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: I want you to try a little mental experiment with me.
Speaker 3: Okay, im game.
Speaker 2: Picture a clock, and not a digital display on your phone,
Speaker 2: but an old school, high precision mechanical.
Speaker 3: Watch, right, like a really finely tuned gear system.
Speaker 2: Exactly. You can hear it ticking, tick tick tick. It
Speaker 2: has a perfect rhythm, unshakable.
Speaker 3: I am visualizing it reliable and steady.
Speaker 2: Now, take that watch and throw it into the middle
Speaker 2: of a hurricane, well that escalated quickly, and not just
Speaker 2: a regular hurricane. Throw it into a jet engine that
Speaker 2: is somehow inside herane. The noise is completely.
Speaker 3: Definitely just absolute chaos.
Speaker 2: The pressure is crushing, the turbulence is ripping literally everything apart.
Speaker 3: And I assume my job in this experiment is to
Speaker 3: still hear the ticking.
Speaker 2: Your job is to hear the ticking. But it is
Speaker 2: actually more than that. You need to measure the gap
Speaker 2: between the ticks to the nanosecond. Oh wow, because if
Speaker 2: that watch skips a beat, I mean even by a
Speaker 2: fraction of a fraction of a second, it tells you
Speaker 2: something about the wind and the pressure.
Speaker 3: It tells you about the very fabric of the reality
Speaker 3: it is floating in. That is a terrifying level of precision.
Speaker 3: But I know exactly where you were going with this.
Speaker 3: You were talking about the galactic center.
Speaker 2: I totally am We're talking about a needle in the
Speaker 2: ultimate haystack.
Speaker 3: Today, the biggest haystack we know of.
Speaker 2: Right, we are looking at a discovery announced just days
Speaker 2: ago in February twenty twenty six, a team of astronomers,
Speaker 2: using data meant to hunt for aliens, has potentially found
Speaker 2: the holy Grail of astrophysics.
Speaker 3: The Holy Grail. It really is.
Speaker 2: A cosmic clock spinning hundreds of times a second, hidden
Speaker 2: in the darkest, loudest, most dangerous neighborhood in the Milky Way.
Speaker 3: Right next to the supermassive black hole Sagittarius a star.
Speaker 2: And holy Grail is not hyperbole here. Scientists have been
Speaker 2: chasing this specific setup for decades.
Speaker 3: Yeah, finding a pulsar orbiting a black hole is the dream.
Speaker 3: It is the one test of Einstein's general relativity that
Speaker 3: we just have not been able to run.
Speaker 2: Yet exactly if this thing is real, And we really
Speaker 2: need to stress early on that it is a candidate, right, it.
Speaker 3: Is not fully confirmed yet.
Speaker 2: But if it is real, it is not just a
Speaker 2: new star. It is a laboratory. It is a way
Speaker 2: to break physics or prove it right once and for all.
Speaker 3: It is a massive deal.
Speaker 2: So today we are exploring a brand new paper. The
Speaker 2: title is on the Deepest Search for Galactic Center Pulsars.
Speaker 3: Published in the Astrophysical Journal.
Speaker 2: Exactly on February twenty one, twenty twenty six. We are
Speaker 2: going to look at the machine they used to find it.
Speaker 2: We will look at the monster black hole it is orbiting.
Speaker 3: And why this tiny, spinning city sized mag It might
Speaker 3: hold the key to understanding gravity itself.
Speaker 2: It is a heavy topic today.
Speaker 3: Literally the heaviest topic in the galaxy.
Speaker 2: So let us start with the headline. This is fresh
Speaker 2: news and it is a really interesting collaboration between Columbia
Speaker 2: University and Breakthrough Listen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the Breakthrough Listen part is fascinating.
Speaker 2: Because when I hear breakthrough listen, I usually think of
Speaker 2: giant satellite dishes listening for little green men.
Speaker 3: Right, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence isn't.
Speaker 2: That their whole mandate, looking for alien civilizations, It is.
Speaker 3: That is their primary mission. They scan the skies for
Speaker 3: techno signatures.
Speaker 2: Meaning signals that look engineered by someone rather than just
Speaker 2: natural space noise.
Speaker 3: Exactly. But here is the thing about hunting for aliens.
Speaker 3: To do it right, you need incredibly sensitive equipment.
Speaker 2: Because space is big and signals are faint.
Speaker 3: And you need to process a staggering amount of data.
Speaker 3: You are looking for narrow band signals in an ocean
Speaker 3: of cosmic static.
Speaker 2: So essentially they build a massive vacuum clean for radio waves.
Speaker 3: That is a brilliant way to put it. A giant vacuum.
Speaker 3: And when you turn on a vacuum that powerful, you
Speaker 3: do not just suck up the specific dust bunny you
Speaker 3: are looking for.
Speaker 2: You get everything else on the floor too.
Speaker 3: You get the background noise, you get interference from satellites. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and you get rare natural phenomena.
Speaker 2: It is almost ironic. They were listening for a call
Speaker 2: from ET and instead they picked up the heartbeat of
Speaker 2: a dead star.
Speaker 3: Well, in astrophysics, one person's noise is another person's data.
Speaker 3: Breakthrough Listens has been surveying the Galactic Center for a while.
Speaker 2: Why there, though, Why look for aliens in the middle
Speaker 2: of a hurricane.
Speaker 3: Because hypothetically, if you were in an advanced civilization, that
Speaker 3: is a great place to put a beacon. It is
Speaker 3: the town square of the galaxy.
Speaker 2: High visibility. Anyone looking inward would.
Speaker 3: See it exactly. So they're staring at the Galactic Center
Speaker 3: with the Green Bank telescope.
Speaker 2: Which is this massive one hundred meter dish in West Virginia, right.
Speaker 3: Huge dish, And because of that they are collecting some
Speaker 3: of the highest resolution radio data have ever seen of
Speaker 3: that specific region.
Speaker 2: So the research team basically saw this data sitting there
Speaker 2: and said, hey, while you are sifting through that, hey
Speaker 2: looking for alien needles? Mind if we look for pulsar needles.
Speaker 3: And they found one, or well they think they found one.
Speaker 2: They found an eight point one to nine millisecond pulsar candidate.
Speaker 3: Yes, a candidate. That is a very careful scientific word.
Speaker 2: It means do not pop the champagne quite yet, right right.
Speaker 3: It means we see a signal. It looks like a duck.
Speaker 3: It quacts like a duck, but the pond is so
Speaker 3: foggy we cannot quite see the feathers yet.
Speaker 2: We will definitely get into why it is so hard
Speaker 2: to confirm later. I know the galactic center is a
Speaker 2: total mess.
Speaker 3: Oh is a chaotic mess. But yes, they have a
Speaker 3: very strong signal repeating every eight point one to nine millisecond.
Speaker 2: Let us pause on the object itself for a second.
Speaker 2: An eight point one nine millisecond pulsar. I feel like
Speaker 2: we toss the word pulsar around a lot in sci
Speaker 2: fi movies. We do. It sounds cool, but let us
Speaker 2: ground this for you listening. We are not talking about
Speaker 2: a normal star like our son.
Speaker 3: No, not at all. A pulsar is what you get
Speaker 3: when a massive star dies, a star much bigger than
Speaker 3: our Sun.
Speaker 2: It runs out of fuel, right, It.
Speaker 3: Runs out of fuel and collapses under its own gravity.
Speaker 3: Then it explodes into supernova. Big boom, the biggest boom.
Speaker 3: The outer layers get blasted off into space, but the core,
Speaker 3: the core gets crushed.
Speaker 2: Crushed how much exactly? Give me a sense of the
Speaker 2: scale here.
Speaker 3: Imagine taking the mass of the Sun, all that gas
Speaker 3: all that fire and compressing it into a ball the
Speaker 3: size of Manhattan.
Speaker 2: A ball twelve miles across.
Speaker 3: Rubb twelve miles across.
Speaker 2: Yes, that is just insanely dense.
Speaker 3: It's inconceivable. A single tea spoon of this material would
Speaker 3: weigh a billion tons on Earth.
Speaker 2: A billion tons.
Speaker 3: Yes, the atoms themselves are crushed so hard that the
Speaker 3: electrons and protons merge together to form neutrons.
Speaker 2: Oh, so that is why we call it a neutron star.
Speaker 3: Exactly, it is basically one giant atomic nucleus the size
Speaker 3: of a city.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we have a city sized zombie star corpse.
Speaker 2: But why does it pulse? Why is it acting like
Speaker 2: a clock?
Speaker 3: Two things happen during that collapse. First, the magnetic field
Speaker 3: gets compressed and it amplifies.
Speaker 2: So it becomes super magnetic.
Speaker 3: Trillions of times stronger than Earth's magnetic field. And second,
Speaker 3: conservation of angular momentum.
Speaker 2: Kicks in the figure skaterect exactly.
Speaker 3: You know when a figure skater pulls their arms in
Speaker 3: and they suddenly spin way.
Speaker 2: Faster, Yeah, they become a blur.
Speaker 3: Well, imagine a star that was a million miles wide
Speaker 3: suddenly shrinking to ten miles wide. It spins insanely.
Speaker 2: Fast, and it has that crazy magnetic field right.
Speaker 3: Because of the magnetic field, it beams out radio waves
Speaker 3: from its magnetic.
Speaker 2: Poles like a lighthouse.
Speaker 3: That is a perfect analogy. The beam is always on,
Speaker 3: but the star is spinning. So if Earth happens to
Speaker 3: be in the path of that sweeping beam, we see
Speaker 3: a flash, flash, flash, exactly, and that flash is the
Speaker 3: tick of our clock.
Speaker 2: Okay, So for normal pulsars, that tick is fast, right,
Speaker 2: maybe once a second.
Speaker 3: Yes, a typical pulsar might spin once a second or so.
Speaker 3: But this object, this candidate, it is not a normal pulsar.
Speaker 2: Because it is a millisecond pulsar or MSP.
Speaker 3: Yes, it is ticking every eight point one to nine milliseconds.
Speaker 2: Do the math for me. How fast is that star spinning?
Speaker 3: That is roughly one hundred and twenty two rotations every
Speaker 3: single second.
Speaker 2: One hundred and twenty two times a second a city
Speaker 2: size ball of neutrons.
Speaker 3: Yes, the surface velocity is a significant fraction of the
Speaker 3: speed of light. It is mind boggling.
Speaker 2: And here is the crucial part for our story today.
Speaker 2: Millisecond pulsars do not just spin fast. They spin with
Speaker 2: terrifying regularity.
Speaker 3: They rival our best atomic clocks. They are some of
Speaker 3: the most stable timekeepers in the entire physical universe.
Speaker 2: How regular are we talking?
Speaker 3: A normal pulsar is like a cheap courtz watch. It
Speaker 3: might drift a little bit over a few years as
Speaker 3: it loses energy, but an MSP will keep perfect time
Speaker 3: to within a microsecond over billions of years.
Speaker 2: So nature essentially accidentally built a perfect chronometer.
Speaker 3: Actually, accidentally might be the wrong word for an MSP.
Speaker 3: There is a whole backstory to these speed demaons.
Speaker 2: Really, they do not just start out that fast.
Speaker 3: Usually when a pulser is born, it spins fast, but
Speaker 3: then it gradually slows down over time that loses energy
Speaker 3: to the surrounding space.
Speaker 2: So to get an old pulsar to spin one hundred
Speaker 2: and twenty two times a second, he usually.
Speaker 3: Needs a partner. We call him recycled.
Speaker 2: Pulsars recycled like it gets a second life exactly.
Speaker 3: The neutron star is in a binary orbit with another
Speaker 3: regular star. It's gravity is so intense it starts stripping
Speaker 3: gas off its neighbor.
Speaker 2: It eats its companion star.
Speaker 3: It siphons the gas off, and as that gas falls
Speaker 3: onto the neutron star, it spirals in and transfers its
Speaker 3: angular momentum.
Speaker 2: Oh so it physically spins up the dead star.
Speaker 3: Yes, it is like hitting a spinning top with a
Speaker 3: leaf blower. You are adding energy back into the system.
Speaker 2: That makes total sense. So finding an MSP usually implies
Speaker 2: a pretty complex history a binary star system gas swapping.
Speaker 3: Right, But finding one here, specifically in the galactic center,
Speaker 3: that is the real.
Speaker 2: Headline which brings us to the location. Because having a
Speaker 2: perfect plock.
Speaker 3: Is useful, very useful for astronomy.
Speaker 2: But having a perfect clock sitting on the edge of
Speaker 2: a press of pit is a whole different ballgame.
Speaker 3: It transforms the discovery from a cool astronomical object into
Speaker 3: a fundamental physics test.
Speaker 2: Let us talk about that neighborhood. The research describes this
Speaker 2: candidate as being close to Sagittarius a star.
Speaker 3: Sgr a star, the supermassive black hole at the absolute
Speaker 3: center of our Milky Way.
Speaker 2: I feel like we often visualize the center of the
Speaker 2: galaxy as this glowing, beautiful, peaceful orb of light, but physically,
Speaker 2: what is it actually like there?
Speaker 3: It is the most hostile environment you can imagine. It
Speaker 3: is a cosmic moshpit.
Speaker 2: Oh wash pit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in our neighborhood. Out here in the spiral arms,
Speaker 3: stars are pretty far apart. If the Sun were a
Speaker 3: great fruit in New York, the next nearest star is
Speaker 3: a great fruit in California.
Speaker 2: Lots of personal space exactly.
Speaker 3: But in the galactic center, the stars are packed in tight.
Speaker 3: The radiation is just intense.
Speaker 2: And there's debris everywhere.
Speaker 3: Right, massive magnetic filaments, clouds of super hot gas, shockwaves
Speaker 3: from old supernova explosions, bouncing around.
Speaker 2: And sitting right in the middle of this total chaos
Speaker 2: is the monster.
Speaker 3: Four million solar masses of black hole. It dominates everything
Speaker 3: in its vicinity.
Speaker 2: Its gravity anchors the entire galaxy, and.
Speaker 3: This pulsar candidate is apparently deep within its fhere of influence.
Speaker 2: Now I have a question about that. If this place
Speaker 2: is so crowded, and if there are so many stars
Speaker 2: living and dying there, shouldn't the galactic center just be
Speaker 2: full of pulsars? You would think, so, why is finding
Speaker 2: one such a big deal?
Speaker 3: That is actually known as the missing pulsar problem. It
Speaker 3: is one of the nagging mysteries of astrophysics.
Speaker 2: Right now, Wait, there is an official missing pulsar problem
Speaker 2: a huge one.
Speaker 3: Based on the sheer number of massive stars we see
Speaker 3: dying in the center, there should be thousands of pulsars there,
Speaker 3: maybe tens.
Speaker 2: Of thousands, but until recently we.
Speaker 3: Had found basically none.
Speaker 2: Why are they hiding from us?
Speaker 3: They are not hiding, They're being camouflaged. This goes back
Speaker 3: to our vacuum cleaner analogy from earlier.
Speaker 2: Wait listening for the radio click.
Speaker 3: To find a pulsar, you have to hear the radio
Speaker 3: clicks sweeping past Earth. But the galactic center is filled
Speaker 3: with ionized plasma hot.
Speaker 2: Charged gas, and radio waves do not play nicely with plasma.
Speaker 3: They absolutely hated. It causes two mathi of problems for astronomers,
Speaker 3: dispersion and scattering.
Speaker 2: Break those two down for me. Start with dispersion.
Speaker 3: Dispersion means the high frequency parts of the pulsar's signal
Speaker 3: travel faster through the plasma than the low frequency parts.
Speaker 2: So the signal gets stretched.
Speaker 3: Out exactly the sharp click gets smeared out into a
Speaker 3: long slide whistle sound. We can correct for that mathematically
Speaker 3: if we are smart about it.
Speaker 4: Though.
Speaker 2: Okay, so dispersion is annoying but fixable. What about scattering?
Speaker 3: Scattering is way worse. Imagine shining a crisp laser pointer
Speaker 3: through a pane of frosted glass.
Speaker 2: The beam spreads down, gets all fuzzy.
Speaker 3: Right, The sharp click of the pulsar gets blurred into
Speaker 3: a long, mushy hiss, and if the scattering is too strong,
Speaker 3: the pulse just disappears entirely into the background noise.
Speaker 2: So the pulsars are there, they are screaming into the void,
Speaker 2: but the fog is just too thick for us to
Speaker 2: see the lighthouse beam.
Speaker 3: That is exactly it, and that is why this specific
Speaker 3: discovery is so incredibly impressive. They did not just point
Speaker 3: a telescope and get lucky.
Speaker 2: What did they do differently?
Speaker 3: They use high frequency observations up around four to eight
Speaker 3: gigahertz because high frequencies punched through that plasma fog much
Speaker 3: better than lower frequencies.
Speaker 2: Ah, So they essentially change the channel to a frequency
Speaker 2: that the fog does not block as much.
Speaker 3: Right, But that comes with a major trade off. Pulsars
Speaker 3: are usually much dimmer at high frequencies.
Speaker 2: Oh so you were trading blurriness for faintness exactly.
Speaker 3: It is an incredibly difficult balance to strike. Finding This
Speaker 3: eight point one to nine millisecond signal is a huge
Speaker 3: testament to the sensitivity of the Green Bank.
Speaker 2: Telescope and to the processing algorithms the team used to
Speaker 2: clean up the data.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, the computing power required to sift through that is immense.
Speaker 2: So we have a miracle detection of a perfect clock
Speaker 2: sitting in a thick fog bank orbiting a super massive
Speaker 2: black hole.
Speaker 3: And that proximity to the black hole is the key
Speaker 3: to everything, because when you have a clock next to
Speaker 3: a massive gravity, well, things get weird.
Speaker 2: Einstein weird, very Einstein weird. This is the part I
Speaker 2: have been waiting for, the holy grail. Why does Einstein's
Speaker 2: ghosts care so much about this dead spinning star?
Speaker 3: Okay, let us talk about general relativity. It is our
Speaker 3: absolute best working theory of gravity.
Speaker 2: The core idea being that matter tells space how to curve.
Speaker 3: And space tells matter how to move.
Speaker 2: Yes, the classic bowling ball in the trampoline analogy.
Speaker 3: Right, Sagittarius star is a very heavy bowling ball. It
Speaker 3: creates a deep, deep dent in the fabric of space time, a.
Speaker 2: Four million solar mass dent.
Speaker 3: Now we have tested general relativity a lot here on
Speaker 3: Earth and throughout the Solar System, and it works beautifully.
Speaker 2: But those are weak gravity environments.
Speaker 3: Earth is a tiny pebble compared to a super massive
Speaker 3: black hole.
Speaker 2: So we want to know does the theory hold up
Speaker 2: in the strongest possible gravity.
Speaker 3: Exactly does the math break down at the very edge
Speaker 3: of the abyss. That is what physicist are desperate to
Speaker 3: find out.
Speaker 2: And the pulsar helps us do that.
Speaker 3: How exactly because it is a clock. Imagine the pulsar
Speaker 3: is orbiting the black hole. As it goes behind the
Speaker 3: black hole. From our perspective, the radio waves have to
Speaker 3: travel past the black hole to get to Earth.
Speaker 2: The ticks of the clog have to skim the edge
Speaker 2: of the crater.
Speaker 3: Yes, and because space is severely curved, the path the
Speaker 3: light has to take is longer. It is not a
Speaker 3: straight line anymore. Space itself is warped, so it has.
Speaker 2: To travel further, which causes a delay.
Speaker 3: It is called the Shapiro delay.
Speaker 2: The Shapiro delay. So the ticks should literally arrive late.
Speaker 3: Yes, if we time the ticks, remember they are incredibly precise,
Speaker 3: and we see them arriving slightly later than they should.
Speaker 3: When the star is behind the black hole.
Speaker 2: We can measure the delay, We.
Speaker 3: Can measure the exact curvature of space time. We can
Speaker 3: map the pothole using a stopwatch.
Speaker 2: That is incredible. You are using the delay of a
Speaker 2: tiny radio wave to map the invisible geometry of the universe.
Speaker 3: And it gets even cooler than that. There's another relativistic
Speaker 3: effect called frame dragging, sometimes called the lens thiring.
Speaker 2: Effect frame dragging that sounds like a video game graphics glitch.
Speaker 3: It is much trippier than a glitch. Since the black
Speaker 3: hole is spinning, it literally drags space time along with
Speaker 3: it as it turns.
Speaker 2: Like a spoon twisting in a jar of honey.
Speaker 3: Exactly, space itself is twisting around the black hole.
Speaker 2: So the pulsar is not just orbiting in a static
Speaker 2: dip on the trampoline. It is orbiting in a whirlpool
Speaker 2: of twisting space.
Speaker 3: Yes, and that twisting should make the pulsar's orbit wobble
Speaker 3: in a very specific mathematical way.
Speaker 2: And because it is a perfect clock, we can measure
Speaker 2: that wobble.
Speaker 3: If we can track this eight point one to nine
Speaker 3: millisecond signal for a few years, we could potentially detect
Speaker 3: that precise.
Speaker 2: Wobble, and if the wobble matches Einstein's.
Speaker 3: Math, then he is right again. General relativity holds up
Speaker 3: in the extreme limit.
Speaker 2: And what if it doesn't match.
Speaker 3: Then someone wins a Nobel prize. Because we have found
Speaker 3: a crack in general relativity, we would need new physics.
Speaker 2: That is why we call this the Holy grail. It
Speaker 2: is the ultimate stress test for physics.
Speaker 3: There is no better laboratory in the universe for this
Speaker 3: than a pulsar near a supermassive black hole.
Speaker 2: But and there's always a butt in astrophysics. We are
Speaker 2: not quite ready to hand out Nobel prizes yet, No,
Speaker 2: definitely not, which brings us to the uncertainty. We have
Speaker 2: to be very careful with our language here. Today the
Speaker 2: research describes this as an intriguing millisecond pulsar candidate.
Speaker 3: Candidate being the operative word.
Speaker 2: Meaning they haven't officially hired it yet to do the
Speaker 2: physics test.
Speaker 3: Meaning they are reasonably confident they see something real but
Speaker 3: has not been fully verified by independent observations.
Speaker 2: Why is it so hard to confirm? I mean, if
Speaker 2: it is beeping every eight milliseconds, can another observatory just
Speaker 2: point their telescope at it? Tomorrow? And say, yep, there
Speaker 2: it is.
Speaker 3: Remember that crowded and turbulent environment we.
Speaker 2: Talked about the Times square noise level exactly.
Speaker 3: The galactic center is full of natural interference. There is dust,
Speaker 3: there's hot gas, there are countless other overlapping radio sources.
Speaker 2: It is allowed room.
Speaker 3: But the biggest enemy here is actually RFI radio frequency interference,
Speaker 3: which comes from where us humans. We are incredibly noisy
Speaker 3: creatures in the radio spectrum.
Speaker 2: Right, satellites, cell phones.
Speaker 3: Microwave ovens, airport, radar, military communications. All of these things
Speaker 3: emit radio waves that telescopes can pick up.
Speaker 2: So you were saying someone heating up a frozen burrito
Speaker 2: could accidentally mimic a pulsar.
Speaker 3: It has literally happened before, no way. Yes, there was
Speaker 3: a famous case a few years ago where astronomers that
Speaker 3: they found a bizarre new type of deep space radio signal.
Speaker 3: They called them peritons, and what were they. It turned
Speaker 3: out to be the microwave in the observatory breakroom. Someone
Speaker 3: was opening the door before the timer went off and
Speaker 3: it let out a tiny burst of radio waves.
Speaker 2: That is hilarious and tragic.
Speaker 3: So astronomers are very paranoid about RFI now the Green
Speaker 3: Bay Observatory is located in a national radio quiet zone.
Speaker 2: Are they banned cell phones and Wi Fi?
Speaker 3: Yes, to prevent local interference, But satellites flying overhead you
Speaker 3: cannot ban those GPS satellites, starlink, you name it.
Speaker 2: So how does this team know their eight point one
Speaker 2: to nine millisecond tick isn't just a satellite passing by
Speaker 2: West Virginia.
Speaker 3: They look for that dispersion we talked about earlier.
Speaker 2: The slide whistle effect from the plasma fog.
Speaker 3: Exactly. An artificial signal from Earth or a low orbit
Speaker 3: satellite will not have that dispersion because it hasn't traveled
Speaker 3: through twenty five thousand light years of interstellar gunk. It
Speaker 3: is clean, right, But this candidate signal does show signs
Speaker 3: of heavy dispersion, and the amount of dispersion is consistent
Speaker 3: with it being all the way at the galactic center.
Speaker 2: Okay, that is a massive point in its favor.
Speaker 3: It is a very strong piece of evidence, but they
Speaker 3: still need to re observe it. They need to see
Speaker 3: it again, preferably with a different telescope or at a
Speaker 3: different time.
Speaker 2: Of year, just to ensure it is not a one
Speaker 2: off fluke or some weird harmonic of local noise.
Speaker 3: Exactly, science reques wires reproducibility, and.
Speaker 2: That actually leads to a really unique and cool part
Speaker 2: of the story. Usually, when a team finds a potential
Speaker 2: holy grail, they hoard their data right.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, They lock it down until they can publish
Speaker 3: the final confirmation.
Speaker 2: They say, this is my discovery. Go get your own telescope.
Speaker 3: Very common in competitive fields.
Speaker 2: But this team is not doing that. The breakthrough listen,
Speaker 2: folks are making the observational data publicly available.
Speaker 3: It is a huge breath of fresh air.
Speaker 2: Why are they doing that? Is it just pure scientific altruism?
Speaker 3: Partly yes, it is a commitment to the philosophy of
Speaker 3: open science, But practically speaking, it is because the data
Speaker 3: is just overwhelming.
Speaker 2: How much data are we talking about.
Speaker 3: We are talking about petabytes of raw information petible. Yes,
Speaker 3: it is too much for one small team to cone
Speaker 3: through perfectly and quickly. By releasing it, they are essentially
Speaker 3: crowdsourcing the verification process.
Speaker 2: They are saying, here's the giant haystack. Here is what
Speaker 2: we think is a needle. You all look too. Exactly, so, theoretically,
Speaker 2: if you're listening to this right now, and you happen
Speaker 2: to be a grad student in astrophysics or just a
Speaker 2: very smart programmer with a ton of spare computing power.
Speaker 3: You could go download this data right now and help
Speaker 3: confirm it.
Speaker 2: That is wild.
Speaker 3: It is the software they used to hunt for pulsars,
Speaker 3: things like Presto, which is a standard search code that.
Speaker 2: Is open source too, So the tools and the data
Speaker 2: are just out there.
Speaker 3: You can run your own folding algorithms on the raw data.
Speaker 3: Maybe you find it totally different pulsar they missed, or
Speaker 3: maybe you find the final proof for this candidate.
Speaker 2: I just love that it is like a global public challenge.
Speaker 2: Here is a strange noise in the dark who wants
Speaker 2: to help figure out what made it.
Speaker 3: It completely democratizes the discovery process. Instead of a handful
Speaker 3: of researchers holding the keys, the entire global scientific community
Speaker 3: can look at the ticking and weigh.
Speaker 2: In and that widespread collaboration is going to be key,
Speaker 2: because if this is confirmed, the payoff.
Speaker 3: Is immense transformative.
Speaker 2: Really, let us get into that payoff. What does success
Speaker 2: look like. We have touched on the general relativity aspect,
Speaker 2: the Shapiro delay and frame dragging.
Speaker 3: Proving Einstein right or wrong.
Speaker 2: But the researchers point out another major benefit. They note
Speaker 2: that confirming this pulsar could help us better understand our
Speaker 2: own galaxy as a whole.
Speaker 3: Yeah, think about stellar demographics, demographics for stars like a census. Exactly,
Speaker 3: we do not actually know how many dead stars are
Speaker 3: floating around the center of the.
Speaker 2: Milky Way because the fog hides them all.
Speaker 3: Right, Finding even one verified pulsar gives us a crucial
Speaker 3: data point. It tells us about the population density.
Speaker 2: If we spot one, there must be others.
Speaker 3: Statistics suggest if we found one under these incredibly difficult
Speaker 3: viewing conditions, there are probably hundreds or thousands more we
Speaker 3: just aren't seeing yet.
Speaker 2: So it tells us about the history of star formation
Speaker 2: and death and the most extreme part of our galaxy
Speaker 2: it does.
Speaker 3: It also helps us understand something called dynamic friction near the.
Speaker 2: Black hole, which is what exactly.
Speaker 3: How these dense star corpses slowly migraine inwards over millions
Speaker 3: of years, interacting with the black hole's gravity.
Speaker 2: That is fascinating, and let us zoom out even further
Speaker 2: for a second. Astronomy is building some massive new tools
Speaker 2: right now, like the SKA.
Speaker 3: The square kilometer array.
Speaker 2: Yes, So how does this discovery tie into those future projects?
Speaker 3: The SKA is going to be an absolute game changer
Speaker 3: for radio astronomy. It will be orders of magnitude more
Speaker 3: sensitive than the Green Bank Telescope.
Speaker 2: So finding this single candidate right now is almost like
Speaker 2: a scout finding a narrow path through the woods before
Speaker 2: the main army arrives.
Speaker 3: That is exactly what it is. It proves that we
Speaker 3: can find pulsars in the Galactic center if we look
Speaker 3: hard enough and use the right high frequency techniques.
Speaker 2: It acts as a proof of concept right.
Speaker 3: It justifies the immense time and money needed for the
Speaker 3: next generation of searches. If we confirm this one candidate,
Speaker 3: it basically guarantees that when the SKA turns on, pointing
Speaker 3: it straight at the Galactic center will be priority number one.
Speaker 2: It is going to crack the missing pulsar problem wide open.
Speaker 3: We might go from zero pulsars to hundreds in a
Speaker 3: matter of years.
Speaker 2: It really is amazing when you step back and connect
Speaker 2: all the dots of this story. We used the Green
Speaker 2: Bank Telescope, which is this massive metal dish sitting in
Speaker 2: a quiet valley on Earth, built by human hands.
Speaker 3: To detect a tiny, spinning dead star acting as a
Speaker 3: perfect cosmic clock, and.
Speaker 2: Nature just happened to place that clock right next to
Speaker 2: a four million solar mass.
Speaker 3: Black hole, so we could test a mathematical theory that
Speaker 3: a guy with crazy hair wrote down on a piece
Speaker 3: of paper over one hundred years ago.
Speaker 2: It connects the unbelievably small and eight millisecond rotation.
Speaker 3: To the unbelievably massive four million suns.
Speaker 2: And it connects human curiosity to the fundamental fabric of
Speaker 2: the universe itself.
Speaker 3: It really is a beautiful piece of science.
Speaker 2: So for you listening, what does this all mean at
Speaker 2: the end of the day, Why should you care about
Speaker 2: a ticking star twenty five thousand light years away?
Speaker 3: It means we are getting fundamentally closer to understanding gravity.
Speaker 2: Gravity is one of those things we just take for granted,
Speaker 2: we experience every single day.
Speaker 3: It keeps our feet on the ground and our coffee
Speaker 3: in our cups. But physicists actually understand very little about
Speaker 3: how gravity truly works on extreme scales.
Speaker 2: Or how it fits together with quantum mechanics.
Speaker 3: Right now, exactly the grand unified theory. We know things
Speaker 3: fall down here.
Speaker 2: On Earth, but does gravity work the exact same way
Speaker 2: near a supermassive black hole as it does in your
Speaker 2: living room.
Speaker 3: Einstein says, yes, that is the equivalence principle, but we
Speaker 3: have to test it to be sure. This pulsar candidate
Speaker 3: gives us the chance to finally check his work in
Speaker 3: the most extreme laboratory imaginable.
Speaker 2: So to wrap this exploration up, let us just quickly
Speaker 2: recap the key takeaways we have covered.
Speaker 3: First the discovery itself, an eight point one to nine
Speaker 3: millisecond pulsar candidate found near Sagittarius, a star by the
Speaker 3: team working with Breakthrough Listen.
Speaker 2: Second, the massive potential. If confirmed, it becomes the ultimate
Speaker 2: tool for testing gravity, measuring the curvature of space time,
Speaker 2: and detecting the twisting of space called frame dragging.
Speaker 3: And third the current status. It is unconfirmed a candidate,
Speaker 3: but the raw data is entirely open to the public,
Speaker 3: invite and the whole world to help solve the mystery.
Speaker 2: It really is the ultimate scientific cliffhanger. Is it a
Speaker 2: perfectly timed cosmic clock or is it just complex noise?
Speaker 3: That is the big question. We just have to wait
Speaker 3: and see.
Speaker 2: You know, it makes me think about the nature of
Speaker 2: that ticking. Assuming it is real, how so that star
Speaker 2: it has been spinning like that for eons. It has
Speaker 2: been ticking away in the absolute dark, eight milliseconds at
Speaker 2: a time, for millions of.
Speaker 3: Years, completely unheard by anyone, unheard.
Speaker 2: It was ticking like that when dinosaurs walk the earth.
Speaker 2: It was ticking when humans first discovered fire. It was
Speaker 2: ticking while we built cities and invented the radio and
Speaker 2: launched satellites, just.
Speaker 3: Sweeping its beam across the void, over and over.
Speaker 2: And it was only just now when we built a
Speaker 2: metal ear sensitive enough and an algorithm smart enough that
Speaker 2: we finally picked its tiny voice out of the chaos.
Speaker 3: It really makes you wonder what else is ticking out there?
Speaker 2: What else is hidden in the noise. The universe is
Speaker 2: incredibly loud, but if you listen closely enough, there is
Speaker 2: actual order in the chaos.
Speaker 3: We just have to be patient enough to find the
Speaker 3: patterns exactly.
Speaker 2: And here's a final thought for you to chew on today.
Speaker 2: The data is public, The confirmation hasn't happened yet.
Speaker 3: Anyone could look at it.
Speaker 2: Could the person who finally proves Einstein right or wrong
Speaker 2: be a student sitting in a dorm room, right, now
Speaker 2: just downloading that file out of curiosity.
Speaker 3: It is entirely possible the next Einstein might be the
Speaker 3: one looking at the data from the last Einstein's ultimate test.
Speaker 2: Keep listening and keep looking up.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: That is it for today's show.
Speaker 4: Catch you on the next one.
Speaker 5: The most said the che