Thank you to Brilliant for sponsoring this video! To try out STEM courses for free, visit https://brilliant.org/PhysicsfortheBi.... The first 200 subscribers will get 20% off of an annual premium subscription.

How many things are there of each size in the universe? Are there more sun-sized objects or LEGO-brick sized objects? In this video, we'll learn how mass is distributed in space and why it has the distribution that it does. After doing some experiments, we'll find out that it has a pretty profound similarity to LEGO bricks.

0:00 Introduction
2:14 History of mass functions
4:10 An experiment with LEGO
9:46 The origin of -2
11:18 Message from Sponsor
12:15 Conclusion

You can try out the code I used to calculate LEGO mass distributions here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dLg_...

LEGO mass distribution: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.10342
Salpeter mass function: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/195...
Zwicky's universal mass function: https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/...
Measurement of the universal mass function: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/...
Helpful intro to initial mass functions: https://websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~glatz/...
LEGO data: https://www.bricklink.com/v2/main.page