Speaker 1: Hey, Jorge, who is the oldest person you know? I
Speaker 1: have a couple of uncles that are in their late eighties.
Speaker 1: I think that's about as old as it gets in
Speaker 1: my family. That's pretty good. They must have eaten a
Speaker 1: lot of bananas or zero bananas, whichever is best. I
Speaker 1: can't keep trying. May either been at a neutral What
Speaker 1: about you? My grandmother, my mom's mom is a hundred
Speaker 1: and five years old and she still beats me at scrabble. Wow,
Speaker 1: what's her secret? I think she just likes beating people
Speaker 1: at scrabble, and that's what keeps her alive. I guess
Speaker 1: what age comes wisdom and a very large vocabulary. Hi
Speaker 1: am orgem a cartoonists and the creator of PhD Comics. Hi.
Speaker 1: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and my kids think
Speaker 1: I'm pretty old, but I feel young at heart. Welcome
Speaker 1: to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio in which we talk about
Speaker 1: all the amazing things in the universe, the new stuff,
Speaker 1: the old stuff, the close stuff, the far away stuff.
Speaker 1: We talk about everything you want to hear about. We
Speaker 1: break it down, we explain it to you in a
Speaker 1: way that we hope also makes you laugh. It's right,
Speaker 1: we talk about the boring stuff in the universe, but
Speaker 1: we also like to talk about the extreme stuff in
Speaker 1: the universe, the things that are pushing the boundaries of
Speaker 1: what is possible in this crazy cosmos. That's right because
Speaker 1: the extremes tell us about what the rules are. How
Speaker 1: hot can something possibly get, how cold can something be,
Speaker 1: how fast can it's been? What is the brightest possible thing?
Speaker 1: Because usually when we look at the extremes is when
Speaker 1: we learned about something new in the universe, we say, wow,
Speaker 1: we didn't realize it was possible to shoot particles at
Speaker 1: that high energy the Earth. What could be doing that?
Speaker 1: So that's why it's a lot of fun to look
Speaker 1: at the most extreme stuff in the universe. And so
Speaker 1: we have a series of episodes dealing with the most
Speaker 1: of a lot of things in the universe. If you
Speaker 1: look back to our archive, you can listen to episodes
Speaker 1: about the biggest thing in the universe, the brightest things
Speaker 1: in the universe, the darkest things in the universe. And
Speaker 1: so today we'll have an episode about one such extremes.
Speaker 1: Are are are we giving out awards? Should we be like
Speaker 1: making trophies and handing them out to astrophysical objects, and
Speaker 1: we we can send them as certificate, like an email certificate.
Speaker 1: Maybe just being the subject of a whole podcast episode
Speaker 1: is enough reward for them. Yeah, they can listen under CV,
Speaker 1: or they can put a little like logo next to
Speaker 1: their cover or something that says they were featured in
Speaker 1: our podcast. That's right. I'm sure the supercluster we're in
Speaker 1: is always emailing at CV around the universe. And by
Speaker 1: the way, did you know I was the subject of
Speaker 1: a podcast? What do you think the email addresses everywhere
Speaker 1: everywhere at everything dot com. That's right. But even if
Speaker 1: nobody is interested in winning these prizes, we are interested
Speaker 1: in exploring them and talking about them because they're super fun.
Speaker 1: Not only because it teaches us something about the universe,
Speaker 1: but because these are the wow factors. These are the
Speaker 1: reasons why the universe is amazing, because things are super
Speaker 1: big and super hot and super fast and super spinny
Speaker 1: and super everything. And so today on the program, we'll
Speaker 1: be asking the question, what is the oldest thing in
Speaker 1: the universe? The oldest thing, not the oldest person. We
Speaker 1: already determined that's her grandmother. No, she's she's like twenty
Speaker 1: something years away from being the oldest person. The oldest
Speaker 1: person is like almost a hundred and thirty. It's ridiculous.
Speaker 1: For real, Yeah, for real, Yeah, I think it was
Speaker 1: like some old French lady. Don't you remember? There was
Speaker 1: a guy when she was in her eighties. He bought
Speaker 1: her apartment for some really low price under the deal
Speaker 1: that she could live in it until she died. He
Speaker 1: figured she was going to expire in a few years,
Speaker 1: but then she outlived him, and she lived to one
Speaker 1: twenty something and he died in his eighties, never having
Speaker 1: moved into the apartment that he purchased. It's amazing. I'd
Speaker 1: love to see that person plays grapple with your grandmother.
Speaker 1: What do you think would win? I don't know. I
Speaker 1: think there'd be a lot of cheating. I guess who's
Speaker 1: going to call them out right? Exactly exactly. But I
Speaker 1: think this is a really fun question because it makes
Speaker 1: you think about the early days of the universe and
Speaker 1: like what God formed first and then what's still around.
Speaker 1: And it's also makes you understand like the grand sweep
Speaker 1: of time. You know, a hundred deers seems like a
Speaker 1: long time for us humans. But it's the blink of
Speaker 1: an eye. Cosmologically, our universe has been around for billions
Speaker 1: of years, and so it's it's fun to think about
Speaker 1: those things that just exist on a completely different scale.
Speaker 1: And I guess we need to get a little bit
Speaker 1: philosophical here, because you know, this sort of opens up
Speaker 1: a couple of questions. First of all, what do you
Speaker 1: mean by the oldest thing in the universe? And I
Speaker 1: guess do you mean the oldest surviving thing in the universe.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a whole branch of philosophy, you know,
Speaker 1: thing is um what is a thing? What defines a thing?
Speaker 1: What isn't the thing? What makes something two things? Is
Speaker 1: that a thing? Really? In philosophy? No, I just made
Speaker 1: that up. We just founded a whole new branch of
Speaker 1: philosophy right here on the podcast. It's the newest thing
Speaker 1: in the universe, the latest thing. We should put a
Speaker 1: sticker in ourselves saying, I philosophies. Yeah, it is an
Speaker 1: interesting question. What do you call a thing? You have
Speaker 1: to go through several categories and talk about what is
Speaker 1: the oldest for various answers of the question what do
Speaker 1: you mean by a thing? All? Right, well as usual,
Speaker 1: we were wondering how many people out there thought they
Speaker 1: knew what is the oldest thing in the universe? So
Speaker 1: I solicited volunteers to answer questions without doing any research,
Speaker 1: off the top of your head, answer a hard physics
Speaker 1: question from a dude on the Internet, and of course
Speaker 1: people were happy to oblige. So thank you to everybody
Speaker 1: who participated, And if you would like to answer random
Speaker 1: future physics questions, please write to me at questions at
Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge dot com. Before you listen to these answers,
Speaker 1: think about it for a second. If someone ask you
Speaker 1: what is the oldest thing in the universe, what would
Speaker 1: you answer. Here's what people had to say. Maybe as
Speaker 1: some proton it is a fortune thing. The oldest thing
Speaker 1: in the universe, from what I understanding, would be the
Speaker 1: leftover resident cosmic microwave radiation after the initial Big Bang.
Speaker 1: But if you're looking for an actual object or a thing,
Speaker 1: I believe primordial black holes, I'm thinking cosmic background radiation.
Speaker 1: I think the oldest thing in the universe um is CMD.
Speaker 1: That's what we can observe at least after that. I
Speaker 1: think it is cluster of Alexi cluster, which is about
Speaker 1: twelve and a half million years old. I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: with space. How about that? Wow, tough question. Maybe black holes.
Speaker 1: So I would say the oldest thing in the universe
Speaker 1: would be quirks. But if you mean by something that
Speaker 1: actually gets assembled, then I would say hydrogen. If you
Speaker 1: don't mean an object, then I would say a primordial
Speaker 1: black hole. I'm not entirely sure what the oldest thing
Speaker 1: in the universe is. I know that after the Big
Speaker 1: bag Um, as far as we know, that was just
Speaker 1: plasma and quantum fluctuations. There weren't particles at that point um.
Speaker 1: These quantum fluctuations we think may have caused primordial black holes.
Speaker 1: So perhaps that's the oldest thing in the universe. Man,
Speaker 1: there are some good answers there. Huh yeah, Wow, it's
Speaker 1: been impressed. Some of these made me think, like, a
Speaker 1: proton is a protonon of thing? I'm like, huh is
Speaker 1: it a thing? If you asked the protein, it would
Speaker 1: say it's definitely a thing, or it's like space. Somebody
Speaker 1: said space like a space the thing? And could that
Speaker 1: be all their than anything else. Yeah, that's a really
Speaker 1: good question because you might then think, well, is the
Speaker 1: universe a thing? Right, what's the oldest thing in the universe.
Speaker 1: It's the universe Boom podcast over everything whatever, everything is
Speaker 1: that that was there from the beginning of everything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you might say everything is definitely a thing because
Speaker 1: it has the word thing in it, But then nothing
Speaker 1: is not a thing and it has the word thing
Speaker 1: in it. So now I'm overthinking it or overthinking it.
Speaker 1: I think you're trying to win a scrabble here. It
Speaker 1: sounds like trying to argue what a word is. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's interesting to think about what is the
Speaker 1: oldest thing because there is sort of an age to
Speaker 1: the universe. That's right. When we look out to the universe,
Speaker 1: we see that everything is rushing away from us, that
Speaker 1: the universe is getting less and less dense. It's spreading out,
Speaker 1: and when you run the clock backwards, everything compresses and
Speaker 1: get back to some like original really high dense point.
Speaker 1: And we have an age for that. We can project
Speaker 1: that backwards in time, and it's about fourteen billion years
Speaker 1: ago when everything was really hot and dense. Of course,
Speaker 1: we don't really know what happens then our theories breakdown
Speaker 1: at that moment. We don't know if there was a
Speaker 1: singularity or something came before it or whatever. But that's
Speaker 1: generally considered roughly to be the approximate age of the
Speaker 1: whole universe just under fourteen billion years, fourteen billion years young,
Speaker 1: and you could be fourteen billion years young. This could
Speaker 1: be like the first moments of the universe on the
Speaker 1: trillions or quadrillion years life cycle of the universe. Right,
Speaker 1: we don't know how far down the road we've walked.
Speaker 1: It seems like a long time, but then again, after
Speaker 1: ten million years it might have seemed like a long time.
Speaker 1: And we know now that that's only just the first blip,
Speaker 1: So we don't really know if we're like looking at
Speaker 1: most of the iceberg or just the tip of it. Right,
Speaker 1: it's like a teenager. They feel like they've lived a
Speaker 1: whole life and everything there's to know about everything. Everything
Speaker 1: the universe knows nothing man, wait till it grows up.
Speaker 1: But yeah, how sure are we that's the age of
Speaker 1: the universe? I know we can we get it from,
Speaker 1: you know, rewinding the trajectory of space and the expansion
Speaker 1: of the universe, But is there any ambiguity about that? Like,
Speaker 1: how sure we couldn't be that the universe didn't do
Speaker 1: what we think it did, you know what I mean, like,
Speaker 1: maybe it didn't compress smoothly from what we've see right now, Well,
Speaker 1: we can see pretty well back in the history of
Speaker 1: the universe. We don't just project, we can actually see
Speaker 1: the history of the universe as we look out into space.
Speaker 1: Remember that it takes light a long time to get
Speaker 1: here from other places, so things that happened a long
Speaker 1: time ago really far away, that light is just now
Speaker 1: arriving at Earth. So we can literally see the history
Speaker 1: of the universe and we can record its expansion, and
Speaker 1: so we're pretty sure about the history of the expansion
Speaker 1: of the universe. What we're not sure about is what
Speaker 1: that represents. That moment fourteen billion years ago. Was it
Speaker 1: really a beginning? Was it just like the start of
Speaker 1: cycle number four and fifty two? Is there an infinite
Speaker 1: number of cycles before that? Did the universe space assemble
Speaker 1: from something else, some deeper quantum foam. We don't really
Speaker 1: understand and whether we can call that a beginning, But
Speaker 1: we know there was a special moment about fourteen billion
Speaker 1: years ago. And how certain are we We haven't nailed
Speaker 1: down to within about a hundred million years. Wow, that
Speaker 1: is very specific. It's pretty specific, but it's also a
Speaker 1: big range. You know, like if somebody said to you, hey,
Speaker 1: I'll meet you tomorrow at three pm plus or mind
Speaker 1: is a hundred million years, that wouldn't feel very specific,
Speaker 1: but that would be hard to sing happy birthday about.
Speaker 1: But if someone said, you know, you're a hundred years
Speaker 1: old plus or mine is a couple of days, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. But I guess my question is how far
Speaker 1: back can we see, Like can we actually see things
Speaker 1: back that long? Or is this is it all sort
Speaker 1: of based on a projection? Now we can see that
Speaker 1: far back in time. If you look at stuff near
Speaker 1: our galaxy, you know, we're in the Milky Way, and
Speaker 1: the neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, is like millions of light years away.
Speaker 1: So when you're looking at Andromeda, you're seeing what happened,
Speaker 1: what it looked like millions of years ago. That's the
Speaker 1: closest galaxy, that's like our immediate neighbor, and that's millions
Speaker 1: of light years away. Then if you look further out,
Speaker 1: like billions of light years, you get to these big structures.
Speaker 1: Because galaxies form themselves into superclusters, and those superclusters are
Speaker 1: organized into sheets that encompass these vast voids, these bubbles,
Speaker 1: and one of them, for example, is called the Sloane
Speaker 1: Great Wall, one of the first of these really big
Speaker 1: structures to be discovered, and it's about a billion light
Speaker 1: years away. A great wall of stars or galaxies, a
Speaker 1: great wall of galaxy superclusters, right, So stars are formed
Speaker 1: into galaxies, galaxies are formed into clusters, Galaxy clusters are
Speaker 1: formed into superclusters, and then those are organized into these walls,
Speaker 1: these sheets that wrap around these bubbles. I wonder who
Speaker 1: paid for that, Danny. It's a lot of dry wall
Speaker 1: and a lot of paint. Who picked those colors? Right?
Speaker 1: With their galactic arguments about which shade of green or
Speaker 1: which shade of red to burn, which spectrum of the
Speaker 1: electromagnetic radiation it's going to give off, So that that's
Speaker 1: a billion light years away. That's billion light years away,
Speaker 1: and then we can look further out, and it becomes
Speaker 1: hard earned harder to look further out because these things
Speaker 1: are more distant, and so you need more powerful telescopes,
Speaker 1: or you need to focus those telescopes for a longer time.
Speaker 1: And that's like the reason we don't have a great
Speaker 1: map of the entire universe so far is just that
Speaker 1: that light is distant and dim, and so you need
Speaker 1: a lot of telescopes looking at it. But we do
Speaker 1: see some individual galaxies, like the hubble points itself in
Speaker 1: one direction of space and just sort of like accumulates
Speaker 1: photons for days and days and days. Then you can
Speaker 1: see the dimmest galaxies, the ones where photons are arriving
Speaker 1: most rarely because they've spread out through the whole universe.
Speaker 1: And there we can see galaxies that are like more
Speaker 1: than thirteen billion light years away. Wow, that's almost the
Speaker 1: age of the universe. It's almost the age of the universe,
Speaker 1: which means something amazing and fascinating, right. It means that
Speaker 1: galaxies formed very early on in the universe. For example,
Speaker 1: the oldest known galaxy is one called g n Z eleven.
Speaker 1: It's thirteen point four billion light years away. That means
Speaker 1: that it's formed just a few hundred million years after
Speaker 1: the start of the whole universe. Well, and the images
Speaker 1: we're seeing of that galaxy, it looks like it did
Speaker 1: thirteen billion years ago, right, Yes, we're seeing baby pictures
Speaker 1: of that galaxy, Like we don't know what's going on
Speaker 1: with that galaxy today. Does it even still exist, did
Speaker 1: it leave home, did it get a job, did it
Speaker 1: have a big argument with his parents? We don't know,
Speaker 1: But the baby pictures are what are arriving now at Earth.
Speaker 1: And if we waited another ten billion years or so,
Speaker 1: we would see the future of that galaxy, what happened
Speaker 1: to it, and everything that subsequently occurred. But right now
Speaker 1: we're only seeing the original light that left thirteen billion
Speaker 1: years and when it was and it looks like a
Speaker 1: fully formed galaxy, like you can see the structure in it.
Speaker 1: And even though it's that young, what I mean is
Speaker 1: it doesn't look lumpy and wrinkled like a baby. It
Speaker 1: doesn't look lumpy and wrinkled like galaxy in the very
Speaker 1: early universe do look different than galaxies today. A lot
Speaker 1: of galaxies we have today are really big because they're
Speaker 1: the product of galaxy mergers. Many galaxies come together in
Speaker 1: a lot out of the spiral galaxies are the product
Speaker 1: of the mergers of several galaxies. So this looks like
Speaker 1: a younger galaxy and it's a great way to study
Speaker 1: the very early universe. Like these infrared telescopes that we
Speaker 1: have and that we're sending up soon are going to
Speaker 1: be great at looking at this light from the really
Speaker 1: really oldest galaxies, the ones that don't glow as much. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: we can use this to study galaxies at the very
Speaker 1: early age. And they do look a little different, like
Speaker 1: galaxies looked different in the very beginning of the universe
Speaker 1: than they do today. You see. I guess the question is,
Speaker 1: and have we seen any stars that old or I
Speaker 1: guess I mean, if you look at the galaxy, you're
Speaker 1: looking at the stars in it, so you're sort of
Speaker 1: looking at really old stars too. Yeah, we are looking
Speaker 1: at old stars. But there's sort of three populations of stars.
Speaker 1: There's the stars that are around today, and most of
Speaker 1: these have formed from the collapse of the previous generation
Speaker 1: of stars, and those stars formed from the collapse of
Speaker 1: the previous generation of stars. Remember, stars happen when you
Speaker 1: have a bunch of gas and stuff gathered together by
Speaker 1: gravity enough so that they burn. And we think that
Speaker 1: the first generation of stars formed fairly early in the universe,
Speaker 1: but they were really big, and really big stars burn
Speaker 1: really really hot, and so they don't last for very long.
Speaker 1: And so that population of stars we haven't ever seen.
Speaker 1: We haven't seen any stars from that time. But if
Speaker 1: we're seeing a galaxy from that time, aren't we seeing
Speaker 1: the stars from that time too, Or are you saying
Speaker 1: we haven't seen like an individual pinpoint of light that
Speaker 1: is one of the oldest stars. We haven't seen an
Speaker 1: individual pin point of light. But also we think that
Speaker 1: this galaxy has stars from the second population. We think
Speaker 1: that first population didn't live long enough in this galaxy.
Speaker 1: It lived less than a billion years, less than a
Speaker 1: billion years. Those stars did not last for a billion years.
Speaker 1: They were really big and hot and burned very quickly,
Speaker 1: so we haven't seen any direct evidence of those stars yet.
Speaker 1: Those are called population three stars. Wow, they burned out
Speaker 1: in less than a billion years, less than a billion years,
Speaker 1: absolutely just out of hydrogen, just out of hygen and
Speaker 1: the keys that they're really big and really big stars
Speaker 1: burned really hot and really fast, and so those are
Speaker 1: all gone. And that's an interesting point because those stars
Speaker 1: were created a long time ago, but they're no longer around.
Speaker 1: So they were created in the early universe, but they
Speaker 1: don't exist anymore, so they're not really old because they're gone.
Speaker 1: I see. So galaxy g n Z eleven is thirteen
Speaker 1: point four billion light years away, which means it's thirteen
Speaker 1: point four billion years old. So is that the oldest
Speaker 1: thing in the universe? We don't know if it's thirteen
Speaker 1: point four billion years old. We know it existed thirteen
Speaker 1: point four billion years ago, we don't know what it's
Speaker 1: doing today. Right. It's like if you look at a
Speaker 1: baby picture from somebody from a hundred years ago, you
Speaker 1: don't know if they lived till two or five or
Speaker 1: a hundred. So they could be the oldest person alive
Speaker 1: if they were still around today, but you don't know,
Speaker 1: you're just looking at the baby picture. I see a
Speaker 1: lot of people when they think about, you know, what
Speaker 1: is the oldest thing in the universe, they are tempted
Speaker 1: to think really far away, really distant in time. But
Speaker 1: we don't know if those things are still around. I see,
Speaker 1: we're asking what's the oldest thing that is still around? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you're not old if you didn't live very long. Right,
Speaker 1: somebody was born two hundred years ago and died ten
Speaker 1: minutes later, isn't the oldest person in the world? Right? Oh? Interesting,
Speaker 1: I guess I guess what would happen? What could have happened?
Speaker 1: To that galaxy. Like galaxies just don't disappear. Galaxies don't disappear,
Speaker 1: that's true. They get absorbed into other galaxies sometimes or
Speaker 1: they get torn apart by other galaxies that come near them.
Speaker 1: You know, there can be a lot of gravitational turbulence,
Speaker 1: so that galaxy may not exist on its own anymore
Speaker 1: and may have been absorbed by collisions into other galaxies,
Speaker 1: or it could have gone shredded, yeah, by other galaxies
Speaker 1: coming nearby and the gravitational tidal forces. It's a dangerous universe.
Speaker 1: When you send your galaxies out there into the wild,
Speaker 1: you don't know what's going to happen. And make sure
Speaker 1: they look both ways before crossing the universal streets. All right,
Speaker 1: let's talk about what is still around and what might
Speaker 1: be the oldest thing in the universe still alive today.
Speaker 1: But first it's take a quick break. All right, we're
Speaker 1: talking about what is the oldest thing in the universe,
Speaker 1: and so Daniel, we were talking about a galaxy that
Speaker 1: was around thirteen point four billion light years away, But
Speaker 1: you're saying that's not necessarily something that is still around today,
Speaker 1: meaning that like what we're looking at is stuff that
Speaker 1: was in the past, but we can't tell if it's
Speaker 1: still around today. Yeah exactly. We don't know what's going
Speaker 1: on really far away right now because it's going to
Speaker 1: take that light another thirteen billion years to get here.
Speaker 1: So if we want to talk about what the oldest
Speaker 1: thing in the universe is, we need to look at
Speaker 1: stuff that's kind of nearby to us, that's kind of
Speaker 1: close so it doesn't take the light so long to
Speaker 1: get here, so we can see it that it's still around.
Speaker 1: But it feels like a you know, like a loophole
Speaker 1: or like a paradox almost, like you know, we can
Speaker 1: only tell if it's old by looking at it, but
Speaker 1: we can only confirm how old it is if the
Speaker 1: light is old that we're seeing of it. Do you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? Well, if there was something that
Speaker 1: was created in the very early universe nearby and still around,
Speaker 1: and we could somehow measure its age, then that could
Speaker 1: be crowned as the oldest thing in the universe. It
Speaker 1: wouldn't take light very long to get here from it
Speaker 1: because it'd be nearby. I see. We have to see
Speaker 1: something old, is what you're saying, Yes, exactly, and not
Speaker 1: just a really old picture of it. Yeah, we want
Speaker 1: something around now that's old, not just old information about
Speaker 1: something that existed a long time ago, which might not
Speaker 1: be around anymore. You see. It's not like you're trying
Speaker 1: to ask, what is the oldest baby picture of a
Speaker 1: person you can find. You're trying to ask like, who
Speaker 1: is the oldest French lady living in an apartment that
Speaker 1: we can talk to today? Exactly? And both are fascinating questions.
Speaker 1: And I want to see the oldest baby picture ever.
Speaker 1: That's actually a really cool question. What is the oldest
Speaker 1: baby picture? Who was the first baby to ever be photographed?
Speaker 1: I don't even know the answer to that. And that's
Speaker 1: why we do look really far away to look back
Speaker 1: in time, because we want to know the original history
Speaker 1: of the universe. But that doesn't tell us who's still
Speaker 1: around today. So yeah, I want to see the astrophysical
Speaker 1: equivalent of the oldest French lady. All right, So let's
Speaker 1: start in our neighborhood. I guess in our galaxy, what's
Speaker 1: the oldest I don't know, star or cloud that we
Speaker 1: can see. Yeah, things get pretty old right around in
Speaker 1: our neighborhood. Now, our star is only about five billion
Speaker 1: years old. It's formed just under five billion years ago
Speaker 1: from collapse of a big cloud of gas and dust
Speaker 1: and bits of other stars. Right, that's about five billion
Speaker 1: years ago, But the Milky Way itself is much older,
Speaker 1: and there are older stars right here in our Milky Way,
Speaker 1: much much older. How old are we to, Well, what's
Speaker 1: the oldest star we can see here in our galaxy? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a star here that goes by the awesome aime
Speaker 1: of h D one zero to eight three, and at
Speaker 1: least it's you know, that's a big plus twenty years ago.
Speaker 1: We're trying to upgrade it to four K but it
Speaker 1: costs a lot of money and it has a really
Speaker 1: weird age. So, you know, the universe is just under
Speaker 1: fourteen billion years old, this star is fourteen and a
Speaker 1: half billion years old, which is weird, Like, what, yeah,
Speaker 1: how can the star be older than the universe. Well,
Speaker 1: it turns out there's a big uncertainty on that measurement.
Speaker 1: It's fourteen and a half plus or minus point eight
Speaker 1: billion years, so it's almost a billion years of uncertainty.
Speaker 1: But it's super wow. Wait, and it's right here in
Speaker 1: our backyard. Yeah, it's only two hundred light years away.
Speaker 1: It's like pretty close by. It's one of the closer
Speaker 1: stars in our galaxy, and it's the oldest star we've
Speaker 1: seen in the galaxy. Wow, or maybe ever? Is it possible? Ever? Yes, absolutely,
Speaker 1: it's one of the oldest stars known in the universe.
Speaker 1: Of course, it's much easier to measure the age of
Speaker 1: stars in our galaxy than in other galaxies. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's one of the oldest stars in our galaxy and
Speaker 1: in the universe it's crazy old. Yeah, because we we
Speaker 1: can't really see stars in other galaxies, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: unless it's like a supernova or something super duper bright.
Speaker 1: But generally speaking, you know, most of the stars that
Speaker 1: you've seen in the night sky are in the galaxy. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: You can if you have a very powerful telescope sometimes
Speaker 1: resolve stars and other galaxies, as you say, if they're
Speaker 1: very very bright. But most of the stars we're looking
Speaker 1: at the constellations, for example, this is just the rest
Speaker 1: of the Milky Way. We're embedded in it, and as
Speaker 1: we look out into the night sky, those are the
Speaker 1: stars we see. And this star here is really old
Speaker 1: and it's lasted a long time because it's pretty small,
Speaker 1: like these stars don't burn very quickly. A really big
Speaker 1: star burns really fast, and a really small star burns
Speaker 1: much slower, and so it can sort of like stretch
Speaker 1: its fuel out much longer. It just sits there, simmering,
Speaker 1: simmering and anger and being small. Exactly, it's grumpy and
Speaker 1: even it literally comes from a previous generation of stars,
Speaker 1: Like our sun is made out of the destroyed bits
Speaker 1: of this second generation stars. So there was the first
Speaker 1: generation that burned really quickly, then the second generation that
Speaker 1: had a little bit of heavier metals in them from
Speaker 1: the remnants of that first generation, and then our star
Speaker 1: is born in the third generation of stars, the remnants
Speaker 1: of the second generation. This one h D whatever is
Speaker 1: actually still from that second generation of stars. It's still around,
Speaker 1: and so it's it's pretty old. It's I feel like
Speaker 1: it's a fourteen point five billion years old. It's almost
Speaker 1: as old as the universe itself. Is it older than
Speaker 1: the Milky Way, Then it's almost as old as the
Speaker 1: universe itself. You're exactly right. We don't know if it's
Speaker 1: older than the Milky Way. We know the Milky Way
Speaker 1: is about thirteen and a half billion years old. It's
Speaker 1: almost as old as the universe. It's a galaxy that
Speaker 1: formed very very early on, so like it's as old
Speaker 1: as that galaxy we talked about g n Z eleven
Speaker 1: that's thirteen and a half billion light years away. We
Speaker 1: have pictures of that one from when it was forming
Speaker 1: the thirteen and a half billion years ago. But our
Speaker 1: galaxy was also forming thirteen and a half billion years ago,
Speaker 1: so we live in an ancient neighborhood. It's almost like
Speaker 1: the star was around when the galaxy was formed, when
Speaker 1: the Milky Way was being born. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: there's a bit of a definitional question there because galaxies
Speaker 1: are formed from stars as they come together. And we
Speaker 1: talked to the podcast once about how the structure of
Speaker 1: the universe formed and how it's influenced by dark matter,
Speaker 1: and we're pretty sure that the structure forms bottom up,
Speaker 1: that you know, stars collapse and then are gathered together
Speaker 1: into galaxies rather than like huge sheets of matter breaking
Speaker 1: off into chunks which then separate into galaxies and separate
Speaker 1: into stars. So we think it's stars before galaxies that
Speaker 1: like galaxies are formed out of stars that have coalesced
Speaker 1: from early blobs of gas and dust. All right, So
Speaker 1: this planet may have been around when all that was
Speaker 1: happening in our galaxy. But I guess the question is,
Speaker 1: how do we know how old this star is? Mean,
Speaker 1: it's just a big ball of simmering resentment or fire.
Speaker 1: How can you tell how old it is? I mean,
Speaker 1: does it look different than it did billion years ago?
Speaker 1: You can tell by how well it plays scrabble. Actually
Speaker 1: that's pretty good predictor. You know, it's really hard to
Speaker 1: measure the age of one star. It's very difficult because stars,
Speaker 1: when they burn, like our sun, look mostly the same
Speaker 1: from most of their lifetime. Like our son. We expect
Speaker 1: to have about a ten billion year lifetime. We're about
Speaker 1: halfway through it, and it's not going to look very
Speaker 1: different now and in a billion years and in four
Speaker 1: billion years. It looks pretty different at the very beginning
Speaker 1: as it's forming, and it's pretty exciting stuff happens at
Speaker 1: the end when it's fizzling out. But in that intermediate time,
Speaker 1: it's really hard to nail down the age of a
Speaker 1: star just by looking at it. But wait, how so then,
Speaker 1: how can we tell how old our star is? Yeah? So,
Speaker 1: mostly the way we tell the age of stars is
Speaker 1: not by telling the age of individual stars. But by
Speaker 1: looking at star clusters groups of stars, because we think
Speaker 1: that they are formed together, that like these big clouds
Speaker 1: of gas and dust smashed together or something happens to
Speaker 1: trigger star formation, and you get these clusters of stars
Speaker 1: that are all the same age. Now, you can't tell
Speaker 1: the individual age of a starter easily, so how could
Speaker 1: you tell the age of a whole cluster. Well, the
Speaker 1: cool thing about a cluster is that it has stars
Speaker 1: of different sizes, as bigger ones and smaller ones. So
Speaker 1: if it gets old enough, then you start to see
Speaker 1: a few of those stars burn out. They go from
Speaker 1: like being a normal star to being like a red
Speaker 1: giant in the last phases of their life. And when
Speaker 1: that happens, you can measure the age of a star.
Speaker 1: You can measure it when it's starting to fizzle out. Oh,
Speaker 1: I see, but you don't actually see it fizzle out.
Speaker 1: You just see like if you see a red giant.
Speaker 1: You know that red giants don't last very long, so
Speaker 1: it must have happened recently. Yeah, exactly. So you look
Speaker 1: at a whole group of stars and you look at
Speaker 1: this population, you say, oh, some of them have started
Speaker 1: to fall off onto this red giant track, and once
Speaker 1: you look at that star, you can see how big
Speaker 1: it is, and then you can tell how bright it's burning,
Speaker 1: like how fast it was using its fuel, And now
Speaker 1: that you know it's turned off on the Red Giant track,
Speaker 1: give an idea of how long it took to burn
Speaker 1: that fuel, so you can figure out like, okay, it
Speaker 1: must be seven billion years old or something, and then
Speaker 1: you can look at the whole cluster and say, oh,
Speaker 1: the whole cluster is about seven billion years old. Even
Speaker 1: though most of the stars individually you can't really tell
Speaker 1: anything about them because they're just burning happily. Still. Clusters
Speaker 1: do have signs of aging, but stars don't. So then
Speaker 1: how do we know that this particular star HD one
Speaker 1: four oh to eight three is fourteen and a half
Speaker 1: billion years old? Well, we don't know it very well.
Speaker 1: And the reason is that it's not part of a cluster.
Speaker 1: It's just like out there on its own, called these
Speaker 1: field stars. They're just like loners, you know, and a
Speaker 1: loner star it's really hard to tell its age. We
Speaker 1: have some ways of doing it, like we have models
Speaker 1: for how stars age as they get older. You know,
Speaker 1: they change their spin rate for example, or the color
Speaker 1: changes a little bit. But these methods are much less reliable,
Speaker 1: much less precise than looking at a whole star cluster.
Speaker 1: And that's why there's so much uncertainty, Like fourteen and
Speaker 1: a half plus or minus point eight is a big uncertainty,
Speaker 1: And the reason is that it's by itself. We have
Speaker 1: to use these models and make a lot of theoretical
Speaker 1: assumptions about how stars look. So that's why we're not
Speaker 1: so sure. I see, I see. We just think it's
Speaker 1: fourteen and a halfpenion years old from what we can
Speaker 1: tell of it. Yeah, you know, we see a bunch
Speaker 1: of wrinkles and we think, wow, that looks like an
Speaker 1: old star. If it was hanging out with all of
Speaker 1: its friends and half of them had died already, would
Speaker 1: be more confident that it was really old. But we
Speaker 1: can't really pin it down as well. Maybe that's a
Speaker 1: secret to old age. Daniel don't don't have any friends.
Speaker 1: That's a secret to looking old. Maybe that's the track
Speaker 1: I'm on. All right, Well, let's get into bigger things
Speaker 1: and maybe older things in our galaxy. But first let's
Speaker 1: take another quick break. All right, we're talking about the
Speaker 1: old thing in the universe, and Daniel. Why I think
Speaker 1: we mean like an organization of matter, because there is
Speaker 1: matter in the universe that is still around from the
Speaker 1: Big Bang, right, Like, like protons and electrons were all
Speaker 1: sort of born in the Big Bang. Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff left over from the Big Bang. And
Speaker 1: so if you call protons a thing or electrons a thing,
Speaker 1: then some of those could be almost as old as
Speaker 1: the universe. Remember the very first moments of the universe,
Speaker 1: there weren't protons and electrons and particles, and the way
Speaker 1: we think about them, things were so hot and so
Speaker 1: dense and so crazy. There was so much energy slashing
Speaker 1: around in the field that didn't really like get discretized
Speaker 1: and localized into what we think of now as particles.
Speaker 1: It's like you had an ocean. You don't think about
Speaker 1: any individual marine drops, right. And for the most part,
Speaker 1: electrons and protons, which are made out of orcs, they
Speaker 1: don't really disappear or appear all of a sudden, right Like.
Speaker 1: They hang around. They might change from being a star
Speaker 1: to being dust to being people. But pretty much the
Speaker 1: things were made out of have been around maybe since
Speaker 1: the Big Bang, Yeah, exactly. Now you can annihilate a
Speaker 1: proton or an electron. We smash a lot of protons
Speaker 1: every day at the Large Adron Collider, and electrons. If
Speaker 1: they hit a positron, they can turn into a photon,
Speaker 1: so it's possible to kill them. They're not immortal in
Speaker 1: that way, but on their own they are a stable.
Speaker 1: You have an electron just sitting in space, it will
Speaker 1: stay there as an electron forever, and the same we
Speaker 1: think for a proton. So you're right that some of
Speaker 1: the protons and electrons in us may be as old
Speaker 1: as any particle in the universe. That could be the
Speaker 1: first generation of particles ever made. Can you imagine me
Speaker 1: in a proton that old, like you've survived fifteen billion
Speaker 1: years and then only to be sucked into a particle
Speaker 1: collider by some physicists and then be killed that way.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'd rather be in an excitement of
Speaker 1: a particle collider than like end up as somebody's tone
Speaker 1: nail or both. I mean, if you get to do both,
Speaker 1: that might be better. Well, we are working on a
Speaker 1: tonail collider, so yeah, you could be both. That would
Speaker 1: be quite a feat. Oh, I don't know what to
Speaker 1: say to that. You just put your foot in my mouth.
Speaker 1: All right, So that star might be the oldest thing
Speaker 1: that we know about, or it may not, because there's
Speaker 1: a big uncertainty about it. But what else we think
Speaker 1: is maybe as old or older than this star in
Speaker 1: our galaxy? Well, there are black holes, right. Black holes
Speaker 1: are fascinating mysterious objects we'd like to understand better. There
Speaker 1: are ones at the centers of our galaxy. There are
Speaker 1: individuals stellar black holes floating around. And then there's the
Speaker 1: possibility that there are primordial black holes. Black holes formed
Speaker 1: in the first moments of the Big Bang, maybe even
Speaker 1: before protons were made. Wow, wait, what black hole? That's
Speaker 1: that are older than particles, older than particles. We had
Speaker 1: a whole fun episode about primordial black holes. And remember
Speaker 1: that the very early universe things were hot and dense,
Speaker 1: and we talked about why there wasn't just like a
Speaker 1: whole universe size black hole in the very big ending,
Speaker 1: because you need like localized pockets of over density for
Speaker 1: stuff to gather together to make a black hole. You
Speaker 1: can't just have the whole universe be a black hole.
Speaker 1: But after things spread out a little bit, that's exactly
Speaker 1: what you had. You had pockets of very dense matter
Speaker 1: that were more dense than the neighboring stuff, and so
Speaker 1: it's possible that some of those formed black holes, which
Speaker 1: could still be around today. Nobody's ever seen one of
Speaker 1: these black holes, these primordial ones, but we can't prove
Speaker 1: that they don't exist, and some people think they might
Speaker 1: even be a good candidate for dark matter. Wait, meaning
Speaker 1: that the black hole is made out of dark matter.
Speaker 1: That dark matter is made out of black holes, right right,
Speaker 1: like little tiny black holes floating around in space. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because we know there's more stuff out there that has
Speaker 1: gravity that we can't explain, and black holes fit the
Speaker 1: bill because they are massive and they are dark, and
Speaker 1: they would have been created before the quarks, and so
Speaker 1: they would explain why these things can't be made out
Speaker 1: of quarks. So it's a really fun idea that primordial
Speaker 1: black holes could be out there. In fact, there's even
Speaker 1: this idea that there's another planet in our Solar system
Speaker 1: because people have seen weird tugs on Neptune and Uranus
Speaker 1: that they can't explain without some kind of dark, massive
Speaker 1: object out there tugging on them gravitationally, and some folks
Speaker 1: think it might be a primordial black hole. And remember
Speaker 1: these things are small, Like a black hole with the
Speaker 1: mass of a planet would be about the size of
Speaker 1: a tennis ball, so it would be pretty easy to miss.
Speaker 1: You don't want to play tennis with that unless you
Speaker 1: have a pretty good racket. You can really hit a
Speaker 1: planet mass ball very hard. Anyway, just like smashing your
Speaker 1: tennis racket on the ground, it doesn't really do anything
Speaker 1: to the trajectory of the planet. And so this primordial
Speaker 1: black hole could be in our in our own solar system,
Speaker 1: so like maybe the oldest thing in our universe, we
Speaker 1: could be really nearby. It could be pulling on us
Speaker 1: right now. It could be in fact. But one of
Speaker 1: the really interesting things about black holes is that you
Speaker 1: cannot tell their age. Remember, black holes hide information that
Speaker 1: give out nothing about what's inside them. The only thing
Speaker 1: you can know about a black hole is it's mas us,
Speaker 1: it's spin, and its electric charge. And that means that
Speaker 1: it's impossible to know the age of a black hole,
Speaker 1: the same way you can't know the age of a proton.
Speaker 1: Black Holes are like quantum mechanically indistinguishable from each other.
Speaker 1: If they have the same mass, charge and spin. They're
Speaker 1: like the canoes of the universe can't tell how old
Speaker 1: they are. That's right, yeah, exactly, though his career is
Speaker 1: not exactly a black hole. But you know, if you
Speaker 1: form a black hole yesterday and you form a black
Speaker 1: hole a billion years ago with the same amount of mass,
Speaker 1: they will look totally identical. There's no way to get
Speaker 1: any information but when that stuff went into the black hole,
Speaker 1: which is pretty fascinating. But it also means that even
Speaker 1: if we saw a primordial black hole, we wouldn't know
Speaker 1: how old it was. And but and again these are theoretical.
Speaker 1: We haven't seen any of these. But what about the
Speaker 1: ones like at the center of galaxies, like at the
Speaker 1: center of our galaxies? Are those made out of primordial
Speaker 1: black holes or do we know for sure they were
Speaker 1: formed more recently. We don't know. And one of the
Speaker 1: mysteries of those black holes is that they're really, really big.
Speaker 1: We can't explain how they got so big so fast.
Speaker 1: Our models of galaxy formation suggests that those black holes
Speaker 1: should be smaller. One way to make them bigger. To
Speaker 1: explain the mystery of super massive black holes is if
Speaker 1: they were actually seated with pretty big primordial black holes
Speaker 1: from the Big Bang. But that's just an idea we
Speaker 1: don't understand. But if they were formed just from like
Speaker 1: stars and gas and dust collapsing into a black hole,
Speaker 1: which is possible, then there would be as old as
Speaker 1: our galaxy and probably less old than the stars in
Speaker 1: our galaxy. Yeah, like, we know how old our galaxy is,
Speaker 1: but do we know of other galaxies out there that
Speaker 1: might be older than ours? Well, we do live in
Speaker 1: one of the oldest galaxies, one of the oldest neighborhoods
Speaker 1: in the universe, and as we look at the galaxies
Speaker 1: around us, we see that they're all pretty old. The
Speaker 1: galaxies nearby seem to be about ten billion to thirteen
Speaker 1: and a half billion years old, so there're no like new,
Speaker 1: fresh galaxies in the neighborhood. But wait, how do we
Speaker 1: know how old they are? It is pretty rude. We
Speaker 1: have two ways to measure the age of galaxies. One
Speaker 1: is just to look at the stuff inside of it
Speaker 1: and say, like, can we see old populations of stars?
Speaker 1: And this works for nearby galaxies where we can actually
Speaker 1: resolve a few of the stars and the star clusters
Speaker 1: and play the same trick where we try to see
Speaker 1: some of those clusters having stars that die off, but
Speaker 1: it's pretty hard because those galaxies are pretty far away.
Speaker 1: Another way to do it is to look at the
Speaker 1: like the overall light from the galaxy, and look at
Speaker 1: the ratio of various heavy elements, because as the galaxy
Speaker 1: gets older, the stars have burned more of the light
Speaker 1: elements and turned them into heavier stuff. Remember that's what
Speaker 1: happens at the heart of stars. You turn light elements
Speaker 1: like hydrogen and helium or whatever into heavier stuff like
Speaker 1: magnesium and eventually iron. So if you look at the
Speaker 1: ratio of magnesium to iron, you can start to see
Speaker 1: this change as the galaxy gets older. And so this
Speaker 1: works mostly for younger galaxies that are far away, and
Speaker 1: this sort of number is rapidly changing as the stars collapse.
Speaker 1: For older galaxies, it's not as effective because it ends
Speaker 1: up pretty stable. You end up with a lot of
Speaker 1: stars like our sun, and the amount of iron is
Speaker 1: not changing quickly. And we can tell these proportions from
Speaker 1: the light right like the light these galaxies give off
Speaker 1: sort of tell us what kind of stuff is in it. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: We can't go out and scoop up a chunk of
Speaker 1: that galaxy and then measure it, though we'd love to
Speaker 1: and you know, NASA comes up with an idea for
Speaker 1: building wormholes to do it. I would definitely pay more
Speaker 1: in taxes to make that happen. But you're right. The
Speaker 1: only way to probe those galaxies to look at the
Speaker 1: light that comes from them, and the light is like
Speaker 1: a fingerprint that tells you what's in a galaxy because
Speaker 1: different kinds of stuff glow at different frequencies. You know,
Speaker 1: every kind of element has a different arrangement of electrons,
Speaker 1: and it's the wiggling and jumping of those electrons that
Speaker 1: give off the light. So there's like a fingerprint for
Speaker 1: every element. You can tell what contributions there are from
Speaker 1: every element just by looking at the spectrum of the light,
Speaker 1: which frequently sees have a lot of light in which
Speaker 1: frequencies don't have a lot of light. All right, So
Speaker 1: that's galaxies. They are maybe about thirteen point six billion
Speaker 1: years old, but they're kind of far away, so we
Speaker 1: also have to kind of account for the fact that
Speaker 1: they may not still be around today. Yeah, we're pretty
Speaker 1: sure Andromeda is there, for example, but yeah, you never
Speaker 1: really know because you're looking at stuff that's millions or
Speaker 1: billions of years old. Yeah, it could have been crossing
Speaker 1: the universe street and who knows. All right, so is
Speaker 1: that then the oldest large scale structure in the universe
Speaker 1: or can we see older, bigger things. There are things
Speaker 1: probably older than galaxies that probably formed before galaxies. So
Speaker 1: we talked about how in the early universe you had stars,
Speaker 1: and the stars gathered together to make galaxies, but not
Speaker 1: every club of stars was destined to make like a
Speaker 1: full on galaxy. Sometimes they make something smaller called a
Speaker 1: globular cluster. These things are really amazing and we're gonna
Speaker 1: have to do a whole podcast episode just about globular
Speaker 1: clusters and you know who give them that name. But
Speaker 1: these are like non ga see blobs of stars usually
Speaker 1: orbiting a galaxy. Interesting and what makes them a blob
Speaker 1: and not a galaxy? I guess is it just like um,
Speaker 1: it doesn't form need swirls or is there something more
Speaker 1: fundamental about them? It's their fundamental blobbiness. Yeah, absolutely, that's
Speaker 1: a That's a thing that visits now is that they're
Speaker 1: smaller than galaxies. There's like a hundred thousand stars and
Speaker 1: so there's just not big enough to form the interesting structures.
Speaker 1: And there's also just like a naming convention. You know,
Speaker 1: things that are smaller that are orbiting actual galaxies, You
Speaker 1: call them a globular cluster, all right, And so those
Speaker 1: we can tell are older than the galaxies. How can
Speaker 1: we tell their age. We can tell their age by
Speaker 1: looking at the stars inside them and playing the same game.
Speaker 1: And the interesting thing is that a lot of these
Speaker 1: clusters seem to have stars all the same age, like
Speaker 1: they all formed at once and then just sort of
Speaker 1: like gathered together to make this cluster. And there's one
Speaker 1: that's pretty nearby. It's like eight thousand light years away,
Speaker 1: and it looks like it's really really old. Well, it's
Speaker 1: super close, I mean speaking in the skill of the universe,
Speaker 1: eight thousand nine years away, eight thousand light years away.
Speaker 1: It's like a satellite to our galaxy. It's orbiting the
Speaker 1: Milky Way. It's like a little blob that's like moving
Speaker 1: around the Milky Way. And when we look at this thing,
Speaker 1: it looks like it's about thirteen and a half billion
Speaker 1: years old. It's got the sexy name of n g
Speaker 1: C sixty nineties. I love how ustromers go for sexy names.
Speaker 1: If you if you like numbers, if you like numbers. Well,
Speaker 1: they just see so many things, right, how can they
Speaker 1: give them all individual names? It's like if you had
Speaker 1: a billion children, would you come up with creative, beautiful
Speaker 1: names for each of them where you start numbering them.
Speaker 1: I think I would probably be dead if I don't
Speaker 1: have any children. You would definitely be broke. All right, So, um,
Speaker 1: it sounds like there's a galaxy globular cluster that's thirteen
Speaker 1: point four billion years old. There's our galaxy is also
Speaker 1: kind of that old. About that old? Um, there's a
Speaker 1: star in our galaxy that we can tell is maybe
Speaker 1: about that old, And there are far away galaxies we
Speaker 1: think might be that old, or at least we're alive
Speaker 1: back then. I guess the question then, is, Daniel, who
Speaker 1: do we give the award to? Who? What is the
Speaker 1: oldest thing in the universe? Whoever is willing to come
Speaker 1: and be a guest on the podcast? That's we could
Speaker 1: the award to have to break the tie somehow. I see,
Speaker 1: whoever comes into tux and stays within the acceptance speech limit.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, but you're right, we don't exactly know what
Speaker 1: is the oldest thing in the universe. It could be
Speaker 1: one of these stars which came together to form some
Speaker 1: of these galaxies and globular clusters, but we're not sure.
Speaker 1: It could be one of the black holes that's floating
Speaker 1: around I think. I think to take away is that
Speaker 1: there's a lot of really old stuff nearby. You don't
Speaker 1: have to look into the depths of the universe to
Speaker 1: see stuff that was created a long time ago, and
Speaker 1: this stuff is still around. So there's a lot of
Speaker 1: like awesome archaeology about the early days of the universe.
Speaker 1: What was it like to be around a few hundred
Speaker 1: million years after the Big Bang? Is evidence for that
Speaker 1: right here in our backyard, because I guess we are
Speaker 1: like still in the middle of the universe, right, Like
Speaker 1: we're not out far away from where the action is.
Speaker 1: You can still see things today around this that we're
Speaker 1: around maybe around the time of the Big Bang. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's not really any middle of the universe, but yeah,
Speaker 1: we're in the center of the action, that's for sure.
Speaker 1: There's plenty of good stuff all around here to tell
Speaker 1: us about what happened in the very early days of
Speaker 1: the universe, and we get to watch it age. We
Speaker 1: get to see, like when many stuff going to burn out,
Speaker 1: what is the lifespan of a star cann go for
Speaker 1: twenty thirty billion years. Well, my money is still on
Speaker 1: that French old lady. I think she's going to outlive
Speaker 1: us all and the rest of the universe. That's right,
Speaker 1: and she'd probably still beat us all at scrabble. All right. Well,
Speaker 1: we hope you enjoyed that and maybe think a little
Speaker 1: bit about the age of the universe and maybe makes
Speaker 1: you appreciate a little bit of our time in it,
Speaker 1: because it is a pretty short clip in such an
Speaker 1: old universe. Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain
Speaker 1: the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. For
Speaker 1: More podcast for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio Apple Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows. Yea