PBS Space Time
Space Time explores the outer reaches of space, the craziness of astrophysics, the possibilities of sci-fi, and anything else you can think of beyond Planet Earth with our astrophysicist host: Matthew O’Dowd. For all business inquiries and sponsorship opportunities please reach out to: pbsspacetime@lighthouseagents.com Matt O'Dowd spends his time studying the universe, especially really far-away things like quasars, super-massive black holes, and evolving galaxies. He uses telescopes in space to do it. Matt completed his Ph.D. at NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute, followed by work at the University of Melbourne and Columbia University. He's now a pr...
Black Holes. Dissected. For 1.5 Hours.
Black holes are not just the strangest objects in the universe, they're the sharpest test we have of how reality actually works. This episode explores how these extreme cosmic laboratories force general relativity and quantum physics into direct confrontation. We look back through a decade of content to understand their formation and the theoretical diagrams that describe them, offering a journey through the profound implications of these celestial objects for our understanding of space time and astrophysics. Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Check out the Space Time Merch...
What If Dark Matter Is Just Black Holes?
PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE ↓ More info below ↓ Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime It may be that for every star in the universe there are billions of microscopic black holes streaming through the solar system, the planet, even our bodies every second. Sounds horrible - but hey, at least we’d have explained dark matter. Want a very deep understanding of Black Holes? Check out the Black Hole playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs...
Did JWST Identify Dark Matter Stars?
Check Out Human Footprint on PBS Terra: https://youtu.be/-c_KBWyPGaQ PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime We knew that the James Webb Space Telescope would find interesting stuff, especially about the mysterious early times. For example, there are hints that the galaxies we’re seeing are brighter and more regular than expected given the short amount of time they’d had to grow. Well, perhaps no one was...
Your DNA's Codes Are (Almost Certainly) From Outer Space
Thank you to Cyber GhostVPN for Supporting PBS. Learn More About Cyber GhostVPN: https://www.cyberghostvpn.com/PBSSpaceTime Did you know that many of us have up to 4% neanderthal DNA? And that 100% of your DNA may come from outer space? No joke. The biochemistry that defined the coding system of your DNA may have happened off-world, and perhaps even long before Earth existed. Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE ...
Where Is The Center of The Universe?
Learn More about Brilliant: https://brilliant.org/SpaceTime/ Take the Space Time Fan Survey Here: https://forms.gle/wS4bj9o3rvyhfKzUA PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Today we’re going to ask a simple-seeming question that will lead to so pretty wacky places. The question is this: If the universe has a center, where is it? Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/sh...
Is There A Basic Answer To The Fermi Paradox?
Use code PBS to get 15% off all Hoverpens and free shipping to most countries for the first 48 hours, 10% off after that. North America / UK / Australia / International: https://bit.ly/pbs_novium EU: https://bit.ly/pbs_noviumeu Around 2 billion years ago, life had plateaued in complexity, ruined the atmosphere, and was on the verge of self-annihilation. But then something strange and potentially extremely lucky happened that enabled endless new evolutionary paths. The first eukaryote cell was born. This may also explain why there are no aliens. Patreon Interview with Dr. Matt Caplan https://youtu.be/hN1I01ZGzJc?feature=shared ...
How To Simulate The Universe With DFT
PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Take the Space Time Fan Survey Here: https://forms.gle/wS4bj9o3rvyhfKzUA ***** Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime If you used every particle in the observable universe to do a full quantum simulation, how big would that simulation be? At best a large molecule. That’s how insanely information dense the quantum wavefunction really is. And yet we routinely simulate systems with thousands, even millions of particles. Ho...
Can The Crisis in Cosmology Be EXPLAINED By Cosmic Voids?
Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Two of the greatest mysteries in cosmology are the nature of dark energy and the apparent conflict in our measurements of the expansion rate of the early versus the modern universe that even dark energy can’t account for. Could both of these be explained by looking to a part of the universe that we’ve largely ignored so far? Could cosmic voids be driving the universe? Episodes Referenced: The Evolution of t...
Could The Universe Be Inside A Black Hole?
Take the Space Time Fan Survey Here: https://forms.gle/wS4bj9o3rvyhfKzUA PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime What is inside a black hole? Inevitable crushing doom? Gateways to other universes? Weird, multidimensional libraries? If you’ve ever wanted to know then you might be in luck - Some physicists have argued that you’re inside one right now. Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www...
How Magnetism Shapes The Universe
Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop How far can you follow a compass needle? As far as the north magnetic pole, where the needle starts spinning wildly? Compass needles align with magnetic field lines, and on the precise spot of magnetic north, those field lines are vertical. So just tilt your compass 90 degrees and you can continue your journey - either down to the molten iron dynamo surrounding the Earth’s core, or up. But up to wh...
The Universe Itself Might Be Veiling the Gravity Particle From Us
Head to https://brilliant.org/Spacetime/ to start learning for free for 30 days. Plus, our viewers get 20% off an annual Premium subscription for unlimited daily access to everything Brilliant has to offer. To progress to the next level in understanding reality, we need to combine quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity. And to do that, most physicists believe we need a theory of quantum gravity .. which means we need gravitons. But it also seems like the laws of physics make it impossible to ever detect this quantum particle of gravity. Almost like the universe is set up to keep th...
Fermions Vs. Bosons Explained by Statistical Mechanics!
Check Out Changing Planet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut0Qdvnsd_s&ab_channel=PBS Comment Repsonse Live Stream with Matt: https://www.youtube.com/live/HmOQrEdhsuI?feature=share Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime If I roll a pair of dice and you get to bet on one number, what do you choose? The smart choice is 7 because there are more ways for 2 dice to come up 7 than any other number. Well, it turns out that you can apply the same logic to predicting the behavior of...
Can a Particle Be Neither Matter Nor a Force?
Get NordVPN 2Y plan + 4 months extra + up to 20Gb Saily data here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/spacetime It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime All particles belong to two large groups: fermions like protons and electrons make everything we consider "matter", while bosons like photons and gluons transmit the fundamental forces. And that about covers the universe: matter moving through space and time under the action of forces. But what if we...
The NEW Warp Drive Possibilities
PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE ↓ More info below ↓ Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime That Einstein guy was a real bummer for our hopes of a star-hopping, science-fiction-y future. His whole “nothing travels faster than light” rule seems to ensure that exploration of even the local part of our galaxy will be an excruciating slow. But Einstein also gave us a glimmer of hope. He showed us that space and time can be warped - and so t...
What if Humans Are NOT Our Planet's First Civilization? | Silurian Hypothesis
Enjoy 10% OFF and free worldwide shipping on all Hoverpens with code PBS: North America & other countries: https://bit.ly/pbs_novium UK & Europe: https://bit.ly/pbs_noviumeu To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime We’re almost certainly the first technological civilization on Earth. But what if we’re not? We are. Although how sure are we, really? The Silurian hypothesis, which asks whether pre-human industrial civilizations might have existed. Check out the Space Time Merch Store http...
Quantum Energy Teleportation Actually EXISTS!
Remove your personal information from the web at https://joindeleteme.com/SPACETIME The vacuum of space is a chaotic sea of quantum fluctuations. Some have said that this vacuum energy can be harvested to build our future starship engines, or manipulated to build warp drives. It can't. But it is technically possible to move real energy through the quantum vacuum without it passing through intervening space. Quantum energy teleportation may be as close as we get to transporter beams. But how close is that? Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com...
Does Space Materialize From A Holographic Boundary?
Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Space seems fundamental. To build a universe, surely you need something to build it on or in. Many, maybe most physicists now think that the fabric of space emerges from something deeper. And perhaps the most existentially disturbing such proposal is that our 3-D universe is just the inward projection of an infinitely distant boundary. A hologram, or sorts. Let’s see how that can actually work, and what the holographic pr...
What If The Cosmological Constant Wasn't Truly Constant?
Weathered: Earth's Extreme is available globally at: https://to.pbs.org/WeatheredST or the PBS App (US Only) Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop We know that the universe is getting bigger. And we know that the speed that the universe is getting bigger is also getting bigger. The standard assumption is that the acceleration rate is itself constant, which will surely result in ultimate heat death. But a recent survey of primordial sound waves frozen into the way galaxies are sprinkled through the universe reveals that this fate is now in question. PBS...
What If Space And Time Are Unreal?
Thank you to Brilliant for Supporting PBS. To learn more go to https://brilliant.org/SpaceTime/ PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Physics progresses by breaking our intuitions, but we’re now at a point where further progress may require us to do away with the most intuitive and seemingly fundamental concepts of all—space and time. Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Sign...
Does the Planck Length Disrupt E=MC^2?
On November 29th, 20% off the whole merch store! https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Every good nerd knows that E=mc^2. Every great nerd knows that, really, E^2=m^2c^4+p^2c^2 Want to know what that even means? Sure, I’ll tell you, but today I’d like to invite you to an even higher level of nerdom with extra bits to Einstein’s famous equation that will make even the greatest nerds quiver in their … space time merch if they turn out to be real. PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http...
Did JWST EXPLAIN The Mystery of Supermassive Black Hole Origins?
Check Out Fascinating Fails: https://youtu.be/8zMhoj7tFiw?feature=shared Check Out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop This is what we astronomers call a blob, or a smudge, if you want to get really technical. It may not look like much from here, but what do you expect for something near the literal edge of the observable universe. If you were there when this light was emitted, you’d A. be at the beginning of time, and B. be looking at an entire galaxy containing an enormous black hole at its heart. It’s the...
The REVOLUTIONARY PHYSICS of Black Hole Star Capture | Extreme Tidal Disruption Events
PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime If you track the motion of individual stars in the ultra-dense star cluster at the very center of the Milky Way you’ll see that they swing in sharp orbits around some vast but invisible mass—that’s the Sagittarius A* supermassive black hole. These are perilous orbits, and sometimes a star wanders just a little too close to that lurking monster, leading to its...
How the Higgs Mechanism Give Things Mass
Take the Space Time Fan Survey Here: https://forms.gle/wS4bj9o3rvyhfKzUA PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Fermilab physicists really care about the mass of the W boson. They spent nearly a decade recording collisions in the Tevatron collider and another decade analysing the data. This culminated in the April 7 announcement that this obscure particle’s mass seems to be heavier than expected. So why do we...
How An Extreme New Star Could Change All Cosmology
Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime A new white dwarf has been discovered (poetically named: ZTF J1901+1458) that’s doing some stuff that no white dwarf should ever be able to do. In fact, it has multiple properties that are so extreme that it almost certainly did NOT form in the way that we thought all white dwarfs formed. This one peculiar point of faint light may change our understanding of not just white dwarfs, but of all cosmology. Professor Dave Explains: Debunking the Electric Universe https://youtu.be/T9...
The REAL Possibility of Imaging Alien Planets!
Go to https://squarespace.com/pbs to get a free trial and 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime I’m going to tell you about the craziest proposal for an astrophysics mission that has a good chance of actually happening. A train of spacecraft sailing the sun’s light to a magical point out there in space where the Sun’s own gr...
Space DOES NOT Expand Everywhere
PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Space is big, and it’s getting bigger. But where does all that new space actually come from? And is it popping into existence all around you right now? Is that why the remote control is always further away than I thought? Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Sign up for the mailing list to get episode no...
New Results in Quantum Tunneling vs. The Speed of Light
Learn More about Brilliant: https://brilliant.org/SpaceTime/ Paradoxically, the most promising prospects for moving matter around faster than light may be to put a metaphorical brick wall in its way. New efforts in quantum tunneling - both theory and experiment - show that superluminal motion may be possible, while still managing to avoid the paradox of superluminal signaling.Paradoxically, the most promising prospects for moving matter around faster than light may be to put a metaphorical brick wall in its way. New efforts in quantum tunneling - both theory and experiment - show that superluminal motion may be possible...
How Supernovas Behave as the Universe's Greatest Particle Accelerators
Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Cern's Large Hadron Collider routinely collides particles at energies equivalent to a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. If this worries you, then the following fact will either put you at ease or scare the hell out of you. And that's that a particle with the energy of an LHC collision hits every square kilometer of the Earth every single second. And we only relatively recently figured out where...
How Many Forms Of Matter Exist?
Enjoy Far Out (https://youtu.be/jpUjze3v_6c) and Why Am I Like This (https://youtu.be/eWzBNfBnFys) on PBS Terra ( https://youtube.com/pbsterra) PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Let’s talk about states of matter. You know your states of matter don’t you? We have solids, liquids and gasses, and plasmas, quark-gluon plasmas, nuclear matter, bose-einstein condensates, neutronium, time crystals, and sand. Come to thin...
Did AI Invalidate Our Proton Model WRONG?
PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime The humble proton may seem simple enough, and they’re certainly common. People are made of cells, cells are made of molecules, molecules are made of atoms, atoms are made of electrons, protons, and neutrons. And protons are each made of three up or down quarks. Simple stuff, right? All except for that last part. Protons are actually made of many, many quarks th...
What Occurs Within a Proton?
PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime If we ever want to simulate a universe, we should probably learn to simulate even a single atomic nucleus. But it’s taken some of the most incredible ingenuity of the past half-century to figure out how that out. All so that today I can teach you how to simulate a very very small universe. Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://ww...
How To Know If It's Aliens
Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime There’s one rule on Space Time: It’s never Aliens. But every rule has an exception and this rule is no exception because: It’s never aliens, until it is. So is it aliens yet? And on today’s Space Time we’re going to examine all the best case scenarios for life beyond Earth. If you want more alien content, check out the ALIENS! Playlist https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsPUh22kYmND9mCwC2vVPMJJrMU95kcAS Check out the Space Time Merch Store http...
Is Our Model of Dark Energy BROKEN? | New 4.2σ Results
Learn More About Anydesk: https://anydesk.com/spacetime The biggest news in cosmology in recent years is that the mysterious universe-accelerating entity we call dark energy may be fading away. The evidence for this is now strong enough that enormous effort is going into confirming this result. So what’s it going to take, and when are we going to know? Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Patreon Livestream with Looking Glass Universe! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime https://www.youtube.com/lookingglassuniverse Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Sign up fo...
Year End Q&A
In this 2022 end of year, Ask Matt anything, Matt discussed the upcoming year ahead for Space Time, Black Holes, the problem with the question of free will, the nature of photons of light and more!
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The Equation That Illuminates (Nearly) Everything!
Check Out Rogue History On PBS Origins: https://youtu.be/xuT35ud41QQ PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime The Standard Model of particle physics is arguably the most successful theory in the history of physics. It predicts the results of experiments with a numerical precision unmatched by any other branch of science, and it does so almost unfailingly. The theory is encapsulated in a single equation known as...
Does the Universe Create Itself?
Take the Space Time Fan Survey Here: https://forms.gle/wS4bj9o3rvyhfKzUA PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Imagine you’re leading a game of 20 questions and you forget the thing you chose half way through. You have to keep answering yesses and nos and hope that you think of something that’s consistent with all your previous questions before the game is done. Well it could be t...
Do Neutron Stars Gleam Within Dark Matter?
👉 Head to https://brilliant.org/spacetime/ for a 30-day free trial + 20% off your annual subscription Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Neutron stars aren't dark matter--we figured that out a while ago. But new research is telling us that they may be dark matter factories. They may produce the exotic axion, one of the most popular dark matter candidates. Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop Sign up for the mailing list to get episode notifications and hear special announcements! https://mailchi.mp/1a6eb8...
What if Singularities FAIL to Exist?
Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord & 10% Off All Merch! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime It's not too often that a giant of physics threatens to overturn an idea held to be self-evident by generations of physicists. Well, that may be the fate of the famous Penrose Singularity Theorem if we're to believe a recent paper by Roy Kerr. Long story short, the terrible singularity at the heart of the black hole may be no more. Roy Kerr Paper: Do Black Holes have Singularities? https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.00841.pdf Check out the Space Time Merch...
How To Build The Universe in a Computer
Thank you to Wren for supporting PBS. To learn more, go to https://wren.co/start/spacetime. Take the Space Time Fan Survey Here: https://forms.gle/wS4bj9o3rvyhfKzUA PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE ***** Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime We routinely simulate the universe on all of its scales, from planets to large fractions of the cosmos. Today we’re going to see how it’s possible to build a universe in a...
Why Did Attosecond Physics Take Home the NOBEL PRIZE?
Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://www.pbsspacetime.com/shop PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to:http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Whenever we open a new window on the universe we discover something new. Whether it's figuring out how to see to greater distances like with telescopes, or down to smaller size-scales like with microscopes, or perhaps expanding our vision to new wavelengths of light or via exotic means such as in...