Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Can stars eat other stars?

Episode Date: June 4, 2020

Can a Thorne-Zytkow object, a neutron star inside another star, actually exist? Did we find one? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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none of that. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. Professionally, I started at Deadwell Records. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into the soul of the music and the purpose that drives it. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The U.S. Open is here, and on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain. I'm breaking down the players, the predictions, the pressure, and of course, the honey deuses, the signature

cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very wonderfully experiential sporting event. To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain, an IHeart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. Hey, Daniel, do physicists ever run out of crazy ideas? Well, we all have our slow days. I mean, I get science blocks sometimes.

Oh, yeah? So what do you do, then, to get fresh ideas? Well, probably very similar to what creative people do, you know? You just let ideas bounce around in your head a little bit and see what happens. I should try that. I usually just take a nap. All right. So what happens?

Well, let's see. Let me try it. Let me see. I'll just let an idea bounce in my head. I'm thinking chocolate chip particles. Is that a good physics idea? I don't know. We have to go see if we can find those out there in the universe.

They could exist. They could exist. Yeah. Chocolate chipos. Yeah. I mean, if I just let ideas bounce around in my head, I think of, hmm, alien black hole. Is that a black hole that's an alien or a black hole made by aliens?

It's a bifurcated idea, so it allows for both possibilities. Well, does this ever work this process? Does it ever actually give you good ideas? Yeah, you know, the universe is pretty crazy. And so sometimes the crazy idea that comes out of the head of a physicist is something that's really out there. Okay, I got a good one for you. Chocolate chip black holes.

Where each chocolate chip is actually an alien. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm the co-author of the book, We Have No Idea, together with Jorge, a book all about the things we do know and mostly the things we don't know about this. The universe. And it's also a huge coincidence because we don't really have an idea of what we're doing here. But welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I-Hard Radio. Daniel and Jorge make it up as they go along when it comes to podcasting.

That's right. This is called science improv. No, but we try to be honest about what we know and about what science doesn't know because it's on that edge of knowledge that all the interesting questions lie. That's where the wonder is. That's where the curiosity is. That's where the mental exploration is. That's where people go when they want to get new answers to questions about the universe. Things everybody wants to know the answer to.

How are stars formed? How do they die? Can they eat each other? Star taste. But yeah, it turns out there's a lot we don't know about the universe. There's more that we don't know than what we do know, kind of in a way. And so it's interesting to sort of talk about that because, you know, I feel like people have the sense that the scientists know everything that's going on in the universe. Until they meet a scientist.

and then they realize, boy, that guy is clueless. This woman doesn't know anything. That's right. How can she call herself a scientist if she doesn't understand what most of the universe is about? But actually, that's a key step to being a scientist is understanding what you don't know and then confronting that ignorance

because confronting your ignorance is the first step in discovery is being open to new ideas and asking questions about the things you don't know. That's the best part of science. And so that's why on our podcast we try to, take you to that forefront of knowledge, bringing you up to speed on the questions that scientists themselves are asking. Yeah, because who knows what could be out there?

What kinds of crazy phenomenon that we've never seen before or even thought about could be out there right now happening in the universe? And so today on the podcast, we'll be talking about one such kind of crazy idea that has been proposed by a couple of famous scientists. That's right. And maybe even discovered, because there are several ways to find weird, new things

in the universe. One is to sort of stumble across them when you weren't looking. Like, huh, what's this thing? We've never seen it before. And the other is to think of it first and say, I wonder if you could make a black hole all out of chocolate chips or whatever.

Could you have a planet the shape of a squirrel or something like that? And then send experimentalists and astronomers out there to look forward to see could this actually work? Yeah. Planet in the shape of a squirrel, that's just nuts, Daniel. but today we'll be tackling one such crazy idea

and so today on the episode we'll be asking the question can you have a star inside of another star sorry I'm still laughing your squirrel nuts joke we'll let that play out yeah but this is kind of a crazy question I don't think I even understand it

how can you have a star inside of another star well you know some stars are really big and some stars are really small and you're used to thinking of stars is really far apart, right? Our star is really far from other stars, but they can get closer together and you can imagine what might happen

if they get really close together. Would one go inside the other one? Would it be a star-on-star battle? Yeah. They merge into one megastar. Wow. Yeah, so who came up with this crazy idea, star inside of another star? Well, it was from two scientists,

Kip Thorne and Anna Jikov. And they had this idea that maybe you could have one tiny, really dense little star called a neutron star inside of a really big, puffy star called a red super giant. And they were just wondering, hey, it's possible. And they did some calculations. And they thought, it doesn't seem impossible. I wonder if it's also real. Do you think there were signs blocked when they came up with that and just sat around drinking whiskey or eating chocolate chips? And they're like, oh, what if you could have a sense?

star inside of another star. Yeah. I bet they just wrote a bunch of random things on the wall and then threw darts at them and they were like, all right, neutron star, okay, red super giant. Hey, what if you got one inside the other? Maybe they had a hundred terrible ideas that day and this is the best one. They're like, what if they're best friends? No, not that. What if they're mortal enemies? No, not that. What if one is the evil twin of the other? We need a, that's been done. We need a better plot twist. You see, there is something though. There's a deep connection between being creative in physics or in science in general and being creative when you're doing writing or whatever.

You just sort of let the ideas flow and think about what's been done before and then try to find something new. Like, has anybody thought about whether, you know, these could actually be black holes reflected into this dimension by some alien supercomputer, whatever, dot, dot, dot. You know, you need to let your mind wander a little bit when you're being scientifically creative. Cool. Sounds like there's a fine line between science fiction and. And science for real.

And I try to straddle that line. All right. Well, these things, these stars inside of other stars, they have a name. They're called the Thorn Zhidkov objects. And so we were wondering, as usual, how many people had heard of these weird and crazy objects out there in the universe. And so as usual, Daniel went out there and pulled the internet for people to ask them this question. Yeah. So thanks to everybody who volunteered.

If you'd like to volunteer to answer random physics questions for future episodes, please write to us at Questions at Danielanhorpe.com. All right. Well, here's what people had to say. I think it is some type of a hybrid star or something. I have no idea. Man, I have no idea. I've never heard of that.

Well, absolutely no idea. I have no idea. I have not heard of a thorn zeit cow. co-object. So I have no idea what that is. No idea. Never heard of it. The name looks like it might be something to do with Kip Thorne, who is an astrophysicist. So I'm going to guess it's something astrophysical. All right. Not a lot of name recognition. I feel like a lot of these people maybe read our book. We have no idea. They stole our idea that we have no idea. That was our idea being clueless. It was our idea not to have an idea. I think that's that's an old.

humankind idea. Yes, I think that's true. But also not really much for an idea for how to pronounce this name. And, you know, I gave it to them in writing. And it's sort of a strangely written name because it's got a Z with a dot on top of it, Y, T, K-O-W. But it's pronounced Jitkov to my best understanding. Right, right. And I guess if you're Googling it, you would have to type in Z-Y-T-K-O-W. Yeah. But Kip Thorne is sort of well-known. And he has kind of a brand name in physics. He certainly does. He's also got a Nobel Prize. And he's worked on Interstellar the movie. So he's sort of a celebrity in lots of different arenas these days. And you know him, don't you? Yeah, I do. I've met him a few times before, a super nice guy and very cool. So he came up with this idea with Anna Ajitkov. So let's dive into it, Daniel. How can you have a star inside of? I don't even know what that is or what that looks like. How can you have a star inside of another star? Yeah, well, I think it's only possible for a couple different categories of stars. Because what you need is, one, star to be really, really big and the other star to be really, really small. So it can sort of like slip inside the other star. And so we got two like extreme categories of stars involved here. One is the red

super giant star. And the other is the neutron star. And that's the really small one. And each of these are like already fascinating just on their own. So you know, you could write a whole science fiction movie about just one of these. So combining the two of them together is like, hey man, that's a bit too much. But, you know, hey, they're not limited in their scientific creativity. Okay. So when you see a star instead of another star, then you're talking kind of about specifically two kinds of star that kind of come together and then one of them kind of eats the other one. Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure which one you would describe as being active. Like, is the bigger one eating the other one or is the smaller one sort of like boring into the larger one? Or is it a poetic dance of two stars? I'm not sure.

But I guess that can happen, right? Because why not? Why can't a star fall into another star? Or why can two stars kind of merge together? That thing happens, right? Yeah, that kind of thing does happen. And if the very different kinds of stars, like a red super giant is very low density compared to a neutron star, then the neutron star can enter the red super giant without being disrupted, without blowing up,

without, you know, being dispersed and just merging into part of the red super giant. Really? But aren't suns like stars, aren't they, sort of like giant explosions? You know, isn't there a lot going on? How can something hold together inside of a star? These are some of the largest stars in the universe. Like, the largest red super giant we've ever found has a radius that's 1,400 times the radius of the sun. 14.00, you mean, if you take 1,400 of our sons, you would get a super giant.

Exactly. These things are ginormous. Like, they make our sun, which is already huge compared to Jupiter, which is huge. Huge compared to the Earth, which is huge compared to you, right? This thing dwarfs our sun. If you put it in our solar system, it would go all the way out to the orbit of Jupiter. It's incredible. Wow, it's like almost as big as our entire solar system.

Yeah. But it's not that much more massive, right? So it's thousand times bigger in radius, which makes it, you know, like a billion times bigger in volume. But it's only about 10 to 40 times the mass of the sun. Oh, I see. It's like a thousand times less dense than our sun. More like 10 over a billion times less dense than the sun. So it's millions of times less dense than our sun.

Now, it's still hot, right? It's like thousands of degrees Kelvin. It's not a place you'd want to be. But compared to our sun, it's more like a cloud, right? It's more like a burning, diffuse cloud. And so while it's a huge burning ball of gas and not a pleasant place to hang out or have a picnic, it's not a hot, dense environment like the center of our sun.

Oh, I see. It's just kind of a hot cloud of stuff. But it's still kind of igniting and burning, right? It's definitely burning, right? You have a lot of pressure and temperature and a huge amount of fusion is going on and you've got light being emitted. These things are big and they're glowing.

They're 10,000 or 100,000 times the luminosity of our sun. And they're pretty hot. You know, there's like 4,000 degrees Kelvin on the surface. And there's one that you can even see in the night sky. Really? Wow. Where?

Yeah. Beteljuice. Badeljuice is a red super giant. In the Orion constellation, you mean one of the points in the Orion? Yeah, Bail Juice. And these stars have fascinating histories because they started as a blue super giant, like the same size, but much hotter and more intense when they were burning hydrogen. And then remember, they burn that hydrogen and they sort of start run out of hydrogen. And as the temperature increases in the center, they start to burn helium instead.

and then near the end of their life, they turn into these red super giants. They're cooled off a little bit. It flipped red, the sun. Yeah. You know, it got more conservative in its older age. I think that tends to happen. There's a very brief period of moderation in the middle,

and then boom all the way to the Fox News side. Suddenly you vote Republican. Yeah. So that's the red super giant. That's like what is going into. And so you can imagine it's much easier to fall inside a red super giant than it is like our kind of sun. Right, because it's so big.

Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah. And so then the second kind of star for this to sort of happen and stay happening is that you need a neutron star, which is almost like the opposite of a red super giant. Yeah, exactly. It's super duper dense. It's like the mass of our sun or 150% the mass of the sun, but it's collapsed to like the size of the city of Denver. What?

It's like an object like just like 20 kilometers wide. Wow. So the whole sun, the size of Denver. Yeah, take the whole sun, which is already a hot, dense mess and collapse it to something that's, you know, much, much smaller than Earth. It's incredibly dense stuff. And this is what happens when a star collapses like at the very end of its life. It can go black hole or it can go neutron star or various other outcomes. This is like the core remnant, the hard little nugget that's left over after the collapse of a star.

And it's kind of almost at the point of a black hole, right? Like it's so dense, it could kind of maybe easily tip into a black hole. Yeah, and one way that you can get a supernova that leads to a black hole is you start with something like a neutron star. And then you add a little bit more gas and then it turns into a black hole. But these things don't yet have enough gravitational power to overcome the neutron pressure. It's like a bunch of neutrons all packed in together really, really, really tightly. It's like a bunch of people squeezed onto, you know, the metro in Mexico City, a rush hour. Have you ever ever done that?

But it's a pretty intimate experience. It's a big Oyo Negro, as they would call it. And New John stars are fascinating because we only discovered them because we found a particular type called a pulsar. This is the kind that shoots a huge beam of light and rotates really quickly. And so it appears on Earth like a flashing light. And they discovered this in the night sky, you know, several decades. ago and that's how we even know the neutron stars exist because neutron stars don't have fusion inside them. They're not fusing that are emitting light in the same way. They're not exploding.

They just glow from all of that compact stuff being squished together. Yeah, they glow because they're hot. They're like 600,000 degrees Kelvin. They're much hotter than... 600,000 degrees Kelvin. Yeah, it's pretty... That's hot. It's pretty hot. They're smoking hot. It's much hotter than the inside of a red super giant. All right. So they're small, but super hot and super compact. And so while the other one is kind of big and fluffy, and so I'm starting to get kind of the picture of here what's going on. And so let's get into how these things would happen and what would happen and are they even real. But first, let's take a quick break.

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Right, Daniel, we're talking about neutron stars being eaten up or invading the space of red super giants. And so I think I'm getting the picture here now that in order for this to sort of happen, you need one big fluffy star that's kind of, it's hot and it's a star, but it's kind of big and it kind of diffused. And then you have one, another one that's really compact and, you know, super duper hot. And then that can go inside of the first one and exist there or an orbit there? do once it gets eaten up. Yeah, it's sort of like a bullet into a pillow, right? One can go into the other one. And there's a few ways that this can happen. Like, one way this can happen is that they just bump into each other. Like, you got a bunch of stars flying around and these two things just sort of happen to hit each other. That's not very likely because

stars are typically very, very far apart in some certain configurations. These things called globular clusters, you have higher density of stars. It might happen. But scientists think it's much more likely that these things already started out near each other, like a binary star system. A system where you have two stars. Like two regular stars. Yeah, two regular stars. And you know, stars evolve. And so say, for example, you have two stars and one of them already is a red super giant. The other one is a normal star. But then it goes supernova. And at the core, it leaves a little neutron star. Well, that little neutron star might not just stick around at the center of the supernova. It might get a sideways kick because these supernova aren't like totally symmetric.

And so it might get sort of shot into the red supergiant. Oh, I see. Wow. It's like the relationship evolves. Yeah. Or that means that the supernova is like a neutron star gun. It's like shoots out one huge crazy bullet from the center of it, which goes right into the red supergiant. Oh, it goes supernova and it jacks its center, which is a neutron star. Which is a neutron star. Which is a neutron star. Yeah, what a way to go. Oh, and it goes into the red giant. Yeah.

And remember, the red super giant is enormous. So it would be pretty hard to miss. It would take up, you know, most of the sky from this neutron star. Wow. So if it just flies off roughly in that direction, it's going to get captured by this red super giant. It's a giant pillow the size of the sky. It's kind of hard to miss. Exactly.

And the other option is the other order is that you have a neutron star and it's got some partner star, which becomes a red super giant because these stars can grow and, you know, like our sun is going to grow near the end of its age, it's going to grow and grow and grow and can do a larger radius. So the other star can just sort of like grow and gradually engulf the neutron star.

You can just sort of like creep on over and take over its space. But the other one needed to be a neutron star, right? Yeah. Okay. And these things just happen out there in the universe, right? Like, you know, we're kind of used to this idea that stars are really far apart

because there aren't any stars around us really close by. But there are places in the universe where it's like a mess of stars. Yeah, and it's actually much more common for stars to form together. Because remember, stars are formed sort of in bunches when a big gas cloud collapses. And so a lot of stars are formed sort of near each other. And it's more likely for stars to have a binary partner than to be solo stars. Really? Our sun is unusual in the Milky Way.

Yeah, binary stars are more common than solo stars. Really? Huh. Yeah. Wow. Out there in the stellar dating field, almost everybody's already married. Somebody needs to get our son a dating app or something. I'm sorry, you want another star?

I just feel bad for our son. I don't know. Then we'd have like a step star and be a weird relationship because it wasn't around when we were formed. It's trying to like boss us around gravitationally. I think it'd be a big mess. They won't let us go to the ball. But, you know, more family is always better. Yeah, I guess more family, more drama.

But I guess if that's what you're really. for. But I think this is what Kip Thorne and Anasjikov were thinking about like, could you have these two things end up inside each other? It's not that unlikely because you have pairs of stars already. So if one of them turns red super giant or one

of them turns into a neutron star, could they then fall into each other? Could they collapse into a single object and could that work? What would it look like? Right. Yeah, let's get into what happens. So we have one really compact neutron star, super hot. It goes into the big, fluffy,

red super giant and then what does it just keep going because it come out the other end kind of like a bullet or does it you know disintegrate as it's going through or does it just kind of stay inside kind of like a like eating a rock yeah it mostly stays inside i mean it depends a little bit on its initial velocity but you know a red super giant is still a lot of mass these things are 10 or 40 masses of the sun and so it's a big gravitational well so most likely the neutron star is just going to spiral to the center of this red super giant. Oh, what do you mean spiral? Like, it can't just keep kind of orbiting around inside of the star?

Or does it eventually, you're saying it eventually kind of collapses into the middle? Yeah, you could orbit stably at a fixed radius if you're not losing energy. And like, you know, if you are a spaceship orbiting the Earth, you can stay at the same altitude if there's no drag. But if you're touching even a little bit of atmosphere, then you're going to be slowing down and spiraling back in towards the Earth. If you're inside a red super giant, then you're definitely going to be dragging against the hot burning plasma. It's going to be stealing your energy.

So you're going to be spiraling in towards the center. And I guess why doesn't it dissolve? Like, why doesn't the neutron star just kind of like under those conditions just kind of like break apart or evaporate? Because it's super duper crazy dense. Like a neutron star is pretty hard to break up. I mean, what you have is a basically a wind of burning plasma that's incident on the surface of this neutron. neutron star. And so at that surface, you get a lot of reaction, but not enough to break up a neutron star. The neutron star is a very tightly bound gravitational object. You know, it's like putting a rock

in a sandstorm or something. I see. And eventually what happens is, you know, the neutron star is also gravitationally very dense. It's just going to gather more stuff around it. And so what starts to happen is this really crazy reactions right at the surface there where the neutron star is super duper hot, it starts burning the inside of the red super giant. Right, because it's so much hotter. It's 600,000 degrees versus 4,000 degrees. Yeah. And so you get crazy stuff happening right there in the interior. And it's also super heavy. So does it start to like kind of suck out some of the red super giant and kind of build up in size as it's going in? Yeah. And so what can happen is that it accumulates enough stuff to trigger it to become eventually a black hole. Oh, that would be

some serious indigestion like if you eat something and it turns into a black hole that's not good yeah that's even more than Montezuma's revenge right it's like Newton star's revenge el ojo negro you see things never go well

when you have two star parents right they always end up fighting all right so then one thing that can happen is that it goes inside and then it becomes a black hole and then it's kind of game over for everybody right because then the black hole is going to suck in the red super Giant? Yeah, it can suck in a lot of the mass of the Red Super Giant, but also a lot of it won't

collapse. Remember, black holes don't automatically suck in everything that's nearby. They're just a powerful gravitational force. If you have enough rotational energy, you can end up just in the accretion disk, like around the black hole. So basically, the Red Supergiant just becomes material for the accretion disc that's surrounding the black hole. Wow. The black hole just kind of sucks up all of the Red Supergiant. Yes, the center of it at least. And then the outside becomes this like big swirling disc. But, you know, that's one possibility. Another possibility is that you get crazy intense fusion and reactions at the surface of the neutron star where it's embedded inside this other star. And it creates a lot of energy flying out. And it basically disperses the red super

giant. It's like a new solar wind that's pushing out on the red super giant and disperses it back into basically a cloud of stuff. Oh, it's kind of like dipping a hot poker in. to a bath of water. Like it touches the water and then it just steams just explodes out and it just disrupts everything. And then that stuff can do interesting things like form planets.

And so you might end up with like a crazy big spinning pulsar in the center surrounded by planets foreign from the death of that red super giant. Wow. Yeah, crazy drama. Crazy drama. Oh, fusion because you're making like a heavier element

as it goes in. Yeah. Yeah. Because at the surface of the neutron star, it's super hot. And then you have all the materials you need for fusion because there was fusion already happening inside the red supergiant. You just like supercharged it by bringing in all this extra energy and all this extra heat. So then now suddenly instead of a red giant and a neutron star, what do you have?

Then you have like a new solar system. Yeah, you have a new solar system where the red supergiant's bones have been used to like supercharge the neutron. star and to form a bunch of planets. And so what happens to the red super giant? It just deactivates? Like it just peters out or does it just turns off? Well, it's become diffused.

And so it's no longer enough energy in the conditions for fusion. But you know, this is the fate of almost every star, right? Especially these really big ones, they will burn. And then eventually their cores will collapse and they will disperse. And so that's just what happens anyway. The red super giant is expecting that. It's not a surprise. If it's one of these Thorne Zhikov objects,

its end just sort of gets accelerated by having a neutron star there in the middle. Wow. Well, it's pretty amazing to think that you start out with a star whose size it is, the size of the orbit of Jupiter. So it's huge. And then you have this tiny little, you know, 20-kilometer wide bullet, basically,

this little tiny, super dense thing. And then it just totally disrupts this whole ginormous star. I know. Imagine if Denver right, was the downfall of the whole roller system. That's pretty impressive, right? I mean, I like Denver. Denver's got a lot of sway,

but, like, that's pretty outsized impact for a tiny little region, yeah. Yeah, well, it is a swing state, I think. So, you know, blue, red, who knows, right? It can totally tip the fate of the entire world. Yeah, but you could become a black hole or whatever. It's all in the hands of those voters. It's all in the hands of Denverans.

All right. Well, let's get into how you could tell if these things exist and if they even are real out there in the universe. But first, let's take a quick break. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable.

These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, got you.

On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum. the Houston lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, and in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Othia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system. right, in terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation

and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying. Don't miss Session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety.

Listen to therapy for black girls on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. The OGs of Uncensored Motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila. And we're the host of the Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast

network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And All that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribes. With guests like Corinne Steffens. I've never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happened.

And then everybody else want to get pissed off because the white said it was okay. Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was going. She was like, oh, dad, all they were doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school. And slumflower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money. Like, I feel the moisture between my leg.

when a man sends me money. I'm like, oh my God, it's go time. You actually sent it? Listen to the Good Mom's Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network. The IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcast. All right, Daniel, a red super giant eating a neutron star. sounds like they've worked it out

and it's totally possible and a lot of amazing things would happen so are they real? And how could we tell if we where they are? Well, that's sort of the disappointing part about this thing is they had this crazy idea they were like, wow, a neutron star inside a red super giant, that would be awesome physics

deep inside the core. And then they asked, well, what would it look like from the outside, right? Because we don't get to like go inside red super giants and take a box to see if there's a neutron star or not. We only can observe these things, thankfully, from the outside. And, you know, a red super giant again is huge. And so seeing this neutron star inside of it, like directly seeing it, totally impossible. Right.

And mostly from the outside, a thorn jikov object looks just like a normal red super giant. The differences are pretty subtle. Really? But doesn't it the little neutron star disrupt it? Wouldn't we see it kind of peter out suddenly or turn into a black hole or turn into a solar system? Well, if you could watch it over, you know, 10,000 or 100,000 or a million years, then yeah, you might see these effects. We only get to see these things in a snapshot, right? You can ask, like, does this particular star have a neutron star inside of it right now? I see.

So we don't get to see the time series evolution. Man, I would love to. Let's take an object in the sky and just like fast forward it for a million years and back and forth and see what's going to happen. That would be amazing. I see. It's like if you see a dead red super giant, it could be like, oh, it could die from. natural clauses or maybe a shot

with a neutron star. It would be hard to tell. Yeah. And really the game is look at all the Red Super Giants out there right now and ask do we think any of them have a neutron star in them right now? How would they look different if they did and can we make the measurements to tell

if one of them does? I see. So how can we tell if they did have a neutron star for a snack? Well, you know, they have a really different interior. They have this crazy neutron star which is triggering this really intense reaction. that's burning at the core. And so that does have some impact on what it looks like from the outside in two important ways.

One is that they're a little brighter. You get more effusion and so you're producing more light. And red super giants are not famously bright. I mean, they're 10,000 times or 100,000 times brighter than the sun. But for that mass and that volume, it's not a very intense source of light. So if you see one that's like extra bright, unusually bright, then that's a clue that maybe it's got a neutron star in its core. I see. Because a neutron star kind of creates new kinds of reactions, which would make it brighter.

And then there's a very specific kind of reaction that we think could only happen inside one of these objects. You have to have a neutron star inside a red super giant for this even to work. And so you can look for the very characteristic signs of that particular reaction. Interesting. It involves elements cycling around from the surface of the. Red Super Giant down to the core where they get added protons onto them and then it's so hot they get shot

back up and they get to the surface. They come back down and they get more protons and they shot back up and get to the surface. Remember, for one of these objects, the core is much, much hotter so it pushes these things out to the surface more. I see. Something like this would make a particular kind of element

which we might be able to recognize in the surface of these stars. That's right. And so if it's a TZO, then you'd see much more lithium and molybdenum and rubidium than you would see in normal red super giants. And so if we look at these stars and we can tell that they have more of this stuff on their surface and they're extra bright,

then it's a good sign that it might have a neutron star hiding inside. Wait, wouldn't a lot of lithium make it more chill and more calm? You know, you can't take studies in humans and extrapolate those two behaviors of stars. Super Giant. We did this study in mice, and so we're going to extrapolate, you know, what would be the dose like for lithium for a red super giant? We're using the mouse model to study this giant supernova red super giant. Totally works.

Exactly. All right. So there might be like if we see a red super giant and we see that it glows kind of in the lithium range, then we're like, oh, maybe it has a neutron star inside. Yeah. Actually, it would be that it doesn't glow in the lithium range. Because if there's lithium on the surface, then the light is going to be absorbed at certain characteristic frequencies that lithium likes to eat. And so if there are dips at certain characteristic frequencies, that would indicate extra amounts of those elements. Oh, I see.

It means that that stuff is there, which means that maybe there's a neutron star in there. Exactly. So that would be the signature we're looking for. And so have we found any? What's kind of the likelihood of this thing happening? Well, there's a really fun story here because there's an awesome scientist named Emily Lefeck, and she became an expert in red super giants because of her research, she was fascinated by how they were made and how they worked and understanding this whole process inside them. And then she got an email from Anna Jitkoff saying, hi, would you be interested in trying to figure out if any of these red super giants might be one of these weird objects that Kip Thorne and I thought about 20, 30 years ago. And so that sounded fun to Dr. Lavec.

And so she surveyed all the Red Super Giants she knew of. And she found one. She found this star. Really? Which looked really weird. With a dip in lithium, like with a lithium signature on it. Yeah, it was weirdly bright. And it had the dip at lithium and melibdenum and rubidium,

exactly the places you would expect by one of these objects. Wow. Unlike the other Red Super Giants, which didn't have these signatures. Exactly. And that's what she did. She compared this Red Super Giant to like the broader population of Red Super Giants to find one that's unusual. And this is a star that we've known about for more than a hundred years. It was discovered in 1908. It's called HV-2112. It's from the Harvard Star Catalog. It's in a small Magellanic Cloud. And so this is a paper that came out in 2014 saying, oh my gosh, maybe we actually found one of these things. Wow. That must have been a fun day. I bet she was science. blocked. And she's like, why should I work on next? I have no idea. Ding. Email from

Anadjitkov, would you like to prove my constant braid? She's like, I'm on it. Sometimes when you don't know what to do, you should just check your email, right? Because sometimes people literally email you good ideas. Wow. So she went out and she found one of these and for real or what do they think? Well, you know, she was very careful because she's a good scientist and she called it a candidate because it's really hard to know for sure. Right. And these calculations are hard to do. You have to measure the brightness of the star, which means you have to know how far away it is, and you have to measure the spectra, which means you have to know, like, how much the light is absorbed between here and there. I see. It's a candidate. It's a candidate. Yeah. So then do the people of Denver now vote on it, or do they decide? Well, we're deciding whether or not to eject Denver into the heart of the, and that depends on how they vote. They're Denver into a star, right? Depending on how they vote in the next election.

No, Denver is a star, Daniel. It's always a star in my heart. But then another group of folks reanalyzed this in 2018 with more data from this one candidate. And their numbers disagree. They said, well, you know what? We don't think it's as bright as you thought it was. And we don't find these dips at those element lines as convincing. Interesting.

Using the same data. Well, it's updated data and different analysis techniques. Interesting. Yeah. So they actually used old. older data, they went back into catalogs and found old data from previous telecopes. They'd been looking for something else and they had this old data and they're like, oh, let's use this to try to understand the behavior of the star more deeply.

So that was sort of disappointing, but it's one of these bad news, good news situations. But also, I mean, either of them could be wrong, kind of, you know? Oh, yeah, either of them could be wrong. Sounds like you need more studies. That's right. Well, a third study that disagrees with both of them and they will be even more confused. But this 2018 paper said that Levex candidate maybe wasn't a TZO, but they found a better candidate. They were like, well, when we reanalyzed all the Red Super Giants, we found this other one that has a very strong Rubidium line and is very, very bright.

And so it's a question of like, how well do we understand the population of Red Super Giants? Maybe there's just weird behavior without having a neutron star in the core. Maybe they just have lithium on them or rubidium. Yeah, or maybe there are a lot of these things. You know, they did some back of the envelope calculation. They said these things last like 10,000 or 100,000 or a million years, and you can calculate like the rate of which they are formed, then you can put together an estimate for like how many there should be in the Milky Way right now.

Wait, do you mean, how long do you expect once the neutron star goes into the red giant, how long do you expect it to live or to just act in an unusual way? How long you expect it to continue looking like a red super giant before it, like, turns into a black hole or blows the red super giant out into just a stellar remnant. I see. There's no scenario in which it just stays a red super giant. No. Like once you shoot a neutron star in, it's game over for it. Yeah, well, game over meaning like, you know, 10,000, 100,000, maybe a million years.

Right, right. Game over. For a star lifetimes, that's pretty short. And, you know, they did some estimates for how often these things should happen. And they figure that, like, you know, this happens one every 10,000 years-ish or so. And if you do the calculations, that tells you that there should be something like 20 to 200 of these things at any given moment in the Milky Way. Wow. It sounds like a lot, but the Milky Way is huge.

Yeah, there's like, you know, hundreds of billions of stars. And so 20 or 200 of those would be these weird category. that's not that many. But it's possible, and it's kind of possible to spot them. Yeah, it's totally possible. Theoretically, there's nothing preventing it from happening. And so we think it might happen. And it's just a question of finding one.

And then you get to play the fun game of like, well, it doesn't look like we expected, which means maybe there's something different going on inside Red Super Giants. You know, we're desperately curious about what's going on in the inside of stars because that's where all the critical stuff happens. That's where heavy metals are made. Currently, we don't have a great understanding, for example, how lithium is made in the universe. And it might be that this is an important component of just the manufacturing of lithium in the universe. And if so, it would change how we understand lithium being made in the Big Bang or the early universe.

And so this is really important stuff to try to get a handle on. All right. Well, it sounds like an almost unbelievable scenario, but it sounds like it's happening all the time right now. Like right now, there's 200 of these possibly red super giants being killed by a neutron star right now. That's right. And I hope it inspires a future generation of scientists to think like, hey, let's put three objects. Like these guys had a stack of two objects that's have like a neutron star inside a bigger star and put that whole thing inside a red super giant. And that whole thing wrap it all up in a, you know, tortilla and Taco Bell will sell it to you.

Gordita and Red Super Giant crunch. Keep putting on the toppings there. That's right. Wrap it in more cheese, wrap it another layer of tortilla, call it something else. Well, I think Kip Thorne should maybe pitch this to Hollywood again as a new movie called Intrasteller. Egg, colon, star snacks. That'd be great because we'd already have spinoffs in terms of merchandising, right? Yeah.

All right. Well, I think it says, again, just about how much we don't know about the universe, you know? We think that we know these red super giants out there and we think we know what's going on and how often they happen. But who knows? You know, there's a lot we don't know going on inside of them. And there's a lot going on that can happen to them in the universe. Yeah. And a big part of the exploration, a big part of answering these questions is internal, is starting with mental creativity, just thinking what could be out there.

And a lot of the progress we've made is because we've come up with the right question, because we've had the right crazy. idea. And so if you're a person who likes science, but you're also creative. Remember, there's a lot of creativity necessary to do good science. And don't forget to put it in an email. That seems to be a critical step in any good idea. How did anybody do science before there was email? I don't even understand it. I don't think they did. There's definitely a correlation with the amount of science paper produced and then our email sent. So hey. Oh, really? Negative or positive correlation. I'm not sure. Some kind of correlation. That's all I'll say. Who knows what the causation is?

There's a relationship. Exactly. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that and think about, you know, next time you look up at the sky, think of red giant stars the size of this orbit of Jupiter being killed by tiny little stars the size of 10. Hope you enjoyed that? See you next time. Thanks for listening.

And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I. Heart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That's an interesting sound. It's like your mental health. If you're struggling and feeling overwhelmed, it's important to do something about it. It can be as simple as talking to someone or just taking a deep, calming breath to ground yourself.

Because once you start to address the problem, you can go so much further. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have resources available for you at love your mind today.org. I was diagnosed with cancer on Friday and cancer free the next Friday. No chemo, no radiation, none of that. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell,

Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. Professionally, I started at Deadwell Records. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into the soul of the music and the purpose that drives it. Listen to Culture Raises Us. Races us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The U.S. Open is here, and on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain. I'm breaking down the players. the predictions, the pressure, and of course, the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open.

The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very wonderfully experiential sporting event. To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain, an IHeart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. This is an IHeart podcast. Thank you.