Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes wild ideas about how to tinker with the universe, from splitting the moon in half to triggering a gravitational wave apocalypse, and applies them to the laws of physics to see how they fare.please listen apple, spotify or our Podcast page.
Most of the time, galaxies have only two shapes: spirals and blobs. Spirals are spectacular when viewed from the right angle, but a lack of variety over the years of the universe can make them boring. So it’s time to spice things up in the galaxy in this episode of Dead Planets Society.
We’re joined by hosts Leah Crane and Chelsea White. Vivian Yu Astronomers at the University of California, Irvine are studying how galaxies evolve when they collide and distort each other. In the real world, colliding galaxies can produce strange spirals and multi-armed giants, but over time, the chaos of the collision becomes nothing more than a blob. Making permanent changes requires slightly more precise tools.
That’s where supermassive black holes come into play. Black holes could create gaps in the galaxy’s dust and gas, allowing us to create more detailed images. But gravity tends to complicate things, and eventually even black holes end up swallowing so much matter that they coalesce, forming yet another mass. Perhaps dark matter could instead be used to create invisible scaffolding that shapes the distribution of normal matter that we can see.
Building galaxies that are different from those produced by natural galaxy collisions, such as these oddly shaped galaxies, especially galaxies with sharp edges or with recognizable images like giraffes, could be a sign of aliens or the future. may be a way to let astronomers know that we are. We are here and we have incredible cosmic power.
In fact, perhaps this is already being done to the Milky Way galaxy by some strange alien force. After all, our home galaxy cannot be seen from outside of it. To know its shape, we need to count the number of stars visible in each direction and build a theoretical model. Therefore, we can rule out the possibility that our galaxy has a very unusual shape, such as a giraffe. But if, for example, it were a square instead of a spiral, it might be difficult for astronomers to tell the difference.
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