(upbeat music)
(characters whooshing)
(bubbles popping)
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- [Man] Hmm.
- Good morning everyone, and
welcome to today's webinar
brought to you buy the
McMaster Alumni Association.
My name is Blake and I'm excited
to talk to you about space,
galaxies, and black holes.
Thanks again for tuning in
and for all of your wonderful questions.
We had quite a few
questions about black holes,
so I'm excited to get
through some of those.
I'm a first-year Master's
student at McMaster
and I study the gas
content in other galaxies.
So I use telescope observations
to try to understand the
properties of this gas
in galaxies other than the Milky Way.
But we have lots to get
through, so let's get started.
Our first question today comes from Jacob,
a grade two student in
Ottawa, and they ask,
"How many galaxies are
there in the universe?"
I think this is a great question,
Jacob, to get us started
on our webinar today.
And unfortunately where most of us are
in these bigger cities in Ontario,
we aren't able to look up at the night sky
and see something as beautiful as this,
but if you were in Northern Ontario,
you might be able to look up and see
the extent of the Milky Way
and all of these little point sources.
And these are the stars
in the Milky Way galaxy.
Now, unfortunately most galaxies
we're unable to see with our own eyes,
but early astronomers were confused
and they would question what's going on
in these dark spots of the night sky,
what's happening here?
We see lots of stars and objects
throughout the night sky,
but what's going on in these dark patches?
And in the early 1900s, a
scientist and astronomer
named Edwin Hubble discovered
the first galaxy in the universe
other than the Milky Way,
and since then there's been
a telescope named after Hubble,
the Hubble Space Telescope,
which you may have heard of before.
It's a famous telescope that was launched
in the late 1990s and has continued
taking observations
through the 21st century.
But what Hubble gives
us the opportunity to do
is point at one of these
dark patches in the night sky
and take a long picture.
And by pointing the
telescope at one single place
and leaving it there for a long time,
we're able to find out more information
and gather more light
from that one dark patch.
And what we see is this complete zoo
of different galaxy structures and colors,
and we see these brilliant,
bright blue spiral galaxies
and these large, red ellipticals.
And we actually open our eyes up
to the amount of galaxies that
there are in the universe,
the extensive number.
And it's actually estimated that there are
more than two trillion
galaxies in the universe.
In this image alone, this
Hubble Deep Field image,
there's about 5500.
So, much more than we can see
when we just look up at the
night sky with our own eyes.
But the invent of the
telescopes like Hubble
allows us to see these
galaxies in the universe.
Our second question today comes from Ava,
a grade three student in Hamilton.
And they ask, "What is the
closest galaxy to Earth?"
Thank you for your question, Ava.
This is a great question.
And the closest spiral
galaxy to the Milky Way,
and I say spiral because
the Milky Way itself
is also a spiral galaxy,
the closest spiral galaxy is Andromeda,
or sometimes called M31.
And we can see that it's a spiral
because of these nice,
dusty arms that it has
that spiral towards the
central right region.
And M31, or Andromeda, has
some close-by neighbors.
Here's M32, this little
companion off to the left,
and at NGC 205, the dwarf galaxy
that's just below Andromeda.
But Andromeda is close,
it's about two million light years away,
but it's not the closest.
Moving closer, we have the large
and small Magellanic clouds,
and these are, again, dwarf galaxies,
but they're a little bit
more irregular in shape.
We can see the large
one up here on the right
and this small Magellanic
cloud here on the left.
And they're closer, they're only maybe
163,000 light years away,
and what's interesting about
the large/small Magellanic
clouds and Andromeda
is they're actually on a collision
course for the Milky Way.
In about five billion years or so,
these galaxies are going
to merge with the Milky Way
and they're going to
have some big interaction
as the two galaxies collide.
And speaking of colliding galaxies,
that brings us to answering
your question, Ava,
about what is the closest
galaxy to the Milky Way,
and this is the Canis Major galaxy.
Now, the Canis Major galaxy is so close,
it's about 25,000 light
years from the sun,
about the same distance the sun is
towards the center of the Milky Way,
but the Canis Major galaxy is so close
that it's already interacting
with the Milky Way.
And what I mean by that is we have
this big, long stream of material
that's being torn off of
the Canis Major galaxy
as the Milky Way essentially eats it
or begins to absorb it into its structure.
So the closest galaxy to
us is the Canis Major,
and it's already interacting
with the Milky Way.
Our next question this morning
comes from Madelyn, a grade
five student in Dundas,
and they ask, "How are galaxies created
"and why do they have different shapes?"
Now this is another great
question, thank you Madelyn,
and it's actually something that
researchers and astronomers are studying
in great detail at McMaster University.
Now, this is kind of a complicated topic
and a complex question,
so I'll try to answer it for you, Madelyn.
Again, we go back to Edwin Hubble,
and in the early 1900s he developed
a classification scheme
where he broke galaxies into two types:
the ellipticals, these
round, spherical galaxies
with a bright center,
and the spiral galaxies,
much like the Milky Way,
where we have a bright center
and these spiral arms moving off of it.
And you can see a nice spiral galaxy here
with a bright center, lots
of stars that are twinkling.
It's very bright, maybe a
little bit blue in color.
And then down here we have a diffuse
bright elliptical galaxy
with a bright center,
but the light kind of fades away
as we move around to the side.
Now, Hubble believed that
galaxies in the universe
started as ellipticals
and moved along what is
called the Hubble Tuning Fork
and moved towards these spiral galaxies.
So he called the ellipticals
the early-type galaxies
and the spirals the late-type galaxies.
But now with telescopes like
the Hubble Space Telescope,
we've actually been able to discover
all sorts of shapes and sizes of galaxies,
and we have irregular galaxies,
which maybe don't fall into
the classification of ellipticals
or spirals on their own.
And we've also discovered
that maybe Hubble
was wrong in his idea that ellipticals
were first and then form
spirals after the fact.
We actually think now that
after the universe started
with the theory of the Big Bang,
and a little bit of time passed
as the universe grew in size,
these first stars were formed.
And these stars were
either formed on their own
or in stellar clusters,
many groups of stars,
and then these stars would come together
under the influence of gravity
and formed the first galaxies.
And this theory is sort
of building of structure.
We start with the small objects
and we join them together due to gravity,
and we build them up to the
larger objects like galaxies.
And then as these galaxies
continue to form and develop,
they continue to join together
and make groups or clusters,
associations of more than one galaxy.
And what we believe now is that
these final galaxy clusters,
as spiral galaxies enter
these galaxy clusters,
they lose lots of their material
and they become ellipticals.
So we think that these
so-called late-type galaxies
formed first, and then
as they form their stars
and reach the end of their lives,
they become the more red
and dead elliptical galaxies
in these galaxy clusters.
And of course telescopes like Hubble,
you can see here on the left,
are helping us to understand
this evolution of galaxies.
Our next few questions get us started
on our discussion of black holes.
The first one comes from Nova,
a grade three student from
Manitoulin Island in Ontario,
and they ask, "How are
black holes created?"
And then Aubrey, a grade five
student from Burlington asks,
"Why do black holes exist
in the first place?"
Now, these are two great questions
to get us started on
black holes, so thank you.
And they're a little bit similar,
so I'm going to answer them together.
Most people might not
know that black holes
actually come from the death of a star.
So when we have a star, it can go through
two different life cycles.
We either have a normal or average star
similar to our own sun
in our solar system,
or we can have what's
called a massive star,
and these stars are maybe
eight or 10 times bigger
than our own sun.
Now, we're going to focus on this pathway
because the massive stars,
the ones that are eight or
10 times bigger than our sun,
are going to be the ones that maybe
will form black holes at
the end of their lives.
So they start as this cloud of gas
and they collapse to form massive stars,
and then as they evolve in their lifetime,
they'll become these
large, red supergiants.
And because they're so massive,
at the end of their lives,
they'll start to collapse
in on themselves.
They no longer have the pressure
or the material inside
that's sufficient to support their selves
against gravitational collapse.
And what that means is that they will
actually start to implode in on themselves
and shrink in size, but all
of their mass still remains,
so you're taking this
entire mass of the star
and shrinking it into a very small point.
And because the star is so massive,
it's unable to support itself
and prevent this collapse
from continuing on
until we reach all of the mass into
a tiny, central region,
a very dense region,
and that's what becomes the black hole.
Now, these stellar mass black holes,
they don't just sit there
after they finish their lives,
they actually are able to interact
with their neighbors if there
are neighbor stars nearby,
or maybe the gas and the dust.
So we can see this black hole here
that actually has what's
called an accretion disk,
or it has a disk of gas and dust
as it absorbs material
from this nearby star,
and it was able to grow
in size a little bit.
Now we also can have
supermassive black holes,
and these ones are formed by the collision
or the interaction between
two of these smaller black holes.
And when we have galaxies interact,
much like when the Milky Way will interact
with Andromeda in the future,
the black holes at the
centers of those galaxies
will also eventually merge
and form bigger black holes.
So they can form from
the end of a star's life
or also from these interaction
and joining of two galaxies.
Our next question comes from Samantha,
and they want to know, "How
many black holes do we know of?"
This is a great question,
and unfortunately
I don't have a number for you Samantha,
but thank you for your question.
I'll try to answer it by, again,
showing this Hubble Deep Field image.
Now, we know that most
galaxies, like the Milky Way
have a black hole at the center.
So that's what's responsible
for the orbit of the sun
around the center of the Milky Way,
and when we look at the nearest galaxies,
we can have these observations
that maybe show us that they might
have a black hole at the center.
Now, it's really hard to take
a picture of a black hole
as you'll see in a few
questions coming up,
but we think that the
majority of black holes,
the majority of galaxies have
black holes in the center,
and this might be
responsible for the dynamics
and holding all that material in.
So that being said, if we
remember back to this image,
and we have all of these
different galaxies,
if each one of them has the
opportunity or the potential
to have a black hole in the center,
that means that we could have
countless black holes out
there in the universe.
Again, just in this image alone
we have about 5500 black
holes, or 5500 galaxies,
so that can be 5500 black holes.
Also, if we look at this image again,
we have a countless number of stars
in this Northern Ontario night sky.
And at the end of a massive star's life,
it will also form a black hole.
And these black holes are not
at the centers of galaxies,
so they're a lot harder
for us to observe or find.
Because black holes don't emit light,
that means that we'll
have these massive stars
that end their lives and
become these black holes
and then they'll just sit
there, alone in the universe,
not interacting with any other material,
and they'll be very, very challenging
for us to find with a telescope.
We'd have to use other means of trying
to understand what's
behind these black holes.
But what that might mean
is in the Milky Way alone,
there could be tens of
billions of black holes
from stars that ended their lives.
Our next two questions come from KN,
a grade two student from Dundas,
and they wanna know, "How
big are black holes?"
And then Diego, a grade
eight student from Ancaster,
also wants to know, "How
big can black holes be?"
Thank you both for your questions.
These are great, and it's a good segue
as we continue our conversation
on black holes this morning.
So there are essentially
three types of black holes
that we believe exist in the universe.
The first is supermassive black holes.
Now, these black holes are,
as the name might suggest,
extremely heavy and big.
We can have a black hole
that's 10,000 times heavier
than our own sun,
but it fits into a space
that's two times smaller.
So we can think of something
that's half the size of the sun
but it has 10,000 suns crammed into it.
It's extremely heavy, extremely dense,
and in a very small volume.
Supermassive black holes
can be even bigger, however.
And you can see here's
the tiny little sun,
this little dot here on the right,
and we can have black holes that are
100 times bigger than the sun
and one billion times heavier.
That means we will have crammed
one billion suns into
this little, small region.
And these supermassive black holes
are the ones that exist at
the centers of galaxies,
specifically they will
continue to grow in size
as the galaxies merge and
interact with other galaxies.
The second type of black holes
that we think might exist
but are actually quite challenging
for us to observe in the universe
are these intermediate mass black holes,
and these are about 1,000
times heavier than the sun,
but they're a similar size to the Earth.
So that's as if we were taking 1,000 suns
and squishing it into an
area the size of the Earth.
So black holes, they're
not actually that big.
They can be the size of
the Earth or smaller.
They're extremely heavy
and extremely dense.
Finally, the last type are
these stellar mass black holes,
which again form when these massive stars
finish their life cycle.
And if we think, this is
the Hamilton region here,
and here's Dundas, and here's Ancaster,
and Toronto's up here at
the top of the picture,
a stellar mass black hole can be
10 times heavier than the sun.
So if we have 10 suns,
we squish it into an area
that's maybe 30 kilometers across,
and what that means is
we have here on the left
a circle that's 50 kilometers across,
and you'd be able to drive
from Hamilton to Toronto in,
it would take longer to drive
from Hamilton to Toronto
than it would for you to
drive across this black hole.
So it's an extremely
heavy, dense black hole,
but it's in a very small area.
So they can be quite small as well.
They can be 30 kilometers
across, that's pretty small.
And as I said, these stellar back holes,
the ones that form at the
end of the stars' lives,
and these supermassive black holes
at the center of galaxies,
are the ones that we mainly are able
to observe or find in the universe
and that we theoretically think exist.
Like these stellar black holes,
we know when a massive star ends its life
it should form a black hole.
Einstein told us that in the early 1900s.
But these intermediate mass black holes,
they're quite challenging to find.
We're not really sure
how they might be made
because it would take quite a few
of the stellar black
holes to join together
in order to make an
intermediate mass black hole.
So this is still an open research question
that scientists and astronomers
are trying to answer.
Our next question comes from Carlos,
a grade 10 student from
Ancaster, and they ask,
"How do we take a picture of black holes?"
And this is a great
question Carlos, thank you.
And I'm happy to be able
to answer it for you today
because last April, 2019, a collaboration
of over 200 international researchers
were able to take the first
picture of a black hole.
This black hole is at the
center of a nearby galaxy
called M87, and it looks like this.
This is an extremely beautiful image
of a black hole shadow here in the center
and the emitting and extremely hot
and intensely energetic gas
surrounding that black hole.
So unfortunately, we're not able
to actually take a picture
of the black hole itself,
but we instead are able to observe
this material surrounding it,
and then we can see the
shadow of the black hole
here in the center, which
lets us know that it's there.
And now this is an incredibly
challenging image to obtain,
and requires the use of telescopes
that are as big as the
planet Earth itself.
And what I mean by that is we actually
use telescopes spread all over the world
to observe the same center of M87
in order to get this
picture of this black hole.
So we have eight telescopes known
as the Event Horizon Telescope
that work together,
they all take a picture
of the same location at the same time,
and through computer analysis,
we're able to piece
those pictures together
from the individual telescopes
and create this beautiful image
that we see of the black hole in M87.
So you can see there's a few telescopes
here in North and Central America,
one over here in Europe,
and then some in South America as well.
There's even one on the
South Pole in Antarctica.
And just as a brief aside,
this telescope here in Chile
in South America, ALMA,
is the one that I use
in my research here at
McMaster University.
Rowan, a grade five student from Dundas,
asks, "How can black holes bend light?"
Thank you for your question, Rowan.
This is a great question.
And if you don't mind, I will start
by answering how a star or how
our own sun might bend light.
The principle or the idea is the same
when we move towards a black hole.
We can think by solving the
equations of general relativity,
which Einstein developed
in the early 1900s,
of having something like a bed sheet
stretched over a surface,
and if you were to put a ball
in the center of that bed sheet,
we can think that it might cause
a little bit of an
indent in that bed sheet.
And in the same way, a mass like the sun
will cause this indent in
what's known as spacetime.
So we have the space all around us
and the time through which we're traveling
and progressing forward as we grow,
and we have a mass will cause an indent
or something to cause a bend
in that fabric of spacetime itself.
And what happens is a star
that might be somewhere
far off in the distance
will emit light, and
that light will travel
along in a straight line until it reaches
this bend in spacetime.
And then the light starts to curve,
and it will continue to
follow a straight line,
but it will move through
this now curved space.
It's like if you're going around
a banked curve with your car.
You can feel that curve
pushing you around the corner.
Now the star, the light from
the star, will continue to bend
until we see it here on Earth,
and we'll actually think
that the star is over here.
That's where we'll think
we see the star from Earth.
But in reality, the star has
its light bent around the sun.
And in the same way, we have a black hole
bend the light from the star.
Now, the amount of bending
and this depression
that we see in spacetime depends
on how heavy the object is.
So a black hole, for example,
which is much, much heavier than the sun,
will cause an even bigger
pool in the spacetime
and an even larger amount
of bending of this light.
So in that case, we'll see
the light through the star
maybe bend all the way around,
and we'd be actually be observing stars
that are a little bit further away
or more off to the side as light
gets bent from this black hole.
Now, what's really interesting about this
and a great tool that we can use
is the amount of bending depends
on how heavy that black hole is.
So if we are able to understand
how much light has bent,
we can work backwards
and try to figure out
how heavy that black hole needs to be.
One beautiful image of how this works
is what's known as an Einstein Ring,
and we can see this ring
of light as it bends
around this cluster of
galaxies here in the center.
So this ring is actually one object
that's behind this cluster of galaxies,
and the light gets bent
around on its way towards us,
and we can see this
galaxy as it's spread out
in a ring structure and refracted
around this cluster of galaxies.
Our next question comes from Parker,
a grade five student from
Dundas, and they ask,
"What happens when black holes collide?"
This is a great question,
Parker, thank you.
And we are just able
to begin to understand
what happens when black holes collide.
In 2018, we were able to
have the first observations
of what are known as gravitational waves
which come from the
interaction of two black holes.
And what happens is these black holes,
they begin to spiral in towards each other
and because they're so massive
and they have so much energy,
they create these waves much like
if you were to throw a rock into a pond.
But these waves are not water waves
and they're not light waves or microwaves
like we use in our kitchens,
they're actually gravitational waves.
So they're waves that actually cause
the bending and the rippling
of spacetime itself.
So we can see this wavelike structure
coming off of this interaction
of two black holes that are colliding,
and by an incredible feat
of science and engineering,
here on Earth we're able
to make observations
of these gravitational waves
using these telescopes known as LIGO.
So there are a few in the United States
and then this one here,
Cascina, is in Italy.
But we're able to predict what
these waves might look like
when two black holes collide,
and that's what we see.
Here we have this sort of wave structure
and these up-and-down motions,
and we're able to observe
with Livingston and Hanford
independently these two signals,
and when we put them
over top of each other,
they line up and they look the exact same.
And this tells us that we're actually
observing gravitational waves
from the interaction and the
collision of two black holes.
Now this is incredible
and Einstein's equations
predicted that we would see this
when two black holes collided,
but it wasn't until recently
that we were able to actually
observe this in real life.
Our next question is
the question of the hour
from Elian, a grade one
student in Ancaster,
and they ask, "What's
inside a black hole?"
Now, Elian, thank you for your question.
I wish I could tell you,
and that's something that astronomers
and researchers would love
to understand and to know
what's inside of a black hole.
But to be honest with you,
we aren't sure yet, we don't know.
There are a number of theories
that predict what might
be inside of a black hole,
but because a black
hole doesn't emit light,
we're unable to observe
anything past its surface.
We're not able to look
inside of the black hole.
Some of the theories suggest
that there might be what's
known as a singularity
or a single mathematical point
which has all of the mass
from those massive stars
that we talked about or these
supermassive black holes.
We have all of that mass at
a single point in the center.
And maybe if that black hole was spinning,
you would see that, not just a point,
but we'd have a ring
inside of that black hole.
But it's hard for us to see inside
and actually understand what might
be inside of a black hole.
These are all theories.
And the reason why it's hard,
we go back to this image of M87
and the black hole that's at the center,
we can see the shadow
of the black hole here,
this nice, circular ring,
and at the surface, at the edge,
right where it's interacting
with this material,
is what is known as the event horizon.
And the event horizon is basically
like the skin of the black hole,
it's like the peel of an orange,
and we can't see anything
past the event horizon.
No light is able to escape
or be emitted from the black hole
past this event horizon.
So while we're able to understand, maybe,
how the black hole interacts
with its material surrounding it,
we won't be able to see what's inside.
Next question comes from Leandro,
a grade four student in
Ancaster, and they ask,
"Can Earth get sucked into a black hole?"
This is a great question
and thank you, Leandro,
but no need to worry.
Earth cannot get sucked into a black hole.
If we see the Milky Way galaxy here,
it's a nice, spiral
galaxy with spiral arms,
and there's a big bar in the center,
and here's where the
center of the galaxy is.
This is where the sun
and the solar system are.
So Earth is here with the sun,
nicely orbiting the Milky Way center.
If we think about the black hole
that's at the center of the Milky Way,
Sagittarius A-Star.
It's about 26,000 light
years away from the sun.
Now, when objects orbit black holes,
and when we orbit the
center of the milky way,
we just happily move along
in our circular or elliptical orbit.
We never actually get
closer to the center.
And what I mean by that
is black holes don't suck.
They're actually really cool.
But black holes themselves only
cause things to orbit
what falls toward them.
Black holes aren't like a vacuum
cleaner sucking things in.
In fact, if we were to replace
our own sun in the solar system
with a black hole of the same
mass, nothing would change.
Things here on Earth would be a lot colder
and we wouldn't have
the energy from the sun
that we need in order to survive,
but the planets would continue to orbit
around the center of the solar system
just as if the sun were there,
and nothing would get
closer or further away.
If we were to replace the
sun with a black hole,
nothing in our own solar
system would change.
Our next question comes from Shannon,
and they want to know,
"Do you believe scientists
"will ever be able to explore
within the black holes
"and find out the hidden
secrets of the universe?"
This is a great question,
thank you Shannon.
And much like I said to Elian earlier,
I'm not sure we'll be able to explore
within the black holes themselves
and find out what's maybe
hidden inside of those,
but we are able, with better telescopes
that we're developing and creating
as we move forward in science,
to understand what's
happening near black holes
and how they might interact
with their surrounding material.
And what I mean by that
is our own black hole
here at the center of the Milky Way
is hidden away from us.
There's a lot of dust in the way.
It's like you walk outside
on a very windy day
and it's kicking up dust from the street
and you can't really see
through, it's kind of foggy.
Much in the same way, we're not able
to observe and study the
center of our own galaxy
because there's a lot of
material in front of us.
But with new telescopes like Spitzer
or one that's coming online here
hopefully in the next few months,
the James Webb Space Telescope,
we're able to see through this dust
and better observe the
center of the Milky Way.
And what that will allow us to do
is understand and study
our own black hole,
Sagittarius A-Star, and maybe understand
how it interacts with the Milky Way
and find out some of the hidden secrets
that are involved with that.
Also, there's a new telescope called LISA,
which is hopefully going
to be launched into space.
We're going to have three telescopes
that are millions of kilometers away,
but they're interacting with one another,
they're talking with one another,
even across this great distance in space.
And they're able to observe, again,
black hole collisions,
much like we are are starting to find out
here with LIGO on Earth.
And this will allow us to understand
more about gravitational waves
and how those might unlock
some of the hidden secrets of the universe
from these great black hole collisions.
But unfortunately, again,
looking into a black hole
is something that's quite challenging.
Our next question comes from Reid,
a grade four student in
Dundas, and they ask,
"Are there white holes in space?"
And this is a great question,
and some people might not have
heard of white holes before,
as lots of the conversations
are around black holes.
And the simple question is
no, the simple answer is no.
I don't think that in reality,
we can have the white holes,
but it's an interesting
topic to talk about.
Now, what is a white hole?
A white hole is essentially a
twin sibling of a black hole.
If we think of everything
falling towards a black hole
and time moving things
toward that center region,
a white hole would be the exact opposite,
where the time reverses the black hole,
where objects would not fall towards it,
objects would fall away from it.
And we can think of this
falling towards a black hole
and maybe falling out of a white hole
kind of a paradox to thinking.
And in maybe a more science fiction
kind of mindset and conversation,
if a white hole were, maybe,
a gateway to another universe,
if we were in that other universe,
we would see that white
hole as a black hole,
and everything would work backwards.
We would have that black
hole in that new universe
and things would be falling towards it,
and then in our universe we would see
that black hole as a white hole
and things would be falling out of it.
So there's kind of this yin and yang,
twin sibling interaction between
this black hole and this white hole.
So mathematically and theoretically,
these white holes will exist,
but in reality I'm not sure
if we'll ever be able to understand
what we're studying in great detail
about these white holes
might serve for us.
And our final question comes from Elian,
again, a grade one student from Ancaster,
and they ask, "What is past space?"
And this is a great question Elian.
Thank you for ending our
webinar with this discussion.
And throughout the last few decades
where we've been able to understand
more about how the universe was created
and what's happening as its expanding.
So we have this theory about
how everything started,
here's the Big Bang.
and then the universe
has been slowly expanding
since that Big Bang happened
and we had our first stars,
first galaxies formed.
And then here is the present day
where we live happily in our Milky Way.
And what we now know is
that the universe itself
is accelerating in its expansion.
So what I mean by that is the
universe is getting bigger,
but it's getting bigger faster.
So not only are objects
moving further away from us
as the universe grows, but
it's actually speeding up.
And so my answer to you
is what is past space?
Well, more space.
And what's past that?
More space.
And more space will continue to be created
as this universe expands.
And all that means, Elian,
and for the rest of you tuning in today,
is that there's more things
to discover out there
in the universe as it continues to grow.
So thank you for tuning in today,
watching "Ask a Scientist."
Again, my name is Blake.
This was brought to you by
the McMaster Alumni Association.
I hope that you learned something today
that you can take to
your family and friends.
Continue to stay safe and tune into
these "Ask a Scientist" presentations.
Thank you.
(upbeat music)
(characters whooshing)
(thought bubbles popping)
(images fluttering)
(words whooshing)
- [Man] Hmm.
