Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Is Betelgeuse about to explode?

Episode Date: January 23, 2020

Betelgeuse appears to be dimming. Is it about to explode? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and 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, what do you think would have? happen if something in the night sky suddenly did something totally new? Like wiggling and shaking or dancing around or something? Doing the floss, the star floss. I mean, like what happens if a star suddenly started doing something it had never done before? Ooh, you know what I would think. That this would be an amazing opportunity to learn something new about the universe? Nope.

This is an amazing opportunity for a major discovery? Only if we're talking about discovering aliens. Hi, I'm Jorge, I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel Whiteson. I'm a particle physicist, and I really, really want to believe in aliens. You're an alien enthusiast or an alien or a professional alien believer? I'm a believer enthusiast. I'm enthusiastic about people who believe in aliens. Who do it professionally.

Is somebody out there paying people to believe in aliens? Because I want to sign up for that. Or maybe that's this job right here. Well, welcome to your weekly career conspiracy advice podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio. In which we talk about all of the amazing and crazy things about the universe, we explain to you how the universe really works, all the stuff that's happening out there in the center of stars and here on Earth and inside the tiny little particles in your fingertip. That's right, all the things that we can't explain about the universe and all the things that we cannot currently explain about this weird and mysterious universe. Only some of which we chalk up to aliens.

Only some. Do you have a giant column in your physics organization? I'm only allowed to declare aliens two times a day. So if I already used that explanation twice in one day, then I've got to come up with actual physics theory to explain what I'm seeing. Oh, no, you actually have to work. Yeah. You know, like, oh, that program didn't work? Must be the aliens.

That's right. My latte's too cold, aliens. Lates. Who drinks lattes anymore, man? That's so a pre-alien beverage. Almond milk, lattes, yeah. When the aliens come, I wonder what kind of coffee beverage they will like.

Hopefully not human coffee. Are you saying like human milk? Like they don't want cow milk or almond milk. They want like human milk? Hopefully they don't want to brew us is what I'm saying.

Well, I think I'd rather be on a human dairy farm than on a human coffee than the source of human coffee. But anyway. Yeah, let's not go into let's not go into apocalyptic scenario. This is a lactose-free podcast.

That's right. Human lactose-free podcast. Please. I think most people would vote for that. That's right. But, you know, if we're talking about discovering aliens, then that's mostly about looking out into the universe and seeing some crazy stuff. And, you know, we haven't yet, of course, discovered aliens, but we have learned a lot

of amazing stuff just by looking out into the night sky. Yeah. And I think the way we would discover something like that is by looking at the sky and then seeing if weird things happen, like if, you know, suddenly things change or things, things happen that don't seem natural. Yeah, we talked once on the podcast about a really strange star that seemed to be obscured. It was almost like somebody was building a huge superstructure that was blocking the light between that star and us, like a Dyson sphere. And that's the kind of thing that you might see if you keep looking into the universe and watching stars and looking for sort of

unnatural phenomena. Right. And sometimes those phenomena can lead to pretty interesting scientific discoveries, even if they're not about aliens or alien lattes. That's right. In 1987, we saw a supernova go and that was the first time in sort of modern astronomy thing. We got to watch a supernova happen. Not in real time, of course. It happened, you know, thousands and thousands of years ago, but the light from it arrived here on Earth in 1987. And we learned a tremendous amount about supernovas and how they work and what happens by getting to watch that one. Really? It was only 1987

that we saw our first supernova? Or I guess maybe with a telescope. Yeah, that was the first one that came in the era of our modern, awesome telescopes. So astronomers saw a few supernova earlier this century. We have records of supernovas sort of like in the Antarctic ice

where they deposited all sorts of crazy radiation going back hundreds of years. But it's sort of modern supernova watching with 1987 was the first really sort of big science supernova and we should do a whole podcast episode about what we learned about science from that one supernova. Oh, I see.

So that's the kind of thing that astronomers do is they look at the sky and they kind of, you know, check all the marks there and on their list of how things should act. But then if they see something new, then that's something worth exploring more, right? Yeah, and that's something sort of fundamentally different about

astronomy and astrophysics than the rest to physics. Like a lot of us in physics, we make experiments happen. I want to know what happens when a proton smashes another proton. Well, I go and I do it. I smash two protons together. But if an astronomer wants to know what happens when you crash one galaxy against another one, you can't build a galaxy collider, right? That's sort of impractical. Instead, they just watch it happen in the universe. They look out into the universe to see their experiment happening. Wow. Did you just call a whole field of physics, couch potatoes? Is that basically what you're thing.

You're like, those guys just sit around in their couches, in Hawaii, looking up at the sky, and wait for things to happen. Yeah, the equivalent is like, if you had some other physicists, you're like, I really wish this experiment would happen. Maybe I'll just sit in my living room and wait and see if it happens in front of me. That's basically the plan. As opposed to particle physicists who endanger the whole human race by building things that might create black holes in the middle there.

Hey, wouldn't you rather study a nice little black hole close to home than one super far away, you can barely see. I think I would rather stay away from black holes as much as possible. All right. Well, that's good to know. It's a very powerful couch that they're sitting on. They get to see the entire universe. And the amazing thing is that basically anything you want to watch happen is happening out there

somewhere in the universe. Neutron stars are crashing into each other and all sorts of strange galaxies exist. They can't make things happen, but, you know, they have a view to one of the greatest test of experiments in the history of the world. universe. Yeah, it's quite a drama going on out there in the universe. And so today we are going to be talking about one such discovery or one such phenomenon that we're seeing out into the next guy that is kind of weird. It's inexplicable almost and totally weird and might be who knows of some weird alien origin. It might be. I think almost anything can be categorized

as potentially of alien origin, which is one reason why. I love that explanation. But This is something that's been capturing the minds of astronomers and even popping up in the news media recently. There's something weird happening with one of our favorite stars in the sky. That's right. So today on the program, we'll be tackling the question. Is Beetlejuice blowing up? That's right.

And we don't mean blowing up on social media. It's not going viral. But just like anything that's blown up on social media, you do have to wonder, is it about to die? And so we're going to be talking about the star beetle juice, right? Not the Broadway play musical, not the movie with Michael Keaton, the original beetle juice. That's right. And not some weird new beverage that Gwyneth Paltrow was pushing on people when you squeeze beetles to stimulate your alkaline intake in the morning.

I think her beetles are sustainably and humanely squeezed. They're gently massaged to get a little bit of one drop of juice out of each beetle every day. But it's not actually beetle juice. It's actually a different spelling. Or is it, it's kind of an old word, right? I think it's, isn't it originally like the name of a demon or something? Yeah, it comes from Arabic, I think. And so it has nothing to do with beetles or juices.

It looks like you might pronounce it like Betel goose or something, but it's pronounced beetle juice, yeah. Let's just go with that, Betel goose. That sounds like the name of my character. in D&D or something. It sounds like a different Gwyneth Paltrow product. I'm going to roll my 47-sided die

to cast a spell from my wizard Betel Goose. While you're playing with Gwyneth Paltrow. I don't think Gwyneth Paltrow plays D&D. But, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I shouldn't say.

You never know. Maybe she listens to the podcast. No, but there are a lot of people have been watching this star and noticing something really strange happening with it recently. And that strange thing is that it's actually dimming, right?

It's like somebody is slowly turning it down. You're imagining some sort of cosmic dimming switch and somebody just sort of dialing it down. On the wall of the universe, there's a giant little knob. Who's playing with the dimming switch? There's some alien dad out there is healing. Or maybe it's connected to the universal Alexa, you know,

and somebody's like, Alexa, dim, beetle juice. No, a beetle juice is a huge star. It's an enormous super giant red star, and it's very bright in the sky. It's one of the, where it used to be, one of the ten brightest stars in the sky. And now it's been dropping. It started in October 2019. It's been dimming, dimming, dimming, and nobody knows why. Okay, so we were wondering, and it sounds pretty recent, October 2019.

It's a pretty recent update. Oh, yeah, we are topical on this show. Yeah. I mean, months. I mean, to a physicist, that's like, on the dot. I don't know how to respond to that. Maybe in a few months you'll come up with that response. Give me until October 2020.

I'll come back with a really clever comeback. Yeah, there you go. Something involving how cartoonists are always on deadline. That's right. We are, yeah. And so it's a recent development. And so we were wondering how many people out there knew that one of the stars in our sky, a famous one, even, Beetlejuice,

is actually dimming. So I walked around campus and I asked students at UC Irvine fresh back from their holiday break if they knew what Beetlejuice was as a star, if they had heard it was dimming, and if they were worried about a potential supernova

that could fry their eyebrows off. And so here's what people had to say. I think I've heard of it before but I don't know or remember much about it. Did you know that the star appears to be dimming in the night sky? No, I didn't know that. I have, yeah.

Did you know that it's dimming dramatically? I did not. Are you worried about it? Not really? No? No. Yes. Did you know that it's dimming in the sky dramatically?

No. Does that make you worried? Should I be? Is it a red star? Yeah, it's a bright red star. Yeah. I guess I'm a little bit worried. I think I've heard of it, but I have no idea anything about it.

Okay, did you know that it's dimming in the sky like right now? It seems to be fading? It is? Yeah. Does that make you worried? Not too much because I, you know, I know, like, stars die and stuff all the time, but it's still a little concerning. Star bio-juice?

No. Sorry, no. No. So you didn't know it was dimming in the sky? No. Does that make you worry? I mean, it doesn't sound like something that's worrying, like, for me. It just sounds something very interesting now that you've brought it up.

So I would want to know a little bit more about it and what it is, and maybe then I could decide if it's worrying or not. When they're dimming, doesn't it just mean their light is going away? So that star has been dead galaxy or universe or whatever it represents been dead for a while. So don't really think it affects us much unless there's something I'm missing. All right. Not a lot of concerned or even a lot of people who had heard of this star. Yeah, I thought there was going to be sort of more penetration in the sort of general student population

about this incredible astronomical event that's happening above our heads every single night. And we had a bunch of listeners to the podcast right in and ask us, Can you talk about what's going on with Beetlejuice explaining to us? So I was expecting the students to have maybe heard about it, but maybe they were too focused on the start of classes and all their new homework assignments. Right. Or I imagine most college students now weren't even born when the movie Beetlejuice came out.

That might be an issue also. But even when I told them about it, they seem to feel like, you know, hey, this is a supernova that's going to happen somewhere super far away. so I'm not too worried about it. There's maybe a supernova involved here. But the main mystery is that Beetleju's, you're saying, recently in October, started dimming.

Like it was one of the brightest stars in the universe, and then suddenly it wasn't as bright? Yeah, people just watch these stars, you know. And some stars burn constantly. They're just pretty stable. They're just like a huge fire going off in the sky and burning at the same brightness. But other stars are sort of variable stars.

And they wiggle, they go up, they go down, they go brighter, they get dimmer. Oh, it's like not a stable process, like it's going through some motions. Yeah, and you know, when you're looking at a fire, sometimes the fire burns brighter as it gets to a good bit of fuel and then it dims out a little bit. We can talk a little bit more about the physics of that in a little bit. But people have been watching Beetlejuice for like more than a century and taking some pretty detailed measurements of its brightness. And starting in October 2019, it started to dim and people thought, oh, it's just going into one of its dimming phases. but then it just kept dimming and dimming and dimming.

And now it's dimmer than it has ever been seen before in more than 100 years. Oh, okay. So it has dimmed before, but now it's dimming more than ever. Yeah, I used to sort of wiggle up and down a little bit here and there. But now it's much dimmer than it ever has been. Wow. And how do we notice this? Like, are there people looking at every star in the sky all the time?

Or is there a dedicated Beetlejuice grad student and telescope? Yeah, we assign one student per star. And that's just your job. And you've got to hope that you know something interesting. That's right. Otherwise, you'll never graduate. That's sort of my problem with astronomy. I mean, I was always interested.

You have a problem with astronomy? I do. I mean, a personal one, which is when I was a kid, the thing that attracted me to science and to physics was astronomy. It was like, wow, look, the night sky is amazing. And I got a telescope and I looked at a star. But then after a few minutes, you're just sort of like looking, hit a dot in the sky. It's not that exciting. It's not that often that anything interesting

happens. As opposed to when you smash point particles, you're looking at things that are not points. Exciting stuff happens every 25 nanoseconds. So yeah, you got stuff blowing up. It's pretty dramatic in comparison. But, you know, I don't mean to impugn any astronomers. I love astronomy and astronomers, and I'm glad that there's lots of different fields of science and different personalities to go into each different fields. Just not my personal choice. But there are people who do watch the sky and they look for things like supernova.

We're always watching to see more supernova coming because they help us measure the size of the universe and its expansion. So yeah, we have surveys that are constantly watching the sky. Just scanning out there and looking for things that change. Like it takes a picture

and then takes another picture and compares it to pictures to see if anything is changed. Yeah, there are these very general surveys and that's how you discover things like a new planet or, you know, Omuamua, something that's coming towards the earth. But in this case, I think Beetle Juice is a star of interest because it's so big, it's so huge,

it's coming near the end of its life, and it has a really interesting pattern of variability. All right, let's get into more details about our friend Beetlejuice and what could maybe be happening to make it dimmer. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. is just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight.

That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. podcast. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot.

He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. According to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them.

I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, and in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down. with Dr. Afia 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 hyperfixation 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. We 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Daniel, so Beetlejuice, one of the brightest stars, or what used to be one of the brightest stars in the sky, has been dimming recently, getting less and less bright,

and nobody knows why that's happening. Yeah, and there's lots of different kinds of stars out there in the sky, and some of them burn for billions of years, and some just for millions of years. And what we're doing is looking at all of them and trying to understand, like, how many different ways is there to be a star? And, you know, there are a lot.

Like, the star that is our sun is not even one of the most typical stars in the galaxy. And some of them are crazy. And Beetlejuice is one of the most extreme stars out there. Really? All right. Tell me about Beetlejuice. Let's get into that a little bit. What do we know about Beetlejuice?

And how is it different than our sun? Well, first of all, beetle juice is huge. Like, it's about 20 times the mass of our sun. 20 times. Yeah. It's an enormous amount of stuff. So we should call it beetle huge. I don't think it likes when you call it that, you know.

Biggle huge, big old huge beetle juice. It's been trying to cut back recently on the amount of hygiene. It's on the keto astronomical diet. Yeah, and it's not just huge in terms of mass. Like 20 suns is a lot of stuff. It's actually physically just the volume is enormous. It has a diameter of close to a billion miles. Wow.

And that's much bigger than. in our sun, right? Like if something that big was in our solar system, it would probably take up most of the space. Yeah, exactly. If you put Beetlejuice in place of our sun, then Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, even up to Jupiter would be inside the radius of the sun, right?

So that would totally fry all of us. We'd be like little juiced beetles. Not good. So it's huge. It's huge. And why is it? it that big? It's just that's how it happened to be put together? Yeah, the size of a star just depends on, you know, sort of the clumps of stuff that are around to form it. And the dynamics of it,

whether it breaks off to form its own little cloud and stuff. That's something that people are still really trying to understand is how stars form and what makes stars form. And we have parts of the galaxy where stars are still forming and parts where they're not forming anymore. And that's not something we understand very well. But what we do know is sort of the connection between the size of the star and how long it's going to live. Oh, interesting. You mean how bright it is or how big it is? Yeah, the larger the star, the sort of bigger it is, than the brighter it burns and the shorter its life. Like our sun is billions of years old and we expect it to keep burning for another

few billion. But Beetlejuice is only eight and a half million years old. It's like a baby. Really? What? You can have a star that young and wait and you're you're telling me it's near the end of it's life yeah stars this size only burn for like 8.6 or 8.7 million years people think and this one it's at 8.5 million. Wow. So these things burn bright and they burn hot and they're huge but they just don't last as long in the universe like the sun is sort of the the turtle of stars it's going to keep burning for a long time after beetle juice blows. It's kind of like a career in Hollywood for a Hollywood star. I think actually in Hollywood it's better to be small.

Isn't it thin still in? Well, I mean, you burn bright and then nobody cares about you. Yeah, I think that's probably a good analogy. All right, so that's beetle juice. It's different. It's bigger. It's beetle huge. And where can I find beetle juice?

Is it on a constellation that I know? Where could I find it if I wanted to see it from Earth? Yeah, it's sort of a Hollywood star because not only is it one of the brightest stars in the sky, it's in one of the most famous constellations. It's in the Orion constellation. So it's a big one, yeah. And it's not that close to the Earth. It's like 625 light years away.

But I think that's kind of close, isn't it? Isn't it close from relatively astronomical distances? It depends, yeah. I mean, the galaxy is 100,000 light years across. So, yeah, it's in our neighborhood. but there are other stars that are, you know, four, five, ten light years away. So there are definitely a lot of stars that are closer.

And it's not just in the Orion constellation, I think, isn't it like the central one? Like if you look at the three stars that make up the belt, isn't Beetlejuice one of them, the middle one? I think the managers of the careers of the other stars argue about which is sort of the most important star in Orion. Come on.

Beetlejuice is the Beyonce of the Orion constellation. Let's be honest. I mean, I think that without Beetlejuice wouldn't really be Iraq. Ryan, you know, wouldn't have that sort of magic to it. But people differ. But it is one of the ones in the belt, right? And that's pretty recognizable in the night sky. If you see three stars pretty evenly spaced, that's the Orion constellation. Yeah, so Beetlejuice doesn't

provide part of the belt, but it's critical, you know, it's the top left shoulder of Orion. And that's his throwing shoulder, I think. And, you know, he's a hunter. And so I think Beetleju can make a pretty good argument to being sort of a foundational star. And that's why I'm not in a trying to wear it, Daniel. Reason number, what? I've lost track. Reason number, you don't even need to count them, really.

I would just, the cartoonist, I would just draw it wherever. Yeah, exactly. We'll fact check that later. All right, so then you guys noticed that it started dimming, and so that's kind of weird, right? Like, stars don't just suddenly dim like that so much. Yeah, well, it's sort of weird, but it's also sort of not weird. And so to understand how weird it is, we have to know what the context is. It turns out there's a huge population of stars out there, like a good fraction of

them are variable. Some of them do dim and brighten and dim and brighten. And these are stars we call them variable stars. Yeah. You mean there's a lot of stars out there, twinkling? Well, twinkling is actually because the light is being mitigated by dust and atmospheric effects and stuff like that. So that's what causes twinkling. But there are stars that if you were like in a spaceship near them, you would notice them brighten and then dim and brighten and dim. And some of those stars played in a really important role in our understanding of the universe. And I guess that would be weird if our sun did that as well, wouldn't it?

Yeah, that would be really weird. Like every six years, we're like, yeah, like solar seasons. Yeah, well, there are some solar seasons. Like the sun has an 11-year magnetic cycle, I think, where his magnetic field flips every 11 years. And there are seasons when there's more solar wind and less solar wind. But these effects are very small compared to what we're talking about. You know, the sun doesn't significantly brighten and dim compared to what's happening in these other variable stars.

Oh, I see. It's a really a noticeable effect. And so we talked about these stars, these sephids recently. These are the stars that pulsate. All right, let's get into that. And like, what could be happening with beetle juice? Because you guys notice it's dimming and that's kind of unusual and it could mean some pretty dramatic things. So what are some possibilities for what could be happening?

to Beetlejuice. All right. Well, I have sort of three categories of explanation for what might be happening to Beetle juice. Okay. And you're going to tell us in order of how alarm we should be. Yeah, so the most boring possibilities, right? And then we got the maybe more exciting, crazy ideas. And then we got the alarming. Everybody builds a bunker and starts to live underground for the next hundred years situation. Everybody start eating beetle juice and praying to the Queenethpaltred demons out there. That's right. Or invest in lentil futures.

All right. So what are the three possibilities that could be causing beetle juice to go dimmer? Right. Well, the first thing to understand, as we've mentioned, is that some stars just do this.

They are variable stars. Now, some of them, when this happens, usually it's very regular. So the stars we talked about before, there are stars called sephids. They pulsate, and it's very regular.

In fact, the key thing about sephids is that how fast they pulsate tells you how bright they are. are at the source. And that's a key thing to knowing how far away the star is, because you have to know how bright it is at the source compared to how bright it is here that tells you how far away it is. So you make a bunch of measurements. You measure how often it gets dimmer and brighter and dimmer and bright it. It does it sort of like a clock. And that tells you something about how bright it is over there near the star. So it's really key for those stars that they are very regular,

right? They're variable and something happening inside them to make them pulsate. And these are not stars that are rotating. It's not like a flashlight swinging through the universe that's just flashing over us. It's really like a pulsating reaction kind of. Yeah, it's a radial pulsation. So no matter where you are around the star, you would see it going brighter and dimmer. Beetlejuice is not one of these very regular stars. It's not a sephid. It has some variation in it. It goes up and it goes down, but it's not like a clock. Okay, so I see. So it's normal for a star to change, to like get brighter and dimmer. But you say most stars, most stars, sort of do it on a clock, like regularly, but Beetlejuice maybe is different.

Yeah, Beetlejuice has sort of two different cycles that people have been noticing over the last few decades. It's got like a long cycle that takes about six years to go up and down. And it also has sort of a shorter cycle that's less than a year. And so we don't know what's going on. We don't have an explanation for how Beetlejuice has these two weird cycles in it. You're saying it might be two kinds of aliens interfering with the star. Fighting inside the star. It's a star war. Rise of the Beetlejuice.

And for those of you who are interested in, like, how can that happen? How can a star burn more brightly and dimly? Remember that it's not just that the star itself is like burning hotter or colder. It's about the light we're seeing from the star. And so sometimes what's happening inside the star can make like the outer shell of the star more opaque because it changes it from like helium 2 to helium 3 or it can make a contrast. which makes it heat up or it can make it expand, which makes it cool down. So all this stuff can happen to a star.

It's not just about how hot and bright it is. It's about like the shells and the layers. And the folks who study this have these amazing models of this enormous cosmic fusion explosions that they can, frankly, it's blows my mind that they can understand them at all. So like if you were standing next to the sun, you wouldn't see it get bigger or smaller. You would just see it get brighter and dimmer. Well, if you're standing next to one of these stars that is variable, then they, no, they do expand and contract.

Oh, they do? Yeah, no, they do. And the outer shell of the star can become more opaque or less opaque. And so what you see from far away is just, of course, is it brighter or dimmer, but there's a lot of really complex stuff going on. It's not just that the star gets bigger and hotter and smaller and colder. Oh, I see. But it's all about sort of the mechanics of the reaction inside the star.

Like the reaction will sort of lean one way, but then it'll lean the other way. and, you know, things sort of are constantly in flux. Yeah, sort of sloshing back and forth, not in a stable situation. But Beetlejuice has these two cycles, sort of the shorter one and the longer one. And so, you know, the most boring explanation for what's happening in Beetlejuice is that it might just be sort of the combination of these two different cycles happening at the same time, that both are sort of in their dimming mode. I see. It's just like a low point in its career as a star.

Yeah, precisely. It doesn't really explain it because Beetlejuice has these two cycles that are like on a year and a six-year timeline. So you would expect to see those things sort of line up more often than every hundred years. Oh, I see. So there's something else going on here. I think there's probably something else going on. There's something else to learn. There could be another longer time scale variation that's happening.

It could be these two things when they do line up in some way, they sort of like accentuate each other. But we don't understand the mechanism, the physics, behind either one. And so it's hard to know specifically what might make this happen. All right. So that's possibly A is that it's just a normal cycle of a, you know, hormonal cycle of a teenage star with crazy moods. But then there are other possibilities, some of which we might want to be concerned about.

So that's sort of like taking the normal boring stuff and saying maybe it's a little weird, but there's other really weird stuff that does happen to stars that could be explaining this and you know sometimes stars don't just burn happily they have like you know indigestion and you get like an enormous eruption and it spews stuff into space a star burp yeah or you can have like a star quake or like cracks on the surface of the star and internal stuff shoots out and you could get an enormous eruption of plasma so you know it could be that that's what happened it happened on the other side of the star and it's dimming as a result this is really just really speculative stars are not these constant balls of fire

they can have big events they can have big events especially big stars that tend to be more dynamic and more violent and stars near the end of their life they get to be a little bit less predictable sort of as the fires is sputtering out kind of like that older uncle you have

that's just the one who's no longer invited to Thanksgiving does a lot of weird star burbs at least now he puts on pants every time he comes to dinner right that's an improvement At least when it ejects the star material, it has pants on, yes. Yeah, or it could just be some really weird thing happening with the magnetic field of the star. You remember what we're seeing is dimming. That doesn't mean that the star is dimmer.

It could also mean that there's some, like, it's ejected some matter, which then cooled and is now blocking our view of the star. I see. It could just be winking at us. It could be winking at us. Yeah. Or, of course, you know, my favorite explanation. is that there's some awesome civilization out there that's like building some structure between us and Beetlejuice.

Really? They've just now closed the blinds. Since October. You know, it's a long construction project and maybe they've just now started to ramp this thing up and turn on their Dyson sphere or whatever. Maybe it's aliens burping too, and or flirting with us. Maybe that is how they flirt.

Maybe it's alien uncles, you know, and they're grumpy that didn't get invited at that. Thanksgiving dinner. I don't know. But anytime something happens in the night sky that's sort of rapid, that's unusual and changes quickly, then you've got to wonder, you know, is that a sign of sort of intelligent life of somebody's being like activist and constructing something and actively changing the way the universe is organized, not just sort of watching it happen. Okay, so I'm getting that idea A for what might be happening to Beetlejuice is just the normal phase in its cycle. idea number two is that maybe

it's some kind of event that's happening like a quake or a star burp or an ejection or and or all of those things at the same time aliens causing a star quake because of their burping that's right while flirting with you all right let's get into the third idea for what might be happening to Beetlejuice

which might be an explosive idea a cataclysmic finish to Beetlejuces run on the Hall of Fame That's right. Not just a bird, but a big boom, perhaps. Don't we all want to end our career sort of like Mel Gibson, exploding in a firing disaster? With a big racist rant. Yeah, sounds like a great way to go out.

Beetlejuice, your astronomical racist uncle. All right, let's take a quick break first. December 29th, 1975. airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass.

The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged. and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professional. is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone.

Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet.

So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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. We 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. All right, so Beetlejuice is dimming. It used to be like the number one brightest star in the universe,

but now its stock has gone down, Daniel. Yeah, and it's not the number one bright star in the universe, right? Oh, I see. And to us, to my universe. Yeah, to the Jorge universe. It was one of the top. Which we all live. We are all just bit players on your stage, sir.

That's right. That's right. But yeah, and we're trying to figure out what could explain that, and we talked about the sort of boring ideas, but there is one more sort of explosive possibility. All right. Sounds exciting. What else could be happening to Beetlejuice, Daniel? Well, remember that Beetlejuice is a massive star,

and it's near the end of its life. And what happens to really big stars when they go out is you often get a supernova. So some stars, when they get old, they go into supernova, and you're saying this dimming could be like a sign of that. Yeah, if Beetlejuice is about to go, then, you know, the last few hundreds

or thousands of years before it goes supernova, could be a little more volatile. It could be hard to predict. And, you know, Beetlejuice is expected to last, you know, up to maybe another 100,000, 200,000 years. But there's a lot of uncertainty in these predictions

for when it will go supernova. Right. I mean, it's like it's eight and a half million years old. What's plus or minus 100,000 years? Yeah, it's basically... For a few months. Yeah, it's, you know, it's 75 in star years. Right.

It's been retired for a while, and it's sort of, you know, ready to go. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of why I'm always late with my deadlines, to be honest, Daniel. Because you're waiting for a supernova? What's 100,000 years in the grand scheme of the universe? Nothing. Three months to a physicist is 100,000 years to a cartoonist. Yeah, there you go.

Just wait for me to go supernova. Yeah, but there's not too much to worry about here for a couple of reasons. One is when we've seen supernova, the stars don't usually dim just beforehand. And usually they get brighter. Wow. They like ramp up to the explosion. Yeah, they ramp up to the explosion. And so dimming is not usually a precursor of a supernova.

So you don't really have to worry. Now, we don't know because we haven't seen a lot of stars like this, this close go supernova. We don't have a huge amount of data. We just have one, right? Didn't you say? Or have we seen many over the years? We've seen a few supernova over the years. And we've seen a lot of the type 1A supernova recently.

And since then, we've got much. much better capturing supernova and seeing more of them. So we don't, but we still, you know, we're talking about hundreds of examples, maybe thousands. So this could be a weird one. I mean, not sure. And none of them have dim right before exploding. Yeah, it's not a typical thing for a start to do just before it explodes. It's not gathering its energy, kind of like a do-kid in Street Fighter, too.

Finish him. We know that was the wrong, that was the wrong video game reference. That's the wrong fighting meeting. But good try, good try. I always wondered why we can't have Street Fighter versus Mortal Kombat, you know, like sort of the epic balance, the epic challenge. I would buy that video game. But the other reason not to worry is that Beetlejuice is sort of far enough away

that even if it were about to go supernova, we'd be pretty safe. Okay. We wouldn't get roasted by this explosion. No, it's 650 light years away. So if there were a supernova, then it would be... We'd be good for 652 years. That's what you're saying. No, it's not about that.

It's not about the time difference. It's just about the fact that the further you are away from the explosion, the less you feel it. It's why in the movies, everybody's always running away from the explosion, right? Because the further you are away, the more the energy, the temperature, the heat, all the radiation has had a chance to dilute, to diffuse over a larger volume. Oh, I see. But what would we see? Would we see it go bright or would we see like a big, a big, fun explosion? What would we see?

Well, it's really fascinating. the first thing you would see from a supernova is not the light. You would actually first see the neutrinos. Interesting. If you can see neutrinos. Yeah, and we can see neutrinos because we have neutrino detectors. And fascinatingly, you might wonder

like how can neutrinos get to Earth before photons, right? Photons travel at the speed of light, being light. Obviously, because they travel backwards in time, Daniel. I do not heard that article. Nucinos do not travel fast in the speed of light. They do not travel backwards in time. time. They travel almost to the speed of light, but they are emitted first from the supernova.

And the reason is that the supernova sort of happens from the beginning out, and the neutrinos can penetrate the star. They can, neutrinos made in the middle of the star can make it out of the star, whereas light made in the middle of the star gets absorbed by the star. So the supernova sort of makes neutrinos first, and then you don't see light from the star until the shock wave of the supernova has hit the surface of the star and then it starts to glow. Oh, I see. Like the explosion has to make it through the star before it actually makes it out. Yeah, so we see neutrinos here on Earth from a supernova before we see the light from it, which is kind of awesome. It's like a pre-warning system. Are you trying to argue for more funding for neutrino detectors? You get about two or three

hours notice. So it's not that much, you know. What are you going to do in two hours to organize your life? I'm going to order more Griffith Paltrow products. All the ones I've always wanted to order. And or play Street Fighter. But so first we would see an enormous amount of neutrinos. And also things people probably don't understand is that most of the energy of supernova is not emitted in the form of light. Most of it comes out in the form of neutrinos.

And then in ejecting the mass of the star. So while we would see a really bright light here on Earth, like the star could be as bright as the full moon in the sky, when it eventually does do supernova, that's just a tiny fraction of the energy it's released. Oh, I see. But isn't that the stuff that can actually kill you, though? It can kill you because the light that's emitted from the star comes along

and it's in x-rays and x-rays are pretty deadly. But beetle juice is far enough away that by the time the x-rays get here, they'll be dilute enough that our atmosphere can mostly absorb them. So you don't really have to worry. I see. But then it doesn't it shoot other things too? Yeah, most of the mass of the star is actually blowing. out also. And so

Beetlejuice, which is a hugely massive star, remember it's 20 times the mass of the sun, it will blow out something like 10 to the 60 protons. 10 to the 60 protons. Yeah. It'll essentially disintegrate, and I mean, some of it will be left behind to form a

neutron star or a black hole, but something like half the mass of the star will get blown out into space. And so if you're too near that thing, you're just going to get riddled with tiny little proton bullets. Right, which are super dangerous right they are super dangerous yeah and you know we are constantly being hit by proton bullets from our own star not because it's going supernova it's just sort of a normal thing for a start to do

but these will come at a much higher velocity the solar wind the protons just from our sun come at about 450 kilometers per second which seems pretty fast but from a supernova these things would come at like 10,000 kilometers per second but again we don't have anything really to worry about because Beetlejuice is far enough away that the flux will not be very high and our magnetic field should be strong enough to protect us. Remember, charged particles get bent by magnetic fields and so we have this force field that prevents

charged particles from sort of raining down on us. So we don't have to worry about it, but it would be sort of interesting, right? Because I think you were telling me that Beetlejuice, if it goes supernova, which you don't actually know it will. When it goes supernova. Now, tomorrow, 650 years.

When it goes supernova, it would be kind of like the closest supernova to Earth ever. Yeah, it would be the closest one ever to Earth. And there have been supernova in the past, and there may have been ones closer Earth in the past. But if so, they could have, like, sterilized all life on Earth. And so we're on the watch out for nearby supernovas. This one would be the closest one to Earth, which would be sort of spectacular from the point of view of astrophysics, but not close enough to fry us. Would we see it in the night sky? Would it look cool?

Would you see an explosion? Or would you just see the star get brighter from our point of view? You might see with a telescope some interesting features because Beetlejuice is not only one of the brightest stars in the sky. It's one of the biggest. And so it sort of takes it the largest area in the sky of any star in the night sky. When a star goes supernova, it makes this ring and explodes out. It's like not just like a Michael Bay movie.

It's beautiful. Right. And so you might be able to see that with a telescope in your backyard. plus it would be really bright it would be as bright as the full moon so that should be pretty cool and it could happen at any moment or maybe we would see it we could see it at any moment but technically if it happened it would already have happened right because it's so far away yeah this thing is 650 light years away and so anything we're seeing today happened 650 years ago um so we can blame it on whoever was alive on that back then from whatever they did to trigger it and um so we're

We're looking into the past, for sure. But it could happen at any time, right? We don't really understand how these stars work. I think most astronomers think it's more likely to happen in 100,000 years than tomorrow. But, you know, astronomers also weren't expecting Beetlejuice to dim this much. So it's not like they really understand the insides of the star that well. All right. So it sounds like our mystery why Beetlejuice is going dimmer is TBD to be determined.

I mean, we don't really have a good explanation for it. But it's happening and it's happening right now. It's going dimmer. Yeah, it's probably not a signal that aliens are coming. It's unlikely that it's going to go supernova tomorrow or next week or next year. But it's very likely that we're going to learn some interesting astrophysics. We're going to learn about how these enormous cosmic furnaces blow and how they burn and how they change. And so astronomers will keep watching and see, is it going to keep getting dimmer?

Is it going to go brighter again? It's like everybody wants to know the answer to this question. and the end of this story. And every day, every week, they keep watching it just to see, like, what's it going to do today? It's exciting. It's really amazing to me that something like a sun, a star. I mean, it's so bright, but we don't really know what's going on inside of it or, you know, all the mechanisms inside and what makes it burn or dim like this.

Yeah, well, it's amazing to me that you would think we could understand it. I mean, it's like 10 to the 58 protons. I can hardly understand what happens when two protons interact with each other. It's incredible to me that plasma physicists and astrophysicists can do the magneto-hydrodynamics to understand a system like that. It's crazy to me. It's impressive. I'm in all of those folks. Yeah, pretty good for some couch potatoes.

Pretty good for some couch potatoes. Turns out, sit on your couch and think about the universe. You can learn some things. Yeah, and be very comfortable at the same time. And they probably have the best snacks. Astronomers, really good snacks. They stay up late all the time. Drink lattes.

made out of coffee beans and alien milk you mean like the green milk in that Star Wars movie I don't know what you're talking about but every milk that's not cow milk tastes like alien milk to me my wife likes this macadamia nut milk

I can't even All right well Lactic products discussions aside Lactic or galactic Galactic and galactic Discussions aside

it's all coming together The Milky Way, the milk in your coffee. Of course. It's all part of the same crazy universe. That's right. And the same crazy podcast. So keep watching the skies and we'll keep learning about the universe. Thanks for joining us.

See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order, Criminal. justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious wait a minute sam maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota luckily it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot he doesn't think it's a problem but i don't trust her now he's insisting we get to know each other but i just want her gone oh hold up Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast

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