Supervoids

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26:49And we're back. We've been talking about how, like, the universe is, like, this foamy wash full of clusters that are, like, on the edges of the bubbles. And then inside of the bubbles we have super voids. What does that tell us about how the universe formed? And like, have we figured that out yet? Because that's not what we expected. Right, yeah. So first, slight clarification. Inside the bubbles are voids. Oh, okay. Super voids, we haven't really talked about exactly yet. Super voids are essentially like really, really big voids. In many cases, bigger than we expect. And so that's why we have to dive into the history of the universe to think about like, do we expect to see voids?

27:27Do we expect to see super voids? Does what we see line up with what we expect? And to do that, we have to go all the way back to the earliest known thing in the universe. Which is? The cosmic microwave background, of course, which, you know, physics is always going back to. You might be like, oh my gosh, these guys lean on the CMB so much. It's just such a rich and incredible source of information. You know, if you were trying to understand somebody's life and you had like a picture of them in kindergarten, it would tell you so much about where they grew up and what they were like. And that's basically what we have.

27:59We have like a baby picture of the universe. And so when we want to understand how the universe got to be the way it is, we look back at that baby picture. We're like, huh, did it have seven toes when it was born? Or was that surgery that came later? What features of the universe can you trace back to the origin? And if they're not there, what does that tell you? So it's incredibly valuable. And that's why we look back. And for those of you who don't remember, the cosmic microwave background light is light that came from the universe the first moment that it was transparent. So we don't know how the universe began or when it began, but we do know that it was filled with a hot, dense plasma.

28:33And that plasma was glowing and it was opaque, just like plasma at the center of the sun. It gives off light and then is immediately reabsorbed. Which, you know, you hear maybe on pop-si channels like a photon takes 50 ,000 years to get from the center of the sun to the surface of the sun. And that's like mostly pop-si nonsense because a photon is emitted at the center of the sun and then immediately absorbed. It never gets to the surface. like, you know, maybe you could say that heat waves travel through the sun at some velocity or whatever, but you're not tracing a photon. Anyway, photons that were created in the very early universe, no longer around, immediately absorbed because the universe they were born into was opaque, but the universe is expanding and the universe is cooling.

29:13And at some point, the universe expanded and cooled enough that protons and electrons found each other and became neutral. And then the universe became suddenly transparent. So photons that were born after that moment are still around, and they are still here for us to measure and for us to learn about the early universe. And what we see in those photons is not a smooth plasma, not like everything was filled with stuff equally. We see some places with more density and some places with less density. And that is not what we expected initially. And why is that not what we expected initially? Yeah, good question.

29:51Here we have like two threads we have to follow. One is the density of galaxies as we're seeing them like today. And that started in the 70s. And by the 70s, we had seen the cosmic microwave background light that happened in the 60s. It was a huge confirmation that the universe had an early hot, dense state, but we had not yet seen its wiggles. It wasn't until like the 80s and the 90s that we measured the CMB light with enough precision to see, oh, there are some little hot spots and there's some little cold spots. It just seemed sort of smooth. And so it wasn't until later that we saw wiggles in the CMB and we saw structure in the universe.

30:28And you're right to ask about that because those two things are definitely connected. And the listener who made that connection is totally right. We think that all the structure in the current universe comes from that structure in the early universe, that you had places with more density and that had more gravity and that pulled in more stuff. And that in those regions, you now have more galaxies and more dark matter and then in places where you didn't. And so you should be able to line up a place in the early universe where there was less dense stuff with voids today. Okay. Got it. And you might be tempted to say, oh, well, can we trace an individual like hotspot or cold spot in the CMB to something in the universe today?

31:09And you might be preparing yourself for disappointment because usually the answer to that is no. We can just do it statistically. We can say, oh, we expect this kind of distribution of galaxies in the late universe based on this kind of density in the early universe. But we can't say like this photon caused that galaxy or whatever. But there is one feature that seems to correlate. What? So there's a feature in the early universe, the cosmic microwave background, that seems to line up with a super void in the universe. Yeah. So the feature in the cosmic microwave background is called the CMB cold spot.

31:44This is a region where it's redder than everywhere else. So we expect there to be some variations in the cosmic microwave background. They vary by like micro Kelvin. And we talk about the CMB in terms of temperature, which is equivalent to thinking about wavelength because black body radiation rules tell us that something at a certain temperature will radiate at a certain wavelength. So when we measure light at a certain wavelength, we say, oh, that came from an object at a certain temperature. So for example, the CMB light came from a really hot plasma, thousands and thousands of degrees, I think 3000 K.

32:16But that light has been redshifted by the expansion of the universe down to about 2.7 K. So if you read that like, oh, the CMB light is 2.7 K, that's what it means. It means that it's the wavelength that an object at 2.7 Kelvin would emit. So very, very cold light. Okay. And we see variations like 20 micro Kelvin in the CMB. That's like typical expected hotspots and cold spots. But there is one spot in the CMB, one spot in the sky when we look at it, that it's like 70 micro Kelvin colder. Wow. So some places like 150 micro K colder. It's in the southern hemisphere in the direction of the constellation Eridanus, which is maybe the source of a poop joke for those of you who are interested in the southern hemisphere.

33:00If you could see how it's spelled, you would get why this could be a poop joke. Maybe all constellations in the Southern Hemisphere should have anus in them, you know? Absolutely. Yes. Astronomers get on that. Or synonyms of anus. Yes. Because you need some options. Yeah. So this is really interesting. You know, it could just be random. It could just be like a fluctuation. And they've done a calculation suggest it's like, there's like a 1.5 % chance of this happening randomly. So it's like weird. It sticks out, but it's not insane. But it does also correspond with a place in the late universe that there seems to be a super void.

33:41And you said at one point, well, we haven't really talked about super voids yet. And super voids are just like really big voids, right? Yes, exactly. And so if you look in the structure of the universe today in the same direction, you do see a really, really big void there. It's like a thousand times the size of a typical void. Wow. So it's like you have bubbles in your sink, and they're all roughly the same size. And then there's one that's just like a thousand times bigger than all the other bubbles. This one's a billion light years across. It's like five to ten billion light years away. So is this like most mornings you eat Special K, but one morning you eat Poops Like a Champion?

34:22And that's the difference between void and super void?

34:28yes exactly you feel it about 24 hours later exactly when you have a super void and here the universe has formed a void like a champion well and just to be clear poops like a champion is an actual cereal you told me about the other day it is an actual cereal and we have boxes of it at home because some company out there that makes it heard about katrina and her fiber journey and her, you know, her effort to make everybody poop better by eating fiber and improve their gut microbiome. So they sent her a bunch of free boxes of poop like a champion. And I am not on their payroll. So I can tell you that it tastes like cardboard.

35:07But still, you know, I think Katrina is one of the better people on this planet. That's what that story tells me. She's out there. She really does want to improve your pooping. Yeah. Even though she has nothing to do with super voids. I tried really hard to derail this conversation. Let's go back to super voids of the universe. Yeah. So this is really interesting because when you run the simulations in the universe, you don't get these kinds of super voids. It's really unusual. And so it helps us try to understand like, we talked about in our simulating the universe episode recently, how when you see something different in your simulation and your data, it tells you that there's a gap.

35:46There's something in your simulation that isn't describing the universe correctly, or there's an element of the universe that you're not describing correctly. And these are super fascinating, especially because they're very sensitive to the expansion of the universe. How we see these cold spots and these hotspots in the CMB tells us a lot about the expansion of the universe, because photons fly through the universe as they get to us. And there's two different effects here to disentangle. And we're looking at the CMB and we see some places are hotter. Some places are colder. There's two different reasons why.

36:19One is, well, we could just be looking at a place that was denser or it was less dense. And so, it's like initial over density or initial under density. That's what we typically think about. But remember that the photons also have to fly through the universe to get to us. And those photons are red shifted by the expansion of the universe. And they fly through the universe, which means that they're sensitive to gravitational density. Because if you fly through a region with a lot of mass, you get redshifted, right? Like black holes produce gravitational redshifts. And so a photon that's flown through the universe, in some senses, measures the density of the universe along its path, which is super duper cool.

37:00That is super duper cool. That photo from our childhood is telling us a lot. Although is it more like, I mean, you should never really dig into an analogy, but it's more like a video from your childhood, isn't it, than a photo? It is like a video because if you keep watching it, you see different things, right? We are looking at the cosmic microwave background of radiation, and we can't see it for the whole universe. We see the light that's arriving right now, which left, of course, many, many, many billions of years ago, and it's arriving to us from a shell of that original plasma that's very far away and around the Earth.

37:33And as time goes on, we get light from a different shell. So it's not like we're watching the same place over time. Over time, we're scanning more and more distant shells of that original CMB. Got it. Cool. So let's trace the trajectory of a photon as it's moving through the universe. And let's think first about over densities, places where there's like a lot of mass. So say a photon is on its way to us, but it's passing by a black hole, right? And so as it falls in towards the black hole, it gains energy, right? So it's getting blue shifted. And then if it doesn't get eaten by the black hole, it makes it out and it comes towards us.

38:09And as it's leaving the black hole, it's losing energy. It's having to climb out of that gravitational well. So it gets redshifted. And so you might think, okay, blue shifted more energy, red shifted less energy. It all balances out. So how could a photon that's coming to us tell us anything about that dense region if it's all got canceled out, if it's basically unchanged, right? So you can't watch it as it changes. You just see like the average of what happened to it over a distance? Yeah, you can't watch a photon go through the universe. You just see one here on Earth and you're like, oh, is it hotter than I expected or colder?

38:42OK, got it. And so the opposite is true for voids, right? If you go near a black hole, then you get blue shifted as you fall in and red shifted as you fall out. And the opposite is true for a void. You get red shifted as you fall in and blue shifted as you fall out. Okay, and so if we only see the average of what happened to a photon when it gets here, how do we know that? So that's our theoretical calculation, but it's missing something really important, which is as time goes on, when the photon is in that void or near that black hole, the universe is not static. The universe is expanding. And so the amount of energy the photon loses or gains when it goes in or out of that void changes because the void is changing or the black hole is changing as time goes on.

39:28So it doesn't perfectly cancel out. And so it does leave an overall effect on these photons. And so you can get cold spots in the CMB if photons have moved through a super void on their way here, if the universe is expanding. And so not only do super voids tell us about like, hey, what is the evolution of the universe? How do you get these bubbles? Do they come from initial over densities? Also, the CMB tells us about photons moving through the universe and measuring existing voids, not from the early universe, but today. So there's so many dimensions of information in the CMB. It's not just a baby picture.

40:08It's a baby picture that was then dragged through your life and distorted by the way your life turned out. And then here we are, we can disentangle those two things in the single picture from the CMB and be like, oh, this is a primordial hotspot, or this is one that appeared because of how the photons moved through the universe. Wow. So all these incredibly clever little effects we can use to try to disentangle the history of the universe. And this is why people seem like they're in love with the CMB. It's just such a gift. It's such a gift. Oh my gosh. Wait, so what if a photon went through a black or past a black hole and then through a super void?

40:46Like, how do you how can you know what a photon saw when it could have seen a bunch of things before it gets to us? You get it in that interview room. OK. Shine the lights in its face. And no, you're right. You can't. And all you can do is look for patterns. And we see in the universe, we see a big cold spot right in the sky. And that's in the same direction as a super void. And so that means either there was like an initial under density there, which created a colder region, or the photons getting here from there have passed through a super void on the way. Okay. And so it's just like, it's fascinating to see that in the CMB and also then to look at our late time measurements of galactic structure and see, oh, there's also a super void over there.

41:34So like things are lining up, they're clicking together. You know, that's exciting when you're doing science and you see two completely separate measurements that are sensitive to the same thing lining up and telling you the same story. That's when you feel like, ooh, we're going to crack this case. All right. We're getting super excited over here, but we have to take a break. Supervoid if you must, but come back in just a moment. But when we get back, we're going to talk about how supervoids get made. The space ones, not the one you just made.

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46:56All right, and we're back. So, all right, Daniel, how do super voids get made? So this is really fun to think about how you get super voids. One is that you can just have an under dense region initially and you could just have a fluctuation. Like these things we think are seeded originally by quantum fluctuations. Why anyway are there regions that are higher or lower density? You know, one theory is you have quantum fluctuations in the very early universe, and then inflation, this pre-Big Bang theory we talked about recently, stretched those out into macroscopic actual fluctuations that matter to gravity.

47:33You know, that's just a speculative theory. We don't know for sure. But that would suggest that the fluctuations themselves, the reason we have more stuff here and less stuff there, comes initially randomly, which means that, you know, lots of stuff could happen. And if, for example, you're flipping coins, you don't expect to get heads and then tails and then heads and then tails. You'll have runs of heads and runs of tails. And so if somebody's flipping coins for the early universe, it's like, are we getting stuff here or not? They could have just come up with no stuff in this part of the universe a lot of times occasionally, right?

48:03So that kind of thing can happen. But it's unlikely, right? The bigger the void, the less likely it is that can happen. And the same way like having a run of 10 heads is less likely than a run of five heads and a run of like 50 heads in a row is essentially unheard of, though there is a probability. And so, you know, we only have this one universe. And so we can't tell like, hey, did we just get lucky or slash unlucky? We don't know. But there are also other ways people have come up with in watching these simulations to see super voids form, which is that you can get voids merging. Right. So these bubbles can pop because you get gravitational disturbances between these things, and the walls can fall apart, essentially.

48:43And so you can get these cells merging. Basically, if you have an over-density in some walls, they can attract those filaments. And it's not like these supervoids are totally empty. And so you still have some galaxies remaining inside of them. And so you can get mergers of these voids to form supervoids. And this is the kind of example of something you can learn about in simulation. You can run a simulation in the universe. You can watch it. You'd be like, look at that. I didn't expect that to happen. But you see it in simulation. You learn about emerging phenomena in simulation that you didn't predict.

49:17Super duper cool. Yay, theoretical physicists. But this allows us to ask the question like, well, why are there super voids? Do they make sense in the universe? And we have this cold spot, which we can partially explain using this like photons come in, photons go out, but it's not a full explanation. It explains like part of the cold spot, but not all of it. It's really very unusual. Though it's hard to say like how unusual is a 1 % effect? You see it in one out of 100 universes. And so are we just unlucky or is this a hint that there's something else going on? Because remember that these things are very sensitive to the parameters of the universe.

49:55How much dark matter was there, dark matter forming that structure? How much dark energy was there to create this acceleration and this expansion, which is what's causing this effect, this cold spot effect? Because remember, it's only if the voids are changing as the photons are going through them that you even see an effect from the voids. And so there's a lot of questions about whether the super voids are something we expect or whether they indicate that we need something new in our theory of the universe. which of course is where the fun begins because then we get to speculate about all the crazy ideas Daniel has a sparkle in his eye so at the beginning of the episode you said super voids remind you of like the marvel universe so if you had like parallel universes like you do in the marvel universe would you expect super voids to be distributed about the same way or like have about the same number like what I'm trying to get to parallel universes for you Well, there's an even cooler way that parallel universes connect to super voids, which is that maybe you had a bunch of initial universes early on.

51:00And remember, we talked about inflation, how our universe maybe is like a tiny dot in a vast landscape of inflationary matter. And in that dot, it just like went from inflationary matter to normal matter. And then our universe is there and expanded. And there could be other dots out there. And usually those other dots are really far away and there's a bunch of inflationary matter between us and them, which is expanding at some insane rates. So we'll never see those other universes. But what if that's not true? What if there are other universes out there and our universe has collided? If early on our bubble bounced into another bubble, it might leave an imprint on the early universe.

51:39And according to some theories and according to some simulations, that can cause like a bruise in the density, which would be like a cold spot, which would lead to a super void. And so there are some really fun speculative theories of the early universe out there that suggest that if there are these parallel bubble universes created in this inflationary landscape, that sometimes they'll bump into each other and they'll leave a mark. And that mark is super voids. Well, I think I'm still having – One, awesome. Two, I'm having a little trouble imagining. So you get two bubbles, they like merge. And then is it like whatever was making the outside wall of the bubble where they touch just sort of like gets blown to somewhere else?

52:25And now you get a big center as those two bubbles merge? Is that, how does that result in a super void? Yeah, great question. And I realized that now we're using the word bubble to mean two different things. Shame on us, shame on me. Yeah, I'm not taking any blame for that. Fair. No, when we talked earlier about bubbles, we were talking about the structure of our universe. And there's densities of super clusters of galaxies and under densities. And we talked about those organizing into bubbles. And those are bubbles. Now we're talking about bubbles as the whole universe is one bubble in a vaster inflationary landscape.

53:04Okay. And so let's not call them a bubble. is to say if our universe bumps into another universe, because remember in this theory, universes are finite. They're little regions of this inflationary landscape that have decayed into normal matter. So if our universe bumps into another universe and then bounces off, they don't merge. They bounce off each other, but they leave a mark. The way like if you take two apples and you smash them together, they don't become one apple, but you get a bruise on each one. What would that bruise look like on our universe if another universe had bumped into us and not even left a note, just hit and run universe style.

53:40Not cool. Well, we would get a bruise, and it would change the initial density of matter in the early universe. And simulations and calculations suggest that that would leave a cold spot, an underdensity in that part of the universe, which would, if you ran the simulations forward, leave to a super void today. Wow. Okay. All right. I'm with you. Yeah. So that's one fun theory. And there's a lot of debate about that. People say, you know, you're cherry picking, you're crafting an explanation to match something you see. It would be much more compelling if you had a prediction for this before you saw the super voids and you say, I predict a super void.

54:15And then you went out and saw it. That would be much more compelling. This is more like a post-diction. It's like, oh, we see this thing in the universe. What could explain it? Not as a criticism, but just saying it would be more powerful, more compelling if it was a prediction and not a post-diction. Okay. I mean, I totally see that. But on the other hand, like, okay, but you've seen the thing and you can't unsee it. And now you have to try to explain it. And so, but I agree. It would have been more powerful if it had met expectations. But the universe doesn't care about our expectations. Yeah.

54:43So another potential explanation for this is a favorite alternative for dark matter. You remember that we talked about dark matter being out there. We have lots of independent lines of evidence for it. But there are alternatives. And it's healthy that people are thinking about other things. and try to understand if those other explanations are coherent, if they can explain multiple things and not just galactic rotation curves. One of those is modified gravity. To say maybe gravity doesn't work the way we expect. Maybe it's not that there's more invisible stuff out there causing gravity, but that gravity behaves differently and there isn't any dark matter.

55:20This is called Mond, Modified Newtonian Dynamics. Remember how we talked about some of these cold spots are due to the expansion of the universe as photons fall in and out of these voids or in and out of the neighborhood of a black hole. Well, that could also be explained in some models of modified gravity. Okay. Because you're changing how gravity works, so it's going to change how these photons experience the universe. And even some theories of the universe isn't expanding, and these things are just due to their evidence that gravity doesn't work the way that we expect. And it's true that we can't fully explain these supervoids.

55:56We don't know where they come from. our current theories do definitely need something. Do you need to go all the way to modified gravity to explain supervoids? I don't think so. But maybe I'm just not a fan of the modified gravity theory, and so I'm blind to it. I do respect that they're trying to find other ways to support this theory, other places to look for evidence that might indicate that it's the real explanation for the universe and not just a single fudge factor they're using to fix galactic rotation curves. Now, when we finish getting through all of the explanations, are you going to tell us which explanation is your favorite?

56:33Or are you just going to super void on this one? No, instead, I'm going to tell you about how we might learn more about the universe rather than betting on any individual one. Because, you know, we talked about how in the 70s, they started putting this together when they were measuring the cosmic structure. And they've continued to do that. There was a big survey in the 2000s called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, mapped out a huge number of these big walls and bubbles and really giving us a broader sense of where we are in the universe. And that's continuing. We now have this telescope called DESI, the Dark Energy Survey Instrument, which is the most powerful telescope we've ever had for understanding where things are in the universe in terms of measuring the redshift of a huge number of distant galaxies.

57:22And so what's more important? What's more exciting than mapping out the universe? And that's what we're doing. And just yesterday, we saw the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, which is also going to tell us about the expansion of the universe and redshifts and the structure of the universe. So we are learning so much more. It reminds me of like, have you seen early maps? I love looking at maps people drew of the world in like 1200, when they didn't know about this whole continent and they misunderstood this whole piece. But you see truth in there. You see the shape of Portugal or you see the coast of Madagascar or whatever.

57:59And that's what our maps are like today. And I think in a thousand years, people look back at our primitive, basic maps of our neighborhood and be like, wow, they knew nothing. But the information is coming. We are building those maps. We are exploring the universe. We're figuring out. And along the way, we're discovering mysteries and puzzles, which are going to clue us into how the universe works. There are answers out there to questions we haven't thought to ask because we haven't even mapped out what the universe looks like, you know? And so we don't even know what to ask yet. Yep. We are constantly pushing the boundaries of our ignorance back farther and farther.

58:37I love it. Yeah. And super voids are a really fascinating hole in our understanding because we don't fully understand how they form. Are we just lucky slash unlucky? Is there something else going on in the universe that makes these incredibly underdense regions? Is this a clue or is it a red herring? We don't know. And really the only way to know is to get more data, more mapping, more structure, more images, more understanding of where we are in the universe. I'm definitely for that. And also, it's cheap. You know, compared to the kind of stuff we spend money on, it costs pennies. Usually physics doesn't feel super cheap, but this one's cheap, you're saying?

59:15I mean, it's a lot more expensive than, say, a week in the archives in New York City reading somebody's blood-covered notes, hypothetically. That was fun. It's a lot more expensive than a lot of stuff. But compared to aircraft carriers, you know, or wars in the Middle East, it's definitely cheap. And then you get to enjoy that knowledge forever. ever. Yes, you do. And you create the opportunities for a new generation of scientists to study new puzzles and come up with new answers. So thanks very much to Nathan and Levi for asking about Supervoids and giving us an opportunity to talk about this incredible cosmic history, all the detective stories we've cracked along the way, and so many open questions we have yet to even ask.

59:55Fun science, please.

1:00:04Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman. He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and XDNKUniverse. Come engage with us. You can email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. We really do want to hear from you. And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

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