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 imagine, just for a second, that
Speaker 2: you're standing on a beach and you're staring out at
Speaker 2: this vast, churning ocean.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'm picturing it.
Speaker 2: Right, But there's a catch. You can't actually see the
Speaker 2: water like at all.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the ocean is completely invisible. The only thing you
Speaker 2: can actually see is the sea foam right on the surface,
Speaker 2: just floating there in midair.
Speaker 3: That is a deeply unsettling mental image, I know.
Speaker 2: Right, But that's essentially the reality of the universe you're
Speaker 2: sitting in right now. Like everything you can see, your hands,
Speaker 2: the room, you're in, the stars, and the night sky,
Speaker 2: that's just the sea foam.
Speaker 3: The visible debris, exactly.
Speaker 2: The visible debris. And today we're going to talk about
Speaker 2: the invisible ocean, the dark matter, and more importantly, what
Speaker 2: happens when the most extreme objects in the universe violently
Speaker 2: collide inside that invisible ocean.
Speaker 3: And honestly, the methodology we're looking at today is it's
Speaker 3: just a brilliant shift in how we approach this.
Speaker 2: It really is. I mean, we're talking about a completely
Speaker 2: new way of looking at data we already.
Speaker 3: Have, right because for decades the astrophysics community has been
Speaker 3: trying to build these massive, ultra sensitive particle detectors to
Speaker 3: catch dark matter.
Speaker 2: And catching exactly zero particles.
Speaker 3: Right, pretty much. Yeah, But this new framework developed by
Speaker 3: this incredible coalition of physicists from MIT, Eucluvane, University of Amsterdam,
Speaker 3: Queen Mary University, and Oxford, it completely discards.
Speaker 2: The particle detector, which is wild.
Speaker 3: It is they are using gravitational waves, the literal ripples
Speaker 3: in the fabric of space and time to feel the
Speaker 3: drag of dark matter.
Speaker 2: Which just sounds like pure science fiction.
Speaker 3: It does, but it's happening, and the elegance of it
Speaker 3: lies in the math. It's a highly sophisticated way of
Speaker 3: predicting how the most extreme gravitational environments in the universe
Speaker 3: interact with the dark sector.
Speaker 2: Okay, so let's unpack this, Yeah, because I want to
Speaker 2: make sure we're all on the same page before we
Speaker 2: get to colliding black holes. It is. So, we have
Speaker 2: this dark matter, and the accepted number is that it
Speaker 2: makes up something like eighty five percent of all the
Speaker 2: matter in the universe.
Speaker 3: Right right, roughly eighty five percent.
Speaker 2: Okay, But if I'm playing Devil's advocate here, if this
Speaker 2: stuff is completely invisible, if it totally ignores light passes
Speaker 2: right through magnets, passes through the Earth, passes through us,
Speaker 2: how on Earth are physicists so incredibly confident that it's
Speaker 2: eighty five percent of everything.
Speaker 3: Well, what's fascinating here is that the universe gives us
Speaker 3: a scale that we just can't ignore. We can't see it,
Speaker 3: but we can definitely feel its weight.
Speaker 2: Like a ghost in a haunted house. Uh kind of Yeah,
Speaker 2: you can't see the ghost walking through the wall, but
Speaker 2: you hear the floorboards creaking under its boots.
Speaker 3: That's actually, that's a really good analogy. The creaking floorboards
Speaker 3: in this case is gravity, right. Gravity is our only
Speaker 3: tool to catch it right now. So when astronomers look
Speaker 3: at say, distant galaxies, they see the light from those galaxies.
Speaker 2: Bend standing around something in the foreground.
Speaker 3: Exactly, bending around massive invisible structures. We call this gravitational
Speaker 3: lensing because.
Speaker 2: The gravity is literally acting like.
Speaker 3: A glass lens precisely. General relativity tells us that mass
Speaker 3: bends space time. So when light from a distant galaxy
Speaker 3: travels past a massive object, it's path.
Speaker 2: Curves, and we can measure that curve.
Speaker 3: We can, And when we calculate the mass required to
Speaker 3: bend the light that much, and then we add up
Speaker 3: all the visible stars and gas in that area, the
Speaker 3: math just doesn't work.
Speaker 2: There's not an invisible stuff, not even close.
Speaker 3: There has to be a massive invisible force pulling on
Speaker 3: that light, and it has to be huge, Hence the
Speaker 3: eighty five.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we know the ghost is heavy, we know
Speaker 2: it's there, right, But the astrophysics community has been chasing
Speaker 2: a very specific kind of ghost for a long time,
Speaker 2: haven't they, Like the wimp.
Speaker 3: Yes, the weekly interacting Massive particle WHIMS have been the
Speaker 3: favored candidate for decades.
Speaker 2: But this new research, the MIT team, they're pivoting away
Speaker 2: from WHIMS completely, right. Yeah, they're looking at something called
Speaker 2: a light scaler particle.
Speaker 3: They are, Yeah, and that pivot is largely driven by well.
Speaker 2: Frustration, frustration with the empty particle detector.
Speaker 3: Exactly. We've built these incredibly sensitive underground vats filled with
Speaker 3: liquid xenon.
Speaker 2: Deep underground to shield them from cosmic rays and stuff, right.
Speaker 3: And we wait for a massive wimp to just bump
Speaker 3: into a xenon nucleus and produce the tiny flash of light.
Speaker 2: But no flashes, no flashes.
Speaker 3: The detectors are remarkably quiet. So theoretical physics has to adapt.
Speaker 3: We have to explore other candidates that still fit the
Speaker 3: macroscopic gravity data, the lensing, the alexy rotation, but maybe
Speaker 3: behave totally differently on a quantum level.
Speaker 2: Enter the light scalar particle.
Speaker 3: Enter the light scaler. So, in quantum mechanics, particles have
Speaker 3: this property called spin, its intrinsic angular momentum.
Speaker 2: Right, like an electron has a half spin.
Speaker 3: Yes, photons have a spin of one, but a scaler
Speaker 3: particle has a spin of exactly zero Okay.
Speaker 2: Meaning it doesn't have a built in direction exactly.
Speaker 3: The only fundamental scalar particle we've ever found is.
Speaker 2: The Higgs boson, which gives mass to everything.
Speaker 3: Right, But the crucial variable here isn't just the zero spin.
Speaker 3: It's the prefix light.
Speaker 2: Because they are incredibly, almost incomprehensibly light.
Speaker 3: We are talking billions of times lighter than a single electron,
Speaker 3: down to fractions of an electron volt.
Speaker 2: Okay, wait, if they are that small, how do they
Speaker 2: make up eighty five percent of the universe. There must
Speaker 2: be an unfathomable number of them there are.
Speaker 3: And what's fascinating here is how ultra light masses force
Speaker 3: us to confront wave particle durality at an aca strophysical scale.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, okay, quantum mechanics on a massive scale.
Speaker 3: Right. Because of quantum mechanics, every particle has a wavelength
Speaker 3: of de Brogli wavelength. Sure, heavy particles have tiny wavelengths,
Speaker 3: so they act like little localized billiard balls. But if
Speaker 3: you take a particle that is absurdly light, like ten
Speaker 3: to the minus ten electron volts, its quantum wavelength stretches
Speaker 3: out immensely.
Speaker 2: How immensely like across a room.
Speaker 3: We're talking meters, kilometers, maybe even astronomical distances.
Speaker 2: Wait, a single particle's quantum field stretches for kilometers exactly.
Speaker 3: And because these are scalar bosons, they don't obey the
Speaker 3: poly exclusion principle.
Speaker 2: Meaning they can share the same space.
Speaker 3: Right, you can pack an infinite number of them into
Speaker 3: the exact same.
Speaker 2: Quantum state, so they just stack on top of each other.
Speaker 3: They overlap perfectly, so instead of a bunch of individual
Speaker 3: discrete particles bouncing around like ping pong balls, they form
Speaker 3: this macroscopic quantum state they behave as a single cohesive
Speaker 3: oscillating wave.
Speaker 2: Okay, so our ghost isn't a swarm of bugs. It's
Speaker 2: more like a thick, undulating fog.
Speaker 3: That's a great way to look at it, a cohesive
Speaker 3: classical field, and that fundamentally changes the game for how
Speaker 3: we try to detect it.
Speaker 2: Right, because a fog isn't going to bump into a
Speaker 2: single xenon atom in an underground tank and make a
Speaker 2: fly exactly. We need something way bigger. We need to
Speaker 2: see how that massive fog interacts with the biggest, heaviest
Speaker 2: things in the universe, which brings us to.
Speaker 3: Black holes see Ultimate gravitational engines.
Speaker 2: Right, And the researchers describe this interaction, this fog hitting
Speaker 2: a rapidly spinning black hole as something called super radiance. Yes,
Speaker 2: and the analogy that you use in the research is
Speaker 2: it's akin to turning cream into butter, which I love.
Speaker 3: It's very evocative, it is.
Speaker 2: But here's where it gets really interesting for me, because
Speaker 2: I mean, we usually think of blank holes as these
Speaker 2: ultimate vacuum cleaners, right right.
Speaker 3: The classic pop science view.
Speaker 2: Nothing of STAPs exactly. They just consume everything. So how
Speaker 2: on Earth is a black hole acting like a butter churn?
Speaker 2: How is it transferring its energy outward to amplify this
Speaker 2: dark matter fog.
Speaker 3: To understand that, we have to look at the geometry
Speaker 3: of a spinning black hole. Okay, it's described mathematically by
Speaker 3: the Cerr metric. So a spinning black hole doesn't just
Speaker 3: have an event horizon the point of no return, it
Speaker 3: also has this region just outside the horizon called the ergosphere.
Speaker 2: The ergosphere sounds intense. It is intense because the black
Speaker 2: hole is so massive and it's rotating so incredibly fast,
Speaker 2: it physically drags the fabric of space time along with.
Speaker 3: It, like a spoon stirring thick syrup.
Speaker 2: Precisely, that's called frame dragging, and inside the ergosphere, space
Speaker 2: time is being dragged around the black hole so violently
Speaker 2: that it's literally moving faster than the speed of light.
Speaker 3: Faster than light just the space itself right.
Speaker 2: Relative to an observer far away. So in that region
Speaker 2: it's physically impossible for anything to stand still. Everything has
Speaker 2: to co rotate with the black hole. Wow. Okay, so
Speaker 2: our dark matter wave, this scaler fog gets drawn into
Speaker 2: the gravitational well, yes, it enters the ergosphere that's forced
Speaker 2: to spin exactly.
Speaker 3: But just getting dragged in a circle doesn't mean the
Speaker 3: wave gains.
Speaker 2: Energy, right, it's just a long for the ride.
Speaker 3: For energy to transfer, we need an extraction mechanism, and
Speaker 3: that happens through a wave scattering process.
Speaker 2: Okay, break that down for me.
Speaker 3: When the incoming scaler wave scatters off the black hole,
Speaker 3: a really weird mathematical boundary condition pops up. If the
Speaker 3: wave is rotating slower than the black hole itself, the
Speaker 3: wave split.
Speaker 2: It splits.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a portion of the wave falls into the event horizon.
Speaker 2: It's gone, okay, standard black hole behavior.
Speaker 3: But because of the extreme physics in the ergosphere, that
Speaker 3: infalling piece of the wave can actually have negative energy.
Speaker 2: Wait, hold on, negative energy.
Speaker 3: Relative to the outside universe.
Speaker 2: Yees, Okay, let me just unpack the conservation of energy here.
Speaker 2: If the black hole absorbs a wave packet with negative energy.
Speaker 2: Then the black hole's overall mass and its rotational energy
Speaker 2: have to go down.
Speaker 3: Right, Yes, the black hole slows down a tiny.
Speaker 2: Bit so to balance the cause Ledger, the piece of
Speaker 2: the wave that bounces off, the part that scatters away,
Speaker 2: has to emerge with more energy than it started with.
Speaker 3: The math demands it. The outgoing wave is amplified. It
Speaker 3: literally steals rotational energy from the black hole.
Speaker 2: That is mind blowing.
Speaker 3: It gets better. Here is where the butter churn analogy
Speaker 3: really shines.
Speaker 2: Okay, hit me.
Speaker 3: The wave doesn't just scatter once and fly off into
Speaker 3: deep space. The black hole's gravity creates a potential well.
Speaker 3: It traps the wave like an orbit, kind of like
Speaker 3: how a proton traps an electron in an atom. So
Speaker 3: this amplified dark matter wave is stuck. It bounces back
Speaker 3: and forth in this gravity well, repeatedly passing through the ergosphere,
Speaker 3: and every single time it passes through it extracts more energy.
Speaker 3: It gets amplified again. It's exponential. It is a runaway
Speaker 3: exponential amplification. The black hole is just dumping its spin
Speaker 3: energy into the surrounding dark matter, whipping it up, making
Speaker 3: it incredibly.
Speaker 2: Dense, turning the cream into butter.
Speaker 3: Exactly until it saturates.
Speaker 2: When does it saturate, usually.
Speaker 3: When the black hole has spun down so much that
Speaker 3: it's no longer spinning faster than the wave. At that point,
Speaker 3: you're left with what physicists call a bosonic cloud.
Speaker 2: A bosonic cloud. Yeah, so instead of just a diffuse
Speaker 2: invisible fog, we now have a highly concentrated, super dense
Speaker 2: halo of dark matter tightly bound to this black hole.
Speaker 3: Orders of magnitude denser than the ambient dark matter in
Speaker 3: the galaxy.
Speaker 2: Wow. Okay, so that is the setup. That's the trap
Speaker 2: we're setting for the ghost, right.
Speaker 3: But there's a problem. There usually is a single black
Speaker 3: hole just sitting there in space with its dense little
Speaker 3: dark matter cloud. It doesn't really emit gravitational waves, at
Speaker 3: least not ones we can easily detect from Earth.
Speaker 2: It's too quiet.
Speaker 3: It's too quiet to trigger our detectors. You need a
Speaker 3: massive perturbation, you need a cataclysm.
Speaker 2: You need a binary system, two black holes crashing into
Speaker 2: each other.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 2: So this MIT and European team, they set out to
Speaker 2: build a predigative model to figure out exactly what it
Speaker 2: looks like when two black holes merge, but one of
Speaker 2: them or both of them is wrapped in this thick,
Speaker 2: heavy butter of dark matter.
Speaker 3: And that is not a trivial task I can imagine.
Speaker 2: I mean, Einstein's equations are brutal on a good day.
Speaker 3: Right, highly complex nonlinear coupled partial differential equations. If we
Speaker 3: connect this to the bigger picture of computational astrophysics, just
Speaker 3: simulating two black holes colliding in a total vacuum empty
Speaker 3: space that took physicists decades to solve. Wait, really decades, decades.
Speaker 3: The breakthrough in numerical relativity only happened around two thousand
Speaker 3: and five, just to do it in empty space exactly.
Speaker 3: So now imagine adding a massive dynamic sloshing cloud of
Speaker 3: Scaler particles to that simulation.
Speaker 2: The math must be a nightmare.
Speaker 3: It introduces immense computational complexity. You have to track the
Speaker 3: gravity of the black holes, the rippling of the space
Speaker 3: time metric, and the gravitational pull of the dark matter
Speaker 3: pulling back on the black holes.
Speaker 2: Right, because the dark matter has mass, so it's going
Speaker 2: to exert drag.
Speaker 3: We call it dynamical friction.
Speaker 2: Diamical friction, so paint me a picture. How does that
Speaker 2: drag actually play out as they spiral in towards each other.
Speaker 3: So imagine the secondary black hole plunging through the dark
Speaker 3: matter cloud of the primary black hole. As it moves,
Speaker 3: its gravity pulls the dark matter.
Speaker 2: Particles toward it, okay, kind of sweeping them up.
Speaker 3: Not quite sweeping them up, but pulling them in so
Speaker 3: they bunch up behind it. It creates a gravitational.
Speaker 2: Wake like a boat moving through water.
Speaker 3: Yes, an area of higher density trailing right behind the
Speaker 3: moving black hole. And because that wake has mass, its
Speaker 3: gravity pulls backward on the black hole.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, it's literally putting the brakes on exactly.
Speaker 3: It bleeds away the black hole's orbital energy and that
Speaker 3: fundamentally alters the merger. Oh so well. In a vacuum,
Speaker 3: two black holes only lose energy by emitting gravitational waves.
Speaker 3: They spiral inward at a very predictable smooth rate. It
Speaker 3: produces a signal we call a chirp.
Speaker 2: The chirp because the frequency and the amplitude go up
Speaker 2: smoothly until they collide.
Speaker 3: Right. But when you add dynamical friction from the basonic cloud,
Speaker 3: they are losing energy through an extra channel for a drag. Yes,
Speaker 3: so they spiral inward faster than they normally would. The
Speaker 3: orbital trajectory tightens much faster, so.
Speaker 2: The phase of the gravitational wave changes, the chirp is accelerated.
Speaker 3: The frequency increases more rapidly. Yes, And it's even more
Speaker 3: complicated because the secondary black hole isn't just orbiting the
Speaker 3: primary black hole anymore. It's orbiting the combined mass of
Speaker 3: the black hole and the dark matter cloud.
Speaker 2: So the team had to use supercomputers to solve all
Speaker 2: of this.
Speaker 3: Yes, they solve the Einstein Klan Gordon equations.
Speaker 2: Just casually solving the Einstein Clan Gordon equations as you do.
Speaker 3: Right, which govern the scaler field in curved space time.
Speaker 3: They ran all these simulations to generate theoretical waveforms, a
Speaker 3: vast library of them.
Speaker 2: Basically, they built a dictionary.
Speaker 3: A dictionary of what a dark matter merger should look like.
Speaker 3: They tweets the masses, the density of the cloud, the
Speaker 3: mass of the scaler particles.
Speaker 2: Okay, so what does this all mean for us on Earth?
Speaker 2: I mean, they have this theoretical dictionary, but how do
Speaker 2: you test it?
Speaker 3: You turn to the actual data. The public archives of
Speaker 3: the Lego Virgo Caagra network.
Speaker 2: The LVK network, which, for anyone who doesn't know, is
Speaker 2: just a global network of massive laser observatories.
Speaker 3: The pinnacle of precision measurement.
Speaker 2: We're talking lasers bouncing down tunnels that are kilometers long, right.
Speaker 3: They are capable of detecting changes in distance on the
Speaker 3: order of ten to the minus twenty one meters.
Speaker 2: Which is what is that? A fraction of a proton?
Speaker 3: A tiny fraction of a proton.
Speaker 2: It's just absurd, it is.
Speaker 3: Over their first three observing runs, the LVK network detected
Speaker 3: nearly one hundred confirmed gravitational wave events.
Speaker 2: Nearly one hundred black hole and neutron star collisions.
Speaker 3: Yes, but the MIT team didn't just use all of them.
Speaker 3: They rigorously filtered the data set. They only selected the
Speaker 3: twenty eight clearest, most pristine signals.
Speaker 2: The gold standard cans. Why only twenty eight? Why not
Speaker 2: use all the data?
Speaker 3: Because the phase shift we're looking for, this tiny acceleration
Speaker 3: in the chirp caused by the dark matter drag, It
Speaker 3: is very subtle. Right, If you have a signal that's
Speaker 3: buried in instrumental noise, or you know, thermal fluctuations in
Speaker 3: the mirrors, or even a tiny seismic vibration that noise
Speaker 3: could easily masquerade as a face shift.
Speaker 2: H Okay, you'd get a false positive exactly.
Speaker 3: By limiting the analysis to the twenty eight highest signal
Speaker 3: to noise ratio events, they ensured that any anomaly they
Speaker 3: found was likely astrophysical, not just a bumpy laser.
Speaker 2: So how did they actually compare their new dictionary to
Speaker 2: these twenty eight signals.
Speaker 3: They used a technique called matched filtering. Matched filtering, right,
Speaker 3: it's standard in this field. You take the incoming noisy
Speaker 3: data from the detector and you cross correlate it with
Speaker 3: your bank of theoretical templates.
Speaker 2: You just slide the template over the data until it
Speaker 2: lines up.
Speaker 3: Essentially, Yes, if a template matches the signal hidden in
Speaker 3: the noise, the cross correlations.
Speaker 2: Spikes and you have a match.
Speaker 3: Right. So they took these twenty eight pristine in this
Speaker 3: and analyzed them twice, once using the standard vacuum template
Speaker 3: and once using their brand new dark matter templates.
Speaker 2: And they used Bayesian inference to see which one fits
Speaker 2: better exact. Okay, this suspense is killing me. What did
Speaker 2: they find when they ran the twenty eight candidates?
Speaker 3: Well, for twenty seven of the twenty eight candidates. The
Speaker 3: Beaesian evidence heavily favored the vacuum model.
Speaker 2: Okay, so twenty seven of them were just regular black
Speaker 2: holes merging in empty space, or at least the dark
Speaker 2: matter was too thin to notice.
Speaker 3: Right, But one event broke the pattern.
Speaker 2: Here we go GW one nine zero seven to two eight.
Speaker 3: Yes, detected on July twenty eighth, twenty nineteen. It was
Speaker 3: a merger of two black holes with a combined mass
Speaker 3: roughly twenty times that of our son.
Speaker 2: Okay, a twenty solar mass collision, and.
Speaker 3: The Beaesian analysis of this specific signal showed a preference
Speaker 3: for the dark matter model over the vacuum model.
Speaker 2: A preference meaning it fit the dark matter dictionary better
Speaker 2: than the empty space dictionary exactly.
Speaker 3: It exhibited that anomalous phase evolution that slight acceleration in
Speaker 3: the chirp that perfectly aligns with the dynamical friction of
Speaker 3: a bisonic cloud.
Speaker 2: Okay, I have to stop you there because I am
Speaker 2: getting incredibly excited. But I also need to play Devil's advocate.
Speaker 2: Go for it. If they found a signal that literally
Speaker 2: matches the dark matter model, why aren't physicists throwing a
Speaker 2: global parade right now? Like, why isn't this front page
Speaker 2: news everywhere? Why is it just a preference?
Speaker 3: This raises an important question about the threshold of scientific discovery,
Speaker 3: and the researchers, particularly show su Arikoetsia from MIT, we're
Speaker 3: very very.
Speaker 2: Cautious about this because in physics you can't just say
Speaker 2: looks pretty good to me.
Speaker 3: You really can't. In Baesian statistics, you calculate something called
Speaker 3: the Bayes factor. It's a ratio that tells you how
Speaker 3: much the data shifts your belief from one model to
Speaker 3: the other. Okay, so a Bayes factor might say the
Speaker 3: data is ten times or one hundred times more probable
Speaker 3: under the.
Speaker 2: Dark matter model, which sounds great.
Speaker 3: It does. It provides strong evidence, but it does not
Speaker 3: quantify the probability that the entire signal is just a
Speaker 3: rare statistical flu.
Speaker 2: No just random noise in the detector that happened to
Speaker 2: look exactly like the dark matter chirp exactly.
Speaker 3: In particle physics and astrophysics, the gold standard for a
Speaker 3: definitive throw a parade discovery is the five sigma threshold.
Speaker 2: Five sigma I've heard that term. What does that actually
Speaker 2: mean In plain English?
Speaker 3: It means there is a one in three and a
Speaker 3: half million chance that the anomaly you saw it was
Speaker 3: just random background noise.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, Okay, that is an incredibly high bar.
Speaker 3: It is, and the base factor for GW one nine,
Speaker 3: zero seven or twenty eight just doesn't reach that level
Speaker 3: of statistical certainty.
Speaker 2: So the signal is strong enough to be in the
Speaker 2: top twenty eight, but not strong enough to absolutely rule
Speaker 2: out a fluke, right.
Speaker 3: Or it could be an unmodeled complexity in the vacuum
Speaker 3: merger itself, like what maybe the black holes had incredibly
Speaker 3: intricate spin dynamics that the standard templates didn't account for.
Speaker 3: Or maybe their orbit was highly eccentric slightly oval shaped
Speaker 3: right before they merged.
Speaker 2: And that is centric wobble look like dark matter.
Speaker 3: Drag exactly, or even a subtle calibration error in the
Speaker 3: interferometer at that exact millisecond. The resolution just isn't quite
Speaker 3: there yet to eliminate the mundane explanations.
Speaker 2: So it's a tantalizing clue, but not the smoking gun exactly.
Speaker 3: The researchers are demonstrating scientific rigor here. They are not
Speaker 3: claiming a discovery. They are flagging an anomaly.
Speaker 2: They're saying, hey, look at this weird BLib right.
Speaker 3: But more importantly, they are proving that the analytical framework
Speaker 3: actually works. The pipeline is.
Speaker 2: Functional if it's there. This is how we find it.
Speaker 3: Precisely, Get one, nine zero seven twenty eight is just
Speaker 3: the first candidate. It warrants a massive independent review by
Speaker 3: other teams.
Speaker 2: Okay, but even if this specific signal turns out to
Speaker 2: be a false alarm, say it was just a wobbly
Speaker 2: vacuum merger, this whole method changes everything, doesn't it.
Speaker 3: It represents a massive paradigm shift. A RICOEXI actually highlighted
Speaker 3: a huge vulnerability in how we currently process data. Called
Speaker 3: it the danger of the wrong dictionary.
Speaker 2: The wrong dictionary. I like that. So if we're only
Speaker 2: armed with vacuum templates, our empty space dictionary, we risk
Speaker 2: mythclassifying the entire universe.
Speaker 3: Exactly because the matched filtering algorithm fundamentally projects the raw
Speaker 3: data onto whatever templates you give it.
Speaker 2: It's an autocorrect.
Speaker 3: An autocorrect, yes.
Speaker 2: Like imagine I type a perfectly valid but obscure word
Speaker 2: into my phone and my spell checker doesn't have it
Speaker 2: in its dictionary, so it just quietly autocorrects it to
Speaker 2: something common and I send the text without knowing it
Speaker 2: change my meaning entirely.
Speaker 3: That is a perfect analogy. If your template BANG only
Speaker 3: has empty space black holes, the algorithm will ruthlessly force
Speaker 3: every incoming wave to fit that scenario.
Speaker 2: So if a real dark matter merger hits the Earth,
Speaker 2: the computer won't crash or see I don't know. It'll
Speaker 2: just find the closest empty space match.
Speaker 3: It will say, oh, this isn't a twenty solar mass
Speaker 3: binary in a dark cloud. This is obviously a twenty
Speaker 3: two solar mass binary in empty space, but with slightly
Speaker 3: weird spin.
Speaker 2: It just tweaks the final parameter to hide the anomaly.
Speaker 3: Yes, it artificially compensates for the phase shift. It buries
Speaker 3: the signature of dark matter in the residual noise.
Speaker 2: We've basically been reading the universe's text messages, but our
Speaker 2: autocorrect was hiding the real meaning, and that.
Speaker 3: Is the profound danger. By aggressively matching everything to a
Speaker 3: simplified vacuum assumption, we blind ourselves to fundamental physics.
Speaker 2: We needed a bitter dictionary, and.
Speaker 3: Now we have one. These new dark matter templates give
Speaker 3: the algorithms the vocabulary they actually need to interpret the
Speaker 3: data correctly.
Speaker 2: That is just brilliant. And you know, Rodrigo Vicente made
Speaker 2: a point about this that really stuck with me. A
Speaker 2: shift in how we fundamentally view the dark sector.
Speaker 3: Yes, the transition from the macro to the micro.
Speaker 2: Right, Because traditionally we only look at dark matter on
Speaker 2: these unfathomably.
Speaker 3: Huge scales, galaxy clusters weighing millions of billions of solar masses,
Speaker 3: measuring the velocity of galaxy spinning inside those clusters.
Speaker 2: Weak gravitational lensing, stretching across millions of light years.
Speaker 3: We are always looking at the universe on the largest
Speaker 3: possible scales. But this methodology radically alters the focal length.
Speaker 2: It zooms way way in.
Speaker 3: It forces us into the extreme micro scale of astrophysics.
Speaker 3: We are moving from the diffuse halos of entire galaxies
Speaker 3: to examining the immediate environment just a few kilometers outside
Speaker 3: the event horizon of one specific black hole.
Speaker 2: We're looking at the deepest, most extreme gravity wells in
Speaker 2: the universe.
Speaker 3: Testing the quantum mechanical nature of dark matter, its wavelike coherence,
Speaker 3: its ability to steal energy from space time itself.
Speaker 2: It really bridges the massive cosmos with particle physics.
Speaker 3: It does. And as the LVK network turns back on
Speaker 3: for its upcoming observing runs, and as next generation detecors
Speaker 3: get built like.
Speaker 2: The Cosmic Explorer right with Einstein telescope.
Speaker 3: Yes, the sensitivity of these interferometers is going to increase exponentially.
Speaker 3: The signal to noise ratios will climb. We will be
Speaker 3: detecting thousands of binary mergers.
Speaker 2: Reaching all the way back to the dawn of the
Speaker 2: universe exactly.
Speaker 3: And for every single one of those events, we now
Speaker 3: have the mathematical tools to screen them for this invisible drag.
Speaker 2: The pipeline is ready, the.
Speaker 3: Theoretical waveforms are there. As Sumunroy emphasized, the volume of
Speaker 3: data is only going to increase. If light scalar particles
Speaker 3: really do make up eighty five percent of the matter
Speaker 3: in the universe, it's mathematically inevitable that we will catch
Speaker 3: a merger with the signal strong enough to shatter that
Speaker 3: five sigma threshold.
Speaker 2: It's just a matter of time.
Speaker 3: It is purely a matter of statistical accumulation.
Speaker 2: Now, man, what a journey we started with this tiny
Speaker 2: invisible anomaly from twenty nineteen, we impact the whimpy problem.
Speaker 2: We explored the completely bizarre reality of ultra light scalar
Speaker 2: fields and macroscopic quantum waves.
Speaker 3: We talked about churning the dark matter bitter.
Speaker 2: Yes, the super radiance of spinning wack holes, and then
Speaker 2: the sheer computational triumph of modeling that dynamical friction.
Speaker 3: And using Bayesian inference to find that friction hidden in
Speaker 3: the microscopic rip of space time.
Speaker 2: We really are standing on the edge of a totally
Speaker 2: new era in astronomy. We finally have the dictionary to
Speaker 2: translate the hidden forces that shape everything.
Speaker 3: It's incredibly exciting.
Speaker 2: So I want to leave everyone listening with a final,
Speaker 2: slightly mind bending thought to chew On.
Speaker 3: I like the sound of that.
Speaker 2: Think about the broader implications of all this physics we
Speaker 2: just talked about. If dark matter is this stuff that
Speaker 2: is completely invisible, that totally ignores light, if it naturally
Speaker 2: gathers into these hyper dense quantum clouds around extreme gravity,
Speaker 2: how many stars, how many entire galaxies? How much of
Speaker 2: the actual foundational architecture of our universe has been secretly
Speaker 2: sculpted by these invisible.
Speaker 3: Waves a staggering amount like right.
Speaker 2: For all of human history, we have looked up at
Speaker 2: the sky and observed the universe through light the electromagnetic spectrum,
Speaker 2: and we've been mapping the visible matter, which is a
Speaker 2: mere fifteen percent of reality.
Speaker 3: We thought we were watching the main event exactly.
Speaker 2: We thought the stars were the main event. But if
Speaker 2: the gravitational waves washing over the Earth tonight are carrying
Speaker 2: the signature of bosonic clouds and scalar fields, we might
Speaker 2: have to accept that the visible universe is just the
Speaker 2: glowing debris, the foam on the ocean, the sea foam
Speaker 2: caught in the currents of a vast, invisible ocean. So tonight,
Speaker 2: when you look up at the night sky, look at
Speaker 2: the empty spaces between the stars, and realize that the
Speaker 2: void is not empty. We are just finally learning how
Speaker 2: to feel the ripples in the dark