Good Morning John, I’ve given up on hats.
So the way that you’re watching this video right now is through two things
one is waves in sound, Uh, so that’s an important part of the video
the other is waves in the electromagnetic spectrum.
Particularly in the part of the spectrum that is visible light
which turns out to be a very narrow piece of the spectrum.
Now sound and light are very important here on earth.
There’s a bunch of other senses as well but when we start to look at the universe,
the only tool we have had to do astronomy
with for the entire history of humanity has been the electromagnetic spectrum.
It’s just been photons.
When Galileo looked up and first looked at the moons of Jupiter,
he was looking at visible light photons. And when Jocelyn Bell Burnell first saw
the rapid radio blinking of what turned out to be pulsars of radio waves coming from pulsars,
she was looking at photons. Or, at least the telescopes
she was using were looking at photons because we can’t see those photons.
In fact a lot of the story of astronomy, and thus the story of how we understand,
like what’s going on around us been the story of expanding from
the visible light spectrum into other wavelengths of light.
We just celebrated a year since the fist photos of JWST
and it’s superpower is being able to see in further sections of the infrared
which is hard to do because anything that is emitting heat
is emitting infrared radiation so in order to detect certain infrared photons
you have to be very cold because otherwise the mirror itself that’s collecting
the light is gonna be emitting a bunch of those photons into the detector
and thus washing out whatever it is you might be able to detect.
So those infrared,
and ultraviolet and e-rays and gamma rays and microwaves and all of these things,
all of this electromagnetic radiation gives us different clues into how the universe works.
We can see different stuff with different wavelengths.
Different events make different kinds of light, different kinds of light
are able to travel through different objects more easily or worse.
And thus we have learned all of the things that we know
about our universe just by looking at this one kind of thing.
But in the last decade, and especially in the last couple of months,
we have got two new ways to observe our universe.
I don’t really know if I can express how big of a deal that is.
It’s like, in the last ten years having Galileo look at the moons of Jupiter
for the first time twice.
Now the first one of these
got pretty good press and I talked a ton about it.
I was part of the press that it
got and it is very exciting and it is gravitational waves.
Ripples in space time that we are able to detect,
have been able to detect for a while,
but now have this new extraordinarily powerful of detecting gravitational waves
by looking at the timing of pulsars that are distant in our galaxy.
Basically turning the entire galaxy into a giant gravitational wave detector.
Because when there are waves in space time,
things actually move a little bit closer or further away.
Like a meter per lightyear, but detectable because
at how regular pulsars are at flashing.
If they move a little bit toward us, we can actually detect that,
which is wild.
And has allowed us for the first time to detect the gravitational wave background,
which is extraordinarily cool.
But I already talked about it already. But there is another thing that's
happened over the last 10 years that had a huge announcement
like on the same weekend as the gravitational wave announcement,
which kind of is a shame, cause it got a little bit overshadowed
and I want to talk about it, because of course I do.
Now, certain high energy things that happen in the universe,
or even low energy things that happens in the universe emit particles.
They emit photons, is one of the types of particles they can emit.
But also particles with mass can be ejected, like you get electrons
and you get protons and pieces of nuclei and that’s amazing,
but those things get tossed all around and get absorbed like crazy
by the gas and dust in the galaxy so they’re not very useful.
But, another kind of particle is also emitted: it's called a neutrino.
it’s like an electron, but it’s neutral.
Like 3% of the energy emitted by the sun
is emitted as neutrinos. It’s a lot!
Like, there’s 100 Trillion of them going through you every second right now.
And me. And everyone.
But the thing is, because they are neutral,
and atoms are mostly empty space, for the most part,
neutrinos just fly right through stuff. And when I say for the most part,
I mean basically all of them. Detecting neutrinos have
been a big deal in the last, you know, decades of science.
Like several Nobel prizes have been won about this.
Because when they do end up in the nucleus of an atom,
things can happen. Detectable things.
Like some light can be emitted.
In very weird situations,
one element can be transformed into another element,
like just one atom. But it can happen.
So we’ve had some ways of detecting neutrinos,
but if you want to detect a lot of neutrinos what you would need is
a giant block of an extremely transparent substance.
I’m talking like kilometers on a side that had inside of it,
a bunch of detectors that could detect
the light created when a neutrino collided with a nucleus.
But the substance we’re talking about would have to be like, more transparent
than anything we’ve ever created in a lab.
And so you would be right to believe
that there is no way to create such a neutrino detector.
But, it turns out that deep down as Antarctica snow gets compressed
and compressed and compressed it turns into a kind of ice
that is more transparent than anything we have.
And also, that ice is an extremely dark place because it's under a bunch of other
ice and snow.
So we have on earth, I mean by chance,
because Antarctica doesn’t need to be there.
Like it could just not be there, but it is.
So by chance we have on earth the perfect neutrino detector.
All we had to do was drill a bunch of holes into it
with like hot water drills and then lower instruments in
to be able to detect the slightest flashes of light from neutrinos hitting atomic nuclei.
And we did that. It’s called and Iove this--
The IceCube Observatory and no that doesn’t stand for anything.
They just called it ice cube, because it’s an ice cube.
It’s just a really big one.
It’s not really a cube, but you don’t care.
But it’s more like a hexagonal prism, but not exactly.
It’s this shape, but we are not done
with the problems yet. So The IceCube Observatory
has detected over 100 thousand neutrino collisions,
which seems like a lot. It’s not that many when you consider
that it’s a kilometer of ice and when you consider that there’s
a hundred trillion of them going through just your body every second.
So, it’s a very small percentage
of the total neutrinos flying through that cube.
The other problem though,
is the vast majority of those neutrinos originated from within our solar system.
They came from the sun. And that’s not that useful.
What we want is the neutrinos that are coming from our galaxy
and maybe even from other galaxies.
That would allow us to see things in our galaxy that we could never see
because of course, photons get absorbed by stuff.
Like, if you go in a place that doesn't have a lot of light pollution
you could look up at the Milky Way and you can see the clouds of dust
that are preventing the light from the Milky Way to reach us.
That’s what those dark areas of the Milky Way are.
But neutrinos are just gonna fly right through that.
If we could map our galaxy
using neutrinos we could see stuff that we’ve never been able to before.
But to do that, we’d have to separate out the 99.9%
of neutrinos that are coming from the sun from the ones that are coming from our galaxy.
But to do that, we’d have to detect some of those neutrinos
coming from our galaxy, and there’s far fewer of them.
But with machine learning, we are now able to do it.
And we are thus able to use those neutrino collisions to create
the first ever map of our galaxy that did not depend on photons.
It’s very low resolution right now,
but as more time passes, more collisions are detected,
hopefully we make this thing even better at detecting neutrino collisions.
That map will get more high resolution and this observatory,
this most bizarre of telescopes, this giant hexagonal prism
of ancient Antarctic ice under thousands of meters of other ice.
Are you serious? This way of observing our galaxy
is entirely new and as more time passes, and we get better at detecting these collisions,
it’s gonna tell us so much stuff about how our galaxy works.
It could, along with the gravitational wave background information,
it could help us rewrite the laws of physics.
And this is just the beginning,
I mean the wild thing about neutrinos is that they aren't like photons,
they change, because they're particles.
So they can go different speeds, they have different characteristics.
And all those things tell you stuff about where they came from
and what they’ve experienced along the way.
And their experience thus gets transferred into our experience.
Our experience and understanding of our universe and how it works.
It has been but continues to be just a remarkable time in science.
John, I’ll see you on Tuesday.