Running Out of Matter with Michelle Thaller

23:39You know, we were sort of talking about photons as particles here, like little billiard balls and stuff. But, of course, remember, famously, they're electromagnetic waves, right? I mean, they're not just little balls. And so what the podcast did is it showed that there's an electromagnetic wave, there's a photon going in, and there's other atoms around. And basically the electromagnetic wave starts those other atoms kind of vibrating along with it. But there's a delay, there's a lag to kind of get those other fields, those other electric fields vibrating as the photon goes by. And the resulting speed is actually a combination.

24:16It's actually a way of resolving those two different vibrational modes. So the photon is like to the other, you know, atoms like, bro, you're bringing me down. Yeah, you're slowing me down. Yeah. Bro, you're a drag on me, man. I can't. I got it. Come on. I'm serious. Like, get off me. And then let me get the hell out of this medium.

24:38Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah. Because once you exit the medium, it's back at the speed of light. The speed of the wave that we measure is a combination of the speed of the photon in a vacuum. but then also the speed of the variations of basically the oscillations of everything around it. Those two combine into the measured speed of the photon that we see. That's fascinating. So the question about, I mean, it's the same thing, Neil. Absolutely. When you talk about how a photon changes, even as it goes through a vacuum, it loses energy. It's a very similar question that if a photon is reflected, is it a different photon?

25:11I mean, it could certainly be a different energy, right? I mean, when a photon is reflected, you usually lose some energy in the reflection. So, I mean, there's all sorts of things. Photons absolutely can change.

25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson:Just to be clear, Chuck, if the photon hits a surface and reflects, some of its energy is imparted as momentum to that surface. And that's why solar sails work at all. It has to be. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, there's an energy change there. So I'm voting for a completely different photon here. What do you think, Michelle? Yeah, like I said, Ross Graves is a name that's familiar to me. So yes, thank you for this fabulous question. And I have to say, I do not have an extremely clear answer. I'm not ashamed of that. This is one I've wondered myself. Okay, so let's vote. That's right, yeah, yeah. I'm voting that the photon that came out is a new quantum state that is carrying the mission forward after it had its delay from the medium through which it passed or the medium off of which it reflected.

26:19Neil deGrasse Tyson:I'm going with that. Okay. I'm going with, I wish I had the same properties and there was a reflection Chuck and real Chuck. And I could tell all the people I owe money, you need to go talk to reflection Chuck. That's not me anymore. That's not me anymore, buddy.

26:42Neil deGrasse Tyson:No, that's a great question. Okay. What else do you have, Chuck? All right, here we go. This is Jao Costa. and Zhao Costa says, good tidings, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Thaler, Lord, nice deep breath now, Chuck. Zhao Costa here. Greetings from Portugal. All right. Yes. He says, if matter isn't being created, only transformed, will there come a day when the universe runs out of matter to create new astral bodies? If so, how will we be able to notice such a situation developing? Will the creations start to become rarer, smaller, or deficient, as in less frequent, less energetic, or less stable. Thank you and please keep making our necks hurt.

27:29Oh, I like it. Look up. Make the neck hurt.

27:31Neil deGrasse Tyson:Oh, I see what he did there. You got him looking up so much, you gave him a neck ache, Neil. Okay, you can lay down and look up and then you're just looking straight ahead. That's true. The geometry works that way. Yeah, yeah. Well, it sounds to me like somebody is just describing what's called the heat death of the universe. And the answer is yes. The answer is that the universe is slowing down in the sense that it's not so much that matter can't be destroyed. It can. It can be converted into energy, right? Matter and energy are two sides of the same coin. That famous equation, hopefully the only one you ever have to deal with in life, unless you want to be a scientist, is energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.

28:16Good old Albert Einstein. E equals MC squared.

28:18Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's most people's first equation they learn in elementary school, even before you know what it means. It's a certain elementary school equation. So you can destroy matter. You can make it into energy. And you can make energy into matter. That's what we do in particle accelerators. We get things going with such high energy. When things collide, there's so much energy around. It actually creates new matter. That's how you find new types of particles. So energy and matter are equivalent. And so there is this. But absolutely what's happening is that in the early universe, there were things that were much higher temperature, much higher energy.

28:51Stars, for example, are an example of something that's a very low entropy. Stars create very high energy radiation. And, you know, over time. Yes. I mean, every time you basically generate heat, I mean, sunlight comes down, it's a high energy photon, hits the earth, warms things up. What's released, the heat is a lower energy type of light. You've lost energy. You've made from a high energy particle of light. Now it's a lower energy type of light. And so eventually the universe, all of the photons that were high energy are going to hit things, get absorbed by things, make things warm, get reemitted, and they're going to lose energy over time.

29:32And so, yes, the universe is running down. And eventually we're going to get to a point where there's nothing left but very low energy photons, photons that are so low energy, they're probably not even detectable. And then it's sort of anybody's guess as to, you know, does time and space exist anymore when there's really everything is just the same temperature? A very, very low temperature is the only thing that the universe has.

29:57Neil deGrasse Tyson:So it's a misnomer to call it a heat death if it's actually a cold death. it gets cooler and cooler yeah yeah i mean it's the heat that's dying yeah it's the heat this is like oh go on without me yeah just go on without me plus the expanding universe also drops dropping the temperature with it right absolutely you got a photon going through expanding space and think about you know right you know draw a squiggly line on a piece of elastic and pull the elastic and that that wavelength drops down, you lose energy. I mean, it's really kind of as simple as that. Wait, just to be precise, the wavelength gets longer.

30:38The wavelength gets longer. That's right, yes.

30:40Neil deGrasse Tyson:And that's the lower energy wavelength. Lower energy. So it drops down. The wavelength gets longer, the frequency drops. Right. And if I may, what Michelle just described is exactly how the warming of the planet happens. High energy comes in, pierces our atmosphere, becomes lower energy and a longer wavelength, which is trapped by greenhouse gases. And that's how we heat up because as everybody has learned from Neil, the atmosphere isn't hot. The ground gets hot and radiates heat back into the atmosphere. And that is the cycle that creates the warming of the planet. Just so that you guys know that it's real.

31:18Okay, it's real.

31:20Neil deGrasse Tyson:And send$5 to Chuck Stenic campaign. By the way, just to be precise, There is a layer of the atmosphere that does absorb light directly from the sun. And that's the thermosphere where the ultraviolet gets absorbed by the ozone. And so there is a layer that is hotter, but we're not experiencing that layer down here. Oh, yeah. That's cool. Yeah. The hottest part of the troposphere is right above Earth's surface. Right above Earth's surface. Okay. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And what's the part? see now now this is where the explainers are all swirling in my head what is the part where the excitation of the molecules is such that it's we say it's cold but it's actually hotter chuck could it be that there's a layer upper layers of the atmosphere where the particles themselves are high energy, but there isn't many of them so that you don't feel that temperature that you otherwise would.

32:27Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's what I'm saying. The concept of temperature kind of loses practical meaning there. Okay, I said it like a... Tell me what you're thinking about. Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking about, but I said it like a dumb two-year-old. No, no, no. Like, Michelle, if I flew you through the sun's corona, which is five million degrees, Would you feel that given how low density the particles are that have such high temperature? We are really, really lucky the answer is no, because I mean, the corona is one thing, but also let's remember, I mean, we actually, our whole solar system is in this hot bubble of gas in the Milky Way galaxy.

33:04Maybe there was a star that exploded here billions of years ago, but the temperature of the gas we're going through is in the millions of degrees in our galaxy. The thing is, the gas between the stars is so thin. It's like, okay, there goes a proton, zoop, there goes an electron, zoop. I mean, there's so few particles that it doesn't really impart any heat to you. I mean, yes, the average speed of these high-energy particles is equivalent to being millions of degree gas. And just like Neil said, the sun's corona is this extended atmosphere of very hot gas. We have a spacecraft. NASA has a spacecraft called the Parker Solar Probe.

33:42that is orbiting well within this solar corona right now. Wow. You better believe it would not be a live returning data if it really felt like 5 million degrees. At 5 million degrees. Yeah. So the analogy we used to use is when you think about, you know, everybody who's like done some baking, you get your oven up to 500 degrees.

34:00Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's some serious baking if you're baking at 500 degrees. It's pizza. We're going for pizza ovens here. Yeah, yeah. You are a pizza shop on the corner of Lenox Avenue, 125th Street. Yeah. If you have a 500 degree oven. Okay. If you open the oven and you just stick your hand in, your hand is not actually feeling like it's 500 degrees all of a sudden. If you were to touch like a metal part of the oven, if you were to touch the rack, then you'd burn your hand. Because, I mean, all of a sudden now you have a denser object. You've got the metal. Yeah. A little bit of a thing about the Parker Solar Probe.

34:31It's another incredible person, Eugene Parker. And he was the person that discovered this wind of high energy particles from the sun, the solar wind.

34:39Neil deGrasse Tyson:The solar wind. And yeah, a fabulous launch. I'm glad somebody told me that a Delta Heavy looks like it explodes on the pad before the rocket comes up. I was at that launch. It was amazing. The whole idea, the surface of the sun is only about, say, roughly like 10 ,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But as soon as you get off the surface, the gas becomes millions of degrees hot. And I mean, this was a big mystery. And how does the sun do that? I mean, normally if you've got a hot campfire, the farther away you walk, the cooler it seems. Why does the temperature go up? And the Parker Solar Probe has really helped answer that.

35:15There's all of these complicated accelerations due to magnetic fields around the sun. The particles pick up speed. There are shocks in there. So, I mean, we're figuring out how the sun works. It's not something we know until we go there near the sun, fly around in this corona, and see what's going on. And look at that. You're getting all of that for a lousy$6 billion. No kidding. What the hell is wrong with you people?

35:41Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay, Chuck, that's his daily, I got to blow a gasket once a day reaction. It's worth it. It's worth blowing a gasket over. If memory serves, the Parker Solar Probe set a speed record. Oh, yeah. It goes over 400 ,000 miles an hour. Holy crap. Wow. Yeah. I keep having to look that up because I don't believe it. and then I look it up again. You don't believe it. Because it gets pulled in by the sun's gravity. That's right. And there it is, 400 ,000 miles an hour. Wow. Amazing. All right. Well, let's move on. Time for a few more questions. Let's try to fit in a bunch more. So let's tighten up the answers and see how many we can fit in.

36:20Let's just do the questions, and then we just have to have Michelle back to ask more. That's all. I'm always here. That's right. Yeah, we're not going anywhere. I mean, you know, why these people, they're just like, you didn't get to my question. What? What? You think you got information we don't? We're getting canceled? What do you know? What do you know that we don't know? You know, we can do this again. I'm always up for questions. Yeah. All right. Here we go. This is Tristan Breaker, who says, good evening, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Thaler, Lord Nice. Tristan here from Utah. Ah, considering gravity is caused by the curvature of space-time, hypothetically, could gravitational waves from two separate sources intersect, forming a constructive interference pattern combining their amplitudes?

37:06If so, could this create regions in space where the curvature of space-time is great enough to produce a gravitational field as though a celestial body were present even though nothing is there? Additionally, wouldn't the crest of the waves create an inverse gravitational field? Could space-time curve in the opposite direction? Imagining the common fabric of gravity demonstration, for instance, producing a repulsive field rather than an attractive one. My heartfelt thanks to you for bringing awareness to the wonders of the universe. Well, Christian, all I can say is, first of all, I need some of that weed you smoking.

37:50Because, man, that is some serious stuff.

37:56Neil deGrasse Tyson:Maybe check with our producers. Maybe for questions like that, we should create a little certificate that we send back out to them for questions that are above and beyond the call of duty. We've had two so far in this show. It's a deep thought question, right? That's a deep thought question. Michelle, are you up on gravitational waves? What's the latest thing? Oh, I love gravitational waves. Are you kidding? I was a postdoc at Caltech. I better love gravitational waves. So, oh my God. Let me just say how impressed I am with gravitational wave detection, because this is something, when I was a postdoc at Caltech, it was a big deal.

38:32The LIGO project, the laser interferometric gravitational wave observatory was something that Caltech was involved in. And I honestly, I talk about my skeptical nature. I was like, they're never going to detect these bastards. I mean, this is really – so LIGO, at the time, there were two facilities. There are now more. You've got a laser that's about two miles long and another one going out in a 90-degree angle. There we go, in a corner. So two miles each direction. And those lasers, you know, are supposed to be exactly the same length. Imagine trying to calibrate that, you know. And so the lasers are going back and forth, bouncing around.

39:12And then if a gravitational wave comes by, a gravitational wave is literally a wave in space and time. And so space contracts in one direction. And all of a sudden, the two lasers are no longer the same length. They're different because space contracted. And so the person with the question is absolutely right. That's what gravitational waves do. The thing that makes it mind-blowing that we detected these things is they're tiny. luckily for us um they i mean they're they're a thousand times smaller than a proton and and to give you a sense of that i mean not that the human brain can even get that and the human brain's not going to get the next one either but it's the equivalent of measuring from the us to the nearest star alpha centauri about four light years light years about six trillion miles damn you're going on you know 24 trillion miles um that would be the equivalent of the distance between us and the near a star varying by the thickness of a human hair.

40:09Wow. They're trying to measure that. Holy. Are you allowed to swear on this, bud? I'll do it for you. Holy shit. Okay. I could go more than that, probably. I could swear I'll do it. You know, I did not think they'd be able to do this.

40:30Neil deGrasse Tyson:And in fact, Michelle, I would, you know, the Nobel Prize, which was ultimately given into the project. For me, I view that as not only a prize for the scientific result, but for the engineering that enabled it. Oh my gosh. Yeah. With that measurement being so infinitesimally small, how did they know that somebody didn't just bump the table? Absolutely. So, I mean, so this is the thing, right? I mean,

41:10there's all of these, there's all this noise in the detector, right? The detector, like you said, there's all kinds of noise going on in the detector. And then, and then this, I was, I was just making sure I had my, my dates and everything. So this would have been in September of 2015.

41:24Neil deGrasse Tyson:And just to clarify, when a scientist uses the word noise, they're not necessarily and almost hardly ever are talking about sound. Yeah, they're not in the lab going, shut your ass up!

41:39Who knows? Maybe that's what the detector was saying. Cut down the noise!

41:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:No, we're talking about sources of interference to the signal you're trying to measure, no matter what those sources are. Right, so go on, Michelle. There's all kinds of little variations. I mean, the lasers are under vacuum, but there's all kinds of things happening. So in September of 2015, there's all kinds of noise, there's all kinds of variation, but then all of a sudden, one of the detectors goes, wumba, wumba, wumba, boom, just like that. And then at the speed of light between one detector, which was in Louisiana and the other one was in Oregon, the same pattern, wumba, wumba, wumba, boom, goes off.

42:19And it was absolutely unquestionable. It was the same pattern, the same frequency at the speed of light. Gravitational waves travel at the speed of light from one detector. And people were like, Nobel Prize. Yeah, that's fantastic. Oh, my God. But let me just say, because I want to say what that event was. There were two black holes 1.4 billion light years away. This event happened 1.4 billion years ago. The black holes were both on the border. In another galaxy.

42:49Neil deGrasse Tyson:In another galaxy. Yeah, it was way out of our galaxy. Far, far away, by the way. Yeah, far, far away. Yes. Thank you, Chuck. Those two black holes were both about - It's far, far away. It's far away. Yeah, yeah. 1.4 billion light years, don't need to worry about it. Yeah, yeah, that's right. You know, there were two black holes that were roughly 30 times the mass of the sun apiece. We caught them in only the last two seconds, point two, sorry, point two, two tenths of a second, of them spiraling together and merging into a bigger black hole. And in that 0.2 seconds, they accelerated from 30 % the speed of light to 60 % the speed of light.

43:27Black holes 30 times the mass of the sun. And about two times the mass of the sun was converted into pure energy. Wow. In 0.2 seconds. This is an unbelievable thing. It's real. That is a monster of proportions that the human brain can't go any. I have no idea what that is. And it happened, and we measured it.

43:48Neil deGrasse Tyson:Michelle, wasn't that the most energetic event in the universe in that moment? I think it had to be. It was more energy than every star in every galaxy in the observable universe. Wow. Yeah. In that 0.2 seconds, right. In that 0.2 seconds, yeah. Jeez Louise. Okay, so tell us about, so if this happens with some frequency, no pun intended there, then two waves that do intersect, what can we say about them? Do they magnify any kind of gravitational disturbance in the space-time? What can we say about what is happening? Because when you drop two pebbles in a pond, you see interference patterns with the peak gets higher and the valleys get lower.

44:35Neil deGrasse Tyson:So it exaggerates what's there. Presumably, we can expect just that same thing, can't we? Yeah, I think the answer is yes, but it's at a tiny, tiny, tiny scale. And also, I mean, this was a fantastic energetic event that the gravitational wave detector was able to detect this event. But there's also a background of gravitational waves, binary stars going around each other, all kinds of things. I'm actually making tiny little gravitational waves right now. So, you know, again, we come to this idea of noise. Wait, you were making gravitational waves because you were lifting your hands up and down?

45:10A mass is moving. There's something moving. There's mass moving around. That's right. It's really, really small. It's not that you have special powers.

45:17Neil deGrasse Tyson:You're just moving your body, just to be clear. Exactly, yeah. That'd be a great superpower, you know, making gravitational waves. But anyway, yeah, so the answer, I think, is yes. But I don't think there's going to be any organized effect of that. Because there's just, I mean, think about waves on a giant lake, a giant ocean. There's ripples going every which way. And yes, they are interfering when they add together. I think all that's happening. But I don't think that has any measurable effect on what's going on in the universe. It's tiny. So in Tristan's question, it was, would it be able to perhaps give the appearance of a celestial body being there when none is there because of the curvature of space-time itself?

46:01And you're saying that that's not going to happen. Okay, cool.

46:06Neil deGrasse Tyson:The energetics are too small. So just to be clear, it gave off more energy than all stars combined in the universe over those 0.2 seconds. But then that energy in the form of gravitational waves moved how many billions of miles to reach us? 1.4 billion light years. 1.4 billion light. So it's been diluted over that distance to the low energies that were ultimately detected in LIGO. Right? I mean, just think of the volume. Because anybody at this distance in any direction from those colliding black holes could make this measure. Yeah, the ripple. Yeah, yeah. So that energy is expanding through the entire universe, and we're just catching our one little piece of it.

46:50What was that event like? I mean, because if you're close to that event, I mean, that must have ripped apart any matter within quite a large distance. I mean, I'm sure we could have somebody do the math on that. So, I mean, I don't think there would be – it can't make it seem like there's a star there. This is not a solution for dark matter. Sorry. It's not a good thing. All right.

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50:47This is Rachel Ambrose who says, Rachel here from Texas. I loved Michelle's Big Think interview. It was the first time I heard someone articulate the profound weirdness of reality in a way that completely resonated with how I have always felt but could never adequately explain. And I just appreciated that so much. Thank you, Michelle. My question is about neutron stars. I am confused why the high-energy fast radio bursts, the FRBs, come to us in the form of low-energy radio frequencies rather than X-rays or gamma rays. What mechanism causes such a high-energy event to manifest as radio light?

51:35Neil deGrasse Tyson:Ooh. So this has built in the knowledge that radio waves are lower energy light than X-rays or gamma rays. And if it's a high-energy phenomenon, why is it wasting itself with radio waves?

51:52Neil deGrasse Tyson:You're answering that one, Michelle. Yeah, right. Okay, so yeah, I at least know a little bit about that. I mean, as I said, one of the missions I absolutely adore is called NICER, the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer. It's on the space station. It's a Goddard-run mission. Fantastic. It's about the size of a washing machine. Again, not an expensive mission. and it's able to actually get x-rays in this case x-rays from neutron stars and at times the arrival of the x-rays so precisely we can make a map of what the surface of a neutron star is like so they're tiny neutron stars are only about 20 miles across they they usually have about twice the mass of the sun packed into 20 miles these are extreme things and they're real i mean we study many of these.

52:37And they're so incredible. When you do a map of these, and they often are rotating very fast, you actually get this strange effect on the side of the map, because light is bending around, there's so much mass, the curvature of space and time is so extreme, two solar masses packed into 20 miles, that you actually can see behind a neutron star as well as in front, the light curves around it. And so, I mean, what an incredible real monster.

53:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:What you're saying is it has many properties that we would find with black holes in its distortion of the fabric of space and time in their vicinity. In fact, the neutron star group at Goddard said that neutron stars are far more interesting than black holes because with black holes, you have this dark event horizon that nothing ever comes out of. You don't know what's going on in there. With neutron stars, you got the freaking thing right in front of you it's very bright still here with us right and you can study something that that has such extreme conditions that there's there's no laboratory on earth we can even study what matters like under these conditions it's amazing wow um but yeah okay so going back to why it's radio waves neutron stars definitely do admit high energy radiation they're actually the source of what we think are gamma ray bursts uh dangerous blasts of high energy radiation.

53:53We're using an X-ray telescope to observe these things. The surface of a neutron star is very hot. It definitely does generate these high energy things. The way you get radio waves is something, Neil, I'm sure it's a favorite of yours too. It's a lovely thing called synchrotron radiation. And would you like to go ahead and talk about synchrotron radiation? How could you not?

54:14Neil deGrasse Tyson:As I understood it, no, as I understand it, the neutron star has to be magnetic, has to have a magnetic field. That's right. And as it rotates, it can accelerate electrons that are ambient in the environment. And you can accelerate electrons off of a magnetic field that will radiate radio waves. Yes. We call it synchrotron radiation. I think I accounted for that correctly. Is that correct? Yeah. I mean, the one thing that's perhaps, you know, something to mention about synchrotron radiation. I mean, so you've got a couple of things going on. I mean, And you also have, you know, electrons are charged particles.

54:52They respond to a magnetic field. They can actually be accelerated. Neutron stars have jets. We see those as well. Also, when you get, synchrotron radiation happens largely when an electron spirals around a magnetic field. Just by the act of spinning around, that's a form of acceleration. That's what it was. And that generates frequency.

55:11Neil deGrasse Tyson:It creates its own frequency, spiral frequency that is the radio wave. So what's fun about the neutron star, just to summarize that, is different processes within the environment of a neutron star give you different bands of light that our different telescopes can participate in, which is kind of fun. And then you can compare notes across different wavelengths of light. And this is why astronomers just aren't greedy. It's like, oh, we need a radio telescope and an infrared telescope and an X-ray telescope and a visible light telescope. But you're absolutely true. You see totally different things in these different wavelengths of light.

55:46And so as high energy and dramatic objects neutron stars are, you better believe they are. There was one in, God, was it 2007? There was an event that actually blew off a measurable amount of our atmosphere. And the whole magnetic field of the Earth was ringing like a bell for a while.

56:04Neil deGrasse Tyson:Now you're telling us this? Look this up. This is all real. and we traced it back to a neutron star that we think is about 50 ,000 light years away. The neutron star had a little bit of a bad day. The crust we think shifted by about a centimeter. And that gave off so much energy that 50 ,000 light years away, it blew off a bunch of our atmosphere. Oh my. These are intense things. Michelle, I'm going to be honest. I could have lived without that information. Yeah, I know. It keeps you up at night, doesn't it? I mean, who cares about asteroids, right? Killer asteroids. No, I mean, these blasts of high-energy radiation from neutron stars, some people think that may limit the age of civilizations in the galaxy.

56:48Eventually, we all get hit by one. Wow. Another great question. Thank you, Rachel. All right. This is Brett. And Brett says, hi, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Thaler, Lord Nice. Tuning in from Dublin, Ireland, my question is, What unlikely possibility or possibilities do you hope are true?

57:16That's father for good thought. It is. An unlikely possibility that you're like, oh man, that'd be so great if that were true. Yeah. Yeah. So, boy, that can go in so many different directions. Because I mean, I've got, I mean, one of the things I...

57:36Neil deGrasse Tyson:What a great question, Brett. Look at you. I can lead off. I got one for you, Michelle. Okay, I got one too. You go ahead. I think I got it. I think it's unlikely that we'll find anything other than microbial life on Mars if we find life at all. But it would be really cool if we found sort of macroscopic crawly things living in the subsurface of Mars. I think that's unlikely, but that would be really cool if creatures crawled out from home. Would you still be satisfied if those macroscopic crawly things were fossilized in some way, but they're no longer there? No, we're talking about unlikely things that we want to happen.

58:14Neil deGrasse Tyson:Let the thing crawl out and ride one of the rovers like a, you know. I got to. Yeehaw! Right. You know, like, what do you call those horse, those bull riders in the bar? Yeah, Bucking Bronco. I want to come out and ride one of our rovers. Rovers. So that'd be unlikely, but it'd be really cool if it was true. So now your turn, Michelle. Well, I mean, since I was just riffing on that, I mean, do you think it might be more likely to find macroscopic life on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn in the oceans? You know, Europa and Celidus. We're talking about unlikely things that we want to happen. Oh, you think that's a likely thing?

58:53Okay, all right, got it. Yeah, yeah. Unlikely things. Yeah, there could be like little brine shrimp and stuff. Yeah. One of my big excitements right now with the Webb telescope is it's looking so far away that we're looking back to a time roughly, like, let's say about 300 million years after the Big Bang. And we're actually seeing the very first stars form. And they're absolutely different. different. I mean, we haven't actually found, you know, one of these first stars yet. I really want to find a first generation star. We're going to be looking back to a time, just like I said, a couple hundred million years after the Big Bang, when stars started to form.

59:32Webb can now see that far back. We have that power. And we're starting to see these pseudo stars that are formed around black holes. They're about a million times the mass of the sun, relatively small. You know, I mean, And these things may become the seeds of the big black holes that are in the centers of all galaxies. We're starting to see that forming now. And my question, I mean, I was a stellar astrophysicist. I was a stellar astrophysicist. I studied stars. That was my thing.

59:59Neil deGrasse Tyson:Outstanding in your field. No, not outstanding, but that's what I studied. And I would love to see what one of the first generation stars looks like. Because my guess is it's going to look totally different. That the universe was more dense back then. There was more dark matter prevalent. I mean, dark matter has gravity. That's going to get sucked into the formation of a star just from gravity too. What was that first generation of stars like? My guess is they're going to be huge, many, many times the mass of the sun, many, many times bigger than the most massive stars we have today. And I'm wondering if they're going to work really differently because there's more dark matter in them.

1:00:36Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay. Interesting. I want to see that first generation of stars. And just to be clear, James Webb was specifically designed and tuned for that exercise to see the beginnings of the formation of matter in the early universe. So you're betting on the right horse there, I think. Yeah, we're doing it. I mean, these things, never let astronomers name anything. These things are called little red dots. Ha ha, yeah. They're massive pseudo stars around a giant black hole at the beginning of the universe for them calling little red dots. Because they look like little red dots. Little red dots, yeah. But they're so far away.

1:01:15That's one of my favorites.

1:01:17Neil deGrasse Tyson:Chuck, time for like two more questions. All right, here we go. But only if Michelle is efficient in her answers. I promise to be efficient. You're on notice. You don't have to promise anything, Michelle. It's going to do what you want. This is Alyssa Feldhaus who says, Hello, Fowler the Great. This is Alyssa Feldhaus, tuning in from Hendersonville, Tennessee. As such a prominent female figure in the science world, what message can you give all the little girls out there that will one day stand on our shoulders? Me and my girls love how the universe works. And thank you for keeping science cool.

1:02:07I always think of myself as so nerdy. I never think about cool. Okay, so a message I always have. The nerdy is the new cool.

1:02:14Neil deGrasse Tyson:Nerdy is the new cool. Nerdy is the new cool, absolutely, yeah. I guess a message I already have is you're already the right type of person to be a scientist. Math and physics did not come quickly to me. I didn't get particularly good grades in school in math and physics. It took me some time. I just loved it so much. You're paying attention to your own curiosity and not being discouraged when maybe you don't get something very, very quickly. You're already enough. you're already there. For so long, I wondered, you know, do I have what it takes to be an astrophysicist? I love this, but maybe I just don't have the magic thing, the right stuff.

1:02:48And science doesn't work that way. If you want to study it, you can study it. It's like learning a language. You know, it takes a while to become fluent in a different language. You don't really go up to a young person and say, you could never learn Spanish, you know, even if you tried. But, you know, no, no. I mean, science is a beautiful thing to study. It takes time. And anyone can learn it if they're interested in it and have that passion more than any innate ability and talent to get all of this very quickly. So, you know, I spent way too much time thinking maybe I'm not the right personality.

1:03:22I'm not smart enough. And it's a cultural, you know, bullshit that science requires a certain type of brilliant, different person. So, you know, you're enough. And, you know, you're going to be the best scientist from your perspective, right? I mean, we're all, people have different science talents. Some people are better at the math. Some people see the larger concepts. Some people are really good at communicating it. These are all really important steps. And you can find that part that you fit into. So you don't have to be anything other than just the way you are.

1:03:57Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wow, look at that. I love it. And if I can add, not having ever been female, but being a black man in the world, there are resonant challenges that we face entering a world where role models are not there. So I would just add that there are always people who will learn something faster than you will. And the school system tends to reward that and call those people smart, and they might get a higher grade. and but in the end that's not what matters what matters is your motivation to ultimately learn what you need to learn if it takes you longer to learn it and longer than the time before you're tested on it takes you a little longer so what took you a little longer if you get there and your ambition takes you and your interest then ultimately that's what will dominate who and what you are as a participant on the research frontier, not how quickly you learn a problem set on an exam in high school or in college.

1:05:01Neil deGrasse Tyson:So ambition is something that tests hardly ever test for. And that's what you need. And that's what you need confidence in. Yeah. And just being able to stick to something. Yeah. And just having the grit. I mean, when I got to college, I got placed in remedial math. I mean, I came from a public school system that didn't have a whole lot of math. and uh you know i uh i just i just i knew i could not get space out of my head i was so fascinated by it and i am so glad i i stuck in when i was thinking geez i just don't have the talent for this and that became the driver that your source of energy to pursue it and i like your language analogy because no one will ever say oh you're not smart enough to learn spanish no one will ever say that.

1:05:45Neil deGrasse Tyson:They just say, are you committed enough to learn Spanish? And you learn a little bit today and a little bit next week and next month. And eventually you wake up and you're just talking fluent Spanish, you know, and everyone can learn it. And I think that's also true with math as a language of the universe. Yes. Well, let me add Alyssa that as a product of Philadelphia for your public schools, there's always comedy.

1:06:21Neil deGrasse Tyson:All right. So Chuck, we only actually had time for that one last question, but that was a really good one to end this episode on. So Michelle, thank you for being a guest on StarTalk. Hey, I'm always here. Where are you based right now? Right now I'm in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Whoa. Is that where you're based? Yes. Yes. Cool. Cool. Okay. Well, we will make sure to find you again because you're a delight to share in our answers here and to get your perspectives on the state of science in America and in the universe. All right. Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. These are fan favorites, these Cosmic Queries.

1:07:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:And we delight in the questions that we receive and keep them coming. But you have to be a member of the Patreon community first. Yes, but it's only$5. That's it. $5 a month. And I got to tell you, that's less than what the budget of NASA is.

1:07:34All right.

1:07:36Neil deGrasse Tyson:I am Neil deGrasse Tyson. You're a personal astrophysicist. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.

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1:08:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:Respect your time. Ask your doctor about EpGliss and visit epgliss.com or call 1-800-LILLY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. From the world and creators of The Big Bang Theory comes a new Max original comedy series, Stuart, Fails to Save the Universe. After accidentally creating a new multiverse, comic store owner Stuart Bloom must locate a quantum interference device to restore reality. Executive producers Chuck Lorre, Zach Penn and Bill Prady deliver the adventure of a lifetime. Check out the new Max original comedy series streaming July 23rd exclusively on HBO Max. Subscription required.