Astronomy Cast

Our galaxy series continues, on to spiral galaxies. In fact, you’re living in one right now, but telescopes show us the various shapes and sizes these galaxies come in. Thanks to JWST, we’re learning how these spirals got big, early on in the Universe.

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Fraser Cain [00:01:11] Astronomy Cast episode 719 – The Galaxy series: Spiral Galaxies. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, a weekly fact based journey through the cosmos where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Doctor Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest. Hey, Pamela, how you doing?

Pamela Gay [00:01:33] I am doing well. When folks are hearing this episode, you’re going to be off in Japan. And that is amazing.

Fraser Cain [00:01:43] Yeah, yeah, we’re making up for that trip. So four years ago in 2020, I booked a trip. Actually, in 2019, I booked a trip to Japan for my son and with my son. And then Covid hit and things got pretty dicey. And so we decided to cancel the trip. And it’s been four years. And now, like, what’s Covid? Who remembers that anymore? So .. so we’re going to do it again. And you know now he’s older and a lot wiser. And I think it’s going to be a really fun time. So yeah yeah. By the time you listen to this we will have been in Japan for a week. And you know, people are like, are you going to do this? Or you can do that. Like, I have no plans. This is purely vacation. I and you know, if I run across Jaxa as I turn a corner in some neighborhood, then sure, I’ll walk in. But I had no plans. I’m not booking things, doing interviews, any of that. I’m going to bring a camera. But … but apart from that, no, this is just purely fun. I want to eat some tasty sushi and noodles. I want to walk around cool parks and temples. I want to ride bullet trains. And I want to meet people there.

Pamela Gay [00:02:53] So yeah, I, I have to say, I haven’t found sushi there that was any better than what I’ve gotten in the US. Other than you can get Fugu there, which you can’t get in the U.S..

Fraser Cain [00:03:05] No, thanks.

Pamela Gay [00:03:06] But the ramen, I had ramen. That is the stuff of dreams. And may you find such.

Fraser Cain [00:03:15] I’m looking forward.

Pamela Gay [00:03:15] To the ramen places.

Fraser Cain [00:03:17] Yeah, yeah, that sounds great.

Our Galaxy series continues on to spirals. In fact, you’re living in one right now. But telescopes show us the various shapes and sizes these galaxies come in. Thanks, Joe is t. We are learning how these spirals got big early on in the universe. All right, Pamela, spiral galaxies. And this is obviously familiar territory because we live in one.

Pamela Gay [00:03:44] We do. Although living in it has made it particularly challenging to study.

Fraser Cain [00:03:49] Right.

Pamela Gay [00:03:50] Like we figured out, there’s a bar in the center of our galaxy only within the past couple of decades. We still see every few years, they change their mind on exactly how far we are from the core of the galaxy.

Fraser Cain [00:04:07] How many arms the Milky Way have, right? Is the last episode we talked about. You know, different controversies are still unfolding. And one of those is how many spiral arms does the Milky Way have? This is a question that is a two. Is it four? Is it two. But then two other kind of arms that are broken off of it. It’s a it is a tricky question because you’re embedded inside like quick. Yes. You know, imagine yourself in a random house. What color is the paint on the outside of your house?

Pamela Gay [00:04:40] It’s a challenge. Is a challenge.

Fraser Cain [00:04:42] Yeah, yeah. Maybe you’ll see it in reflected windows of cars as they drive by.

Pamela Gay [00:04:48] And. And what makes the challenge all the more fun is we have this Andromeda galaxy looming so very close. And at first glance, it seems to be so much bigger than we are. And yet every time we revise our mass estimates, it seems that our galaxy and Andromeda get closer and closer in size. And so it just turns out, trying to understand things that take more than one field of view of a telescope to look at is really hard. Really hard.

Fraser Cain [00:05:21] Yeah, I love those images of what Andromeda would look like if you if it was bright like before and you could see it, it is the size of what is it like nine full moons in the sky? It’s a tick.

Pamela Gay [00:05:34] Yeah. Yeah. And. And then there’s also the challenge of the size of galaxies varies depending on what color of light you’re looking in. And this has been one of the challenges with classifying galaxies, especially spiral galaxies. So the the old school still taught tried and true way of classifying spiral galaxies. Is the Hubble tuning fork diagram. And in this diagram you have ellipticals of varying, roundness to flatness that eventually become what’s called a lenticular galaxy, where you have a nucleus in the center. And then just like a disk of no structure around it, and then it forks. Thus the tuning fork part of the analogy and the arms on on the galaxies for the spirals and the barred spirals just get more and more unwound. But it turns out if you look at galaxies in different colors of light, you’re able to see their arms in different degrees. And so when it comes to trying to figure out how do we write software to classify galaxies, how do we get human beings to classify galaxies? It is a glorious disaster.

Fraser Cain [00:06:59] Right? Right. And I mean, it’s just it’s a mess because galaxies are weird. Yeah. Yeah. It’s not. It’s like humans. It’s the galaxies problem.

Pamela Gay [00:07:10] Go.

Fraser Cain [00:07:10] Galaxies go. Right? Yeah. It keeps keeping weird galaxies. Yeah. So then then how do they form? I mean, we look at these. I mean, there’s some beautiful examples. The whirlpool galaxy, the Pinwheel Galaxy, their nice face on spiral galaxies where we look just right down on to them, as well as ones that are farther away, that are less famous, that are equally as beautiful and indistinct. How do we get this, this, you know, weird shape and some of the structures that we see.

Pamela Gay [00:07:38] So how exactly you go from either blob of mass to spiral galaxy or a whole bunch of dwarf galaxies merging together, which is how these probably formed. But the universe likes to have exceptions to every rule, and I’m just gonna throw that out there. There are always exceptions. Yeah. It looks like we get spiral galaxies through the merger, with the correct angular momentum coming together to set things in a nice, coherent spiral. Then it gets tricky. Tricky, though, because spirals come in different varieties, separate from just how much of their arms splayed out. We have what are called flocculant spiral galaxies, which are spiral galaxies. When you look at them, you see there is what appears to be feathers, flock, flocculant of of spirally bits all throughout them. But there isn’t a clearly defined pair or multitude of arms. It’s just like arm bits all the way down. Then you have galaxies usually that have a companion. We think that it’s the gravitational interactions that drive the, the, spiral density waves that create these grand design spirals, which have two arms, only two arms perfectly formed.

Fraser Cain [00:09:08] And the number shall be two.

Pamela Gay [00:09:09] And the number shall be two, and.

Fraser Cain [00:09:11] Is the arms. Yes.

Pamela Gay [00:09:13] And, and and so going between these extremes is every possible version of massy and glorious. And then we see some spiral galaxies have, rings in their centers, have bars in their centers. And again, this is all driven, we think, from the gravity of companions. And then we have things like the see for 1 in 2 galaxies that have active galactic nuclei that are shooting out jets of radio waves. Spirals are just out there trying to show off. They are the drama queens. They’re the pageant queens.

Fraser Cain [00:09:59] You know, the peacocks galaxy world. Yeah. So this this shape, I mean, it really looks like someone is winding up a bunch of stars from the middle, and you get these spiral arms that form. What? What are the spiral arms?

Pamela Gay [00:10:19] They they are actually just places where material lingers as it goes on its orbit around and around the galaxy. It’s not that galaxies have solid disk rotation where those arms are intact, and the whole thing is bulk rotating like a pinwheel. That is not happening. I just want that very clear. Yeah, yeah. The structure might look like a pinwheel. It is not rotating like a pinwheel. So what’s happening is as material goes around and around the core, there are regions that have higher density. The regions that have higher density accelerate material towards them. So it gets there faster and then holds on to it. So it slows down as it exits. So the amount of time that material stays in the arms is increased compared to the amount of time that it spends on the other parts of its orbit. So you can have material zoom into. I don’t know why I said that like that. You can have material that zooms into a galaxy’s arm, passes through ever so slowly interacting a lot. Star formation gets triggered in arms and then passes out the other side until it gets to the next arm. Rinse and repeat.

Fraser Cain [00:11:41] Yeah. So like analogy that I love to use. Like, imagine you’re in a balloon above the Super Bowl and you’re looking down and the wave is happening. I don’t if do the wave at the Super Bowl. But imagine the wave is happening is you got human beings standing up, shaking their banners, cheering, and then sitting back down again, and you’re seeing this wave propagate through the entire arena. And from your blimp view, it looks like something is turning inside the stadium. But it is not what’s turning. It is the people standing up and sitting back down creating this illusion. And that’s the same thing as what’s happening with the spiral galaxy. Now the whole galaxy can be spinning. That’s a separate thing. But those spiral arms that you’re seeing are these density waves that are just rotating through as all of the stars are doing the wave and they take their time, they have their turn? Yeah. In the in in the arms. And then times when they’re not in the arms.

Pamela Gay [00:12:44] And to be clear, the majority of material in a spiral galaxy, not all. There’s always exceptions. That’s just going to keep coming up. The majority of material in a spiral galaxy will be orbiting all in one direction, like cars on a racetrack should, in theory, all be going in the same direction. And and what we’re seeing is all these things that are going more or less in the same direction are just lingering longer, where there’s a higher amount of mass to pull them in and hold on to them as they try to continue their orbit.

Fraser Cain [00:13:16] But we clearly see these star forming regions in the spiral arms of these galaxies. So what’s that about?

Pamela Gay [00:13:21] So if you think about it, star formation gets triggered through interactions, through shocks, through something taking a nice stable cloud of gas that is supported through the balance of gravity inwards and thermal pressure outwards. It doesn’t take a lot to knock that kind of a cloud out of equilibrium. So as these nice, friendly clouds enter the region of crowding, the probability that something they got there before them is gonna have a supernova go off, the probability that a couple of these clouds are going to interact with each other and knock each other out of equilibrium is a whole lot higher than when that cloud is all by itself in the space between arms. So when these clouds get to the high density region of the arm, they tend to get knocked around. And that knocks them out of that very careful thermo gas dynamics versus gravity balancing act. And you get star formation right.

Fraser Cain [00:14:23] So parts of the cloud are. Hold in, and then you get the densities that can begin and trigger this star formation.

Pamela Gay [00:14:31] Or it could. It could literally just be the shockwave from the supernova hit it to these clouds. And there’s a lot more supernova going off in the arms where you have a lot more star formation, and supernovae go off when you have star formation, and those first giant stars die.

Fraser Cain [00:14:48] Right, right. It’s this cycle that just gets rolling. It’s it’s crazy. Like I just sort of imagine this wave sweeping past. And as the wave is sweeping past through space, you’re getting clouds of stars start to form in this and then supernova are going off in this triggers more star formation. And then the wave passes and the fuel is depleted and you have less stars in that region. But now the next region gets filled with stars. It’s a it’s a very, I don’t know, very evocative concept to think about.

Pamela Gay [00:15:22] A better analogy might be a traffic jam. I don’t know if you’ve ever been like driving along on a road trip, full tilt buggy, and all of the sudden, three miles ahead, there is an accident on the complete other side of the highway. There’s no reason for your side of the highway to slow down. Yeah, but it turns out because human beings are human beings, they will race forward. And end up piling up. And then when they get close to that, that accidents are like must look, must look.

Fraser Cain [00:15:57] Must the what is it? How many.

Pamela Gay [00:15:59] Feet.

Fraser Cain [00:16:00] Yeah.

Pamela Gay [00:16:01] And so you end up with this, this compression wave triggered by looky loos. And that causes a compression of cars in that one place. Well, here it’s the gravitational wave of looking at the car accident that’s causing the compression and the lingering in the galaxy. It’s the gravitational pull of all the cool stuff going on that has mass and is holding you in place.

Fraser Cain [00:16:31] So once again, g t has joined in the hunt for galaxies. And because these things are fairly large and fairly bright, it’s seeing spiral galaxies early on in the universe. Yeah. So give me give me some surprising discoveries about spiral galaxies thanks to J team.

Pamela Gay [00:16:51] So so we thought that they would come very slowly in the being. It would take billion, couple billion years for them to exist, built up through the slow aggregation of smaller systems into larger systems. And it turns out something happened. We we don’t know exactly what happened. J t still looking and hundreds of billions of years, not a billion years, hundreds of millions of years. We’re already starting to see spiral structure. It’s not perfect, at least not what we can see through j w s t which admittedly isn’t that many pixels across, but still, it’s enough that we can see the spiral structure. Wow. And and so it turns out that somehow these things are forming faster and earlier than we thought through means that are still being defined. And there’s so much to figure out. Like if if you look at the velocity curve of a dwarf irregular galaxy, they have the same velocity curve structure as a spiral galaxy. So these dwarf irregulars that look like dead bugs on the sky have stars that are mostly going around and around in one direction in a known way related to dark matter. And then we see spiral galaxies. And so how are these things merging to get us bigger systems? Are they forming just big and spiral? We don’t know. We’re figuring it out. It’s a really cool time to realize everything we knew was wrong. And we get to start over and try. Right?

Fraser Cain [00:18:28] Right. And the other thing that this is fairly recent news, I don’t know if you have been following the story, but they’ve found that the galaxies have bars as well early on.

Pamela Gay [00:18:39] And that implies companions.

Fraser Cain [00:18:41] Right? Right. Which was what you were talking about earlier, that there’s some kind of interaction between the galaxy and its companions, leading to this bar forming in the middle. What is this bar?

Pamela Gay [00:18:53] There are so many different papers that don’t say the same thing. So what it is. For reasons that have many explanations, and I am not going to make a personal opinion right now because someone will send me a nasty letter, right? There are galaxies, including our own, that have a companion and have a structure in the center that is linear and radiating out from the black hole, and then these spiral structures appear to spiral off of the ends of this bar.

Fraser Cain [00:19:26] Right.

Pamela Gay [00:19:27] That companion is the consistent part, exactly how the barred structure forms. There’s lots of theories. I’m just going to leave it there and write. Deal with the letters in my inbox.

Fraser Cain [00:19:41] Yeah. So it’s a couple of things. One is that, you know, about two thirds of galaxies have bars, and they appear to come and go over time.

Pamela Gay [00:19:50] Yes.

Fraser Cain [00:19:51] Yeah.

Pamela Gay [00:19:52] So it’s a transient phase, which is consistent with the companion galaxies coming and going, changing in distance, getting consumed actively.

Fraser Cain [00:20:01] Yeah, yeah. And so you can get some event that causes the bar to buckle to, to collapse in on itself and disappear again. And then other times the bar will start to spread out and stretch out, and the arms end up at the end of the, of the bar. So it’s a weird thing. Spirals have them. Yeah. And and yet, as you know, I mentioned this, that the now there’s observations that they’re seeing these spiral bars in galaxies that are under a billion years old, like, you should not have seen these mature structures in galaxies. And yet there they are. So once again, the universe is speed running, its large scale structures, its more mature structures. And this is a surprise.

Pamela Gay [00:20:55] And what I’m really loving is we already knew quasars, active galaxies were much more common in the early universe. We haven’t been able to really make out consistently the structure around them. I studies that you slowed in digital Sky survey to do extremely statistically rigorous looks. Found that there were the same fraction of mergers among quasars as non quasars. So there’s just something special in the systems with quasars that causes them. But there’s something of the early universe. There was more gas than there was more material than. And and so we have all of these weird things that were high energy events creating amazing forces. There was more stuff around to do the mergers that hadn’t formed large galaxies yet. It was basically the pottery waiting to be formed.

Fraser Cain [00:21:51] Right. We talked a lot about dark matter in the last episode, and I think we should definitely talk about dark matter as it relates to a spiral galaxy as well. To what role does dark matter play in the behavior of the galaxy?

Pamela Gay [00:22:06] It changes how they rotate or it changes. I guess a better way to put it, how the stars at a variety of different distances orbit around the galaxy. This was one of the things discovered by Vera Rubin. And what’s was remarkable here is Vera Rubin was trying very hard to do non-confrontational research. Right. She moved away from other topics because she was like, nope, don’t want to deal with the the politics just when you do science. Yeah. And she quite accidentally discovered that as you move out from the core of a galaxy and you get more and more material inside your orbit, it was expected that things would be, going at lower and lower orbital velocities.

Fraser Cain [00:22:54] Like the solar system.

Pamela Gay [00:22:56] Like the solar system. Right. And instead what happens is it just flattens off. This flattens off. Right? So the outer parts of galaxies out to the greatest distances we can see beyond a certain point, everything just keeps rotating at the same rate. Right. And this is because the distribution of dark matter is such that it’s counterbalancing what we see with the baryonic luminous matter and changing the rotation curves. And so we’re essentially trying to map out the distribution of material we can’t otherwise see by looking at the rates at which stars, globular clusters, clouds of neutral gas are going round and around our Milky Way. And poor Vera Rubin, who was trying to do non-confrontational research, discovered this, ended up having to spend about a decade proving that she was right. Along the way, she demonstrated that work done in the 30s by, Fritz Zwicky on, galaxy clusters was the exact same effect. And then the poor woman never got the Nobel Prize for everything that she went through. She got many awards, but it is generally seen as a great oversight that she didn’t get the Nobel Prize for what she did.

Fraser Cain [00:24:11] And I want to I want to sort of just reiterate this, this discovery because I think it it is it is so foundational.

Pamela Gay [00:24:18] And yeah.

Fraser Cain [00:24:19] You can’t hear this and roll your eyes at dark matter, right? Which is what I see a lot of in the comments. And so if you’re like, you know, astronomers just make up this thing called dark matter to blah, blah, blah. You know what? No, no, no absolutely not. That is incorrect. And let me let me sort of give you this insight, right. You measure like here in the solar system, the Earth is going at 30km per second around the sun. Neptune is going five kilometers per second around the sun. There is this drop off in the velocities of the planets as you get farther from the sun. It is this steady line going downward that measures the velocities. You look at a galaxy. Yeah, close to the center of the galaxy. The the rotation rate is increasing. And then you hit this point where you then as you measure outward, it’s like, what is it, 250km per second and little farther away. It’s hundred and 50km per second, a little farther away, you know, still 50. It’s still the same. Or the two one. I forget the exact numbers 220 or 250, whatever. And it just it remains the same all the way out to the outskirts of the galaxy. And so the galaxy is not a little solar system. It is something else. Yeah. And you cannot you just can’t get that rotation curve without ten times the mass in the galaxy that if that if there was, you know, you could see. Ten times the mass in black holes all around the galaxy, and they were visible somehow. Then that would explain it.

Pamela Gay [00:25:51] Yeah, it’s it’s the equivalent amount of matter of taking one Acme brick per solar system sized volume in the outer galaxy. So you can imagine just all these Acme bricks floating around. And the Matcha project has gone looking for the the universal version, which is neutron stars, stellar mass black holes, white dwarfs and hasn’t found them.

Fraser Cain [00:26:17] Yeah. And so you can take a person who like doesn’t who rolls their eyes at this and you say, okay, fine. So how how does this work? How do you get the the stars not slowing down in their orbital velocity like you would see in a solar system? Right. And then the person has to say, oh, I don’t know. Right. Done. You you now are part of the dark matter belief system, right? You like weird observation. Why is this happening? I don’t know, good enough. Join the club. Here’s your membership card. You’re now one of us. And so, yeah, it’s called dark matter. But. But who knows what it could be. As you said, particles. It could be black holes. And it could be that we don’t understand gravity at the longest scale. Doesn’t matter. It’s still dark matter.

Pamela Gay [00:27:06] And it can be a combination. I just want to make that clear.

Fraser Cain [00:27:10] It is almost certainly a combination of all of them. And and done. You are like you are part of the confusion that nobody knows what this thing is. And yet you can people can make these observations with relatively small telescopes. If your Rubin did it in the, you know, almost a hundred years ago. And yet here we are still arguing about what it is.

Pamela Gay [00:27:37] And little tiny radio telescopes that universities have allow us to go even further out in the galaxy than what your Rubin initially did with optical light, because we can start seeing the neutral gas that is the furthest stuff out in our galaxy. And so, yeah, grab yourself a small optical telescope and a small radio telescope and you’re done. You can prove there has to be something invisible out there. You’re affecting the rotation curve.

Fraser Cain [00:28:06] And there’s one last piece of spiral galaxy that I think is really important, which is the monster at the heart of them.

Pamela Gay [00:28:13] And and as recently as the 1990s, people were drying on overhead sheets, little tiny monsters, usually with antennae and giant mouths like vomiting jets out of the cause of spiral galaxies. So much has been lost now that professors aren’t hand drawing on overhead sheets. I it’s truly a lost art, and we are suffering so many fewer cartoons as a result of it. Right. So yeah, spiral galaxies. There is a relationship. And this works for ellipticals as well. There’s a relationship between the size of the bulge and the size of the, supermassive black hole in the center. There are some galaxies, like less than ten last I looked, that looked like quite maybe. Possibly it could be they don’t actually have a supermassive black hole and they don’t have a bulge, but still working on it. Yeah.

Fraser Cain [00:29:18] Millions do. Ten don’t.

Pamela Gay [00:29:21] Right. Exactly. Yeah. And and so when you see these systems with large bulges in the core with lots of high velocity stars in those bulges, they’re going to have the big supermassive black holes, smaller bulge, lower motions, smaller supermassive black hole. And yeah. And what’s neat is, depending on the angle that we’re able to look in on a supermassive black hole that’s feeding, we get all sorts of different cool effects. So if you have a system that’s that’s edge on and has a supermassive black hole in the center, it’s called a siefert two. They’re kind of boring. They don’t have very exciting lines that do very much, but they are active and they show up in the radio in new and interesting ways. Now tilt that towards us and you start to get what’s called a Seyfert one, tilt it straight towards us and give it a really powerful jet. And you start to get what’s called a blazer. And here, because of the the distance that it that the time that it takes light from the far jet to get to us and the time that it takes for light from the near jet to get to us, it gives the perspective of faster than light motion between the two ends of the jet. So there’s this really cool physics.

Fraser Cain [00:30:40] Yeah, that’s really awesome. All right, well, I think we can cover two spiral galaxies. And so next week, we pick up the story with the giant elliptical galaxies. Thanks, Pamela.

Pamela Gay [00:30:54] Thank you, Fraser, and thank you to all the folks out there that support us through Patreon. We we really rely on you so very much. Beth, pulled together pretty. In these three episodes for us on a dime. When? When I told her yesterday. Surprise. Yeah, I guess what. And and Rich is out there doing all of the editing, hiding so many blunders. We thank you, Rich. Ali’s out there helping with our YouTube channel. It takes a team to make this happen. This week, I want to thank Kimberly Kimberly Wright. Jesus. Trina, Jeff Wilson, Tim Gerrish, Greg wilde, John Drake, Robert Cordova, Paul de Disney, Veronica cure, Michelle Cullin, Philip Walker, Benjamin Davies, Dwight. Ilke, Brian. Kilby. Daniel. Loosely, Sabra. Lark, Sydney. Walker, David. Borghetti, evil. Melky, Justin. Ace, Maxime. Leavitt, Hal McKinney. Bebop. Apocalypse. I love that one. Daniel Phillips on Bruno. Let’s Ruben McCarthy, Larry Dart’s Bob, Zach, ski time Lord, I row Frank Stewart and Jason could Dorcas folks who donated $10. We are grateful and this means I mispronounce your names. I am sorry you won.

Fraser Cain [00:32:18] Thanks everyone, and we’ll see you next week.

Pamela Gay [00:32:20] Goodbye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of the Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy cast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Doctor Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website. Astronomy. Cars.com. This episode was brought to you. Thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon.com Slash Astronomy Cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast.

It’s time to begin a new mini-series, where we’ll look at different classes of galaxies. Today, we’ll start with the dwarf galaxies, which flock around larger galaxies like the Milky Way. Are they the building blocks for modern structures?

Transcript

(This is an automatically generated transcript)

Fraser Cain [00:01:19] Astronomy cast. Episode 718 The Galaxy series: Dwarfs. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly fact space during through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Doctor Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest. Hey, Pamela. How are you doing?

Pamela Gay [00:01:40] I am doing okay enough. I am recovering from discovering shampoo I am terribly allergic to. I’m so sorry there was chaos on our normal recording day, and I continue to be in a bit of a Benadryl haze, but I’m better than it was yesterday. So thank you, everyone, for your patience.

Fraser Cain [00:02:02] All right. Well, hopefully you’ll be here cognizant and ready to explain galaxies. Now, I did one of my live streams last night, and I was talking about different kinds of telescopes, blah, blah, blah. And I always recommend first thing you do is you get a pair of binoculars and there’s like a sale on for Celestron Sky Masters. So, the 20mm x 80mm’s are down from $200 U.S to $140 U.S on Amazon. Wow.

Pamela Gay [00:02:32] Yes like 50%.

Fraser Cain [00:02:33] Yeah almost. And then similar for the 25mm x 70mm. And so I’m not sure what the story is. There’s no ad. This is not. We’re not sponsored – I just noticed this. And so if anyone’s like “oh I really want to pick up a pair of astronomical binoculars.” … I don’t know if the sale will last. But they seem to be relatively inexpensive on Amazon in the US, that is. That is the beginning and the end of this message.

It’s time to begin a new mini series where we’ll look at different classes of galaxies. And today we’re going to start with the dwarf galaxies, which flock around the larger galaxies like the Milky Way. Are they the building blocks for the modern structures that we see all around us? So, give me an example of a dwarf galaxy that maybe people in the southern hemisphere are familiar with. Give me two.

Pamela Gay [00:03:25] In the southern hemisphere, they have the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. These are dwarf galaxies that look like someone grabbed a handful of the plane in the Milky Way and just tossed it to the side. These are two systems where it’s not entirely understood. And there is debate in the literature over whether or not they’re going to end up in orbit around our Milky Way, whether or not they’re going to end up flying past. Yeah. And I feel like every few years they change their mind. Right.

Fraser Cain [00:03:55] It’s like the question of whether or not the sun is going to consume the Earth. Yeah. We get we get that going back and forth as well. But it’s only like give us a comparison. Like how big and massive is a dwarf galaxy compared to something like the Milky Way?

Pamela Gay [00:04:13] They can get so tiny. So we have systems like the Ursa minor dwarf toroidal galaxy, which is one of the smaller ones that are the size of globular clusters. They have masses of hundreds of thousands of stars. Majority of that is actually dark matter. And then they get up to being fractions, like a few percent. 10%.

Fraser Cain [00:04:40] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pamela Gay [00:04:42] Of of the size of, of a spiral galaxy like us. Now, to be clear, the Large Magellanic Cloud is. A dwarf spiral barred according to the latest classifications. Right. So so I feel like there’s folks that are going to be adding are saying but I have heard it’s it’s still a dwarf, folks. It’s still a dwarf.

Fraser Cain [00:05:10] It’s a jumbo shrimp.

Pamela Gay [00:05:11] Yes.

Fraser Cain [00:05:12] Exactly right. So okay. And then a apart from the, the LMC, structurally, what do these dwarf galaxies tend to look like in terms of, like, regular matter? Stars got dark gas dust and dark matter.

Pamela Gay [00:05:31] So they’re there are basically the smallest ones that are dark matter dominated and have globular cluster ish like masses. And then there are the larger ones, which were able to undergo multiple generations of star formation and have normal to low amounts of dark matter. So just like low luminosity galaxies can have squirrely amounts of dark matter, dwarf galaxies can have squirrely amounts of dark matter. And there’s lots of debate about how this ends up being the case. The story that seems to be coming together in the literature is that on the small side of this, you have that first generation of supernovae that goes off, and it is able to blast large amounts of the baryonic matter out of the halo, of these dwarf galaxies, when you start looking at them, in molecular lines, you see lots of cold gas outside the system’s core, and their dark matter dominated. So this seems to communicate that through supernovae and other actions, they blast out most of their luminous matter, most of their baryonic matter. Some of that gets blasted out at escape velocities. And what’s left behind is essentially a halo of dark matter hanging out darkly in in the halo of a galaxy.

Fraser Cain [00:07:01] So it’s kind of like a star, which, you know, or a stellar nebula. When it starts to finally form in, the stars start to turn on, and then they their stellar winds blow and they clear out all that gas and dust. There’s these three body interactions with stars whipping around each other, but in a large galaxy like the Milky Way, because the gravity is so intense, the escape velocity is very high. And so these stars are stuck. They’re just not near the cluster. They escape the velocity, they escape the cluster, but they don’t escape the galaxy. But I guess in these dwarf galaxies, there’s so little gravity holding the thing together that it can shed bits and pieces of itself out into space quite easily.

Pamela Gay [00:07:43] And this gets people asking questions along the lines of what is the difference between a small dwarf galaxy and a globular cluster? And it appears to be one strictly of of how they’re formed, where we’re now starting to understand that globular clusters most likely formed during galaxy interactions, where material gets slammed together and where these shockwaves come together, you get globular clusters forming, whereas dwarf galaxies form kind of like an open cluster writ large. You have this massive cloud of material that collapses under its own gravity. And as it does this, it’s it’s able to start having star formation. And so you have a dark matter halo. Luminous material gravitationally pulls into the center star formation. And supernovae can blast material out if it’s too small. Multiple generations of star formation can go on and it’s large enough. And, yeah, they’re just cool little systems.

Fraser Cain [00:08:51] Like with the Large Magellanic Cloud, though, the largest regions of star formation that we know of in our near vicinity are in that galaxy or in that dwarf galaxy, like there are like we think about the Tarantula Nebula. It’s a ludicrous amount of star formation stars vastly more massive than anything we know of in the Milky Way. So is that just a special case or. It is.

Pamela Gay [00:09:14] It’s big.

Fraser Cain [00:09:15] It’s big. Yeah.

Pamela Gay [00:09:16] This this is where we start getting into the jumbo shrimp category.

Fraser Cain [00:09:20] And it gets to tidal interactions too with the Milky Way.

Pamela Gay [00:09:23] Well, so you have a number of different things going on. This is a system that has its own globular clusters that is indeed interacting with the galaxy, our galaxy. There are occasional questions of were the Large and Small Magellanic Cloud wants the same thing? I don’t think that’s ever come to a consensus, but the question does get asked, which amuses me. And with all of these different interactions going on. Interactions. Trigger shockwaves trigger star formation. And so, as the system sweeps past the Milky Way as it interacts with our dark matter halo, as it starts to interact with our outermost, actual starts the baryonic stuffs. You’re getting shocks, the trigger star formation. And it’s glorious to look at.

Fraser Cain [00:10:15] Yeah, yeah. So then let’s talk about, like, where these things came from. Do we know where do or how dwarf galaxies originate? Because I’m, I’m sort of thinking about, say, a star cluster where you’ve got this giant stellar nebula like the Orion Nebula, and you’ve got concentrations of larger amounts with larger stars forming, and then you’ve got smaller areas and maybe you’re even getting these rogue planets forming. And so when we think about the primordial hydrogen and helium in the early universe, is it the same idea as a stellar nebula writ large, with large blobs turning into certain sized galaxies and smaller blobs turning into, you know, the the galaxy equivalent of red dwarf stars.

Pamela Gay [00:11:02] So so I. I’m just going to clean up the language here a little bit. So we have. You know, like blubber. No that’s fine. I’m down with blubber.

Fraser Cain [00:11:11] So. All right, all right.

Pamela Gay [00:11:13] Solar nebulae generally form to solar systems forming. We have star forming regions, which are a kind of nebula. I’m not sure what you’re referring to with a stellar nebula.

Fraser Cain [00:11:28] So a sort of star forming region like the Orion Nebula, where you’ve got this giant area of gas and dust of different concentrations and different stars whirling up inside this whole region of different masses. You know, there is this there is this mass relationship. Across the, you know, in a in a star forming region that creates. Stars of different sizes is of the same mechanism to make bigger galaxies versus dwarf galaxies.

Pamela Gay [00:11:57] No, because star forming regions are singular clouds that have been shocked into simultaneously forming all of these stars. And. You can have dwarf galaxies like Ursa minor, where all of the gas in them. I got shocked into a single star forming burst and whatever wasn’t used up got blasted away. But they didn’t form that way. They formed. We think that the modern dwarf, irregulars that are rich in star formation are actually analogs to these dwarf blue galaxies that we’re starting to see in images, where we’re seeing the smallest of the dark matter halos that formed are pulling in material. And that material, just like in any form in galaxy, has the chance to then clump up. And some of those clumps are going to form stars now, some form later. And. In the case of the dwarfs, there’s just not that much material. So you don’t tend to get the same numbers of star forming epics that you get with bigger systems. But it’s that same dark matter. Halo collects material inside material forms, galaxies, and these are essentially building blocks of large galaxies that came later.

Fraser Cain [00:13:23] Right, right. But I guess let me try and kind of rephrase the question, because I sort of I’m imagining in the beginning there is just the primordial hydrogen and helium. There is the dark matter. Yeah. Structure that that underlies the whole thing. And you’ve got different concentrations based on regions of over under density in the, in the original universe. And then gravity is pulling things together, pulling. And so places where you’ve got an over density, you’ve got more stuff being pulled together in places you’ve got an under density, you’ve got less of being pulled together. And after a while, like pizza dough that’s being pulled too thin, you start to get gaps opening up, voids opening up, and then the, you know, as you pull far farther and farther, then these things kind of snap and the gravity pulls them together into however much gas you have. And then the expansion continues. And so now you’re left with this just distribution of blob. I’m gonna go back to my blob of material that is now like gravitationally distinct from the other ones, as they’re sort of, you know, they’re still orbiting one another, but they are not continuing to merge up into larger objects in the beginning. That roughly on the right track then. And so the dwarf galaxies are like are the dwarf galaxies that we see today. The result of those sheared off chunks of primordial material. Or was there some mechanism later on that spun them out that that split them in half into smaller pieces?

Pamela Gay [00:15:09] So things don’t get split up later. Generally, unless it’s like a title tale or something. And those probably aren’t forming dwarf galaxies.

Fraser Cain [00:15:17] Right?

Pamela Gay [00:15:18] So the way to think about it is things tend to break up into pieces in a distribution. If you drop a mug, you’re going to get a distribution of pieces where you’ll have a few giant pieces, and then inevitably, a whole lot of little tiny crumbs, which is always the source of sadness when trying to reassemble the mugs powder.

Fraser Cain [00:15:40] Yeah, right.

Pamela Gay [00:15:42] And when the early universe fragmented, we had a distribution of of blobs of material going back to your blobs. And there were a few that were giant. And these were those first forming giant galaxies.

Fraser Cain [00:16:01] Right.

Pamela Gay [00:16:02] But the majority were these little tiny lumps of extra material that pulled in stuff, and then those within them could fragment further. So you have all this stuff is gravitationally bound together, but within this gravitationally bound together, you could get further fragmenting into star forming regions that would start up stars at different points, different times, due to what triggers were there to start the star formation. So entire universe has swept over and under densities. It fragments into pieces. Big pieces formed giant galaxies. The majority is little pieces from little galaxies that are gravitationally bound. And within that gravitationally bound, you could get further collapse into star forming regions.

Fraser Cain [00:16:56] So I mean, we thanks to Gaia, the amazing guy emission, we can see the evidence of the dwarf galaxies that the Milky Way has consumed in the ancient past.

Pamela Gay [00:17:09] And and we’re still eating a very hungry galaxy. Sure.

Fraser Cain [00:17:15] But it is interesting that a lot of the larger mergers, like, I think the last great merger happened like 8 billion years ago. Yeah. So so you say it’s happening now, but it sounds like it was furious in the early universe. And now it’s a lot less common as as the universe matures into a, into a old age. But how what contribution? Because it’s all right. Like, one of the big questions that that Webb was designed to ask was, will we see these dwarf galaxies coming together as building blocks of the larger galaxies? That is, those observations are now happening. What is this story that we’re seeing of galactic evolution over the entire age of the universe?

Pamela Gay [00:18:04] We’re still figuring out all the details. What we do see is there are these small, bright blue, furious. First, start with star formation galaxies in the early universe. Just finding them. What we see is there are galaxies that are undergoing greater amounts of merger activity in the past. There are more quasars in the past. And that excess material to feed black holes that, significantly more galaxy merger is going on the past. What is happening is over time, gravity is pulling things into tighter and tighter structures. So we went from lots and lots of small stuff to the small stuff. Having time to consume one another, to building bigger things, then kept eating the smaller things. And so we have this picture where some galaxies did just form giant from day zero. But the majority of systems grew through the constant merger of larger and larger systems. And the shapes of the galaxies seem to be dominated by what were the angles that they came together? What were the eye? Basically the distribution of big thing to small things orbiting it for grand spirals. So a lot of these grand design spiral galaxies that we see are driven by having a smaller companion. So here we can think dwarf galaxies in many cases for bringing us grand designs, spiral galaxies. Through this constant merger of systems we get bigger and bigger things. And this is an ongoing process. We continue to eat dwarf galaxies in lower numbers because we’ve already ate so many of them. There’s just not as many left to be eaten.

Fraser Cain [00:20:02] Right?

Pamela Gay [00:20:03] We continue to eat them. And then we’re also seeing the larger systems merging together. And and this is where things get more and more interesting as time progresses, because we’re going to run out of things to merge eventually. Right. And and so it’s, it’s small galaxies merging bigger and bigger all the way down.

Fraser Cain [00:20:25] I mean, I think there’s sort of like two pathways that’s there’s really interesting things to do with T. And the first one is this idea, you know, they’re called the impossible galaxies, but they just, you know, they’re not impossible. They’re possible. But the gist is that we’ve got these big galaxies early on in the universe. You’re seeing quasars at less than a billion years after the Big Bang. You’re seeing spiral galaxies again as literally within, you know, the first billion years of the universe. And so that is definitely pushing things back to what you mentioned, that you get large chunks are just turning directly into big galaxies. And and then also this history, thanks to guy of seeing when the mergers happened that that a lot of the big mergers happened early on in the Milky Way’s history. And that’s just driven by these dwarf galaxies. And so what do you know? It’s more complicated than we thought, that it’s probably both right, that you’re getting the dwarf galaxies being the building blocks of the galaxies. And a lot of them are just never making it close to another galaxy and are remaining unperturbed since almost the beginning of the universe.

Pamela Gay [00:21:35] And the difficult thing is, they are hard to see. And when the smaller things are the most numerous and the smallest things tend to be the most dark matter dominated, it becomes very difficult to do a census of these beyond our own local group. We know dwarf galaxies dominate. We know that galaxies, large ones, participate in dwarf tossing using their gravity on a regular basis.

Fraser Cain [00:22:02] Right.

Pamela Gay [00:22:03] And and so this is the hardest to observe kind of galaxy. And also the most common and also the most necessary to understand what I love is as we try and understand our past, different things that we’ve known for a long time, like the other half classifications of galaxy clusters where half of them not half, but a lot of them are going in entirely the wrong direction. And we have this thick disk to our galaxy that has a slightly different metal composition. That is all getting tracked back to eating larger dwarf galaxies and consuming their their globular clusters consuming their matter. We are a system made from multiple galaxies coming together and sharing their material and their angular momentum and everything else to give us this barred spiral structure. And that bar is due to our companions.

Fraser Cain [00:23:02] Right? Yeah. Now, you talked about sort of how some of these galaxies are dark matter dominated. Yes. In other cases it’s the opposite. They have very little dark matter. So what is the mechanism that is creating such vast differences in composition for these different dwarf galaxies?

Pamela Gay [00:23:23] It likely comes down to different interactions. This is what we’re also finding with the low surface luminosity galaxies, where if you have a system that or two systems that pass through each other, you can end up with the dark matter staying in one part and some of the luminous matter escaping. And so you get systems that are luminous matter dominated, you get systems that are dark matter dominated. And of course, the Holy Grail is finding the system that is just dark matter. We haven’t quite got there yet. We’re getting close with some of these systems. Yeah. They’re the the luminous to dark matter ratio is in the hundreds with some galaxies. And this is where it starts to get necessary to look in every wavelength to find. All right. Is there just super cold gas in these systems that is giving the mass that we don’t otherwise see? Because cold mass is. Is transparent and not exactly luminous and optical. So millimeter dishes are so important for studying these, getting down, looking for the molecules and. They’re cool and hard to see and don’t get the attention they deserve, because they’re not necessarily the kind of thing you write press releases with pretty pictures about. Yeah.

Fraser Cain [00:24:54] It is amazing to me how often new dwarf galaxies are being discovered, that every year or so, I feel like there’s a couple of new dwarf galaxies that turn up from larger and larger surveys of our neighborhood. And some of these ones, as you said, that are, you know, are dark matter dominated, are harder to find. And so often it’s like gravitational lensing gives us insights into where these things are. And I know and you mentioned early on there’s like one that, as you said, has the mass of a star cluster.

Pamela Gay [00:25:28] Yeah. There’s several like that. Yeah.

Fraser Cain [00:25:30] And yet is a is a galaxy with all the parts and pieces.

Pamela Gay [00:25:36] The Ursa minor dwarf squirrel galaxy is near and dear to me. It was the topic of my master’s thesis.

Fraser Cain [00:25:41] Yeah.

Pamela Gay [00:25:41] If you take an image of it and it’s about a degree across. So you need a big field of view. You can’t tell you’re seeing a galaxy. It’s just an over density of stars in the sky. And it’s closer to us than some of our globular clusters. So these are large diffuse systems where you can see individual stars and look right through them to galaxies beyond. They’re super cool.

Fraser Cain [00:26:08] I’m looking at. There’s like since when you did your doctoral thesis, there have been many more. Even lighter. Even smaller.

Pamela Gay [00:26:17] Oh, yeah.

Fraser Cain [00:26:18] Galaxies. It’s it’s kind of amazing. So for example, is one called SEG two that has about a thousand stars. Yeah. That’s it. A thousand stars in a galaxy.

Pamela Gay [00:26:28] Yeah.

Fraser Cain [00:26:29] So again, this is the scale of of what’s out there. And yet the galaxy itself has about 55,000 times the mass of the sun. And so.

Pamela Gay [00:26:41] 1000 matter that.

Fraser Cain [00:26:42] Dark dark matter dominated. Yeah. Exactly. Right. That is that is causing the bulk of that of the mass of that galaxy. It’s fascinating. And. I wish they were easier to see because they are telling the true story of the history of the universe. And this is what Webb. One of the things Webb was really designed to do was to find these things and see them coming together, to really tell us that story of where we came from. And if there couldn’t be a more cutting edge piece of research right now that, you know, we look back and we think, oh, what are the things that changed dramatically? I’ll bet you the story of dwarf galaxies will be one of the ones that we’re going to come back to in ten years and go, oh, we didn’t know anything about galaxies. And thanks to thanks to all of these, like Euclid and Vera Rubin and Nancy Grace Roman and, the Desy database, because all these things that are coming online to search for dark matter, dark energy, and to do these detailed galaxy surveys of the area around us. And I think our our understanding of the universe is going to change subtly or dramatically in the coming years. And so don’t be surprised if we like dwarf galaxies. We hardly knew you.

Pamela Gay [00:28:02] And what’s amazing is what is nearly invisible today, because they’re made of elder red stars.

Fraser Cain [00:28:08] Yeah.

Pamela Gay [00:28:09] They shone like fireflies in the early universe. These were rich in blue stars billions of years ago, and so how our universe looks has radically changed with the single epic of star formation dying out in all these systems. So they were the bright blue galaxies of the past, and they’re the red, almost impossible to see galaxies of today.

Fraser Cain [00:28:35] All right. So stay tuned to this series. We will be back next week with the next episode. Thanks, Pamela.

Pamela Gay [00:28:42] Thank you, Fraser, and thank you to everyone out there who is donating at the $10 a week or higher level. Thank you, actually, to everyone that donates. I just want to be clear, we are grateful for all of you, but I only mispronounce the names of folks donating at the $10 or higher level. This week I’m going to tempt and fail to pronounce the following people who I am grateful for as names. Thank you to Paul L Hayden, Steven Coffee, Bart Flaherty, Benjamin Carrier, and 1961 super symmetrical Michael Purcell. Jim Schooler share some Andrew Stevenson, Tim McCormack, and the lonely stand person Kenneth Ryan, Gregory Singleton, Frodo Tenham Bo, Michael Regan, father Prax J. Alex Anderson, Glenn McDavid, Jim McGinn, Bruce Amazing, Szymanski, planetary, the air major Michael York, Matthew Horstman, Scott. Cohen, Scott. Bieber, Georgie. Ivanov, Justin. Proctor, Matthias. Hayden, Lu Zealand, Nyla the big squish squash David Gates, Benjamin. Mueller. Cooper, Eran. Zagreb, beta. Peter Philip Grant, Grand Don. Mondesi, James. Raj. Roger. Wow. That one I shouldn’t have to stumble over but I’m going to today. It’s a that’s. Yeah, it is. Shawn. Max, Cami Raspbian, Nate Detweiler, Sam Brooks and his mom and Dean, thank you all so very much. You make this show possible.

Fraser Cain [00:30:18] Thanks, everyone. And we’ll see you next week.

Pamela Gay [00:30:21] Bye bye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy cast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Doctor Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website. Astronomy. Cars.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon.com Slash Astronomy Cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast.

How old is that star? That planet? That nebula? Figuring out the ages of astronomical objects is surprisingly challenging. Fortunately, astronomers have developed a series of techniques they can use to work out the ages of stuff.

Transcript

(This is an automatically generated transcript)

Fraser Cain [00:01:04] Astronomy Cast episode 717. How old is that thing in space? Welcome to Astronomy Cast, her weekly facts based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Doctor Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the planetary sciences, too, and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, Pavel, how you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:01:27] I am doing well. It is hay fever. It is spring. Yeah. I do have a cool announcement to share out with all of our audience on, the. I should have had these dates in front of me. On Friday, May 24th, I’m going to be doing a meet and greet in Baltimore, at a cool old clock restoration place that has now been turned into a bar. And then on May 30th, I’m going to do a meet and greet in Orlando at the East Side Market. All of this information is going up on my social media and Cosmo Quest’s social media, and it will go on Astronomy Cast social media. It’s not there yet. So if you are going to be in either of those places, come say hi. I’ll be in Baltimore for the ball to con convention. So if you want to hear me give talks, that’s your opportunity. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:24] Read on. How old is that star? That planet, that nebula. Figuring out the ages of astronomical objects is surprisingly challenging. But fortunately, astronomers have developed a series of techniques they can use to work out the ages of stuff in space. So this is going to be like a collection of store like techniques overlapping. In some cases, it’s it’s like the distance ladder. 

Pamela Gay [00:02:51] Yeah, yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:52] But it’s the age ladder which is, which is kind of sort of like a different, I don’t know, totally different perspective in how you think about stuff in space. So, I mean, we could talk about stuff in the solar system, stuff out in space, the beginning of the universe itself. Where where would you like to begin this conversation? 

Pamela Gay [00:03:10] So, so the way that we measure times falls into two categories. There is expanding stuff and we can just work backwards. Glorious, glorious B we can just work backwards. And then there is all of the stuff that has an age ladder that is usually, rooted in atoms and stuff. And I say, why don’t we start with all of the stuff that’s expanding? Okay? And. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:38] That sounds good, like Crab Nebula. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:39] Is that a good place to start? Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:41] Totally. Yes. Okay, so this is a great example, right? You look in space, you see this puff cloud of material and you ask yourself, how old is this thing? Now, in this specific case, we know how old it is because people watched it happen. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:57] And what’s cool is we figured out, yes, these two things exactly match because looking at the expansion rate and working backwards also matches the historic records. And and so to have this double confirmation is is kind of awesome. So with with the Crab Nebula we have photographic evidence of what it’s been doing since the early 1900s. We can look at this. We can see where the details in that. It kind of looks like a dead bug pattern of clouds and gas. We can see where it is relative to all the background stars. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:44] Right. And the point is that this is a supernova remnant that’s exactly expanding debris cloud from a supernova that went off. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:52] And then because we have these old images, we take new images and you can superimpose them, lining them up using the stars. Stars. Some of them have moved, but in general they haven’t. And you can see all of this dead bug of clouds of gas and dust have moved. And this allows us to work out the rate of expansion. And once you know the rate at which something is expanding, and we have enough images that we can now see, it’s also a continuous expansion. Once you know the rate at which something is expanding, you know the size that something is. That’s now just a distance equation that all of us have done when we were trying to figure out how long until I get to the place I’m going. Right, right. The total size of friends. Getting you a. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:43] Car? Yeah. In the car. They are traveling eastward at 50km/h. How long does it take for them to reach their destination? Yeah. Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:51] Yeah. So it’s exactly that math. You take the rate they’re moving, you take the distance, and you can figure out the time. It’s easy. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:01] Now, what are we seeing? Expanding. I mean, are we actually seeing this cloud of debris or. I know in some cases, you’re seeing the light that is leaving the explosion as it’s illuminating the surroundings. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:15] Right. So we have two different things we have to worry about with the Crab Nebula supernova remnant. We are actually seeing the the stuff move in some cases and the shockwave propagate. In other cases we’re looking at light echoes. One of the coolest side effects of the mantra project which looked at the nearby Magellanic Clouds was they saw these weird bright streaks through a lot of their images that they initially thought were errors in the optics. But as they went back year after year, they were able to see these bands did not remain in the same place. And as the bands moved when they ran the geometry, they were able to figure out this is an expanding shell of light. Oh, this is an expanding child, and the shell of light is moving at the speed of light, and it’s simply hitting gas and dust particles between the stars, getting reflected back at us. So we’re seeing this expanding shell and and then it’s just geometry problem to figure out where the center of that is and calculate when the supernova event that triggered the light was let off. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:39] And the example that we see in the sky more recently is supernova 1987 A, which has that really cool ring structure and has these weird, pearls. Yeah. This is embedded within the, the ring itself. And in fact, this material was hurled out as the star itself was dying. And that ring that we’re seeing is the light emanating away from the blast zone, illuminating all of the previous stuff that had been thrown out as it’s interacting with the interstellar medium. It’s a it’s a phenomenal idea. So so, you know, we sort of led into this idea that you can calculate back. And so when astronomers calculated, you know, use that simple geometry problem to figure out how long this expanding gas cloud has been going on with the Crab Nebula. When did they calculate the beginning? 

Pamela Gay [00:08:40] 1054. And there were Chinese records of something in 1054. And it now looks like that’s the match. This this is what it is. There’s archeological, records in the American Southwest as well. That may be datable because it’s thought that those carvings in rock may be the supernova and they’re in the right era. So we may also be able to use what we see with the light echo. What was confirmed in Chinese writing to get at the date of records in the American Southwest. Well, it all slowly allows things to go full circle as we create a time ladder, as he said at the beginning of the show. But in this case, it’s. Time of one thing and a whole lot of records. They get interrelated. And I just want to say it isn’t just supernovae that do this. One of my favorite light echoes is the 838 mine. This is a star that flashed amazingly. Two different color flashes. We were able to watch them evolve in this expanding shell, or pair of shells of light, allowed us to map out the distribution of material around this star or stars. After these Nova events took place. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:14] It, like almost everything that you see in space, is very static. You’re like, oh, there you’re looking at this nebula, you’re looking at this galaxy, and it is going to be unchanged for tens of thousands of years, millions of years in some cases. But in the 838 on it is this the time lapse of just from Hubble shows just how much it really looks like this explosion. It it yeah, it’s absolutely incredible. And so you can say, when did this event take place? We’ve done a ton of reporting on Universe Today about this, this stellar archeology that goes on where astronomers will find some, supernova remnant. They’ll use that technique that you mentioned, they’ll calculate the age of the blast wave, determine the date when this should have been visible, and then they go looking in historical records for anybody that noticed a bright star in the sky up here at this time. And it comes up again and again and again in ancient Chinese records, Japanese records, European records, Greek records, things like that. It’s it’s amazing how much there is this correlation, because these supernovae must have just been so exciting and scary for the people who saw them. They wrote it down. And we get to find out that this happened. All right. So we talked about, things that are expanding. Now let’s try and figure out the ages of more static objects. All right. So let’s talk about something simple a star. How old is that star. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:45] I was obsessed with, like, cratering, which is a whole lot easier. Okay, let’s go to the hard stuff first. I’m with you. With you. Okay. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:54] All right. Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:55] So? So with stars, we use nuclear cosmic chemistry, which is just a really fun word to say. The idea is there are a whole lot of atomic nuclei that are not entirely stable. And when a star forms, they will have a certain ratio, given the supernova material that went into them of the radioactive material and the water particles that come off when that material, decays into the water particles. And so when we look at some stars with just the right atmospheric conditions, we are able to see the ratios of the. Atoms that have the half lifes and do the decaying. And the daughter particles they get decayed into. And by looking at these ratios, we start to be able to say, this object appears to be this amount of time old. Now, this is an imperfect science because stars can eat their neighbors, they can eat their friends, they can eat their planets. So there’s always the potential for contamination. It’s also an imperfect science, because if a star is small enough, you have convection. If a star is big enough, it’s just gonna have a much more weird atmosphere to deal with. And if it’s a main sequence star, its surface gravity is just going to make things harder. It’s complicated. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:27] And and so. But to make lives easier, if it is in a globular star cluster, then you’ve got another vector to try and triangulate the age. 

Pamela Gay [00:13:38] Yes. So this is where we start getting into the do astronomers actually understand the lives of stars as a way of calculating the age? So we know in general that stars over time go from burning hydrogen in their core to burning more and more advanced atoms. Throughout this process, they change in color, they change in size. And when you make a plot of the color of the stars and the luminosity of the stars, they group up in different places in this plot according to what’s going on in their centers. And the first thing we see. Is because the biggest stars run out of hydrogen to burn in their cores. First, they leave the line that represents the main sequence of hydrogen burning first and is more complicated than that. There are things other than hydrogen being burned by the biggest stars on the main sequence. Do not at us, right? But by measuring where this turn off is, as you go to smaller and smaller stars, you can first rank. Okay, this is definitely older than this, right? Yeah. And as our modeling gets more and more advanced, we start to be able to say we are pretty sure that stars that have gone through all these different processes and have this combination of atoms, this metallicity scientifically, are going to be this age at this point. And so, this is how we went from when I was a graduate student being very confused that the globular clusters appeared to be older than the universe. We didn’t quite have our stellar evolution nailed down. We’re better now. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:29] Well, right. And I think that goes to the challenge of. 

Pamela Gay [00:15:33] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:34] Any of these techniques and that like, really, I mean, we’ll get into this in a second, but really into the last couple of years, you were you would be off by billions of years occasionally. 

Pamela Gay [00:15:46] Yeah. That was a thing. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:48] It was not very accurate to know the age of that star. You say, look, it’s a means you would star. It’s it’s probably at this phase, you know, it’s 2 to 4 billion years old, right? Yeah. Which isn’t the level of accuracy, but but there has been a technique developed fairly recently. Astro seismology? 

Pamela Gay [00:16:07] Yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:16:07] Which is giving us much more accurate measurements of stellar ages. 

Pamela Gay [00:16:11] And this is because astro seismology, like making anything resonate, allows us to get at the density and size of that cavity in the outer atmosphere of the star. And, and one of my earliest things of research was actually looking at how our Laris, for instance, over time, their periods will evolve as the density of the star changes, with nucleosynthesis and stellar mixing and all these other things going on. And so by being able to get this check on the conditions in the outer layers of the star, getting this check on how the different forms of energy transfer taking place, the convective region, the radius transfer region. We are able to start saying from the data, we know these are boundary conditions and knowing boundary conditions. That reduces so much of the era. And we’ve also had another really cool check on a lot of this, which is as our telescopes get better, we’re able to see more and more white dwarfs in these clusters. And we know from how nuclear burning works what temperature the core of a star was when it decided to get rid of its atmosphere. And that gives us the starting temperature of a white dwarf star. And then we look at them and we can see what temperatures are the white dwarfs as they cool off. And that starts to tell us, okay, this distribution of white dwarf temperatures, in combination with this combination of evolved stars and the rest of the cluster, means it has to be a given age. So there’s lots of checksums coming into place. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:02] Yeah, it’s really cool, right? We look at the chemicals in the stars upper atmosphere, we look at its neighbors. We look at the tiny variations in its brightness, the the wobbles of seismic waves passing through the star. And you can triangulate on the age of that star three inch map. And there are more. But but those are, you know, if you’ve got other things that it’s interacting with other clues and hints and feels very much like, like a detective working on a very complex case. And if you notice something nearby, then you can draw that in as a hint to the age of this, of this object. So let’s talk about just the edges of surfaces on worlds. 

Pamela Gay [00:18:44] And this comes down to looking at cratering. And we can also get a ground truth by cheating and going there and grabbing rocks. So the moon is the best example. When we look at the moon, we see areas that are extremely cratered. We see areas that are quite smooth. And it all comes down to how old is that surface? If a region on the moon is sufficiently cratered such that. Every time a new rock comes in and hits it, it’s just a racing. Other craters. It’s basically at an equilibrium for the distribution of craters in that region. That is a very old region. Adding new craters does nothing right. If I’m looking at a region that has progressively fewer craters than that saturated region, I can then order the ages by. This is fewer. So it’s younger. This has even fewer. So it’s even younger than that. Bare naked crater lists. That’s a brand new section. And craters get erased through a variety of different means on the moon. Once upon a time, there was volcanism. Today, the biggest way to erase a region is you hit it with something sufficiently large that it flattens an area, probably melts the entire area as well, which is just a different form of lava flow. It’s no longer volcanic. Still have a crater, just not a volcanic crater. Blame craters. That’s the moral, I guess, for the moon. So you basically erase an area and then we know the rate at which rocks from space attack as a function of size. Right. There’s this regular onslaught of tiny stuff. There’s a less regular but frequent enough that we can actually see bright spots when we look at the crescent moon, where the bright spots appear on the dark part of the moon regularly, and imagery, which is super cool, that’s impacts taking place. And by knowing the rate at which cratering occurs, is a function of size of the thing doing the impacting, we can say, what is the difference in age between different areas? Now what we know with the moon we can put on a this is the actual time scale. Because the Apollo astronauts landed in a variety of different places. The, lunar samples taken from the Soviet Union were taken from a variety of places. And by saying this region where this rock came from is, related to this amount of cratering and this rock from over here that came from, this amount of cratering, has this actual age using radio, dating radio, active material dating then. We can correlate all of the the crater densities to actual ages. And what’s cool is we can then also take this and expand it out to the rest of the solar system. Now it’s a little bit more complex. We have to make assumptions about things closer to the sun are going to get hammered. A lot more things further out from the sun are generally going to get hit less. Exceptions get too close to Jupiter. All bets are off. And and by combining models ground truth with lunar samples and what we hope to someday get with ground truth from places like Mars and asteroids that aren’t rubble piles. We will be able to work out the cratering rate throughout our solar system, and thus get the age of various surfaces that aren’t being affected by weather and atmospheric conditions. Here on Earth, it’s a completely different story. We use sedimentation and radiocarbon dating, and other atoms depending on the ages you’re going towards. But, cratering is a great way to understand the rest of the solar system, and it’s from cratering that we know the surface of Pluto has been around for less time than insects belonging to the family of bees have been on the planet Earth. Bees have existed as bees longer than the surface of Pluto has existed based on cratering rates. And that’s right. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:27] Right. And so the just being that some, some active process is happening to resurface the, the, the, the surface of, of Pluto. Yeah. And and it’s the same thing like we look at the surface of Europa and it’s surprisingly smooth. Not a lot of craters there. So some process is actively smoothing it out. While we look at Mercury we look at the moon Ganymede. They look a lot older. Yeah. And and and again it’s back to this overlapping methods of, of measurement that you’ve got. On the one hand, you’ve got the actual samples that were brought home to Earth to allow you to sample, to figure out within the closest tens of millions of years when those samples, like when these regions were formed on the surface of the moon, was this lava flow, was that that lava flow, was it an ancient hilly terrain? Whatever. And then you count up the the crater counts, and now you start to realize how often these craters, these impacts are happening. And you can measure the ages with incredible precision across the surface. And that gets used on Mars as well. It’s kind of amazing. This crater happened before that crater, this. You can tell when this impact happened because of the amount of sub craters inside of it, which is bonkers. 

Pamela Gay [00:24:49] It’s it’s really amazing. And it it works in so many different ways. Even when you do have weathering here on Earth, it’s from our lack of of craters that we’re able to start to get at how young the surface of our planet has to be. When we look at Mars, we can see this region of Mars must have been wildly changed due to some factor, because it’s just dunes as far as the eye can see, and you don’t have craters. Now, admittedly, dunes are probably eating many craters. Our geology and our search for how worlds are changing is driven by what we do and don’t see with cratering. And that’s just a really cool dichotomy, and it really starts to get fascinating when you look at things like the radar data of what Venus looks like beneath all that cloud. Because yes, there are craters, but not as many as you would expect if it was a dead world. Highlight. Venus was not a dead world. It was very interesting until recently. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:00] Yeah, yeah, that that you don’t see the kinds of cratering that you would expect to see. And it all feels like it got a refresh at a very specific point in time to. And so you get this theory that, in fact, the entire crest of Venus turned itself inside out at some specific point in time, which is mind bending to think that’s that’s how a planet can evolve geologically. Sounds scary. Well, that was very cool. Powell I love this idea. Is there a name for this? The the age ladder? I don’t know if there’s a term for this, I wonder. 

Pamela Gay [00:26:37] There is not. I don’t think I’ve ever really heard anyone put it as age ladder before. And I love that. And yeah, I think I’m going to give you credit and use that whenever I can. So it sounds good. Thank you for making my life happier. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:57] That sounds good. Thanks very much. 

Pamela Gay [00:26:59] And thank you. Not just Fraser, but thank you everyone who’s out there supporting the show, allowing us to do this week after week. This week. I would like to thank Jordan Young, Boogieing that Stephen Veitch and that Wink burrow under a level, Christian manager Holt, Ziggy, Camilla, Andrew Lester, Brian. Cagle, David. Trobe, Ed David, Gerald. Schweitzer, buzz. Parsec, zero. Chill, Laura. Kelson, Robert. Plasma, Joe. Holstein, Richard. Drum, les. Howard, Gordon. Doers, Adam. Annas. Brown, Alexis. Brenda. Conrad, Holling. Kim, Baron. Astrocytes. I think this person made up their name, conveyed the role of love science Wanderer and 101 Felix Goot, William. Andrews. Gold. Jeff Collins. Marcy. Her. Leo. Simeon. Parton, Jeremy. Kerwin, Kellyanne and David. Parker. Slug. Harold. Barton. Hagen, Alex. Cohen. Claudia mastroianni. Conception. Franco, Matt. Rucker, Abraham. Cottrell, Mark. Steven. Rusnak and Esau. Alex. Rain. And. And if you too would like to hear me, attempt to pronounce your name with varying levels of success, join our Patreon at the $10 a month level or higher at Patreon.com Slash Astronomy Cast. You are the reason we get to do this pretty much stress free. We have the best group of humans behind us making everything happen. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:37] Awesome! Thanks everyone and we’ll see you next week. 

Pamela Gay [00:28:40] Bye bye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of the Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy cast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Doctor Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website. Astronomy. Cars.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon.com Slash Astronomy Cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast. 

Last week, we learned about the death of Peter Higgs, a physicist and discoverer of the particle that bears his name. The Large Hadron Collider was built to find and describe the particle. Today, we’ll look back at the life of Peter Higgs and his particle.

Transcript

(This is an automatically generated transcript)

Fraser Cain [00:01:05] Astronomy cast episode 716 The God Particle remembering Peter Higgs. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly fact based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know about how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Doctor Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmo Quest. Hey, Pam. How are you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:01:28] I am doing well, I, I am still trying to get my sleep back on schedule after having a whole bunch of our Cosmic Quest community mods come out and hang out during the eclipse week and all the events around that. It was a tremendous event, and it was so good to see so many people face to face, including some I had never met in person. At one point we had 14 humans and four spare dogs in the house during the, lead up to the eclipse as everyone was prepping in house. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:01] Can absorb that. 

Pamela Gay [00:02:02] It can, although keeping the dogs separated is necessary. Was was a fascinating game of gates. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:11] But we were off last week because we were enjoying the eclipse and victory for both of us. Yes, both saw totality clear skies. It was perfect. So yay us! 

Pamela Gay [00:02:25] We did it. We did it. No need to ever travel again for an eclipse. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:30] No way. I want to see war. But it was it was amazing. And I think for everybody out there who’s listening to this, if you did get a chance to see it, congratulations. If you didn’t get a chance to see it, the the. Cosmic geometry continues, and you will get more chances in the future and some fun travel ideas. So. So keep trying out there and. Yeah, yeah. I’m so glad that we got a chance to see it after 2017. Yeah, I didn’t get a chance to see it. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:05] We tried. We tried. The universe mocked us. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:08] Yes. Last week, we learned about the death of Peter Higgs, a physicist and the discoverer of the particle that bears his name. The Large Hadron Collider was built to find and describe the particle. Today, we’ll look back at the life of Peter Higgs and his particle. All right. Pamela. What? Who is Peter Higgs? 

Pamela Gay [00:03:29] He was a British theoretical physicist. Who? Every single thing I found to read described him as shy, as filled with creativity and curiosity and. Just not wanting to be a famous person, but willing to explain science to anyone and break down the concepts. As much as it was needed to help them understand. He’s not someone I ever met, but after all the reading I did for this episode, I really am sad I never met him. There aren’t enough personable theoretical physicists who actually can break things down, because most of the time they’re just working at such a high level that bringing it down to even the level of an observational astronomer isn’t something that happens. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:26] But let’s talk about his, I don’t know, discovery. His his what? You call it his background. His. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, his background, but also leading up to his. Ma’am. What’s the right word? I guess his theory of that there should be a particle that connects mass to the universe. So? So how did. Was he the person that figured this out? 

Pamela Gay [00:04:55] So he was one of them. And so. So basically, this is the story of everything working exactly the way it’s supposed to. He he went to a private school when he was in high school or a magnet school. I’m not sure quite what the right words are. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:12] Yeah, I know, it’s like public school means not what you think he does in private schools. I mean, what you think it means. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:16] So he wanted England now? 

Fraser Cain [00:05:18] Right, right. So did did he go to the one where the regular people go to? Or the one where people pay for them to go? 

Pamela Gay [00:05:25] He went to the one that that Paul Dirac had gone to. And that’s the key point. Okay, is he went to the same, high school. I think that’s the closest explanation word. But Paul Dirac had graduated from well before him, but he knew about Paul Dirac because he was an alumni, and he decided that he wanted to follow in Paul Dirac’s footsteps and become a physicist. He moved to the City of London so that he could go to a more exclusive, finishing off the rest of high school before starting university. And so this really starts by being this is someone who had a role model, and that role model inspired them to do great things with their life. So first of all, when I like this story already. Yeah. He then bounced around, did his undergraduate hitchhike for a while, fell in love with the city of Edinburgh while hitchhiking. Which which is just pleasing. It was is the 50s. It was safer back then. When got his PhD when he was 25, did the same thing that still happens today. He bounced around. He was a lecturer here, a lecturer there. And when he was 35, he submitted a paper to Physics Letters that outlined how maths, which at that point in time couldn’t be explained. Like everything we knew about particle physics at that point in time, said a lot of the key particles should not have any mass, but they have mass. And so there was this very deeply confusing issue. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:10] And at this point, I mean, there was the standard model of particle physics that had a lot of the bits and pieces already figured out. There was it. 

Pamela Gay [00:07:17] Wasn’t as complete. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:19] Right? Right. I mean, we knew about the proton, the neutron, the electron, but also the quarks and the various particles that the subatomic particles, some of which had been confirmed in with particle accelerators and others which hadn’t, but everyone just assumed they had to be. There was just a matter of time before they were found. 

Pamela Gay [00:07:38] And and so he was working in trying to understand how symmetries get broken, how you make space for mass to exist. And he put together a theory that brought together both the, the boson that would go on to hold his name, and a scalar field that permeated all of space and time. The particles couple went through that boson, and it’s through that coupling that objects end up having what we discern as mass in our laboratories. And the paper was soundly rejected. And I love this part of the story because he submits the work. The paper gets rejected from a journal that was published out of CERN. So like the laboratory that would eventually be the one that discovers the Higgs boson said, no science for you do not believe. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:39] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:08:40] And he added one paragraph to the paper, submitted it to a different journal, Physics Review. And and it got published. Now here is where he is such an awesome human. So his work was not the only work on on trying to understand this. There are three different teams at the time that were all working on this at the same time, and throughout his entire life, he always gave credit to all the other teams. And so you see it called the Higgs field. You see it called by a variety of other different names. And he made sure every time he referred to it, he listed everyone involved, usually by an alphabet soup of all their names, which is about the nicest thing a human being could do. And in preparing for this episode, I was rewatching and I didn’t make it all the way through. But I was rewatching, Particle Fever, which is a documentary. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:53] That’s great documentary. 

Pamela Gay [00:09:54] Yeah, yeah, it’s by David Kaplan. It’s available. Not for streaming, but you can purchase it or rent it, pretty much everywhere. And he’s he’s not playing a major role in it. And so while they have all these other physicists where they’re like, this human only writes papers with three authors because Nobel Prizes can only go to three people. Peter Higgs is, like, shown crying when they find the well, I mean, he’s not doing this. He’s wiping away tears. But, like, Peter Higgs is just like they they found it. He’s so sweet, so nice. And they catch him crying, and everyone else is just like, oh. Because they weren’t the ones getting the Nobel Prize. And here he is the day. This is my favorite story so far. So, like, everyone knows when they’re going to be making the calls for the Nobel Prize. The people who are nominated often have an idea they don’t know who’s going to be the winner, but they know to stay home and stay next to the phone. And Peter Higgs went out for a walk and left his phone at home because he didn’t want to deal with it. And it was one of his neighbors. As he’s walking home, that lets him know, right, that you got the Nobel Prize in physics and it’s just awesome. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:12] So, you know, he had predicted this particle and the field and the interactions between these two. And I think that’s that’s the key. You know, it’s very easy to just say, oh, there’s got to be some field that contributes to mass. There’s got to be some particle that makes mass. But to recognize this connection between the particle, the boson and the field, and there’s some great analogies to describe how the Higgs boson would work. Do you have a do you have a favorite? 

Pamela Gay [00:11:42] I do, I read this initially in Scientific America back in the 90s. So the way to think about the the Higgs boson in the Higgs field is if you’re trying to walk through a room and you’re a nobody, you have no mass, you just fly through the room because there’s nothing slowing you down. You have nothing dragging you. You have nothing connecting. You zoom. You’re through the room. Now, if you have. A few friends, you might get slowed down because like, hey, how’s it going? Hey, great. How’s how’s how’s the trip? 

Fraser Cain [00:12:20] What do you think about this? Yeah. What do you think about this? Yeah. I want you to meet this person. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:25] And so this is someone who has or something that has a little bit of mass. They have a few bosons coupling them to the Higgs field, and this slows down their passage. Now, the more famous you are, or the more massive you are, the more you have dragging you down by coupling you to that field. And so more massive objects have a stronger coupling. They have more Higgs bosons tying them to that Higgs scalar field. And so there’s no direction to the field is just everywhere all the time. And, we all get stuck to it by these Higgs bosons. And I, for one, could do with a few fewer Higgs bosons. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:07] Right? But like Taylor Swift trying to move through that party and make no progress. 

Pamela Gay [00:13:12] And that is a massive particle. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:15] A very massive particle. Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. So so key predicts the particle predicts the field. But but how did this get translated into what is one of the greatest scientific experiments in human history? 

Pamela Gay [00:13:30] Well, this is a combination of really good promotion by another Nobel Prize winner and also the entire field, trying really hard to check all the boxes in the standard model, trying to find all the things. So first we have Leon Letterman, who won his Nobel Prize for work on neutrinos, who wrote a book that he intended to call the God four letter word, I’m not going to say on Air Particle. And his publisher was like, no, no, Leon, we cannot do that. And so the God four letter word that I’m not going to say on air particle, became the book The God particle. Right. And and what. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:16] It would be the it was the god damn particle, right? 

Pamela Gay [00:14:19] Yeah. Now you’re going to say the word that I. Yeah. That’s fine. You do it. Yeah, yeah. So, so, when Letterman was going to name his book The Goddamn Particle, his publisher was like, no, no, we cannot do that. And, and and one of the reasons it was called that is because it was so frustrating to find it’s such a massive particle. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:38] Right, right. So the name is not is not like its incredible purpose in the universe. It is just like it. How frustrating it’s been to find this thing that the most powerful particle accelerators, which have been trying to find it, have failed because they don’t have enough energy. You don’t have the right tools to get to this stupid, elusive particle. 

Pamela Gay [00:15:01] Yeah. And and then, of course, because early on, Letterman had done that, a lot of people were like, oh, we’re going to to make this the most important particle ever, because it is what gives the universe mass. And with mass, gravity can evolve all the things. And so it’s it’s not so much a back rename as a back rename where they, they gave it all the import after it had been done by a publisher trying to. Yeah. But I think that because of the book, because of the popularity of the idea, that probably helped with keeping the funding turned on to make this happen. So, so the idea that we needed to build bigger and bigger and bigger particle accelerators have been around for a while here in the United States. We’ve been trying to build the super collider, super colliding. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:59] Superconducting SuperCollider. 

Pamela Gay [00:16:00] Thank you in Texas. And then Congress canceled it after it had mostly been dug, after they had taken all of the land from the farmers via eminent domain, they sold the land to, real estate people who built McMansions, and they actually sold in the tunnel instead of using it for geologic research, which had been proposed. So that was just a hot mess. U.S was not going to find this particle. And and CERN was like, okay, we’re a multinational consortium. We have partners from nations that are all but at war with each other, and we’re still in the name of science going to use the wealth of all of these nations, the intellectual capabilities of all of these nations, to work together to build a. Accelerator capable of sending particles at higher and higher velocities. And collecting them in these instruments. Atlas being the key to finding the Higgs boson. And and full disclosure when I was a baby student at Michigan State University, I spent a summer weaving fiber for instruments for Atlas. Oh, wow. So, my skin cells are probably somewhere in Atlas. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:19] This is personal. 

Pamela Gay [00:17:21] Yeah, yeah. So I, I just, like, listened to audiobooks all summer and attach fibers very carefully over and over. Hundreds and hundreds of them. This is what undergraduates in physics do. But this is just an idea of how many members of the physics community in the astronomy community have been part of building this. There were thousands of students. There were hundreds of graduate students. There were probably hundreds of thousands, just fewer, hundreds working on all levels of this experiment, from the electronics to the optics to the control systems. It was a true, truly global endeavor to find the reason my bathroom scale makes me sad in the morning. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:12] Right? So let’s talk about the experiment then. What was the Large Hadron Collider at CERN? What was sort of some of the key parts to this experiment? 

Pamela Gay [00:18:24] So they needed to get a extremely large amount of energy, tens of electron volts, confined in the tiniest of volumes. And the reason they needed to do this is so that. That energy could then turn into the ever so briefly lived Higgs boson. So Higgs bosons have a mean lifetime, and I have to look at my screen for this. Of between 1.2 and 4.6 times ten to the -22 seconds. So 0.0, right? That zero 21 times. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:13] Right? 

Pamela Gay [00:19:14] 1.2 to 4.6. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:17] Right. That is a very tiny amount of time. A fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:24] Yeah. So. So they not only needed to get a 125 giga electron volts divided by c squared, which is the crazy units that we use in particle physics of energy confined in one small area. They also had to have instruments capable of measuring the trails made by the particles created in that energy. Combine in that small area all at once. And so the way this was done was they were accelerating protons. They needed to get them going super, super fast. They needed to then make them go smash as you do. And then one of the biggest features of Atlas was layers upon layers of fiber optics of varying, kinds, with color sensitivities that would then be able to channel the energy through the photo multiplier tubes that could sense the light, the flickers of energy of these particles coming in and out of existence. And. They did it in there. What was amazing is there had been hints that this was the correct energy. There have been hints that things had previously been seen, at Fermi National Lab when they were running some of their high energy experiments. They had to turn off Fermi’s experiments while they were working on upgrading their things. Then they upgraded everything at CERN. CERN was the place that ultimately did the experiment, and it’s hoped with the next generation of of the CERN accelerator and all of its instruments, that they’ll be able to see more than just a signal created by these things, but they’ll actually start to be able to measure more and more of their properties and hopefully be able to start doing things like prove once and for all that the supersymmetric particles are or aren’t there, and find any particles that may or may not be dark matter. So it’s not that they did CERN just to find the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson helped. And Leon Letterman’s book popularizing the Higgs boson really helped. But this is fundamental physics. This this is what we do. We we go, okay, we have a theory. The theory says all these particles are going to exist. We’re now going to make sure all those particles actually exist, because if they don’t, the theory is wrong. Yeah. This was the last of the the core particles that should be discoverable. There’s a graviton out there that we probably will never find if it exists. But this was the last of the particles we knew we could find. If we could just turn the energy up to 11. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:22] Right, right. And and there’s, like, a real beauty to that. I mean, was it 2012? They announced the the findings, but but we had for a couple of years leading up to that, we knew that they were that they were on the right track. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:37] It was going on. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:38] With higher level signals. It was going to work. They’d found it. It was really a matter of exactly, you know, trying to pin down the mass of this, of this particle. But how did the physics community, I guess, how did Higgs I mean, you mentioned early on he he wiped away tears from his eyes. Yeah, yeah. So, so how did that sort of change his perspective on on what he had originally proposed. 

Pamela Gay [00:23:06] So, so he’s a shy human. So finding things like that wasn’t something I was able to do. He was the kind of person who showed up to these events, looked spectacularly happy in front of giant pictures of Atlas. And then when people were like, I don’t understand, he just explained the physics. This this was a human being that, as near as I can tell from everything I read, his true joy came in understanding our universe, having the theory proven true. But then it wasn’t all about, oh, look at me. It was, hey, let me explain the science to you. My favorite description was is he is someone whose shyness was overcome by explaining physics to others. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:53] That’s wonderful. 

Pamela Gay [00:23:54] It’s true. I wish I had met him, I really do. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:57] Yeah, yeah, that sounds amazing. So I guess what comes next? What do you think is his legacy for physics and the future of of particle accelerators? 

Pamela Gay [00:24:09] So he had some ideas on dark matter that that will either get proven or disproven. But mostly he’s been retired and following along for the past few years. And his legacy is all the particle physicists who inspired who he taught, who are going to be the humans working to figure out what is dark matter, what is dark energy? He worked as a professor at the University of Edinburgh. He got to be at the place he loved when he went hitchhiking, and he trained generations of students. And that, in a lot of ways, is the best legacy anyone could have, other than, of course, the Nobel Prize. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:50] I love the idea of an international physics community coming together to do this basic research work, too. Yeah, like on the one hand, the Higgs, you know, the the particle that interacts with the scalar field, that is the source of mass, the, you know, in the universe. Yeah, it seems very esoteric and and yet it is this basic building block of us to understand better the true nature of the cosmos. And who knows if there will ever be a practical use for it. But but we do know that we that we have one less mystery out there. 

Pamela Gay [00:25:36] And and let this also just be a lesson about history. Remembers the workers, the helpers. And this is a human who was one of three different collaborations who proposed what became the Higgs mechanism, the Higgs boson and the Higgs field. And, well, pretty much everyone in everything refers to them as Higgs boson, Higgs mechanism, Higgs field. He was like, no, he called it the a b e g h k prime t h mechanism for Anderson, Brout, it Guralnik Hagen, Higgs, kibble, and to Hooft, right, right. He gave credit to everyone every time. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:21] What a gentleman. 

Pamela Gay [00:26:22] So yeah. Be be the helper. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:25] Thank you, Peter Higgs. And thank you, Pamela. 

Pamela Gay [00:26:30] And and thank you to all the people out there who make this show possible. We would not be here without you. And I regret to say the names for this week were not listed. So I’m going to really, really hope that the names for April are good enough. And I’m going to read the April 3rd names, and I will make sure that everyone else who should have been read today, all of our $10 and up we break you across the month, people get. Acknowledged. So our $10 and up patrons whose names are going to be read are David Everson, Michael Proctor, John Faiz, Barry Gowan, Stephen Vai, Jordan Young, Jeannette Wang, Nano Phillips, Andrew Lester, Venkatesh Chaudhry, Brian Cagle, David Trog, Gerhard Gear hard Schweitzer, David Buzz parsec, Laura. Carlson, Robert. Plasma, les. Howard, Jack. Mudd, Joe. Holstein, Alexis. Gordon, doers, Richard. Drum, Adam, Annie’s Brown, Frank. Tippin, Greg Davis, William Andrews, and gold. And if you two would like to hear me stumble horribly over your name and be extremely grateful for you while doing it. Join at the $10 and up level. Thank you all. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:51] So thanks everyone. We’ll see you next week. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:53] And bye bye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy cast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Doctor Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website. Astronomy. Cars.com. This episode was brought to you. Thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon.com Slash Astronomy Cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast.