Supervoids

Daniel and Kelly explore the structure of the Universe and examine its emptiest places, making no effort to spare the scatological humor. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:05Speaker 01

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• 1:49Speaker 04

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• 2:13Kelly Weinersmith?

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• 2:55Kelly Weinersmith?

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• 3:35Kelly Weinersmith?

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• 3:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment. A Lincoln Original Series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 4:15Speaker 06

  This week on Game Recognized Game with Breonna Stewart and me, Miles Turner, we talk with two-time WNBA All-Star and current ESPN analyst, Janae Ogumike, about tearing her Achilles tendon while playing in China and how a deep connection with her sister Nekka helped the recovery process.

• 4:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nekka claims to have felt something while she was sleeping and that's why she was up when I called. And I was like, oh my gosh, Nekka, I'm hurt. And I think this is a problem.

• 4:38Speaker 06

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• 5:29Daniel Whiteson?

  When you look out into the night sky on a camping trip, you're seeing the best view in the universe. Much better than standing on a mountain top or on the top floor of a building. Stretching over zillions of light years of cosmic space, you're seeing entire stars and galaxies across this black ocean. It's amazing. But there's something else for you to see up there, for us to learn about. The empty bits. Between the galaxies stretch huge regions without all that flashy glowy stuff. How is that all arranged? What is the map of galaxies in the universe? And what does that tell us about how the universe forms and the forces that shape it?

• 6:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Today in the pod, we're digging into the biggest maps we can make of the biggest stuff and the biggest non-stuff in the universe. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary Mostly Empty Universe.

• 6:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I studied parasites and space and super void. Sounds like a sort of gothy concept, so 16-year-old Kelly is totally into it.

• 6:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist who likes to think about aliens and I'm about 0% goth. So when I hear super voids, I don't think black lipstick, I think Marvel characters.

• 7:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, all right. Well, so super voids does make me think of gothy stuff, which reminds me of some of my favorite gothy characters, which are Frankenstein from the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

• 7:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes. R.I.P. Tim Curry.

• 7:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Exactly. And the devil in Legend, which, yes. So my question for you today is, what was Tim Curry's best role and why is it the saddest thing in the whole world that Tim Curry is gone? Because it's the saddest thing in the world that Tim Curry is gone.

• 7:30Daniel Whiteson?

  It is sad. He was wonderful. I loved him in Clue.

• 7:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 7:34Daniel Whiteson?

  You know, the hilarious movie, wonderful. And I love a mystery, you know? For me, science is the biggest mystery in the universe. How does this all work? Who caused the ripples in the primordia plasma? You know, was it the butler with the candlestick in the early universe? Who knows?

• 7:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  You are so good at keeping us on track.

• 7:56Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm doing my best here. Oh, my gosh. This car is going off into the weeds of Virginia.

• 8:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  I just needed a moment to like vent and feel seen because I am just devastated about the loss of Tim Curry.

• 8:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Would you say that the loss of Tim Curry creates a void in your heart?

• 8:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  A super void, Daniel. And so, and my heart is now cold and empty.

• 8:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, no.

• 8:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  And let's go ahead and change the subject before I get too emotional here and dig into super voids. Why are we talking about super voids today?

• 8:27Daniel Whiteson?

  We're talking about super voids because they're super awesome. They're fascinating. They're one of the biggest things or non-things in the universe. They tell us so much about its history, about its future, about its formation, about how it works. And it's so hard to get them in your mind because they give you a sense of scale of the universe, you know? How tiny, how small, how insignificant we are, and yet how we can cast our minds to understanding the largest scale structures in the universe, which stretch across billions and zillions of light years. It's super awesome to think about super voids. And I'm not the only one who thinks so. We got a request from two listeners, Levi and Nathan, who wrote in and said, hey, would

• 9:10Daniel Whiteson?

  you tell us why the universe has super voids? So that's why we're talking about super voids specifically today.

• 9:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, and I noted in that email that Levi also says he enjoys my poop jokes. And so this is a family that gets our podcast.

• 9:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And we'll try to make as many poo jokes as we can in today's episode just for you, Levi.

• 9:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  I am trying to connect super voids to poo jokes and the only thing I can think about is the prep for a colonoscopy. You are super voided at that point. But probably that joke's over Levi's head because Levi's a little bit younger, isn't he? Yeah.

• 9:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, exactly. But maybe Levi thinks about super voids every time he's voiding himself.

• 9:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, well, good. Look, we did it. We did it. We got the poop jokes in there.

• 9:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes. And you know, a really important thing for understanding super voids and the structure of the universe is dark matter, which is its own poo joke right there.

• 10:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, man, I love the work we do together, Daniel. It's the best.

• 10:10Daniel Whiteson?

  We are out here doing hard-hitting science. No, really, we are proving that it's possible to do deep dives into science and also make poo jokes. That is our niche in the psych com community. But before we tell you what we think about super voids and dig into the cosmic history that created them and our confusion about them, I wondered what the extraordinaries thought about why the universe has super voids. So I reached out to our group of volunteers, which you are very, very welcome to join. Just write to us, two questions at danielandkelly.org and you can join this crew. In the meantime, think about it for a minute. Why do you think the universe has super voids?

• 10:51Speaker 03

  The universe is expanding and the amount of stuff in it is not increasing.

• 10:56Daniel Whiteson?

  So we can fight all of those dastardly dark energy and dark matter criminals.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Initial randomness allowed some parts to get denser and presumably some parts

• 11:08Daniel Whiteson?

  to get a lot sparser. It's for the same reason my gravy has lumps in it. I don't know what that reason is, but I think it's the same reason. Collects in some places, then it has to clear out in others. I think it has to do with the way matter was created during the Big Bang.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  I would guess some astronomers saw some very cold or empty patch in space and could not avoid to give it a super name. Does not have to be uniform. I have no idea what a super void is. Is it like a really, really big void? Or is it, you can't really have like a void is just void.

• 11:47Speaker 06

  A void is just void. Because of dark matter. It's because of dark matter. Yeah. We're confused. Help us.

• 11:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh my gosh, I love the answers. Astronomers saw an empty patch and couldn't avoid giving it a super name. You are my new best friend.

• 12:03Daniel Whiteson?

  That's got everything you love, right? It's got a pun. It's got to dig against astronomers.

• 12:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I feel like it implies that astronomers give things good names. Although maybe they do. No, no, they don't actually. What is it? The, uh, the rings around Saturn or Jupiter or like A, B, C, and D, or?

• 12:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. The solar system is a disaster. Even young planets and dwarf planets. You've got like centaurs and meteors and all sorts of stuff. It's a mess.

• 12:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's a mess, but we are here to clear up confusion. And so let's jump right in. Daniel, what the heck is a super void?

• 12:39Daniel Whiteson?

  So to understand super voids, we first have to understand our cosmic context, like the structure of the universe around us. So let's start here in California or Virginia. California, by the way, feeling more like Virginia these days, you know, because it's like stinky and humid and gross and like, ugh, where do I even live anymore? Man.

• 13:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh my, I see that your handle on Riverside today is humidity hater. This is really living rent free in your brain. I'm not a humidity fan either.

• 13:09Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, since we're putting ourselves in the cosmic context, it's important to note that Los Angeles yesterday was the most humid place in the country, which is, you know, breaking all the rules, if you ask me.

• 13:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  That does not seem fair.

• 13:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Anyway, zoom out from the sticky issues here on planet Earth. And of course we have our solar system and the sun is just one of, you know, hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way swirling around in roughly a disk. And then our galaxy is not just one of zillions scattered through the universe. Galaxies themselves cluster. So we have the local cluster of galaxies, a bunch of galaxies that are gravitationally bound together, which doesn't mean that there's like some big object in the center around which everything is orbiting the way it is in the solar system. But it does mean that there is a center of mass of the local cluster and everything is swirling around that.

• 14:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, I'm with you.

• 14:01Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, so we have clusters and now clusters organized into super clusters, right? Astronomers, great names. And super clusters are not always gravitationally bound. They're like near each other in that you can look at them and say, oh, these clusters are near each other, but it's not clear whether gravity is strong enough to hold them together. Because remember the universe is expanding. It's creating new space between everything. And then includes new space between California and Virginia, new space between Earth and the sun, new space between the sun and the center of the Milky Way. But because there's enough gravity to hold the earth together and hold the sun to the earth and hold the sun to the rest of the galaxy, those distances are not increasing.

• 14:43Daniel Whiteson?

  So the expansion of the universe is losing to gravity. But gravity gets weaker as distances get greater. So when you get to super voids, dark energy is starting to get powerful enough that it's going to overcome gravity. And that's right about the cutoff. So we don't think that all super clusters are technically objects in the sense that they're not gravitationally bound. We think that as time goes on, they probably will get pulled apart. But they're still sort of objects in the sense that they're near each other. And if you looked at them on a map, you'd probably draw a circle around them.

• 15:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, that doesn't sound voidy.

• 15:16Daniel Whiteson?

  No, we're not at the voids yet.

• 15:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 15:18Daniel Whiteson?

  But now we've already zoomed out incredibly, right? Like from the earth to the sun, to the galaxy, to like clusters of galaxies, to now super clusters of galaxies. It might feel like this is the biggest thing you could ever have in your head. Okay, now collapse all those super clusters down to a point. Because now we're going to zoom out so far that structure inside a super cluster is irrelevant. We're just going to treat each super cluster like a dot. And we're going to ask, how are the super clusters organized across the universe?

• 15:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 15:50Daniel Whiteson?

  And they're not organized evenly. It's not like somebody sprinkled sand across the universe, each one being a super cluster. Instead, they form filaments, they form walls, they form bubbles, right? So there are sheets and filaments of super clusters. And inside those bubbles are the voids. That's where there are fewer galaxies and fewer super clusters. And so imagine like a foam, right? Where super clusters lie on the edges of the bubbles and inside the bubbles, there's comparatively less.

• 16:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so my brain is now wondering why you can't get super voids on the outsides of the bubbles too. Am I just letting this analogy get stuck in my head too much?

• 16:29Daniel Whiteson?

  There is no outside to the bubbles. The universe is filled with these bubbles.

• 16:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 16:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, the bubbles are everywhere. The universe is just bubbles. And it's the foam fills the whole universe. And everywhere you have a bubble edge where the bubbles meet, that's where you have super clusters, walls, sheets of super clusters. And inside, those are the voids.

• 16:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa, okay.

• 16:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 16:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Are they totally empty or just less empty than the outside of the bubble?

• 16:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, great question. They're not completely empty, right? It's a relative density. So we measure the density of stuff in the universe. And we say anything less than like 10% of the mean density, we call that a void. And these things are pretty big, like they have diameters like 10 to 100 megaparsecs, which is like three to 300 million light years across. So like, these are vast structures. And these are not super voids. These are just voids. These are just normal, everyday, run of the mill voids. Already, these things are much, much bigger than one individual super cluster. Relative to a void, a super cluster is so tiny, you just think of it as a dot. And remember, inside that super cluster is a bunch of clusters of galaxies.

• 17:38Daniel Whiteson?

  And inside each cluster of galaxies is a bunch of galaxies, each of which is unfathomably huge to the human mind. So this is like a real brain stretcher to even get this in your head, what a super void is and how big it is.

• 17:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I was, so you said 30 to 300 million light years. And I was still having a little trouble wrapping my head around that number. So I just looked it up. The distance between our galaxy and Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away. So we are talking about voids that are like, I don't know, 15 times bigger than that minimum. That is huge.

• 18:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And you know, the size of our galaxy is like 100,000 light years across. And so if you can somehow get the Milky Way into your brain, then we're talking about distances that are thousands of times bigger than the Milky Way.

• 18:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh my gosh.

• 18:29Daniel Whiteson?

  And so, yeah, these are big, empty regions of space.

• 18:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow, we should put something in there.

• 18:38Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, I know your house is filled to the brim with all kinds of interesting stuff. And so you're always looking for more storied space.

• 18:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I was thinking we could put all the stuff in my house into the super void so that I don't have, but I think Zach might fill the super void pretty quick.

• 18:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  With Dorito bags.

• 18:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Not just Dorito bags, but you know, you've got all these projects that are always half done. You're like, I'm storing all these cabinets in this room because I can't put them on the wall yet.

• 19:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  They're on the wall now.

• 19:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Do you imagine someday in the future, you will be done with projects and the house will just be like, actually totally functional?

• 19:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  No.

• 19:16Daniel Whiteson?

  No. She says with resignation.

• 19:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't know when I'll have time to finish everything. Maybe when I die.

• 19:24Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, well, maybe your house never will have voids. It's always going to be filled with stuff. But the universe has voids and they're fascinating. And they were kind of surprised when we learned that the universe had this structure.

• 19:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  So why, okay, so if I'm like imagining a giant space, I would imagine that if you like distributed stuff around that space, you would expect there to be some empty areas for random reasons. But you've, I think you've already explained to us that these voids aren't random because they tend to be on the inside of like bubbles. Does that tell us something about how they're formed?

• 19:58Daniel Whiteson?

  It does tell us something about how they're formed. And you put your finger on exactly what the discovery was. Until around the seventies, we thought that galaxies were distributed roughly equally, that, you know, any galaxy had an equal chance to be here or there. And if you took any chunk of space, you would find roughly the same number of galaxies. You know, that the density was pretty smooth. And it wasn't until the seventies that they went out and they started measuring these things and trying to map out the structure of the universe. You know, I love when we have an idea about how the universe works. And then we develop the technology, the capacity to actually measure it. And the universe is like, nah, uh, what you thought was natural, what you thought was intuitive, what you thought made sense, that's not how things work. Cause those are the best moments.

• 20:41Daniel Whiteson?

  Those are the moments when the universe is confronting your intuition and teaching you something about how things work. I mean, not like the universe is a teacher, you know, that like cares what we understand. But those are the best moments of discovery.

• 20:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes.

• 20:52Daniel Whiteson?

  And it was in the seventies that people first started measuring redshifts of these galaxies and trying to assemble them into sort of a 3D map. What you need to understand the structure of the universe is to know, where is a galaxy? How far away is it? If you know those two things, you can start to build a 3D map of where all the galaxies are and you can start to see structure.

• 21:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 21:12Daniel Whiteson?

  And so people started doing this seriously in the seventies. The Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and the Smithsonian started to do this with the Tillingham Telescope. And they were surprised. They surveyed like 2,200 galaxies and they saw. The things were not smooth, right? It didn't look like galaxies were distributed randomly across the universe. They were clustered together into these bubbles. Imagine a sheet of paper and you throw sand over it. You expect there, as you said, to be some places where there are galaxies and some places where there are not. It's not going to be perfectly smooth. You don't expect the galaxies to be like in a grid, you know,

• 21:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 21:47Daniel Whiteson?

  perfectly arranged. There'd be some clustering accidentally, but what they saw was definite structure, not just random distributions. They saw like a bubble bath of cosmic voids and filaments. And they discovered what they call the Great Wall, a superstructure over 500 million light years wide.

• 22:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa.

• 22:04Daniel Whiteson?

  And what a moment, you know, to be the first person to map the universe, right? Like, I always imagined the joy of being like a first person to land on a new shore or to cross a land bridge or, you know, get in a boat 10,000 years ago and cross the Pacific to the South Pacific Islands or whatever, right? What a moment of discovery. But this is just on another scale, you know? This is like, oh, my gosh, the universe has patterns and we're part of this. And there's a huge wall over there and like, oh, my God, what a moment. And, you know, I think that's sort of natural for us to think about now because we've known about it for 50 years. But at the time, this was a real revolution in the way people thought about, you know, our entire cosmic context. So that was very cool. And that was in the seventies.

• 22:49Daniel Whiteson?

  And again, the primary way we figured this out is that we look at galaxies and we measure their redshift, meaning that the light that comes from them has been shifted to lower frequencies. And we measure their redshift, which tells us how the light has been shifted, which tells us how fast they're moving away from us. Because remember, the things that are moving away from us have their light shifted into the red. And if we know how fast they're moving away from us, then we can tell how far away they are. Because that's the Hubble relationship. It tells us that things that are further away are moving away faster. So if you just measure the light from one of these galaxies, you measure the redshift, you say, I know where hydrogen should be. I know where helium should be on my spectrum and I see it shifted. You measure that shift, you can translate that to the distance to the galaxy.

• 23:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa.

• 23:34Daniel Whiteson?

  And now you know the angle in the sky, right? You know, I saw this galaxy at this angle, I saw that galaxy, the other angle. You put those together and you start to make your 3D map of the universe.

• 23:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing. Okay, so now we know what the pattern is. Let's take a break and when we come back, we'll talk about now that we know what the pattern is, what does that imply about how everything ended up, where it finally ended up?

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• 29:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  And 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.

• 29:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Right, yeah. So first slight clarification, inside the bubbles are voids.

• 29:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, okay.

• 29:40Daniel Whiteson?

  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? Do 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.

• 30:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Which is?

• 30:02Daniel Whiteson?

  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. We 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 is that surgery that came later? You know, 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.

• 30:46Daniel Whiteson?

  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 and 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 side 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 sign 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.

• 31:27Daniel Whiteson?

  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. And 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.

• 32:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  And that is not what we expected in this. Initially, and why is that not what we expected initially?

• 32:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, good question. Here 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 seventies. And by the seventies, we had seen the cosmic microwave background light that happened in the sixties. It was like 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 eighties and the nineties 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. And you're right to ask about that because those two things are definitely connected. And the listener who made that connection is totally right.

• 33:00Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 33:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, got it.

• 33:25Daniel Whiteson?

  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? And 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.

• 33:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 33:56Daniel Whiteson?

  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. This 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.

• 34:35Daniel Whiteson?

  So for example, the CMB light came from a really hot plasma, thousands and thousands of degrees, I think 3,000 K. But 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. And we see variations like 20 micro Kelvin in the CMB. That's like typical expected hot spots 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.

• 35:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 35:11Daniel Whiteson?

  So some places like 150 micro cake holder. 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.

• 35:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  If you could see how it's spelled, you would, you would get why this could be a poop joke.

• 35:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Maybe all constellations in the southern hemisphere should have anus in them, you know?

• 35:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Absolutely, yes.

• 35:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Astronomers, get on that.

• 35:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or synonyms of anus, yes. Cause you need some options.

• 35:42Daniel Whiteson?

  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 suggests 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.

• 36:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  And 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?

• 36:14Daniel Whiteson?

  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. 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 10 billion light years away.

• 36:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  So is this like most mornings you eat Special K, but one morning you eat poops like a champion? And that's the difference between void and super void?

• 36:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, 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.

• 37:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, and just to be clear, poops like a champion is an actual cereal you told me about the other day.

• 37:09Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 37:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  But still, you know, I think Katrina is one of the better people on this planet. That's what that story tells me.

• 37:39Daniel Whiteson?

  She's out there, she really does want to improve your pooping. Yeah. Even though she has nothing to do with super voids.

• 37:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  I tried really hard to derail this conversation. Let's go back to, uh, super voids of the universe.

• 37:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so this is really interesting because when you run the simulations in the universe, you don't get these kinds of super voids, like it's really unusual. And so it helps us try to understand like, you know, we talked about in our simulating the universe episode recently, how when you see something different in your simulation and in your data, it tells you that there's a gap. There'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 hot spots in the CMB tells us a lot about the expansion of the universe. Because photons fly through the universe as they get to us.

• 38:36Daniel Whiteson?

  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. One is, well, we could just be looking at a place that was denser or it was less dense. And so that'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 redshifted 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.

• 39:17Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 39:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  That is super duper cool. That, 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?

• 39:38Daniel Whiteson?

  It is like a video because if you keep watching it, you see different things, right? We are looking at the cosmic microwave background 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. And 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.

• 40:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got it, cool.

• 40:11Daniel Whiteson?

  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. And as it's leaving the black hole, it's losing energy, it's having to climb out of that gravitational well. So it gets red shifted. 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 cancelled out, if it's basically unchanged, right?

• 40:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  So you can't watch it as it changes? You just see like the average of what happened to it over a distance?

• 41:02Daniel Whiteson?

  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?

• 41:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, right, got it.

• 41:09Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 41:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, and so if we only see the average of what happened to a photon when it gets here?

• 41:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 41:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  How do we know that?

• 41:30Daniel Whiteson?

  So that's our theoretical calculation, but it's missing something really important.

• 41:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 41:34Daniel Whiteson?

  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. So 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?

• 42:19Daniel Whiteson?

  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 like so many dimensions of information in the CMB. It's not just a baby picture. It's a baby picture that was then like dragged through your life and distorted by the way your life turned out. And then here we are, like, 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?

• 42:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 42:52Daniel Whiteson?

  So all these incredibly clever little effects we can use to try to disentangle the history of the universe. And this is why like people seem like they're in love with the CMB. It's just such a gift. It's such a gift, oh my gosh.

• 43:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wait, so what if a photon went through a black? Or past a black hole and then through a super void. Like, 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?

• 43:20Daniel Whiteson?

  You get it in that interview room.

• 43:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 43:22Daniel Whiteson?

  You shine the lights in its face and.

• 43:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, boy.

• 43:25Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 43:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 43:34Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 43:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 43:49Daniel Whiteson?

  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. So 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.

• 44:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, we're getting super excited over here, but we have to take a break. Super void if you must, but come back in just a moment. But when we get back, we're going to talk about how super voids get made. The space ones, not, not the one you just made.

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• 49:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, and we're back. So, all right, Daniel, how do super voids get made?

• 49:58Daniel Whiteson?

  So this is really fun to think about, how you get super voids. One is that you can just have an underdense region initially, and, you know, 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. You 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.

• 50:43Daniel Whiteson?

  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? So that kind of thing can happen. But it's unlikely, right? The bigger the void, the less likely it is that can happen. 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 rows, 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

• 51:28Daniel Whiteson?

  to see super voids form, which is that you can get voids merging.

• 51:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 51:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Right? So these bubbles can like pop, because you get gravitational disturbances between these things, and the walls can like fall apart, essentially. And so you can get these cells merging. Basically, you know, if you have an over-density, in some walls, they can attract those filaments. And, you know, it's not like these super voids are totally empty. And so you still have some galaxies remaining inside of them. And so you can get like mergers of these voids to form a super voids. And this is the kind of example of something you can learn about in simulation. You can run a simulation of the universe, you can watch, you'd be like, look at that, I didn't expect that to happen. But you see it in simulation, you learn about emergent phenomena in simulation that you didn't predict. Super duper cool.

• 52:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yay, theoretical physicist.

• 52:19Daniel Whiteson?

  But this allows us to ask the question, like, well, why are there super voids? Do they make sense in the universe? And, you know, 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 know, you see it in 1 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. How 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?

• 53:04Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 53:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 53:11Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 53:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  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? Supervoids 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.

• 53:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, there's an even cooler way that parallel universes connect to supervoids.

• 53:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 53:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Which is that maybe you had a bunch of initial universes early on. And 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 universes collided? If early on, our bubble bounced into another bubble, it might leave an imprint on the early universe.

• 54:37Daniel Whiteson?

  And 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 supervoid. 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 supervoids.

• 55:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I think I'm still I'm 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. And now you get a big center as those two bubbles merge? Is that how does that result in a supervoid?

• 55:29Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 55:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I'm not taking any blame for that.

• 55:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Fair. No, when we talked earlier about bubbles, we were talking about the structure of our universe. And there's densities of superclusters 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.

• 56:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 56:01Daniel Whiteson?

  And so if our so let's not call them a bubble. Let's just 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 decayed into normal matter.

• 56:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 56:15Daniel Whiteson?

  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. You know, 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.

• 56:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 56:28Daniel Whiteson?

  What would that bruise look like on our universe if another universe had bumped into us and like not even left a note, just you know, just like hit and run universe style?

• 56:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Not cool.

• 56:38Daniel Whiteson?

  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 and under density in that part of the universe, which would, if you ran the simulations forward, lead to a supervoid today.

• 56:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow. Okay. All right. I'm with you.

• 56:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So that's one fun theory. And, you know, 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 supervoids. And you say, I predict a supervoid. And then you went out and saw it. That'd be much more compelling. This is more like a post addiction. 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 addiction.

• 57:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  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.

• 57:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So another potential explanation for this is a favorite alternative for dark matter. 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 is more invisible stuff out there causing gravity, but that gravity behaves differently. And there isn't any dark matter. This is called MOND, Modified Newtonian Dynamics. Remember how we talked about some of these cold spots are due to

• 58:24Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 58:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 58:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Because, you know, you're changing how gravity works. So it's going to change how these photons experience the universe. And even some theories that the universe isn't expanding. And these things are just due, they're evidence that gravity doesn't work the way that we expect. And it's true that we can't fully explain these supervoids. We 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 you know, 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.

• 59:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Now, when we finish getting through all of the explanations, are you going to tell us which explanation is your favorite?

• 59:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or are you just going to supervoid on this one?

• 59:35Daniel Whiteson?

  No, instead, I'm going to tell you about how we might learn more about the universe.

• 59:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 59:39Daniel Whiteson?

  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, 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.

• 1:00:20Daniel Whiteson?

  And so like, what's more important, what's more exciting than like 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 like maps people drew of the world in like 1200, you know, when like, they didn't know about this whole continent and they misunderstood this whole piece. But you see truth in there. You see like the shape of Portugal, or you see like the coast of Madagascar or whatever. And that's what our maps are like today. And I think in a thousand years, people look back at our primitive, basic

• 1:01:03Daniel Whiteson?

  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 it 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 can't, we don't even know what to ask yet.

• 1:01:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep. We are constantly pushing the boundaries of our ignorance back farther and farther. I love it.

• 1:01:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And supervoids are a really fascinating hole in our understanding. Because, you know, 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 under dense 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. Compared to the kind of stuff we spend money on, it costs pennies.

• 1:02:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I was usually physics doesn't feel super cheap, but this one, this one's cheap, you're saying?

• 1:02:13Daniel Whiteson?

  I 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.

• 1:02:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  That was fun.

• 1:02:21Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 1:02:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, and then you get to enjoy that knowledge forever.

• 1:02:31Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 1:02:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Fun science, please.

• 1:03:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, 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.

• 1:03:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

• 1:03:15Daniel Whiteson?

  He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, D and K Universe. Come engage with us.

• 1:03:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  You can email us at [email protected]. We really do want to hear from you.

• 1:03:30Daniel Whiteson?

  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.

• 1:03:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

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