The most surprising discoveries from our universe - with Chris Lintott
Did you know that many profound discoveries about our universe have been made accidentally? Find out more with Chris Lintott.
Buy Chris' book 'Our Accidental Universe: Stories of Discovery from Asteroids to Aliens' here: geni.us/IEBBkkY
Watch the Q&A here: • Q&A: The most surprisi...
Join BBC Sky at Night presenter and Gresham Professor of Astronomy Chris Lintott as he unravels tales of peculiar accidents, remarkable individuals, and the occasional human oversight that have collectively shaped some of the most pivotal celestial revelations.
This lecture was recorded at the Ri on 21 March 2024.
00:00 Intro - our accidental universe
4:08 The incredible discovery made on Saturn’s moon Enceladus
13:27 Searching for life across the cosmos
19:16 Radio signals from across the universe?
29:06 Detecting possible structures around planets
39:51 Planetary ingestion - planets eating stars
45:11 Why conditions on Venus are so different from Earth
50:40 How NASA fixed the Hubble telescope in space
54:38 What Hubble discovered by accident
When capturing the first glimpses of the earliest galaxies, the Hubble Space Telescope was focused on a region of space presumed to be vacant. However, the image it produced was anything but - the iconic Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image revealed at least 10,000 galaxies.
Another astonishingly accidental discovery was the hidden story of Enceladus, one of Saturn’s myriad moons. Very little was known about Enceladus until NASA’s Cassini probe revealed its environment in more detail, including its capabilities as a potential haven for life.
The narrative continues with the revelation of pulsars, the remnants of colossal stars long extinguished. They were not uncovered through meticulous observation but rather as hidden gems within the unassuming data, disguised as background noise in the measurements of faint celestial radio signals.
As new observatories and state-of-the-art technology continue to develop, Chris calls for scientists to keep an open mind as the potential for discovery grows, allowing us to unravel the mysteries of the universe.
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Christopher John Lintott is a British astrophysicist, author and broadcaster. He is a Professor of Astrophysics in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, and since 2023 is the Gresham Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London. Lintott is involved in a number of popular science projects aimed at bringing astronomy to a wider audience and is also the primary presenter of the BBC television series The Sky at Night.
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I was fortunate to have been one of the attendees - this was a wonderful event!
Lucky you! And congrats too!
Go fry a chicken o darn it , I'm cloaked in gravy balls for a couple hours but a lot more with me now and I have to deal of to listed above all that we will be a little concerned to ensure we are going ahead to make sure my work got finished by end up in a couple weeks and a little bit of the app to get the chance of a joke or not so confident in that now that you have a better understanding of the process and how to make this change but I will request that myself to say it last week because it still has me angry and I had been told by my manager that this information would be forwarded on to me for the past year was the best I could for the company after certain people had retired but I was wondering what the best I can see you in this regard as I'm a fan
That is so cool, and I'm jealous in the most spiritual, mental and psychological way, plus I was personally enriched by their free to learn class on chemistry, so I'm happy for you in the most altruistic way simultaneously grateful for the Institutes philanthropic endeavors!
@@martinlaird9712ok gptv1
It's unfortunate that the audio in this recording is so distorted. Is that something that was noticeable at the lecture?
I enjoy Chris Lintott's communication style; interesting, humorous and laid back. Good lecture. Thanks :)
Agreed. He's definitely a gifted scientific public speaker.
I love Chris Lintott! I have been watching “The Sky at Night” for years 😍
It's one of my earliest TV memories, watching Patrick Moore in black and white on The Sky at Night! Chris was Sir Patrick's hand-picked successor.
@@gerryjamesedwards1227Mine too! 🙂
Same here, absolutely loved that show.
Do you do any of the space projects on Zooniverse? there's a good community of people of all skill levels there. I have a current potential giant planet orbiting a low-mass star and supernova candidates and I've never owned a telescope.
And the Sky has been watching you since you were born (wink) !
How wonderful that the universe very occasionally creates by a series of accidents, a gifted science communicator able to deliver these staggering concepts on mainstream media and in RI talks. Thank you
i have been following this channel from 2019 all guests enthusiasm is astounding
Royal Institution is the gift keeps giving to humanity. I am amazed and I awe of these magnificent talks. Thank you!
What an enthralling lecture, I was thoroughly captivated for the entirety of the hour, what a fascinating universe we all live in. 😀
Such an inspiration! The style may still be there but lucid clarity is seldom heard.
A wonderfully easy and thoroughly engaging talk to listen to, even for those of us who may already be familiar with the examples shown here. I am consistently proud of the Royal Institution for showcasing scientific communication to the world.
This was spectacular…thank you
💚🏜️💚 lovely presentation
I've just bought the book, looking forward to reading it.
Oh my goodness! This was so beautifully explained that I am moved to tears. Seriously. It reminds me to stand in awe of my own existence.
Lovely talk. Thank you. 👍
I cant remember who said it originally, but once I heard it, it became my goto way of explaining how science usually works: Scientific discoveries are rarely made with a cry of "Eureka!" But most often with a mutter of "Hmm, that's interesting..." The discovery of Uranus being one such example, someone looked at the orbit of Saturn, realised there was an anomaly and said "That’s interesting..." and that lead to the discovery of a new planet.
And the award for most pleasing speaking diction goes to .... Chris Lintott! A very engaging speaker.
Stellar talk!
Punny 😏
16:40 - pondering 'answers' to the Fermi Paradox is one of my favourite intellectual activities. It touches upon such deep questions....how we view ourselves, how we view humanity and our trajectory as a species.... what we suspect is the nature of the cosmos in relation to fostering life ... whether one thinks that consciousness, that strange and mysterious seeming trick of advanced life, whether THAT is in some way central to the cosmos .... what we think of time, etc, etc. The Fermi Paradox is a fun question to engage with.
The evening star on earth is venus, not jupiter. The cassini probe was launched by a titan rocket, not the space shuttle.
Thank you enjoyed your presentation 🐺
Very grateful.
Engaging talk, would love to see more! Thx for the upload!
Brilliant delivery of very interesting thoughts, wonderful production!
Brilliant, Many Thanks Chris Loved it!
Great talk. Almost stream-of-consciousness-like. Super.
Excellent !!! 🙂
I wish we could fly around and visit these places.
That will never happen unfortunately.
Soon, they are working on that tech I'm sure. We just don't know about it yet. Look what we have done in just the last 15 years! Won't happen in my lifetime, but we will get there. Maybe even in a tourist capacity!
What a great talk!
I LOVE DR. T!! I was an astrophysics major at LSU for 2 years and took her for a few classes!
That was great. Thank you.
Excellent lecture. 🙂
Great presentation! 🖖
This is very interesting! Fun stuff too!
I was there, but just watched through again 😁👍
The universe, what a concept
Synchronicity and human brilliance is amazing. Wonderful talk!
My personal favorite is, each time a civilisation gets noisy they have been eaten.. 🤫
the RI likes repeating lecture topics, i've seen this topic a dozen times or more! but, it is always interesting none the less
I read the answer to the Fermi paradox just recently from a humble KZhead comment and I wish I could remember the name of the person that presented the solution. There is no Fermi paradox, life is out there, but the reason we don't know about them is because like us, they simply cannot get government funding to progress their civilisation.
Ummm....Yeahh....No. Just...No. You're honestly trying to say that there's all these advanced lifeforms just like us out there... but tragically, they just can't procure funding from their governments to come find us??🤔🤦🏼♂️
Ummm it's called 'humour', maybe an alien concept for you? 😆
Wouldn't it be amazing to have a 'POV' view of an ultra-sturdy melting-swimming probe as it descended through the icy layer of a moon and into its ultra-deep ocean. It would be so fascinating ... would we see anything macroscopic life? Would ANYTHING live? It's so hard to imagine vast amounts of water and NOT imagine life, but that's due to our Earth-centric view where every where we find liquid water, we find life. I'd LOVE to have these outer moons explored ....
11:57 - "an underwater ocean" - now that's something I have never heard before! Other than that - a brilliant lecture. (But my niggle does show that I was paying attention!)
Space telescopes have superpower, they can see the whole universe unfold on time even when they stare at the emptiest part of our universe
Us as an accident makes life rare in the universe, life with purpose makes it abundant Our seasons show the narrow band that we as life can exist in
Is that lost in translation?
@@Safetytrousers Thanks, fixed
There is no paradox in the search for life. The only paradox's are those that are invented. If we search with an open mind then we will find whatever we encounter.
Maravilha!!
Always keep RS
Im soooo sick of the media printing headlines that arent true or suggests ideas that havent been substantiated yet. How are they allowed to get away with it ????
40.02 _So this is a story about planets eating stars._ Quite a mouthfull, beats eating hot peppers!
Our existence is a product of "chance contingencies of existence"
Our Solar system is very kooky. I feel that some being created our solar system to teach us, "don't make your planet like Venus, don't make your planet like Mars, don't m etc."
Yes! I'm in the video!!! I will be, a young white star, forming a eye in the HorseHead nebula
I think they have a lot of Crystals which could be used in higher frequency settings and the lowers ones as well that becomes a Tallow flow without destruction of itself in a way we can find out how much they can transmit and resonates with other ones atoms heat up or freeze in place for a long term relationship of resonance. Imagine that all vibrations are stronger or weaker in certain areas and the floating density is measured as a different environment than the same planet or moons in each state of gravity recordings in crystal caverns or surface space that was in a very distant way
I thought HST’s “glasses” were called COSTAR for Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement.
You know, even the info concerning penguin poo is a valuable serendipitous knowledge that plausibly lends itself to alien detection especially when one considers that everything alive with exception to the human face mites, does in fact poo!
Honestly, it is precisely counterintuitive to focus the Hubble telescope at nothing in order to discover what is actually there and 100% new but a perfect example of thinking outside the box...like the double slit experiment changed by the observer which honestly is counterintuitive until you consider the observer needs to convert and capture light for the observers ability to report on what they observed!
Sounds like you misunderstand what exactly is mean by “observer” has nothing to do with a conscious being
I love the story behind the The Hubble Deep Field image and I have the Hubble _Ultra_ Deep Field taken over 11.3 days total exposure between September 2003 and January 2004 as the background for my computer monitors. I do wonder what the - carefully unnamed - _Eminent Astronomers_ who said there'd be nothing there thought on first seeing the images. 🤣
They were probably pleasently surprised. They knew they would have just been giving their best guess.
Giant impact of large bodies or variable size bodies of significant sizes could indeed modify a regular dipping event into a rather odd wtf type scenario! It's only a theory but these events did and have occurred multiple times within our own solar system, along with planetary ejection, etc, thus these somewhat irregular events can or could be attributed to spacial body events that we are currently aware of within our own galactic/solar neighborhood, history!
Cassini / Huygens was launched on top of a Titan IV B / Centaur rocket and not from the Space Shuttle. Hubble was kind of launched from the Space Shuttle.
One of the problems of our 'understanding' of astronomy is that we use earthbound measures. 4.5 billion years is only 'a long time' is you're a human and use a time scale that is designed by and for humans. If you were simply to recalculate everything using an equivalent Neptune-based set of measurements where 1 year is 164.8 earth years long, the whole situation would look completely different.
It's not a problem of understanding. You and I have an idea of what 4.5 billion years is because we know what our Earth year feels like. And we are numerate.
National Park hypothesis seems my type of hypothesis! 😂❤
is this how Saturn's rings survive - through near constant contributions from the ice blowing off Enceladus?
Why and how would a watery ring make rings made of solid material more stable?
@@Safetytrousers NASA found the ring material showering into the surface clouds of Saturn... so *STABILITY* would require a source of *NEW* ice material.
@@brookestephen Infall of rings is proposed to be due to electrically charged water ice being drawn down magnetic lines. How would an inner ring of ice be preventing the other rings from all scrunching together against it?
Won't Jupiter on average deflect just as many comets towards "us", as it shield us from? - comets that would never have headed our way, if Jupiter hadn't influenced their trajectories.
Recently I have been doing a lot of thinking about the "accidental" universe idea. I do agree that our discoveries occur in that fashion but it seems as though the universe unfolds in increasing levels of complexity. It appears as though it is centered around the acquisition and transmission of information. Firstly, the organization of particles into atoms then into matter, allowing gravity to take center stage. Gravity is the mechanism with which the universe takes its form and function. Stars, planets, galaxies and cosmic web come to be. When certain conditions are met, higher levels of universal complexity occur on these planets; life and consciousness. Our discovery of AI seems to be a further level of complexity. AI is a tool that will allow us to gain a level of knowledge we may not have been able to obtain on our own. Maybe not, just my two pennies.
It might be considered funny when there's a 1000 to 1 ratio of click bait vs. genuine science on certain social media platforms, but it's less funny when we take into consideration that there are curious people who are just trying to learn and they have to deal with it. It's disgusting to take advantage of these people for profit.
The sound quality seems to get worse and worse at the royal institute, this is on par with a laptop mic, they really need to fix this.
The microphone is saturating. Either turn down the sensitivity or bend it away from the mouth some. It's disappointing... you'd want to think of the Ri as being world-class, but they fail to adequately soundcheck.
Little correction: Cassini wasn't launched from the Space Shuttle (anymore). It was launched (fittiingly) on a Titan rocket. The concept of launching probes and satellites with the Shuttle died with Challenger. Sadly not before seriously crippling Galileo. Doing a "mundane" transport job that could be done with a much, MUCH cheaper rocket, saved costs and pointless risk for astronauts.
"...pointless risk for astronauts": What astronauts do, is not pointless. They practice science. Which give scientific results.
@@mpmpm read and understand.... Launching a satellite or probe with he Space Shuttle is a pointless risk for astronauts, because it is not science! It's a transport job. And doing it with the Shuttle has absolutely NO benefits over doing it with a rocket. So putting multiple people at risk for that makes no sense. Hence "pointless". And as i said it was also insanely expensive compared to a rocket. So you have high costs, risking a whole crew for a needlessly complicated launch job, for no benefit. It was stupid and after challenger the Shuttle was reserved for actual science work, deemed worth the risk. The Shuttle is worth reading (or watching) up about. It was the result of budget cuts ,politics and design by many committees, making it much less than it could have been. Why Nasa missions and even commercial satellites were launched on it was also political. It's history is complicated. And interesting. And to explain the Galileo thing (years before Cassini) : it was supposed to launch on a Shuttle. But after Challenger, the Shuttle was grounded for 2 years and Galileo put in storage. It is likely that the greasing of various bearings suffered from that and that's why Galileos big main antenna never unfolded. Limiting it to a few low bandwidth engineering antenna to send data back. Despite some engineering magic by Nasa it limited Galleos bandwidth for the entire mission. Lessons for Cassini, directly from Galileo: Fixed main antenna, no fancy unfolding business, and DON'T launch it on the Shuttle. Making Cassini a unqualified success.
So is the universe an accident or not?
WE HAVE ONLY BEGUN TO UNDERSTAND OUR NECK OF THE WOODS WE WILL SOON LEARN HOW DANGEROUS IT REALLY IS EARTH ?
If or when several of "our" planets align; Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, etc... what would the signal appear like at 10k light years? Wt flux? Maybe a bunch of rocks still making their way together under gravity, orbiting the star.
Venus doesn't have a large moon to help skim off excess greenhouse gasses.
18:40 - I disagree that intelligence took a long time to form on Earth. COMPLEX life took a long time to form. For most of Earth's history, the only form of life was microbial, single-celled or at least far from the complex macroscopic creatures we tend to call 'animals'. I'd argue intelligence may yet exist on it's own, separate 'rung' of a ladder, but that MOSTLY, the challenge seems to have been life advancing beyond the simple and microbial.
"Stories of Discovery from Asteroids to Aliens" Humans have "discovered" Aliens? TWO WEEKS AGO?
at 54:25, "sharpness" is singular, "galaxies" is plural, but "sharpness of galaxies" is still singular. Sharpness is, not are, what you were trying to get. If you can't identify your subject, you don't know what you're talking about, do you?
"Did you know that many profound discoveries about our universe have been made accidentally?" Yes, and no. Engineers and scientists worked hard on a lot of these, and some of the so called discoveries are mistakes anyway. But the fact that cosmologists have to rewrite everything from scratch every time a new kind of observatory pops up should tell us something.
14:16 ya and decades ago scientists were certain our solar system was a fluke and there were only stars out there
Note thtat Swiss billy meier has had since 1942 over 800 recorded face to face chats with human ets. They claim common ancestry with many here.. so have observed and helped us along for millennia. They get here instantly over 500 light yera distance from beyond Star Taygeta in the Taurus Const., given us 20K pages of data, on the sire, and told us we are nearly all et bere today.
13:58
Any life form living in an ocean won’t be doing any radio astronomy.
This Fermi Paradox stuff: don't be emotional! Of course the aliens won't visit us, because were mere weepy emotional apes, trying to be something like "civilized". Pure science explains to us that being smart is evolutionary very expensive, and then one can extrapolate from there.
I neglected to mention just how valuable the herbivorous dinosaurs poo has contributed to our chances of locating, utilizing and production of massive crop cultivation that feeds us all, which is an odd but wonderful aspect to poo!
Explain please
What Mars Rover? "February 14, 1990: the Pale Blue Dot The Voyager 1 spacecraft, out near Saturn, took this iconic image of Earth 33 years ago. It turned out to be one of the most memorable images ever taken from space. Astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: Look again at that dot."
We can’t even land on the moon after 50 years yet we can do the most complex things you can imagine with other things lol.
Great lecture 👌 👏 Can we not raise a new feild & dicipline of Objectivism? It does seem to be happening as Most of those who study physics appear to spend more & more efforts working on subjective properties outside of their own self defined domains. This should be from a blank slate perspective that isn't informed or held by the standard accommodations. We have represented the old world whatsboutism really well even spent the most money in human history to try and prove them without luck . We've used the inventions of our most essentric fundamentalistic ancestors to do so even though most of them would ask why we abandoned their most fruitfully eccentric ideas and inspirations ? Take our most taught foundational ordering and categorizing skills it looks OK on paper ( like a football draft on paper it's a playoff roster) but in excersize the slightest variations can be argued a completely different species of losers. Plausible deniabilty loopholes embedded within have even experts talking past one another to the point we have no idenfiers to hold anyone accountable. No means to build concensus on defining what life is, what is a tribe, a nation a people place 0r thing.. If you went to school in uk or America 40+ years ago you was taught the most single origin given enough time & chances in universe that one random primordial soup on earth where space is a bottleneck. You would get in trouble asking where is the code of life measure & teachers was instructed to give all the arguments of Darwin and Lyle in opposition to all things phenotypical or epigenetics . Modern explanatory power of dna would get you blackballed. We seem OK with all these old eccentric alien hunters and reaching for the most Sci fi movies narratives if it stays within certain extremes. As if this embedded plausible deniabilty wasn't bad enough , We seem to oppose nature dictating it's own 1st position orientation and direction and telling us how to properly order & speak of it . We want to project our quality into it and make it say what we want to hear
19:30 Maybe we don't hear anyone because we don't yet know how to to open a wormhole channel 😂 We now know everything we see is electric, atomes, molecules, light, name it and yet, not that long ago we knew none of it. What else we don't know of...
We very much know there are things we don't know, and things we don't know to know we don't know.
@@Safetytrousers which means we should be opened for ideas, perhaps even crazy-soundings ones.
@@pierregrondin4273 One explanation of the dimming star could be a gaseous giant green space elephant. But there are reasons such an idea should be dismissed although absolute proof is not possible.
اونها زمینها ی ما رو میسازند (بینهایت سیاره و زمین )ولی در زمانهای مختلف هستند اون زمین ها که پشت سر هم جای خود را عوض میکنند در مرکز یا کانونها (که جای اصلی کره زمین هستش) و زمان ودر واقع فهم گذر زمان رو روی زمین برای ما به وجود می آورند که به سرعت نور هم طبق فیلم قبلی مرتبط میشه 🙏🙏 اینطوری جلو نیاید لطفا قوی و قدرتمندتر از کل تاریخ باید ادعا کنید که دارید کل اسرار فیزیک و جهان رو در طول عمر بشر میفهمید و شما ها بزرگترین فیزیکدانهای کل تاریخ بشریت هستید و برای بقیه رشته ها هم همینطور ✋️👍🙏💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚🏅🎖🏆🥇
Why would ANYONE think that people who have convinced themselves that something that can't be seen, touched or interacted with [dark matter] is real have ANY IDEA of what they're doing?
I love to hear people say "we don't see UFOs" .. specifically people that never look. UFOs and alien craft have been admitted to having been recovered by US forces. All this "harharhar..aliens are dumb ok" attitude is so old.
He sure likes his own jokes...
شهاب سنگ ها همان سیارک های مشتری هستند که به دلیل جو زمین اون بارش های شهابی رو میبینید ولی امسال چند تاشون دارند به سمت زمین می آیند متاسفانه و باید بررسی کنید اگر در میدان دید تلسکوپ ها باشند میتوان فهمید و در غیر اینصورت نمیتوان من هم دارم بررسی میکنم خودم همین
Did they discover gas on Uranus again? 😴
ودر نهایت اکثر قمر های مشتری و بقیه سیارات گازی (قفل شده ها با سیارات مخصوصا ) بخش های مختلف و لایه های مختلف کره زمین هستند و در بخش پوسته و مخصوصا بالای پوسته و سطح زمین 😎🙏🙏💜💜💜💜💜🤫 بیابانها و کوه ها و رودها و بقیه را تشکیل میدهند قمر اروپا چه خبر ؟؟😄
Shouldn’t you guys be promoting some radical left-wing ideology or something? It’s bizarre to see you not doing that. Makes you wonder.
یه آدم فضایی روی زمین هست ولی بقیه بیرون منظومه اند برادر ،و شما نمیبیشون 👽👻👻👻 زیاد مغرور نباشید و کشفیات رو انجام بدید
Wonderful. BBC woke free science.
These are unjustified conclusions.
Really. Please elaborate. I’d like a good laugh.
This man has some infuriating mannerisms.
R.I. has done it yet again! Another advert for a fukcing BOOK! Unsubscribed in disgust.
What? Chris delivers a wonderfully engaging lecture, where he gives away about a third of his book's content for free, and you are disgusted?
How else would you like such authors to advertise and bring awareness to their books? Should all experts cancel talks and lectures? That’s always been a huge percentage of what these kind of talks have been utilized for since the dawn of such things. 😂😂😂
You won't be missed, just missing out.
Chris Lintott was only appointed Gresham Professor of Astronomy in late June 2023. Since he has many other commitments (e.g. teaching as a professor at Oxford, his research projects, preparing/delivering these Gresham talks), it's likely that he'd have started writing his book long before he knew he'd be doing the Gresham lectures.
That's how it works though. What grinds me is when the lecturer continually describes their book as 'the book', like it's the only one in the freakin' universe.
Zaraarg, the humans are getting smarter....again. Make sure agent Trump does something spectacular to distract them.
I’m sueing I never subscribed to ya don’t even know none of y’all
The tale Chris Lintott spins is millin time more fantastic than 100 bible genesis stories put together....