its diameter, is similar to Earth, and we might well discover more because Earth like planets are not that easy to find. They're the smaller end of the planet range. So it was when we started discovering extra planets. At first there were all the big ones because they're easy to find, So we may be missing a lot of Earth like planets. But I basically do agree with Justin because we think earth like planets are relatively rare. But then when we look at our own planet, we see not just that it's an earth like planet, which really is, but it's got other really interesting quirks about it, like a massive moon that may well have stabilized its rotation over very very long periods of time, and so all of that comes in to sort of direct your thinking to the idea that maybe the sort of environment that we've had that has allowed life to flourish, and in particular to take that step from single cell to multicelled organisms, which we think could be a very energy hungry process and therefore very air. When you look at that, you begin to wonder just how unique we are, And well, you can't really qualify uniqueness, can you, But you know what I mean, we are probably unique, and it may well be that that's one of the reasons why we're not seeing alien life everywhere. Astrobiologists are fairly convinced I think today that yes, you can probably get single celled organisms forming relatively easily if you've got the right conditions, but it's much more difficult to produce multicelled organisms, and to go on from there to vertebrates and all you know, primates and all the rest of it. Giant they are all giant leaps. But I think that itself is the answer to the Fermi paradox that if there are species like us elsewhere, they are so far away that you might as well forget them. We might be alone, you know, galaxy, for example, Although I've been watching the Three Body Problem series on TV and those aliens are way too close. So in fact, it's prompted me to buy the book because I know it's a Chinese book that's translated to English but makes it a bit difficult to read, but well, not difficult to read, but totally different setup because it's been americanized for television, so you've got to get your head around that. But I'm really enjoying it. I don't know why I mentioned that, but thank you justin and because it involved aliens, obviously, let's go to our final question. Will be real quick on this one. Hello again from James. I've got a couple of hypotheticals for Fred, thank goodness. If we could travel in time in reverse in the same fashion as going forwards, would gravity behave in the reverse like you can mathematically reverse a black hole in it or white hole? Uh huh? And question two, if in the future we have a strong enough power source, could we travel to a metallic body such as Psyche and put some form of electro magnetic generator at opposite ends of the body and generate an electro magnetic current through the asteroid or even a planet to generate an asteroid planetoid planetoid magnetosphere. Thanks for entertaining my nonsense, James. Yeah, actually, Psyche might already have a magnetosphere because it is miscellic. You know, there may be residual magnetism in there. So the answer to to Germs's second question is probably yes that you know, if you were not enough to think about doing that, it may already have a magnetisphere. We'll find that out when Psyche and the spacecraft gets to Psyche. The asteroid, I can't remember when it is. I think it's a couple of years time. I remember writing something like that. It's on its way now, so you're going to look it up for me, I hope. And the first question, that's an interesting one. If if if you Rea July twenty twenty nine, there you go, thank you, so five years time. Yeah, when to talk about reversing time? Yeah, we time, the arrow of time goes forward for us. If and we know that the physics are symmetrical so that you could reverse the arrow of time. And if you do that you get white holes rather than black holes and things of that sort. But I don't know that you get negative gravity. That's a really interesting one. I'd have to think about that, and yeah, we look up some of the equations negative. I can't imagine you could you could reverse gravity like that. It's such a dominant force and it seems to kind of be like we still we know what it is, we know what it does and bend things like the light, but it just I can't imagine that you could equivocally flip it on its head. It just doesn't seem Yeah, I mean, just thinking along further along from that. So we we imagine that there are particles called gravitons that carry gravity. This is quantum theory that is not yet proved, but yeah, hypothetical particles, but they are probably what's the name for them is a unipolar It's something like that, they've only got one sign. They're only positive. It's like it's so electrical charge. You can have positive negative make this ism. You can't, which is odd. You can have north and south pools, but that's slightly different. The graviton is probably something that you can't have a negative version of. So I'm sticking my neck out here and saying that the answer to James's question is probably no, probably not moron. Thank you, James, Thank you to everyone who's sending questions. Don't forget to keep them coming. You can do that via our website, space nuts podcast dot com or space nuts dot I and just hit the Send us your Questions tab on the right or the AMA tab up the top where you can send us text and audio questions. Please don't forget to tell us who you are and where you're from. We just like to know. And I hate to do it. I hate to do it. But we've got a dad joke from Misty who's listening in Live today. There she is. Now, how did you get your number? Fred? What did the black holes say when they collided? Gone? Nothing? They just waved nice one. I like that. Yeah, very good. Yes, all right, Thank you Fred, as always great to catch up again, and we will talk to you again real soon. Sounds good. Thank you very much, Andrew. I think I'm probably missing another meeting, so I should skip off now. I'm okay, I'm going on next door. We'll talk next week. We'll force all it. Yeah. Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large. And thanks to Hu in the studio for being here in the studio, because he's the best person in the world at being here in the studio and from me Andrew Dunkley. Thanks to your company on this episode. We'll see you next time on another edition of Space Nuts. Bye Bye, You Nuts. Podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at fights dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from fights dot com.