#452: Early Universe Mysteries, Galactic Demise & Dark Matter Interactions

Hello once again. This is Space Nuts. It's a Q and A edition. You know what that means. We ask nothing and you do the rest. All we ask of you is to send us questions, and you do do that, and we try to answer them, including a question from Bob about the older universe, which Fred remembers. Sean has a question about galaxies and their demise, James is talking about the origin of life on Earth, and Michael does dark matter interact with itself? Those are the questions that we'll be tackling today on a Q and A edition of Space Nuts fifteen in Channel ten nine ignition sequence Space Nuts NI. Or three two more review once Space Nuts as the Night Report. It Bill's good, he's back again for more. His name is Professor Fred. What's an hello? Fred? Hello? And his name is Professor Andrew Dunkley. I don't think I'll ever get that kind of title. Sir Andrew Dunkley. How's that? Yeah? What Jordy like that? Now he's barking mad about the idea. That's what's. Barking. Mutual stuff They can tell you, yeah. Oh yes, well you know it's a terrier, isn't he. All terrors are barking mad. Well, yes, no, no, he's barking, but he's a poodle. A poodle. Oh yeah, well there they are a similar ilk. Yes, I think all those kinds of dogs suffer from small dog syndrome. That's what. It's just angry because they're tiny. Yes, that's just a theory, not a dog person. So I don't know. So we try to answer some questions. Right, I thought we're just gonna have a chat. But well we can do that. We can about dogs, about dogs and dogs and cats living together, or we can answer this question from Bob. Gentlemen, I'm Bob from Central Florida and the United States. It occurs to me that as we look back at the older and older parts of the universe, it seems that the galaxies that far away should be farther back in time but closer together. Does that make sense from our. Perspective, This is the surface of a sphere far away, and we're at the center of it. And yet back then the universe hadn't been expanding as long. Thank you very much, Thank you, Bob. Sounds like it was at the mall. I could hear music in the background. I'm not I've listened to the question a few times. I'm just I'm not quite sure where he's coming from, and maybe it's just me, But what's the question about Fred? Well, no, no offense, Bob. I'm not having a crack at you of it. No, Bob, Bob's right. So what Bub's saying is, Okay, we live in a universe thirty point eight billion years old. It's been expanding for the whole of that time, and now we have the capability with the James Web telescope and other things coming on stream before too long to see back probably thirteen billion of those years. You know, we can see very early galaxies. And so Bob's comment is, Okay, the universe is expanded by a large fraction by over that time, you know, factors like twenty something like that, twelve to twenty thereabouts. Shouldn't the galaxies look closer together? And they do. They do, but it's a little bit more subtle because the way we know there they look closer together. Wait till you get this one. Oh boy, if you thought Bob's comment was strange, gets even stranger. The galaxies actually look bigger with the expanding universe. You look further back in time and eventually, I mean, galaxies start to look smaller, as smaller as you look out in the distance. Do you expect that that's the way everything works in normal space? But the universe isn't normal space. It's been expanding and it's got curious properties, and you get to a certain point, which I don't think we've actually reached yet. I'm not sure that this is something that's been proven. But the theory says that the galaxies should look bigger, and that's because they're closer together. So what it is is the space between them is smaller, and that means the galaxies look and it sounds completely cockeyed, but that is what the relativistic model of the universe telligence. So what's the enter? The answer is Bob's right, all right, Okay, Well, Dan bollm I. Was in Florida not that long ago, and it was great. Yeah. I love Florida. We'll be there next year. As a matter of fact, lucky you. I think we go in March. Yes, although I'm a little bit confused because we've got we're going to Miami via Vancouver. Oh yeah, figure Funnily enough, that's what we did. That's that's the long haul. Yes, but we had a fortnight in between them. A. Right, We've done Vancouver, so we're just going to jump off one plane and jump onto the other. Lovely city. It is beautiful. The Vancouver Marathon was on while we were there. Okay, yeah, so I got to how to go. I got to. Watch because it was just behind our hotel. It was lovely and went through the park and had to look around. It's beautiful city. Beautiful. Thank you Bob for your question. Our next question comes from Sean speaking of Canadia. He's from British Columbia. All question, All, are all galaxies eventually going to get sacked into their central super massive black holes? If so, then what or then what could the inflection? Right? I think then what is correct? Then? What as in now? What? Yeah? No, probably not because black holes they do suck stuff in, but only if it happens to be kind of lying around. Yeah, and so a black hole compared with the size of a galaxy is very very small. So I think what will happen in the longer term is galaxies will lose all the hydrogen fuel because that will go into making stars. Stars will live their lives, they'll create heavy elements. They'll blow up and either create black holes or white dwarfs or neutron stars or one of the ends products of stellar evolution, and eventually they'll just become dark. They'll run out of energy, they'll become cold and dark, but not necessarily getting sucked into the super massive black hole. They may well just orbit around it and continue doing that until the big rip occurs or whatever is going to happen to space time with the expanding universe. Or they can GiB. They can have GiB. That's right, Okay, well that's it, is it? Yeah? Yeah? I mean, we see galaxies which have been which are devoid of their hydrogen fuel. We call them elliptical galaxies because they're quite different from the spiral galaxies. They're blobs of stars shaped like a football, elongated quite often, and they they don't have any star formation going on in them, not much gas to speak of, probably a super massive black hole at the middle, but not doing much in terms of eating stuff up because it's all it's eating it all up what's available, and its surrounded by a retinue of stars that it can't touch because they're too far away. Okay, very good, thank you, Sean. This is Space Nuts Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Fred Watson. Let's take a break from the show to tell you about our sponsor, in Cogny, and I'll be giving you a special space nuts url so you can get up to sixty percent off in Cogny. But first, what's in Cogniti all about. It's a way of cleaning up your online presence and reducing the risk of your personal information being sold to unscrupulous people via the dark Web, or just via a hacker who's trying to fleece you or other people. It's also a great way to reduce spam emails and spam phone calls, reduce the risk of identity theft, which is big business these days. I think most significantly, it greatly reduces your risk of being scammed, and that is just such a viral thing that's happening around the world at the moment. So how does all this work? Well, it's simple. All you have to do is sign up to in COGNI, give them permission to act on your behalf and they'll do the rest. They'll trawl the Internet and remove your personal information from the web. The stuff that can be found on search engines, public websites, even private databases. It's all easily accessible. And let's face it, are you really going to be able to clean up the entire world wide web of your personal information by yourself? Right now? In Cogni is offering a significant discount for space Nuts listeners, up to sixty percent off and that comes with a thirty day money back guarantee. Just go to in cogni dot com slash space nuts. That's I Ncogni, incogni dot com slash space nuts to find out more. And they have special for students and graduates as well. Make your personal information much harder to find online with in Cogny. Check out all their plans today at incogny dot com slash space nuts. Now back to the show three Space Nuts and you're listening to a Q and A edition. And yes, we love it when you send us your questions, so you can do that via our website to give you all the details at the end of the program. Our next question Fred comes from James. Gooday, gentlemen, this is James from the Mountains of Me. I have enjoyed your podcast since your first episode. Please keep doing what you do. Here is my question. I have been reading recently that there is now tantalizing evidence that life may have begun on Earth as far back as four point one billion years ago. I believe this overlad with the heavy bombardment period of our Earth's history. If this is truly the key, and we find my croby or life elsewhere in our solar system, is it possible or perhaps even likely, that it originally came from Earth? Thanks again for keeping them nerd and me alive. Our great pleasure, James, and thanks for the question the origin of life on Earth. There are those that say it probably came in from all sorts of different sources and got mixed up in Moila. There we are. Yeah, it's a tough one to answer, because, yeah, we've got evidence of life on Earth, but how on Earth did it actually originate? It needed the right formula, it needed the right environment, it needed the right substances to mix with. Yeah. Could it have already been here getting ready to flourish during the early bombardment? Good question. Yeah. So, I mean, you know James's postulate that maybe life was in existence on the Earth as early as four point one billion years I think that the evidence is still fairly tenuous on that, but certainly three point eight billion years there are rocks that show evidence that there was life there, so it is very old. Now. The idea of life coming to Earth from elsewhere is called the panspermia theory, and that is one that is not generally favored by astrobiologists. I think most astrologists think a little bit as James has suggested, that life formed on the Earth itself because we had the right conditions and the right prebiotic chemicals, all those organics that we've already found out in space, the fats and lipids that you need to hold cell walls together, and all of that sort of thing. So maybe life did kick off on Earth if we find it elsewhere, like for example, Perseverance on some of those little capsules that it's got left on the planet's surface on Mars. If bringing some of those back found that yes, there is life, living organisms in there, or even fossilized ones. If we could somehow sequence the DNA of those and found that it had factors in common with life on Earth, then you could be pretty sure that that's what's happened. That the late heavy bombardment has stirred things up enough that you've got life spreading throughout the Solar system. And we're not at a stage in the history of our exploration of the Solar system that we can yet say that we've still got a long waist. But it is possible that that might turn out to be the case. So it's not impossible, James, it's a good suggestion. Yeah, I just want to follow up on his suggestion that life could have been in existence four point one billion years ago, and you're saying, well, no, probably not that far back, but three point eight three point seven It doesn't sound like that's a big gap, but I suppose it realistically is in terms of the development. Of life three hundred million years Yeah, well it's not. No, you're right, because life didn't do much until only it still doesn't well, you know, in terms of evolution. Oh right, it. Didn't do much until about seven hundred million years ago when we started getting all these multi celled organisms. So you've got this huge gap, you know, more than three billion years where all you had was single cell slime, probably just slime. And so if yes, three point eight billion year old slime and four point one billion year old slime might not be very different, if I can put it that way. So, but you know, James's point is correct that that's the period when the late heavy bombardment was in full swing. Things were charging about all over the Solar System. We think it's when the most of the big maria on the Moon were created, and the eight in South Pole Basin the biggest of all impact craters that we know about in the Solar System. So it was a wild and wooly place. And it may well be that debris spread into space carrying microbes, may have evolved into other things on Mars or even Venus. You know, Venus may well have had a very different climate back then. Hmm. Yeah. While we've spoken in the past about the fact that scientifically they've suggested that at one stage there were three livable planets in the Solar System, yes, Venus, Earth and Mars. So yeah, that's the possibility. And as you say, the interesting thing will be if if perseverance finds evidence of past life on Mars, or we find evidence of life somewhere else in the Solar System, maybe beneath the surface of the some of the ice moons, and we can do a DNA test and find out who it's related to that's and the big revelation will be yes, it's the same as life on Earth it's come from the same source, or that it's completely different. That's the big question. And if it's completely different, you could probably assume that it's fairly common throughout the universe because you've got, you know, widely different circumstances in which life might have taken hold in the Solar System. It's completely different than that's the ledge you to the conclusion that it might form everywhere. Or worst, Yeah, well, wouldn't that be something We just got to find it. That's just got to get out there and find it. Indeed, thank you, James. Great question. I love those early life questions. And we've got one more question to tackle today from Michael, who lives in Illinois. I've just now listened to the dark matter story in the most recent podcast, which is no longer the most recent podcast naturally, I'm now prompted to ask yet another dark matter question. Does dark matter gravet gravitationally interact with itself? As always your best, Michael. Thanks Michael. We don't often get dark matter questions, so thanks for that. That's right, So I'm looking now at an article. When was it published. Four point one billion years ago? Now? Yeah, So the model that we have of dark matter, this is the standard model, and dark matter we don't know what it is. So you know, you're always working in the dark here, if I can put it that way, light, dark photons, weekly interactive interacting, massive particles, primordial black holes, all of those things. But the model that we have of the basically the the you know, the way the building blocks of matter work. The model suggests that whatever it is, dark matter doesn't interact with itself, and because it can only interact with gravity, but not in itself. But the article I'm looking at is from a paper set of papers. I'm not going to go through it in detail, but you can find it on Universe today. It is called evidence of dark matter interacting with itself in El Gordo merger al Gordo is the name of a galaxy cluster if I remember rightly, and it's one merging with another one. And so there is some evidence of dark matter interacting with itself from that that galaxy cluster, and it comes from gravitational lensing. You can plot where the dark matter is by looking at the gravitational lensing. So the answer yesterday would have been no, it doesn't interact with itself. But since I saw this article today, it's well, maybe. It does, okay, and then what would that interaction entail. Basically it means well, the way that they have drawn that conclusion is that when you plot where the dark matter is in these two galaxy clusters, normally what we see, and there are a number of examples of this. You can you can look at galaxy clusters that are merging, they're colliding. You can see that the stars and the gas or pile up into a central region, but the dark matter just keeps on going as though nothing had happened. We see that. But there is some evidence in this particular one that shows some sort of streaming between the two blobs of dark matter associated with these two clusters colliding. And that's that's what this has led to, this suggestion that perhaps dark matter does interact with itself. I'm not sure whether this might be a story we covered. Actually, Andrew, it was not very long ago. As I've said last June, we perhaps should put it on the agenda to talk about in a little bit more details. Possibly, So yes, yeah, there's there's that match research going into this kind of thing. There's always something to talk about when it comes to dark matter, and always a question or two to answer. We get the occasional on ourselves, thank you, Michael. But the answer is possibly yes at this stage. So the answers today went yes, no, not likely and yes that's right. I think good. Yeah, two and a half. Yes, this is not bad. It would have been a much shorter episode if I just went yes, no, yes, maybe not you know done, we've been over in a minute. Yeah, we could have done. Yeah. Yeah, wouldn't have helped much. Thanks Michael. Great to hear from you. If you've got a question for us, go to our website because that's where you can send it through Space Nuts podcast dot com, Space Nuts dot ao. Up the top, there's a little tab that says a m A and you click on that and you can submit a text question or can record. If you've got a device with a microphone, wham bam, thank you, ma'am. You can record a question straight onto our website and send it through to us. Don't forget to tell us who you are and where you're from. And I haven't mentioned this in a while, but if you are listening to us through whatever platform, please leave a review. Reviews are very helpful. If it's only got one star, well we know we've got to lift our game. If it's got a few, that's great. If it's got five, thanks for lying. But it's all good. Yeah, we value your reviews greatly. They help us to be found, so do that as well if you will. Fred, we're done, Thank you very much. It's a pleasure. Thank you, Andrew, and real talk soon. We will, indeed, Professor Fred Watson, astronomer at large and here in the studio. I don't think he surfaced today. So one star, one star for you here and from me Andrew Dunkley. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time on another edition of Space Nuts. Bye bye. 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 bytes dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.