YouSaid · the spoken record

Anna Frebel

lines on the record: 167
first: 2023-05-18
most recent: 2023-05-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, Millie was certainly magic. She was a professor at MIT for many decades. I met her a number of times. Her photograph, actually a young and an older Millie is still on the wall. Every time I step out of the elevator in one of the buildings, I see it. She pioneered all sorts of carbon nanowork. So she was a material scientist very far removed from what I do on a daily basis. But yes, carbon has amazing properties when you study it. And again, that's indeed another aspect of why carbon is so fascinating, not just in the cosmos, but also for us making us creating us in the way that we can use it. It's wonderful.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, we need all the elements, but if you don't have stars like the sun, small stars that can actually host planets that have long lifetimes, you need long, long lifetimes if you want to have a stable planet and develop humans.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we're carbon based, and so I think carbon is really the most important element in the universe for a variety of reasons because it has enabled this whole evolution that we're now observing and literally seeing in the sky. And it's really fascinating.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So there's well established now that the lower the iron abundance of the stars are, the higher the carbon sort of gets. Carbon is such an interesting element in that regard. If we come back to the formation of the first low master, right? So we had the hotter gas, just hydrogen and helium that made the first stars, there were 100 solar masses or so because the gas couldn't cool enough. So they were big and puffy. Carbon then coming from the first stars probably led to enough cooling in these gas clouds that enabled the formation of the first law masters. So think about what happened if there wouldn't have been any carbon or the properties of the carbon atom would be different. It would not have cooled the gas in such significant ways perhaps. There wouldn't be any low mass does. Wouldn't be here today, right?”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And so in the process, right, if you make your black hole basically big enough, it will suck away some of the iron because that's the closest in terms of the layers. You hold on to it, you don't let it escape. And carbon is much further out. You let it all go. And so”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, sort of, right? Because if you think of the, we haven't talked about this yet, but if you know what the star looks like, a massive star looks like in its interior before it explodes, you have hydrogen, helium still on the outskirts, and then you have heavier layers of heavier and heavier elements all the way up to iron. So you have an iron core in the center. And because you can't get any energy out of iron when you want to fuse to iron atoms anymore, right? That's when the supernova explodes, occurs really. Actually, an implosion first, and then you have a bounce of the sort of neutron star phase that occurs in the process. It is so awesome gets disrupted. Yeah, it's like this giant, you know, basketball and then it all goes up.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's not so much an explanation, more like finding a mechanism for what happens in supernovae. the official term what was sort of as I said cooked up in order to explain the observations. And we have, by the way, found a whole bunch more of these stars. So that holds. And it's called a fallback mechanism. So actually in the during the supernova explosion, a massive black hole emerges. And so some of the materials back onto the black hole. So here is a vacuum cleaner now. Flopped into the middle, right?”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That really spurred the field to think about what was the nature of the first stars. How did they explode? What are the implications? Because if they are not as luminous and bright and energetic, that has consequences for these early protogalies in which they have been located in terms of blowing the gas out, let's say, and disrupting the system. So much higher chance for the earlier system to stay intact for longer, right? So there's a whole tale of consequences. And this is what I mean with we need to find the story because you do one thing and it's like the dominoes that consequences everywhere and then you have a different universe, right?”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we needed to concoct a theoretical supernova that made less. And it's actually surprisingly difficult because you can always add more in the universe, right? But you can't take stuff away. So Japanese colleagues kind of came up with the idea of a fainter supernova. Just doesn't have enough oomph, you know, when it explodes. So somehow there's less iron coming out. But at the same time, then these stars showed huge overabundances of carbon, you know, a thousand times more carbon. So how do you now get a thousand times more carbon out of these poor first supernovae? That was the theoretical challenge. And because we didn't have just one star, but two.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. So these stars are incredibly iron deficient, which means there must be of the second generation because there was, and interestingly enough There was this discrepancy A normal supernovae until then we thought would get us so much iron, you would distribute that in the gas cloud and then you would form this little star that we're observing. But the iron abundance that we measured was actually much lower than that. And I already mentioned you can't take things away. That must mean these early massive POP3, we call them population three, the first stars, they must have exploded in a different way than we previously thought. They can't output as much iron because they just can't. Otherwise, it wouldn't match our observations. And so that's when we started to work with several. On supernova yields, so what comes out of”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that so actually let me before I get into this two stars had huge amounts of carbon relative to iron. So we usually use iron as a reference element. For what we call the metallicity, so the overall metal content, the overall amount of heavy elements in it.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because then we're on to something. And it's not just some kind of weird quirk. And there are a lot of quirks in the universe, but we want to know, is that a real thing? Does it happen regularly? Is there something that we can learn? Is that a piece of the story? And so finding the second one that was even a little bit more extreme than the first one really showed, yes, our search techniques work. We can find these stars. They provide an important part to the story in the sense that If we had more than two stars, and by now we have about 10ish or so. What do they tell us about the nature of the very first stars And what we found, again, working with the theorists, of course, who run these supernova models.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes. But they have very different stars, both absolutely significant career-defining actually for me, but really pushed the envelope in very different ways. So HE1327, the first one that you mentioned, that was the second second generation star that we found. And you know, usually people say, like, oh, the first one is a big one, and the rest is nobody cares. But to us, it proved that, yes, we can do it. Because one, astronomers live in this sort of way of, you know, there are a lot of serendipitous discoveries and we, that's really great. But we need to show that we can do it again”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These numbers are actually based on older sets of coordinates for these stars. So yes, the minus in the middle means that they're in the southern hemisphere. So negative is in the southern hemisphere, positive is in the northern. And then 13 and 15 means that's sort of observable in the middle of the year”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While some colleagues at conferences have just called them Anastar or Freeboster because they didn't want to learn the Phone number, you know, I get it”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, exactly when it was. Still a little bit more organizable. But the variety of different types of metal pour stories we have is stark. Many different types of stars, many patterns we have sort of identified, but they are still crazy ones out there that we're still trying to kind of fit in”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As soon as you add elements to it, things kind of get a little out of hand. That ends in this beautiful variety that we have everywhere these days.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the elements except hydrogen and helium are called metals. Now, if we look again at the concept of chemical evolution, it means more and more of all the elements, everything higher than hydrogen helium gets produced slowly but surely by different types of stores and events. So that's a monotonously increasing function. And so we look for the stars that have the least amounts of heavy elements in them because that means we are going further and further back in this process, in that function almost all the way to the very beginning. And that is the first stars, right? They started that process. That's why I said it was such an important transition phase because we call the post-Big Bang universe pristine, just hygiene helium. And after that, the mess.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know who came up with this. I would love to know. The universe is a complicated place Many decades ago, someone clever came up with the idea to say, let's simplify things a little bit. Let's call hydrogen X helium Y and all the other elements combined metals. When I give public talks, I always ask, Is there a chemist in the audience? Let me just tell you, Neon is a wonderful metal. And they're like, oh my God, what's she saying? But I'm an astronomer. I'm not a chemist, so I'll get away with it. So if you just roll with it for a moment,”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the story of that paper is now usually I don't say I find the oldest stars, you know, when I talk to my research colleagues, I talk to them about we find the chemically most pristine stuff. They must be the oldest stars That came into the galaxy because they formed before the galaxy was the Mickey Way, right? And this is so cool. And it was so wonderful. So this class, it went so well in the fall, I had nine people sign up. That's not unusual for a class specialty class at MIT. So small number. It was eight women and they were so into it. I said, okay, let's use this opportunity. You're going to do some extra work with me and we're going to publish this.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But coming up with a story when you only have three puzzle pieces, what does a puzzle look like? You have to be a little bit bold. You need to have some experience. And you need to kind of see the universe in 3D. You just need to kind of go for it. And that's the beautiful thing. I really love that.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The whole thing. But the promise was you come sign up for my class in teens of two, you each get your own old star that has not been analyzed before. I don't know what the solution is. Because in research, we don't look up the solution at the end of the book. We do not know what we're going to find. Our job is to do the work and then to interpret the numbers because our job as scientists is to find the story. Anyone can crunch numbers. Anyone.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I wanted to streamline that and give not just trial how it would work to provide the safe confines of a classroom where you just sign up and do research in a very structured way. And I developed it. It was a lot of work, a little bit more than I thought to map up an entire research project basically from scratch in 10 worksheets so that they could do it again in a very structured and organized fashion.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it was a wonderful little collaboration that actually emerged in the fall. So I really like working with undergrads and grad students, postdocs. And I came up with a new concept for a class at MIT where I wanted to integrate the research process into the classroom. Because sometimes people find it really hard to call email a professor, hey, you know, I'm this and that person and I'm interested in your research. Could I possibly, you know, come?”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But this could only happen early on when, you know, there wasn't left and right and up and down. So stuff would come in from all ways. So now 13 billion years later, we're looking at... They're still doing it. And B We just looked for stars that have low stroth human barium abundances, and then we look at the kinematics, and lo and behold the awe at hundreds of kilometers per second going the wrong way. It's like, dude, you must have come in really early on from somewhere else. So we call this retrograde motion. That's a clear sign of accretion, so something that has come into the galaxy. And because they are so fast and it's really all of them, that must have happened early on, right? You can't throw a galaxy into the Mickey Ray right now the wrong way. It eventually will turn around.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We looked at the kinematics. How are these stars moving? And they're all going the wrong way in the galaxy. How is that possible? Well, it is possible because now we come back to the proto-galaxy. The proto galaxy was like a beehive. It just didn't really know what it was or what it wanted to become when it grew up. And it was absorbing all these little galaxies to grow fast. Some galaxies, some absorbed galaxies were thrown in going the main way. And some came in the wrong way, huh? Happens.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we can't really say, oh, it came from that and that dwarf galaxy. But interestingly enough, so I'm just a few days ago, I submitted a paper with three women undergrads. It was so good to work together. And we found a sample of stars that have very, very low abundances in strontium and barium. So very heavy elements. And I had a hunch for a while that these stars would probably be some of the oldest. Because, as I said, heavy elements give you extra information about special events. And again, finding something that's really low means it must have happened either really early on or in a very special environment, right? Because we can only ever add. So if you find something that's incredibly low in terms of the abundance, maybe just one event contributed that max.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends really on what star you find. There are many different chemical signatures. We actually pair up these days our element signatures with also kinematic information, how the star moves about the galaxy Actually, gives us clues as to where the star might have come from, because again, all these old stars are in the galaxy, but they are not off the galaxy. That's a small but important distinction. So they all came from somewhere else”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have maybe 10 stars or so now where we are saying they contain so little of these heavy elements that there must be second generation because how else would you have made them? And again, I want to stress that the elements that we observe in these stars were not made by the stars themselves that we observe. That's just a reflection of the gas cloud. So we don't actually I hate to say that because I love stars. At the end of the day, we don't really care for the stars that we're observing. We care for the story that they're telling us about the early universe.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we think we can sort of say, okay, this was like second generation or third because the amounts of heavy elements in the stars that we observe is so tiny. One super one normal supernova explosion is actually already basically too much. It would give us too much of it. And the thing is, you can never take away things in the universe. You can only add, there's no cosmic vacuum cleaner going around sucking things away. Black holes are probably the closest to that, but they would have taken the whole star. Yeah, they'd take the whole thing not just stuff out of the gas, you know.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that is what we're observing today. So, all these old stars basically carry the signature from all these progenitor events. It's our job then to unravel, okay, which processes and which events and how many may have occurred in the early universe that led to exactly that signature that we observed 13 billion years later.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, important clarification. So. The source that we are observing today, these old ones, they formed from the gas. And the question is what enriched that gas? So it could have been just a first star dumping their elements into that gas all the way up to iron. And we have found some stars that we think are second generation stars. So they form from gas enriched by just one first star. That's super cool Then we find other old stars that have a much more complicated heavy element signature. And that means, okay, they are probably formed in a gas cloud that had a few things going on. Such as maybe a first star, maybe another more normal supernova, and maybe some kind of special process like a neutron star merger that would make heavy elements. And so they created a local chemical signature from which the next generation star they informed.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just goes all the way up to iron And then it just is a little bit more of all of these elements. Yeah, just yeah, it's one sprinkle, then another, and it just kind of adds up, right? Now, the heavy elements form in very different ways. They are not fusion made, they are made typically through neutron capture processes, but for that you need seed nuclei, ideally iron or carbon or something. So the supernova-made elements are very good seed nuclear for other processes that then create heavy elements. And because they cannot be made everywhere, when you when so some of my stores have huge amounts of these heavy elements in them. And they tell us in much more detail something really interesting happened. Somewhere”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they're the spice of life, right? So every supernova gives you elements up to iron. That's cool, but at some point it gets a little bit boring because that always works. But that's the baseline. We need that. And that's certainly what came out of the first stars and then all the other supernova explosions that followed with every generation. And it took about a thousand generations, give or take until the sun was made. So the sun formed from a gas cloud that was enriched by roughly thousand generations of supernova explosions. And that's why the sun has its chemical composition that it has, including, you know, and somehow the planets were made from that as well.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so over time, all the elements in the periodic table have been built up. There have been other processes, for example, neutrons, submergers and other exotic supernovae that have provided elements heavier than iron all the way up to uranium from very early on. We're still trying to figure out those details. I always say pretty much all the elements were done from day three.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Age range. That's what we think. Now, as a small caveat here, we cannot accurately date these stars, but we use a trick to say, oh, these stars must have formed as some of the earliest generations of stars, because we need to talk about the chemical evolution of the universe and the Milky Way for a second. So already mentioned the pristine-ness of the universe after the Big Bang, right? Just hydrogen and helium. Then the first stars formed. They produced a sprinkle of heavier elements up to iron. Then the next generation of stars formed that included, again, massive stars that they would explode again, but also the little ones that keep on living, right? So, and then the massive ones again explode as supernova. So they provide, again, another sprinkle of heavier elements.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which means it has perfectly preserved that information from way back then all the way to today and going forward. So I'm Estella archaeologist because I don't dig in the dirt to find remnants of past civilizations and whatnot. I dig for the star, for the old stars in the sky because they have preserved that information from this first billion year in their outer stellar atmosphere, which is what I'm observing with telescopes. So I'm getting the best look at the chemical composition early on. That you could possibly wish for.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can we learn from these stars? Why should we study them? Now, these little stars are really, really efficient with their energy consumption. They are still burning for the experts just burning hydrogen to helium in their cores and they have done so for the past 12, 13 billion years, however old they are. And they're going to keep doing that for another few billion years, same as the sun, the same sun also just does hydrogen helium burning and will continue that for a while. which means the outer parts of the star, well, pretty much actually most of the star that gas doesn't talk to the core. So whatever composition that that star has, you know, in its outer layers is exactly the same as the gas composition from which the star formed.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because again, hierarchical assembly over Milky Way meant exactly. They formed in a little other galaxy in the vicinity and at some point the Milky Way ate that, which means it absorbed all the stars, including these little old stars that are now in the outskirts of the Mickey Way that I used to. My telescope to.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's really fascinating. So I mentioned the lesser, the mass of the star, the longer it lives. And again for reference for the next dinner party, the son's lifetime is 10 billion years. So, if you have a star that's 0.6 or 0.8 solar masses, then it's lifetime is going to be 15 to 20 billion years. And that's an important range for our conversation because, again, if you assume that such a small star formed soon after the Big Bang, then it is still observable today. You mentioned old light before. Yeah, that light is like a few thousand years old, but compared to the age of these stars, it's nothing. So to me, that's young. It comes straight from our galaxy of, you know, it's not far. These stars are not far away. They're in our galaxy in the outskirts. They probably did not form in the galaxy.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's like a big sandbox, right? And everyone kind of has their little corner and they do things, but we're all in the same sandbox together at the end of the day.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was really interesting just to take the time and really try to talk to each other. And it's amazing how How hard that is. You know, even among scientists, we already have trouble talking to each other. Imagine how hard it is to talk to non-scientists and other people to try to, we're all interested in the same things as humans at the end of the day, right? But everyone has sort of a different angle about it and different questions and way of formulating things. And sometimes it really takes a while to converge and to get, you know, to the common ground. But if you take the time, it's so interesting to participate in that process. And it feels so good in the end to say like, yes, we tackled this together, right? We overcame our differences, not so much in opinion, but just in expressing ourselves about this and how we go about solving a problem. And these were some of my most successful papers. And I certainly enjoyed them the most.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. The physics is kind of different. It's not extreme. I mean, you know, you could consider a nuclear fusion sort of be perhaps extreme. You need to tunnel. There are some interesting physics there, but it's just a different flavor, and I don't do these kinds of calculations myself either. I very much like to talk with my theory colleagues about these things though because I find there's always an interesting intersection and often it's just I've written a number of papers with colleagues who do like simulations about galaxies and so they're not quite as far removed as let's say the black hole you know pen and paper folks but even in those cases we had the same interest in the same topics but it was almost like we're speaking two different languages and we weren't even that far removed you know both astronomers and all”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, at first glance, there isn't actually much crosstalk. Personally, I mostly observe stars, so I don't usually actually think too much of black holes.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, and more and more sort of primitive in terms of the structure. But of course, as you can imagine, if you make your system smaller and smaller, it becomes dimmer and dimmer and it's further and further away. So we're reaching the end of the line from a technical perspective pretty quickly.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that would fall into Telescope right now to any promises, big, big steps forward. This is in its early days because it's only been online like a year or so. But that collects the infrared light from the farthest. Like literally proto-galaxies, earliest galaxies, that light has traveled some 13 billion years to us. And they're observing these faint little blobs. And folks are trying to, again, study the onset of these early supermassive black holes, how they shape galaxies. So they're seeing that they were there surrounded by already bigger galaxies. Ideally, I'd like for my colleagues to push a little bit further, hopefully that will eventually happen.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think to some degree we can answer that because there are lots of little dwarf galaxies out there. The Milky Way remains surrounded by many dozens of small dwarf galaxies. I have studied a bunch of them. And to the extent that we can tell they do not contain black holes. So there certainly were gravitationally bound structures. Either you can call them proto-galaxies or dwarf galaxies or first galaxies. They were definitely there, but there must have been bigger things, like the Proto-Milky Way, where something was different, right? What made them more massive so that, you know, they would gravitationally attract these smaller systems to integrate them. So we'll have to see”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There must have been a seed for one of these supermassive black holes, and I'm not actually sure that it's clear right now kind of what was there first, the supermassive black hole or the galaxy. So lots of people are trying to study that. And of course, the black hole wasn't as massive back then as it is these days. But it's a big area of research and the new James Webb, the JWST, the telescope, the infrared telescope in space is working on many people are working on that to figure out exactly what happened. And there are some surprising results that we really don't understand right now.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't actually know, we don't really know where they come from. Again, we know that they are there, but how do we get there? So if we go back to the early universe, right, we had a little galaxy that just sort of, you know, I don't know, had some small number of stars. It was a first gravitationally bound structure that was held together by dark matter because dark matter actually kind of structured up first before the luminous matter could because that's what dark matter kind of does. And it started to hold gas and then stars sort of together in his first very shallow what we call potential well. So these gravitationally bound systems. And then the Milky Way grew from absorbing neighboring smaller, even smaller systems. And somewhere in that process,”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of the above. That's what makes astronomy really hard, but also really interesting, right? No day is like another because we always find something new. I want to come back to the idea of the proto-galaxy because it actually matches or relates to the black hole formation. So most large, well, pretty much all large galaxies have a supermassive black hole in the center.”
2023-05-18 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #378 – Anna Frebel: Origin and Evolution of the Universe, Galaxies, and Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source