Think about where you are right now. Maybe you're in your car commuting, or you're out walking the dogs or at home doing the dishes. But where are you relative to everyone else? How do you define it? Probably you zoom out and put yourself in a wider context, your town, your region, your whole country. Listeners to this pod will likely be inclined to zoom out even further to all
of Earth and then the whole Solar System. From there, it's very tempting to skip forward and put our solar system into its place in the galaxy, than the galaxy into its cluster, and then that cluster within the supercluster foam. But have we been too hasty? Is our galaxy so simple, just a collection of stars floating around a central black hole? Or is there more nuance to our galactic context? We think of the galaxy as mostly stars, but they're formed,
they burn, and they die. There's a constant slashing of energy back and forth between those stars and vast clouds of raw material. Where is our Solar system relative to those clouds? Are we in the midst of a galactic fog? Or are we floating through an open bubble? Today on the pod will zoom out to this fascinating scene, understand the dynamics of star formation and destruction, and let you know exactly where you we all of us stand galactically speaking.
Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Galaxy.
Hello, I'm Kelly Winer Smith. I study parasites and space and I love bubbles.
Well, Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. I love bubbles, and I have all of my organs.
Okay, yeah, right, So that I was gonna ask you about the most painful thing you ever experienced in your life as a lead into why my laugh is going to be a little off today, folks.
I'm going to try to restrain myself from being funny today because if I make a joke that makes Kelly crack up, she could literally crack up.
Oh I could, Yes, I could split a stitch. So what aside from labor, The most painful thing that ever happens to me was the gallstones that tried to pass their way out of my body on Friday, but ended up getting removed surgically. The whole thing, the whole gallbladder was removed, and so I am still working on resolving my stitches. And so it hurts to laugh. So I think I've come up with the way to laugh that it hurts less, and so my my laugh will sound
a little I don't know, maybe even less annoying. I have seen there's a couple complaints about the way I laugh. You'all can just kiss my rear ends. But anyway, Daniel, what is the most painful thing that's ever happened to you?
Oh? Most painful thing that's ever happened to me? I broken my wrist, but weirdly that didn't hurt that much. I think maybe the most painful thing is when I broke my little toe. I like massively stubbed it on a little concrete outpost and cracked it and wow, yeah, I thought I was gonna die.
Ouch. Yeah, And how long did it take to heal? What do you do? Just put like a nothing.
You just tape it to the next toe, and like whatever happens inside of it happens. Like there's no surgery to correct, like the little bones inside your little toe, nobody needs it. I was like, just cut that bugger off, but I was like, no, you just tape it to the next one. That's it.
Well, you know, Daniel, it sounds like if you lived in a bubble, you would have been safe. But if I lived in a bubble, well, that wouldn't have saved me. And so well, you know, maybe if the whole universe was in a bubble, that would save us from some of the bumps and bruises of existence. But do we live in a bubble? Daniel?
Well, we are trying to pop the bubble of ignorance out there and help everybody understand their cosmic context, where we are situated in our solar system, where our solar system is situated in the galaxy, and the whole context for our existence. I love filling in all those details and helping people understand really where they live. And today we're going to dive into that topic essentially, where our sun is in the galaxy? Is there structure out there? How does it all work?
And I think all of our inner kids are excited today to find out whether or not we live in a super bubble.
So before we dive into it, I was wondering what people out there knew on the topic. So I went to our group of volunteers, I asked them, do we live in a super bubble? Here's what folks had to say, I don't even really know what a super bubble is, so maybe what do you think, Glen. I have no idea what a super bubble is. I have not heard the term super bubble. It makes me think about some conceptualizations of fourth dimensionality.
Considering I couldn't tell you what a super bubble is. I can't really say if we live in one, but it sounds like one of these really exciting astrophysical maybe who knows cool universe things, so I'm eager to learn about it. I have never heard of the term super bubble, but we probably live in one.
I like the I've never heard of it, so yes, this is.
Really exciting to me that nobody had heard of it, because it means we get to share this really cool thing about the universe with everybody. Yay.
We love doing that.
You know that great XKCD comic. I mean they're all great, but the one about the moment you discover somebody doesn't know something really cool about the universe and how you should treat that with reverence and respect because it's a wonderful teaching moment. That's where we are today about super bubbles.
I mean, I think we can all agree that Randall Monroe is the greatest web cartoonist to have ever lived.
Right, Wow, that's instant karma right there. Wow. I hope Zach is listening and laughing at that.
All right, all right, bubbles, all.
Right, bubbles. So we're talking about the Sun and the Solar System's context in the galaxy. But before we get there, let's do like an overview of like what's out there in space? How empty is it? Anyway? So to get oriented, remember that our situation here on Earth is very unusual. Like the density of stuff around you is very rare in the universe. The universe is mostly very very low density, and we live in a very very high density situation.
The Earth, of course, is wonderful and cozy, and in like a normal atmosphere, you'll find a huge number of molecules per cubic meter, like ten to the twenty five molecules per cubic meter. It's a big number. And that's just because like Avagadro's number is pretty big, and gravity has gathered the Earth and the stars and all that stuff together into little dense clumps.
I thought Avagadro's number was ten to the twenty three.
It is, yeah, exactly.
Oh but this is ten to the twenty fifth.
Yeah, because a mole is less than a cubic meter.
Got it, got it. I'm with you now, Okay, these are big numbers, Daniel, big numbers.
These are big numbers. And you know, sometimes on Earth we want to do experiments in low density situations, like when we collide particles together, we don't want a whole bunch of other particles around, Or when you build a plasma inside eater to diffusion, you want mostly a vacuum before you start. And so we have all these vacuums
in labs. We've created these situations you pump out all the air, and you might be surprised to learn that even in those highly specialized vacuums on Earth, we still have something like ten to the twelve or ten to the fifteen molecules per cubic meter. Like that's down ten or thirteen orders of magnitude from your general atmosphere. So like, really good work, and this is not easy, but still it's a lot of molecules.
When somebody says the vacuum of space, are we doing better than the vacuum of space? When we make a vacuum in the lab or are we doing about the same as the quote unquote vacuum of space.
Neither. We're not doing anywhere close to the vacuum of space. The density of vacuums in labs here on Earth is much higher, is much much more stuff in our lab quote unquote vacuums than there is out there in space. Okay, but let's stick into that and zoom our mental picture out from the surface of the Earth. Obviously, the atmosphere drops gradually, right, There's no like huge wall or gait
or anything. This is not space balls, where atmosphere is that contained by a huge bubble right where the code is one two three four. But in a funny way, there is because space officially starts at like one hundred kilometers above the surface of the Earth, which I always thought was weird.
There's some debate about that though, isn't there.
Yes, absolutely there is, and like you can be an astronaut if you've gone eighty kilometers above. There's definitely a debate. It's something about astronomy, so it's not just it depends. It's a bunch of nerds arguing about it.
I thought one hundred kilometers was something like at that point, there aren't enough molecules to hold up your airplane anymore, and so that's where space starts.
Oh that's cool, isn't it.
The Von Carmon line.
That's the Von Carmen line. Yeah, And the ISS is like three hundred or four hundred kilometers above the surface of the Earth, so definitely in space. And so if you're inside our Solar system but outside Earth and its atmosphere, then there's still stuff out there. The vacuum of space inside the Solar System is not a perfect vacuum. There's a bunch of particles. Most of it comes from the Sun because the Sun, as we say often is producing a lot of stuff, not just photons but also matter.
The solar wind is electronic and protons and alpha particles. These things are zooming around with a lot of energy. And so there's something like ten million protons per cubic meter between planets. So remember on Earth it's ten to the twenty five molecules per cubic meter, labs on Earth is ten to the twelve. Now we're down to like ten to the seven protons per cubic meter, so that's down like five or six orders of magnitude compared to vacuums on Earth.
Wow, you wouldn't want to go out there, people, but.
It would be a good place to do vacuum based experiments.
Sure.
Yeah, but it's still not that empty, right, Like millions and millions of protons are out there. It's not something you could say is empty. And when we talk about vacuum in physics and theoretical physics, we mean space with no extra energy, and it's a minimum energy state of space. And so this interplanetary space is not approaching the theoretical physics vacuum at all. Okay, And then take your mental picture and zoom out from the Solar System and now
we're between stars. Were between our star and Alpha Centauri for example. Now we're in what we call the interstellar medium, the stuff between the stars. And even this is not that empty, right. It turns out there's a big range of densities of stuff from ten to the six molecule percubic meter, which is like the density in our Solar system, all the way down to ten to the four molecules per cubic meter.
Isn't this where we thought the Ork cloud would be? Or this is like when we get past the Ork Cloud.
Yeah, so there's a couple of different boundaries here. You go out past the planets, you get to like the dwarf planets, and then the Kuiper Belt objects. Beyond that, there's the boundary of the heliosphere where the Sun dominates and it meets the interstellar wind, the galactic wind. That's a region where you're exiting the Solar System. But you're right beyond that is more stuff. So the Orc Cloud technically is part of the interstellar medium because it's past
that boundary. It's in a region where the interstellar wind dominates over the Sun's wind, but it is gravitationally bound to the Sun, so it's sort of like playing both sides of the equation off.
That makes sense, it does, but it's still so overwhelmed by the gas in that area that the interstellar medium is ninety nine percent gas and all the rocks out there are just make up one percent dust. Would that be fair to say?
Yes, that's right, and we're going to come back to the interstellar medium and do a deep dive into it. Has a lot of really interesting structure, but yeah, most of it is gas. It's ninety nine percent gas, and then a little bit of it is rocks or comets, like in the oricloud and dust. There's a few cosmic rays out there, but mostly it's just gas and has all sorts of interesting turbulence and structure that we're going to talk about and don't forget out there. Also in
the galaxy is dark matter. We're only talking right now about the luminous matter, the kind of stuff that's made up of atoms, but we know that the universe is dominated by dark matter. We know that it's spread out throughout the galaxy, but it there's five times as much of it as there is luminous matter, so you can't interact with it, but it is there. And so if you're just thinking about like the density of matter overall, you have to also account for that dark matter.
Okay, so in the interstellar space mostly gas, little bit of dust, you're not likely to stub your toe. But so now we're talking about what's between the stars, But what about what's between the galaxies and the intergalactic space.
Yeah, so now we're leaving the region we've ever probed directly, Like we've sent probes that have left the Solar System just barely like Voyager one reached the interstellar medium in twenty twelve, Voyager two and twenty eighteen. But now we're going well beyond where we've ever probed directly, and we're
relying just on observations and theory and stimulation. So now between the galaxies, what is there, Well, this is something we call very creatively the intergalactic medium, and this is mostly rarefied plasma, so that means essentially ionized hydrogen is just protons and out there. On average it's like one to ten atoms per cubic meter, so a pretty small number, but still not that small. I mean, intergalactic space is
unimaginably vast. There's just so much of it. Even if you think about space between the planets as being big, and most of the space and the Solar System is the space between the planets, right, planets and the Sun are rare, like you're randomly sampled inside the Solar System. You would very rarely touch a planet or a star
inside the galaxy. Right structure is also very rare. But between the galaxies, it's even hard to comprehend because we have like millions of light years between these galaxies, and yet it's still filled with stuff. There's one to ten atoms out there, and actually these tendrils of plasma there's
also structure to it. It's not just randomly distributed. All the galaxies are connected by these tendrils of plasma, these filaments, and something like half of all the atoms in the universe are outside of galaxies and are inside these tendrils between galaxies.
It's incredible, wow, And how do they get there? Do they get like shot out by suns? They were just there from the beginning of the creation of the universe and they just stayed.
There both and all of those like there's a feedback loop where galaxies are emitting particles right, supernovas and shockwaves and all sorts of stuff. But mostly this structure represents the dark matter structure of the universe. Galaxies form in the deepest wells and then there are tendrils of dark matter between these wells, and that's where you find these tendrils of plasma. So the plasma is like a tracer
that tells you where the dark matter is. And also between these galaxies, of course, is a significant amount of dark energy. Dark energy is everywhere in space. It's just a really, really tiny amount, but because it doesn't get diluted, as the universe expands over vast spaces, it really starts to add up. Between the galaxies, you have to start accounting for the dark energy. And then as you zoom out, galaxies form clusters, and between those clusters most of the
energy density between those clusters. It's not matter at all. It's dark energy, all right.
So at the big scale, we're mostly thinking about dark energy, and as we zoom in, we're starting to think about gas. Let's take a break, and when we come back, I want to go back to the interstellar medium and go into more detail about what's there. Yeah, and we're back, and Daniel is going to be telling us more about what is in the interstellar medium.
That's right. Today we're talking about the context of our solar system where it is and how much stuff there is around us, and whether our solar system is jumping into a huge bubble in the galaxy. Sounds fun, and so the important thing is to understand this bit between the stars. And the thing I love doing is going back in history and understanding when we understood something and what our early silly ideas were, you know, because it's easy to just like, download all of human knowledge into
your brain right now. But remember that people like struggled and puzzled to figure this out, and there were many wrong paths and silly ideas entertained for hundreds of years along the way.
It's kind of cute to imagine that nobody in like fifty years is going to look back at us and be like, oh, remember that cute thing that the physicists thought in twenty twenty six about anyway, they could be laughing at us eventually, but let's go ahead and laugh at them.
So first, remember, in the broader context, we didn't know that our galaxy was one of many galaxies until like the early nineteen hundreds, right, we thought we had a galaxy. It was a bunch of stars and that was it. It was just our galaxy, and that was everything. The galaxy was basically the universe and everything that was out there that wasn't actually in our galaxy, but we didn't know it yet. We called like a nebula because it was like a smeary blob in the sky we couldn't resolve.
So that's sort of like the bigger picture. But then what about inside the galaxy, Well, people try to make like maps of the galaxy early on to try to understand the structure. But we're interested in like the bit between the stars. And it was like the late seventeen hundreds people started to wonder, like, hmm, is the space between the stars really a vacuum or is there something there?
You know? And how would we know? And this coincides a little bit later with Maxwell's development of electromagnetism, the idea that light is a balance between electricity and magnetism. The energy slashes back and forth between the two fields, but then it moves as a wave in these fields at the speed of light. And this is Maxwell's great discovery that light is a wave, which of course begged the question of a wave in what right, And so
we saw the rise of the theory of the luminiferous ether. Right. This is a famous theory which was invented to explain what light is wiggling? Right, Maybe there's something out there, like if waves are wiggles and water, and sounds wiggles and air, maybe light is a wiggle in this luminiferous ether that we hadn't ever discovered before it fills the universe. So this would be an early theory of the interstellar medium.
What is out there between the stars, what allows the light to go from Alpha Centauri to us here?
And so the luminiferous ether. I thought I was going to get it on the first shot. Totally did I stumbled a little. Would you find that between like Earth and Mars or that was just between the end of our solar system and the start of the next solar system?
Great question. No, is should be everywhere. If it exists, it should be everywhere. And that was key because people looked for it and they said, well, let's try to measure our velocity through this ether. If it's out there and it's a medium for light, light is wiggling through this ether, then Earth moving around the Sun should be
moving zigzagging basically back and forth through this ether. And if light has a constant velocity relative to the ether, then we should be able to measure light moving in different velocities as we move in different velocities through the ether. Okay, right, the same way that like you can catch up to sound waves and air because they have a constant velocity relative to the air, so you can catch up to them and even pass them. Right, just like when you're
on a boat in a lake, you're making ripples. If you go fast enough, you can catch up to them, which it gives you awake, right, And so if light is moving through this ether, and then as the Earth moves around the Sun, we should see a change in the velocity of light famous Michaelson. More the experiment of course proved that light is the same speed year round, regardless of the direction, and so apparently there is no
luminiferous ether. So then people are like, oh, wow, maybe there really is a vacuum in between the stars.
And you all didn't find another use for the word luminiferous ether. That's a total bummer because it just sounds so nice.
Well, these days is actually a proliferation of ether theories, which is very confusing because ether most generally just refers to like a theory of the substrate of space, and our current theory that quantum field theory, where space is filled with these fields and these fields exist in space. Then that's sort of the modern ether, and that's totally
cool and nobody objects to that. But that's an ether where you can't measure your velocity relative to it, like the luminiferous ether has a frame it's at rest in some frame, and light moves at a constant speed only in that frame. The modern ether quantum field theory vacuum has no frame. And so there's a big distinction between the luminiferous ether of two centuries ago and today's concepts
of the ether. And in lots of pop side descriptions you see this important distinction sort of ignored or fuzzed over.
Okay, all right, and I could use a quick step back and a reminder about where we are. So we've been talking about what is in space between things. Yeah, and we've just established that we used to think there was ether between stuff, but there's not. But there's not, but there's not. And so now, okay, so we're going through the history of our understanding of what was in the interstellar medium.
That's right. And then in eighteen ninety nine people discovered, oh, there is some actual stuff out there between the stars, not ether, but like actual matter. There were these things called dark nebulae, essentially these dusty clouds you could see out there that passed between the stars, right between us and other stars. There were like these clouds of stuff which were sometimes silhouetted against this background starfield. This is
essentially the first discovery of interstellar gas. It's just blobs of gas that are out there between the stars. And so as you make more and more accurate observations of these stars and understand like why they dim or what you can see and what's between you and those stars, you start to build a map of the galaxy and understand like where there's dust and where there's gas. And this is our first like understanding really of the context of our Solar.
System, understanding that there's gas out there. That gas isn't like the ort cloud. That's just under standing where other galaxies are out there and you're just kind of seeing them as gas or what is that gas exactly?
Yeah, this is gas within our galaxy, okay, right, not between galaxies. This is just understanding like what's between the stars. Are the stars dots in a true vacuum or is there like a soup out there? And it turns out it's pretty soupy. We discovered these dark clouds of gas between the stars, and then in the early nineteen hundreds we discovered cosmic rays, which are just particles from space that are zipping towards the Earth. And if there are
particles zpping towards the Earth. There's zipping from somewhere right, which means that like space out there is filled with all of these particles. So we had this growing awareness that the space between the stars is filled with gas and with ions and with electrons, just like in the
Solar System. And so instead of thinking of it like here's a pocket of stuff the star and the planets, you know how, now we think about like a spectrum of stuff inside the Solar System, little bits of dust all the way up to Jupiter and then the Sun. In the same way, you should think about a smooth transition between the Solar System and the interstellar medium that
between the stars there is still stuff. Yes, there is a boundary where the solar wind stops dominating and the interstellar wind starts dominating, But in terms of the distribution of stuff, it's pretty smooth, and so you should expect there to be stuff out there in the interstellar medium, and it actually makes up like between ten and fifteen percent of the mass of the galaxy is not inside
the stars. Yeah, it's between the stars, and it's going to play an important role in how those stars are formed and the health of our galaxy in forming stars, whether our galaxy keeps making stars or whether it gets quenched as they say, don't get quenched. So let's dig a little bit more deeply into what's in the interstellar medium. We said before the break that it's mostly gas, which
means that it's mostly hydrogen. It's like ninety percent hydrogen ten percent helium, and the universe is mostly hydrogen, so that makes sense. Something that's interesting, though, is that even though there's a lot of space out there, it's super dense, this stuff still behaves like a gas, like it interacts with itself. It's not like non interacting, like the way the exosphere of the Moon is just a bunch of
particles that ignore each other. Out there, these particles are moving so fast the mean free path is pretty short, Like they don't go very far before they run into another one or interact with another one. They don't have to actually touch because they have charges. They can interact without touching each other. So that's really fast and that was a little bit of a surprise to me when I learned about that.
So if somebody were living out there, could they be getting power from that, They.
Could be getting killed from that. I mean, this is radiation, right, These particles are moving at high speeds even though it's fairly low density. These things are moving pretty fast, like inside the solar system, the solar wind is moving at four hundred kilometers per second. Sometimes these particles of energy up to ten keV, And in the interstellar medium, these
things are even higher speeds. So technically the temperature can sometimes be like up in the millions of even though the density is very very low, So you would like freeze because there's not a lot of heat being deposited, but also you'd be riddled with all of these tiny, little high speed bullets.
That's definitely worse than New Jersey.
It's a close call, but I agree with you.
Ah, I do like New Jersey though I was born there.
The others fascinating bit about the interstellar medium is what's not gas, which is the dust. And dust sounds like, you know, stuff you'd sweep up and throw away, but dust is actually super fascinating from a cosmic sense because dust comes from dead stars. Right, Like, how do you make dust? You need heavier elements. You need those elements to stick together, You need them to form these little crystals and to gather more bits to themselves, and dust
is like the seed for new solar systems and new planets. Right, our Earth formed by a bunch of dust which bounced into itself and stuck together and formed a bigger piece of dust and gathered more together. So these are really the seeds of future solar systems as well as the ashes of previous ones.
Oh man, at first I thought you were talking about gallstone formation, and then it sounded much more beautiful, and I'm glad my gallstones, you know, stopped getting bigger before they formed planets and universes.
But these huge amounts of like iron in silicon, magnesium, a bunch of oxygen and carbon. This even like nano diamonds and fullerines out there. They're really fascinating. And some of these things are presolar grains, which are preserved from the original star. So things formed like in the atmosphere of the star, and then there's a supernova that blasts out and spreads all these dust grains, and some of
them survive, right, They're not shattered. A lot of this stuff is smashed into itself and shattered and reprocessed, but some of these presolar grains survive and we actually find them, like on the ocean floor, we can find little grains of dust that survived a supernova and zoomed across the universe and gathered together to help form the Earth.
How could you know? How could you find a grain of sand and be like, I know where you came from.
Yeah, they have really unusual isotope mixtures which you only find like in those conditions that are formed, like in the atmospheres of supernovas. It's really incredible.
Wow, that is incredible.
And so the interstellar medium, it's mostly gas. There's a little bit of dust out there, it's like one percent, but I think that's the most interesting part. And then of course some of it is very very high energy particles zooming through space cosmic rays, and so you mix all this together and that's what interstellar medium is made out of. Mostly gas, which is actually mostly molecular not ionized, and then one percent dust and then a few very high energy ions.
All Right, we are getting closer to talking about the amazing and exciting superbubble. So we're going to take a break, and when we get back, we're going to talk about how the gas and the dust are structured inside of the interstellar medium. We are back and we're talking about the interstellar medium, the space between the stars, and we've established that it's mostly gas some dust in there. How is all of that stuff structured in this space?
Daniel, Yeah, So you might imagine, oh, it's just smooth, it's just spread out out there. But it's like a vast fluid, which means that it has all sorts of stuff going on. It's like our atmosphere, right, which we model and has currents and winds and high density regions and low density regions, and so you can think about the
interstellar medium as a vast fluid because it is interacting. Right, The meanfree path of these particles is pretty short, but it's also more complex than a simple fluid because often these particles are moving really really fast. Our whole regions of particles are moving super duper fast. So you can have supersonic regions of this interstellar medium right places where the gas is moved being faster than the speed of
sound in that medium. Remember, you can define the speed of sound in anything, in water and air and steel, and it depends like on the density of the thing. Things that are denser, the bonds are tighter, and if you push on one, then the pressure wave propagates more quickly, and then it would if something was really low density, because then the particles have to drift longer before they
bump into each other. Okay, And so what happens in the interstellar medium is you have these shockwaves, these supersonic shockwaves which smash into something else, and so you get this supersonic shockwave, but that compresses the gas, makes it more dense, and that actually raises the speed of sound.
So then the local flow becomes subsonic. So you get supersonic shockwaves, which then actually becomes subsonic, and so it creates this really complex structure and these really interesting patterns of density. It's really hard to model because it's so chaotic.
So in order to hear sound, you need like molecules to transmit it. So like if you were out there, would you be hearing these particles or or not?
Really you can technically scream and be heard in the interstellar medium, it would be very faint and very very slow. Right, Okay, you could hear these things, I can tell you what they would sound like. You know, probably like shh cool.
Okay, interesting, I don't know why, But in my mind, I'd imagine the interstellar space is being like a quiet, calm, still place, which is probably silly because you know, like solar winds keep things moving. There's probably nowhere that in space that's actually super still, But I hadn't imagined it being super turbulent like this.
So yeah, it's really turbulent. And you know, on time scales that we don't usually think about, but if you played a movie, you know, where a million years passes in a second, it would look like bubbling, frothing tea or something. You know, it's a lot of stuff going on. And the most interesting stuff that goes on is that when you get dense regions, you get star formation. Right, if you have a clump of gas and it cools down and then one of those grains of dust can
start to gather other stuff near it. It's important that's cool, remember, because if things are really really hot, and that means they're moving fast and then gravity has no chance to pull them together. But if things are cool, that means they're slow moving and gravity can gather dust grains together little bits at a time. They stick together, they start forming bigger and bigger stuff and that's when you get
gravitational collapse leads to a runaway effect. You get more gravity, and then you get a star forming and there stuff around it starts to swirl around it to a protoplanetary disc. And that's how a star is born. It's born from denser regions in the interstellar medium, and those regions come from the turbulence. So the structure in the interstellar medium is the reason we have stars.
The structure in the interstellar medium. But don't you only have interstellar medium because it's the region between pre existing stars.
Yeah, there's sort of a circular definition there, but yeah, the interstellar medium can make new stars and then it's no longer the interstellar medium.
Okay, So you can imagine this process going on infinitely many times, and then you just have an infinite number of suns. So how often does this process happen?
So it depends a lot on the details of the temperature of the cloud and the composition. But when it happens, it happens a lot. Like you get a lot of stars all born in one of the neighborhood together. And this is why, for example, stars are very often found in binary systems like pairs of stars gravitationally bound to each other, or even briefly trinary systems or more long lived systems where you have like a binary star and another one that's more distant, so that it's like effectively
a binary system. So you have these regions of star formation where a huge cloud meets these requirements where you have like little dense grains and the whole thing is cold enough, and how often it happens depends a lot on the history of your galaxy. There's actually an interplay between the stars and the interstelling medium, which we're going to talk about, because the stars push back and form these bubbles, and so it's a whole complex of all thing.
And the rate at which stars form changes a lot where you are in the galaxy and over time, and it's not something we fully understand. Like some galaxies out there have stopped forming stars at all, and some of them are still making stars and this is called quenching, and it's not something that's fully understood.
All right, well, we still haven't gotten to the bubbles. How do we get closer to bubbles?
Yeah, so you have the interstellar medium. You got these clouds of gas. Sometimes they collapse and form a star. What happens when you make a star is that it pushes back against the interstellar medium, right, Like our Sun has a solar wind, and that's pushing back. The reason we call it a solar system is it's the region where our solar wind dominates. So now you have this cavity inside the interstellar medium, right, And so the Sun basically makes like a little bubble, which we call the
heliosphere by pushing back against the interstellar medium. So now imagine you have a bunch of stars, each with their little bubbles, and one of them goes supernova, right, So this blows out a huge region inside the ism, and this can create a superbubble that's like hundreds of light years across. Because remember a supernova is the collapse of a star of gravitationally, which then bounces back out and
dumps an enormous amount of energy. A single supernova can be brighter than the entire galaxy and it doesn't just put out photons. That also shoots out a huge number of particles.
How many light years across is our solar system?
So our solar system is like one or two light years in radius, okay, right, So it's pretty small. But then a supernova can make a bubble that's like hundreds of light years across. And if there's multiple supernova, because remember stars are formed in bunches, and that means they can also go supernova in bunches they have like their cycles all synchronized. Oh boy, then you can get a really big bubble that lasts for like tens of millions of years.
Okay, so the bubbles that we're talking about then are solar winds of some sort blowing interstellar medium out, and that is the bubble. These are not the fun bubbles that I was imagining, Daniel.
So you get little bubbles from solar winds, but you really get the super bubbles from a bunch of supernova's all going off at once and making these really vast bubbles. It's super cool. Also, if one happens near the edge of the galaxy, Like the galaxy is a big disc, right, it's like much broader than it is thick. So if it occurs like near the top of the disk, then
essentially it creates like a hole in the galaxy. And they call it a galactic chimney because in hot gas from inside the galaxy basically vents out from the galaxy, so you have like a little spurt.
So the question that we're answering today is do we live in a super bubble? But timing's got to matter too, right now, if you get a bunch of stars going supernova all at once to make your super bubble, you would be dead if you were inside of the super bubble region, right, So it's got to go super bubble, make a bubble exact, and then a planet needs to like wander in or get captured and then become habitable,
and then you find yourself inside the super bubble. That would have to work, right, okay.
Right, And remember, our Solar system has existed for like almost five billion years, but these super bubbles last for tens of millions of years. They're very transient, and our star is moving through the galaxy, right, and its orbit takes hundreds of millions of years, and so they're created by supernova. But you don't want to be there when they're made, you're right, And so coincidentally, there is a bubble. It's called the local bubble. It's three hundred to one
thousand light year wide. It has a much lower gas density than the rest of the interstellar medium by like down by ten, and it's surrounded by denser walls of neutral gas and dust. Probably it was formed by like maybe ten to twenty supernovas that happened over the last ten to fifteen million years, so sort of recently on cosmic history scales. We can't pinpoint exactly which stars they are. Probably their stars related to the Scorpius Centaurus association of stars.
And the shape of it is kind of weird. It's not spherical, and there's other like nearby bubbles that it connects to called loop one, and so fortunately it formed before we got here. Right, the Sun orbits the center of the galaxy at like two hundred and twenty kilometers per second and moves it like twenty five kilometers per second relative to the interstellar medium, and so that means that we go like twenty to thirty parsecs every million
years or so. This bubble is a few hundred parsecs across, so seems like about fifteen million years ago the first supernova started inflating this bubble. Five or ten million years ago we entered the cavity, and now we're in this superbubble. We're drifting through a little warm cloud of gas inside this bubble, and in a couple million years we're probably going to exit it back into the interstellar medium, which is a little bit denser.
So when we enter the interstellar medium where there's all of that turbulence and it's crazy, is that going to be a bad time for us?
No, probably not, because we have the solar wind which protects us. Were moving within our own little bubble anyway, So it doesn't really matter that much. It's just a way to highlight that there's a lot of stuff happening out there, right there's turbulence and chaos and all that stuff, and star formation and start dying and all that happens because of this structure. Like you get stars because you have denser regions, and then those stars blow out make
superbubbles when they die to make less dense regions. But then those superbubbles collapse because the interior is lower density but higher temperature, and that hot gas leaks out and ruptures the shell, and so you get this cycle of stuff. And so you know, you shouldn't think of the galaxy
out there between the stars is empty. In fact, it's filled with stuff, and it's really dynamic, and the structure out there is what determines like where stars are made and then stars explode and replenish the interstellar medium, and so the interplay between the stars and the interstellar medium really determined, like, hey, is your galaxy making stars or not?
Is it to pleasing all of its gas? All this kind of stuff is determined by this interaction between the stars and the interstellar medium.
Huh. So we live inside of a bubble made by our son, which is currently inside of the local super bubble.
That's right, that was made by supernovas of other stars, fortunately before we entered this region.
Amazing exactly, And.
So that's the broader context of your life. We happen to be living inside this bubble, and now you.
Know all about it, that's right. And we hope that you don't stub your toes on any galactic dust or happen to get dust of any sort inside of your gallbladder or kidneys or anything else. We wish you health. And this is not a great transition. But man, it hurt to laugh at Daniel's jokes today.
I try to hold back. I really really did.
I appreciate it. Daniel. You can't help yourself. You're just a funny guy.
Looks, Aren't everything right ready?
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