#428: Dark Matter Mysteries & Sci-Fi Innovations: Listener Queries Answered

Hello again, thanks for joining us. This is Space Nuts Q and A. My name is Andrew Dunkley and good to have your company again. Questions today coming from Michael, Rennie, Joseph, and Ralph. Michael wants to look at dark matter. We've got a big bang question. We'll talk about the early universe and that three body problem has come up again. That's all to be discussed on this episode of Space Nuts fifteen in Channel ten nine ignition Space Nuts NY or three two Space Nuts. As when I reported Neil's good and he's back again for more. Professor Fred Watson, astronomer at LA Tellofred. Yeah, just send those questions and we'll get onto them. Yep, yep. Just can't just can't get enough start. This first question comes from my in Illinois, Michael and Illinois gentlemen. What a fantastic podcast. Which one are you talking about? Michael, Absolutely absolutely fabulous for the space nuts like me who love space but just have just enough knowledge to be dangerous. Two questions. Can dark matter be the fabric of space time? I don't think so because you've addressed this topic, but I can't, for the life of me recall what you said. What technological advances would you most like to say? This is his second question, what technological advances would you most like to see happen within the foreseeable future. Here's the kicker. It has to have appeared in science fiction stories. Mine is a space elevator, which Arthur C. Clark described in the Fountains of Paradise, published in nineteen seventy nine. That comes from Michael and Illinois. We'll get to that in a minute. Yeah, Okay, dark matter, the fabric of space time is no, it's no. And that's because we can map dark matter. We can map where it is by looking at the you know, the fact that it it warps space itself. It warped space rather than being the fabric of space. And that warping can be revealed by looking at what it does to galaxies beyond beyond the once of the warp, there's there's somebody warping in the background. Yeah, good old Jordy. Oh shut up, Jordy, I love it. We've got our very own space warp here. So yeah, so dark matter warped space, so we can map where it where it is, and we know that galaxies are immersed in these huge blobs of dark matter. So dark matter is something definitely something within space rather than the fabric of space itself, and it's still a puzzle. It's still you know, unknown actually what it is. And we we'd believe it's some species of sub atomic particle that is invisible in every way except by its gravity, and we are still looking for it. We're looking for the particles. We know that they We know that for every kilogram of normal matter in the room that you're in, in the room that I'm in, there's five kilograms a dark matter as well. What do we do about that? We don't know what it is. Yeah, wow, it's hard to get your head around that. I can understand people trying to come up with answers for this because it's not an easy one to wrap the mind around, and some of the best experts in the world still can't agree on what this is exactly, and there's some widely you know, disparate views of what it might be. We have many times raised the issue of MOND the theory of modified Newtonian dynamics, which suggests that our understanding of gravity is wrong and it's not that this dark matter exists, But I think that's still regarded as speculative by mainstream science. I think most astronomers are convinced that there are these sub atomic particles that we are yet to find. M all right, I think Michael go on, no, IM just going to say it's one of the reasons for you know that the Largechadron Collider at Cerne in the on the Swiss French borders, the European Nuclear Research Center that was the collider where the Higgs boson was found back in twenty twelve. They've got plans for something called the FCC, the Future Circular Collider, which will make the Large Chadron Glider look very small. One of the reasons for doing that is to look at subatomic particles with higher energies with the hope that they will reveal whatever the particles are that make up dark matter. So there are plans to try and sort it out, but it's still very much an open question. Sure is okay, Michael? That was part one of your question. Part two, what technological advances would you most like to see happen within the foreseeable future. He's the kicker it has to have happened in science fiction stories. He likes the space elevator that was written about by Arthur C. Clarke. We've talked about space elevators before, Fred, What is it for you? I had a long think about this and I'm still pondering. Have you come up with anything, you know the kind of thing. So my go to place in science fiction, of course, is done There, back in the nineteen fifties, Done There, the Pilot of the Future, and so much of what Frank Hampson, the author of dun There and a great, fabulous artist and illustrator, but also a man with a good command of science. The sorts of things that he was talking about were little personalized flying machines. Well, we're seeing those already. You can now buy You can buy a jets and one which is basically a flying machine that you can sit in the twenty minutes of flight up two hundred kilometers an hour. The waiting list is quite long. I think you won't get you if you order one now, you won't get it until twenty twenty six. And the other one, you know that Dan Dare used all the time, was a watch that let you talk to people with. Well, I've got one of those now. It's incredible. So a lot of what was forecast back there in the nineteen fifties is basically happening to us now. I guess the technological advance for me that would really really dramatically change our entire existence would be for the manipulation of gravity. I mean, we've talked about that before. How can you tweak gravity so it does things for you that you wanted to do? At the moment, we're just stuck with it. Any massive body distorts the space around it, and we feel that there's gravity, Could you warp space to let you move, you know, more readily through the universe, the good old wormhole technique and things of that sort. I know that's very much on the you know, well beyond the horizon of anything that we're thinking about at the moment. But just a quick comment on Michael's favorite, the space elevator probably won't happen just because of the debris that we're surrounded by Earth orbit. And it was a guy called buzz Aldrin who told me that that dinner once, when I was lucky enough to have dinner with it. He said, yeah, space elevator is a great idea, but it won't happen. And that's because every bit of space jump crosses the equator twice, and it's all bit if you've got to have the space elevator on the equator, else it doesn't work. So you're always going to get collisions. And so he wrote it off. He knows certain terms disappointing. Really it is rather but not surprising. We humans have a tendency to make a mess. And did you do so what was your technological advance, Andrew? What did you do when you kind of touched on it with when you mentioned high speed travel? I think let's steal one from Star Trek. I think if you could achieve warp speed, that would be for me a wonderful innovation in terms of even just traveling within our Solar system. And I know they're working on different kinds of engines. NASA's looking at different types of engines to try and increase travel speed, and we talked about it recently being able to get to Mars in two months instead of six to nine months. I would dearly love to see that kind of technology perfected so that we could get around our own neighborhood very fast. And that was portrayed well in a TV series which I watched for a second time recently. Called the Expanse, where they had developed a way to travel within the Solar System and you could do a trip from Mars to Pluto or something in a few weeks versus many, many, many many years. To me, would be a great innovation. It would make exploration of the Solar System so much easier and people would be able to move around with expediency, which we cannot do at the moment. So I think that would be you know, whether or not it's warp speed or some kind of pulse engine technology that makes us smooth faster. It would have to be highly efficient as well, but I know they're working on it, so that to me would be the next big thing. But you know, the other one I'd like to see is space tourism happen. I think it's already started with little sort of trips up and back, but I think having a space motel, for example, in orbit, I'd love to see that happen. I think that would be the next big thing in tourism and it would be a lot of fun. This precursors up there already, so is it. Bigelow the company is a very big company of a hotel chains within America. Back in the early two thousands, they developed an inflatable In fact, they launched too. I think I think they're still in orbit. There was one that was also attached to the International Space Station and it was for exactly that. Think about space hotels, the bigger old inflatable space modules. Mmmm, that just scares me there, just yeah, do you want to be in a balloon in space? You know? Yeah, I'm not, especially with all that junk flying around the Actually, all right, they did say that it was more resilient to impacts by small pieces of space debrits because I'm like a piece of metal when you get a hole in it. The holes there, some of these fabrics that they used in the in the test modules actually heal themselves so that the whole blocks up very quickly. That's interesting. Actually, one thing we learned when we were in China we went and visited a silk factory. I used to have silk worms as a kid. But they were telling us that the strength and durability of silk is so so strong they can actually they actually use it in bulletproof vests. Yeah. I didn't know that remotable. Incredible stuff. Okay, thank you, Michael, let's go to a question from Rennie Troub, how energetic was the Big Bang in comparison to the most powerful supernova's or gamma ray bursts ever discovered. Science is exciting, Renny says, it is, and that's why we're still doing it, plus the fact that it's helpful occasionally. Look, I don't know the strict answer to this in terms of, you know, a million times or anything like that, but the Big Bang was the Big Bang, so it was the you know, the energy that was released in that means that even the most powerful supernova really pales into insignificance. Although supernova are often described as the biggest bang since the Big Bang, but they're vastly less energetic than what was involved in the creation of the universe. As you kind of expect it to be, a super and ova leaves these a debris cloud around it to enriched material, you know, the chemical reactions that take place in the heat of the super and ova create some elements that are quite rare, but that's just spread around its locality, whereas the Big Bang created everything. So yes, it's the ratio of one or the other is a very big number. Indeed, I don't know what it is, but I'll try and check it up, but I'm not sure that I'll find the answer. Yeah, I imagine the difference would be just staggering, like we'd be talking billions upon billions upon trillions of megatons in variation between a super and over and the Big Bang. I imagine the Big Bang was Well, look, we're still seeing the after effects of it. It's still going technically, let's try it thirty point ten million years later. Yeah, so, yeah, a short answer to that question, Rennie. But yeah, it's chalk and cheese basically. By the sound of it, this is space nuts. Addred Ugley here with professor Fred what's a three space nuts? All right, let's keep rolling with the questions. Hey, space nuts. Given the early universe was believed to be a dense hot plasma, could it be that at this time large, gargantuan level primordial black holes formed, which could explain the recent James where images of very distant, enormous and distant black holes. They could have formed at the very start of the universe, before the black holes that formed from more recent star collapses. And also, further to this, could it be a source of naked singularities as well as as well that may have formed from failed black holes in this early time. Could these naked singularities be so numerous and widespread that they account for the missing mass we infer but cannot see. Could this be all the dark matter? Love the show, keep up the great work, and hope to see around Dubbo in twenty twenty eight for the eclipse. Joseph from Melbourne. Yeah, we've got to spare bed, Joseph, So that's possible. I'm gonna I'll take bits, take deep bids. Yeah. Yeah, interesting thought. Now, so let's do the second bit first. But the idea of naked singularities or black holes effectively representing the missing mass by the missing mass, I think we mean the dark matter missing mass is slightly different. That's a normal matter that should be there that seem to be missing, but we think we've failed it now in the electrons between the galaxies. But dark matter, yes, as we've been talking about, it is just something that is invisible, only revealed by its gravity. And the reason why we don't think it's lots and lots of primordial black holes is because of some experiments that were done in the nineteen nineties. We used to think that there might be things called matchos m acho, which was massive compact halo objects, and that meant exactly what we're talking about, black holes that were lurking around the outer regions of our galaxy. But in an experiment, which funnily enough, was also called Matcho, done with one of the telescopes actually at the Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra, as well as other places throughout the world. Well, the many experiments were done to try and identify whether mat chos were the dark matter. They failed to see enough what's called gravitational lensing. If we had these little black holes everywhere that were enough of them to make up the dark matter, we'd see lots of instances of these passing in front of a distant star and acting as a magnifying glass because of the gravitational distortion around it, So you'd see a gravitational lensed image of the star. It would suddenly get brighter and then fade away with a particularly characteristic light curve. The weather light behaves over time, and they weren't seen in enough numbers. They did see some, so they knew that the technique was working, but they didn't find anywhere near enough to make matchos the dark matter, and that's why it became whips, which is what we now think they are weekly interacting massive particles. And so the answer is no, probably not. And then going back to Joseph's first question, I think he's kind of on the money with this and really looking at research that's only been in publication for two or three months whether which came first, galaxies or black holes or the super massive black holes, And exactly as he says, James Webb telescope shows images of galaxies which have probably have very large, supermassive black holes at the center. And the conventional wisdom has always been that the super massive black holes probably formed by lots and lots of stars reaching the ends of their lives, exploding into supernova, creating a black hole which then gets absorbed into another one, and you've got super massive black hole at the end of it. We are now seeing doubt cast on that by a paper which was led by a well known cosmologist called Joe Silk another Joseph, He and his colleagues have postulated that maybe the black holes were actually formed in the Big Bang, and these black holes became the nuclei of galaxies. I'm hoping actually to find out a bit more about this theory later in the year, Andrew, because one of Joseph Silk's collaborators on that paper is an old friend and colleague of mine. Dr oh sorry, Professor Rosemary Wise. She's at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, and she's coming to Australia to help us celebrate the fiftieth birthday of the Anglo Australian Telescope. So I'm going to try and bend her ear about that and find out what it's all about. Yeah, wow, that'd be great. Yeah, all right. So the answers to Joseph's questions were no, no, yes, well perhaps and no. I think of the answers to take them in the order that Joseph set them fair enough, Thank you, Joseph. Pretty deep question, but we like to try and tackle them. We don't always have the answer, but that's because probably nobody does have the answer a lot of the time. One final thought, Fred, This comes from Ralph, who's messaged me before about the story three Body Problem, which is originally a book series by a Chinese author, but it's now been turned into a TV series. Andrew thanks for your advice on the Three Body Problem book. What I suggested he do was get his device to read it to him rather than struggling through it himself, because I taught mine how to read to me, so I just because it is a really tough read in the original manuscript. Anyway, Ralph says, I gave up on the book, but I want to know what you're up to on the mountain, so I have the I want to know what they're up to on the mountain. This is where they made their first communication with the aliens. So I have the audiobook on hold from the Indianapolis Public Library. I hope to get it soon. Ralph. Yeah, I guess with the series coming out, it's become popular and people are grabbing audio books because the read is really tough. I'm still pushing on with it, Ralph. I haven't finished it yet. I find myself sort of reading a few chapters and then having to have a rest and a lie down with a headache tablet. But it is a tough It is a tough read, but I'm persisting. I want to finish it, so I'll keep going on it. But whatever you can do to get through it is my advice, and Ralph's found a way, So let me know how you go with it, Ralph. I have heard on the grapevine, Ralph that they've decided to continue with the series. I think it's on Netflix. They originally we're going to only make two seasons. In fact, they were just going to run the second season as an add on to the first season and just do it as one series. But now the latest is they've decided to make three series, so it will follow the three books in the written series as a TV series, and they're going to follow it as closely as possible, and from what I've read so far, they're sticking to the actual manuscript. So yeah, that's what I've heard about. Three Body problem. Three body problem. Basically, Fred I think I've explained before is these aliens live in a or come from a planet that is unfortunately in orbit around three stars. And when you get three big bodies with all the gravitational influence that they possess, fighting over a tiny little planet, it's not a nice place to live. And so they've decided to move out and we made ourselves known, which Stephen Hawking always said could be a problem. Well, that's basically the situation in this book. But it is a really great series and I'm enjoying the book. As difficult as it is to read, it is super technical, and it's so technical that he's got reference numbers all through the manuscript of the book, so if you're not sure what he's talking about, you can click on the number and it will take you to the reference page so you can understand what he's trying to tell you. It's a really tough read, a really tough read for someone as meager as me in terms of technicality. I did. Anyway, there's the update I did recently. Andrew come across a website. It might have been on the Conversation which was about the science of the Three Body Problem book, and I thought of book marks. I've just been looking through my bookmarks and I can't find it. But if I find it out, I meant to send that to me. Yeah, I meant to send you the link. And that was a couple of months ago. Actually a cap forgetting to send it to you. But I'll find it and drop it along too. Yeah, all right, blumme it. Thanks Ralph, and thanks to everyone who contributed. Don't forget if you've got a question for us, send it in through our website Space Nuts podcast dot com. You can just click on the links the AMA tab at the top for text and audio questions, or to send us your questions button on the right hand side. If you've got a device with a microphone, you are all set. Don't forget to tell us who you are and where you're from. Thanks Fred, as always, it's a pleasure, Andrew. Always good to talk and especially when you've been away somewhere. Yeah. Yeah, just that little trip to China. Not much scar stargazing to do in China. It's not many clear days, although I had to laugh. Our guide on the first few days said, we've been cleaning up our act. We've been mourning, moving industry away so that the city of Beijing can enjoy blue skies like today. Looked up and went, oh, here there's a patch. There's a tiny little patch of Yeah, but look they're working on it. Thanks Brad, will catch you soon, And of course we also like to thank our stand in producer Jordie this week in the absence of you and from me Andrew Uncley, thanks for your company. Catcher on the next episode of Space Nuts Bye, Byepacenuts. You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast, available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bides dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.