Speaker 1: Picture this. You step outside on a perfectly clear, dark night, right,
Speaker 1: you look up and the sky feels like this vast,
Speaker 1: unmoving tapestry. It is quiet. It is just incredibly peaksful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, completely serene, exactly.
Speaker 1: The stars are fixed in their constellations, just twinkling down,
Speaker 1: giving us this grand illusion of a clockwork cosmos, like
Speaker 1: everything is predictably tracing out its orbit exactly where it belongs.
Speaker 2: It is a very comforting thought, it is.
Speaker 1: But when you strip away that illusion of perspective, like
Speaker 1: you actually look at the mechanics of what is happening
Speaker 1: up there, that piece is a complete lie.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, it is total chaos.
Speaker 1: The cosmos isn't some clockwork machine. It is a chaotic,
Speaker 1: violently unpredictable arena. I mean, we are orbiting in a
Speaker 1: universe filled with invisible wanderers, light speed snipers, and literal
Speaker 1: gravitational shredders that completely defy our basic understanding of reality.
Speaker 2: It really is the ultimate trick of human perspective. Honestly,
Speaker 2: we evolved on this tiny blue r to track immediate
Speaker 2: earthly threats. You know, a predator in the brush, a
Speaker 2: storm rolling in, or I don't know, a miss deadline right.
Speaker 1: Our brains are wired for the local stuff exactly.
Speaker 2: Our stress responses are fundamentally built for the local and
Speaker 2: the immediate. We perceive tranquility when we look up because
Speaker 2: the scale of the universe is just so vast that
Speaker 2: the violence takes millions of years to unfold, or it
Speaker 2: happens so quickly and so far away that the light
Speaker 2: is just a tiny pinprick by the time.
Speaker 1: It reaches us, a pinprick that actually represents something completely catastrophic.
Speaker 2: Yes, the reality of astrophysics is intensely aggressive. The forces
Speaker 2: at play are so unfathomably violent that they completely redefine
Speaker 2: what danger actually means.
Speaker 1: And that is exactly what we are getting into today.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. We are going to journey through
Speaker 1: the most mind bending, deeply unsettling, and awe inspiring events
Speaker 1: in the universe.
Speaker 2: It's going to be a wild ride, it really is.
Speaker 1: And I want to be clear right up front to
Speaker 1: you listening. The goal here isn't to induce cosmic anxiety.
Speaker 1: We aren't doing the whole doom and gloom thing. The
Speaker 1: goal is to reveal how dynamic, how incredibly bizarre, and
Speaker 1: how active the fabric of reality actually is. We want
Speaker 1: to peel back the curtain on the physics that govern
Speaker 1: everything around.
Speaker 2: Us, which is an essential shift in perspective. I think
Speaker 2: if you only view the universe as static, you miss
Speaker 2: out on the profound mechanics of how things are created,
Speaker 2: how they evolve, and ultimately how they are destroyed. The
Speaker 2: universe is an engine, and engines are noisy, volatile things.
Speaker 2: To really understand our place in it, we have to
Speaker 2: look closely at the gears that are grinding together in
Speaker 2: the dark.
Speaker 1: That is a great way to put it. So let
Speaker 1: us start by dismantling a very comforting assumption. When we
Speaker 1: think of space, we naturally think of it as neatly
Speaker 1: organized into solar.
Speaker 2: Systems, right, the classic model.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have a star in the middle and planets
Speaker 1: anchored beautifully to it, orbiting in these nice predictable ellipses.
Speaker 1: The star provides the light, the gravity provides tether but
Speaker 1: that completely ignores the things that aren't tethered, the things
Speaker 1: that are just drifting out there in the absolute dark.
Speaker 2: Right, the rogue planets.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 2: We have this star centric bias when we look at
Speaker 2: the universe because stars emit photons and photons are what
Speaker 2: our telescopes collect. We see the light, so we assume
Speaker 2: the light is where all the.
Speaker 1: Action is because it's all we can see.
Speaker 2: Yes, But the interstellar medium, the vast, seemingly empty spaces
Speaker 2: between the stars, is actually populated by these invisible wanderers.
Speaker 1: And the mechanics of how a planet goes rogue is
Speaker 1: fascinating to me because it isn't like they form out
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere, right. They are born in
Speaker 1: solar systems just like ours, but they basically get evicted.
Speaker 2: They get kicked out.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Planetary formation is not a polite process at all. When
Speaker 2: a star is born, it is surrounded by a protoplanetary disk,
Speaker 2: so a swirling mass of gas and dust.
Speaker 1: Like a spinning plate of debris.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and as that material clumps together to form planets,
Speaker 2: the gravitational interactions are incredibly chaos. You have the n
Speaker 2: body problem in full effect.
Speaker 1: Break that down for us.
Speaker 2: Sure, So the N body problem refers to how multiple
Speaker 2: massive objects tug on each other gravitationally. It is wildly unpredictable.
Speaker 2: In the early days of a solar system. Gas giants
Speaker 2: like Jupiter don't just stay put in one nice orbit
Speaker 2: they migrate inward and outward.
Speaker 1: Like a bowling ball rolling through a field of marbles.
Speaker 2: That is a perfect way to visualize it. As a
Speaker 2: massive gas giant migrates, it exerts immense gravitational influence. If
Speaker 2: a smaller planet, say something the size of Earth or Mars,
Speaker 2: happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,
Speaker 2: it can get caught in a gravitational slingshot.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, so it just gets whipped around the gas giant.
Speaker 2: Basically, yes, the orbital resonance essentially transfers a massive amount
Speaker 2: of kinetic energy from the giant to the smaller planet,
Speaker 2: accelerating it past the star's escape velocity. And just like that,
Speaker 2: it is forcefully ejected from the Solar System entirely.
Speaker 1: So it is just cast out into the interstellar void,
Speaker 1: which means it loses its sun completely. The temperature in
Speaker 1: the surface would plummet instantly. We are talking about a
Speaker 1: world plunged into eternal, perpetual night, just freezing over, completely
Speaker 1: drifting silently through the galaxy. There's no day, no seasons,
Speaker 1: no warmth, just a frozen ghost ship.
Speaker 2: A completely lightless world. And because they don't emit light
Speaker 2: and they aren't reflecting the light of a host star anymore.
Speaker 2: They are extraordinarily.
Speaker 1: Difficult to detect because space is black and they are black.
Speaker 2: Right. We only catch glimpses of them through a process
Speaker 2: called gravitational microlensing.
Speaker 1: Okay, yes, right, where we use Einstein's general relativity to
Speaker 1: spot them. Can you explain how that works? Because it
Speaker 1: is one of the coolest detection methods we have.
Speaker 2: Honestly, it really is elegant. Einstein taught us that massive
Speaker 2: objects bend the fabric of space time. So if a
Speaker 2: rogue planet happens to drift perfectly between our telescopes on
Speaker 2: Earth and a distant background star, the rogue planet's gravity
Speaker 2: acts like a magnifying glass.
Speaker 1: It warps the space it yes.
Speaker 2: It bends and focuses the light of the background star
Speaker 2: for a brief moment, maybe a few days or weeks.
Speaker 2: That distant background star suddenly gets much brighter and then
Speaker 2: dims again as the rogue planet moves on, So.
Speaker 1: We don't actually see the planet itself, We just see
Speaker 1: the distortion it causes in the light behind.
Speaker 2: It, exactly like seeing a ripple in water.
Speaker 1: Right, And based on how many of these microlensing ripples
Speaker 1: we have actually managed to catch. Astronomers have extrapolated the numbers,
Speaker 1: And this is the part that genuinely blew my mind
Speaker 1: when researching this.
Speaker 2: The scale is wild.
Speaker 1: There could be billions, maybe even trillions, of these rogue
Speaker 1: planets drifting through the Milky Way. There might actually be
Speaker 1: more rogue planets wandering the dark than there are stars
Speaker 1: shining in the whole galaxy.
Speaker 2: The statistical models heavily suggest that planetary ejection is a
Speaker 2: standard expected phase of Solar system formation. I mean, our
Speaker 2: own solar system likely ejected several planets early in its history.
Speaker 1: Really, our Solar system kicked planets out.
Speaker 2: Oh almost certainly. So, Yes, the void isn't empty. It
Speaker 2: is teeming with frozen, exiled worlds.
Speaker 1: I try to imagine what it would be like to
Speaker 1: stand on the surface of one of those. You look
Speaker 1: up and there's no moon, no sun, just the static
Speaker 1: background of the Milky Way. And it brings up a
Speaker 1: slightly unsettling thought. If space is basically a giant, dark
Speaker 1: billiard table filled with trillions of invisible balls, what happens
Speaker 1: if one rolls into our neighborhood. Could a rogue planet
Speaker 1: just drift right through our Solar System.
Speaker 2: It's entirely possible. I mean, space is incredibly vast, so
Speaker 2: the odds of a direct collision with Earth are vanishingly small. However,
Speaker 2: if a Jupiter sized rogue planet were to pass through
Speaker 2: the outer edges of our Solar system, say through the
Speaker 2: Ort Cloud or the Kuiper Belt, its gravitational wake would
Speaker 2: disturb millions of icy bodies and commets.
Speaker 1: Oh Man, so would send them flying at us.
Speaker 2: It could potentially send a barrage of them plunging toward
Speaker 2: the inner Solar System. Yes, or if it passed close
Speaker 2: enough to the major planets, it could perturb their orbits.
Speaker 2: It wouldn't even need to hit us. It would just
Speaker 2: need to tug gon Us enough to change our distance
Speaker 2: from the Sun, which.
Speaker 1: Would totally wreck our climate. But okay, if rogue planets
Speaker 1: are the invisible billiard balls of the galaxy, let us
Speaker 1: turn the physics up to eleven here, what about the
Speaker 1: invisible wrecking balls. If planetary migration can kick a planet
Speaker 1: out of a solar system, can the universe inject something
Speaker 1: much heavier? Let's see a black hole.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, we call them rogue black holes, and the mechanics
Speaker 2: behind how they get cast into the void. Are some
Speaker 2: of the most violent processes in astrophysics.
Speaker 1: Let us unpack that because I think most of us
Speaker 1: picture black holes as stationary drains. You have the supermassive
Speaker 1: ones angering the centers of galaxies, or stellar mass ones
Speaker 1: just sitting where their parents star died, quietly pulling things in.
Speaker 1: How on Earth does a black hole go rogue? You
Speaker 1: can't exactly use a Jupiter sized planet to slingshot a
Speaker 1: black hole.
Speaker 2: No, definitely not. You need forces much much more extreme
Speaker 2: than planetary migration. One primary mechanism is an asymmetric supernova. Okay,
Speaker 2: when a massive star runs out of fuel and it's
Speaker 2: core collapses into a black hole. The outer layers of
Speaker 2: the star explode outward. But that explosion isn't always perfectly spherical.
Speaker 1: Right, So if the stars rotating wildly, or if there
Speaker 1: are instabilities in the plasma, the explosion can be kind
Speaker 1: of lopsided.
Speaker 2: Precisely, if the supernoa deetondes with slightly more force on
Speaker 2: one side than the other, conservation of momentum dictates that
Speaker 2: the newly formed black hole must recoil in the opposite direction,
Speaker 2: like a gunfiring. Yes, exactly, it receives what astrophysicists call
Speaker 2: a natal kick, and these kicks can be incredibly powerful.
Speaker 2: They can accelerate the black hole to millions of miles
Speaker 2: per hour, which is easily enough to break free of
Speaker 2: its local stellar neighborhood and send it hurtling through the
Speaker 2: galactic arm.
Speaker 1: A needle kick. So the star dies, gives birth to
Speaker 1: a black hole and basically blasts it out of a
Speaker 1: cannon in the process. That is one way, and there's
Speaker 1: another way, too, right, involving gravitational ways.
Speaker 2: Yes, and this one happens on a much larger scale
Speaker 2: when two supermassive black hole merge, which usually happens when
Speaker 2: two entire galaxies collide. They spiral into each other. As
Speaker 2: they do, they emit massive amounts of energy in the
Speaker 2: form of gravitational waves.
Speaker 1: Which are literally ripples in the fabric of space time itself.
Speaker 2: Exactly now. If the two black holes have different masses
Speaker 2: or different spin rates, those gravitational waves are emitted asymmetrically.
Speaker 1: Meaning more space time ripples are being fired off in
Speaker 1: one direction than another.
Speaker 2: Exactly right, space time acts like a fluid in this scenario.
Speaker 2: The asymmetry gives the newly merged ultra massive black hole,
Speaker 2: a massive recoil kick. It is the universe's ultimate rocket thruster,
Speaker 2: using space time itself as the propellant. That is insane,
Speaker 2: it is this can eject a supermassive black hole completely
Speaker 2: out of its host galaxy, leaving it to drift through
Speaker 2: intergalactic space.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we have these invisible gravitational monsters, either stillar
Speaker 1: mass or supermassive, just hurtling through the dark, and just
Speaker 1: like roade planets, they emit absolutely zero light. The event
Speaker 1: horizon traps every single photon. So we have this major
Speaker 1: detection problem. A rogue black hole could be wandering through
Speaker 1: our spiral arm right now and we wouldn't see it
Speaker 1: coming until it started warping the light of the stars
Speaker 1: behind it.
Speaker 2: And we have actually detected a few of these candidates
Speaker 2: using that same gravitational microlensing technique we discussed for rogue planets.
Speaker 2: The light distortion is just much more severe and it
Speaker 2: lasts longer because the mass is so much greater.
Speaker 1: I have to ask, if one of these stellar mass
Speaker 1: rogue black holes wandered into our solar system, what exactly
Speaker 1: are we looking at? Like, do we get sucked in.
Speaker 2: We most likely do not get sucked in. Oh really, yeah,
Speaker 2: The physical size of a stellar mass black hole its
Speaker 2: actual event horizon is surprisingly small. We are talking maybe
Speaker 2: only a few dozen kilometers across.
Speaker 1: Wait, that is tiny.
Speaker 2: It is The danger isn't that it acts like a
Speaker 2: cosmic vacuum kinner directly over Earth. The danger, just like
Speaker 2: with the rogue planet, but magnified thousands of times, is
Speaker 2: the gravitational disruption.
Speaker 1: Because gravity has an infinite reach, right just drops off
Speaker 1: according to the inverse square.
Speaker 2: Logsrect So as the rogue black hole enters the Solar System,
Speaker 2: it begins a certain gravitational dominance. It would warp the
Speaker 2: orbits of the outer planets. First. If it passed near Jupiter,
Speaker 2: the delicate gravitational dance of the Solar System would be
Speaker 2: irreparably broken.
Speaker 1: Just completely ruined.
Speaker 2: Yes, Earth's orbit, which is normally relatively circular, could become
Speaker 2: highly elliptical.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, So for one half of the year we
Speaker 1: are pulled dangerously close to the sun ocean's boiling, and
Speaker 1: then the other half we are flung out into the
Speaker 1: freezing depths past Mars.
Speaker 2: Yes, we'd experience catastrophic Melankovitch cycles on steroids.
Speaker 1: It sounds miserable, and.
Speaker 2: That is actually the best case scenario.
Speaker 1: Wait, that is the best case.
Speaker 2: The worst case scenario is that the gravitational perturbation from
Speaker 2: the black hole is so severe that it transfers enough
Speaker 2: orbital energy to Earth to eject us from the Solar
Speaker 2: system entirely. Oh no, the black hole just passes through,
Speaker 2: barely slowing down and leaves Earth as a rogue planet,
Speaker 2: itself freezing in the dark, just.
Speaker 1: Our own eviction. Notice. Wow, it really forces you to
Speaker 1: realize that the safety of our Solar system relies entirely
Speaker 1: on the fact that space is unimaginably vast. It is
Speaker 1: mostly empty volume. We are safe because the odds of
Speaker 1: a direct hit are low, not because our neighborhood is
Speaker 1: inherently peaceful exactly.
Speaker 2: Distance is our primary shield.
Speaker 1: But distance doesn't mean anything if the threat moves at
Speaker 1: the cosmic speed limit. A rogue black hole has to
Speaker 1: physically cross the physical space to get to us, which
Speaker 1: takes millions of years. But let us shift gears to
Speaker 1: a class of cosmic events where distance offers absolutely no warning.
Speaker 1: Let us talk about the light speed snipers, things that
Speaker 1: move at two hundred ninetynine thousand, seven hundred and ninety
Speaker 1: two kilometers per second. By the time you see them,
Speaker 1: you are already caught in them.
Speaker 2: Gamma ray bursts gamma ray bursts, or GRBs, are profoundly
Speaker 2: terrifying when you understand their mechanics. These are the most
Speaker 2: energetic electromagnetic events since the Big Bang.
Speaker 1: To put the energy scale in perspective for everyone, in
Speaker 1: a matter of a few seconds, a GRB can release
Speaker 1: more energy than are in entire Sun will produce in
Speaker 1: its entire ten billion year lifespan. It outshines the entire
Speaker 1: observable universe for a fleeting moment. But what is actually
Speaker 1: happening physically to generate that much raw power.
Speaker 2: Well, there are two main types, short and long duration GRBs,
Speaker 2: but let us focus on the long ones, which are
Speaker 2: generally associated with the collapser model. This happens when a
Speaker 2: massive rapidly rotating star something like a wolf rayet star,
Speaker 2: which has already stripped away its outer hydrogen envelope, reaches
Speaker 2: the end.
Speaker 1: Of its life, so the core runs out of fuel
Speaker 1: and gravity wins the fight. The core collapses in on
Speaker 1: itself to form a black hole.
Speaker 2: Yes, but The key here is the rapid rotation. Because
Speaker 2: the star is spinning so incredibly fast, when the core collapses,
Speaker 2: the infalling material doesn't just drop straight down. Conservation of
Speaker 2: angular momentum forces the material to form a rapidly spinning
Speaker 2: accretion disk around the newly forming black hole, like.
Speaker 1: Water swirling down a drain, rather than just dropping straight
Speaker 1: into it.
Speaker 2: Precisely, and this plasma in the acretion disk is incredibly
Speaker 2: hot and dense, which means the magnetic fields of the
Speaker 2: star get wound up. They get twisted into this impossibly tight,
Speaker 2: hyperdense magnetic coil.
Speaker 1: Okay I can picture that this.
Speaker 2: Magnetic dynamo channels a fraction of the infalling material away
Speaker 2: from the black hole and blasts it outward along the
Speaker 2: star's axis of rotation.
Speaker 1: So it fires two jets of material out from the pole.
Speaker 2: Yes, but these jets are moving at relativistic speeds, meaning
Speaker 2: ninety nine point nine to nine percent the speed of light.
Speaker 2: As these jets plow through the outer layers of the
Speaker 2: dying star, they accelerate even more internal shock waves within
Speaker 2: the jet, where faster moving material catches up to slower
Speaker 2: moving material create these intense bursts of gamma radiation.
Speaker 1: It really is a cosmic shotgun. It doesn't explode outward
Speaker 1: in a sphere like a normal supernova. All that unimaginable
Speaker 1: energy is focused into these two incredibly narrow, tight beams,
Speaker 1: which means the danger isn't simply that a GRB happens
Speaker 1: somewhere in our galaxy. The danger is entirely dependent on
Speaker 1: whether the barrel of that magnetic shotgun happens to be
Speaker 1: pointing directly at Earth when the star dies.
Speaker 2: It is a massive game of cosmic Russian roulette because
Speaker 2: the beam is so tightly collimated. If we aren't in
Speaker 2: the direct line of sight, we might barely even notice it.
Speaker 2: But if a GRB fired within say three to eight
Speaker 2: thousand light years of US, and the pole was aimed
Speaker 2: right at our Solar system, the implications for Earth would
Speaker 2: be devastating.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't physically incinerate the planet right, the dangerous to
Speaker 1: the atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Correct. Gamma rays are highly energetic photons. If a beme
Speaker 2: of gamma rays washed over Earth, it would interact violently
Speaker 2: with our atmosphere, so specifically, it would break apart the
Speaker 2: nitrogen and oxygen molecules. These would then recombine to form
Speaker 2: nitrogen oxides.
Speaker 1: Which are completely terrible for the ozone layer.
Speaker 2: They would act as a catalyst to aggressively deplete the
Speaker 2: ozone layer, potentially destroying up to fifty percent of it
Speaker 2: in a matter of days or weeks. Wow, And the
Speaker 2: ozone layer is our planetary shield against the Sun's ultraviolet radiation.
Speaker 2: Without it, lethal levels of UV radiation would reach the surface.
Speaker 1: Well phytoplankton would die off, disrupting the base of the
Speaker 1: entire oceanic food chain. DNA mutation rates with skyrocket crops
Speaker 1: would fail. It would be a mass extinction event driven
Speaker 1: by our own Sun, but initiated by a dead star
Speaker 1: thousands of light years away.
Speaker 2: And the paleontological record actually suggests this might not just
Speaker 2: be a theoretical exercise. Yeah. Many researchers believe that the
Speaker 2: Ordovision Silurian mass extinction, which happened roughly four hundred and
Speaker 2: forty million years ago and wiped out eighty five percent
Speaker 2: of marine species, could have been triggered by a relatively
Speaker 2: close gamma ray burst. The fossil evance shows a sudden
Speaker 2: die off of shallow water organisms that would have been
Speaker 2: most vulnerable to a spike in UV radiation.
Speaker 1: That is just chilling. And here's the thing that really
Speaker 1: gets into my skin about GRBs. We wouldn't see it
Speaker 1: coming because gamma rays are light. They travel exactly at
Speaker 1: the speed of light. The radiation beam arrives at the
Speaker 1: exact same instant as the visual flash of the star exploding.
Speaker 1: There is no early warning system. One second you're enjoying
Speaker 1: a sunny afternoon, and the next second the chemistry of
Speaker 1: the upper atmosphere is irrevocably altered.
Speaker 2: It perfectly illustrates the limits of our perception. We are
Speaker 2: bound by the.
Speaker 1: Speed of light, but at least a gamma a burst
Speaker 1: is an explosion of stuff within the universe. It's radiation
Speaker 1: moving through space. But let us move to another zero
Speaker 1: warning event that is fundamentally different, something that doesn't just
Speaker 1: destroy matter, but actually destroy space itself. Let us talk
Speaker 1: about false vacuum decay. This is widely considered one of
Speaker 1: the most existentially terrifying concepts in quantum mechanics.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate paradigm shift because it forces us
Speaker 2: to question the stability of reality itself. To understand it,
Speaker 2: we have to look at the concept of a vacuum.
Speaker 2: In classical physics, a vacuum is just empty space. But
Speaker 2: in quantum field theory, empty space isn't truly empty. It
Speaker 2: is filled with quantum fields, like the electromagnetic field or
Speaker 2: the Higgs field, that permeate everything, and these fields.
Speaker 1: Have energy levels. A system in nature always wants to
Speaker 1: seek its lowest possible energy state, like water flowing down
Speaker 1: a mountain to reach sea level.
Speaker 2: Exactly, we call the lowest possible energy state the true vacuum. Now,
Speaker 2: the raining assumption for a long time was that our
Speaker 2: universe is currently operating in the true vacuum state. But
Speaker 2: when the mass of the Higgs bosin was discovered in
Speaker 2: twenty twelve, physicists crunched the numbers and realized something highly
Speaker 2: disturbing about the Higgs field potential.
Speaker 1: The Higgs field is the field that gives fundamental particles
Speaker 1: their mass, right it determines how heavy an electronic or
Speaker 1: a quark is.
Speaker 2: Yes, and the mat suggests that the Higgs field might
Speaker 2: not be resting at the true vacuum. It might be
Speaker 2: in what we call a false vacuum.
Speaker 1: A lot of people use the analogy of a ball
Speaker 1: sitting in a little dimple on the side of a
Speaker 1: steep hill. It is stable for now because it is
Speaker 1: in that little dip, but it isn't at the very
Speaker 1: bottom of the valley. But I think a better way
Speaker 1: to visualize this is through phase transitions like super cooled water.
Speaker 2: That is a much more accurate mechanical analogy.
Speaker 1: Yet right, because you can take pure water, put it
Speaker 1: in a freezer and lower the temperature below freezing without
Speaker 1: it turning into ice. It remains liquid because there are
Speaker 1: no impurities for the ice crystals to start forming around.
Speaker 1: It is trapped in a liquid state even though it
Speaker 1: wants to be solid. That is a false state. But
Speaker 1: the moment you tap the glass or drop a single
Speaker 1: grain of sand in it, the whole bottle instantly flashes
Speaker 1: into solid ice. A phase transition cascades through the water.
Speaker 2: And that is exactly what would happen in false vacuum decay.
Speaker 2: But on a cosmic scale, our universe is the super
Speaker 2: cooled water. We are sitting in a local temporary state
Speaker 2: of stability, but through a quantum event, the Higgs field
Speaker 2: could suddenly drop to its true lowest energy state in
Speaker 2: one specific point in space. This process is called quantum tunneling.
Speaker 1: It just spontaneously drops through the barrier to the bottom,
Speaker 1: and when it does, it creates a bubble, a bubble
Speaker 1: of true vacuum.
Speaker 2: Yes, inside that bubble, the vacuum expectation value of the
Speaker 2: Higgs field is completely different.
Speaker 1: Which means the rules of physics have changed inside the.
Speaker 2: Bubble, precisely because the Higgs field gives particles their mass.
Speaker 2: Changing the field changes the masses of everything. Electrons might
Speaker 2: become infinitely heavy or have no mass at all. Protons
Speaker 2: and neutrons might no longer stick together. The strong and
Speaker 2: weak nuclear forces would behave differently. Chemistry, biology, planet stars,
Speaker 2: everything relies on the fine tuned constants of the standard model.
Speaker 2: Inside the true vacuum bubble, matter as we know it
Speaker 2: simply cannot exist.
Speaker 1: The rules that allow reality to function are just overridden.
Speaker 1: And this bubble of true vacuum, it doesn't just sit
Speaker 1: there because it is in a lower energy state. It
Speaker 1: releases latent energy, which pushes the walls of the bubble outward,
Speaker 1: and it expands at the speed of light.
Speaker 2: It sweeps through the universe at light speed, unmaking everything
Speaker 2: it touches, and because it moves at the speed of light,
Speaker 2: no information can precede it. You cannot see it coming.
Speaker 1: There is no flash of light on the horizon. The
Speaker 1: light from the bubble's edge arise at the exact same
Speaker 1: moment the bubble's edge hits you. One instant, you're here
Speaker 1: banging the laws of physics, and the next instant, the
Speaker 1: framework of reality ceases to support your existence. You wouldn't
Speaker 1: even have the time to process that you were dying
Speaker 1: because the electrical impulses in your brain would no longer
Speaker 1: be physically possible.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate existential dread. There is no defense,
Speaker 2: no bunker, no technology that can save you, because the
Speaker 2: very atomic structure of your bunker and your body would
Speaker 2: be rewritten to something incompatible with life.
Speaker 1: Now. I know some people listening to this are probably
Speaker 1: sweating right now, but the mathematical probability of this happening
Speaker 1: in our cosmic neighborhood anytime soon is exceedingly low, isn't it.
Speaker 1: The universe has survived in this false vacuum for thirteen
Speaker 1: point eight billion years.
Speaker 2: That is the comfort we take. Yes, The timescale for
Speaker 2: the Higgs field to naturally tunnel into the true vacuum
Speaker 2: is estimated to be many orders of magnitude longer than
Speaker 2: the current age of the universe, so it is unlikely
Speaker 2: to happen tomorrow, but it serves as a profound reminder
Speaker 2: that the fundamental bedrock of our reality might be much
Speaker 2: more fragile, much more conditional, than we ever assumed.
Speaker 1: It really pulls a rug out from under your perception
Speaker 1: of reality. Okay, let us take a deep breath. Let
Speaker 1: us pull ourselves out of theoretical quantum dread and ground
Speaker 1: the conversation back in something we actually interact with. Let
Speaker 1: us talk about stars, the engines that actually sustain us.
Speaker 1: We base our entire concept of time, agriculture, and energy
Speaker 1: around our Sun. But stars are not calm, benevolent orbs.
Speaker 1: They are incredibly violent fusion reactors held together by gravity.
Speaker 1: Let us look at stellar tantrums, starting with our local hazard,
Speaker 1: solar superstorms.
Speaker 2: It is easy to view the Sun as a static
Speaker 2: yellow circle in the sky, but it is a churning,
Speaker 2: roiling sphere of plasma. And because plasma is a gas
Speaker 2: composed of charged particles, the Sun generates immense, highly complex
Speaker 2: magnetic fields.
Speaker 1: And those magnetic fields get twisted because the Sun isn't
Speaker 1: solid right, the equator rotates faster than the poles.
Speaker 2: Yes differential rotation, the magnetic field lines get stretched, twisted,
Speaker 2: and wind up like rubber bands over an eleven year
Speaker 2: solar cycle. Eventually the tension becomes too great. The magnetic
Speaker 2: field lines snap and real line in a lower energy configuration,
Speaker 2: a process called magnetic reconnection.
Speaker 1: And when they snap, they release a tremendous amount of energy.
Speaker 1: You get solar flares with your flashes of light and radiation.
Speaker 1: But the real physical hazard to us is when that
Speaker 1: reconnection flings actual physical matter out into space. Coronal mass
Speaker 1: ejections or CMEs.
Speaker 2: A CME is a massive cloud of magnetized plasma billions
Speaker 2: of tons of protons and electrons hurled away from the
Speaker 2: Sun at speeds of up to several million miles per hour.
Speaker 2: If the Earth happens to be in the path of
Speaker 2: that plasma cloud, the consequences for our modern way of
Speaker 2: life can be severe.
Speaker 1: Now, to be clear, a CME doesn't harm human biology
Speaker 1: on the ground. Earth's own magnetic field acts as a
Speaker 1: deflector shield. It guides those charged particles toward the poles,
Speaker 1: which is why we get the auroras, the northern and
Speaker 1: southern lights. The danger isn't biological. The danger is entirely electromagnetic.
Speaker 2: This is when we need to understand Faraday's law of induction.
Speaker 2: Faraday discovered that a moving magnetic field induces an electrical
Speaker 2: current in a conductor. When a massive CME hits Earth's magnetosphere,
Speaker 2: it causes our magnetic field to rapidly fluctuate and compress.
Speaker 2: This rapidly changing magnetic field sweeps across the surface of
Speaker 2: the Earth.
Speaker 1: And what are the longest conductors we have on the
Speaker 1: surface of the Earth.
Speaker 2: Power lines Exactly the fluctuating magnetic field induces geomagnetically induced currents,
Speaker 2: or GICs in our long distance transmission lines. These lines
Speaker 2: are designed to handle alternating current, but the GIC acts
Speaker 2: like a massive influx of direct current. This extra uncontrolled
Speaker 2: current flows right into our high voltage transformers.
Speaker 1: And transformers are not built to handle that. They overheat,
Speaker 1: the copper windings literally melt, and the transformer explodes or
Speaker 1: catches fire. To understand just how bad this could be,
Speaker 1: we have to look back at the benchmark historical event,
Speaker 1: the Carrington event of eighteen fifty nine.
Speaker 2: Y In September eighteen fifty nine, British astronomer Richard Carrington
Speaker 2: observed a massive white light solar flare. Less than eighteen
Speaker 2: hours later, the CME slammed into earth. The auroras were
Speaker 2: so intense they were seen as far south as the
Speaker 2: Caribbean and Hawaii. People woke up in the middle of
Speaker 2: the night thinking it.
Speaker 1: Was dawn, and the technology of the time the telegraph
Speaker 1: system went completely haywire. The induced currents were so strong
Speaker 1: that telegraph operators were receiving physical electrical shocks from their equipment.
Speaker 1: Some telegraph lines actually sparked and set the paper on fire.
Speaker 1: In some cases, operators realized they could disconnect their batteries
Speaker 1: and actually send messages using just the ambient current flowing
Speaker 1: through the earth from the storm.
Speaker 2: It was a brilliant, terrifying demonstration of electromagnetic induction. But
Speaker 2: in eighteen fifty nine, a few shocked operators in burnt
Speaker 2: paper was the extent of the infrastructural damage. Society wasn't
Speaker 2: electrified yet.
Speaker 1: Now let us fast forward to today. Picture that exact
Speaker 1: same storm, a Carrington level CME hitting our modern grid.
Speaker 1: This is the scenario that legitimately keeps grid engineers awake
Speaker 1: at night.
Speaker 2: If a Carrington level event struck today, the induced currents
Speaker 2: will simultaneously hit thousands of high voltage transformers across the globe.
Speaker 2: We would see cascading failures. The power grid operates on
Speaker 2: a delicate balance of supply and demand, so when major
Speaker 2: transformers melt down, the grid fragments and collapses to protect itself.
Speaker 1: We are talking about global sweeping blackouts, and the purifying
Speaker 1: part is the recovery time. You can't just flip a
Speaker 1: breaker to fix a melted transformer. These massive multiton transformers
Speaker 1: are custom built, They take months to manufacture, and the
Speaker 1: factories that build them well, they require electricity run.
Speaker 2: It is a vicious cycle. Without power, water purification plans fail,
Speaker 2: fuel pumps at gas stations stop working. The global supply
Speaker 2: chain logistics freeze, refrigeration stops, banking, networks go offline, and
Speaker 2: satellite communications, which would also be severely degraded or destroyed
Speaker 2: by the radiation, are lost. We are talking about potentially
Speaker 2: months or even years of an infrastructural dark age for
Speaker 2: a affected regions.
Speaker 1: It is the ultimate Achilles heel of modern civilization. And
Speaker 1: the thing that gives me absolute chills is how close
Speaker 1: we came to this recently in July twenty twelve, the
Speaker 1: Sun unleashed a monster CME. It was a perfectly directed,
Speaker 1: incredibly fast plasma cloud. It was easily Carrington level, perhaps
Speaker 1: even stronger, and it crossed earths exact orbit, but it
Speaker 1: missed us by one week. Earth had moved just far
Speaker 1: enough along its orbital path that the CME harmlessly crossed
Speaker 1: the space where we'd been just seven days prior. It
Speaker 1: did hit one of our stereo satellites, which is how
Speaker 1: we know exactly how powerful it was, but one week
Speaker 1: of orbital timing was the only difference between our normal,
Speaker 1: everyday life and a global catastrophe that could have set
Speaker 1: humanity back decades. We literally sailed right past the bullet.
Speaker 2: It highlights our vulnerability. The Sun is a dynamic system,
Speaker 2: and we are heavily reliant on it behaving predictably, which
Speaker 2: it fundamentally does not do.
Speaker 1: So that is our local hazard. But what about the
Speaker 1: stellar tantrums happening further out the distant fireworks? There are
Speaker 1: two specific stars that astronomers watch very closely because they
Speaker 1: are actively in the process of tearing themselves apart Beatlesers
Speaker 1: and Etcarnate. Let us start with the gentle giant beetle Gers.
Speaker 2: Beetlegers is a red supergent located in the constellation Orion,
Speaker 2: about six hundred light years away. It is massive in
Speaker 2: a way that is difficult to internalize. If you replaced
Speaker 2: our Sun with Beetlegears, its outer surface would stretch out
Speaker 2: past the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Jupiter
Speaker 2: would barely be skimming at surface.
Speaker 1: It is bloated, and it is bloated because it is dying.
Speaker 2: Yes, stellar nucleosynthesis is coming to an end. A star
Speaker 2: is a constant balancing act between gravity pulling matter inward
Speaker 2: and the outward pressure of nuclear fusion pushing outward. For
Speaker 2: most of a star's life, it fuses hydrogen into helium.
Speaker 2: When the hydrogen runs out, the core compresses, heats up
Speaker 2: and starts fusing helium into carbon, then carbon into neon, oxygen,
Speaker 2: and eventually silicon.
Speaker 1: And Beetle Juice is deep into those later stages. It
Speaker 1: is highly unstable, pulsating and churning. I remember the massive
Speaker 1: panic back in late twenty nineteen and early twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: Beetlejuice one of the brightest stars in the night sky,
Speaker 1: but suddenly it started dimming dramatically. You could see the
Speaker 1: change with the naked eye. Everyone was buzzing, asking is
Speaker 1: this it is the core finally collapsing? Are we about
Speaker 1: to see a supernova?
Speaker 2: The astronomical community immobilized every available telescope to figure out
Speaker 2: what was happening. It was an unprecedented drop in luminosity,
Speaker 2: but it turned out not to be the final collapse.
Speaker 2: It was a massive stellar exhalation.
Speaker 1: A dust cough exactly.
Speaker 2: The star underwent a massive convective upwelling, essentially burping out
Speaker 2: a huge bubble of hot plasma from its interior. As
Speaker 2: that plasma moved away from the star, it cooled down
Speaker 2: and condensed into titanium oxide dust. This massive cloud of
Speaker 2: dust happened to form perfectly in our line of sight,
Speaker 2: physically blocking the starlight from reaching Earth. Once the dust dissipated,
Speaker 2: Beetlejuice returned to its normal brightness.
Speaker 1: So it was just a false alarm. But the reality
Speaker 1: is Beetlejuice will go supernova. It will run out of fuel,
Speaker 1: the core will collapse into iron, fusion will stop, gravity
Speaker 1: will win in a fraction of a second, and the
Speaker 1: resulting rebound will blow the star apart. And when it
Speaker 1: does happen, whether it is tomorrow or one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: years from now, it is going to be the greatest
Speaker 1: celestial show in human history.
Speaker 2: The sheer luminosity of the supernova will be staggering because
Speaker 2: it is relatively close at six hundred light years. When
Speaker 2: it detonates, it will shine nearly as brightly as a
Speaker 2: half moon.
Speaker 1: It will cast shadows at night. You will be able
Speaker 1: to see it in the middle of the day, a
Speaker 1: brilliant second point of light in the blue sky. It
Speaker 1: will hang there for weeks or months before slowly fading away.
Speaker 1: And the best part is six hundred light years is
Speaker 1: safely outside the kill zone for a supernova. The radiation
Speaker 1: won't harm us. We just get front row seats to
Speaker 1: a stellar death.
Speaker 2: Batal Juice is certainly dramatic, but it is relatively benign
Speaker 2: compared to Eta Carino Ah Yes Atakarne.
Speaker 1: This thing is a monster. It is located about seventy
Speaker 1: five hundred light years away, and it is a Lunius
Speaker 1: blue variable system. It's incredibly massive. The primary star is
Speaker 1: somewhere around one hundred times the mass of our Sun,
Speaker 1: and stars that massive do not live long and they
Speaker 1: do not live quietly.
Speaker 2: They burn through their fuel at an extraordinary rate. Edik
Speaker 2: Arnie is so luminous that it is constantly fighting the
Speaker 2: Eddington limit.
Speaker 1: The Eddington limit. This is such a cool concept. Explain
Speaker 1: how radiation pressure basically tries to blow the star apart.
Speaker 2: Light actually has momentum. When a star is incredibly massive
Speaker 2: and luminous, the outward pressure from the sheer amount of
Speaker 2: photons being generated by fusion can actually equal or even
Speaker 2: exceed the inward pull of gravity holding the star's outer
Speaker 2: layers together. The star is literally shining so brightly that
Speaker 2: the light itself is blowing the star surface away into space.
Speaker 1: And Edicarnia has a history of violent instability because of this.
Speaker 1: In the eighteen forties it underwent what astronomers call the great.
Speaker 2: Eruption, yes for a few years it became the second
Speaker 2: brightest star in the night sky, despite being seventy five
Speaker 2: hundred light years away. During this eruption, it violently ejected
Speaker 2: massive amounts of material somewhere between ten and forty times
Speaker 2: the mass of our Sun into space.
Speaker 1: It basically threw off multiple entire solar systems worth of
Speaker 1: matter in one massive explosion and it survived. It just
Speaker 1: shrugged off an explosion that would have completely obliterated a
Speaker 1: normal star. You can still see the aftermath today through
Speaker 1: the hubble and webkelescoats the homunculus nebula of these two
Speaker 1: massive expanding lobes of gas and dust, forming an hourglass
Speaker 1: shape around the star.
Speaker 2: But Edi Kearny's luck will eventually run out. When a
Speaker 2: star of this immense mass finally collapses. It doesn't just
Speaker 2: go supernova. It has the potential to become a hypernova
Speaker 2: or a pair instability supernova, an explosion exponentially more powerful
Speaker 2: than a standard core.
Speaker 1: Collapse, and because it is rotating rapidly, we circle back
Speaker 1: to the collapse or model. There is a very real
Speaker 1: chance that when Edi Karnny dies, it will fire off
Speaker 1: a gamma ray burst.
Speaker 2: It possesses all the necessary characteristics to generate a GRB.
Speaker 2: It has the mass, it has the rotation, and it
Speaker 2: will eventually form a black hole with a highly magnetized
Speaker 2: accretion disk.
Speaker 1: So we have a hyperviolent, incredibly unstable star. They could
Speaker 1: detonate at any moment and potentially fire a light speed
Speaker 1: ozone destroying gamma ray beam, and the only reassurance I've
Speaker 1: seen from astronomers about this is that the rotational axis
Speaker 1: of etcarina, the barrel of the shotgun is probably not
Speaker 1: pointed exactly at Earth.
Speaker 2: The alignment of the homunculus nebula suggests the poles are
Speaker 2: tilted roughly forty five degrees away from our line of sight.
Speaker 2: So mathematically the beams should.
Speaker 1: Miss us, probably and should I love that when dealing
Speaker 1: with a hypernova, probably won't vaporize the ozone layers. The
Speaker 1: best we get it is a fun little cosmic gamble.
Speaker 2: But to weave these threads together. The death of a star,
Speaker 2: even a massive one, is rarely the end of the physics.
Speaker 2: In fact, stellar death is merely the prologue to something
Speaker 2: much more extreme. The corpses that are left behind the
Speaker 2: neutron stars and the black holes create environments where gravity
Speaker 2: and magnetism are pushed to their absolute maximum limits.
Speaker 1: The physics of shredding and forging. Let us talk about
Speaker 1: what happens when dead stars flex their muscles, starting with
Speaker 1: the magnetic monsters magnetars.
Speaker 2: When a massive stargo's supernova, if the core isn't quite
Speaker 2: heavy enough to collapse all the way into a black hole,
Speaker 2: it halts at the neutron star phase. This is an
Speaker 2: object where gravity has crushed protons and electrons together to
Speaker 2: form a solid sphere of neutrons. It is unimaginably dense,
Speaker 2: a sphere the size of a city packing the mass
Speaker 2: of a couple of suns.
Speaker 1: And as we mentioned earlier, when you take something the
Speaker 1: size of a star and crush it down to the
Speaker 1: size of a city, conservation laws go wild. The rotation
Speaker 1: speeds up immensely, like an ice gater pulling their arms in,
Speaker 1: but the magnetic field also gets compressed and.
Speaker 2: Amplified, exactly the conservation of magnetic flux in a specific
Speaker 2: subset of neutron stars. This dynamo effect creates a magnetar.
Speaker 2: It possesses the strongest magnetic field in the known universe.
Speaker 1: Well, let's give this some scale, because the numbers are absurd.
Speaker 1: Earth's magnetic field, the thing that protects us from solar
Speaker 1: storms and turns compass needles, is about point five gas.
Speaker 1: A refrigerator magnet is maybe one hundred gas. A Magnetar's
Speaker 1: magnetic field is a quadrillion goup trillions of times stronger
Speaker 1: than Earth's. What does a magnetic field that strong physically
Speaker 1: do to matter.
Speaker 2: If you were to place a magnetar at the distance
Speaker 2: of our moon, roughly two hundred and forty thousand miles away,
Speaker 2: its magnetic field is so profoundly strong that it would
Speaker 2: instantly wipe the magnetic stripe off every credit card on Earth.
Speaker 1: Okay, financial room from two hundred and forty thousand miles away.
Speaker 1: But it gets worse for biology, right.
Speaker 2: Much worse at a closer distance, say a few thousand miles.
Speaker 2: The magnetic field is strong enough to warp the electron
Speaker 2: clouds around individual atoms. Your body is composed of chemistry,
Speaker 2: which relies on the shapes of electron orbitals to form bonds.
Speaker 2: A magnetar's field would stretch the atoms in your body
Speaker 2: into long, thin cylinders. The chemistry sustaining your biology would
Speaker 2: instantly cease to function. You would dissolve at the atomic level,
Speaker 2: pulled apart by sheer magnetism.
Speaker 1: It physically alters the shape of atoms. That is staggering.
Speaker 1: And these things aren't just sitting there quietly. They have a
Speaker 1: solid crust, right, made of highly compressed neutron rich iron.
Speaker 2: Yes, but that solid crust is locked in a constant
Speaker 2: battle with the intense magnetic field threading through it. As
Speaker 2: the magnetic field shifts and twists, a process driven by
Speaker 2: hall drift within the star, it exerts unbelievable mechanical stress
Speaker 2: on the crust. Eventually, the tension exceeds the tensile strength
Speaker 2: of the crust and it snaps. A starquake, precisely a
Speaker 2: physical rupture in the ultra dense crust of the magnetar.
Speaker 2: And when it snaps, the sudden realignment of the magnetic
Speaker 2: field releases a burst of gamma and X ray radiation
Speaker 2: that is incomprehensibly violent.
Speaker 1: And we actually felt when these starquakes in recent history.
Speaker 1: In December two thousand and four, a wave of energy
Speaker 1: washed over Earth. It came from a magnetar called SGR
Speaker 1: eighteen oh six twenty.
Speaker 2: The burst of gamma rays from that starquake struck Earth's
Speaker 2: ionosphere and physically compressed it. It ionized the upper atmosphere,
Speaker 2: briefly altering the propagation of radio waves around the globe.
Speaker 2: And for a fraction of a second, this single event
Speaker 2: outshone the entire rest of the galaxy in gamma rays.
Speaker 1: And here is the kicker. SDR eighteen oh six twenty
Speaker 1: is fifty thousand light years away. It is on the
Speaker 1: other side of the Milky Way galaxy. From fifty thousand
Speaker 1: light years away, a crack in the crust of a
Speaker 1: dead star physically touched our atmosphere. If that magnetar had
Speaker 1: been within ten light years of us, it would have
Speaker 1: been an extinction level event. The sheer reach of these
Speaker 1: extreme objects is deeply humbling.
Speaker 2: It demonstrates how interconnected the galactic environment can be. But
Speaker 2: while magnetism can shred atoms at a distance, gravity can
Speaker 2: shred entire stars up close. If we look at the
Speaker 2: center of nearly every large galaxy, we find a super
Speaker 2: massive black hole. These are millions or even billions of
Speaker 2: times the mass of our Sun.
Speaker 1: Normally they're relatively quiet. Stars orbit them at safe distances,
Speaker 1: just like planets orbit a star. But the galactic center
Speaker 1: is crowded. Stars interact, orbits get perturbed, and sometimes a
Speaker 1: star gets nudged onto a trajectory that brings it just
Speaker 1: a little too close to the supermassive.
Speaker 2: Black hole, and when it crosses that critical threshold, we
Speaker 2: witness a titled disruption event. This is gravitational shredding on
Speaker 2: a macroscopic scale.
Speaker 1: It is exactly as brutal as it sounds. Explain the
Speaker 1: mechanics of the shredding, because it is not just the
Speaker 1: star falling in like a rock into a pond.
Speaker 2: It comes back to the tidal tensor, the difference in
Speaker 2: gravitational poll across a distance. As the star approaches the
Speaker 2: black hole, the side of the star facing the black
Speaker 2: hole experiences a significantly stronger gravitational pole than the backside
Speaker 2: of the star.
Speaker 1: Because gravity follows the inverse square law, a small difference
Speaker 1: in distance means a massive difference in force when you
Speaker 1: are that close to something that heavy.
Speaker 2: Exactly this tidal force overcomes the star's own self gravity.
Speaker 2: The star is literally stretched out, elongated, and pulled apart.
Speaker 2: It is shredded into a long, incredibly fast moving ribbon
Speaker 2: of glowing plasma spaghetification.
Speaker 1: The star is spaghettified, yes.
Speaker 2: The technical term applied to a stellar mass. As the
Speaker 2: star is unwound into this ribbon, roughly half of the
Speaker 2: stellar material spirals down toward the black hole, forming superheated
Speaker 2: accretion disk before passing the event horizon. The other half
Speaker 2: of the material gains angular momentum and is violently flung
Speaker 2: outward into deep space at relativistic speeds, and.
Speaker 1: This process generates a massive flare as the material falls
Speaker 1: in friction heats it to millions of degrees, releasing a
Speaker 1: brilliant flash of X ray and optical light. We can
Speaker 1: spot these flares from hundreds of millions of light years away.
Speaker 1: It is the universe's most violent execution broadcast for anyone looking.
Speaker 2: It is a spectacular end to a star that may
Speaker 2: have burned quietly for billions of years. But let us
Speaker 2: bring the physics of spaghetification down to a human scale.
Speaker 2: What happens to a biological body falling into a black hole?
Speaker 1: Oh? Man, okay, let us do the Ma Cob thought experiment.
Speaker 2: If you were to fall feet first toward a stellar
Speaker 2: mass black hole, the same tidal forces apply. The gravitational
Speaker 2: pull on your feet would be vastly stronger than the
Speaker 2: pull on your head, so your body gets stretched significantly.
Speaker 2: You would be pulled into a long, thin shape. The
Speaker 2: lateral forces would also compress you inward. Eventually the tidal
Speaker 2: gradient would exceed the electromagnetic forces holding your molecules together.
Speaker 2: You'd be snapped apart at the joints. Then the cellular level,
Speaker 2: and finally the atomic level drawn down into a single
Speaker 2: file stream of subatomic particles as you cross the event horizon.
Speaker 1: Which is horrifying. But there's a twist to this that
Speaker 1: makes it so much worse psychologically. The timing of the
Speaker 1: spagheification depends entirely on the size of the black hole
Speaker 1: you are falling into.
Speaker 2: This is a beautiful paradox of general relativity. The Schwarzschild radius,
Speaker 2: the size of the event horizon, scales linearly with the
Speaker 2: mass of the black hole, but the tidal forces scale
Speaker 2: inversely with the cube of the distance from the singularity.
Speaker 1: Okay, what does that mean In practical terms?
Speaker 2: It means that if you fall into a small stellar
Speaker 2: mass black hole, the tidal gradient is incredibly steep near
Speaker 2: the event horizon, you be spaghettified long before you actually
Speaker 2: reach the point of no return. You die outside the
Speaker 2: black hole.
Speaker 1: What if it is a supermassive black hole, Yeah, like
Speaker 1: Gargantua in interstellar.
Speaker 2: For a supermassive black hole billions of solar masses, the
Speaker 2: event horizon is massive, perhaps the size of our entider
Speaker 2: solar system. Because the event horizon is so far away
Speaker 2: from the singularity, at the center. The tidal gradient at
Speaker 2: the horizon itself is actually very gentle.
Speaker 1: So you could drift right across the event horizon and
Speaker 1: feel absolutely nothing.
Speaker 2: You wouldn't even notice when you crossed it. You would
Speaker 2: be fully alive, fully intact, and completely aware, but you
Speaker 2: would be on a one way trip toward the singularity.
Speaker 2: Once inside the horizons, spacetime geometry bends such that every
Speaker 2: possible direction you can move points toward the center.
Speaker 1: You are alive in the dark, just drifting toward a death.
Speaker 1: You cannot stop, cannot escape, and cannot communicate to the
Speaker 1: outside world, just waiting for the tidal forces to eventually
Speaker 1: ramp up as you get closer to the center. That
Speaker 1: is pure, unadulterated psychological horror.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate isolation. But we shouldn't only focus
Speaker 2: on the destructive nature of these extreme environments. Gravity and
Speaker 2: extreme density also act as the universe's ultimate foundaries. Let
Speaker 2: us look at creation through violence.
Speaker 1: Yes, let us pivot to the forges of gold Kelenova's
Speaker 1: We talked about neutron stars, the city sized balls of
Speaker 1: solid neutrons. What happens when two of them are in
Speaker 1: a binary system orbiting each other bleeding off energy through
Speaker 1: gravitational waves until they finally crash into each other.
Speaker 2: The collision of two neutron stars is called a killinova.
Speaker 2: When these two impossibly dense objects smash together at a
Speaker 2: significant fraction of the speed of light, the physics gets
Speaker 2: incredibly exotic. The temperatures and pressures generated in the collision
Speaker 2: are so extreme that they trigger what is called the
Speaker 2: r process or rapid neutron cacture.
Speaker 1: Process, and this is how the heavy elements are born.
Speaker 1: Standard stars can only fuse elements up to iron in
Speaker 1: their cores. Fusing anything heavier than iron actually costs energy
Speaker 1: rather than releasing it, so a star can't do it.
Speaker 1: But at a killinova, there is a flood of free.
Speaker 2: Neutrons, a literal ocean of neutrons. When the fractions of
Speaker 2: a second during the collision, atomic nuclei, primarily iron, are
Speaker 2: bombarded by these neutrons. The nuclei capture neutrons so rapidly
Speaker 2: that they don't have time to undergo beta decay before
Speaker 2: capturing the next one. This allows the atoms to bulk
Speaker 2: up to massive sizes.
Speaker 1: And eventually these super heavy isotopes decay into stable heavy elements.
Speaker 1: We're talking about the creation of platinum, uranium, and gold.
Speaker 1: The Kilinova explosion violently flings these newly forged heavy elements
Speaker 1: out into the interstellar medium, seating the galaxy with them.
Speaker 2: For decades, the r process was theoretical, but in twenty seventeen,
Speaker 2: a milestone in multi messenger astronomy occurred. The Lego and
Speaker 2: Virgo observatories detected the gravitational waves of two neutron stars
Speaker 2: spiraling in and colliding. It was designated GW one seven
Speaker 2: eight seven.
Speaker 1: The space time ripples washed over Earth. But the amazing
Speaker 1: part is that we didn't just feel the gravity waves
Speaker 1: because it wasn't black holes colliding. There was actual physical
Speaker 1: matter involved. Telescopes around the world quickly pointed at the
Speaker 1: source and caught the optical flash of the Kilanova.
Speaker 2: We saw the light, and by analyzing the spectrum of
Speaker 2: that light, astronomers confirmed the presence of heavy elements, including
Speaker 2: massive quantities of newly forged gold, expanding outward in the
Speaker 2: debris cloud. It was absolute proof that neutron star collisions
Speaker 2: are the primary source of these elements.
Speaker 1: And I love tying this back to everyday life because
Speaker 1: it means the gold ring on your finger, or the
Speaker 1: tiny trace amounts of gold in the circuitry of the
Speaker 1: smartphone you might be holding right now. That material wasn't
Speaker 1: just made in the Earth. Earth doesn't have the heat
Speaker 1: to sorge gold. That gold was literally synthesized in the
Speaker 1: apocalyptic collision of two dead slams hundreds of millions of
Speaker 1: years ago, scattered across space, swept up in the nebula
Speaker 1: that formed our Solar system, and eventually mined out of
Speaker 1: the rock.
Speaker 2: You are wearing the shrapnel of a cosmic collision. It
Speaker 2: perfectly encapsulates how destruction and creation are intimately linked in
Speaker 2: the universe.
Speaker 1: It is poetic in a highly violent way. Okay, so
Speaker 1: we have explored the life, death, and afterlife of stars.
Speaker 1: Let ussume the perspective all the way out. We are
Speaker 1: leaving the stellar scale and moving to the galactic scale.
Speaker 1: Let us look at the kinematics of the cosmos. What
Speaker 1: happens when entire galaxies are affected by anomalies. Let us
Speaker 1: talk about the Great attractor.
Speaker 2: To understand the Great attractor, we have to look at
Speaker 2: how galaxies move. We know the universe is expanding, carrying
Speaker 2: galaxies away from each other, but Superimposed on that general
Speaker 2: expansion are peculiar velocities, local gravitational.
Speaker 1: Movements, galaxies tugging on each.
Speaker 2: Other exactly the Milky Way. Andromeda and dozens of other
Speaker 2: galaxies form the local group, and the local group is
Speaker 2: part of the much larger Laniakia supercluster. But when astronomers
Speaker 2: mapped the peculiar elocities of thousands of galaxies in our
Speaker 2: region of the universe, they found a massive, coordinated.
Speaker 1: Flow, like a river of galaxies.
Speaker 2: Yes, our entire local supercluster, thousands of galaxies, trillions of
Speaker 2: stars is being pulled in a specific direction at an
Speaker 2: astonishing speed of roughly two million kilometers per hour.
Speaker 1: Are being dragged toward a gravitational.
Speaker 2: Anomaly two million kilometers an hour. And the thing pulling
Speaker 2: us is the Great Attractor. It is located roughly one
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty million light
Speaker 2: years away. But the most frustrating part of this entire
Speaker 2: cosmic mystery is that we can't just point a telescope
Speaker 2: at it and see what it is.
Speaker 1: The Great Attractor is perfectly hidden behind what astronomerst call
Speaker 1: the zone of avoidance. The zone of avoidance, it sounds
Speaker 1: like a forbidden area in a sci fi novel.
Speaker 2: It essentially is for optical astronomy because we are situated
Speaker 2: inside the flattened disc of the Milky Way galaxy. When
Speaker 2: we try to look out toward the Great Attractor, we
Speaker 2: have to look straight through the dense, bright, dusty center
Speaker 2: of our own galaxy. The interstellar dust completely obscures the
Speaker 2: visible light. It is like trying to see the stars
Speaker 2: during a dense fog or looking through a thit forest.
Speaker 1: We are blinded by our own galaxy. We only know
Speaker 1: the Great Attractor is there because we can map the
Speaker 1: gravitational pull it exerts on everything around it.
Speaker 2: We can use radio and X ray telescopes to peer
Speaker 2: through the dust. Somemit what and we've found massive galaxy
Speaker 2: clusters in that direction, like the Norma cluster. But even
Speaker 2: that doesn't seem massive enough to account for the sheer
Speaker 2: gravitational pull affecting us.
Speaker 1: So what is it? Is it a massive concentration of
Speaker 1: dark matter? Is there a supercluster even further out, like
Speaker 1: the shapely supercluster that's actually the main culprit.
Speaker 2: That is the subject of ongoing debate. It is likely
Speaker 2: a combination of these large scale structures, massive filaments of
Speaker 2: dark matter and intersecting superclusters, creating a dense gravitational basin.
Speaker 2: But the unsettling reality is that a massive portion of
Speaker 2: our universe's architecture is fundamentally obscured from us just because
Speaker 2: of where we happen to be sitting in the Milky Way.
Speaker 1: We have a galaxy sized blind spot. But if the
Speaker 1: Great Attractor is a mystery of an overwhelming abundance of mass,
Speaker 1: the Boots Void is the exact opposite. It is a
Speaker 1: mystery of an inexplicable absence of mass.
Speaker 2: When you zoom out and look at the large scale
Speaker 2: structure of the universe, it isn't uniform. It looks like
Speaker 2: a massive cosmic web. You have dense nodes, superclusters of
Speaker 2: galaxies connected by long filaments of dark matter and gas,
Speaker 2: and between these filaments you have voids regions of lower density.
Speaker 1: But the Boots Void isn't just a normal void. It
Speaker 1: is staggeringly massive.
Speaker 2: It is roughly spherical and spans an incredible three hundred
Speaker 2: and thirty million light years across. It is one of
Speaker 2: the largest known voids in the universe.
Speaker 1: To put that in perspective. If space is a sprawling,
Speaker 1: densely packed city, the Boots Void is like walking for
Speaker 1: thousands of miles and finding absolutely nothing but empty desert.
Speaker 1: Based on standard cosmological models, how many galaxies should be
Speaker 1: in a space that large.
Speaker 2: In a typical region of space that size, we would
Speaker 2: expect to find at least two thousand to three thousand large.
Speaker 1: Galaxies, And how many are actually in the Boots void.
Speaker 2: Astronomers have only found about sixty.
Speaker 1: Sixty galaxies in a space that should hold thousands. It
Speaker 1: is so utterly barren that it has been nicknamed the
Speaker 1: Great Nothing. How does a gap that profound even form?
Speaker 2: The leading theory involves the gravitational runaway of void formation
Speaker 2: over billions of years. Slightly denser regions of space exert
Speaker 2: a stronger gravitational pole. They pull matter away from less
Speaker 2: dense regions. As the void empties out, its gravitational pole
Speaker 2: becomes even weaker, accelerating the process. It's essentially the rich
Speaker 2: getting richer and the poor getting poorer on a cosmic
Speaker 2: gravitational scale. Smaller voids merge together like soap bubbles to
Speaker 2: form superoids.
Speaker 1: But what I love about the Boots Void isn't just
Speaker 1: the physics of how it formed, It is the philosophical
Speaker 1: implication of it. Think about the epistemological limits. Imagine a
Speaker 1: civilization that evolved on a planet orbiting a star inside
Speaker 1: one of those sixty lonely galaxies, stuck right in the
Speaker 1: dead center of the Boots void.
Speaker 2: It is a profound thought experiment for their entire history.
Speaker 2: As they developed astronomy and built telescopes, they wouldn't see
Speaker 2: the cosmic web. They wouldn't see a sky teeming with
Speaker 2: distant galactic neighbors.
Speaker 1: They would see their own local stars, and beyond that
Speaker 1: utter darkness for millions of light years in every direction.
Speaker 1: Nothing They could logically and sit iient typically conclude that
Speaker 1: their single galaxy was the entire universe. They would have
Speaker 1: no visual evidence to suggest otherwise until their technology advanced
Speaker 1: to an extreme degree.
Speaker 2: It highlights how our understanding of cosmology is deeply dependent
Speaker 2: on our vantage point. We are incredibly lucky to live
Speaker 2: in a dense, crowded part of the cosmic web. We
Speaker 2: have the visual evidence to deduce the expansion of the universe,
Speaker 2: the Big Bang, and the existence of other galaxies. A
Speaker 2: civilization born in the heart of the boots void might
Speaker 2: be structurally blind to the true nature.
Speaker 1: Of reality stranded on a cosmic island in the great Nothing.
Speaker 1: It makes you wonder what structural blind spots we might have. Okay,
Speaker 1: we have toured the invisible wanderers, the quantum vacuum bubbles,
Speaker 1: the stellar shredders, and the galactic voids. We have to
Speaker 1: bring this to the ultimate conclusion. Where does the timeline end?
Speaker 1: How does the universe finally shut down?
Speaker 2: Cosmology offers a few leading theories based on the mathematics
Speaker 2: of general relativity and thermodynamics, and they represent wildly different fates.
Speaker 2: We will look at the two most prominent, starting with
Speaker 2: the most violent, the Big Rip.
Speaker 1: We touched on this earlier. But we know the universe
Speaker 1: is expanding, the space between galaxies is stretching. But the
Speaker 1: critical discovery in the late nineteen nineties was that this
Speaker 1: expansion isn't slowing down due to gravity as we expect it.
Speaker 1: It is accelerating.
Speaker 2: Yes, we attribute this acceleration to a mysterious force we
Speaker 2: call dark energy. It permeates all of space and exerts
Speaker 2: a negative pressure, pushing the fabric of the universe apart.
Speaker 1: And how dark energy behaves in the future determines our
Speaker 1: fate exactly.
Speaker 2: The fate depends on the equation of state parameter of
Speaker 2: dark energy, often denoted as W. If W is exactly
Speaker 2: negative one, we have a cosmological constant and the universe
Speaker 2: expands forever at a steady accelerating rate. But if W
Speaker 2: is less than negative one, we are dealing with what
Speaker 2: physicists call phantom dark energy.
Speaker 1: Phantom energy meaning the density of the dark energy actually
Speaker 1: increases as the universe expands.
Speaker 2: Which creates a runaway feedback loop. If phantom dark energy exists,
Speaker 2: the expansion doesn't just accelerate, It becomes infinite in a
Speaker 2: finite amount of time, and it drives a cascading destruction
Speaker 2: of all bound structures in the universe. This is the
Speaker 2: Big Rip.
Speaker 1: Let us walk through the timeline of the Big Rip
Speaker 1: because it is a very specific, terrifying sequence of events.
Speaker 2: It happens in reverse order of gravitational strength. First, as
Speaker 2: the expansion rates, skyrockets, galaxy clusters are torn apart. The
Speaker 2: space between galaxies expands faster than the speed of light,
Speaker 2: pushing them beyond the cosmic horizon. The night sky goes
Speaker 2: completely dark.
Speaker 1: We are utterly isolated.
Speaker 2: Then the phantom energy overpowers the gravity holding individual galaxies together.
Speaker 2: The Milky Way's spiral arms are ripped outward, Stars are
Speaker 2: scattered into.
Speaker 1: The void, but the expansion keeps amplifying.
Speaker 2: Months before the end, the expansion overpowers stellar gravity. Solar
Speaker 2: systems are disassembled. Earth is literally pulled away from the.
Speaker 1: Sun, and then the planet itself goes.
Speaker 2: Hours before the end, the expansion overpowers the gravity holding
Speaker 2: the planet together. Earth violently fractures and shatters.
Speaker 1: But the terrifying part is that it doesn't stop at gravity.
Speaker 1: It keeps going down to the fundamental forces.
Speaker 2: In the final fractions of a second, the expansion rate
Speaker 2: becomes so extreme that it overpowers electromagnetism and the strong
Speaker 2: nuclear force. The forces holding molecules together fail, Then the
Speaker 2: forces holding individual atoms together fail. Protons and neutrons are
Speaker 2: ripped apart into.
Speaker 1: Quarks, and then, in the final instant, the scale factor
Speaker 1: of the universe reaches infinity. The very fabric of space
Speaker 1: time is torn us under. Every single particle in existence
Speaker 1: is infinitely separated from every other particle, an instant microscopic
Speaker 1: shredding of reality itself.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate violent end, but it is not
Speaker 2: the most likely end. While mathematically possible, most current observational
Speaker 2: data suggests dark energy behaves more like a constant, which
Speaker 2: points us toward a much quieter and arguably more melancholic fate.
Speaker 1: The heat death of the universe long fade.
Speaker 2: The heat death is not about temperature. It is about thermodynamics,
Speaker 2: specifically entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that in
Speaker 2: a closed system, entropy or disorder always increases. Energy naturally
Speaker 2: seeks to spread out, to dissipate until it is perfectly
Speaker 2: evenly distributed.
Speaker 1: Like dropping food coloring into a glass of water, it
Speaker 1: starts concentrated, but eventually spreads out until the water is
Speaker 1: a uniform color. And once it's uniform, you can't use
Speaker 1: it to do any work exactly.
Speaker 2: To do work, to power a star, to fuel a
Speaker 2: biological metabolism, to spark a thought in a brain, you
Speaker 2: need an energy gradient. You need a hot spot and
Speaker 2: a cold spot so energy can flow between them.
Speaker 1: But the universe is expanding, and as it expands, it
Speaker 1: cools over unimaginably vast stretches of time. The processes that
Speaker 1: create those hot spots will exhaust.
Speaker 2: Themselves in a few trillion years. Star formation will completely cease.
Speaker 2: The interstellar gas required to form new stars will be
Speaker 2: locked up in stellar remnants, white dwarfs, newtron stars, and
Speaker 2: black holes. The last red dwarf stars will slowly burn
Speaker 2: through their fuel and fade into black dwarfs. The galaxies
Speaker 2: will go entirely dark.
Speaker 1: So we have a universe filled with cold, dead rocks,
Speaker 1: dead stars, and black holes. But even that isn't the end.
Speaker 2: Now, overtime scales that bobble of mine, perhaps ten to
Speaker 2: the thirty fourth power years, even the proton's composing matter
Speaker 2: might begin to decay, dissolving the dead stars and planets
Speaker 2: into a thin soup of subatomic particles.
Speaker 1: In the black holes, the absolute titans of gravity that
Speaker 1: we talked about earlier. They are the last monuments standing, right.
Speaker 2: They are the last monuments, But even they are not eternal.
Speaker 2: Thanks to Stephen Hawking, we know that black holes emit
Speaker 2: a faint radiation Hawking radiation.
Speaker 1: This relies on quantum fluctuations near the event horizon. Right.
Speaker 2: Yes, in the vacuum of space, pairs of virtual particles
Speaker 2: and antiparticles are constantly popping into existence and annihilating each other.
Speaker 2: But if this happens exactly on the boundary of an
Speaker 2: event horizon. One particle can fall into the black hole
Speaker 2: while the other escape, and.
Speaker 1: To conserve energy, the particle that falls in must have
Speaker 1: negative mass energy, effectively stealing a tiny fraction of the
Speaker 1: black hole's mass.
Speaker 2: It is an incredibly slow process. A supermassive black hole
Speaker 2: might take ten to the one hundredth power years to evaporate,
Speaker 2: but with eternity on the clock, it will happen. They
Speaker 2: will slowly shrink amid a final flash of radiation.
Speaker 1: And vanish, And when the last black hole evaporates, what.
Speaker 2: Is left a photon gas approaching absolute zero. The universe
Speaker 2: will be a could unimaginably vast and perfectly uniform sea
Speaker 2: of subatomic particles and low energy photons. Energy is perfectly distributed,
Speaker 2: entropy is maximized.
Speaker 1: There are no energy gradients left, which means nothing happens
Speaker 1: and vitally nothing ever can happen again. There is no light,
Speaker 1: there is no heat, There is no motion, no thought,
Speaker 1: just particles drifting endlessly through a void too vast for
Speaker 1: them to ever interact. The ultimate permanent silence.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate equilibrium, a quiet, eternal rest for
Speaker 2: a cosmos that's spent eel burning so brightly.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, we have covered an immense amount of ground today.
Speaker 1: We've journeyed alongside drifting invisible rogue planets in the pitch black.
Speaker 1: We've examined universe rewriting, vacuum bubbles, tunneling through quantum fields.
Speaker 1: We've watched dead stars forge, the heavy elements and apocalyptic collisions.
Speaker 1: And we've stared down the cold, silent, inevitable, thermodynamic end
Speaker 1: of all things.
Speaker 2: And if there's one final overarching thought to take away
Speaker 2: from synthesizing all this physics, it is a profound realization
Speaker 2: about our own perspective. Learning about these terrifying cosmic scales
Speaker 2: and these apocalyptic mechanisms shouldn't make us feel small or insignificant.
Speaker 2: It should highlight the absolute sheer improbability of our situation.
Speaker 2: The anthropic principle, exactly, the fact that we exist at all,
Speaker 2: living in a relatively calm epoch of the universe, safely
Speaker 2: orbiting a stable, middle aged star, possessing the biological complexity
Speaker 2: and the consciousness to look up, build instruments and actually
Speaker 2: comprehend the immense forces operating around us, is baggering marvel
Speaker 2: of cosmic timing. We are a brief, localized rebellion against entropy.
Speaker 1: We are sitting in the calm eye of a cosmic hurricane,
Speaker 1: perfectly positioned with a clear view of the storm. It
Speaker 1: completely reframes how you look at a quiet, starry night,
Speaker 1: doesn't it. The universe might be a chaotic arena of
Speaker 1: snipers and shredders, but right here, right now, we are
Speaker 1: unimaginably lucky to be able to talk about it. So
Speaker 1: I want to pose a question to you, the listener.
Speaker 1: After journeying through the mechanics of the cosmos with us,
Speaker 1: what is your stand on the universe's grand finale? Which
Speaker 1: fate do you personally find more haunting to contemplate the violent,
Speaker 1: sudden atomic tearing of the Big Rip or the endless, silent,
Speaker 1: permanent equilibrium of the heat Death. Leave a comment and
Speaker 1: let us know what you think about today's deep dive.
Speaker 1: We truly cannot wait to read your thoughts. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for joining us on this incredible journey through
Speaker 1: thrilling threads. Keep looking up and we will catch you
Speaker 1: next time.