Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this because I want you to imagine
Speaker 2: trying to force a physical wave of gas and dust
Speaker 2: through the interstellar medium at like on two and twenty
Speaker 2: kilometers per second.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is I mean, that's not just fast. That's
Speaker 3: a speed that physically breaks things.
Speaker 2: Right. We're not talking about a beam of light or
Speaker 2: a subatomic particle here. We're talking about a macroscopic shockwave
Speaker 2: made of baryonic matter, just regular gas and dust exactly.
Speaker 3: And if you actually sit down and calculate the thermodynamics
Speaker 3: of pushing the ceial through the vacuum of space, well
Speaker 3: in the near vacuum, at that velocity, the physics just
Speaker 3: completely falls apart.
Speaker 2: Because it's not empty space. Yeah right, there's friction.
Speaker 3: Right, there is. The kinetic energy involved would cause the
Speaker 3: gas to heat up to the point of turning into
Speaker 3: basically a superheated plasma. It would radiate immense amounts of X.
Speaker 2: Rays, so it would just cook itself completely.
Speaker 3: It would unbind the structural integrity of whatever medium it
Speaker 3: was traveling through. You wouldn't get a neat ordered structure
Speaker 3: at the end of it.
Speaker 2: You just violently disperse into nothing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the thermal dissipation alone would tear the structure apart
Speaker 3: long before it ever had a chance to stabilize. At
Speaker 3: twelve hundred and twenty kilometers per second, you are looking
Speaker 3: at ram pressure forces that would strip a galaxy completely bare.
Speaker 2: Wow. Okay, so it's a velocity that directly violates the
Speaker 2: fluid dynamics we observe in space. But and here is
Speaker 2: the crazy part, that is exactly the mathematical corner astrophysicists
Speaker 2: found themselves backed into recently.
Speaker 3: Yes they did. We observed the structure in the cosmos that,
Speaker 3: according to our classical models of gravity and collisions, demanded
Speaker 3: that impossible speed limit to exist.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the anomaly itself, the object that
Speaker 2: is forcing this entire revaluation of the universe. It's led
Speaker 2: one three, one three, four, two four but astronomers affectionately
Speaker 2: called it the bull's eye galaxy.
Speaker 3: And it is a very fitting name. When Mioon Pasha
Speaker 3: and his team at Yale University published their observations back
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty five, they didn't just find, you know,
Speaker 3: slightly weird galaxy.
Speaker 2: No, they found something that completely breaks the rules.
Speaker 3: Right. They found a structure that basically shouldn't exist under
Speaker 3: the classical paradigm of astrophysics. We are talking about a
Speaker 3: galaxy characterized by nine distinct, perfectly concentric rings of glowing
Speaker 3: material radiating outward from its center.
Speaker 2: Nine rings like a perfectly formed nine layer wedding cake
Speaker 2: just floating in the middle of a messy, chaotic kitchen.
Speaker 2: It just begs the question who or what baked this exactly.
Speaker 3: It is an extraordinary morphological profile. I mean, when we
Speaker 3: look at typical galactic structures, we expect spiral arms like
Speaker 3: our own Milky Way.
Speaker 2: Where things are sort of swirling and.
Speaker 3: Messing right, where density waves propagate through the disc creating
Speaker 3: these trailing arms of star formation. Or we see elliptical galaxies,
Speaker 3: which are essentially featureless, randomized swarms of stars.
Speaker 2: It's a big fuzzy blob.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. But a concentric ring structure implies a highly localized,
Speaker 3: highly symmetric mechanism. Finding one ring is rare, but you
Speaker 3: know it's mechanically explainable. But nine, Finding nine stacked with
Speaker 3: that level of geometric precision, that challenges the foundational models
Speaker 3: of how galaxies evolve.
Speaker 2: So the mission for today's really pull apart the physics
Speaker 2: of this Bull's eye galaxy because to explain how those
Speaker 2: nine rings got there, we basically have to entirely discard
Speaker 2: the classical model of galaxies.
Speaker 3: We do. We have to throw out the idea of
Speaker 3: galaxies as giant pools of gas just responding to physical collision.
Speaker 2: And we have to cross over into a framework where
Speaker 2: quantum mechanics, which are you know, the rules governing tiny
Speaker 2: subatomic particles, are actively dictating the macro structure of a
Speaker 2: galaxy that's hundreds of thousands of light years across, which.
Speaker 3: Is mind boggling. We are looking at a potential bridge
Speaker 3: between the microscopic quantum realm and macroscopic cosmological structures.
Speaker 2: So the Bullseye galaxy isn't just a weird space picture.
Speaker 3: No, not at all. If the prevailing theory holds this
Speaker 3: galaxy is a galactic scale quantum laboratory. It provides observational
Speaker 3: evidence for stuff we previously thought we could only isolate
Speaker 3: in like super cooled lab environments on Earth.
Speaker 2: Okay, to really grasp why finding nine rings in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five caused such a crisis, we need to look
Speaker 2: at how astronomer's historically explained ringed galaxies, like what was
Speaker 2: the baseline.
Speaker 3: Well, the baseline was established way back in nineteen forty one.
Speaker 3: That was the discovery of the Cartwheel galaxy by Fritzwicki Zwiki.
Speaker 2: Was kind of a legend for finding weird stuff in space.
Speaker 3: Oh absolutely, he was a pioneer in identifying structural anomalies.
Speaker 3: When he observed the Cartwheel galaxy, it presented as this
Speaker 3: dense central hub surrounded by a massive luminous ring of
Speaker 3: young blue stars, and.
Speaker 2: It had these faint spokes connecting them. Right.
Speaker 3: It was a radical departure from the normal sequence of
Speaker 3: spiral and elliptical galaxies, and for decades the cartwheel served
Speaker 3: as the absolute archetype for what we call collisional ring galaxies.
Speaker 2: And the model they came up with to explain the
Speaker 2: cartwheel made total sense at the time. It's the drop
Speaker 2: through collision theory.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 3: The idea is that a smaller, really compact companion galaxy
Speaker 3: plunges directly through the center of a larger disc galaxy,
Speaker 3: like a bullet going through an apple.
Speaker 2: So it's a gravitational perturbation model. The smaller mass punches
Speaker 2: through creates a sudden localized spike in gravity at the center.
Speaker 3: Exactly, and as the smaller galaxy exits the other side,
Speaker 3: that gravitational spike vanishes. This sudden shift triggers a massive
Speaker 3: density wave.
Speaker 2: So the material in the disc gets pulled inward first,
Speaker 2: and then it kind of rebounds outward as this concentrated ring.
Speaker 3: That's a perfect way to describe it. As that density
Speaker 3: wave travels outward through the interstellar medium, it compresses the
Speaker 3: surrounding gas and dust.
Speaker 2: And when you compress gas in space, you get stores right.
Speaker 3: It pushes the gas beyond what we call the genes
Speaker 3: mass limit, which triggers a localized wave of star formation.
Speaker 3: So you end up with this glowing ring of new
Speaker 3: stars expanding outward.
Speaker 2: It's basically the leading edge of a gravitational ripple, like
Speaker 2: dropping a rock in a pond.
Speaker 3: Yes, a very very big rock and the math for
Speaker 3: the drop through collision works beautifully. For the cartwheel galaxy.
Speaker 2: The numbers actually line up.
Speaker 3: They do. The velocities of the expanding gas correlate perfectly
Speaker 3: with the mass of the intruder galaxy and the timeframe
Speaker 3: of the collision.
Speaker 2: And over the eighty years followings wiki, we found other
Speaker 2: examples right like Hog's object.
Speaker 3: We did. Hogog's object exhibits a similar ring morphology. We'd
Speaker 3: occasionally find galaxies with two, maybe even three.
Speaker 2: Rings, which you can explain by like a secondary ribble.
Speaker 3: Right, it can be modeled by a complex oscillating drop
Speaker 3: through event a secondary density wave reflection.
Speaker 2: But the underlying mechanism for all of them remained collisional.
Speaker 2: It was kinetic brute force physics. A smaller object hits
Speaker 2: a bigger object, ripples move outward.
Speaker 3: That was the consensus from nineteen forty one all the
Speaker 3: way until twenty twenty five. It held because the observations
Speaker 3: hit the parameters, the waves had enough energy to propagate
Speaker 3: one or two rings before friction dampened them.
Speaker 2: Okay, so then a mod poscious team points their instruments
Speaker 2: at leadie one three one three, four two four, and
Speaker 2: they don't see one or two rings, they see.
Speaker 3: Nine, nine concentric structures.
Speaker 2: I want to pause here. How do they even verify that?
Speaker 2: Because a nine ring structure at that distance could so
Speaker 2: easily just be a smudge on the lens or an
Speaker 2: optical illusion from gravitational lensing.
Speaker 3: That's a great point. The Yale team didn't just look
Speaker 3: at a photograph. They utilized deep spectroscopic imaging to confirm
Speaker 3: the morphology.
Speaker 2: So they analyze the actual movement.
Speaker 3: Of the gas exactly. By measuring the red shift and
Speaker 3: blue shift of the molecular gas, they could track the
Speaker 3: rotational velocity and the race expansion of the material in
Speaker 3: those rings.
Speaker 2: Wow, so they proved it wasn't just a trick of a.
Speaker 3: Life, right. The data confirmed these were distinct, physically coherent
Speaker 3: rings embedded right within the galaxy's disc, sharing the exact
Speaker 3: same rotational kinematic.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the rings are real, and the immediate scientific
Speaker 2: reflex is to use the old tools. The assumption was, well,
Speaker 2: we have rings, therefore we must have had a collision.
Speaker 3: They applied the drop through model. But to generate nine
Speaker 3: distinct rings you need a highly specific set of initial conditions.
Speaker 2: You'd need a massive intruder galaxy, a perfectly perpendicular hit,
Speaker 2: and a very tight timeline for the waves to ripple out.
Speaker 3: The initial hypothesis suggested this colossal impact event happened approximately
Speaker 3: fifty six million years ago. The logic was that a
Speaker 3: single energetic collision triggered a whole series of reverberating waves.
Speaker 2: But that is where Pierre Sickiv and Yuxinzau at the
Speaker 2: University of Florida enter the picture, because they look at
Speaker 2: that fifty six million year timeline and they run.
Speaker 3: The mass and the model instantly falls apart.
Speaker 2: Yeah, tell us why.
Speaker 3: What's fascinating here is that Sikidian Zou calculated the necessary
Speaker 3: phase velocity of the outermost ring. If a single event
Speaker 3: fifty six million years ago created all nine rings, then
Speaker 3: that outermost ring must have traveled from the center to
Speaker 3: its current position in exactly.
Speaker 2: That timeframe, which brings us right back to that speed
Speaker 2: limit problem we open with. For that distance to be
Speaker 2: covered in that time, the math demands a speed of
Speaker 2: twelve hundred and twenty kilometers per second.
Speaker 3: And let's revisit why that fluid dynamics problem is fatal.
Speaker 3: The interstellar medium is a fluid. It has density, temperature pressure, So.
Speaker 2: A wave moving through it is essentially a.
Speaker 3: Sound wave exactly, And the speed at which a wave
Speaker 3: can travel is strictly limited by the sound speed of
Speaker 3: that medium.
Speaker 2: And in a typical galaxy, what is the speed limit.
Speaker 3: The sound speed of interstellar gas is maybe ten to
Speaker 3: thirty kilometers per second, even in highly energized regions. You
Speaker 3: might push it slightly higher, but you are nowhere near
Speaker 3: one thousand kilometers per second.
Speaker 2: So, going back to our rock and a pond analogy,
Speaker 2: you drop a boulder in a lake, you expect ripples
Speaker 2: to move at all leisurely pace. But if you drop
Speaker 2: a rock and the ripples shoot out at the speed
Speaker 2: of a fighter.
Speaker 3: Jet, you wouldn't think, Wow, that water is fast. You'd
Speaker 3: think is this pond actually made of water?
Speaker 2: Yes, you'd question the medium itself, because if you force
Speaker 2: a wave at that supersonic speed, you flash heat the gas.
Speaker 3: You do it turns into X ray emitting plasma. It
Speaker 3: would literally boil the interstellar medium right out of the
Speaker 3: galactic disc. You'd be left with a sterile, dead galaxy.
Speaker 2: Definitely not a beautifully structured series of glowing star rings.
Speaker 2: The medium just cannot support it.
Speaker 3: Sikhivi and Zoo prove definitively that a classical collision cannot
Speaker 3: physically produce those nine rings without violating thermodynamics. The wave
Speaker 3: would die out long before reaching the outer edges.
Speaker 2: So when the math so directly contradicts the observation, you
Speaker 2: have to question everything. If a physical shock wave moving
Speaker 2: through gas can't create these rings, then they aren't ripples from.
Speaker 3: A crash, right, there are kinetic ripples at all.
Speaker 2: So the structure of the galaxy must be dictated by
Speaker 2: something else, entirely, a different underlying force.
Speaker 3: And this requires a massive pivot. We have to stop
Speaker 3: looking at the baryonic matter, the visible stars and gas,
Speaker 3: and start analyzing the non buryonic mass.
Speaker 2: The stuff that actually dominates the gravitational environment. We have
Speaker 2: to talk about dark matter.
Speaker 3: Yes, the invisible elephant in the room.
Speaker 2: Now. I want to frame this carefully for you listening.
Speaker 2: Dark matter sometimes gets a bad rap, like it's just
Speaker 2: a catch all plug for whenever our gravity math doesn't work.
Speaker 2: But it's actually a rigorously tested concept.
Speaker 3: It is. The empirical foundation goes back to VERA. Rubin's
Speaker 3: work in the nineteen seventies. She observed galaxy rotation curves.
Speaker 2: Right, and based on standard Newton physics, we thought the
Speaker 2: stars at the edge of a galaxy should orbit slower
Speaker 2: than the ones near.
Speaker 3: The center, because the further away a planet is from
Speaker 3: the Sun, the slower it orbits. We assumed galaxies work
Speaker 3: the same way, since most of the visible mass is
Speaker 3: packed into the center.
Speaker 2: But Ruben found something totally different.
Speaker 3: Her data show that the rotation curves were flat. Stars
Speaker 3: at the very edge were orbiting at the exact same
Speaker 3: velocity as stars much closer to the.
Speaker 2: Center, which means there just isn't enough visible stuff to
Speaker 2: generate the gravity needed to hold onto those fast moving stars.
Speaker 3: Exactly without an unseen source of mass, those galaxies should
Speaker 3: have literally flung themselves apart through centrifugal force eons ago.
Speaker 2: Now, just to play Devil's advocate here, why do we
Speaker 2: jump straight to invisible particles? What about MAM and D
Speaker 2: modified Newtonian dynamics. Doesn't that say we just need to
Speaker 2: tweak how gravity works at the edges of galaxies.
Speaker 3: MMND is a really fascinating theory, and it does successfully
Speaker 3: model the flat rotation curves of some individual galaxies.
Speaker 2: But it has limits, right.
Speaker 3: Significant limits MND applies a universal modification to gravity. It
Speaker 3: smooths out the gravitational potential. It struggles to explain highly
Speaker 3: localized comp substructions.
Speaker 2: Or things like the Bullet cluster where the gravity is
Speaker 2: separated from the visible matter.
Speaker 3: Precisely because MO and D basically just says gravity is
Speaker 3: stronger out here, it does not provide a mechanism to
Speaker 3: create highly specific, concentric geometrical rings.
Speaker 2: You can't get sharp ridges of gravity just by tweaking
Speaker 2: a formula. You need actual localized mass.
Speaker 3: Right, You need a physical substance that can clump, structure
Speaker 3: itself and exert localized gravitational wells. MO and D can't
Speaker 3: herd visible gas into nine distinct rings. We need particulate
Speaker 3: dark matter.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we're operating under the standard model here. Ordinary
Speaker 2: matter everything we can see makes up maybe fifteen percent
Speaker 2: of the universe's mass.
Speaker 3: And the remaining eighty five percent is non baryonic dark matter.
Speaker 2: And it's not just floating around randomly. It organizes into
Speaker 2: these massive spherical halos.
Speaker 3: Yes, the dark matter halo is the primary architectural component
Speaker 3: of any galaxy. The visible glowing disc of stars we
Speaker 3: see is really just a tiny secondary structure sitting inside
Speaker 3: a massive invisible sphere.
Speaker 2: Kind of an existential thought. We are the weird rare
Speaker 2: stuff in the universe. The dark matter dictates the rules.
Speaker 3: It holds the whole system together. But as you were
Speaker 3: hinting at earlier, a generic smooth sphere of dark matter
Speaker 3: still doesn't explain our nine rings.
Speaker 2: Because a featureless blob just provides a uniform pull. It
Speaker 2: wouldn't make stept geometric rings.
Speaker 3: Exactly, which is why sakiw and Zou didn't just invoke
Speaker 3: generic dark matter. They relied on a very specific theoretical
Speaker 3: flavor of dark matter, the axion.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's really dig into the axion, because it's amazing
Speaker 2: to me that it wasn't even invented to solve the
Speaker 2: dark matter problem in the first place.
Speaker 3: No, it was theorized to solve a completely different crisis
Speaker 3: in quantum physics called the strong CP problem.
Speaker 2: Right, So what is the strong CP problem?
Speaker 3: Well, it's a discrepancy regarding the strong nuclear force. The
Speaker 3: math of quantum chromodynamics suggests that the strong force should
Speaker 3: violate a principle called charge parity symmetry.
Speaker 2: So basically, the interaction should look different if you swap
Speaker 2: particles for anti particles and reflect them in a mirror.
Speaker 3: That's a good way to visualize it. But the problem
Speaker 3: is in every single lab experiment ever done, the strong
Speaker 3: force preserves that symmetry perfectly. The math says it should break,
Speaker 3: but reality says it doesn't.
Speaker 2: So physicists had to fix the math right.
Speaker 3: In nineteen seventy seven, ROBERTA. Picchet and Helen Quinn introduced
Speaker 3: a new symmetry to the equations to fix it, and
Speaker 3: shortly after Steven Weinberg and Frank Wilcheck realized that this
Speaker 3: new math would create a brand new, incredibly light, electrically neutral.
Speaker 2: Particle, and Willcheck named it the axion.
Speaker 3: Yes, and while it was invented to fix the nuclear force,
Speaker 3: cosmologists quickly realized that if axions are real, the Big
Speaker 3: Bang would have produced unfathomable amounts of them.
Speaker 2: They're light, they barely interact with normal matter. They're stable.
Speaker 2: They are the perfect candidate for dark matter.
Speaker 3: But what makes axions fundamentally different from older dark matter
Speaker 3: candidates like WIMPs is their quantum classification. Axions are bosons.
Speaker 2: Okay, this is the heavy science, but it's the critical juncture.
Speaker 2: The difference between a fermion and a boson is the
Speaker 2: whole key to the Bullseye galaxy.
Speaker 3: It is all particles in the universe fall into these
Speaker 3: two categories based on their quantum spin. Fermions, like protons
Speaker 3: neutrons electrons have half integer spin. They obey the poly
Speaker 3: exclusion principle.
Speaker 2: Which means no two fermions can occupy the exact same
Speaker 2: quantum state at the same time.
Speaker 3: Right. It is literally why matter has volume. Electrons in
Speaker 3: an atom stack up in different shells. They refuse to
Speaker 3: cram into the lowest energy level together. Fermions hate sharing space.
Speaker 2: You are rugged individualists.
Speaker 3: Precisely. Bosons, on the other hand, have integer spin. Photons
Speaker 3: are bosons, and crucially, axions are bosons. Bosons do not
Speaker 3: obey the exclusion principle.
Speaker 2: So they are perfectly fine occupying the exact same space
Speaker 2: at the exact same time.
Speaker 3: Yes, now, under normal hot conditions, this doesn't change much.
Speaker 3: A warm gas of bosons bounces around like a normal gas,
Speaker 3: but a dark matter halo is incredibly cold.
Speaker 2: Because as the universe expanded after the Big Bang, everything
Speaker 2: cooled down. The temperature plummeted.
Speaker 3: And when you cool a gas of bosons to near
Speaker 3: absolute zero, their quantum behavior shifts dramatically. It comes down
Speaker 3: to their thermal to Brolly wavelength.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack that. In quantum mechanics, particles aren't just
Speaker 2: solid little dots, right. They act like waves.
Speaker 3: Yes, And the wavelength of a particle is inversely proportional
Speaker 3: to its momentum. So as the axion gas cools down,
Speaker 3: the speed of the individual axions drops, and as.
Speaker 2: They slow down, their momentum drops.
Speaker 3: Which means their Debroley wavelength physically stretches out.
Speaker 2: So the wave of each particle gets bigger and bigger
Speaker 2: as it gets colder.
Speaker 3: Exactly at room temperature, the wavelength of an atom is tiny,
Speaker 3: but in the freezing depths of a dark matter halo,
Speaker 3: these axion wavelengths stretch over macroscopic.
Speaker 2: Distances until eventually they stretch so much that they start touching.
Speaker 3: They don't just touch. The overlap the distance between the
Speaker 3: particles becomes smaller than the waves themselves, and when that
Speaker 3: threshold is crossed, the axions undergo a phase transition.
Speaker 2: They become a Bose Einstein condensation.
Speaker 3: Yes, the billions of overlapping wave functions merge, the axions
Speaker 3: lose their individual identities completely. You no longer have a
Speaker 3: vast collection of distinct particles.
Speaker 2: They have one single giant quantum.
Speaker 3: Entity governed by a single wave function. The entire halo
Speaker 3: acts as one unified superfluid.
Speaker 2: It's like imagine a crowded train station. Everyone is walking
Speaker 2: in different directions, bumping into each other. That's a normal gas.
Speaker 2: But a Bose Einstein condensate is like a flash mob.
Speaker 2: The temperature drops, the music hits, and suddenly billions of
Speaker 2: people are doing the exact same synchronized dance.
Speaker 3: That is a brilliant analogy. They stop acting like individuals
Speaker 3: and become one giant entity. And we aren't talking about
Speaker 3: a microscopic drop in a lab. We are talking about
Speaker 3: a condensate spanning hundreds of thousands of light years.
Speaker 2: It's just wild to think about quantum Canic usually rules
Speaker 2: things small enough to fit on a pinhead, and here
Speaker 2: it is dictating the shape of an entire galaxy.
Speaker 3: But this specific behavior is what provides the mechanism for
Speaker 3: the nine rings, because this galactic scale flash mob isn't
Speaker 3: standing still, It is rotating.
Speaker 2: Right, The dark Manner halo is spinning and it has
Speaker 2: massive gravity.
Speaker 3: So how does a smooth spinning sphere of axions develop
Speaker 3: distinct ridges. It comes down to orbital mechanics and the
Speaker 3: conservation of angular momentum.
Speaker 2: Okay, break that down for us. How does the halo
Speaker 2: actually form?
Speaker 3: It accretes mass from the surrounding space over billions of years.
Speaker 3: As axions fall inward toward the center of the galaxy,
Speaker 3: they bring angular momentum with them.
Speaker 2: So as they fall deeper into the gravity, well, they
Speaker 2: have to spin faster, like an ice skater pulling.
Speaker 3: Their arms in Exactly, they fall in spinning faster, but
Speaker 3: they don't just collapse into a black hole. They pass
Speaker 3: their closest approach to the center and get flung back
Speaker 3: outward on elliptical orbit.
Speaker 2: Until they run out of energy and have to fall
Speaker 2: back in again.
Speaker 3: Right, They travel outward until they reach their maximum distance,
Speaker 3: which we call the turnaround radius. At that exact moment,
Speaker 3: their radial velocity drops to zero.
Speaker 2: Before they fall back, So it's like throwing a baseball
Speaker 2: straight up. It slows down, hits the absolute peak of
Speaker 2: its arc, where it hovers for a split second, and
Speaker 2: then drops. The turnaround radius is the apex of the orbit.
Speaker 3: Yes, now, remember the dark matter is a bosin Stein condensate.
Speaker 3: It is cold and zero viscosity. The axioms don't bump
Speaker 3: into each other and scatter.
Speaker 2: They stay perfectly synchronized.
Speaker 3: They remain on highly specific coherent orbital paths dictated by
Speaker 3: their initial spin, which means you have massive, massive streams
Speaker 3: of axions all reaching their turnaround radii at the exact
Speaker 3: same geometric location.
Speaker 2: They all pile up at the apex at the exact
Speaker 2: same time.
Speaker 3: And this is where the caustic forms. A caustic in
Speaker 3: physics is an envelope of focused particle trajectories. Think of
Speaker 3: the bright curved lines of light you see at the
Speaker 3: bottom of a swimming pool.
Speaker 2: The water bends the light and focuses it into intense
Speaker 2: bright lines.
Speaker 3: Right in the halo. The axion orbits are focused because
Speaker 3: they all slow down and pile up at the turnaround points.
Speaker 3: You get a massive spike in physical density at those
Speaker 3: specific spherical boundaries.
Speaker 2: But the halo is rotating, so they don't just pile
Speaker 2: up in a simple sphere.
Speaker 3: Correct The conservation of angular momentum deflects them. Laterally, the
Speaker 3: combination of falling inward and spinning sideways forces these density
Speaker 3: spikes to form into distinct, concentric tubular rings around the
Speaker 3: galactic center.
Speaker 2: So the dark matter actually stratifies into these nested layers.
Speaker 3: It does. The continuous infall of dark matter creates multiple
Speaker 3: layers of these high density turnarounds, and the geometry of
Speaker 3: these invisible rings is dictated by a very specific mathematical ratio.
Speaker 2: And this is where the twenty twenty six paper just
Speaker 2: blows my mind, because Sikkivi and Zau took this pure
Speaker 2: theoretical math for axion caustic rings.
Speaker 3: And they overlay it onto the observational data from the
Speaker 3: u A team.
Speaker 2: They put the theory over the reality. Yeah, and what happened.
Speaker 3: The correlation was staggering. The radii of the nine visible
Speaker 3: rings in LETA one, three, one, three, four, two four
Speaker 3: matched the predicted radii of the invisible dark matter rings
Speaker 3: with incredible precision.
Speaker 2: The glowing galaxy we see is an exact map of
Speaker 2: the quantum dark matter halo.
Speaker 3: We can't see exactly the geometry maps perfectly.
Speaker 2: I want to make sure the mechanics of this are
Speaker 2: super clear. The caustic rings themselves are dark matter. They
Speaker 2: emit no.
Speaker 3: Light, right, they are completely invisible. But because they are
Speaker 3: zones of extreme particle density. They represent massive concentrated trenches
Speaker 3: of gravitational pull.
Speaker 2: They are deep gravity wells, and as the normal gas
Speaker 2: and dust of the galaxy orbits around.
Speaker 3: The gas encounters these trenches and it.
Speaker 2: Falls in, it just gets trapped in the.
Speaker 3: Grooves, gravitationally drawn right into the coustic rings. And once
Speaker 3: the gas is packed inside that high density trench, it collides, compresses,
Speaker 3: and cools, which triggers intense star formation.
Speaker 2: So the nine glowing rings we see aren't the dark
Speaker 2: matter itself. We are just the visible matter lighting up
Speaker 2: the dark matter's invisible scaffolding.
Speaker 3: It is exactly like scattering iron filings over a piece
Speaker 3: of paper with a magnet underneath.
Speaker 2: You can't see the magnet. You see exactly where the
Speaker 2: field lines are because the filings trace them.
Speaker 3: The gas and stars in the Bullseye galaxy are the
Speaker 3: iron filings. The axion caustics are the magnet. And this
Speaker 3: elegantly solves the speed limit problem that ruined the collision
Speaker 3: theory because.
Speaker 2: The rings aren't rippling outward from a crash.
Speaker 3: No, they are basically stationary architectural features of the dark
Speaker 3: matter halo. They evolve very slowly over billions of years,
Speaker 3: but they aren't fast moving waves.
Speaker 2: The visible gas just settled into the pre existing gravity grooves.
Speaker 3: Yes, there is no requirement for supersonic wave propagation, no
Speaker 3: catastrophic thermal unbinding. The physics works perfectly.
Speaker 2: It totally reframes the history of the whole galaxy. It
Speaker 2: wasn't the victim of this violent, random cosmic car crash.
Speaker 2: It's this highly ordered quantum sculpt record.
Speaker 3: Player, a macroscopic quantum system.
Speaker 2: But this raises an important question. If this axion model
Speaker 2: fits the data so perfectly, why are we only seeing
Speaker 2: nine rings here? Why doesn't every galaxy look like a
Speaker 2: giant target?
Speaker 3: That is the crucial caveat the manifestation of these rings
Speaker 3: in the visible matter requires an exceptionally pristine.
Speaker 2: Environment, like it needs to be left alone, right.
Speaker 3: The dark matter caustics are probably present in most galactic halos,
Speaker 3: but the normal matter in the disc is subject to
Speaker 3: so many disruptive forces supernova's blowing up, internal turbulence, galactic bars,
Speaker 3: close encounters with other galaxies.
Speaker 2: So if things get too chaotic, the gas just gets
Speaker 2: sloshed around and blown out of the neat little gravity.
Speaker 3: Trenches exactly, the delicate imprint of the dark matter architecture
Speaker 3: gets completely washed out by chaotic, everyday physics.
Speaker 2: So LATA one three, one, three, four, two four must
Speaker 2: have had an incredibly boring, isolated history.
Speaker 3: It managed to avoid any major mergers or disruptions for
Speaker 3: billions of years. It allowed the gas to quietly we
Speaker 3: pool into the axion trenches. It's a perfectly preserved fossil
Speaker 3: of the underlying dark matter geometry.
Speaker 2: Which is why it's such a huge paradigm shift. It's
Speaker 2: a visible, large scale proof of quantum mechanics because you know,
Speaker 2: for decades scientists have been trying to find the axion
Speaker 2: in these deep underground labs.
Speaker 3: Yes, experiments like ADMX, the Axion Dark Matter Experiment at
Speaker 3: the University of Washington.
Speaker 2: They use these massive, super cooled magnetic cavities right just
Speaker 2: hoping to catch a single axion flying through the Earth.
Speaker 3: It is an incredibly difficult search because axions interact so
Speaker 3: weakly with normal matter. You are looking for a tiny
Speaker 3: signal barely above the quantum noise limit.
Speaker 2: But Sicki and Zou's paper is basically saying, hey, we
Speaker 2: don't necessarily need to catch one in a jar to
Speaker 2: prove they exist. The actual structure of the universe is
Speaker 2: broadcasting it to us.
Speaker 3: It flips the scientific approach entirely. Instead of looking for
Speaker 3: a microscopic particle to explain the universe, we are using
Speaker 3: the massive architecture of a whole galaxy to prove the particle.
Speaker 3: The macro observation validates the.
Speaker 2: Micro theory, and if this holds up, it means dark
Speaker 2: matter is definitely a boson. It operates as a bosine
Speaker 2: sign condensate, and it solves the strong nuclear force problem
Speaker 2: all at once.
Speaker 3: It is a profound realization. One astronomical observation could resolve
Speaker 3: two of the biggest mysteries in modern physics.
Speaker 2: So how does astronomy proceed from here? Because you can't
Speaker 2: just rewrite the textbooks based on one weird galaxy, right,
Speaker 2: even if the math is perfect.
Speaker 3: No, you absolutely have to verify. The immediate next step
Speaker 3: is a rigorous reevaluation of archivel.
Speaker 2: Data, going back to the old photos.
Speaker 3: Yes, now that we have the mathematical blueprint for these
Speaker 3: caustic rings, astronomers will systematically look at the kinematic data
Speaker 3: of other known ringed galaxies like the Cartwheel galaxy. Or
Speaker 3: hoogs object.
Speaker 2: So the collision model might still apply to some of them,
Speaker 2: especially if they look messy.
Speaker 3: Right if there's an obvious nearby intruder, Galaxy collisions are
Speaker 3: still a valid mechanism. But if we find that the
Speaker 3: radial space of the rings in those older examples also
Speaker 3: conforms exactly to the geometric ratios predicted by the Axon model.
Speaker 2: Then it provides compounding evidence. We could start mapping dark
Speaker 2: matter halos just by reading the barcode of the rings.
Speaker 3: We will also use new technology with instruments like the
Speaker 3: James Web Space Telescope and the upcoming Roman Space Telescope.
Speaker 3: Our ability to see faint structures is exponentially greater than
Speaker 3: it was even ten years ago.
Speaker 2: So it's highly likely the Bullseye galaxy isn't alone. It's
Speaker 2: just the first one we had the tools to actually
Speaker 2: see properly.
Speaker 3: As we look deeper, we are likely to find a
Speaker 3: whole population of these quiet multi ring systems, and each
Speaker 3: new one will serve as a test for the condensate.
Speaker 2: Model, and it helps the lab guys too.
Speaker 3: Right, Yes, the precise geometry of the galactic rings provides
Speaker 3: constraints on the exact mass of the axion particle which
Speaker 3: tells the Earth based heloscope experiments exactly what frequency to
Speaker 3: tune their machines to.
Speaker 2: That is just a beautiful feedback loop. The galaxy tells
Speaker 2: the lab what to look for. The lab eventually confirms
Speaker 2: the particle that shaped the galaxy.
Speaker 3: It is a true synthesis of disciplines. We are moving
Speaker 3: away from this fragmented idea where cosmology is big and
Speaker 3: quantum mechanics is small. We are moving toward a unified
Speaker 3: framework where the sub atomic laws actively build the cosmic architecture.
Speaker 2: The narrative of space being this messy, chaotic demolition derby
Speaker 2: driven by brute force gravity. It's giving way to something
Speaker 2: so much more intricate.
Speaker 3: The twenty kilometer per second problem forced us to look
Speaker 3: past the visible chaos. It forced us to recognize the invisible,
Speaker 3: freezing cold quantum fluid that actually holds it all together.
Speaker 2: The baryonic matter, the stars, the gas, everything we can
Speaker 2: see in touch. It's just the indicator die revealing the
Speaker 2: hidden currents of the dark matter.
Speaker 3: See the Bullseye galaxy proves that order emerges from the
Speaker 3: quantum nature of the dark.
Speaker 2: It just completely reorients how you have to look at
Speaker 2: the night sky. For centuries, humanity has mapped the stars,
Speaker 2: assuming those glowing dots of light were the main characters.
Speaker 2: We thought the visible matter was the substance of reality,
Speaker 2: but this whole discussion reveals that the visible universe is
Speaker 2: really just the decorative icing the true physics, the massive
Speaker 2: structural scaffolding that dictates the shape and the movement of
Speaker 2: the cosmos. It exists entirely in the dark. So I
Speaker 2: want you to think about that. The next time you
Speaker 2: look up at a swirling galaxy or a starry sky,
Speaker 2: Ask yourself what else is out there, silently choreographing the
Speaker 2: dance of billions of stars, completely invisible to your eyes.