What Caused the Big Bang?

August 6th, 2019

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Every astronomy textbook tells us that soon after the Big Bang, there was a period of exponentially accelerating expansion called cosmic inflation. In a tiny fraction of a second, inflationary expansion multiplied the size of the universe by a larger factor than in the following 13 and a half billion years of regular expansion. This story seems like a bit of a … stretch. Is there really any mechanism that could cause something like this to happen? What what we’re covering today – the real physics of cosmic inflation.

Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Matt O’Dowd
Graphics by Leonardo Scholzer
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Produced By: Kornhaber Brown

Dark Energy Playlist:
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The Quantum Vacuum and Hawking Radiation Playlist
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Most cosmologists buy some variation of the inflation hypothesis. It seems to very neatly solve some of the biggest questions in cosmology. Those being: why is matter and energy so smoothly spread out across the entire observable universe? And why is the geometry of the universe so flat? Neither should be expected unless the universe expanded much more rapidly early on. We explored these problems in an earlier video – worth a look if you really want to get inflation. Another problem fixed by inflation is the absence of magnetic monopoles – strange particles predicted to have been produced in the early universe. We’ll come back to those another time.

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Posted in Physics |

Deciphering The Vast Scale of the Universe | STELLAR

July 25th, 2019

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One of the fundamental questions humanity has always asked is how big is our Universe? For much of human history, people believed that Planet Earth was the very center of the entire universe. And Earth is pretty big. But compared the rest of the universe, we are infinitesimally small.

The animation in this video the Digital Universe data collection curated by the American Museum of Natural History. The software is used to visualize these datasets is OpenSpace, which is developed through a collaboration between AMNH, Linköping University in Sweden, New York University, and the University of Utah. The software and datasets are open source and are free to download and explore. https://www.openspaceproject.com/

Credit: From the ESO Supernova to the end of the Universe at 00:52
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hy2cxmHuEAs
Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser/spaceengine.org

Credit: Cepheid Variable 4:06
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXJBrRmHPj8
NASA, ESA, M. Kornmesser

I know, this video is a bit different from most Space Time videos. It’s part of a PBS miniseries called Stellar, done in collaboration with Diana Cowern from @physicsgirl and Joe Hanson from @It’sOkayToBeSmart. Over six episodes we travel to telescopes, go inside space research centers, and chat with amazing scientists. Next up is Joe’s episode where he explores where life might be outside our solar system.

Check out Joe’s episode here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoxGOL-Ow9w

Check out the other episodes in this series:

The Quasar from The Beginning of Time | STELLAR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqCPn…

Seeing a Black Hole with a Planet-Sized Telescope | STELLAR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUpKt…

I Visited the First Gravitational Wave Detector! LIGO | STELLAR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtp71…

How We’ll Find the Aliens in Our Solar System! | STELLAR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfqpYDVhXd8&t=2s

Stellar is a part of the PBS Summer of Space. There’ll be lots of awesome space related content all summer long on PBS. See what’s happening at https://www.pbs.org/summer-of-space/

#SummerOfSpacePBS #astrophysics #space

Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by: Sophia Chen, Matt O’Dowd, Andrew Kornhaber, Eric Brown
Directed by: Andrew Kornhaber & Eric Brown
Producer: Randa Eid
Director of Photography: Eric Brouse
Sound: Justin Pope & Brett Van Duesen
Production Assistant: Marifisia Bel
Editing: Pavel Ezrohi, Tom Levin, Rebbecca Senn
Graphics: Murilo Lopes
Assistant Editing: Daniel Sircar
Produced By: Kornhaber Brown

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Posted in Physics |

Did Time Start at the Big Bang?

July 18th, 2019

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Our universe started with the big bang. But only for the right definition of “our universe”. And of “started” for that matter. In fact, probably the Big Bang is nothing like what you were taught.
A hundred years ago we discovered the beginning of the universe. Observations of the retreating galaxies by Edwin Hubble and Vesto Slipher, combined with Einstein’s then-brand-new general theory of relativity, revealed that our universe is expanding. And if we reverse that expansion far enough – mathematically, purely according to Einstein’s equations, it seems inevitable that all space and mass and energy should once have been compacted into an infinitesimally small point – a singularity. It’s often said that the universe started with this singularity, and the Big Bang is thought of as the explosive expansion that followed. And before the Big Bang singularity? Well, they say there was no “before”, because time and space simply didn’t exist. If you think you’ve managed to get your head around that bizarre notion then I have bad news. That picture is wrong. At least, according to pretty much every serious physicist who studies the subject. The good news is that the truth is way cooler, at least as far as we understand it.

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Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Matt O’Dowd
Graphics by Leonardo Scholzer
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Produced By: Kornhaber Brown

Big Bang Supporters:

Anton Lifshits
David Nicklas
Fabrice Eap
Juan Benet
Justin Lloyd
Morgan Hough

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Mark Heising
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Vinnie Falco

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Danton Spivey
Donal Botkin
Edmund Fokschaner
Hank S
John Hofmann
John R. Slavik
Jordan Young
Joseph Salomone
kkm
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Matthew
Matthew O’Connor
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Posted in Physics |

The Quantum Internet

July 15th, 2019

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When we finally have a quantum internet you’ll be able to simultaneously like and dislike this video. But we don’t. So I hope you like it. The world is widely regarded as being well and truly into the digital age, also called the information age. No longer are economies and industries solely characterised by the physical goods they produce, and in fact some of the largest companies in the world produce no physical goods at all: digital information is a commodity in its own right. As discussed in a previous episode, this worldwide digital economy is fundamentally reliant on certain cryptographic processes. Currently these processes work in the realm of classical cryptography, but one day soon this may not be enough and so quantum cryptographic methods and algorithms are being developed. However, it’s one thing to design a protocol, it’s something else entirely to build a system to support it. To understand what needs to be done we need to get to the foundations of quantum mechanics – we need to talk about quantum information theory.

Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Graeme Gossel and Matt O’Dowd
Graphics by Leonardo Scholzer
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Produced By: Kornhaber Brown

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Posted in Physics |

Thorium and the Future of Nuclear Energy

July 1st, 2019

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Energy too cheap to meter – that was the promise of nuclear power in the 1950s, at least according to Lewis Strauss chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. That promise has not come to pass – but with some incredible new technologies, perhaps it still could. The question is – should it?

Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Matt O’Dowd
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Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Produced By: Kornhaber Brown

If we want to convert mass into energy, fission gives the most bang for our buck. Unfortunately that “bang” can be literal. Use of nuclear energy may risk the proliferation of nuclear weaponry, and there’s also the problem of nuclear waste, and the specter of horrible accidents. This last one was painted in terrifying detail in the recent dramatization of the Chernobyl disaster. Nuclear reactors sound scary because the disasters are pretty epic. However the reality is that far, far more people die from straight up air pollution due to coal-fired power plants than ever died in a nuclear reactor accident. In fact the radioactivity around coal-fired plants is also higher due to the trace but completely uncontained radioactive products of coal burning.

But the most compelling attraction is that nuclear power doesn’t directly produce carbon emissions. In fact nuclear power may be our most sure path to reducing carbon emissions and halting climate change. But can we do nuclear power safely enough? There are modern ideas – including the much-hyped thorium reactor – that suggest maybe we can. Before we can understand those we’ll need to review how nuclear reactors work.

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Posted in Physics |

The Quasar from The Beginning of Time | STELLAR

June 20th, 2019

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Check out Physics Girl visit LIGO to see where they discovered Gravitational Waves
https://youtu.be/jtp71NT0GNg

Recently, the oldest quasar ever seen was discovered by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, the Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, as well as the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona. In this first episode of the PBS DS mini-series, STELLAR, Matt travels to the top of Mauna Kea to visit the Gemini North telescope and see just how they found this ancient Quasar and it’s massive black hole.

Stellar is a brand new miniseries done in collaboration with Dianna Cowern from @Physics Girl and Joe Hanson from @It’s Okay To Be Smart Over six episodes we travel to some of the world’s most important telescopes, go inside amazing space research centers, and talk with brilliant scientists. Next up, Dianna from Physics Girl visits LIGO observatory in Washington that detected the very first gravitational waves. Then Joe Hanson visits one of the telescopes that was part of world spanning Event Horizon Telescope.

You’ll be able to see future episodes on the Physics Girl and It’s Okay to be Smart YouTube channels, as well as the PBS Digital Studios Facebook page.

Stellar is a part of the PBS Summer of Space. There will be lots of awesome space-related content all summer long on PBS. See what’s happening at https://www.pbs.org/summer-of-space/

#SummerOfSpacePBS #astrophysics #space

Special Thanks to Joy Pollard and Gemini Observatory for all their help making this episode.

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Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by: Sophia Chen, Matt O’Dowd, Andrew Kornhaber, Eric Brown
Directed by: Eric Brown and Andrew Kornhaber
Producer: Randa Eid
Director of Photography: Eric Brouse
Sound: Tobi Nova
Production Assistant: Anna Bosketti
Editing: Pavel Ezrohi
Graphics: Murilo Lopes
Assistant Editing: Daniel Sircar
Produced By: Kornhaber Brown

Posted in Physics |

How Black Holes Kill Galaxies

June 17th, 2019

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Black holes are really only dangerous if you get too close. Ha, who am I kidding. It turns out they may be responsible for ending star formation across the entire universe.

Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Matt O’Dowd
Graphics by Leonardo Scholzer
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
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When we first realized that black holes could have masses of millions or even billions of times that of the sun, it came as a bit of a shock. They were discovered as the driving force behind quasars, where matter is heated to extreme incandescence before its plunge into vast black holes. But if that weren’t enough, we soon realized that every single decent-sized galaxy contains such a supermassive black hole. By the beginning of the 21st century it became clear that black holes and the galaxies that contain them are very closely connected. The bigger the galaxy, the bigger its supermassive black hole. That might not sound surprising. What was weird was how closely they were connected. There’s a tight correlation between the mass the central black hole and the mass of the stars in the galactic bulge – that’s the central ball-like part of a spiral galaxy, or the entirety of an elliptical galaxy, and every bulge contains a supermassive black hole around one-one-thousandth its mass. And there’s an even tighter relationship between the black hole mass and the speed that stars are moving in their random orbits within the galactic bulge – the so-called stellar velocity dispersion – which itself depends of the total mass of the galaxy, including dark matter.

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Posted in Physics |

The Alchemy of Neutron Star Collisions

June 6th, 2019

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Carl Sagan’s famous words: “We are star stuff” refers to a mind-blowing idea – that most atomic nuclei in our bodies were created in the nuclear furnace and the explosive deaths of stars that lived in the ancient universe. In recent years it’s become clear that the truth is even more mind-blowing. Many heavy elements – includes most precious metals – were produced in an even more spectacular event: the collision of neutron stars. In fact, according to a recent study most of the Earth’s supply of these elements was created in a single neutron star merger that took place near our Sun’s birth nebula 80 million years ago before Earth formed.

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When I was in astrophysicist school they taught us that all of the elements of the periodic table between carbon and iron were produced in onion shells by nuclear fusion in the cores of very massive stars during the last phases of their lives. And that the elements heavier than iron were synthesized in the following supernova explosion. That latter process is well understood – the star’s dead core collapses and protons are converted to neutrons. The surrounding shells ricochet outwards, along with a layer of the iron and nickel core. The latter is blasted by a wave of neutrons, which get rammed into the escaping nuclei. Some of those captured neutrons convert back to protons and so elements all the way up the periodic table can be made. This is the rapid neutron capture or r-process. The rapid part is because neutrons are captured faster than nuclei can decay, making it possible to build very heavy nuclei.

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Posted in Physics |

The Cosmic Dark Ages

May 16th, 2019

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We live in the stelliferous era. Somewhere between 10 and 1000 billion trillion stars fill the observable universe with light. But there was a time before the first star ignited. A time we call the cosmic dark ages.

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#theuniverse #astrophyics #spacetime

Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Matt O’Dowd
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Produced By: Kornhaber Brown

In astronomy we study things that are very far away. It’s a powerful challenge because even the brightest objects are almost impossibly faint when you view them from the other side of the universe. But there’s an up side. If the light from some space object took billions of years to get to us then we see that object as it was billions of years ago. In this way we can peer back in time and literally see the past in motion. In fact we’re able to see some of the first stars and galaxies to ever form. But if we look beyond, both in distance and in time, there is … nothing. Darkness. For the hundred million years or so between the formation of the first atom and the formation of the first star there were no light sources in the universe. These were the cosmic dark ages. It’s a period of cosmic history rarely discussed because it’s hellishly difficult to observe. Fortunately scientists are devilishly clever. So what do we know about the time before stars?

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Posted in Physics |

Why Quantum Computing Requires Quantum Cryptography

May 9th, 2019

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Quantum computing is cool, but you know what would be extra awesome – a quantum internet. In fact if we want the first we’ll need the latter. And the first step to the quantum internet is quantum cryptography.

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#cryptography #quantumcomputing #spacetime

Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Graeme Gossel and Matt O’Dowd
Graphics by Leonardo Wille
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Produced By: Kornhaber Brown

Quantum theory may seem like an obscure subject of questionable relevance to the average person. But in fact much of our technological world depends on our understanding of the quantum properties of the subatomic universe. And soon, perhaps very soon, we’ll be interacting with the weirdness of quantum mechanics even more directly – with the coming of quantum computing and the quantum internet. Quantum computing is a topic that’s that has been well covered, so we’re going to be talking about the quantum internet. Specifically quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution – the foundations of the prospective quantum internet. We may come back to quantum computer in detail – but for now let me show you why their advent will demand a quantum internet.

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Posted in Physics |

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