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Black Holes? Dark Energy? Dark Matter? Alien Life? What are the biggest mysteries that still exist out there for us to figure out?
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Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain
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Created by: Fraser Cain and Jason Harmer

Edited by: Chad Weber

Music: Left Spine Down - “X-Ray”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tcoZ...

“The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.” These are the words of Albert Einstein. I assume he was talking about Minecraft, but I guess it applies to the Universe too.

There are many examples: astronomers try to discover the rate of the expansion of the Universe, and learn a dark energy is accelerating its expansion. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft finally images Saturn’s moon Iapetus, and finds a strange equatorial ridge - how the heck did that get there? Did the Celestials forget to trim it when it came out of the packaging?

There have always been, and, let’s go as far as to say that there always will be, mysteries in astronomy. Although the nature of the mysteries may change, the total number is always going up.

Hundreds of years ago, people wanted to know how the planets moved through sky (conservation of angular momentum), how old the Earth was (4.54 billion years), or what kept the Moon from flying off into space (gravity). Just a century ago, astronomers weren’t sure what galaxies were (islands of stars), or how the Sun generated energy (nuclear fusion). And just a few decades ago, we didn’t know what caused quasars (feeding supermassive black holes), or how old the Universe was (13.8 billion years). Each of these mysteries has been solved, or at least, we’ve a got a pretty good understanding of what’s going on.

Science continues to explore and seek answers to the mysteries we have, and as it does it opens up new brand doors. Fortunately for anyone who’s thinking of going into astronomy as a career, there are a handful of really compelling mysteries to explore right now:

Is the Universe finite or infinite? We can see light that left shortly after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years in all directions. And the expansion of the Universe has carried these regions more than 45 billion light-years away from us. But the Universe is probably much larger than that, and may be even infinite.

What is dark matter? Thanks to gravitational lensing, astronomers can perceive vast halos of invisible material around all galaxies. But what is this stuff, and why doesn’t it interact with any other matter?

What is dark energy? When trying to discover the expansion rate of the Universe, astronomers discovered that the expansion is actually accelerating? Why is this happening? Is something causing this force, or do we just not understand gravity at the largest scales?

There are supermassive black holes at the heart of pretty much every galaxy. Did these supermassive black holes form first, and then the galaxies around them? Or was it the other way around?

The Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago, and the expansion of the Universe has continued ever since. But what came before the Big Bang? In fact, what even caused the Big Bang? Has it been Big Bangs over and over again?

Are we alone in the Universe? Is there life on any other world or star system? And is anyone out there we could talk to?

Shortly after the Big Bang, incomprehensible amounts of matter and antimatter annihilated each other. But for some reason, there was a slightly higher ratio of matter - and so we have a matter dominated Universe. Why?

Is this the only Universe? Is there a multiverse of universes out there? How do I get to the Whedonverse?

We've found hundreds of exoplanets in the galaxy. But only a few of them have just the right combination of factors to hold life like Earth's.

The weather in your hometown is downright uninhabitable. There’s scorching heatwaves, annual tyhpoonic deluges, and snow deep enough to bury a corn silo.

The bad news is planet Earth is the only habitable place we know of in the entire Universe. Also, are the Niburians suffering from Niburian made climate change? Only Niburian Al Gore can answer that question.

We as a species are interested in habitability for an assortment of reasons, political, financial, humanitarian and scientific. We want to understand how our own climate is changing. How we’ll live in the climate of the future and what we can do to stem the tide of what our carbon consumption causes.

There could be agendas to push for cleaner energy sources, or driving politicians towards climate change denial to maintain nefarious financial gain.

We also might need a new lilypad to jump to, assuming we can sort out the travel obstacles. The thing that interests me personally the most is, when can I see an alien?

The habitable zone, also known as the “Goldilocks Zone”, is the region around a star where the average temperature on a planet allows for liquid water with which to make porridge. It’s that liquid water that we hunt for not only for our future uses, but as an indicator of where alien life could be in the Universe.

Problems outside this range are pretty obvious. Too hot, it’s a perpetual steam bath, or it produces separate piles of hydrogen and oxygen. Then your oxygen combines with carbon to form carbon dioxide, and then hydrogen just buggers off into space.

This is what happened with Venus. If the planet’s too cold, then bodies of water are solid skating rinks. There could be pockets of liquid water deep beneath the icy surface, but overall, they’re bad places to live.

We’ve got this on Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The habitable zone is a rough measurement. It’s a place where liquid water might exist.

Unfortunately, it’s not just a simple equation of the distance to the star versus the amount of energy output. The atmosphere of the planet matters a lot. In fact, both Venus and Mars are considered to be within the Solar System’s habitable zone.

Venusian atmosphere is so thick with carbon dioxide that it traps energy from the Sun and creates an inhospitable oven of heat that would quickboil any life faster than you can say “pass the garlic butter”.

It’s the opposite on Mars. The thin atmosphere won’t trap any heat at all, so the planet is bun-chillingly cold. Upgrade the atmospheres of either planet and you could get worlds which would be perfectly reasonable to live on. Maybe if we could bash them together and we could spill the atmosphere of one onto the other? Tell Blackbolt to ring up Franklin Richards, I have an idea!

When we look at other worlds in the Milky Way and wonder if they have life, it’s not enough to just check to see if they’re in the habitable zone. We need to know what shape their atmosphere is in.

Astronomers have actually discovered planets located in the habitable zones around other stars, but from what we can tell, they’re probably not places you’d want to live. They’re all orbiting red dwarf stars.

It doesn’t sound too bad to live in a red tinted landscape, provided it came with an Angelo Badalamenti soundtrack, red dwarf stars are extremely violent in their youth. They blast out enormous solar flares and coronal mass ejections. These would scour the surface of any planets caught orbiting them close enough for liquid water to be present.

There is some hope. After a few hundred million years of high activity, these red dwarf stars settle down and sip away at their fuel reserves of hydrogen for potentially trillions of years. If life can hold on long enough to get through the early stages, it might have a long existence ahead of it.

When you’re thinking about a new home among the stars, or trying to seek out new life in the Universe, look for planets in the habitable zone.

As we’ve seen, it’s only a rough guideline. You probably want to check out the place first and make sure it’s truly liveable before you commit to a timeshare condo around Gliese 581.

The Solar System is 4.5 billion years old, but the Universe is much older. What was here before our Solar System formed?
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Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain
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Created by: Fraser Cain and Jason Harmer

Edited by: Chad Weber

Music: Left Spine Down - “X-Ray”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tcoZ...
The Solar System is old. Like, dial-up-fax-machine-old. 4.6 billion years to be specific. The Solar System has nothing on the Universe. It’s been around for 13.8 billion years, give or take a few hundred million. That means the Universe is three times older than the Solar System.

Astronomers think the Milky Way, is about 13.2 billion years old; almost as old as the Universe itself. It formed when smaller dwarf galaxies merged together to create the grand spiral we know today. It turns out the Milky Way has about 8.6 billion years of unaccounted time. Billions and billions of years to get up to all kinds of mischief before the Solar System showed up to keep an eye on things.

Our Galaxy takes 220 million years to rotate, so it’s done this about 60 times in total. As it turns, it swirls and mixes material together like a giant space blender. Clouds of gas and dust come together into vast star forming regions, massive stars have gone supernova, and then the clusters themselves have been torn up again, churning the stars into the Milky Way. This happens in the galaxy’s spiral arms, where the areas of higher density lead to regions of star formation.

So let’s go back, more than 4.6 billion years, before there was an Earth, a Sun, or even a Solar System. Our entire region was gas and dust, probably within one of the spiral arms. Want to know what it looked like? Some of your favorite pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope should help.

Here’s the Orion, Eagle, and the Tarantula Nebulae. These are star forming regions. They’re clouds of hydrogen left over from Big Bang, with dust expended by aging stars, and seeded with heavier elements formed by supernovae.

After a few million years, regions of higher density began forming into stars, both large and small. Let’s take a look at a star-forming nebula again. See the dark knots? Those are newly forming stars surrounded by gas and dust in the stellar nursery.

You’re seeing many many stars, some are enormous monsters, others are more like our Sun, and some smaller red dwarfs. Most will eventually have planets surrounding them - and maybe, eventually life? If this was the environment, where are all those other stars?

Why do I feel so alone? Where are all our brothers and sisters? Where’s all the other stuff that’s in that picture? Where’s all my stuff?

Apparently nature hates a messy room and a cozy stellar nest. The nebula that made the Sun was either absorbed into the stars, or blown away by the powerful stellar winds from the largest stars. Eventually they cleared out the nebula, like a fans blowing out a smoky room.

At the earliest point, our solar nebula looked like the Eagle Nebula, after millions of years, it was more like the Pleiades Star Cluster, with bright stars surrounded by hazy nebulosity. It was the gravitational forces of the Milky Way which tore the members of our solar nursery into a structure like the Hyades Cluster. Finally, gravitational interactions tore our cluster apart, so our sibling stars were lost forever in the churning arms of the Milky Way.

We’ll never know exactly what was here before the Solar System; that evidence has long been blown away into space. But we can see other places in the Milky Way that give us a rough idea of what it might have looked like at various stages in its evolution.

What should we call our original star forming nebula? Give our own nebula a name in the comments below.

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When massive objects crash into each other, there should be a release of gravitational waves. So what are these things and how can we detect them?
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Created by: Fraser Cain and Jason Harmer

Edited by: Chad Weber

Music: Left Spine Down - “X-Ray”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tcoZ...
Who wants to bet against Einstein? You? You? What about you?

Sure, there were a few bumps, but the guy’s track record on relativity is spotless. He explained the strange way that Mercury orbits the Sun. He guessed astronomers would see stars deflected by the Sun’s gravity during a solar eclipse. He predicted that gravity would redshift light, and it took physicists 50 years to finally come up with an experiment to verify it.

Based on his predictions, scientists confirmed galaxies warp light with their gravity, photons get time dilated when they pass near the Sun, and clocks that travel at high speeds experience less time than clocks on Earth.

They’ve even tested gravitational redshift, frame-dragging and the equivalence principle. Which is a word salad we’ll cover in the future, or for those of you who can’t wait, google.

Every time Bertie made a prediction about Relativity, physicists have been able to verify via experimentation. And so, according to this fuzzy man with the giant brain, when massive objects crash into each other, or when black holes form, there should be a release of gravitational waves.

So what are these things and how can we detect them?

First, a quick review. Mass causes a warp in space and time. The Sun’s “gravity” isn’t a pulling force, it’s really an indentation that the Sun causes in the space around itself.

Planets think they’re moving in a straight line, but they’re actually pulled into a circle while traveling through this warped spacetime. Go home planets, you’re drunk.

The idea is when mass moves or changes, Einstein said that there should be gravitational ripples produced in spacetime.

Our problem is that the size and effect of gravitational waves is incredibly small. We need to find the most catastrophic events in the Universe if we hope even detect them.

A supernova detonating asymmetrically, or two supermassive black holes orbiting each other, or a Galactus family reunion; are the magnitude of events we’re looking for.

The most serious attempt to detect gravitational waves is the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO detector, in the United States. It has two facilities separated by 3000 km. Each detector carefully watches for any gravitational waves passing through by the length of time it takes for laser pulses to bounce within a 4km long sealed vacuum.

If a gravitational wave is detected, the two observatories use triangulation to determine its magnitude and direction. At least, that was the plan from 2002 to 2010. The problem was, it didn’t detect any gravitational waves for its entire run.

But hey, this is a job for science. Unbowed, the steely-eyed researchers rebuilt the equipment, improving its sensitivity by a factor of 10. This next round starts in 2015.

Scientists have proposed space-based instruments that could provide more sensitivity and increase the chances of detecting a gravitational wave.

Physicists assume this is a question of “when”, not “if” that gravitational waves will be detected, as only a fool bets against Einstein. Well, that and gravitational waves have already been detected... indirectly.

By watching the extremely regular energy blasts coming from pulsars, astronomers track exactly how quickly they’re radiating their energy away due to gravitational waves. So far, all the observations perfectly match the predictions of relativity. We just haven’t detected those gravitational waves directly… yet.

So, good news! Assuming the physicists and Einstein are right, we should see the detection of a gravitational wave in the next few decades, wrapping up a series of predictions about how insanely strange our Universe behaves.

Should we dig deeper into relativity, Einstein and his predictions? Tell us in the comments below.

When a massive star reaches the end of its life, it can explode as a supernova. How quickly does this process happen?
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Created by: Fraser Cain and Jason Harmer

Edited by: Chad Weber

Music: Left Spine Down - “X-Ray”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tcoZ...
Our Sun will die a slow sad death, billions of years from now when it runs out of magic sunjuice. Sure, it’ll be a dramatic red giant for a bit, but then it’ll settle down as a white dwarf. Build a picket fence, relax on the porch with some refreshing sunjuice lemonade. Gently drifting into its twilight years, and slowly cooling down until it becomes the background temperature of the Universe.

If our Sun had less mass, it would suffer an even slower fate. So then, unsurprisingly, if it had more mass it would die more quickly. In fact, stars with several times the mass of our Sun will die as a supernova, exploding in an instant. Often we talk about things that take billions of years to happen on the Guide to Space. So what about a supernova? Any guesses on how fast that happens?

There are actually several different kinds of supernovae out there, and they have different mechanisms and different durations. But I’m going to focus on a core collapse supernova, the “regular unleaded” of supernovae. Stars between 8 and about 50 times the mass of the Sun exhaust the hydrogen fuel in their cores quickly, in few short million years.

Just like our Sun, they convert hydrogen into helium through fusion, releasing a tremendous amounts of energy which pushes against the star’s gravity trying to collapse in on itself. Once the massive star runs out of hydrogen in its core, it switches to helium, then carbon, then neon, all the way up the periodic table of elements until it reaches iron. The problem is that iron doesn't produce energy through the fusion process, so there’s nothing holding back the mass of the star from collapsing inward.
… and boom, supernova.

The outer edges of the core collapse inward at 70,000 meters per second, about 23% the speed of light. In just a quarter of a second, infalling material bounces off the iron core of the star, creating a shockwave of matter propagating outward. This shockwave can take a couple of hours to reach the surface.

As the wave passes through, it creates exotic new elements the original star could never form in its core. And this is where we get all get rich. All gold, silver, platinum, uranium and anything higher than iron on the periodic table of elements are created here. A supernova will then take a few months to reach its brightest point, potentially putting out as much energy as the rest of its galaxy combined.

Supernova 1987A, named to commemorate the induction of the first woman into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the amazing Aretha Franklin. Well, actually, that’s not true, it was the first supernova we saw in 1987. But we should really name supernovae after things like that. Still, 1987A went off relatively nearby, and took 85 days to reach its peak brightness. Slowly declining over the next 2 years. Powerful telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope can still see the shockwave expanding in space, decades later.

Our “regular flavor” core collapse supernova is just one type of exploding star. The type 1a supernovae are created when a white dwarf star sucks material off a binary partner like a gigantic parasitic twin, until it reaches 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, and then it explodes. In just a few days, these supernovae peak and fade much more rapidly than our core collapse friends.

So, how long does a supernova take to explode? A few million years for the star to die, less than a quarter of a second for its core to collapse, a few hours for the shockwave to reach the surface of the star, a few months to brighten, and then just few years to fade away.

Which star would you like to explode? Tell us in the comments below.

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The strangest feature on Iapetus is the equatorial ridge. What could possibly create a feature like this?
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Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain
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Susie Murph - @susiemmurph
Brian Koberlein - @briankoberlein
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Kevin Gill - @kevinmgill

Created by: Fraser Cain and Jason Harmer

Edited by: Chad Weber

Music: Left Spine Down - “X-Ray”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tcoZ...

To paraphrase the British geneticist J.B.S Haldane, “in my suspicion, the Universe is not only stranger than we suppose, it’s stranger than we can suppose.” The context was life and evolution, but he might as well been talking about Saturn’s moons. Those teeny worlds are some of the strangest places we’ve ever seen.

Titan is a massive moon with an atmosphere thicker than Earth’s. If it wasn’t for the bone crippling cold and unbreathable atmosphere, you could wear a pair of wings and fly around in the Titanic skies.

There’s Enceladus, an icy moon that blasts water out into space through geysers at its southern pole. But the Saturnian moon that fascinates me the most has got to be Iapetus, also known as Saturn’s yin-yang moon.

Here’s a photo captured by Cassini. Check out the bizarre surface features, where half of the moon is icy white and the other is brownish red. Astronomers believe this strange coloration comes from the ice on the warmer side sublimating away, leaving this darker material beneath.

Sure that’s a bit odd, but the strangest feature on Iapetus is the equatorial ridge. This feature measures 1,300 km long and it makes the moon look like a space walnut. Because of the heavy cratering on the ridge, astronomers know that it’s ancient, nearly as old as the moon itself. At 13 kms high, it’s tall enough to keep out the most persnickety white walker or wildling mammoth & giant battalion.

What could possibly create a feature like this?

Astronomers are of a few camps. The first think it formed through convective activity early on in the moon’s history. Saturn pulls Iapetus with its tremendous gravity, and the moon undergoes massive tidal forces. This generates heat in the moon’s interior, and it might have caused it to blob out at the equator.

A second idea is that Iapetus consumed one of Saturn’s rings, billions of years ago. The moon might have slowly wandered through the ring plane, and accreted all the ring material, like snow piling up in front of a plow.

A third is that Iapetus was smashed into by a massive asteroid billions of years ago. This impact caused the moon to fly apart, but then mutual gravity pulled it back together. The force of this recombination squeezed out material at the equator, which then solidified in place.

Alternately, it might be a walnut from a Galactus family Christmas stocking. So which is it?

It turns out that Saturn has two more moons in its system with similar equatorial ridges. Its moon Atlas is just 15 km across, but it’s dominated by an equatorial ridge. It looks like a UFO, and Pan has a similar feature.

Astronomers know that both of these created their ridges by pulling material out of the rings and piling it up on their surface. This is the mechanism that seems to match what’s going on with Iapetus.

One mystery, is how distantly Iapetus orbits Saturn. There’s no ring that far out, so where did it get the material to consume? Is it possible that Iapetus drifted outward, or had a ring system of its own?

You want puzzles? Iapetus is one of the strangest places in the Solar System, and it would be my candidate for a future orbiter or lander. Let’s explore it closer.

What’s your favorite bizarre object in the Solar System? Tell us in the comments below.

Thanks for watching! Never miss an episode by clicking subscribe. Our Patreon community is the reason these shows happen. We’d like to thank Victor Taveras, Alan Orr and the rest of the members who support us in making great space and astronomy content. Members get advance access to episodes, extras, contests, and other shenanigans with Jay, myself and the rest of the team. Want to get in on the action? Click here.

Nothing lasts forever, not even black holes. According to Stephen Hawking, black holes will evaporate over vast periods of time. But how, exactly, does this happen?
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Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain
Jason Harmer - @jasoncharmer
Susie Murph - @susiemmurph
Brian Koberlein - @briankoberlein
Chad Weber - weber.chad@gmail.com
Kevin Gill - @kevinmgill

Created by: Fraser Cain and Jason Harmer

Edited by: Chad Weber

Music: Left Spine Down - “X-Ray”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tcoZ...
The actor Stephen Hawking is best known for his cameo appearances in Futurama and Star Trek, you might surprised to learn that he’s also a theoretical astrophysicist. Is there anything that guy can’t do?

One of the most fascinating theories he came up with is that black holes, the Universe’s swiffer, can actually evaporate over vast periods of time.

Quantum theory suggests there are virtual particles popping in and out of existence all the time. When this happens, a particle and its antiparticle appear, and then they recombine and disappear again.

When this takes place near an event horizon, strange things can happen. Instead of the two particles existing for a moment and then annihilating each other, one particle can fall into the black hole, and the other particle can fly off into space. Over vast periods of time, the theory says that this trickle of escaping particles causes the black hole to evaporate.

Wait, if these virtual particles are falling into the black hole, shouldn't that make it grow more massive? How does that cause it to evaporate? If I add pebbles to a rock pile, doesn't my rock pile just get bigger?

It comes down to perspective. From an outside observer watching the black hole’s event horizon, it appears as if there’s a glow of radiation coming from the black hole. If that was all that was happening, it would violate the law of thermodynamics, as energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Since the black hole is now emitting energy, it needs to have given up a little bit of its mass to provide it.

Let’s try another way to think about this. A black hole has a temperature. The more massive it is, the lower its temperature, although it’s still not zero.

From now and until far off into the future, the temperature of the largest black holes will be colder than the background temperature of the Universe itself. Light from the cosmic microwave background radiation will fall in, increasing its mass.

Now, fast forward to when the background temperature of the Universe drops below even the coolest black holes. Then they’ll slowly radiate heat away, which must come from the black hole converting its mass into energy.

The rate that this happens depends on the mass. For stellar mass black holes, it might take 10^67 years to evaporate completely.

For the big daddy supermassive ones at the cores of galaxies, you’re looking at 10^100. That’s a one, followed by 100 zero years. That’s huge number, but just like any gigantic and finite number, it’s still less than infinity. So over an incomprehensible amount of time, even the longest living objects in the Universe - our mighty black holes - will fade away into energy.

One last thing, the Large Hadron Collider might be capable of generating microscopic black holes, which would last for a fraction of a second and disappear in a burst of Hawking radiation. If they find them, then Hawking might want to the acting on hold and focus on physics.

Nothing is eternal, not even black holes. Over the longest timeframes we’re pretty sure they’ll evaporate away into nothing. The only way to find out is to sit back and watch, well maybe it’s not the only way.

Does the idea of these celestial nightmares evaporating fill you with existential sadness? Feel free to share your thoughts with others in the comments below.

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