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SN350: Questions Time

May 04, 202344 minEp. 350
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Episode description

The Sun's Wobble: Unraveling the Mystery of Solar Movement
If you're feeling frustrated and disheartened by reading countless articles and watching endless videos about black holes without gaining a deeper understanding of human proximity to them, then you are not alone!
In this episode, you will be able to: Unravel the enigmatic influence of black holes on human lives and cosmic occurrences. Gain insight into the formation dynamics of rocky planets and the role gas plays in space. Understand the role of dark energy in driving the universe to expand incessantly. Scrutinize the realism of movie asteroid fields in contrast to real-world examples. Delve into ongoing research into the fabric of spacetime and the pursuit of a quantum gravity theory.
'One day we might be able to get out there and get close to one of these things'. - Andrew Dunkley

The resources mentioned in this episode are: Learn more about the Hubble Law to understand the relationship between the velocity of objects and their distance.
Check out the website of the Chandra X-ray Observatory to view stunning images of the universe. Visit the website of the European Space Agency to learn more about their missions and research. Check out the website of the Subaru Telescope to learn more about their observations of the universe. Check out the website of the Keck Observatory to learn more about their ground-based observations of the universe.
For more from the Space Nuts team plus details on how you can help support the show and share in the rewards, visit our website at www.spacenuts.io or our HQ at www.bitesz.com
#astronomy #space #science #podcast

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/space-nuts-astronomy-insights-cosmic-discoveries--2631155/support.

Transcript

Hello, thanks for joining us. This is Space Nuts. I'm Andrew Dunkle, your host, and it's so good to have your company once again. And coming up on this episode, it is all questions because it's episode three hundred and fifty, and that's when we dedicate our show to the audience to nail down such questions as those of stellar mass, black holes, our place in the universe, and where that place might be in the future because it's

moving. Is there a size limit to rocky planets. We're going to look at expansion limits, expansion effects, asteroids, space time, and photons. All questions coming from our vast audience of nine here on Space Nuts. Hope you can hang around a while. Dan Sack and Rad in Ternel ten nine Magnian sequenced Space Nuts three two two one Space Nuts and actually report a bill good and joining me to discuss all of that and much much more is Professor

Fred Watson, a storm Er at Large. Hello Fred, Hello Andrew, very good to be at large again. If I haven't caught you yet, not at all. We've got a smashing program. It's there's so much to talk about today, so I think we'll just hose straight in and get stuck

into it. And our very first question comes from none other than Hallo Space Nuts, Margin Burman Gorvyn here, writer extraordinaire in many genres, and today we're crossing my strength in science fiction with horror as we ask how close could a spacecraft with human beings aboard realistically get to a stour mass black hole before all the inside our fried and or linguinified, which I think sounds better than spaghettified, don't You can't wait to hear the answer? Margin Burming Gorvine in

Potomac, Maryland here over and act linguinified. Yeah, yeah, with that or with that? Yeah that's not bad? Um? Yeah, how close is too close? So I suppose the answer is it depends? Uh, it does, doesn't it? Yeah? I am um so somewhere and here we go. This is the the usual um tribute to one of my books, but I can't remember which one, which Chat's five episodes? Sorry, I'm not naming any at least I don't think I'm going to um. I

did write about the event. Horizon divers are a stellamass black hole, and I can't remember what it is, but it's it's relatively compact, measured in kilometers if I remember rightly, But the event horizons not really what would sort you out in you know, in the answer to Martin's question, because yes, you'd be linguinified spaghettified. You probably would even be result of fired as well, because you might end up in bids when you got within a much

closer distance. Um, So here is a something I'm pulling out of my memory from only about four weeks ago. There is a there's a gas cloud which is currently orbiting the it's not orbiting, it's passing by the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy. Now that's not a tellomass black hole, which is what Martin's asking about. This is a three point six million

stellar mass black hole. This, this gas cloud is passing within a few trillion kilometers if I remember rightly, of the black hole, and it is being spaghettified. It's been watched, it's been observed to do that over quite a long period. Notwithstanding that a few more million trillion kilometers there are stars happily in orbit around the supermassive black hole. So I don't haven't done the

calculation, Martin. It's probably conjecture as to you know what, at what level do the tidal forces separating your head and your feet start to become significant enough that they overcome the the you know, the stomic forces which are holding your atomies together. And that's a calculation that I haven't done. But it's even for a stellar mass black hole, it's probably not very far away.

I think the title forces that you would experience would would really start to make things uncomfortable, Okay, And which one is the stella mass black hole? Again, in terms of the size of black holes, it's the massive one star. Stella mass is one star, right, Okay, gotcha, hen's the name. Yes, sorry, sorry, I'm I'm being lived there, But that's right. It's an object of the order of the massive one star, which sometimes includes things up to twenty or thirty times the mass of the

song. But it's still not a super massive black hole. And it's not the other thing that we've talked about from Touch to Town. The intermediate mass black calls things of order a thousand times the mass of the song, which which quite rare, we believe, and very much unlike the ultra massive black hole that we talked about four weeks ago, that's bigger than big. Just wait for the hypermassive black hole. That's the next one to come up. Well, it could happen, couldn't it? And did it? Could?

You just never know these things, these like we when we started the podcast and write through several episodes or several years of episodes, we could only confirm there were two yes, moall and large. Now we've got yeah, yeah, loads different, including that ultra massive black hole that we talked about. That's sort of pushing the limits of which we thought black holes could exist. We thought that couldn't exist. I can't remember what it was. Was it

thirty billion or thereabout? It was some astronomical numbs a huge number. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was amazing. Um. So the answer to Martin's question is, in real terms, you could get reasonably close, but not but not that close. Sorry Martin, we haven't given you another for at all. We've just talked about. But reasonably close is what I think. Yeah, I don't think you'd want to get you know, if it was at the center of the solar system. I don't think you want to

get much nearer than such an r neptune. Sorry, your readers, so well, no one wants to get hear that now. Okay, so Martin, that's a very loose answer to your question, but it's a good question because you know, one day we might be able to get out there and get close to one of these things, and you just really, you really didn't need to do your mathematics before you lined yourself up. Bring it. Who came out of your space warp ups? I mentioned the name and got

too close. Yeah, all right, thanks Martin. Great to hear from you. Let's go to a text question. This actually came in via email from Andrew. He says, I love the show. I have a science question. Does our Sun move its position as the planet's orbit? If so, by how much? Thanks? Andrew? Hit reply to respond. Now we'll just talk about that. Yeah, it's a great question, and the

answer is yes, it does. And so basically the bottom line here is that the Sun in a sense, is not the center of the Solar system. The point at the center of the Solar system is something called the Barry center, which is the sort of it's like the center of gravity of the Solar System. So it includes not just the Sun but also the planets, of which really only one counts in this argument, and that's the planet Jupiter, which is, you know, the most massive of the Solar System's planets.

So, but the Barry center, that's to say, this center of gravity does actually move around with respect to the Sun, or should I say the Sun moves around with respect to the Barrier center. And it's that process that actually allows us to detect the planets of other stars. Because if you've got if you've got a object in deep space, a star, you know, one hundred light years away, all you can observe is its light and its spectrum. But what you can see is it's velocity changing slightly as the

planets pullets, you know, slightly one way or the other. And you can actually disentangle how many planets there are around at the star without being able to see any of them, just by knowing how the star moves with respect to the barri center. It's that movement that you can see reflected in the star's velocity. And in fact, we can now detect motions of stars with

an accuracy measured believe it or not, in centimeters per second. Rather than well the work I did, you were doing well if you got down to a kilometer per second accuracy, but meter per second accuracy has been attainable for a long time, but now people are talking about sentimeter per second accuracy in the speed of a star that you can detect if I remember rightly, the planet Jupiter changes the Sun's velocity by around eleven meters per seconds, right to

detect. Yeah, if to detect a Jupiter sized planet in the same orbit as Jupiteres, but around another star rather than the Sun, you would see motions of that star of eleven meters per second as it moves with respect to the Barrit Center. Now, Andrew's other part of his question was how much

does it move? How much does the Sun move with respect to the center of gravity of the Solar system, And it's basically not much, but that Barry center does actually from time to time it is outside the Sun rather than being within it. So you're talking about the Sun moving by, you know, some fraction of its diameter. It might be quite a large fraction.

It's not millions of kilometers. It's well, actually the Sun is one point formula kilometers in diameter, so it might be millions of kilometers, but but you know, more likely to be tens of hundreds of thousands. That's which means that the Barris center is for the most part inside the Sun, but it does occasionally go outside when you reckon. When you include the effect of all the planets that include Saturn as well, it's one of the Jupiter.

I suppose the other way to describe the movement would be that that wobble we talk about when they're trying to detect planets around other stars, that that's one of the mythos, isn't it. Yeah, exactly what that wobble is the eleven kilometers per second in the place of Jupiter el the song Dopler wobbles technique. It's called yeah, yeah, very good. Thanks Andrew, hope you're doing well. Let's go on to our next question. This comes from Tom in Ireland. He said, Hi, my brain hurts, please help.

Paracetamol or iberprofen is very good. For that time, thirteen point eight billion years ago, the universe began and has been expanding ever since. How is it that we can see objects up to twelve billion light years away in one direction and also in the opposite direction. If we are seeing these objects where they were twelve billion years ago, which means they were twenty four billion years apart. How could they have originated at the same point thirteen point eight billion

years ago? Please help love the show Tom in Ireland. I think he's getting his light years and his universal age years mixed up. Possibly, No, it's it is. It's a confusing thing because yeah, and your age years is a good point, because we talk in terms of lookback times. That's the kind of usual phrase, and so it's misleading to say Gallex is twelve billion light years away and unless you qualify it by adding in the in the co moving coordinate system, and not many people do, I know,

I don't know. There you go, So the bottom it's better to talk in terms of look back times, because that's the sort of fundamental thing. When you see an object in very the very distant universe, it's seeing it as it was, maybe when the universe was one point eight billion years old. If it's if it's got a twelve billion year lookback time, but it's actual distance is much more than twelve billion light years, because the universe has

expanded by a huge amount since their light left that object. So the the what you might call in fact, it's got a name, it's called the proper distance would be something like thirty maybe thirty five billion light years away because of the expansion of the universe. But that's something that you can't actually measure in any way, that distance, because all we see is the light that's

reached us after it's twelve billion year journey. And so it's more accurate to talk about look back time of four billion years than to say a distance of a look back time of twelve billion years, rather than a distance of twelve billion light years, unless you say it's a co moving distance, which is the distance which doesn't account for the expansion of the universe. Good grief kind of equates to the question we often get about where is the center of the

universe and where we are? Where are we in it? Well, we are in it, that's rightly speaking. Yeah, so sorry, and Tom, I didn't really answer probably the address your question about things being separated by twenty eight and sorry, twenty four billion light years. And that's all that is saying, Yes, we see things receding from us in different directions. And the Hubble law seems to work everywhere whatever direction you're looking, and the

Hubble law is the one that relates. It's this velocity of the velocity away from us of an object to its distance. It's how we know that redshift equals distance in the you know, standard cosmological model of the universe. So what what that is telling you is that the universe, first of all,

is extremely big. And we think that when it kicked off within the first gazillions to the second, in fact, about tenth of minus thirty three of us and if I remember the number rightly, it expanded very violently in this period we call the Age of inflation, which only lasted a few quintillions of a second, but blew up the universe from the size of a p to the size of a galaxy. And then the expansion sort of settled down.

But that's how we think. That's why we think the universe looks the same in all directions, even though it's very very large and the distances separating objects is very very extreme. We think at one time everything was very close together, and then it wasn't. And that's why we she what was she today? Okay, Tom's headache is throbbing now, Yes, probably, Yeah. I go for asprints, actually you know you do? Yeah, yeah, I just go around trying to find willow trees and lick the bark. Okay,

all right, I wondered what you were doing. That's that's a natural pankiller. I didn't know that. Hell, that's that's I think that's how aspurin was invented. Not sure something like that. Yeah, willow is a natural has a natural painkilling property in it. It does. Thank you, Tom. Great to hear from you. This is space Nuts with Andrew Duntley and Professor Fred. What's a space nuts? Now? Fred to a regular contributor to our question answer session, and it's Duncan from Weymouth. I think

I'm pretty sure he'll tell me that's where he's from. Hello, Duncan. Hear from Weymouth in the UK. Another quick question. I know that Andrew likes hypothetical one, so here's one that's been bugging me for a while. If you could get a huge mass of rock together, say, well, I don't know, a hundred times Jupiter's mass of solid rock in one place and put it in either they wore a bit around a star. Would it form a really massive rocky planet? Or is there an upper limits to how

big or how massive a rocky planet can be? Just interested to know and if it couldn't form a massive, massive rocky planet, what would actually happen to that rock to prevent it becoming a rocky planet. Would it somehow not be able to be bound together, or would it melt or boil and form a gas or what would prevent that? Okay, keep up the good work

and thanks for your efforts. Bye bye, thank you. Duncan m I kind of become a type of belt or an asteroid belt or something like that if it couldn't form a planet would have to sort of break up like that? But how big is the limit? That's they So, yeah, it's a really interesting question. And I think the limit is imposed is imposed not by the physics of how big something can be. It's more about how things

evolve when planetary systems are formed. So we think that rocky planets do evolved by the sort of silicon material in the original dust and gas cloud that formed the Solar System. We think that stuff all stuck together became solidified turned into rock. These bits are rock bashed into one another, some stuck together, some didn't. But in the end you got planets building into a sort of rocks building into planetismals and then to protoplanets and eventually two planets. But this

is all taking place within an environment that is very very gasy. And if you form rocky cause that start getting very big, you will also a mass gas you want just you don't want just to create rock, you'll acret gas as well. And that's why we think the gas giants are gas giants, because they grew big enough that they not only collected more bits of rock,

they actually collected very significant envelopes of gas around them. And it sort of helped as well by them what we call the frost line or the ice line in the Solar system, that region which is between the orbits of Miles and Jupiter, where where ice actually forms because the temperatures low enough. Yeah, and so that the you know, the limits are more about the way you

form planets rather than what could exist. Um, whether a hundred jupiter mass I mean a hundred jupiter mass solid, a hundred jupiter mass object is is actually a star because I think the the mass linits for brown dwarfs, is is it thirteen jupiter mass is up to about eighty I think in something in that range will produce deuterium burning and become what's called a brown dwarf star. But if you get above that, then you've got a dwarf star. Um

So, but that's assuming it is made of gas. I think that the physics present prevent you from forming a rocky planet with anything like that kind of mass, because it would have created gas rather than create just more rock. Okay, that's that's pretty good though. I think we are discovering rocky planets that are much much bigger than Earth. Yeah, that's sort of up to

neptune mass. But they're called super earths, so that yes, So what that's saying is that we we perhaps haven't achieved that limit within the Solar System. Yeah. Well, in the scheme of things, our rocky little world is actually one of the smaller ones, isn't it in real terms? Yeah, although it's hard to you know, the bottom line is that we're not really yet able to detect all the smaller planets that around stars because it's harder

to detect them. You can do and there are programs that that you do that. Gravitational lensings. Want transit method lets you do it as well. But the and perhaps you know, the Kepler and tests spacecraft have both contributed many objects which are small compared with you know what we used to be finding, which were always the Jupiter of us. Things are bigger, so we

are finding rocky planets. But there's still I think, gaps in our knowledge because when I've got the technology yet to define the smallest ones, so when we get that perfected, we might find a whole bunch thinks that a smaller than the Earth as well. Yeah, okay, thanks Duncan. Always good to hear from you. Jim is next. He's from something I can't pronounce, New Orleans. Yeah, New Orleans, it's Jim dear, Professor Watson,

and mister Dunkley. I've been traveling by car a lot in the past year and was able to catch up on all your podcasts thus far, Blimy, I truly enjoy the show and look forward to the next episode. Onto my question. Because the bodies in the universe are accelerating at an ever increasing rate, eventually there will come a time when space time will become impracticable or

space travel will become impracticable, if not impossible. What I mean is that, eventually, as a result of increasing excel leration, the velocity at which galaxies and their component parts move through the universe will attain a substantial percentage of the speed of light. If we cannot build spacecraft that attain speeds greater than that substantial percentage of the speed of light, then it seems that when a spaceship leaves the Earth's gravity, well, the Earth will become unreachable by the

spaceship because the spaceship cannot catch up. Can this be right? There must be something that I'm missing. Thanks for your thoughts. Have a great day, Jim. Yeah, that's I can see where he's coming from. It is a quandary, And yes, we have talked about the fact that as things expand, we're eventually just going to be totally isolated in the universe. We won't be able to see anything else, which is due to happen in a couple of days. But what yeah, yeah, indeed, what's the

what's the answer to Jim's quandity? I think on the body actually, because yes, if we look into the distant future, when the expansion has accelerated so that you know, you're talking about a hugely greater expansion of space time than we have at the moment, things will disappear beyond the horizon because the light that's leaving them now will never catch up with the expansion of the universe,

so we won't see them. And that's the point that you were just making, Andrew, that we will have a very lonely existence when you look a few trillion years perhaps down the track, because there won't be anything other than the local group of galaxies visible. Maybe the local group will disappear as

well. And I suppose what Jim's question about the spacecraft really means is that if the spacecraft could get far enough from the Earth so that it was being carried away from the Earth due to the expansion of the universe by a velocity higher than the velocity of the spaceship could have achieved, then yes, you're right, you will abs get back. You'd never never make it back.

So yeah, it's an interesting conjecture, and the universe very different from the one we live in today than It's a horrifying thought, though, isn't it. Let's go visit that rock. Oh it's gone, yeah, and we can't get back. Not good, thank you, Jim. On a similar kind of playing field, Paul in Melbourne says there has been talked recently about

the energy that causes the universe to expand coming from black holes. If this is so, then wouldn't we see the space time around or near a black hole expanding at a faster rate than that further away from black holes, for example, between galaxies or that in the spaces between the filaments of the cosmic web. Wouldn't the filaments of the cosmic web be expanding faster? And it's

pretat data. Yeah, I'm just trying to remember what the mechanism wants that linked and quite get my head to it that linked black holes with the dark energy, which is what, you know, what is the thing that we think drives the expansion of the universe. Dark energy seems to be very much a property of space itself, a uniform property that that's the same wherever you

look. So Paul's question is is an interesting one. So and I can't remember the exact link between the mechanisms within black holes and the dark energy, because yes, you know, it's an intuitive thought if if dark energy coming from black holes, then the region around black holes should be expanding more than the region elsewhere. But we already observe the fact that that doesn't happen. We do see space time distorted around black holes. But that's due to their

gravitational attraction. That's the standard general relativity distortion of space time that we see, you know, whenever we find gravitational lenses, for example. So, as I said, the point about dark energy is, say it is a phenomenon that is a property of space. I would have to I'd have to look back at what I was reading up on the mechanism that feeds the energy of black holes into the space around them to be able to give an answer

to pulse question. So I'm a bit embarrassed that I can't do that. I mean, it was about well, it must have been at least two months ago when we talked about this. Yeah, I guess, so I don't remember the conversation. I just yeah, I just can't recall it. Is it is that paper I don't think has been refuted, the one that suggests that maybe black holes could provide the origin of dark energy. And I wish I could there is a there's a there's a point about it which I'm

just not not able to recover at the moment from the memory bikes. Yeah, I could have a quick look and see if I can find the article, but gosh, I don't know. There's yeah, there's there's plenty of articles about it, So which one do you pick? But yeah, it's certainly got a lot of interest at the time. Will continue. So we're talking, we're talking mid February when that first came. Yeah, so you know it's fair enough that at our age we've forgotten. I felt we remember

the was there? Yes, yes, indeed, So Paul, I might try and look at that again and we might get back to if we don't forget. Thanks entire conversation. I'll put an asterisk next to his question. Follow up. All right, thank you, Paul, Thanks for sending in the question. This is Space Nuts Andrew Duncley here with Professor Fred Watson. Great Space Nuts. Okay Fred, a few more questions before we wrap it up. And this one comes from Western Australia and our good friend Rusty,

actually, to be more specific, Rusty's wife. Hello, Space Nuts. It's Rusty and Donnybrook. My lovely wife Ally came up with a question about asteroids and she's seen a few movies with asteroid fields in them and wonders if they're realistic, how close do they get and how often do they collide, and I think I'm sure she'd love your answer. Cheers, Thanks, Rusty, we are Yeah, asteroids are not an uncommon topic of questions either, mainly the ones that are going to hit us or near nar hit us.

But yeah, a different spin on it, so to speaking, and a good one too, great question, because we you know, when you look at depictions of the Solar System, the main asteroid belt, which sits between the orbits of Males and Jupiter, is always portrayed as being full of asteroids, asteroids everywhere in every direction. Whereas the bottom line here is, you know Douglas Adam's famous quotation, space is big. You will believe how big it is. Anyway, it's big. What was it? You might think

it's a long way. You might stret a long way down the street to the chemist. That's right. Anyway, there is a lot of space between them. So, as witnessed by the fact that I can't remember how many is it must be this five. About eight or nine spacecraft have gone through the asteroid belt, including Galileo Cassini, two Voyagers to two Pioneers New Horizons. They've all gone through the asteroid belt and of course been completely unscathed.

On having said that, the second part of rust wife's question, I'm sorry I didn't catch your name, But the second part is do they collide? And the answer is yes. From time to time they do, which we see usually as a plume of material coming from an asteroid that's being accidentally observed, usually because since part of the field of view of something else, so

some nondescript asteroid will suddenly start looking like a comet. It will get a tale of material, a bit like Demorphus did after it was clouted by the Dart spacecraft. So you get this usually reasonably straight lined cloud of material which is interpreted as having been a collision between two asteroids. We think we've even observed one in the planetary system of another star. The star is Famulo. It's a bright star in our southern skies, and over a number of years

that's been observed to have an object going around it. We covered this, I think a year or so ago Andrew, which was thought to be a planet. They gradually got fainter and eventually disappeared, And the thinking is that what we actually were looking at was the debris cloud from two large asteroids that it collided. That collided because that thing's vanished altogether now as the debris cloud disperses, so they do collide relatively rarely because the space between them is so

it's big. Yeah, I mean, going back a few billion years, it was probably a lot more collisions. There's a lot more stuff out there to hit each other in close proximity. In fact, that we give that period a name, it's called the Late Heavy bombardment about three point eight billion years ago, when the place was full of debris charging around and bashing into other things, including Earth. Yeah, including Earth. That's right. Indeed,

Thanks Rusty and spouse. Let's get let's go onto annex. Question from Renny all right, this is ready from West Hills, California, with another question. I'm trying to understand what space time is made out and why it bends when it interacts with matter. I envisioned space climb as an invisible energy force pushing against some object of matter, which is another form of energy, where they to find a balance, which is gravity. Am I correct?

Yes? And the answer to your question is it's made up of space end time. Yeah, that's the trouble. Nobody really knows what space time is, but I can qualify that a little bit further because whatever it is, yeah, you know, we glibly talk about the fabric of spacetime bending under

the action of mass. Renny is quite right. It's really hard to get your head around that because back in the eighteen eighties we got rid of the idea that there was an ether something that actually permeated space and allowed light to pass through a medium that would transmit light that got thrown out, and the consequence of that was actually the special theory of relativity, which says that you know you're in the speed of light is the same everywhere because the experiments,

the Mikolson Morley experiment as it was called, to measure the ether relied on the fact that you should see the speed of light changing depending on what direction you're moving through the ether. And we're not moving through the ether, so the speed of light doesn't change. And that then brings up special theory of

relativity. So we really don't know what it is. But I think you have to look at the big picture here, because the big picture says, well, there are two sort of pivotal theories on which we base our view of reality. General relativity, which works incredibly well for things on a large scale and quantum mechanics, which works incredibly well for things on a small scale. But the two are incompatible. They don't sort of sit together, and

that sparks back in Einstein's day. Actually the quest for a theory of quantum gravity that would allow us to unite these two theories, which we're still looking for. But one of the themes that I think is addressed by quantum gravitists, if I can put them that way, people theoretical physicists who work on this. One of the themes is that we're missing something, and what we're missing is a more fundamental theory of space and time that underpins what we see

as space and time. In other words, there might be something else that from which space and time emerge and hence space time. Many quantum theorists in the last twenty years have proposed that, and most of the theories I mean string theories one of those. It's that sort of idea that there's something there that underpins what we observe in relativity and in quantum mechanics, and a kind

of deeper version of reality which may include additional dimensions. There is some recent work that's being done on this, which we might talk about in coming weeks. Andrew, that once again highlights that there might be this hidden reality beneath space and time, which how do we probe it? That's the problem and the suggestions that are being put forward by how we might deal with that in a real situation, how we might actually try and peer underneath the gossom avail.

It's not gossom avail, it's a curse relativity. And on the other side, quantum mechanics, also known as the banking industry. The banking industry has got that as well as different realities. In fact, yes, I think there are many places in the world where you can put to different realities. Yeah, indeed, thank you, Renny, and hope that helped somewhat now adequately. Now, finally we'll go to David, who is from Huntsville, Alabama. First of all, I'm a huge fan of the show and

appreciate what you guys do to put new wrinkles in my brain. I look forward to each Thursday for my space nuts fixed. My question is if a photon does not experience time after it's been emitted, and the universe is expanding greater than the speed of light, assuming the photon has an unimpeded line straight towards the edge of the universe. Is the photon essentially trapped in time at that point? Thanks keep up the great work kind of relates to a question

we had earlier. It does yet, and it presupposes the universe as an edge, which we don't think it has. We don't know what it's got will beget us an edge. It's got a banking industry surrounding it, a pique veil. So if but if the photon, you know, to the photons always traveling through the universe at the speed of light. Now, the fact that it's the source of the photon and its destination are separating, are being separated by the expansion of the universe greater than the speed of light,

doesn't matter to the photon. It just keeps ongoing. The fact that its target is moving away from it faster than it's ever going to get there is not a concern to the photon. It will still not experience the passage of time, which is exactly what David said. That's what we think is the case. We'll just keep going forever. I suppose, in a sense it's the scenario that he he mentioned that it will just keep on passing through space

and infinitem because it's destination is not good. He is always going to be further away that it will reach until the big rip an escape, yeah maybe, or if there's a big rip, there'll be tidal forces beyond imagination that

would probably disturb everything as it. Yes, that's the big rip. There's got consequences that we can't really envisage it at the moment, but it's definitely not nice and it reminds me of that famous song I'm a Photon and I'm okay, I Glow all day and I Glow all night and I Glow all day stealing from Monty Python. Yeah, not quite, but nearly works as well as the original Lumberjack song. Thank you, David. It's so great to hear from you, and thanks to everyone who's sending questions. It's nice

to fill an episode with audience questions. And we've got a whole fresh batch like one minute before we started, so that was that was good, and that's why some of them sort of caught us out of left field because we did what we usually do and went in totally unprepared. Sometimes works, So if you do have a question for us, of course, send it to us, because that's what it's all about. We love to interact with you and we love to hear your voices. So where you can record through our

website, space nuts podcast dot com or space nuts dot io. Click on the AMA link and you can record a question there, or send us a text question, or you can just hit the tab on the right hand side at the home page send us your voice message. And as long as you've got a smart device or a computer or something dumber than that that's got a microphone, you can send us a question. But we're taking text and audio questions all the time. The more the merrier. And yes, don't forget

the hypotheticals. I love those hypotheticals. Fred, we're wrapping it up for you yet another. It's a milestone. It is actually three hundred and fifty. Kind of let that slip through to keep it. I'll believe it. Yeah, fifty three hundred and fifty. Oh my gosh, it seems like only six months ago we did episode. Probably a year ago we did episode three hundred. That's a bit, wouldn't it, Yes, that will be I have to be near a year would yes? That's a calculation there the

words we should get a life really come to by. Maybe we should thank you Fred as always good good to tell Andrew take care all right, We'll catch you soon. Fred Watson, astronomer at large part of the team here adds Space Nuts and back at Space Nuts HQ, we say thanks to Hugh for reasons we cannot comprehend, but anyway, thank you anyway, and from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks for joining us each and every weekend for this latest episode. We'll catch you on the very next one on Space Nuts. Bye

bye. You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast, available at Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bides dot com. This is been another quality podcast production from sites dot com.

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