170 | Priya Natarajan on Galaxies, Black Holes, and Cosmic Anomalies

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2021

⏱️ 88 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There is so much we don’t know about our universe. But our curiosity about the unknown shouldn’t blind us to the incredible progress we have made in cosmology over the last century. We know the universe is big, expanding, and accelerating. Modern cosmologists are using unprecedentedly precise datasets to uncover more details about the evolution and structure of galaxies and the distribution and nature of dark matter. Priya Natarajan is a cosmologist working at the interface of data, theory, and simulation. We talk about the state of modern cosmology, and how tools like gravitational lensing are providing us with detailed views of what’s happening in the distant universe.

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Priya Natarajan received her Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Cambridge. She is currently professor of astronomy at Yale University, the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professor at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen, and an honorary professor for life at the University of Delhi, India. She is an Affiliate at the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University and an Associate Member of the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and other publications. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the India Abroad Foundation’s “Face of the Future” Award, and an India Empire NRI award for Achievement in the Sciences. She is the author of Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Tron Carroll.
0:03.7	And as I've often said, on podcasts and elsewhere, cosmology is a great science because the universe
0:10.9	is so simple. It has ingredients in it, right? Our universe has electrons and atoms and photons and
0:18.0	neutrinos, dark matter, dark energy, but it's a fairly finite list, right? It's not like there's
0:24.0	a hundred different ingredients that really matter for the evolution of the universe. And even better,
0:28.4	when you look on sufficiently large scales, the universe looks smooth. If you kind of squint and
0:34.2	average out over a scale of, I don't know, 100 million light years across, it's more or less the
0:39.6	same amount of stuff in every part of the universe, the same number of galaxies and stars and so forth.
0:45.6	And that helps us. We can put together a picture of what the universe is doing, how old it is,
0:50.2	etc. But then, of course, if you squint a little bit closer, if you zoom in on what the universe is
0:56.4	doing, all that simplicity kind of evaporates. And you see a very rich, complicated universe. There
1:02.7	are stars and planets, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, filaments of galaxies, and what have you.
1:09.4	And then the particular way that these structures both exist today and have evolved over time
1:17.1	depends on the list of ingredients and the expansion history of the universe and so forth.
1:22.5	So the bread and butter of modern cosmology is not measuring the expansion rate or the acceleration
1:29.0	rate. Those are important things. We do them and they matter. But most of observational cosmology and
1:36.0	theoretical analytic cosmology is interested in the structures that are there in the universe.
1:42.0	So that's what we're going to be talking about today with today's guest is Priya Nader-Ajjan,
1:46.3	who is an astrophysicist at Yale and the author of a book called Mapping the Heavens,
1:52.3	the radical scientific ideas that reveal the cosmos, which traces both through the history of
1:56.9	mapping the heavens, but also the modern version of it. And that's what I'm talking about.
2:02.0	Mapping where the galaxies are, how they get distributed, and in particular,
	...

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