Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What Are The Weirdest Stars?

Episode Date: April 4, 2019

What are neutron stars, pulsars and magnetars? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denial is easier complex problem solving takes effort listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts so i wonder sometimes why isn't the universe you know more boring you know what what do you mean more boring. Well, not only is so much of our universe beautiful, from, you know, like, features on earth to incredible things in space, but it also just seems to be filled with, like, really

weird stuff, you know? Yeah, the universe always seems to top itself with more intense or more crazy stuff. I know, but I wonder, is that a property of the universe, or is that something about us? Like, if we meet aliens and their physicists, would they be like, yon, the universe is so simple and boring? And we're the only ones who think it's fascinating, or we're, Would they also just like stand agape at the incredible features we see in the universe? Oh, I see. You're asking a philosophical question. Like, is it not boring objectively or just subjectively as for humans given our experience?

Yeah. Is the universe not boring because of who we are or because of what the universe is? Like if we lived in a crazier part of the universe, maybe we would be more used to crazy things. Yeah, exactly. If we had seen all the fascinating stuff early on, then all these discoveries would be ho-hum, right? But we grew up in a kind of a boring corner of the universe, and so we're blown away when we go to, like, the Manhattan part of the universe and see all the crazy stuff that happens.

All the extremes, yeah. Yeah, we're like the provincial ignoramuses of the universe. Y'all. Y'all got a nice universe here. Now let's insult the United States. Yeah, I mean, we should cut that. Definitely, let's cut that. Hi, I'm Jorge, and I'm Daniel.

Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio. In which we take a tour of the universe and find weird, interesting stuff that's hard to understand and try to explain it to you. Today, we're going to take a topic, and we're going to examine in some of the weirdest examples of them, some of the most intense and extreme examples of this very common thing you see every night. That's right, and this episode is dedicated to a listener who wrote in and asked us to do an episode

about all the weirdest stars in the universe. This was requested by Callie Smith, who also in her email described yourself as a physics ninja. Jorge, what do you think that means? She must have gone to like a combination school where they teach physics and ninja skills. I imagine that a physics ninja is somebody who breaks into your office late at night, totally silently, and solves all the problems you have on the chalkboard and escapes without leaving a trace. Wow. I would love to see a duel between her and like a physics samurai.

What would happen? A physics samurai comes in and chops your chalkboard in half, I think. Less subtle. Less subtle. Problem, solving. Isn't that what you do to your students? You like walk in. This is no good. Slash.

Yeah, no, I'm definitely not like a physics gladiator, if that's what you mean. I think I myself more as a physics architect, try to build interesting stuff in physics and find interesting puzzles. Cool. Well, thank you, Callie Smith, for submitting this idea. And it's a pretty interesting one, just the idea that there are things out there that you might, somebody might call weird stars. Yeah, and, you know, you know that our sun is a star and lots of other stars out there.

And a lot of them are sort of vanilla. You know, they're out there. They're fusing hydrogen. They're enormous burning balls of gas. We can see them from billions of miles away, you know. But there's so many of them, that becomes a little plain, right? Like, you're bored by that. But it turns out there's a lot of stars out there that are weird, that are strange, that do incredible stuff

that blows your mind. And so this episode is dedicated to talking all about those kinds of stars. Yeah, because it's funny to think that our star, our sun, is this giant enormous, continual immense atomic bomb that it's exploding all the time. But it's weird to think that that's the vanilla version. There are versions of stars out there that would make our star look boring.

Yeah, you've got to be pretty jaded to think an enormous constantly exploding fusion bomb is yesterday's news. Yeah, the size of the sun is yesterday's news, right? But that's the world we live in. You know, you always need something more exciting, something as you're scrolling down your internet feed, right? You need something to catch your eye. And so yesterday's ball of enormous plasma is boring, and you need something new, something exciting.

And so that's what we're providing to you today. Yeah, so let's break it down. What do you mean by weird stars? There are stars that are not like the typical star that you see out in the universe. Yeah, you know, astronomers like to look out in the sky and see what they look at and try to understand it. And they look at the population. They see, do the stars have the distribution or. brightness that we expect, do we see the sizes

that we expect, the distances we expect, and they start to ask questions, you know, and when they do so, they find some oddballs, they find some stars out there that don't quite act the way they might have expected, and that gives them clues that there's different stuff going on in the universe that's producing these weird stars.

And so specifically, today we're interested in things like neutron stars and pulsars, and weird things called magnetars. Magnetars. Sounds like a Greek mythology monster. I wonder what a magnetar would do against a physics ninja. Who do you think would win?

Oh, epic battle. That would be an epic battle. I would love to see some fan art if anyone's listening, who knows it a draw. A magnetar versus a physics ninja. I'd love to see that done. That would be awesome. Yeah, so we are going to dig into what's weird and fascinating and interesting about all these kinds of stars.

But, of course, before we do so, I went around and I asked people what they knew about these weird categories of stars. Yeah. We asked people what they thought was in. neutron star or a pulsar or a magnetar. That's right. So before you listen to these answers, think to yourself. Do you know what a neutron star is? How is it made? Why is it weird?

Do you know what a magnetar is other than a comic book villain in Jorge's imagination? Think about it for yourself. Then listen to these answers. Here's what people had to say. Kind of the, I don't know too much about it. I don't know. Big stars? I don't know. I've heard days

before, but nothing about like information on it. Okay. I feel like you've heard about neutron stars, but not the other two. Did you make a guess what a neutron star is? Neutrons are like, it's like the atom, right? Like the protons, the neutrons. So I would assume it has to do something with that.

Okay. That's right. I know. No. Well, if you have to guess what a quasar was, what would you guess it is? Like a type of star or something? Something like that, a fireball. Okay, awesome.

A pulsar, to my understanding, would be like a black hole. When a black hole is, and I could be very wrong, when a black hole is like eating earth, you know, or just breaking apart like a planet. And as it's doing that, it's spewing, you know, stuff out. And as the black hole spins, it kind of emits, like, what is, like radiation or, you know, frequencies that when we see it here on Earth, it seems like it pulses or flashes.

Cool. Something that's like emitting like energy. I'm not sure. Oh, yeah. P-U-L-S-A-R? I have, but to be honest with you, I can't remember what it is. All right. How about a neutron star?

I'm sure just like any other star is a form of energy that now emits a sense of light. As far as neutron, I mean, that's just my best guess. I mean, they're called the neutron star because it's probably more neutrons than, like, what, positrons and those other things. So what do you think of those answers, Jorge? Yeah, no.

I think they demonstrate as much knowledge as me about these topics. I see. So like them, you're fascinated to learn more about neutron stars and pulsars and magnetars. Yeah, like them, I would have just said, yeah, it's like a fireball, right? Or it's a big ball of energy. Yeah, so a lot of people seem to have heard the term, right? Neutron Star is not unfamiliar to people. I think one reason is that Thor's hammer is supposed to be.

made out of neutron star material, isn't that right? Oh, is that true? I think so. I'm not an expert on the Marvel Universe. I'm sure somebody's going to write in and correct me, but please do. I think it was forged by the energy of a neutron star. Oh, right, of course. According to the movie. But I'm not sure if it's comic book lore.

Isn't it super heavy, though? It's super heavy, right? It's as dense as a neutron star, right? I don't know if it's super heavy. I know that only Thor can pick it up. Yeah, there's some complicated physics rules in the Marvel universe there. Well, this is not Daniel and Jorge explained the Marvel

universe, so let's get back to our universe. Although, that sounds like a great podcast. That's our spin-off podcast, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I thought people, you know, mostly had heard of this stuff, but they didn't really know a lot of details about what pulsars were, and nobody had any idea what a magnetar was.

I mean, it sounds like it's magnetic. Yes, that's a good clue. Magnetars are super magnetic. Is it like a star that will stick to your fridge? or it's a star that will erase your credit cards so the idea is that

when you look out into the sky at night you see a whole bunch of stars but some of the ones that you're looking at are not like the others that's right some of them are pretty weird and they're not always easy to spot so let's dig into it

the first category of weird stars we want to talk about is neutron stars yeah so what's a neutron star besides you know a plot element in the Avengers movie Well, I don't think they were created just for that purpose.

Neutron Star is what happens after some stars go supernova. So the typical life cycle of a star is gas and dust come together. They're compressed by gravity. It starts to ignite in the center. It burns for billions of years, right? Eventually it runs out of that fuel and the burning slows down and it can't any longer prevent itself from collapsing gravitationally, right? All this stuff.

gravity's trying to pull the star into as small a dot as possible, but during its whole life it's burning and that's causing this outward pressure. Eventually, that burning fades and fades and fades, then the star gives way to the inevitable forces of gravity and collapses. Like it's nuts out and all that stuff to suddenly crunches down into the center. Yeah, well, usually you get an implosion followed by an explosion, which is a supernova, so a huge amount of light is emitted. And then you have what's left over is a very, very, very dense, very small core.

And if it's big enough, if it's like massive enough, then it can form a black hole, right? And that's how a lot of black holes are made. But if it's not quite massive enough, sometimes it doesn't form a black hole. It just forms a super dense blob of stuff. Wow. So a neutron star is like a failed black hole. I don't want to pass any value judgments on neutron stars. I think neutron stars should be happy with how they look, you know, and not be aspiring to anything else.

That's right. But, yeah, neutron stars are black holes that didn't go black. This is a stellar positive podcast. That's right. That's right. Love your body stars. Love who you are. But yeah, they are blobs of matter that weren't big enough, weren't dense enough to turn into black holes.

What are you left with? This huge blob of matter. And it's an amazing amount of gravitational pressure. And it squeezes, squeezes down. And in the end, you know, you started out with this thing. It's millions of kilometers wide. All that stuff gets compressed into a little blob that's like 10 kilometers in radius. Which is pretty small.

It's like the size of Manhattan. Yeah, exactly. And these things start out often much bigger than our sun. Remember, our sun is fairly small compared to a lot of sun's out there. So this thing comes out to be like 10 kilometers wide, but still have like one or two times the mass of our sun. So imagine taking our sun and squeezing it down to like the size of Manhattan. Wow. And what's holding it together is the gravity, right?

That's right. Gravity is pulling this thing together. And nothing else is capable of sustaining. it anymore. There's no pressure left to keep it larger. So what's keeping it from becoming a black hole? We're going to just keep compressing because of gravity? Yeah, well, there's not enough gravity, right? There is

some pressure there. And so what happens, the reason it's called the neutron star is that gravity's compressed it. And, you know, mostly these atoms have neutrons and protons and electrons, right? Well, it gets so compressed that the protons and the electrons they have this interaction and they

turn into neutrons. Right? And so you turn all the protons and electrons into neutrons. Remember, protons are plus one, electrons are minus one. Wait, wait. Usually one is plus and one is negative, so they attract each other. But you're saying if they get close enough, they become a neutron? They turn into a neutron, yeah. And it's not like, don't be confused, a neutron is not just a proton and electrons stuck together, right?

There's a transformation of the corks that are inside the proton. One of the corks inside the protons gets flipped from being like a down cork to an upcork. and that turns the proton into a neutron. And also it emits a neutrino. And so you turn all the protons and electrons inside these atoms into neutrons so that all you're left with is neutrons. Why doesn't that collapse into a black hole?

Well, neutrons don't like to be on top of each other, right? And there's still gluons and things. The neutrons don't want to be like literally on top of each other. So there's still enough pressure there to prevent it from collapsing into a black hole. If there was more mass... I mean they push each other out still. Yeah.

They don't... They crowd each other out. Yeah, you know, it's like a bag of ping pong balls, right? You squeeze it and squeeze it and squeeze it, and eventually they pack so tightly that they can't get any closer. And if you had enough neutrons, you added another, you know, if you doubled the mass or something, there'd be enough gravitational pressure to form a black hole. But these are ones where there isn't enough gravitational pressure to overcome the neutrons pushing against each other. I see.

It's just stuck in this really dense state. Yeah, super dense. You know, if you had like a spoonful of this stuff, it would weigh three billion. tons. It's hard to even really fathom, like, how heavy this stuff is. A spoonful weighs 3 billion tons. Wow. Yeah. I mean, you've taken something twice the size of the sun and compressed it to a sphere 10 kilometers wide. Like, yeah, it's really dense stuff. Wow. So that's why it's called a neutron star. It's that it's mostly made out of neutrons. Yeah, it's basically just neutrons. Like, you know, what is a neutron star? It's a star of neutrons, right? For once,

We have a great name in science that's compact, it's crisp, and it's totally accurate, right? So, kudos to the anonymous physics naming committee that we are often crapping on their work. But today they did a great job. But why is it still called a star? Wouldn't it just be like a neutron ball? Wouldn't you just call it a neutron ball? You don't even want to give them this one, huh? Why is it called a star?

Yeah, well, okay, that's a good question. I mean, let's talk about how you see them, right? A neutron star isn't actively fusing. anymore. So it's not giving off a lot of light. So you can't see neutron stars in the sky the way you see other stars, right, just by seeing the light that comes off them. They're more like black holes in that they're intense sources of gravity and the stuff around them is getting sort of rubbed and compressed. They have an accretion disk, right? It's the stuff that's about to fall into the black hole of the neutron star. And that's giving off a lot of radiation. So you see the

neutron stars not directly, but if they happen to have an accretion disc, it gives off a lot of radiation. So, yeah, that's a fair point. That's a fair point. Maybe they shouldn't be called Star. They should be called like Neutron Rocks or Scoops O Neutron or something. Neutron balls. I feel like I should just get a Nobel Prize just for figuring out this problem. The Nobel Prize for Star Naming.

Yeah. Nice. Maybe you can get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for naming stars. Or at least a sticker, you know, like a little gold star. That would be nice. I'll make you a gold neutron star. Or a ball, technically. okay so I see what you're saying

so it's not like the thing itself that super dense core is glowing itself it's just that it's almost acting like a black hole and that it's so heavy and stuff that's around it it's such an intense gravitational field that the stuff around it kind of burns and gets shredded

and that's what gives up the light that we see yeah exactly it's a lot like a baby black hole right but it's cool because it's a baby black hole you can see into, right? The stuff is not hidden behind the gravitational event horizon. You can see it, you can study, you can ask questions like,

how fast is it spinning? What does it like to be on the surface? And it's pretty crazy because these neutron stars, you know, they contain all the angular momentum of the original star, right? So imagine, for example, think about like being a figure skater

or being on the ice. If you're spinning and you have your arms out wide and then you bring your arms in closer and closer together, you go faster and faster. Right. The reason is angular momentum. You have to have the same.

amount of spinning momentum when your arms are out wide as when you're they're close in right but having things close in means they have to go faster to have the same amount of angular momentum because it depends on the radius so like it shrinks like as it shrinks it goes faster and it spins faster and faster until exactly it gets so small that it's it's probably spinning spinning at a crazy speed yeah exactly some neutron stars we found spin like they rotate the entire star rotates like five or six hundred times per second 500 times per second Wow

Per second yeah which means if you're like standing on the surface of the star the surface is moving at like a quarter of the speed of light Wow but technically you could sort of like land on it right

like if you maybe right if you match the speed maybe I don't know what it would be like to be on the surface of a neutron star I think it would be pretty hot and unpleasant there's definitely a huge amount of radiation from all the stuff nearby but yeah technically you could

I mean it's a thing right you could land on it. You could touch it. I would suggest sending a robotic probe first, but yeah, go for it. Well, I mean, I think if you were spinning that fast, you would probably just get squished against your chair, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, imagine landing on something that's spinning really, really fast, right? You'd have to catch up to it in order to land on it. So you'd have to be orbiting it at a quarter of the speed of light. It'd be pretty tricky maneuver. Okay. So how rare are these neutron stars? How many are there in the universe or in our galaxy? Yeah, well, we've identified a bunch of them. You know, we've seen, we've identified pretty confidently like

thousands of them in our neighborhood. And the closest one we've ever seen is like 400 light years away. And then we can extrapolate. We say, well, if there's a certain density of neutron stars around here that we've seen, you know, how many do we expect to see? And we can have models of stars and supernova collapses and their masses. And the estimates are that there are tens of millions of these things in the galaxy. And, you know, that's a tiny fraction of the hundreds of billions of stars that are in our galaxy, but it's not a small number, right? There's a lot of these crazy, dense, super spinning, little tiny, what do you call them, neutron balls?

Neutron balls, yeah. That sounds like something you'd order for dessert, you know. I'd like two neutron balls with chocolate syrup, please. Can I get our physics ninja to cook up some neutron balls? Oh, no, you should have a dessert that's not quite so dense. Yeah, so there's a lot of them, and they spin really fast. They're super dense. But you can actually see them.

Can you actually see them in the night sky? You can't, right? Because I heard they don't give a visual light. Yeah, exactly. They're like anything else that doesn't glow, you know, just like an asteroid. You can't see an asteroid unless the sun shines on it. These things are too far away for any star to shine on them. We can only see them from the radiation that comes from nearby them

because of the gravitational pressure they exert on like gas and dust that's orbiting them. So you can't see them directly. You can't point your telescope at a neutron star and expect to see it. It would just be like a black rock, but not a black hole. You see like the chaos that it's causing around itself. Yeah, exactly. Just the way if you see a star walk, you know, through the crowd of photographers at the Oscars, right? You probably don't see the star directly.

You just see like all the flashes of light from the cameras and all the whispering and all the people jockeying to get a quote, right? Yeah. And so often it's the secondary stuff that you see more directly. Yeah, and probably if you try to reach, you can go in there and touch them, you probably also die, right? probably yeah some of the stars are spinning at a quarter of this people like to be careful yeah yeah definitely out I burned myself all right cool so those are neutron stars or neutron balls and so let's get into the other kinds of weird stars that we're going to talk about today but first let's take a quick break

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And we already talked about neutron stars. Now, Daniel, what's our second kind of weird star in the universe? The second kind of weird star is one of my favorites. And this is something called a pulsar. That sounds like a watch. they're very expensive they're only made in geneva and they cost like 50,000 dollars each because they're made by like tiny little dwarves

that are kept underground and never see the sun or anything all right there's my strange watch fantasy no pulsars pulsars are actually a type of neutron star right so neutron star as we just talked about and neutron stars have strong magnetic fields like really really powerful magnetic field

because as we talked about in our episode about why the earth has a magnetic field anything that has like a fluid inside of it that can conduct electricity and is active is going to have a magnetic field and neutron stars already have magnetic fields that are like billions of times as strong as the Earth's magnetic field because it's spinning is that why?

Yeah, it's spinning and because it has activity inside of it so you know there must be stuff going on inside the neutron star it's not just neutrons like crammed in and quiet right they're moving around there's like some fluid and some flow in order to get the magnetons. field. So inside of this 10-kilometer, two suns, mass, super dense thing, there's actually stuff going on inside of it that's creating a magnetic field. Yeah, but we don't understand that very well. Like, we even don't understand the magnetic field of our sun very well. You know,

our son has this very strong magnetic field and it flips every 11 years, which is really weird and we don't understand very well. So we have a very tentative understanding of the magnetic fields inside neutron stars. And even weirder is that some neutron stars have even strong stronger magnetic fields. Like, all right, neutron star is already crazy hot, crazy dense, crazy fast, crazy small, crazy spinning, crazy magnetic fields. And in this category of them called pulsars have extra powerful magnetic fields, like a thousand or a million times more powerful.

Wow. And so, but other, some stars don't have this magnetic field. Yes, some neutron stars have weaker magnetic fields. All neutron stars, we think, have magnetic fields. But some of them have such a strong magnetic field that something really weird happens. And remember that magnetic fields interact with charge particles. So a charged particle gets bent by magnetic field. And you know, on Earth, we see this all the time in the northern lights.

Northern lights are just charged particles from the sun or from somewhere else that got carried up to the north part of the earth by the magnetic field. We have these lines in the magnetic, then the charged particles get bent by them and sent to the north or to the south. So something weird happens on a pulsar that's sort of the inverse, which is that a lot of charge particles get shot. out from the pulsar around the north pole and the south pole of the pulsar. It becomes like a death ray. Yes, exactly. Two death rays, right? One from the north and one from the south of the south.

And there's all this radiation produced and it gets funneled up to the north and the south magnetic poles and then shot out into space. So it's not just like scent everywhere, like a glowing sun. It's like you take all this crazy radiation and you focus it into just two beams, one from the top and one from the bottom. Right. And the crazy thing is that this magnetic field is moving, right, relative to the star. Well, sometimes, like on Earth, the magnetic field is not pointing the same direction as the rotation axis, right? So the Earth, for example, spins around one axis, and the North Pole, as we talked

about in that other episode, is not aligned, right? So the direction of the North Pole doesn't always point the same way as the direction of the magnetic north pole. So there's a, it drifts. And like on Earth, the magnetic North Pole is drifting into Russia right now. That's right. And as long as they're not aligned, then the magnetic north pole is sort of like sweeping out a circle in space, right, like a cone in space. Now, imagine if you're blasting a hugely powerful laser.

That's basically what pulsars are doing. A hugely powerful laser out into space from your magnetic north pole, but the spinning north pole is in another direction. So the magnetic north pole is going to sweep through space, sending this huge blast of radiation in different places. And that's why it's called a pulsar, because it doesn't. always point towards Earth, for example. Sometimes that radiation sweeps across Earth and we're like, whoa, what was that? And then it turns black again. And it waits for

the pulsar to spin around and then it covers us again. It's like a lighthouse that's spinning around and you only see it sometimes. It's always shining, but you don't always see it. It's kind of like the Death Star and Star Wars, right? How is it like the Death Star? Yeah, I know. Follow me

on this one, Daniel. You know the little circle that shoots the beam out of the Death Star? That's kind of like the north pole of the pulsar. And so if you can imagine the Death Star kind of spinning along its axis, then that laser beam is going to be also rotating around. Kind of like a... Yeah.

Yeah. Like if you shine a flashlight out into the sky and you move your hand, it's going to be sweeping around, right? Yeah, exactly. You know, I think a better name for Pulsars would have been Death Stars because they really are Death Stars. There are these big blobs, right? fully operational battle stations

capable of delivering incredible amounts of radiation. Well, you know, this is our podcast, Daniel. We can name things whatever we want. Neutron balls, death stars. Exactly. In our little universe, we are in charge. The first Pulsar ever discovered

actually has a pretty cool name. It's called LGM. It stands for Little Green Men. What? That's because it was an exciting discovery. The first Pulsar I ever seen, you know, they saw it in their data and they saw it was bright and then dark, and then bright and then dark, and then bright and then dark, and then dark, and it was regular, right? This is not random. It's not like the Pulsar just shuns on you

sometimes, and sometimes it doesn't. It follows a very specific pattern. It felt like somebody was trying to send us a signal. Yes, exactly. So the first time they saw this, they thought, what? Are we getting a message from aliens? I mean, it's like Morse code or something, right? And so that's why they called it LGM1, because they thought, well, maybe this is the first time we're hearing from aliens. And they were a little hesitant to publish. That's the real name.

It's LGM. Yeah, the real scientific name and the first pulsar ever discovered was called LGM1. Wow. And they thought for a while, wow, maybe this is aliens. I mean, I love reading about those moments in science

when people thought they discovered aliens, right? Because maybe there are aliens out there. And usually aliens in science are relegated to like the fringe of, you know, the extremes, the crazy people, et cetera. But one day we might actually find aliens and some actual scientists doing careful work is going to stumble across evidence of it

or hear a message from space or something. So I love hearing about those moments when a scientist is like, am I that person? Am I the person who's going to call it my colleagues and be like, no, I know this sounds crazy, but I think I found aliens. Well, they must have felt pretty confident if they named it LGM.

I think that was mostly a joke between them. But then they found a second one coming from a totally different direction in the sky and so they were like oh let's call this one little blue man big green man or something so they found a second one so they thought oh

there must be it can't just be there can be two civilizations of little green men sending us signals it must be some natural phenomenon yeah exactly and the thing that made it seem like maybe it was aliens was just the fact that it was regular and that's not that hard to explain right

there's not that much information content in a regular message. If somebody wants to send you a message saying, hi, we're here, we're alive, come talk to us. You don't just send regular beeps, right? You want to send some information. And so that's, it wasn't very convincing as an alien message anyway. Yeah, so then they found the second one, and then they found a bunch. And so now we found lots of these things. So if you were to look at these out and you wouldn't see them in the night sky, right? You only see them in x-ray, the x-ray spectrum, right? That's right. I think they're mostly in x-ray. And you would see them as kind of these blinking lights.

exactly and some of them blink slow because they rotate slowly and some of them blink really fast because they rotate like crazy fast like some of them blink on and off every millisecond wow so it's like this something 10 kilometers big and with the massive two suns spinning once every millisecond yes exactly I mean this is an enormous cosmic object doing these really extreme maneuvers just to send us this bling

Ranking radiation. It's really crazy. Wow. And there's a mystery to them, right? Like, we don't really know why they're sending this, how or how they're sending these beams of radiation. Yeah. You know, how the magnetic field is generated and how the magnetic field turns into this beam of radiation is not something that's well understood. It's an area of active research. And, you know, there's some models here and there, but nobody's really fully confident that they understand it. It's pretty weird. I think it's pretty clear. There's probably some guys in black helmets inside turning a lever. and that's what's causing these beams. I mean, obviously, it's a death star.

I find your lack of faith in science disturbing, Jorge. And it costs these guys energy, right? You can't just beam a huge amount of energy into space for free. That energy comes from somewhere. So what happens is as the years and the millions of years go by, these pulsars start to slow down. Essentially, shooting out all this energy into space is like friction on the pulsar.

and it slows down. And they last, like, you know, we think like 10 to 100 million years. Oh, so only a little while in the Granskymos of things. Yeah, only a little while. And they're unique. You know, each one has its own pattern. And that makes it really cool because you can use them for things like cosmic locations. Oh, kind of like beacons.

Yeah, you can say, I'm this distance from that pulsar, and I'm that distance from this other pulsar, and I'm this distance from this third pulsar, and that's enough to say uniquely where you are in the galaxy. Oh, wow. That's pretty cool. It is cool. We actually, we used it because when we sent out some of those early satellites that we just sort of like lofted out into space thinking maybe one day they'll crash land on an alien planet, we included on that spacecraft a plaque that describes our location using pulsars. So then what happens after 100 million years after they run out of energy? They just become regular neutron balls? Yeah, yeah, exactly. They start to slow down. They just become dark.

Neutron balls. Yeah, exactly. Oh. Hopefully the aliens find us before our address becomes obsolete. All right, let's get into the last

type of weird star out there in the universe. But first, let's take another 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, 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 podcasts. Hola, it's HoneyGerman, and my podcast, Grasias Come Again, is back. This season we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years.

Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending With a little bit of chisement

A lot of laughs And those amazing Vibras you've come to expect And of course we'll explore deeper topics Dealing with identity, struggles And all the issues affecting our Latin community You feel like you get a little whitewash Because you have to do the code switching I won't say whitewash

Because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me But the whole pretending and coat You know it takes a toll on you Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again As part of My Cultura podcast network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Our IHeart Radio Music Festival

presented by Capital One is coming back to Las Vegas. Vegas. September 19th and 20th. On your feet. Streaming live only on Hulu. Ladies and gentlemen. Brian Adams. Ed Sheeran. Fade.

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Tate McCray. The offspring. Tim McRaw. Tickets are on. Sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today. AXS.com. Okay, so the last kind of weird star that our listener...

Our physics ninja. Our physics ninja. Yeah, Callie Smith suggested we talk about is something called a magnetar. Yeah, a magnetar. Magnetars are like the extreme version of pulsar. So pulsars are the extreme version of neutron stars, which are already extreme, and magnetars are like the crazy of the crazy. Huh.

But wait, if we're naming neutron stars, neutron balls, you're saying this is the balsiest of all the neutron balls. That's right. These are the balsiest balls of all. And AC and D.C. would love these. Yeah, neutron stars sometimes have crazy magnetic fields, and they call them a pulsar. But when they have super crazy magnetic fields, like ridiculous, then you call it a magnetar. And so these are things that are spinning incredibly fast and have incredibly powerful magnetic fields.

We think these are the most powerful magnetic fields basically anywhere in the universe. Wow. What do you mean? So it's just something, it's just a neutron star or neutron balls. It just happens for some reason to have started off with a giant magnetic field and rotation. Is there something that would, you know, how do you,

what causes a neutron ball to have? these higher or higher energy in fields? I think Thor's hammer has to strike it at just the right moment. It was bitten by a microwaved spider. We don't know. We don't understand. We know that it's not super rare. Something like one in ten of these pulsars is a magnetar.

So it's not super rare, but they're super powerful. And we don't even really have a strong grasp on magnetic fields of ordinary stars. So understanding like the crazy extreme magnetic fields of some really strange neutron stars is definitely an area of active research and not something that we understand very well. So wait, are these things are made out of pure neutrons? There aren't any more atoms, basically, is what you're saying.

It's just pure neutrons clump together. That's right. If you want a source of pure neutrons, you want to go to Whole Foods and go in the bulk food sections, they don't have neutrons. You've got to go out to the neutron stars to get a pure spoonful of neutrons. Because remember, atoms started out

with protons and electrons and neutrons. But in the vicinity of a neutron star, in the internal crazy compressed bits of a neutron star, the protons, the electrons react to give neutrons, and then also neutrinos, which fly out into outer space and are not kept inside the star. Wow. But neutrons don't have any electric charge, right? They're not neither positive nor negative. So how can they have a magnetic field? Well, there are quarks inside the neutron, right, which have charge. Oh. So it's the spinning of those that's causing maybe these fields. fields. Yeah, exactly. And as I said, we don't really understand it very well. But these things are

crazy, and they're moving really fast, and they're moving so fast that they don't last very long. Like we said, that pulsars take like 100 or 10 to 100 million years to give up all their energy because they're spinning and beaming all this energy into space. Magnetars use up all their energy in like 10,000 years or something. Wow, that's super quick. That's like a, it's like a blink in the age of the universe. Yeah, exactly. It's hardly anything, right? It's basically an explosion. right from the from the time scale of the universe it's an explosion it basically don't last at all take a flash yeah exactly it's a flash but you know before they before they die they do even weirder stuff so the surface of the of this magnetar is very intense right it's a huge amount of pressure

and we think that maybe it's not stable and that sometimes what happens is the same thing that happens on earth when you have huge dense bits of matter pushed against each other which on earth you get an earthquake So on the surface of this magnetar, you might get a star quake. What? Huge blob to these neutrons, like push against each other and slide and slip, and you get cracks, and the thing reforms. Wow. And, yeah, I know. It sounds like science fiction, right?

But we think it's actually literally happening in this universe. Because they're spinning faster. You're saying these spin even faster than a thousand times a second. Yeah, some of them do, exactly. And they have crazy magnetic fields. And the reason we think that sometimes they have these star quakes is that we see these really strong flashes of light, these gamma ray bursts that we think are essentially like light escaping from the inside the neutron star during one of these star quakes.

Wow. And so it releases this huge amount of energy. And, you know, we should do a whole podcast episode on gamma ray bursts. They're fascinating. They're not very well understood. But one idea is that they might be caused by star quakes on the surface of magnetars. Wow. Wait, so...

Doesn't that sound like fiction? It just sounds like fiction. Starquakes on the surface of magnetars. Well, it doesn't sound that impressive if you switch to balls, right? Ball quakes on the surface of neutron balls. And that's why we're not using balls, because it doesn't sound as good. All right, so then how do we see these magnetars? Do you also see them blinking like the pulsars?

Yes, they also emit a lot of radiation. That's why they slow down. So they're essentially like the super duper version of pulsars. If pulsars are super duper neutron stars, then magnetars are super duper pulsars. and we can see them in that same way. And then also sometimes they emit these huge flashes of gamma rays. Which, coincidentally, is what gave another Avenger his superpowers. What? Which one?

I don't... I'm not up on my Marvel Universe details. It's the Hulk. The Hulk, everyone knows, got his powers from Gamma Ray. Gamma Ray radiation. Yeah, but not from a Gamma Ray burst from outer space, right? That would have affected everybody. Well, we don't, hmm.

When he was getting one of his seven peach, he was doing an experiment and immersed him in game arrays, right? Yeah. All right, so those are magnetars. They're like supercharged pulsars, which are like supercharged neutron stars, which are like actually neutron balls. Exactly, exactly. And, you know, these things are not just ideas, right?

These things are out there. They're literally there. You could take a spaceship and go and look at one and visit them and interact with them. The universe really has this stuff in it. Right. And I always try to remind myself in astronomy that we've only seen the tip of the iceberg. You know, every decade we find something else super weird that astronomers 20 years ago would have thought, no, that's incredible. That's crazy.

That's too weird to exist. Which means that there must be lots of stuff out there we haven't even imagined, crazy stuff to trip over. We haven't even begun to think about. Well, there are even crazier things that we think might be out there, right? Hypothetical crazy stars. Yeah, there's no shortage of theorists out there thinking up. other crazy stars that might exist. So let's transition from talking about real weird stuff

to hypothetical weird stuff. What are some of the things that physicists think might be out there that are even weirder? Well, one of them is called a quark star. And so we talked about how the neutron has quarks inside of it, right? And that in a neutron star, it's really compressed and the neutrons are all pushed up against each other. well it might be that you get a neutron star that's so dense that has enough gravity not to become a black hole but to break up the neutrons right where the bond between the quarks is weaker than the energy of the gravity and so basically breaks them up and then you just have a ball of quarks

a cork ball a corg ball and you know we don't see even though we're made out of protons and neutrons which are made out of corks we never see corks by themselves even in particle colliders we never see that because corks have really really strong and neutrons which are made out of corks we never see that because corks have really really strong. bonds with each other. They have this really strange kind of force. You know how gravity gets weaker as things get further apart? Well, the bonds between quarks is really weird. It gets stronger as things get further apart, which means it's very, very difficult to pull things apart because the amount of energy stored in that bond becomes enormous. But where would this pressure come from? Like, what would be the difference between a regular neutron star and a quark star? I don't know. That's a great question. I think it must just have to do with the mass of it and the gravitational pressure, right? So if it's bigger than if it's enough mass to form a neutron star,

but not quite enough to form a black hole, then under some conditions it might break down those neutrons into quarks. But that's not something we've ever seen. Wow. So you would just see like a ball of solid quarks? Yes, exactly. And I'm not sure how you would observe that, right? That's a great question. How would you tell the difference between a neutron star and a star where the neutrons have broken down into quarks? There must be some sort of strange radiation that's generated from that kind of star. You just ask it, right? Like on the red carpet, you're over here, over here. That's right. And the kinds of corks that are in neutrons are just up corks and down quarks. But there are other kinds of corks. There's the strange cork and the bottom cork and the charm cork.

And so some people have thought of like, well, what if you had a star made exclusively of strange corks, for example? And so they call that, of course, the strange stars. And that's another just crazy hypothetical example. of something, but it could be out there, right? It could be this enormous ball of pure strange quarks just out there floating in the universe. Well, that's a whole different Avenger, I think. That's right. That's the strange Hulk,

right? But I also read that there is something that might be called a dark matter star. Yeah, exactly. Remember that stars are formed from gravity, right? It's gravity pulling stuff together and squeezing it and making denser and denter. Well, we know that dark matter's out there.

In fact, there's more dark matter than anything else. And we do know that it's affected by gravity. That's how we discovered it. So it's entirely possible that in every star there's dark matter, but that there are some stars that have huge fractions of dark matter, or that in the early universe, some of these stars were formed primarily from dark matter. Or even you might have stars that are pure dark matter.

Like a dark star. A dark star. Exactly. And that sounds like a science fiction novel I'd like to read. Meaning you could get enough dark matter condensed in the same spot that it might actually start to, like, combust or burn? Well, that's a question we don't know the answer to, because we don't know if dark matter has any interactions with itself other than gravity.

So gravity can cluster it together. The reason that normal matter starts to burn is because of the other forces, right? The strong force and fusion and all that stuff comes from the other interactions. We don't know anything about dark matter's interactions. If it has some sort of crazy interaction with itself, then, yeah, it could combust and start to burn, but then it might emit some sort of radiation we can't see, right? You might admit dark photons, for example. So again, you're just talking about dark matter balls.

Back to the balls, as always, Jorge. Dark balls. Welcome to Daniel and Jorge, explain the balls. No, but do you know what I mean? Like, you're really just talking about clumps of really super dense dark matter clubs. Yes, exactly. But they might be so dense and so crazy that they might emit some sort of lighter radiation. They might.

That part is pure speculation. I would not be surprised if dark matter formed clumps that was at least as dense as stars, right? So you could call that a star, I think. We don't know anything about dark matter interactions for generating radiation, so that is just pure wild guesses. It might be that dark matter has no other kind of interaction, in which case it just sort of quietly gets clumped together by gravity to form these structures, but never radiates anything. It could be. I don't think so. I think dark matter must have some kind of interaction with normal matter, otherwise it wouldn't have come into equilibrium in the

the universe, but we haven't figured that out at all. That's like one of the biggest questions in science right now is doesn't dark matter feel any forces other than gravity. Does it feel anything? It's so cold and distant, just like all those other stars. So emo. So full of itself. All right, well, those are all the weird stars that Callie Smith wanted us to talk about. And I think the lesson is here is that the universe always has more surprises waiting for us. That's right. Don't be bored by the universe. It's always got something on the next page. So just turn the page, dial that telescope up one more notch, and you'll see something else to entertain you. All right. Thanks, everybody.

Thanks for listening, everybody, and tune in next time. And if you have questions about something we said, or if you have questions about something else, or you want an episode where we talk about your questions, just send us your suggestions to questions at danielandhorpe.com. All right. 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. 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.

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