Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What does the NICER telescope study?

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

Daniel and Jorge explain how an X-ray telescope works and what it reveals about the inside of neutron stars.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Well, let's check in. Here's a paper by the ASCAP rotation measure and polarization investigation team, also known as armpit. I don't know what the best part of that is, is the ass cap or the armpit. There's also the background imaging of cosmic extragalactic polarization or bicep. Ooh, all right, a musley acronym. Well, if you're not into the aggressive ones, then you won't like the balloon-borne large aperture sub-millimeter telescope or blast. Oh, nice. Although technically that one should be blast, right? Balloon born?

You guys need more, you know, positive, upbeat, science-y names. Hmm, well then, what do you think of the project called Super Huge Interferometric Telescope or S-H-I-T? Sounds like a crappy title. What does it study, Dark Matter? Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I'm definitely not an astronomer. Why not, Daniel? Not a fan of the stars? I love the stars, and I love the mysteries of the universe, and I am a professor in the physics and astronomy department.

So I sometimes get emails that address me as an astronomer, and I wonder what the real astronomers in my department would think about that. Oh, well, it's an interesting distinction, right? It's called physics and astronomy. Is astronomy not part of physics? You have hit on an existential question for astronomers that I see them struggling with every single day. Really? They don't, wow, they don't consider themselves physicists?

I hesitate to speak for the astronomers out there, but I definitely know that they feel like a different community. You know, it's a different set of skills, a different set of questions, a different set of ideas, and also like a different set of classes that astronomy, students, and physics students take. Interesting. But fundamentally, you're both trying to study how things work out there in the universe, right? Yeah, but I guess all scientists are, right? From that point of view, chemists are physicists, biologists or physicists? But are physicists chemists? Only physical chemists. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of iHeart radio.

In which we believe everybody's a physicist, even the chemists and the biologists, and maybe even the sociologists, because we all want to understand how. the universe works. We want to apply our tools, the eyeballs that are in our head and the eyeballs that we can build to answer the deepest questions about the nature of the universe. What is out there on those other planets surrounding those other weird stars in those other swirling galaxies and what can it tell us about the nature of the universe we live in where it came from and how it will all end? Yeah, it is a swirly universe full of amazing facts and incredible objects out there doing incredible things that we just want to know more about.

Every time we look at it into the universe, we discover something new and weird because the universe is stranger than fiction. When you think you've understood something and you point your telescope at it just to sort of double check, you find something bizarre like the Fermi bubbles or astrophysical jets or neutron stars or pulsars or any other sort of weird surprise that nature has in store for us. Yeah, does all sound like basketball teams, Daniel. Is there like an intramural physics department league?

That's right. You've got to be able to dunk to get on the astrophysical jets team. Yeah. No, there's not a whole lot of dunking going on in the physics league. I've got to be honest. Only donuts and coffee. Yeah, more sort of like Twitter dunking than actual physics dunking. But that's right.

We all want to know. We're all scientists in a way. Everyone has curiosity and questions about the universe. And just asking the question sort of kind of qualifies you as a scientist, doesn't it? Yeah, everybody out there is doing science. if you're asking questions about the universe. Remember that science is not some weird institution in a tall building somewhere. It's just a bunch of people asking questions about how the universe works

and deciding to dedicate their lives to answering one particular question about the universe. So if you have a question that's burning deep inside you about the way the universe works, then maybe you can help push forward the envelope of human knowledge. Yeah, maybe like maybe your department should just be called the science department, right? Or I guess you're all, you know, a science part of being human, so maybe it should just be the human department? The department. That sounds like a John Grisham novel about science department gone bad.

Daniel, you could be the John Grisham of physics. You could write thriller novels about science conspiracies. We don't tenure anyone. We just take 10 years to chew them up. There you go. That's the tagline for your debut novel. That's right. Netflix, write to me, please.

We joke, but that's a little bit the history of science, right? It all started out as philosophy, and then when a question becomes sort of well enough formed for people to do experiments, it buds off into its own area of science. And then it splits further and further into sub-areas. I joke with my wife a lot because while the physics department is the biggest department on our campus and on many campuses, that's only because there are like nine different biology departments. So all in all this like 10 times as many biologists as physicists on campus.

If only they knew, you could put all the names in one department title, you know, like physics and astronomy. Yeah, exactly. Or I guess, you know, we're all part of the universe, so really it should just be the universe department or maybe like the university. Is that where that name comes from? I have no idea, actually, where the word university comes from. Maybe it's an acronym.

What does it stand for? It stands for a university. It's a recursive title. internally versus I ran out of steam halfway through. Yeah, extraneous resources, research, science, and engineering. Bam. We almost got there. We almost got there.

But it is a pretty wonderful universe full of things to think about and to wonder about, including all of the amazing light and information that's out there for us to see. Exactly. While so much of the universe is incredible and beautiful, just in the visible light that our eyes, can see, we also know that the universe looks quite different in other kinds of light, in light where the wavelengths are too long for our eyes to see, radio and infrared, and also in very high energy photons that are above our visible spectrum, in the ultraviolet and deep into the x-ray. Yeah, because humans have sort of a very limited view of what we can see

out there with light, and it's almost like the universe isn't just there for us. It's doing all kinds of things in other parts of the light spectrum. Just the same way your doctor can see very different things about your body using x-rays, which pass through all the soft tissue and reveal the location of the bones, then they can't using visible light just by looking on the outside. Astronomers can also x-ray the universe by looking at the x-ray photons that arrive here on Earth. Yeah. Do they have special like x-ray glasses, like the time you can order from the back of comic books? You want to see through the clothes of astronomers? Is that what's going on? Yeah, you won't like what you see.

Probably not, all those donuts. Not a lot of biceps. But we do have very special x-ray eyeballs that we have built. Since our eyeballs can't see x-ray light, we've had to develop special technology to focus, to shape, to detect these x-ray photons, and to use them to answer deep questions about what's out there in the universe. Wow. You make it sound like astronomers have like special implants in their eyeballs that give them x-ray vision. That's the future, man. right to step one is build a big device that weighs like a ton and sits outside your body

and eventually you miniaturize it and implant it right in the brain well step one is to get your own department and then you can order that kind of stuff that's the goal I just want the department of Daniel there he go and your subject matter is just yourself whatever I want maybe actually the rest of the department wants me to have my own department I'm going to get kicked out you could be the chair of your own department you could have just a chair and be the chair There should be some adage. He who has himself, his department chair, has a fool for a faculty member. But anyways, there is a lot of incredible stuff happening out there in the universe in the x-ray spectrum.

It's not just good for looking at your bones or your teeth. There are also incredible things happening in stars and neutron stars and pulsars out there and even black holes that we could learn if we can see better in this part of the spectrum. Because remember that different parts of the universe are at different temperatures and that something thinks temperature determines the light it emits. Our sun emits light in the visible spectrum because its surface is around 5,000 Kelvin. And the Earth emits light in the infrared because it is much, much cooler. And you emit light in the infrared because you are also cooler than the sun, but hotter than the Earth. And things out there that are super duper hot, like the surface of

neutron stars or jets near black holes, they only emit in the x-ray. So if you look at some corner of the universe, it might seem dark until you turn on your x-ray eyeballs and then all of a sudden it's glowing very brightly. Yeah, but I think what's also cool is that, you know, like our sun emits both light in the visible spectrum, but also it emits x-rays, right? Like you can look up pictures of x-ray, uh, what the sun looks like with x-ray glasses. Yeah, the sun emits all kinds of radiation that our eye can't see from infrared light all the way up to x-rays and even in particles. We talked recently about how you could see the sun in neutrinos. If you had neutrino glasses. So while it's true that the sun peaks in the visible spectrum, that's where

a lot of its light is emitted. It's not exclusive to the visible spectrum. It also does produce some x-rays. And it tells a different story. If you look at a picture of the sun in infrared or visible or x-ray, you see sort of different parts of the sun. Different things are going on. Yeah. And so the more we can see in other parts of the light spectrum, the more we can learn about the universe. And so humans have been building better and better x-ray telescopes. And as part of of our mission to be nicer to astronomers, we let them give them really silly names like the nicer telescope, N-I-C-E-R. Yeah, so to the end of the program, we'll be tackling the question.

What does the nicer telescope study? Now, Daniel, isn't the answer obvious? Doesn't it study things that the less nice telescopes can study? There's a huge rivalry in astronomy between the nicer telescope and the meaner telescope to see which is better for learning about the universe. But then there's the third rivalry there with the naughty astronomers. Are you nice, naughty, or nasty? Or mean? You said mean, right.

The meaner telescope, yeah, exactly. We know who's getting the Christmas presents from Santa, but who's getting the goods about the universe? No, there's nothing nice or mean about the nicer telescope. It's just a ridiculous acronym. It stands for Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer. They pull that R from the end of Explorer to make it nicer. Why not just call it the Nice Telescope?

Why did they have to pull up the R from the end? I have no idea. The Nice Telescope sounds pretty good, right? But I guess they wanted to MF, you need to win a grand proposal these days, you know? Not just Nice, Nicer. Oh, I see. It's like 2.0. It's like Nice 2.0.

Next generation of Nice Telescope. I also like how they skipped the star. They're just like, let's just not include star in our acronym. I mean, it really should be like necesser. Now I see why they skipped the star. Well, I guess they want to leave room so that the next one could be the nicest telescope. Then where do they go from there? You know, double nice, double nicest, Uber-niced?

They go for the Mother Teresa telescope. I guess they haven't named themselves on corner the way the ground-based telescopes have. You know, they've got extremely large, ultra-large, absurdly large telescope. Is that for real? Is there an absurdly large telescope, official name? No, I'm joking. The actual title of it is called the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope. And that's a real title of a real project. No, that is overwhelmingly crazy. The biggest telescope that's actually going to be built is called Extremely Large. Overwhelmingly Large was a little overwhelmingly large and so it wasn't actually funded.

It was overwhelmingly rejected. I was overwhelmingly excited about it. But we could learn a huge amount about the universe. But anyway. They were underwhelmed. It's certainly underfunded. But this is a new telescope, sort of relatively new in the last couple of years, that's out there studying the x-rays that are coming to us from other parts of the universe

so we can study amazing things. And we were wondering how many people had heard of this telescope and what it's studying. So Daniel went out there into the wilds of the internet to ask people the question, what do you think the nicer telescope studies? And I'm continuously indebted to those of you who are willing to volunteer to answer these questions

and give us a sense for what people know and what they are curious about. If you'd like to participate, please write to us to questions at danielandhorpe.com. Everybody's welcome. Here's what people had to say. My guess on what nicer telescope study stands for, or the acronym Nicer, is Nebula Interstellar Clinical Euphoric Research, where I think we study the actual beauty of nebulas through a telescope, and its effect on psychedelic trips, clothing patterns, and obsession among humans.

Well, this is my favorite subject, Neutron Stars. So nicer Bustadi Neutron Stars. This is what I have until now. Not know how it will work and when it will be on, but can wait to, find out more. I have no idea. The nicer telescope studies how nice things are or does it study ice? Like the end stands for something I don't know and then ice like does it is it some telescope that's going to find more water on Mars or other moons of the solar system or exoplanets or I don't No, yeah, I'll go with that. The nicer telescope studies ice on other celestial bodies.

Nicer. Well, that's got to be some acronym that's good for funding. So how about nearly impossibly cool electromagnetic radiation? I have no idea. I'm not going to make up some guess of the acronym. Nope, never heard of it. All right. I'm surprised nobody said nice things. I like the person who said it studies how nice things are. Like you can measure the niceness of astrophysical objects. Like, oh, that black hole looks so nice. Can you measure that? Are there physical units for that?

For nicety? Nicety. Measured in awes. Awes. But it is sort of an interesting telescope to talk about and lots of fascinating exploration that it's doing. And so Daniel, maybe step us through this again. What does nicer stand for?

So nicer stands for, again, neutron star interior. composition explorer, which tells you already a little bit about its mission. It's designed to understand the interior of neutron star. We call this thing a telescope, but if you saw a picture this thing, you wouldn't think that's a telescope. Right. I have a picture here in front of me, and it looks like a refrigerator, basically, like a box, like a refrigerator bugs. It looks more like a particle physics detector because it kind of is. It sits right on the boundary between the kind of devices that astronomers built like classical telescopes and those devices that is that particle physicists build, which basically always look like the Borg ship.

Yeah, and this one is kind of, it looks like a cube, and it has a frame, and it's got some like a grid on one side. So it does sort of look like an air conditioning unit that you see sticking out of a window. It does look like an air conditioning unit, and it's basically just a box with a bunch of tubes in it. And the reason it's so different from the kind of telescope you imagine when you think about Hubble or when you go to your astronomy night at your nearby university is because x-rays are very, very different from visible light in how they interact with matter. So you need a very different kind of system to like gather the light and to bend it and to focus it because x-rays mostly just go through stuff like x-rays would go right through Hubble.

I see. So even if you had a lens, the x-rays would just go through the glass that they wouldn't bend necessarily. That's right. X-rays, when it hit an object sort of head on that way, the way you might hit a lens, they would just penetrate through because they have very high frequency. And remember that while air and glass seem transparent, to us in the visible light, different things are transparent or opaque to x-rays. And so while your body is mostly transparent to x-rays, which is why you can use it to take a

picture of your insides, the air is mostly opaque to x-rays. Like our atmosphere blocks almost all x-rays, which is why all the x-ray telescopes have to be like on balloons or in space. That's why this one is attached to the international space station. And so you can't use typical optics to gather and focus x-rays for that reason. Interesting. But can it focus at all? Or is it, are there any moving parts to it? Or is it just a box with little sensors in it? It's mostly a box with collimating sensors.

So you have these tubes and the x-ray hits one of the tubes. And at the end of the tube is a little detector that tells you, I got an x-ray. And the idea is that these are collimators. And so you can sort of point this thing in one direction and that limits the focus. So you're not just getting x-rays from the whole universe onto the back plane, which is where your detectors are. You have like, you know, a bunch of tubes so you can only look sort of in one direction. So that's one aspect of these tubes. They're columnators. They restrict your field of view so you know what you're looking at. They're later like sort of like looking through a tube

kind of, you know, like a cardboard tube. If you look through it, it limits you to only look at one thing in front of you. Yeah. And that's the way your eye works also, right? The reason that our eyes are inset inside our heads and behind a little hole is so you can tell sort of where the light came from based on where it hits the back of your eye rather than just having light sensitive cells on the surface where you could just tell that there is light or there isn't light. And so by having these tubes in front of your x-ray detectors, you can tell when the x-ray hits detector at the back of the tube where it came from. And it's a little bit better than that because the tubes also do a very small amount of focusing. Oh yeah? What do you mean? Well, it's hard to focus x-rays when they

hit straight on, but you can do like grazing focusing. If an x-ray comes in at a very high angle to some surfaces to some kinds of materials, they will bounce off at a slightly different angle. So they have these really weird kind of, they call them lenses, but they're nothing like what you would recognize. They have these very special shapes. They're called paraboloids and hyperboloids. And they're designed so the x-ray comes in at a very high angle and then gets bent very slightly towards your detector. So it's sort of like the tube is larger on one side and smaller on the other. And it just sort of like tapers a little bit to gather the x-rays down to the bottom.

So it does have like a focusing lens. It's just not made out of glass. It's not made out of glass. This thing is made out of 24 concentric shells of aluminum that are coated in gold. And the gold has the right properties to sort of change the angle of the x-rays just a little bit. Remember, these are very, very high energy photons. So it's very hard to bend them at all. Ah, sounds expensive.

Yeah, exactly. And they have 56 of these tubes. And on the back plane, they have silicon detectors that can detect these. x-rays. When x-rays smashes into it, it like releases an electron that's in the silicon wafer, and then that can get picked up by a circuitry. So it's basically just like a digital camera on the back plane that's sensitive to x-rays that are focused onto it by these very gradually tapering tubes. And so these tubes are kind of in a box, and this box is sort of like attached to the outside of the International Space Station? Yeah, it's got like a little arm

and it's stuck to the space station, and they can turn it so they can point it to different things, like, oh, look at this star, look at that star, and it's maintained by the astronauts. And was this done recently? It's sort of in the last few years, right? Yeah, it was installed in 2017. So the space station's been up there for decades, right? But they keep adding to the science mission. It's pretty cool to have a facility in space where you can install new stuff and you can have people maintain it and control it. And so this has been up there for the last five years. And it's done a lot of really interesting science already. Yeah, and it's sort of named with the word neutron star in its name, but it actually,

sort of studies a wider range of x-rays, right? What are called soft x-rays. Yeah, we have a variety of x-ray telescopes. You might have heard of Chandra and other space-based telescopes that are capable of seeing the sky in x-rays. But to study neutron stars, we're interested in a very particular kind of x-ray, sort of on the less energetic side of the typical x-ray spectrum, from around 200 electron volts up to about 12,000 electron volts.

And this is what we call soft x-rays, soft just meaning a little bit lower energy than like hard. hard x-rays. I see because the hard X, rays have not been approved. Definitely not for the nicer telescope. That's for the naughty telescope. That's the NC-17 telescope, still to be launched. Maybe that's where the R comes from.

I mean, that's why they kept the R at the end. But it does show us some very dramatic and incredible things going on in the universe. Yeah. And it's not just neutron stars. There's all kinds of stuff out there that gives off x-rays that reveal amazing things about the universe. So let's get into the things that nicer is studying, but first, let's take a quick break. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, and in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr.

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shifting culture and using your voice to spark change. A very fake, capital-driven environment and society will have a lot of people tell half-truths. I'm telling you, I'm on the energy committee. Like, if the energy is not right, we're not doing it, whatever that it is. Listen to Culture raises us on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking about the nicer telescope, the neutron star interior, composition explorer er, which stands for nice er, sort of, sort of. You got to say the er at the end of it.

You can't just say explorer. You got to say explore er. So the R gets in the acronym. I guess there are no laws or rules about acronyms, right? You can pretty much do whatever you want. You can grab letters, ignore letters, right? Why not? If there are any rules, and astronomy is busy breaking them.

There are some really ridiculous acronyms out there. Oh, they're rebels in the astronomy community. That's why they need their own department. I feel like there's this trend in science. Every time you come up with a new idea, it needs a name and an acronym so you can brand it your cool new idea. What happened to naming it after yourself? May you're encouraged to do both.

Like make an act like Cham could be a pretty cool, heterogenic, amazing moniker. Convolutional high altitude mechanic. There you go. I am a mechanical engineer. All right. So this is a telescope out there, up there attached to the International Space Station, and it's made out of little tubes that can collect x-rays from specific points in space. And it's been studying all kinds of things, including neutron stars.

So, Daniel, what is a neutron star? A neutron star is a super fascinating object. It's basically the remnant of a massive super giant star that collapsed. Remember that stars burn for a long time because they have very hot interiors and they have the fuel needed to perform fusion, like to squeeze hydrogen together into helium and then squeeze that heat. helium into something else, then squeeze that into something else, and they get heavier and heavier and heavier where the byproducts of fusion produce the byproducts of the next round of fusion until they no longer can, until they're making iron, which cools the star down and causes it to collapse. So eventually gravity wins its battle against fusion and collapses the star.

And depending on the mass of the original lump of stuff you started with, you can get a black hole if you have enough stuff, or you could get a neutron star, which is just this really hot, very dense clump. of matter left over the core of a star after it has collapsed. Yeah, it's sort of like one half step up from a black hole, right? Like we had a whole episode about neutron stars and they're just kind of like what happens when light is just almost compressed enough to make a black hole. There are various ways that you can resist the pull of gravity, right? A burning star resists it by producing all this energy that puffs out its outer layers and prevents it from collapsing further.

Once gravity has overcome that, there's like another threshold, which is this electron degeneracy threshold. The electrons don't want to get squeezed together as closely as gravity wants to squeeze them and they resist. But if you add more mass to it, it can overcome even that and then produce a black hole. It's like the last holdout. It's like matters last line of defense. Yeah. And but do they inevitably become black holes or can they, you know, resist becoming a black hole forever? Neutron stars, we think are stable. They can resist becoming a black hole unless they gather more mass. There's a maximum mass to the neutron stars. We think. But that's not something we understand very well.

Like we have pretty basic questions about neutron stars, like how much mass is in a neutron star? How big can they get? Or how wide are they? We know that neutron stars are super duper dense. They have like one and a half times the mass of our sun squeezed into an object with a radius of like 15 kilometers. But we don't really know what the boundaries are. Like can you get a two solar mass neutron star or does it collapse into a black hole? Interesting.

I guess maybe a question is, they are sort of close to a black hole and they're not effusing anymore, meaning exploding and giving of light, how do we like know where they are? How do we find them? And have we actually seen one? We have seen neutron stars, but you're right, they are hard to see because they don't glow in the visible. But the incredible gravity means incredible temperatures and incredible pressures. And under those conditions, they tend to produce x-rays. So the surface of a neutron star has this crust, this really incredibly intense environment.

And as that crust like rubs and bumps and has star quakes, it produces flashes of light, x-rays that we can see with our fancy eyeballs on the International Space Station. Interesting. It has like a shiny coat to it, you know, like most stars emit light sort of from the insides. But this one, you were saying neutron stars amid light and x-rays on the surface. Yeah, that's the prevailing model. Although we don't really understand what's going on with neutron stars. One of the core questions is like, what is the state of mass? in the inside of neutron stars. It's a situation that's so hot and so dense

that all four forces come into play. I mean, usually gravity, which is the weakest force, can be mostly ignored when you're talking about like forces between quarks. But inside a neutron star, there's so much mass that gravity is as powerful as the strong force. And you need to take into account all the different forces if you can understand the nature of what's going on in there.

You know, we think about like the neutron has three quarks quarks and they're hanging out. They got gluons bound together. It's a happy little thing. It can last for a long time or protons are very similar. But now take a bunch of those and squeeze them all together. It's like you got this ocean of corks that are floating around creating this weird new kind of thing. You could almost even think of it as like one enormous particle. Right, because you're saying it's like they're squeezed so much that all of their usual bonds don't work anymore, right? Like the bonds that keep electrons and protons and quarks together, all of that kind of turns into a giant soup of stuff.

Yeah, the same forces are at play, right? You still have the strong force and the weak force, but they're typical patterns, the way that quarks form into a proton and make a stable little package, those patterns are no longer relevant because you have all these other forces on the outside pulling them apart.

And so we don't have an understanding of what's going on inside that. That's why Niser has the word interior composition in it, because we want to really understand what's going on on the inside of the neutron starts. It's a very strange environment and not something that we typically see, and so we don't have a lot of ways to probe it. We can't create those conditions here on Earth.

Right. And they sort of maybe even start to get into the, up to the boundary of our knowledge about physics, right? Like, that's when you start to question things like how much are things quantum and how much are they special relativity. Yeah, describing it as on the boundary of what we understand is probably generous to our understanding. This is well beyond something that we can model. We're trying to use the equations of general relativity to describe what's going on on the inside of the star.

But you're right. We know there are probably quantum effects there. And so that's why it's a great way to test these things to say, like, is it possible to understand the impact of quantum gravity and the gravitational interactions between particles? Are those necessary to understand what's going on inside there? Or do you just need a really, really big computer? And so we're trying all sorts of different kind of things to like build up models of what might be going on in the inside of the neutron star. Unfortunately, we can't see the inside of the neutron star. We can only see the outside of it.

But those x-rays that are produced by the outside give us clues about what might be going on on the inside. Right. Really, you just want to know if it's nice on the inside as well as the outside. Is it a candy coating around like a sour center or is there like chocolate inside? Should it be on the naughty list or the nice list? One thing we really want to understand about the inside of neutron stars is like, what is the pressure? What is the density? What is the speed of sound on the inside of a neutron star?

Because in very, very dense environments, a speed of sound can be up to like the speed of light. Remember early on in our universe when things were very, very dense, we think the speed of sound was about half of the speed of light. Imagine that. And so in these environments, we just don't know very basic things about that. Like, how does a neutron star ring after there's a star quake on its surface? You know, how do those sound waves penetrate and bounce around on the inside?

Wow. Like what happens if you, like, ring? at neutron star kind of. And a lot of these questions about the pressures and the densities determine what masses and radii are allowed for a neutron star. Like if you have one model of the pressure and the density and how all these things are interacting, then you have a relationship between the mass and the radius. Imagine a graph of like mass versus radius of neutron stars.

You can't have neutron stars just like anywhere in that graph. There's like a line through that plane where neutron stars are allowed. They always fall along some line. And that line is determined by the relationship between the pressure and the density and all that stuff going on inside the neutron star. So if we just knew like what are the masses of these neutron stars, what are their radii, we can know a lot about what was going on on the inside. Right, because I guess what you're saying is that, you know, when you look out into the night sky with just your eyes, you see stars shining with your eyeball. But if you had x-ray glasses, you would also see some of these sources of x-rays that you know or do you think are neutron stars? That we're pretty sure our neutron stars. Yeah, we can see the stuff around them that suggests there used to be a super giant star there.

And then we can look for x-rays at the core and that suggests that a neutron star is there. And I guess the physics that are going on inside of them are so extreme that we don't know a lot about it. So that's why you want to look at them with a telescope like this one. Yeah. And if we could measure, what are the masses of all these neutron stars? What are the radii of all the neutron stars? Then we would have an idea of what might be going on inside them because those two are very closely connected. you want to take like a survey like a survey like if you're wondering how do the bones work inside an elephant like how do you even hold that thing up if you had a sense for like how big can elephants get it would give you a clue to like well how do that bone system work and so we want to know like how big can neutron stars get what neutron masses are allowed and not allowed now give us an idea of like the composition the various layers of the neutron star yeah well you now you just rope zoology into physics as well they're all physicists in the end right the physics of elephants next I'll be building an elephant collider. That would be fun. Oh, boy. You'll get in trouble with the

animal rights activist. I'll just call it the nicer collider and it'll be fine. You call it the animal cruelty collider, maybe. I don't think they'll put you in the nice list with Santa, Daniel. Non-intentional collisions of elephants research. There you go. Nicer. Well, neutron stars are just one thing that the nicer telescope can study. It can also study other incredible stars out there in the universe, right? That's right. That's because neutron stars are so weird. They have like various categories of neutron stars that do even weirder things than just like exist at crazy high temperature and pressure, these weird blobs of matter. We have stars like pulsars, which are a special kind of spinning neutron star. Interesting. Like a neutron star can do can have different flavors to it. Like they can do different things.

We talked about on the podcast once the really weirdest stars in the universe. And some of the stars in that category are things like magnetars and pulsars. So magnetars are neutron stars. with incredibly intense magnetic fields. You know, we have a magnetic field on Earth because of the swirling currents inside the Earth that we think generate that magnetic field and our star has a magnetic field. But those are nothing compared to the magnetic fields

generated by these magnetars, which are really incredible. It's because kind of like a neutron star is spinning, right? And sort of like when you have a magnet spinning, it generates crazy magnetic fields. Yeah, that's exactly right. And magnetars, we think that the magnetic field comes from the spinning and that it powers this incredible electromagnetic

radiation, the x-rays and the gamma rays that come from this magnetic field coupled with the spinning. And these magnetic fields are just really incredibly intense. There can be like a hundred million times stronger than any man-made magnet, like a trillion times more powerful than our magnetic field here on Earth. And so you're hoping that maybe with a telescope like this, you could study those magnetic fields? Would you be able to see like images of the magnetic field or get a sense of what they're doing? What we want to do with Nicer is try to understand the source of these magnetic fields and how it

affects the crust on the magnetic field. Recently, Nyser saw a magnetar and was able to watch a star quake in action. There are these hot spots on the surface of the magnetar as like the bits of crust are rubbing against each other or breaking and falling inside down into the like crazy neutron star lava and the internal parts. Each of those hotspots emits x-rays. But this thing is spinning, right? So sometimes those hotspots go around the back of the star and so you can no longer see the x-rays. So the x-rays are sort of periodic and they're periodic because the star is spinning. And so as they come into view, you see a spike from x-rays. They watch this star quake in action. They saw this neutron star with like three huge spikes and then two of the spikes sort of merge together

into one bigger spike. So you could get a sense for like what was going on on the surface So this incredible object super far away. Wow. Well, first of all, I just like the word starquake. Pretty cool idea. And second, I guess we can get images of these stars with our telescope. Like, can we actually see these magnetic fields? Or are we just getting like one train of x-ray photons and then inferring kind of what's

happening from that? Yeah, we do not have great spatial resolution. Remember, the structure of this telescope is not like a great optical telescope the way Hubble is. It just got like 56 different channels. And so what we're getting is like just as you said, it's like a train of x-rays. And we see the energies go up and down. We can measure the energy of the x-rays as they come in. So at any given time size, you have like a spectrum in the range that nicer can see.

And you can see peaks at various wavelengths. And then those peaks go up and down in time as the magnetar spins. And so really we just have like a single train of x-rays from each star. We don't have great spatial resolution. Right. I guess with 56 tubes, it's like a 7 by 8 pixel image kind of. Yeah. It's 8 bit.

It's retro. Yeah, they usually use a Game Boy to visualize these things. You could, right? We'll be cutting edge in the 80s. Yeah, so there's a little bit of imagination required. We can't see these surfaces, but we can tell that there are hotspots there. And so we can infer like the physics of what might be going on in this Starquake. All right.

Well, Nyser is also studying other kinds of neutron stars and other kinds of stars, and incredible things happening out there in space. And so let's get into them. But first, let's take another quick break. I'm Dr. Joy Hardin-Brand-Brandtford. And in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls, I sit down with Dr. Athea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity,

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I'm telling you, I'm on the energy committee. Like, if the energy is not right, we're not doing it, whatever that it is. Listen to Culture raises us on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking about nicer the telescope. I think it's the nicest telescope out there. Is there any reason not to call it the nicest? Well, the folks I know that work on the nicer telescope, there are some of the nicer people I know.

Some of the nicer, but they're not the nicest. I mean, that's for the next project, right? We'll remove some of the meaner people in the collaboration and then we'll upgrade to the nicest collaboration. You purify the nicety. We'll purge. Oh, my goodness. Boy, you're not getting on the nice list, Daniel.

No, it's a wonderful community, people who work on. X-rays and they've been very nice to me. Well, we talked about how this telescope is going to study neutron stars and magnetars, but it's also going to study pulsars, which are pretty amazing. Yeah, pulsars are another variety of neutron stars. There are ones with this magnetic field accelerates charged particles and basically creates a beam that goes up the top and the bottom of this star. So imagine like a huge, just like flashlight being shown out from the top of the star

and the bottom of the star out into the universe. It comes because this thing is spinning and it's got this magnetic field and particles that are released from the surface get like swept up in this magnetic field and shot out. Sort of like the inverse of the northern lights. You know how particles from the sun come to the earth and get funneled up to the north and the south poles by our magnetic field. If we were emitting radiation from the surface, it would also get funneled up to the north and south poles and shot out in terms of two beams. Yeah, it sort of looks like like a lighthouse, right? Like when you think of a traditional lighthouse that it's like a, you know, something at the top of a tower that shines basically two spotlights in opposite directions, that's kind of what a pulsar is. And if those spotlights don't actually align with the spinning of the star itself, right?

If they're slightly out of alignment, then where the spotlight points changes as the star spins, right? If you're shown a flashlight straight up and then you spun, you wouldn't change what you're shining your flashlight at. But if your flashlight is pointed a little bit down or sideways, then as you spin, you're going to be hitting a different spot in the sky. That's why a pulsar pulses because it's sweeping across the universe and only when its beam hits the earth do we see it. So when we look up at the sky, we see these pulsars blinking very regularly as they whip around and that beam passes the earth. Right, kind of like a lighthouse, right? Like if you're far away from a lighthouse, it looks like it's blinking. But once you get up close, you can see it's actually like a flashlight.

that's spinning around. Yeah, and these are some of the most powerful accelerators in the universe. The particles that come from these things are just really crazy high energies. It's amazing. So what do we know about how they work? We don't know a lot about them because we don't know a lot about neutron stars. And these are like weird, intense neutron stars that we understand even less. But we can try to use nicer to study them because sometimes these beam of particles doesn't

make it all the way to Earth. Sometimes it gets bent by like a wiggle in the magnetic field and comes back to the star. itself and can create hotspots. So it like sort of shoots the beam and it gets bent back around and like zaps itself. Wait what? What do you mean? Like it bends the light or it bends like a stream of particles? It bends like this stream of particles. I mean, pulsars emit in lots of different frequencies.

You can also shoot electrons and all sorts of other particles. Lots of things are swept up in these magnetic fields. But ultimately it creates like when it looped, you're saying like this beam of particles shoots up, comes around, hits the star again. then admits a bunch of x-rays. Yeah, that's what we can see. We see those x-rays from hotspots on the surface of these pulsars that are created by this beam, like bending back around and hitting the surface, creating those hotspots.

And so we can try to map those hotspots and try to understand what's going on on this crazy pulsar. Right. Well, I guess what's interesting is that, I mean, this is what you think is going on, right? Like we don't actually have a picture of one of these pulsars up close to see this bending and stuff. This is all just kind of a little bit from our models of what we think is going on. There's a lot of inferring from models.

Yeah, we have a computer model for what we think is going on and that predicts a certain distribution of x-rays. And then we go up there and we say, what? This thing is emitting something very different from any of our models. Can we come up with a model that explains it? And then can we try to apply that model to other neutron stars and how well does it work? So, you know, we're really at the very beginning of an era of neutron star astronomy, trying to understand what's going on inside these things.

Like the fact that these pulsars sometimes shoot up particles that make it to Earth and sometimes they bend back around to hit the pulsar itself means that the magnetic field is probably much more complicated than just like having two poles. It's like knotted and tangled in some weird way. Sort of like the way that the surface of our sun emits these coronal mass ejections, which then sometimes bend back around and hit the sun. You get these loops of plasma. Right, right.

But those we can see kind of with the naked eye or telescopes, but for the neutron stars, we're just kind of imagining. in it for now, until we get a nicest telescope. Until we send a fleet of cartoonists over there to draw what's going on on the surface of these stars. That's a lot cheaper than a couple of billion dollar telescope. But nicer would actually help you on a mission into deep space because nicer can see x-rays from these pulsars.

And remember once we talked about how to navigate deep space. And as you move away from like NASA's deep space network, you have to figure out another way to figure out like which star you're near and where you are in the galaxy. And because pulsars are so regular and each one has its own like fingerprint, then by measuring the pulses from pulsars, you can use x-rays as a like way to infer where you are in the galaxy. And nicer can actually do that. They have a system on it called sextant, which is another crazy acronym, which can do this sort of x-ray navigation. They've like actually tried it. They can use pulsars to figure out where we are in a galaxy. It's like you're using the blinking lights of the universe to guide you through space.

Yeah, exactly. Astrophysical lighthouses for real. It's not just a metaphor. I'll make sure to bring one on my next space footage. But it's interesting you're saying almost its own field, right? Or like, you know, you're an astronomer, you're studying neutron stars. I'm not saying they're ready to have their own department yet, but absolutely there's a whole field of neutron star astronomy, people who just study neutron stars, all the way from people writing computer code, to model what's going on inside them, to people designing telescopes to look at them, to people analyzing the data,

people writing machine learning codes to try to understand what we can learn about the inside of neutron stars based on the patterns of x-rays. It's a huge field. And I guess astroming stars, so would they technically be called neutron astronomers or nas-nastronomers?

New astronomers, yeah. Or nasty astronomers? Nastronomers? Nice, astronomers, maybe. Nice, there you go. Nice. They're the nicest. Well, but also this telescope doesn't just study neutron stars.

You could also study the kind of the opposite of a star, which is a black hole. Remember that functionally it's an x-ray telescope. We built it to see x-rays that come from neutron stars in this particular region, but it's not limited to just studying neutron stars. It can also see anything else in the universe that generates x-rays in this frequency range. And one of those things are black holes. Remember that black holes, while they're black, and they're these incredible pinpoints of space where light cannot escape.

The region around the black hole is a very intense environment with a huge amount of gravity and very high temperatures. And before things fall into the event horizon, they get super duper hot and can emit crazy amounts of light, including x-rays. Yeah, that's kind of the only thing we can see about black holes, right, is this stuff falling into it. Yeah, and that stuff, these pockets of gas and dust that are swirling around before they fall in, they can get crazy hot.

We're talking about like a billion Celsius. It's like 1.8 billion degrees Fahrenheit. It's just really incredible, the velocity of these particles. So when they're at these temperatures, they tend to emit in the very high frequency range, meaning x-rays. And we're very curious about the nature of these particles, what's going on just before they fall into the black holes. Because remember, not all the particles in the accretion disk actually make it into the black holes. Black holes sometimes have very powerful magnetic fields, just like magnetars. Sometimes these particles don't end up in the black hole.

They get swept up by the magnetic field and shot out the top or the bottom, creating these huge astrophysical jets, things are much, much bigger than the black hole itself. And you need something like nice, sir, to study the x-rays because there could be things happening around a black hole that you can see with a sort of visible light, right, with the naked eye. Yeah, because these things are so hot they don't really emit in the visible light. The x-ray is the right spectrum to see them in because of their incredible temperature. And so this lets us do things like look right at the edge of a black hole's event horizon and image the particles that are just about to fall in or just about to get shot out the top or the bottom into those jets.

So they've done this recently. They've looked at like the black hole corona, this environment just past the edge of the event horizon where the particles are like about to fall in or about to get shot out into the jets. And they've done this before for like super massive black holes at the hearts of galaxies, but they had never done one for a stellar mass black hole, like a black hole that's just the collapse of a normal star. Interesting. But I guess don't things near the surface of a black hole kind of get stretched out, right?

Like don't things kind of get redshifted and wouldn't that make it hard to see with an x-ray telescope? Good point. In the vicinity of a black hole, there is gravitational redshifting. So things do get moved down to lower and lower frequencies. So that means that if these things are still x-rays after they got redshifted, they must have been ridiculously high frequency. But that's also why we have a big spectrum of observing devices like the James Webb

telescope that just went up. It's going to be looking in the infrared to look specifically at things that have been massively redshifted because they're old or because they're moving really, really fast, or because they went through some gravitational redshift like the vicinity of a black hole. Right. It's almost like you need like several different glasses to study. what's happening in these extreme environments, right?

Like, you need a regular magnifying glass. You need an x-ray glass. You need an infrared pair of glasses. Yeah, just the same way we use various senses to understand the nature of the world around you. If you only had vision or if you only had hearing, you might have a very different sense of the world that you are embedded in.

And so we want as many different senses as possible to understand the universe and all of its different colors and sounds. Right. It's sort of like 3D glasses, right? Like you want one eyeball to see one thing. you want the other eyeball to see something else and then that gives you a more complete picture of what's going on. Because we're trapped

here on Earth. We can't go and visit those stars very effectively. And so we want to take advantage of as much information as we can that makes its way here to Earth. It would be crazy to ignore a whole channel of information in the X-ray that's telling us so many things about a hidden part of

the universe. Yeah. And I guess it's thanks to telescopes like these that we can, that we even know there's stuff going on in those other frequencies. Yeah, and we have a whole generation of new devices going up along a broad set of these wavelengths. And each one is going to tell us a different story about what's going on out there. And then we try to piece that together into a whole model of the universe. And that's in the end what physics is, right? We take what we see out there in the universe and try to

stitch it together into one grand story that explains everything that describes the heart of neutron stars and the flapping of butterfly wings and the collisions of elephants. You just lost me there. You had me at the collision of stars with butterflies? Yeah, you know, the vortices created by butterfly wings are not something we understand very well. There's a whole group of people studying like, how do insects fly? It's really pretty complicated fluid dynamics. I see. And you need x-rays for that?

You don't need x-rays for that. But it's just an example of the kind of picture we're trying to build about the universe. Physics is not just about neutron stars. It's about understanding how the universe works and stitching together everything we see. into one holistic picture of the fundamental nature of the universe. Oh, I see. Got it, got it. You're trying to co-op the other departments.

It's all physics in the end. That's where I'm going. You want all the funding. Until you get sucked out by the math department and then you're in trouble. They're not even relevant to reality, man. They exist in the realms of what might be. They're not so nice. They're not as nice as my astronomers.

I don't know if math has good acronyms or not. I haven't dug into that. I think, well, they only deal with the letters. So I guess any equation can be an acronym. Yeah, maybe their acronyms are like all Greek and Hebrew letters, math acronyms. Yeah, they don't even care about words. All right, well, again, it's pretty cool to think about all the things that humans are doing

to look at the universe around us. You know, it's sort of screaming at us, shining us, raining upon us with information about what's going on and how it works at the molecular, at the quantum level. And all we need are like the right pair of glasses, the right tools. to kind of see and get this information. And we need folks who are so passionate, so interested, so curious about one question about the universe that they spend their career designing things like crazy X-ray telescopes that can help us understand the nature of the heart of neutron stars.

And they also need help with their acronyms. So if you're good at that also, join the team. Just make sure you're nice about it. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. 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.

Do we really need another podcast with a condescending finance brof trying to tell us how to spend our own money? No, thank you. Instead, check out Brown Ambition. Each week, I, your host, Mandy Money, gives you real talk, real advice with a heavy dose of I feel uses. Like on Fridays when I take your questions for the BAQA. Whether you're trying to invest for your future, navigate a toxic workplace, I got you. Listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone, and there is help out there.

The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. One Tribe, save my life twice. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Let's start with a quick puzzle. The answer is Ken Jennings' appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs. The question is, what is the most entertaining listening experience in podcast land?

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