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These are the user uploaded subtitles that are being translated: 1 00:00:03,190 --> 00:00:07,290 First there was light, visible light. 2 00:00:07,390 --> 00:00:12,830 Then, we viewed the universe in radio waves and X-rays. 3 00:00:12,930 --> 00:00:15,500 Ever since there's been astronomy, 4 00:00:15,600 --> 00:00:19,130 we've been looking at different kinds of light 5 00:00:19,240 --> 00:00:22,740 and opening up the universe a little bit more of the time. 6 00:00:24,410 --> 00:00:28,410 But then in 2015, like, the roof came off. 7 00:00:29,710 --> 00:00:31,550 Something happened that changed everything, 8 00:00:31,650 --> 00:00:35,220 the ability to see waves in space and time itself. 9 00:00:35,320 --> 00:00:37,690 Gravitational waves. 10 00:00:37,790 --> 00:00:41,290 They help us roll back the clock to the dawn of time, 11 00:00:41,390 --> 00:00:44,890 discover epic cosmic collisions, 12 00:00:44,990 --> 00:00:48,460 on make Earth-shaking discoveries. 13 00:00:48,560 --> 00:00:51,330 Gravitational waves are the biggest game changer 14 00:00:51,430 --> 00:00:53,300 since the invention of the telescope. 15 00:00:53,400 --> 00:00:57,170 We have a completely new universe to view now. 16 00:00:57,270 --> 00:01:00,180 A new exploration of space is just beginning. 17 00:01:12,790 --> 00:01:16,690 Long ago, 17 billion light-years away, 18 00:01:16,790 --> 00:01:19,130 a cataclysmic showdown plays out. 19 00:01:20,700 --> 00:01:22,930 Two black holes locked together 20 00:01:23,030 --> 00:01:25,130 in a deadly cosmic dance. 21 00:01:25,230 --> 00:01:30,410 Black holes are unimaginably dense objects with gravity 22 00:01:30,510 --> 00:01:33,210 so intense that if you get too close to them, 23 00:01:33,310 --> 00:01:34,910 you're gone. 24 00:01:39,750 --> 00:01:42,420 Their immense gravitational pull causes 25 00:01:42,520 --> 00:01:45,250 them to spiral towards each other. 26 00:01:45,350 --> 00:01:48,760 When black holes collide, they don't just run 27 00:01:48,860 --> 00:01:49,620 into each other. 28 00:01:49,730 --> 00:01:51,930 They're in orbit about each other. 29 00:01:52,030 --> 00:01:55,660 So what we're talking about is an inspiralling orbit 30 00:01:55,760 --> 00:01:58,770 that goes faster and faster and faster and faster. 31 00:01:58,870 --> 00:02:02,240 Until they finally collide in a fatal embrace. 32 00:02:08,040 --> 00:02:10,110 But astronomers don't see a thing. 33 00:02:11,650 --> 00:02:14,020 The problem with observing colliding black holes is all 34 00:02:14,120 --> 00:02:16,750 about the name, black holes, they give off no light. 35 00:02:16,850 --> 00:02:19,090 How can astronomers see something that 36 00:02:19,190 --> 00:02:20,960 no telescope can detect? 37 00:02:22,860 --> 00:02:24,090 Across the universe, 38 00:02:24,190 --> 00:02:27,400 extraordinary events take place. 39 00:02:27,500 --> 00:02:33,370 But we sometimes miss them, because we rely on light. 40 00:02:33,470 --> 00:02:37,410 Now, astronomers have a new toolkit that's 41 00:02:37,510 --> 00:02:41,240 revealing the cosmos in a totally different way... 42 00:02:43,410 --> 00:02:46,750 ...using the very fabric of our universe 43 00:02:46,850 --> 00:02:49,950 we call spacetime. 44 00:02:50,050 --> 00:02:53,790 Everything with mass, like stars, 45 00:02:53,890 --> 00:02:57,760 planets, and black holes, all curve this fabric. 46 00:02:59,860 --> 00:03:01,630 The more massive the object, 47 00:03:01,730 --> 00:03:04,430 the bigger the distortion of spacetime. 48 00:03:04,530 --> 00:03:06,870 The classical analogy is 49 00:03:06,970 --> 00:03:08,970 this stretched rubber sheet, right? 50 00:03:09,070 --> 00:03:12,840 And, like, a mass, like, the sun is, like, a ball on this sheet, 51 00:03:12,940 --> 00:03:14,910 and it distorts and warps the sheet 52 00:03:15,010 --> 00:03:16,180 into this valley, right? 53 00:03:16,280 --> 00:03:19,410 And if you roll a marble across it like the marble is 54 00:03:19,520 --> 00:03:21,150 a planet, the marble will be 55 00:03:21,250 --> 00:03:23,920 pulled into orbit around the ball because 56 00:03:24,020 --> 00:03:25,820 of the curvature of the sheet. 57 00:03:28,890 --> 00:03:31,290 But that's only half the picture. 58 00:03:31,390 --> 00:03:34,960 If an object has mass and is accelerating through 59 00:03:35,060 --> 00:03:37,430 spacetime, it creates ripples 60 00:03:37,530 --> 00:03:39,230 in that fabric of spacetime, 61 00:03:39,340 --> 00:03:41,570 and we call these gravitational waves. 62 00:03:41,670 --> 00:03:46,210 Gravitational waves give us vital clues 63 00:03:46,310 --> 00:03:48,880 about distant objects that we can't see. 64 00:03:50,280 --> 00:03:53,880 The more massive the object that produces them and the faster 65 00:03:53,980 --> 00:03:57,550 it's moving, the bigger the ripples. 66 00:03:57,650 --> 00:04:01,690 These ripples pass through planets, stars, and galaxies 67 00:04:01,760 --> 00:04:03,020 with ease. 68 00:04:04,730 --> 00:04:07,930 When a gravitational wave passes through an object like 69 00:04:08,030 --> 00:04:10,230 a star or a planet or a person, 70 00:04:10,330 --> 00:04:12,230 it stretches and compresses them, 71 00:04:12,330 --> 00:04:13,640 like with this tennis ball. 72 00:04:15,040 --> 00:04:17,770 Now, if you're close to a powerful source of 73 00:04:17,870 --> 00:04:18,740 gravitational waves, 74 00:04:18,840 --> 00:04:21,180 like merging supermassive black holes, 75 00:04:21,280 --> 00:04:23,850 those waves are incredibly strong, and they're capable of 76 00:04:23,950 --> 00:04:26,110 actually destroying a planet. 77 00:04:26,180 --> 00:04:29,380 But like the ripples on a pond, 78 00:04:29,490 --> 00:04:32,790 their strength and size diminishes over distance. 79 00:04:34,090 --> 00:04:36,720 The farther away you are, the weaker they get. 80 00:04:36,830 --> 00:04:39,530 And when they're hundreds of millions of light-years away, 81 00:04:39,630 --> 00:04:42,660 they're actually smaller than the size of an atom. 82 00:04:42,770 --> 00:04:45,530 So, to listen for gravitational waves, 83 00:04:45,630 --> 00:04:48,740 scientists built the most sensitive measuring device on 84 00:04:48,840 --> 00:04:49,900 the planet. 85 00:04:54,310 --> 00:04:56,810 This is LIGO, 86 00:04:56,910 --> 00:05:01,480 the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, 87 00:05:03,250 --> 00:05:07,360 two enormous detectors located almost 2,000 miles 88 00:05:07,460 --> 00:05:10,660 apart in Louisiana and Washington state. 89 00:05:12,430 --> 00:05:16,660 Each sensor has L-shaped arms, measuring 2.5 miles. 90 00:05:19,130 --> 00:05:21,100 Inside the LIGO detectors, 91 00:05:21,200 --> 00:05:25,770 inside these concrete tunnels, there is a laser system. 92 00:05:25,870 --> 00:05:29,780 It's called an interferometer, so light comes in from 93 00:05:29,880 --> 00:05:34,820 a laser beam and is split into two paths. 94 00:05:36,550 --> 00:05:39,820 Normally, the lengths of the two beams are the same. 95 00:05:41,160 --> 00:05:43,360 That changes when gravitational waves 96 00:05:43,460 --> 00:05:44,490 hit the beams. 97 00:05:46,500 --> 00:05:49,200 When a gravitational wave passes through, 98 00:05:49,300 --> 00:05:53,770 it changes the distance that light travels along these arms, 99 00:05:53,870 --> 00:05:58,210 so one arm effectively gets longer, and the other one 100 00:05:58,310 --> 00:05:59,540 gets shorter. 101 00:05:59,640 --> 00:06:03,810 The length of those two beams varies just ever so slightly, 102 00:06:03,910 --> 00:06:07,750 and the very sensitive apparatus in LIGO is able to pick that up. 103 00:06:08,850 --> 00:06:11,450 With this ultra-sensitive laser system, 104 00:06:11,550 --> 00:06:16,590 LIGO picks up distortions in spacetime, narrower than 105 00:06:16,690 --> 00:06:20,130 one millionth of the diameter of an atom. 106 00:06:20,230 --> 00:06:21,360 Just that feat, 107 00:06:21,460 --> 00:06:23,500 just the fact that we were able to build 108 00:06:23,600 --> 00:06:26,370 a detector to detect gravitational waves 109 00:06:26,470 --> 00:06:28,970 is just mind-boggling. 110 00:06:29,040 --> 00:06:30,740 All of a sudden now, we were listening 111 00:06:30,840 --> 00:06:33,040 to the faintest whispers of the universe. 112 00:06:34,940 --> 00:06:39,450 In 2015, LIGO picked up a whisper that had 113 00:06:39,550 --> 00:06:42,320 been traveling towards Earth for over a billion years. 114 00:06:44,490 --> 00:06:48,590 Its source? Two colliding stellar black holes. 115 00:06:48,690 --> 00:06:52,290 Watching two black holes spiral in and merge... 116 00:06:52,390 --> 00:06:54,560 That's not something we can do using optical 117 00:06:54,660 --> 00:06:57,500 telescopes or X-ray telescopes or anything like that. 118 00:06:57,600 --> 00:07:01,500 But with LIGO, we could actually detect that event. 119 00:07:11,580 --> 00:07:13,210 Now, scientists can paint 120 00:07:13,320 --> 00:07:15,680 accurate pictures of invisible objects. 121 00:07:18,520 --> 00:07:20,790 You can tell you're looking at black holes. 122 00:07:20,890 --> 00:07:23,490 You can get their masses, you can get their distance. 123 00:07:23,590 --> 00:07:27,260 There's a phenomenal amount of information in that wave. 124 00:07:29,330 --> 00:07:30,670 The colliding black holes are 125 00:07:30,770 --> 00:07:33,270 the most massive LIGO has ever detected. 126 00:07:34,340 --> 00:07:37,340 One is 66 times the mass of our sun, 127 00:07:38,540 --> 00:07:41,540 the other, 85 times the mass of our sun. 128 00:07:43,150 --> 00:07:45,550 As two black holes are spiraling in, 129 00:07:45,650 --> 00:07:47,150 they are moving faster and faster 130 00:07:47,250 --> 00:07:49,020 as they get closer and closer. 131 00:07:49,120 --> 00:07:50,890 That means that the gravitational waves 132 00:07:50,990 --> 00:07:54,090 they're emitting have a higher and higher frequency. 133 00:07:54,190 --> 00:07:57,330 So as time goes on, the pitch gets higher. 134 00:07:57,430 --> 00:07:59,530 - So it goes... - ooop! 135 00:07:59,630 --> 00:08:00,760 Ooop! 136 00:08:00,860 --> 00:08:01,960 Zhhhrp! 137 00:08:08,270 --> 00:08:11,570 When they finally merge, they create a giant. 138 00:08:17,010 --> 00:08:19,510 By analyzing that data, 139 00:08:19,620 --> 00:08:23,180 it's possible to establish that the new black hole from 140 00:08:23,290 --> 00:08:26,920 the merger of these two original black holes weighs as much as 141 00:08:27,020 --> 00:08:31,130 something like 140 times the mass of our sun. 142 00:08:32,930 --> 00:08:34,630 It's really difficult to overstate 143 00:08:34,730 --> 00:08:36,630 the importance of gravitational wave detection. 144 00:08:36,730 --> 00:08:39,170 It's like adding on an entirely new sense... 145 00:08:39,270 --> 00:08:41,700 All of a sudden, there's a brand-new way 146 00:08:41,800 --> 00:08:43,300 to explore the rest of the universe. 147 00:08:47,010 --> 00:08:49,040 Invisible cosmic collisions are just 148 00:08:49,140 --> 00:08:51,280 the beginning of what gravitational wave 149 00:08:51,380 --> 00:08:52,950 astronomy can reveal to us. 150 00:08:54,320 --> 00:08:58,390 Now, scientists are using gravitational waves 151 00:08:58,490 --> 00:09:00,960 to revisit other long-standing mysteries, 152 00:09:01,060 --> 00:09:05,690 like what causes the brightest explosions 153 00:09:05,790 --> 00:09:08,160 in the cosmos? 154 00:09:08,260 --> 00:09:10,130 This is not an everyday car crash. 155 00:09:10,230 --> 00:09:12,730 This is the most dramatic event that 156 00:09:12,830 --> 00:09:16,400 you're ever gonna see in our universe. 157 00:09:27,380 --> 00:09:29,020 Across the universe, 158 00:09:29,120 --> 00:09:32,320 strange bursts of light puzzle astronomers. 159 00:09:34,090 --> 00:09:36,260 For just a fraction of a second, 160 00:09:36,390 --> 00:09:38,960 they shine more than a trillion times brighter 161 00:09:39,060 --> 00:09:43,800 than the sun... Then, they vanish. 162 00:09:43,900 --> 00:09:46,500 These brief flashes of light are known 163 00:09:46,600 --> 00:09:50,470 as gamma-ray bursts or GRBs for short, 164 00:09:50,570 --> 00:09:52,870 and they're such a mystery, because they are 165 00:09:52,980 --> 00:09:57,710 insanely energetic, and we don't know what causes them. 166 00:09:59,510 --> 00:10:02,520 For decades, these short gamma-ray bursts 167 00:10:02,620 --> 00:10:04,750 have been an enigma. 168 00:10:04,850 --> 00:10:08,660 No explanation was off limits, no matter how wild. 169 00:10:09,960 --> 00:10:11,460 Is it a supernova? 170 00:10:11,560 --> 00:10:14,000 Is it on alien civilization saying hello? 171 00:10:14,100 --> 00:10:15,660 You know, we just don't know. 172 00:10:17,730 --> 00:10:21,100 In August 2017, the Fermi Gamma-ray Telescope 173 00:10:21,200 --> 00:10:24,770 detected another short gamma-ray burst, 174 00:10:26,510 --> 00:10:29,180 but this one was different, 175 00:10:29,280 --> 00:10:33,250 So a gamma-ray burst went off 130 million light-years away, 176 00:10:33,350 --> 00:10:36,120 and it actually produced a ripple in space and time 177 00:10:36,220 --> 00:10:37,350 that LIGO could detect. 178 00:10:38,420 --> 00:10:40,290 Gravitational waves could help 179 00:10:40,390 --> 00:10:42,590 finally reveal what causes 180 00:10:42,690 --> 00:10:45,360 one of the brightest explosions in the universe. 181 00:10:48,330 --> 00:10:51,470 LIGOS data suggests the culprit could be two 182 00:10:51,570 --> 00:10:54,540 massive objects spiraling towards each other 183 00:10:54,640 --> 00:10:56,740 and colliding. 184 00:10:56,840 --> 00:10:59,240 But based on the gravitational wave data, 185 00:10:59,340 --> 00:11:04,110 these two objects were too small to be black holes. 186 00:11:04,210 --> 00:11:05,810 They had to be something else. 187 00:11:07,850 --> 00:11:10,380 Not black holes, but the ultra dense 188 00:11:10,490 --> 00:11:14,090 cores of collapsed stars called neutron stars. 189 00:11:15,960 --> 00:11:18,790 A neutron star is what's left over 190 00:11:18,860 --> 00:11:21,930 after a massive star collapses in on itself. 191 00:11:22,030 --> 00:11:25,770 It's very, very dense, because it took all, essentially, 192 00:11:25,870 --> 00:11:30,770 the mass of the core and contracted it into a really, 193 00:11:30,870 --> 00:11:32,770 really small radius. 194 00:11:36,580 --> 00:11:39,850 As the dense neutron stars spiral ever closer, 195 00:11:39,950 --> 00:11:44,620 the gravitational wave signal gets stronger and stronger, 196 00:11:44,720 --> 00:11:47,490 until they collide, releasing 197 00:11:47,590 --> 00:11:50,460 an epic burst of gravitational waves. 198 00:11:52,530 --> 00:11:54,300 Because they're not black holes, 199 00:11:54,400 --> 00:11:57,500 light can get out. 200 00:11:57,600 --> 00:12:00,840 And if you smash two things together at these kind of 201 00:12:00,940 --> 00:12:02,540 absolutely massive speeds, 202 00:12:02,640 --> 00:12:04,770 there's a huge amount of energy involved. 203 00:12:04,870 --> 00:12:08,080 Energy we detected both as 204 00:12:08,180 --> 00:12:13,210 invisible gravitational waves and visible light. 205 00:12:14,750 --> 00:12:16,950 Could this light be a mysterious 206 00:12:17,050 --> 00:12:19,490 and ultra-powerful gamma-ray burst? 207 00:12:21,360 --> 00:12:24,660 How could these colliding dead stars be associated 208 00:12:24,760 --> 00:12:25,960 with gamma-ray bursts, 209 00:12:26,060 --> 00:12:28,341 which are in fact, the most energetic explosions we see in 210 00:12:28,430 --> 00:12:29,500 the entire universe? 211 00:12:31,100 --> 00:12:33,830 Neutron stars have powerful magnetic fields 212 00:12:33,940 --> 00:12:36,370 that trap particles of gas and dust. 213 00:12:38,270 --> 00:12:39,510 During a collision, 214 00:12:39,610 --> 00:12:41,910 the swirling magnetic fields twist up, 215 00:12:42,010 --> 00:12:44,810 building up more and more energy. 216 00:12:46,850 --> 00:12:50,080 You have lots of little particles of matter that are 217 00:12:50,190 --> 00:12:53,250 trying to keep up with these rapidly spinning magnetic 218 00:12:53,360 --> 00:12:57,630 fields... that starts swooshing them round until they reach 219 00:12:57,730 --> 00:12:59,990 pretty much the speed of light, and eventually, 220 00:13:00,100 --> 00:13:03,930 they're kind of shot out of the remnant in a tight beam. 221 00:13:05,800 --> 00:13:09,100 The beam is a gamma-ray burst, 222 00:13:09,200 --> 00:13:11,510 but they're not always easy to detect. 223 00:13:13,410 --> 00:13:16,240 If the jet coming out is pointed right at you, 224 00:13:16,340 --> 00:13:19,450 then you see this extremely high energy event, 225 00:13:19,550 --> 00:13:21,150 the gamma-ray burst. 226 00:13:22,450 --> 00:13:24,850 If it's not pointed at us, 227 00:13:24,950 --> 00:13:26,450 we might miss it. 228 00:13:26,560 --> 00:13:28,720 Fortunately, the gravitational waves 229 00:13:28,820 --> 00:13:30,590 show us where to look. 230 00:13:36,260 --> 00:13:37,900 Following the gamma-ray burst, 231 00:13:37,970 --> 00:13:43,070 we spotted a strange red cloud, evidence of a heavy 232 00:13:43,170 --> 00:13:46,070 element factory. 233 00:13:46,170 --> 00:13:47,610 After the initial collision, 234 00:13:47,710 --> 00:13:50,980 there is a shell of debris moving outwards, 235 00:13:51,080 --> 00:13:56,080 but then, high-energy neutrons come slamming into this 236 00:13:56,180 --> 00:13:59,650 material and start to build heavier elements, 237 00:13:59,750 --> 00:14:02,490 one after another. 238 00:14:02,620 --> 00:14:07,730 We can see the gold, we can see the potassium, 239 00:14:07,830 --> 00:14:11,630 we can see the plutonium being created 240 00:14:11,730 --> 00:14:13,900 before our very eyes. 241 00:14:17,010 --> 00:14:18,810 The neutron star collision 242 00:14:18,910 --> 00:14:22,110 produced huge quantities of heavy elements, 243 00:14:22,210 --> 00:14:25,610 blasting out enough gold and platinum to weigh more than 10 244 00:14:25,710 --> 00:14:27,850 times the mass of the Earth, 245 00:14:27,950 --> 00:14:30,320 solving a long-standing mystery. 246 00:14:30,420 --> 00:14:31,820 We knew that 247 00:14:31,920 --> 00:14:34,660 supernova explosions did create some 248 00:14:34,760 --> 00:14:35,890 of the heavier elements. 249 00:14:35,990 --> 00:14:39,360 But from everything we've observed about supernova, 250 00:14:39,490 --> 00:14:43,830 they don't happen often enough to really populate a galaxy 251 00:14:43,930 --> 00:14:46,770 with all of the heavier elements that we observed. 252 00:14:46,870 --> 00:14:49,940 This was the missing piece. 253 00:14:50,040 --> 00:14:52,940 The gold on your wedding ring, 254 00:14:53,040 --> 00:14:55,180 the gold in your jewelry, 255 00:14:55,280 --> 00:14:57,410 was formed and forged from 256 00:14:57,510 --> 00:15:00,950 a titanic collision before the Earth even existed. 257 00:15:03,890 --> 00:15:06,150 The combination of gravitational waves 258 00:15:06,250 --> 00:15:07,250 and telescopes 259 00:15:08,990 --> 00:15:12,030 proves that neutron star collisions create 260 00:15:12,130 --> 00:15:14,430 precious metals 261 00:15:14,530 --> 00:15:17,400 and cause super-bright gamma-ray bursts. 262 00:15:18,900 --> 00:15:23,440 When you can measure a gravitational wave signal 263 00:15:23,540 --> 00:15:25,870 and a light signal like a gamma-ray burst, 264 00:15:25,970 --> 00:15:29,040 you get a whole new way to solve complicated, 265 00:15:29,140 --> 00:15:31,710 intertwined physical processes. 266 00:15:33,880 --> 00:15:36,550 It's like you're watching a symphony on mute, 267 00:15:36,650 --> 00:15:38,920 and then you hit that button, and the sound comes on, 268 00:15:39,020 --> 00:15:41,390 and it's just a completely different picture. 269 00:15:45,160 --> 00:15:49,900 The sounds of the cosmos don't just reveal collisions. 270 00:15:53,970 --> 00:15:57,440 It turns out, we can use gravitational waves to help us 271 00:15:57,540 --> 00:16:00,610 understand some of the biggest mysteries of the cosmos. 272 00:16:13,590 --> 00:16:15,720 Gravitational waves are a new way 273 00:16:15,820 --> 00:16:19,590 to listen to the universe, revealing unseen, 274 00:16:19,690 --> 00:16:24,130 epic cosmic events and adding vital details to our picture 275 00:16:24,230 --> 00:16:25,430 of the cosmos. 276 00:16:28,200 --> 00:16:31,770 Every new way we figure out to probe the universe is 277 00:16:31,870 --> 00:16:34,910 a good thing, and detecting gravitational waves, 278 00:16:35,010 --> 00:16:37,410 it's a new dimension to being able to study the universe. 279 00:16:37,510 --> 00:16:39,680 It's like... it's like having a new sense. 280 00:16:42,520 --> 00:16:45,290 This new sense could be just what astronomers need 281 00:16:45,390 --> 00:16:48,920 to answer some of the biggest questions in physics, 282 00:16:49,020 --> 00:16:51,690 like, "What is the speed of gravity?" 283 00:16:53,190 --> 00:16:56,130 And, "Does it travel at the universe's speed limit?" 284 00:16:57,930 --> 00:17:00,300 One of the things we learn early in science is that 285 00:17:00,400 --> 00:17:02,870 the universe has an absolute speed limit, 286 00:17:02,970 --> 00:17:05,440 which is the speed of light in a vacuum, 287 00:17:05,540 --> 00:17:08,710 which is 186,000 miles per second. 288 00:17:11,580 --> 00:17:13,480 Light from the sun takes eight minutes 289 00:17:13,580 --> 00:17:15,850 and 20 seconds to reach Earth. 290 00:17:15,950 --> 00:17:19,390 So, if the sun disappeared, 291 00:17:19,490 --> 00:17:21,460 we wouldn't miss its light immediately. 292 00:17:23,160 --> 00:17:25,960 But how quickly would we notice its missing gravity? 293 00:17:27,560 --> 00:17:30,700 The first thing that we'd notice is nothing. 294 00:17:30,800 --> 00:17:35,740 Things would seem very normal, but then they wouldn't. 295 00:17:35,840 --> 00:17:40,570 There would be nothing curving space where Earth is located, 296 00:17:40,680 --> 00:17:43,810 and so Earth would take off in a straight line, 297 00:17:43,910 --> 00:17:46,480 moving at the same speed at which it orbits the sun. 298 00:17:46,580 --> 00:17:52,250 And things will get cold and lonely really, really fast. 299 00:17:54,020 --> 00:17:55,420 According to Albert Einstein, 300 00:17:55,520 --> 00:17:59,160 our skies would go dark, and the earth would be flung into 301 00:17:59,260 --> 00:18:02,100 deep space at exactly the same time. 302 00:18:03,800 --> 00:18:07,100 It's a foundation of his famous Theory of Relativity, 303 00:18:07,200 --> 00:18:11,040 still the most complete theory of how our universe works. 304 00:18:12,510 --> 00:18:14,370 Einstein's theory of relativity has been 305 00:18:14,480 --> 00:18:15,940 a fantastic theory. 306 00:18:16,040 --> 00:18:19,680 It explains so many things for us, including gravity. 307 00:18:19,780 --> 00:18:21,980 But when we look out at the universe, 308 00:18:22,080 --> 00:18:25,090 there are many mysteries, there are things that are quite hard 309 00:18:25,190 --> 00:18:26,190 to explain. 310 00:18:28,490 --> 00:18:30,560 At the top of the list... 311 00:18:30,660 --> 00:18:33,030 The mystery of our expanding universe. 312 00:18:35,860 --> 00:18:39,100 There is something pushing outward that is 313 00:18:39,200 --> 00:18:43,570 making that expansion rate ever and ever faster. 314 00:18:43,670 --> 00:18:46,940 Astronomers call this something dark energy. 315 00:18:49,340 --> 00:18:53,850 It accounts for 70% of the total energy in the universe. 316 00:18:57,120 --> 00:19:00,020 Einstein's models of the universe need dark energy 317 00:19:00,120 --> 00:19:02,920 to work, but we have no idea 318 00:19:03,020 --> 00:19:04,730 what it is. 319 00:19:06,490 --> 00:19:09,860 Dark energy is not something we actually understand. 320 00:19:09,960 --> 00:19:12,170 It's kind of a placeholder term 321 00:19:12,270 --> 00:19:14,230 for something we don't understand. 322 00:19:14,340 --> 00:19:17,910 And so people naturally are looking for better theories, 323 00:19:18,010 --> 00:19:20,310 theories that are a bit like Einstein's theory 324 00:19:20,410 --> 00:19:22,880 but just go that bit further and explain 325 00:19:22,980 --> 00:19:26,550 some of these things that we don't currently understand. 326 00:19:26,650 --> 00:19:30,220 One way to excise dark energy 327 00:19:30,320 --> 00:19:31,990 is with a new theory of gravity, 328 00:19:33,450 --> 00:19:35,820 one where the speed of gravitational waves 329 00:19:35,920 --> 00:19:39,160 is different from the speed of light. 330 00:19:39,260 --> 00:19:40,530 There are some so-called 331 00:19:40,630 --> 00:19:42,300 non-Einsteinian theories for 332 00:19:42,400 --> 00:19:45,400 the structure of spacetime itself that don't actually 333 00:19:45,500 --> 00:19:46,870 require dark energy. 334 00:19:46,970 --> 00:19:49,670 For example, if gravity doesn't propagate through 335 00:19:49,770 --> 00:19:52,770 spacetime at the same speed that light does, 336 00:19:52,870 --> 00:19:55,340 you could find models that don't actually require 337 00:19:55,440 --> 00:19:58,950 dark energy... it could be a clean, simple, albeit very, 338 00:19:59,050 --> 00:20:02,150 very profound solution to this underlying problem. 339 00:20:04,220 --> 00:20:06,220 In order to overthrow Einstein 340 00:20:06,320 --> 00:20:07,690 and eliminate dark energy, 341 00:20:07,790 --> 00:20:11,460 the speeds of light and gravity must be different. 342 00:20:12,930 --> 00:20:14,760 We know the speed of light. 343 00:20:14,860 --> 00:20:18,370 So how do we test the speed of gravity? 344 00:20:20,130 --> 00:20:21,970 In order to test the speed of gravity, 345 00:20:22,070 --> 00:20:24,100 you need to have a system that emits both 346 00:20:24,210 --> 00:20:26,140 gravitational waves and light. 347 00:20:28,240 --> 00:20:30,910 The colliding neutron stars detected by LIGO 348 00:20:31,010 --> 00:20:33,750 in 2017 are part of the solution. 349 00:20:35,480 --> 00:20:38,450 The collision released a flash of light, 350 00:20:38,550 --> 00:20:40,820 along with a burst of gravitational waves. 351 00:20:45,590 --> 00:20:49,300 But the universe threw a curveball. 352 00:20:49,400 --> 00:20:52,470 The light signal arrived 1.7 seconds 353 00:20:52,570 --> 00:20:55,800 after the gravitational wave signal. 354 00:20:55,900 --> 00:20:57,740 Does that mean gravitational waves 355 00:20:57,840 --> 00:20:59,810 travel slightly faster than light? 356 00:21:02,380 --> 00:21:05,480 Albert Einstein predicted that gravitational waves 357 00:21:05,580 --> 00:21:07,410 would move at the speed of light. 358 00:21:07,520 --> 00:21:10,180 So what if Albert Einstein was wrong? 359 00:21:10,290 --> 00:21:11,920 I know, sounds crazy, right? 360 00:21:12,020 --> 00:21:15,020 That's like almost as crazy as me being wrong, right? 361 00:21:15,120 --> 00:21:18,890 But if Einstein was wrong, that's one thing. 362 00:21:18,990 --> 00:21:21,960 But a bigger problem is that we'd have to rethink 363 00:21:22,060 --> 00:21:23,260 our physics. 364 00:21:25,530 --> 00:21:26,600 Before we do that, 365 00:21:26,700 --> 00:21:29,170 let's take a closer look at the neutron star 366 00:21:29,270 --> 00:21:30,500 collision site. 367 00:21:32,110 --> 00:21:34,940 It's surrounded by a shroud of gas and dust. 368 00:21:36,510 --> 00:21:39,380 Light is made of particles called photons, 369 00:21:39,480 --> 00:21:42,680 which scatter when they hit obstacles. 370 00:21:42,780 --> 00:21:46,220 But gravitational waves pass through anything. 371 00:21:47,490 --> 00:21:50,260 They pass right through everything like it's not there. 372 00:21:50,360 --> 00:21:51,930 Light, on the other hand, 373 00:21:52,030 --> 00:21:55,260 was slowed down by interactions with that matter. 374 00:21:55,360 --> 00:21:57,500 It didn't just escape immediately 375 00:21:57,600 --> 00:21:59,900 like the gravitational wave signal did. 376 00:22:01,670 --> 00:22:03,870 The debris gave the gravitational waves 377 00:22:03,970 --> 00:22:07,270 a head start by slowing the light. 378 00:22:07,380 --> 00:22:10,140 So gravitational waves and light do, 379 00:22:10,240 --> 00:22:13,250 in fact, travel at the same speed. 380 00:22:13,310 --> 00:22:14,680 Einstein was right. 381 00:22:16,620 --> 00:22:19,420 This one event ruled out the other theories of 382 00:22:19,520 --> 00:22:21,960 gravity that are competing with Einstein's theory, 383 00:22:22,060 --> 00:22:25,060 things that people have been working on all their life 384 00:22:25,160 --> 00:22:27,260 and overnight, it's gone. 385 00:22:29,130 --> 00:22:30,830 Thanks to gravitational waves, 386 00:22:30,930 --> 00:22:34,630 dark energy remains our best explanation for why 387 00:22:34,740 --> 00:22:37,340 the universe's expansion is accelerating. 388 00:22:38,840 --> 00:22:41,610 Maybe dark energy isn't what we think it is, and maybe 389 00:22:41,710 --> 00:22:43,210 tomorrow, or maybe next year, 390 00:22:43,310 --> 00:22:44,880 or maybe next decade or next century, 391 00:22:44,980 --> 00:22:49,150 - we will discover that. - Gravitational waves are a huge 392 00:22:49,250 --> 00:22:52,620 step forward in our effort to understand the universe, 393 00:22:52,720 --> 00:22:54,250 and I mean everything. 394 00:22:54,390 --> 00:22:57,490 Space, time, matter, dark energy. 395 00:22:57,590 --> 00:23:00,990 We have a completely new universe to view now. 396 00:23:03,770 --> 00:23:05,500 Now astronomers want to use 397 00:23:05,600 --> 00:23:08,570 gravitational waves to answer another mystery. 398 00:23:10,170 --> 00:23:14,370 What happens when supermassive black holes collide? 399 00:23:26,020 --> 00:23:30,720 We first detected gravitational waves in 2015. 400 00:23:30,830 --> 00:23:33,460 Since then, they've revealed colliding 401 00:23:33,560 --> 00:23:35,930 black holes across the universe. 402 00:23:38,130 --> 00:23:40,200 Prior to LIGO going online, 403 00:23:40,300 --> 00:23:43,840 we never witnessed black hole collisions directly, 404 00:23:43,940 --> 00:23:47,370 but now that we can witness them with our observatories, 405 00:23:47,480 --> 00:23:50,310 we're finding them pretty regularly. 406 00:23:50,410 --> 00:23:53,280 We're seeing gravitational waves come 407 00:23:53,380 --> 00:23:55,450 across the LIGO experiment 408 00:23:55,550 --> 00:23:57,380 left and right. 409 00:23:57,490 --> 00:24:00,220 But LIGO has only been listening for gravitational 410 00:24:00,320 --> 00:24:02,020 waves from black holes 411 00:24:02,120 --> 00:24:04,490 on the smaller end of the cosmic scale. 412 00:24:06,060 --> 00:24:09,860 When we look at the cosmic zoo of black holes out there, 413 00:24:09,960 --> 00:24:14,300 we find small ones weighing, you know, 10, maybe 30 times as 414 00:24:14,400 --> 00:24:18,040 much as the sun, and then large all the way up to extra-large 415 00:24:18,140 --> 00:24:19,146 going from, like, a million 416 00:24:19,170 --> 00:24:20,870 to a billion times as much as the sun. 417 00:24:22,340 --> 00:24:24,640 These supermassive black holes 418 00:24:24,750 --> 00:24:27,550 lurk at the hearts of galaxies. 419 00:24:27,650 --> 00:24:31,050 When Galaxies merge, supermassive black holes 420 00:24:31,150 --> 00:24:33,320 should merge, too. 421 00:24:37,120 --> 00:24:39,560 But even though we see galaxies colliding 422 00:24:39,660 --> 00:24:40,660 across the universe, 423 00:24:40,760 --> 00:24:45,000 we've never seen two supermassive black holes 424 00:24:45,100 --> 00:24:47,930 collide, because they have too 425 00:24:48,040 --> 00:24:51,340 much orbital energy to get close enough to merge. 426 00:24:56,010 --> 00:25:00,080 That orbital energy has to go somewhere, 427 00:25:00,180 --> 00:25:03,120 and what supermassive black holes do is they throw out 428 00:25:03,220 --> 00:25:06,220 stars that are around the core of the galaxy. 429 00:25:06,320 --> 00:25:09,660 But when they get sufficiently close, there are just no more 430 00:25:09,760 --> 00:25:11,190 stars to throw out, 431 00:25:11,290 --> 00:25:14,660 and so the idea is, they can't merge. 432 00:25:14,760 --> 00:25:15,760 So there's a problem. 433 00:25:15,830 --> 00:25:19,070 How is it that they managed to bridge that gap 434 00:25:19,170 --> 00:25:21,230 and finally spiral in? 435 00:25:21,340 --> 00:25:23,370 The only way to understand if supermassive 436 00:25:23,470 --> 00:25:25,540 black holes merge is by looking 437 00:25:25,640 --> 00:25:28,640 at their gravitational wave signal. 438 00:25:28,740 --> 00:25:30,810 Two supermassive black holes 439 00:25:30,910 --> 00:25:34,510 merging should release a burst of gravitational waves 440 00:25:34,580 --> 00:25:36,420 millions of times more powerful 441 00:25:36,520 --> 00:25:38,820 than a stellar mass black hole merger. 442 00:25:41,620 --> 00:25:43,960 But LIGO won't hear a thing. 443 00:25:45,190 --> 00:25:47,330 The problem with using LIGO to detect the merger 444 00:25:47,430 --> 00:25:50,630 of supermassive black holes is actually a scale of time. 445 00:25:54,140 --> 00:25:57,340 One wave, as these things move around each other very slowly, 446 00:25:57,440 --> 00:26:02,280 would take over 10 years to go by, just one wave. 447 00:26:02,380 --> 00:26:04,510 In order to detect a gravitational wave with 448 00:26:04,610 --> 00:26:05,810 periods of decades, 449 00:26:05,910 --> 00:26:09,750 you also need an experiment that can be extremely stable 450 00:26:09,850 --> 00:26:11,080 over that amount of time. 451 00:26:12,990 --> 00:26:15,460 Vibrations from earthquakes, 452 00:26:15,560 --> 00:26:17,420 weather, or even nearby traffic 453 00:26:17,530 --> 00:26:21,560 prevent LIGO from listening for a decade, just to hear one wave. 454 00:26:23,860 --> 00:26:26,730 But there may be another way to 455 00:26:26,830 --> 00:26:30,540 detect gravitational waves from supermassive black holes, 456 00:26:30,640 --> 00:26:35,510 using a strange type of dead star called a pulsar. 457 00:26:35,610 --> 00:26:39,010 A pulsar is a kind of 458 00:26:39,110 --> 00:26:42,180 neutron star that is rapidly spinning 459 00:26:42,280 --> 00:26:45,620 and has a beam of radiation that makes 460 00:26:45,750 --> 00:26:48,390 wide circles across the sky. 461 00:26:48,490 --> 00:26:52,730 And when that flash of circle washes over the planet Earth, 462 00:26:52,830 --> 00:26:55,160 we get a little beep, a little beep. 463 00:26:55,260 --> 00:26:58,260 We get pulses of radiation, hence pulsar. 464 00:27:00,430 --> 00:27:03,270 Pulsars are the best timekeepers in the universe, 465 00:27:04,610 --> 00:27:09,180 but passing gravitational waves make them miss a beat. 466 00:27:09,280 --> 00:27:12,010 What if we noticed that the frequency of a pulsar was 467 00:27:12,110 --> 00:27:14,310 shifting very, very slowly, 468 00:27:14,420 --> 00:27:17,450 year to year to year, over 10 years or more, 469 00:27:17,550 --> 00:27:21,590 just slightly getting a little bit longer as space itself was 470 00:27:21,690 --> 00:27:23,360 changing between us and the pulsar? 471 00:27:25,960 --> 00:27:28,400 By monitoring dozens of pulsars, 472 00:27:28,500 --> 00:27:31,200 Chiara Mingarelli and a team of astronomers 473 00:27:31,300 --> 00:27:36,470 have created a galaxy-sized gravitational wave detector. 474 00:27:36,570 --> 00:27:42,340 It's called a pulsar timing array. 475 00:27:42,440 --> 00:27:45,880 You can really look for deviations in those arrival 476 00:27:45,980 --> 00:27:47,350 times over decades, 477 00:27:47,450 --> 00:27:50,920 almost like a tsunami warning system to show you when 478 00:27:51,020 --> 00:27:53,850 a gravitational wave is passing by. 479 00:27:56,360 --> 00:27:58,530 After 12 years, the team detected 480 00:27:58,630 --> 00:28:01,460 the same change in a number of pulsars. 481 00:28:03,360 --> 00:28:04,630 These pulsars are all 482 00:28:04,730 --> 00:28:06,800 thousands of light-years apart. 483 00:28:06,870 --> 00:28:07,870 If you think about it, 484 00:28:07,940 --> 00:28:11,270 it's difficult to make a signal that's the same 485 00:28:11,370 --> 00:28:12,970 in all of these pulsars. 486 00:28:13,070 --> 00:28:16,340 This has to be this common signal from something like 487 00:28:16,440 --> 00:28:18,710 a gravitational wave event. 488 00:28:21,750 --> 00:28:24,480 The signal the team detected wasn't created 489 00:28:24,590 --> 00:28:27,950 by just two supermassive black holes colliding. 490 00:28:29,460 --> 00:28:33,830 It's evidence of gravitational waves from hundreds of pairs of 491 00:28:33,930 --> 00:28:35,860 supermassive black holes, 492 00:28:35,960 --> 00:28:38,700 all in different stages of merging. 493 00:28:41,070 --> 00:28:44,700 Because it takes so long for one of these individual 494 00:28:44,810 --> 00:28:48,510 binary systems to merge, there could be thousands, 495 00:28:48,580 --> 00:28:52,210 if not millions, of these signals all being emitted at 496 00:28:52,310 --> 00:28:54,250 the same time, all of them. 497 00:28:54,350 --> 00:28:56,620 They all create this gravitational wave background 498 00:28:56,720 --> 00:28:59,320 that we're just starting to see the first signs of now. 499 00:29:02,490 --> 00:29:05,020 Astronomers predict this gravitational 500 00:29:05,090 --> 00:29:07,730 wave background fills our universe. 501 00:29:09,600 --> 00:29:12,230 If the signal the team detected is confirmed, 502 00:29:12,330 --> 00:29:16,300 it's proof that supermassive black holes do merge. 503 00:29:18,110 --> 00:29:21,840 The next step is to observe that as it happens. 504 00:29:23,280 --> 00:29:26,010 It would be a dream to see two supermassive 505 00:29:26,110 --> 00:29:27,310 black holes merging, 506 00:29:27,410 --> 00:29:30,150 emitting gravitational waves, and also being able to point 507 00:29:30,250 --> 00:29:33,490 a telescope at them and to see the physics of how they merge. 508 00:29:34,960 --> 00:29:37,620 Gravitational waves reveal the hidden workings 509 00:29:37,730 --> 00:29:39,860 of the cosmos. 510 00:29:39,960 --> 00:29:43,230 They reach the farthest corners of our universe. 511 00:29:44,570 --> 00:29:47,270 Now, astronomers are using gravitational 512 00:29:47,370 --> 00:29:49,770 waves to look back in time. 513 00:29:51,070 --> 00:29:53,440 They'll let us see all the way back 514 00:29:53,540 --> 00:29:55,380 to the earliest moments of our Big Bang. 515 00:30:16,000 --> 00:30:18,330 13.8 billion years ago, 516 00:30:20,300 --> 00:30:22,470 the universe sparks into life. 517 00:30:24,270 --> 00:30:28,270 The tiny speck of energy expands and cools. 518 00:30:28,380 --> 00:30:33,680 The infant cosmos is a fog of tiny particles of matter. 519 00:30:33,780 --> 00:30:38,990 Over time, the particles form atoms of hydrogen and helium. 520 00:30:40,450 --> 00:30:44,090 The fog clears, and the first light races across 521 00:30:44,190 --> 00:30:45,660 the universe. 522 00:30:45,760 --> 00:30:49,660 We call that light the cosmic microwave background. 523 00:30:50,870 --> 00:30:52,670 The cosmic microwave background is simply 524 00:30:52,770 --> 00:30:54,570 the most distant light we can see. 525 00:30:54,670 --> 00:30:57,640 So, looking at it give us baby pictures of our universe 526 00:30:57,740 --> 00:31:00,440 the way it looked 400,000 years after a big bang. 527 00:31:02,210 --> 00:31:04,710 What happened before these baby pictures 528 00:31:04,810 --> 00:31:07,010 remains a mystery. 529 00:31:08,220 --> 00:31:11,020 The leading theory is that in the very first second 530 00:31:11,120 --> 00:31:12,850 of the Big Bang, 531 00:31:12,950 --> 00:31:15,590 our infant universe had a growth spurt. 532 00:31:18,390 --> 00:31:21,230 Scientists call this idea inflation. 533 00:31:22,400 --> 00:31:26,330 In a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, 534 00:31:26,430 --> 00:31:30,300 our universe grew a billion, billion, billion, 535 00:31:30,400 --> 00:31:33,810 billion, billion, billion times bigger. 536 00:31:33,910 --> 00:31:37,510 That is the mother of all growth spurts... it laid 537 00:31:37,610 --> 00:31:41,580 the foundations for the entire cosmos that we know today. 538 00:31:49,060 --> 00:31:51,160 Inflation is just a theory, 539 00:31:51,260 --> 00:31:54,860 but there may be a way to prove it happened. 540 00:31:54,960 --> 00:31:57,500 Scientists think that during that brief moment of 541 00:31:57,630 --> 00:31:58,870 cosmic expansion, 542 00:31:58,970 --> 00:32:02,800 inflation stretched tiny fluctuations of gravity. 543 00:32:02,900 --> 00:32:06,840 That is such a violent process that it actually causes ripples 544 00:32:06,940 --> 00:32:08,210 and distortions in the very 545 00:32:08,310 --> 00:32:10,710 shape and fabric of space itself, 546 00:32:10,810 --> 00:32:13,110 which we can see today as gravitational waves. 547 00:32:14,620 --> 00:32:17,450 Scientists call these theoretical ripples through 548 00:32:17,550 --> 00:32:21,020 the early universe primordial gravitational waves. 549 00:32:22,890 --> 00:32:25,120 When they were first released, 550 00:32:25,230 --> 00:32:27,690 these were deafening. 551 00:32:27,800 --> 00:32:30,760 But in the billions of years since, our universe has grown 552 00:32:30,860 --> 00:32:32,300 bigger and colder, 553 00:32:32,400 --> 00:32:35,270 and these gravitational waves have diluted 554 00:32:35,370 --> 00:32:38,670 so that they barely even exist today. 555 00:32:38,770 --> 00:32:43,280 Scientists searched for signs of these very weak, 556 00:32:43,380 --> 00:32:46,050 primordial gravitational waves in the cosmic 557 00:32:46,150 --> 00:32:48,380 microwave background. 558 00:32:48,480 --> 00:32:50,950 And in 2014, 559 00:32:51,050 --> 00:32:54,620 a teen, using their purpose-built microwave array 560 00:32:54,720 --> 00:32:56,920 in Antarctica called BICEP, 561 00:32:57,020 --> 00:32:59,660 found a strange swirling pattern. 562 00:32:59,760 --> 00:33:03,960 When they saw those swirls, they saw those patterns, 563 00:33:04,060 --> 00:33:05,100 they thought they had seen 564 00:33:05,200 --> 00:33:08,200 the signature of primordial gravitational waves. 565 00:33:08,300 --> 00:33:11,970 Now this is really the conclusive 566 00:33:12,070 --> 00:33:15,070 evidence that inflation had to have happened. 567 00:33:15,180 --> 00:33:18,540 The results were exciting, 568 00:33:18,650 --> 00:33:21,510 but there was a glitch. 569 00:33:21,620 --> 00:33:23,580 This amazement lasted 570 00:33:23,650 --> 00:33:28,590 for a few months until cracks started appearing in this, 571 00:33:28,690 --> 00:33:30,190 and gradually, it all collapsed. 572 00:33:33,160 --> 00:33:34,790 The signal, thought to be proof of 573 00:33:34,900 --> 00:33:39,100 primordial gravitational waves and the theory of inflation, 574 00:33:39,200 --> 00:33:42,000 turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. 575 00:33:45,670 --> 00:33:47,710 As this light from the ancient universe, 576 00:33:47,810 --> 00:33:50,510 from the cosmic microwave background, travels 577 00:33:50,610 --> 00:33:53,210 through the universe, it had to travel through dust 578 00:33:53,310 --> 00:33:58,480 before reaching our detectors, and the dust itself can affect 579 00:33:58,590 --> 00:34:01,290 the light and mimic what 580 00:34:01,390 --> 00:34:03,720 the primordial gravitational waves can do. 581 00:34:05,530 --> 00:34:07,890 The primordial gravitational wave signal 582 00:34:08,000 --> 00:34:11,230 turned out to be mainly clouds of dust 583 00:34:11,330 --> 00:34:12,800 floating through space. 584 00:34:15,400 --> 00:34:17,770 That's how BICEP bit the dust. 585 00:34:19,610 --> 00:34:21,410 BICEP failed to detect 586 00:34:21,510 --> 00:34:24,610 primordial gravitational waves. 587 00:34:24,710 --> 00:34:27,110 Can LIGO do any better? 588 00:34:27,210 --> 00:34:30,980 Unfortunately, LIGO can't help us 589 00:34:31,090 --> 00:34:33,790 in observing primordial gravitational waves. 590 00:34:33,890 --> 00:34:35,960 It can't even observe supermassive black holes 591 00:34:36,060 --> 00:34:37,260 at the centers of galaxies. 592 00:34:37,360 --> 00:34:39,530 It is designed to observe in a particular 593 00:34:39,630 --> 00:34:41,290 frequency range. 594 00:34:41,400 --> 00:34:44,200 Primordial gravitational waves 595 00:34:44,300 --> 00:34:46,370 are at such a low frequency in 596 00:34:46,470 --> 00:34:48,270 such a low amplitude 597 00:34:48,370 --> 00:34:53,010 that there is no hope of LIGO being able to detect them. 598 00:34:55,580 --> 00:34:58,240 But scientists hope that an ambitious project 599 00:34:58,350 --> 00:35:00,210 called LISA will. 600 00:35:01,750 --> 00:35:05,280 Not on Earth, but from 30 million miles above. 601 00:35:07,220 --> 00:35:10,490 LISA is like LIGO, 602 00:35:10,590 --> 00:35:12,490 but bigger and in space. 603 00:35:18,030 --> 00:35:22,070 Or the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, will be a system 604 00:35:22,170 --> 00:35:26,910 of three satellites arranged in a giant triangular formation, 605 00:35:27,010 --> 00:35:29,910 1.5 million miles apart. 606 00:35:30,010 --> 00:35:32,280 If a gravitational wave passes through them 607 00:35:32,380 --> 00:35:33,580 and changes that distance, 608 00:35:33,680 --> 00:35:36,080 they can detect that... because the satellites are so much 609 00:35:36,180 --> 00:35:39,450 farther apart, a very low frequency wave 610 00:35:39,550 --> 00:35:40,950 can make a detectable change. 611 00:35:41,050 --> 00:35:44,890 LIGO wouldn't be able to see that, but LISA could. 612 00:35:44,990 --> 00:35:47,290 As well as listening for low frequency 613 00:35:47,390 --> 00:35:50,530 gravitational wave sources, like supermassive black 614 00:35:50,630 --> 00:35:51,960 hole mergers, 615 00:35:52,070 --> 00:35:55,330 LISA will listen for primordial gravitational 616 00:35:55,440 --> 00:35:58,370 waves from the dawn of time. 617 00:35:58,470 --> 00:35:59,540 If it detects them, 618 00:35:59,640 --> 00:36:03,780 we will know that the infant universe inflated. 619 00:36:04,950 --> 00:36:08,150 Inflation has explained almost everything 620 00:36:08,250 --> 00:36:10,780 we measure in modern cosmology. 621 00:36:10,880 --> 00:36:12,650 It's an incredibly successful theory. 622 00:36:12,750 --> 00:36:15,320 The icing on the cake would be if we could 623 00:36:15,420 --> 00:36:17,990 also discover these gravitational waves 624 00:36:18,090 --> 00:36:21,430 that it's supposed to have created. 625 00:36:22,900 --> 00:36:26,000 From the Big Bang to the most massive black holes, 626 00:36:27,100 --> 00:36:30,500 the universe talks to us using gravitational waves. 627 00:36:32,770 --> 00:36:37,510 Just like with telescopes, we're using gravitational waves to 628 00:36:37,610 --> 00:36:39,650 look at different types of objects... 629 00:36:39,750 --> 00:36:44,320 Neutron star mergers and black hole mergers... and learn more 630 00:36:44,380 --> 00:36:45,990 about the universe around us. 631 00:36:48,390 --> 00:36:49,660 They could even reveal 632 00:36:49,760 --> 00:36:53,060 the most elusive substance in the universe... 633 00:36:53,160 --> 00:36:55,060 Dark matter. 634 00:36:55,160 --> 00:36:57,900 If anything's gonna help us understand 635 00:36:58,000 --> 00:36:59,230 the nature of dark matter, 636 00:36:59,330 --> 00:37:01,670 it might just be gravitational waves. 637 00:37:11,210 --> 00:37:12,580 Across the universe, 638 00:37:12,680 --> 00:37:15,850 an invisible substance holds galaxies together. 639 00:37:15,920 --> 00:37:20,090 Without it, they would fly apart. 640 00:37:20,190 --> 00:37:23,990 The Milky Way should've dispersed long ago, 641 00:37:24,090 --> 00:37:26,160 and the Magellanic clouds right in front of us are 642 00:37:26,260 --> 00:37:27,590 exactly the same. 643 00:37:27,690 --> 00:37:29,500 These things should be just shedding stars 644 00:37:29,600 --> 00:37:32,230 left and right as they fly off this rotating galaxy. 645 00:37:32,330 --> 00:37:34,770 Instead, they're not. They're holding together. 646 00:37:34,870 --> 00:37:37,340 There are motions in the stars that we just cannot 647 00:37:37,440 --> 00:37:39,740 account for unless there's something holding 648 00:37:39,840 --> 00:37:40,840 the whole thing together. 649 00:37:42,580 --> 00:37:45,710 We call this mysterious substance dark matter. 650 00:37:45,810 --> 00:37:50,280 It doesn't interact with light, so we can't see it. 651 00:37:50,380 --> 00:37:52,350 But we cannot ignore it. 652 00:37:54,320 --> 00:37:57,760 From the motions of stars inside of galaxies to 653 00:37:57,860 --> 00:38:00,630 the motions of galaxies inside of clusters 654 00:38:00,730 --> 00:38:04,500 to the very structure of the universe itself, 655 00:38:04,600 --> 00:38:08,730 we see evidence for dark matter everywhere we look. 656 00:38:11,410 --> 00:38:13,710 We think dark matter makes up 657 00:38:13,810 --> 00:38:17,780 85% of the matter in the universe. 658 00:38:17,880 --> 00:38:22,080 But because we can't see dark matter with telescopes, 659 00:38:22,180 --> 00:38:23,880 we know very little about it. 660 00:38:25,650 --> 00:38:27,920 While we know that it's there, 661 00:38:28,020 --> 00:38:31,560 we haven't actually answered the question of what it is 662 00:38:31,660 --> 00:38:36,000 or how it interacts or why it's there or how it's created. 663 00:38:36,100 --> 00:38:37,860 So you have to be really creative 664 00:38:37,960 --> 00:38:39,280 if you want to go after this stuff 665 00:38:39,370 --> 00:38:42,200 and really understand what's it made out of? 666 00:38:45,570 --> 00:38:48,270 One creative theory suggests that black holes 667 00:38:48,380 --> 00:38:50,580 make up dark matter, 668 00:38:50,680 --> 00:38:54,580 not the regular stellar mass black holes that LIGO detects, 669 00:38:56,020 --> 00:38:58,420 or the supermassive black holes that 670 00:38:58,520 --> 00:39:00,720 lurk at the center of galaxies 671 00:39:00,820 --> 00:39:05,460 but tiny, primordial black holes born during the period of 672 00:39:05,590 --> 00:39:09,430 rapid expansion in the first moments of the Big Bang. 673 00:39:10,900 --> 00:39:13,370 Primordial black holes could be 674 00:39:13,470 --> 00:39:16,940 potential explanations for what we call dark matter. 675 00:39:17,040 --> 00:39:19,240 And if there's enough of them, they can hold an entire 676 00:39:19,340 --> 00:39:21,070 galaxy together. 677 00:39:21,170 --> 00:39:24,980 We don't know if primordial black holes exist, 678 00:39:25,080 --> 00:39:30,050 but gravitational waves could change that. 679 00:39:30,180 --> 00:39:32,550 When you form a primordial black hole, 680 00:39:32,650 --> 00:39:35,220 you send out a burst of gravitational waves 681 00:39:35,320 --> 00:39:38,190 that, in principle, carries on traveling through the universe, 682 00:39:38,290 --> 00:39:39,830 and you might be able to detect it 683 00:39:39,930 --> 00:39:41,190 still today. 684 00:39:41,290 --> 00:39:43,900 The problem is that these things would have emitted 685 00:39:44,000 --> 00:39:46,170 gravitational waves at a frequency that is not 686 00:39:46,270 --> 00:39:47,630 detectable by LIGO. 687 00:39:47,730 --> 00:39:51,000 And so it's very hard to discern whether or not they 688 00:39:51,100 --> 00:39:54,370 are plentiful enough to actually serve as a compelling 689 00:39:54,470 --> 00:39:55,470 dark matter candidate. 690 00:39:58,040 --> 00:40:00,450 If primordial black holes do exist, 691 00:40:00,550 --> 00:40:03,650 they still might not explain all the dark matter in 692 00:40:03,750 --> 00:40:05,350 the universe. 693 00:40:05,450 --> 00:40:07,750 They might be working with another type 694 00:40:07,850 --> 00:40:10,420 of dark matter to hold galaxies together. 695 00:40:11,830 --> 00:40:14,890 The upcoming LISA mission may fill in the blanks. 696 00:40:16,530 --> 00:40:18,760 What we call dark matter could be simple. 697 00:40:18,870 --> 00:40:22,470 It could just be made of one thing that absolutely floods 698 00:40:22,570 --> 00:40:24,700 the universe, or it can be made of 699 00:40:24,810 --> 00:40:28,310 many different things that all work together to combine 700 00:40:28,410 --> 00:40:29,910 to make this effect. 701 00:40:30,010 --> 00:40:32,110 Is dark matter all primordial black holes? 702 00:40:32,210 --> 00:40:34,910 Is it something else that we haven't thought of yet? 703 00:40:35,020 --> 00:40:38,280 Gravitational waves could provide those answers. 704 00:40:40,490 --> 00:40:43,720 The detection of tiny gravitational waves generated 705 00:40:43,820 --> 00:40:45,560 by primordial black holes 706 00:40:45,660 --> 00:40:49,900 will be a huge advance in our understanding of dark matter. 707 00:40:50,000 --> 00:40:51,600 With gravitational wave astronomy, 708 00:40:51,700 --> 00:40:54,930 we're seeing things that we have never seen before. 709 00:40:55,040 --> 00:40:56,540 So who knows 710 00:40:56,640 --> 00:40:59,100 what we're gonna see as we continue to look out into space? 711 00:41:01,840 --> 00:41:04,880 We've been able to see dozens of black holes 712 00:41:04,980 --> 00:41:07,610 merge, two neutron stars merging, 713 00:41:07,710 --> 00:41:10,650 and discovered from that merger that neutron stars 714 00:41:10,750 --> 00:41:12,750 can make platinum and gold. 715 00:41:15,820 --> 00:41:18,390 From thinking that we would never be able to see 716 00:41:18,490 --> 00:41:22,730 gravitational waves to seeing gravitational wave signals 717 00:41:22,830 --> 00:41:25,830 happen on the regular... It's just crazy. 718 00:41:27,530 --> 00:41:30,740 Already, we've heard epic explosions. 719 00:41:32,310 --> 00:41:35,840 We've identified the brightest lights in the cosmos, 720 00:41:37,340 --> 00:41:40,510 and we have solved some of the biggest mysteries 721 00:41:40,610 --> 00:41:42,580 in astronomy. 722 00:41:42,680 --> 00:41:46,090 But that is just the beginning. 723 00:41:46,190 --> 00:41:49,190 Right now is a golden age in astronomy. 724 00:41:49,290 --> 00:41:51,666 Think of the time that you're living in... the first detection 725 00:41:51,690 --> 00:41:54,830 of gravitational waves by LIGO was only a couple of years ago. 726 00:41:54,930 --> 00:41:56,700 You were here of the birth of 727 00:41:56,800 --> 00:41:58,700 this entirely new view of the universe. 728 00:41:58,750 --> 00:42:03,300 Repair and Synchronization by Easy Subtitles Synchronizer 1.0.0.0 58151

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