Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What happens when stars collide?

Episode Date: January 4, 2022

Daniel and Jorge talk about the chances of two stars smashing, and whether we could survive. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the powerful stories I'll be mining on our upcoming 12th season of Family Secrets. We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Jorge, have you ever seen two stars collide? Well, I live near Hollywood, so it doesn't.

That's happened sometimes. What do you mean? You know, like Brad Pitt and Angelina Julie. They're like a binary star system. I get it. And when they collided, it sent out paparazzi waves or something? Yeah, it sends out ripples in the fabric of the entertainment space time. Well, I hope that somewhere alien physicists have built a device to measure those ripples

and are wondering what it is they're looking at. Probably too attractive human beings. Hopefully they're not thinking how delicious they look. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I live in Southern California, but I've never accidentally bumped into a celebrity. How about on purpose? Have you bumped into one on purpose? No, their bodyguards keep me away. It's so frustrating.

Really? You live down here, and you've never had a celebrity. sighting. I've seen them from afar, but I was imagined I would bump into one at the grocery store or something. I see. Well, you're sort of becoming a star yourself, Daniel, at least in the physics podcast universe. Whatever. I can walk around UC Irvine and people think I'm just some homeless person. Or a professor, one of those. They're easy to confuse sometimes. Have you had any good celebrity sightings in all your years in Hollywood? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I've had several. Yeah. Sometimes you sort of, you can't get away from them sometimes. But welcome to our podcast, and Jorge explain the universe, a production of iHeard Radio.

In which we collide your brain and the universe. We take all the incredible, all the amazing, all the bonkers, all the wild stuff that's out there, and we squish it all into your head because we think that the entire universe should be understandable and should be explainable to everyone. Yeah, because it is sort of a wild universe. It's a lot happening in it. There's obviously stars burning bright out there and planets orbiting them and asteroids fly around. But sometimes we get some pretty interesting events happening. That's right. While you look

out into the sky and it seems sort of like static, it seems like, hey, it's just sort of hanging out. It's not really doing anything. If you watch the universe in fast forward, it would seem like a crazy chaotic place. It would seem like a drink that somebody is shaking really, really fast. It would seem like the mosh pit at a crazy concert. What's the music that the universe is dancing to? Is it like punk rock, but it's super slow motion? Exactly. The universe is a super slow-mo punk rock concert. But it is interesting to think about all the things that could be happening out there

and all of the near misses and all of the things sort of flying by each other. And sometimes things sort of inevitably collide out there in the universe. Because there's a lot of space out there in space, but it's also a big universe. So eventually everything's going to happen at some point. Exactly. And we're not unfamiliar with the idea of collisions. After all, we know that sometimes asteroids hit planets, right? We see craters all over the surfaces of everything in the solar system.

We even see comets smash in the planets like Shoemaker Levy did a few decades ago. But what about bigger collisions? Is it possible for even larger things to smash into each other? Yeah. Isn't the prevailing theory about our moon is that it came from a big collision of the Earth with an asteroid, right? That's how the moon was born. Yeah, maybe not even an asteroid. Maybe two proto planets collided, merged, and the Earth on the Moon are like weird mixtures of those.

two planets. It's an awesome titanic collision. Yeah, but you're thinking even bigger than planets or proto-planets colliding. You're thinking maybe stars colliding. That's right. Why not always think bigger, right? These collisions are boring now. When we go to the next level, it's like fast and furious. They've got to get even crazier. Yeah. What happens when Vin Diesel collides with the rock. Everyone knows about that. Exactly. What happens is they each get their own movie franchise because they can't work together. That's the only way. that it can go on. So, yeah, so that was an elastic collision

because they both seemed to have survived it with their careers intact. But is it always so clean? What happens when bigger things smash into each other? Does that ever happen? Has it happened to our sun? These are the kind of questions that keep me up at night.

Yeah, so today we'll be looking into some stellar events. And in particular, we'll be asking the question, what happens when stars collide? And are their children as good looking as they are? Usually not, right? Oh, are you throwing shade on the children of stars right now? Sholi Jolie or whatever her name is? I thought you were still talking about stars, like real stars.

Okay, right. Put it on me. Like stellar objects. I think all stellar objects are beautiful. Even the ones that might inevitably come for us. But yeah, this is pretty interesting. I guess there are so many stars out there in the galaxy in the universe that eventually some of them

might run into each other, right? They might crash into each other. Yeah, it turns out to be quite interesting. In some parts of the universe, stellar collisions are quite common and in other places, they're very rare. So as usual, we're wondering how many people out there had thought about these stellar collisions, these stars colliding

and what would happen? And so Daniel went out there to ask people on the internet, what do you think happens when stars collide? That's right. And as usual, I'm grateful to our internet volunteers for answering random physics questions. If it sounds fun to you to get four random physics questions in your inbox that you have to answer without any preparation, please just write us an email to questions at

Danielanhorpe.com. So think about it for a second. What do you think? What do you see in your head when you imagine two stars colliding? Here's what people have to say. Well, I don't think they usually collide because having this fusion inside them and all this energy. coming out of the sun, I think actually it's not usually for the stars to collide. Yes, and very often because there's so many stars out in the universe. Seems like a trick question. Like everyone would say, yeah, they collide. That's how they form mergers and stuff.

But it's probably really unlikely that two stars would hit each other smack on on the first pack. They would pass close to each other and lock into orbit around each other. Maybe once they're locked in orbit around each other, either that's stable or one of them is way bigger and it sucks the matter out of the other one. Well, I definitely think they do. Sometimes whole galaxies can actually collide, pass each other's paths and just became one. I could imagine that it would probably happen with a huge explosion or just, I don't know, depending on their mass and, like, gases are burning in them. And for example, if there's like a dual star system and they just, I don't know, like really close to each other and orbiting each other or just being really

close to each other, they can also exchange matter, maybe just get closer and closer to each other by gravitational pull. And at one point they can just get so close that they actually collide. They do. They circle around one another and then eventually collide into one another or fall into one another. I think yes and no. I think it is possible for things to crash into each other, things with mass to fall into each other, just like how they discover gravity waves to black holes crashing to each other. But also, I think space is very spacey. And for things to death spiral into each other, it has to be special circumstances. Because I think when objects rotate around each other, like say stars are rotating around each other, I think

it is possible to have stable orbits. So there has to be some special math where if they fall over a certain criteria, then yes, objects in space, like stars, with mass, will crash into each other. I would say very, very rarely nowadays. Maybe it was more common in the very early universe when the, what is it, third generation of stars was first born. Maybe those collided from time to time, but nowadays it's very rare. All right.

I'm seeing where it's like huge explosion crashes, some pretty exciting times here. Also, some very technical answers, like space is very spacey. It's a good point. It is pretty spacy. It's roomy, too. There's a lot of room in the space of rooms. That's right. It's very minimally appointed the universe.

It's not overcrowded. Yeah. Well, I like the person who thought it was a trick question. Like, maybe stars never collide. But is that possible? Maybe they just bump into each other at the supermarket by, quote, accident, unquote. Hey, I was reaching for that box of cookies. Exactly.

I ended up in a tug-of-war with Brad Pitt over a box of cookies. That's my Southern California dream. There you go. I'm guessing Brad Pete will win. No offense. He's pretty strong. He's a tough dude, yeah. But yeah, it seems like some people didn't think they would actually collide.

And some people thought that it happens in binary star systems. There's a wide range of answers here. And that maybe this is an interesting one. People thought that maybe it happens more often in the early universe than in the older universe. Yeah, really fascinating stuff. I like the people are using their physics brains to think about what would make this happen. Yeah, because I guess. in the early universe, things were more crowded, right? Technically.

Well, we'll get into it. It's quite interesting. You know, in the early universe, the stars had just formed, and so galaxies hadn't formed yet. So in some sense, things were less dense. All right, well, let's jump into it. Daniel, what happens when stars collide? How common are these star collisions? It depends a lot on where you are, because star densities vary a lot from place to place. Like in the center of the galaxy, things are much denser. the distances between stars are much smaller than they are out here where we are.

We're like 20,000 light years from the center of the galaxy, sort of like out in the suburbs. Out here, there's like three or four light years between stars, and so it's much less likely for stars to collide. Like the closest star to us is Proxima Centauri just under four light years away. In terms of the widths of our sun, that's like 100 million sun widths. Like if you try to fill up the space between our sun and the next star, you'd have to stack it with a hundred million copies of our sun. That gives you a sense for like how far apart stars are in our neighborhood. Hmm, that's interesting. What about closer to the center of the galaxy? Are stars more crunched together? Like what are the relative distances there?

So in the center of the galaxy, it can get much, much denser and the stars average less than a light year apart. But it grows very, very quickly as you get closer to that black hole. Things get very, very dense. very dense. And it's not just the center of the galaxy where things are denser. Our galaxy has these things called globular clusters, which are collections of stars we think formed all at the same time, or might even be like mini dwarf galaxies that got eaten by the Milky Way. But these are much, much denser than the rest of the galaxy. So you're saying that even in the outer parts of the galaxy, there might be sort of like dense clusters where there could be a lot of stars running into each other. Yeah, these globular clusters, they're fascinating. We did a whole podcast

episode about them last year. Some of them are sort of embedded in the Milky Way and some of them are sort of like in close orbit around the Milky Way, but people consider it all to be part of the Milky Way. So in the center of the galaxy and in globular clusters, there are better conditions for having collisions. Like out here where we are, for the sun to get into a collision is very, very unlikely. Somebody actually did a calculation and they estimate that the sun should collide with another star every 10 to the 28 years. Like, that's a hard number to think about. Just remember that the universe is 10 to the 10 years old.

So it would take a lot, lot longer than the age of the universe so far before we expect the sun to collide with anything. Interesting. So it seems like pretty unlikely. Although I wonder if it's like, you know, like in the center of a downtown, there's a lot more traffic, but people are going slower maybe. But out in the suburbs where you have just empty highways, maybe people are going faster.

And so I wonder if that increases the likelihood of a crash. Things are actually moving really rapidly in the center of the galaxy because things are closer to the source of gravity, right? There's a huge black hole there. And when a star, for example, swings around the back of that black hole, it picks up a lot of speed. These stars can get up to like half of the speed of light when they whizz around the back of that black hole.

So things are moving pretty rapidly in the center of the galaxy. They estimate that in globular clusters, there's a stellar collision every 10,000. years. Well, that's a lot, right? I mean, in terms of the age of the universe, that's like a crash every other day. That's a lot of collisions, exactly. And if you estimate how many globular clusters there are in all of the galaxies out there, the current estimate is about a trillion or so, you know, give or take to a factor of 10. But if you assume that there are a trillion globular clusters in the observable universe, then that estimate tells you that there are a thousand

pairs of stars colliding at every moment. Like right now, a thousand stars are colliding with a thousand other stars. Wow. That's amazing to think about for sure, yeah. Like right now, boom, or a thousand booms, stars collided. A thousand booms, exactly. And these are not stars that are colliding like in neighborhoods similar to our sun. These are stars colliding in the center of the galaxy or again in these globular clusters

that these pockets of density elsewhere in the galaxy. But we're not near any one of these globular clusters, right? I mean, we have them in the Milky Way, but are we near one? We aren't near any globular clusters, not near enough to be worried about it or, like, to be sucked in or anything. So these collisions are happening in other places. But globular clusters are really fascinating scientifically and help us probe really interesting questions about the formations of stars. And there's still a lot of things that we don't understand about globular clusters. Yeah, they're almost sort of where people call them like the cradle of stars, right?

Or nursery, star nurseries, they call them, right? Yeah, and these things are typically really, really. old. Like they think they might mostly be population two stars. So these things were formed billions and billions of years ago in the second generation of stars. After the first ones blew up, the second generation formed. And these sort of low metallicity, they don't have as many heavy elements in them as our stars do because the universe hadn't made as much heavy metals. But they were all born about the same time. And so when you look at the globular cluster, you're seeing a lot of really old stars. Or at least we thought, and they found a bunch of stars inside these globular clusters

that look sort of unusually young. Like they're really, really blue stars, which means they glow really, really brightly. And really bright glowing stars tend to not live very long. They like burn out really fast. So there are these stars in these globular clusters that look really young when the rest of the globular cluster is really old. So they imagine that what might be happening is that you could be getting like a bunch of stars that collide. They're like on their way, the end of their life and then they collide to form a new huge star which then burns brightly. So these are called blue stragglers. They're currently a mystery in astronomy, but that's one possible explanation for them. Interesting. So they're old and so maybe they're, and not as

heavy metal. So maybe they're listening to like music under parties. It's sort of like two stars at the end of their career decide, hey, let's have kids and they can carry on burning brightly and earning money to support us in retirement. So that's sort of our chances of running into another star or a star colliding near us doesn't seem very likely. But let's talk about maybe what would happen if our star did collide with another star or generally what happens when stars collide with each other. Yeah, it can be pretty dramatic, but it also depends on exactly how fast the collision happens and whether there's actually a collision or just sort of a near miss.

You might feel a little bit relieved to think, well, our sun is not going to hit any other stars for another, you know, 10 to the 18 years so I can relax. But our solar system might be seriously impacted, even if just another star comes somewhere near us, it could have a real impact on our lives. Right, like they don't have to actually touch each other for there to be a disaster, right? Yeah, because those stars are huge sources of gravity, and they're already sort of tugging on each other a little bit. Remember that our solar system doesn't just have a star in a bunch of planets. It's surrounded by this vast cloud of trillions of icy objects.

We call this the Orte cloud, and we think that's where comets come from. And so if another star passes anywhere near our solar system, it can perturb some of those. And then they can fall into the gravitational well of our solar system, picking up a huge amount of speed and energy as they fall in zooming down through the inner solar system and right past the planets. And these comets, if they hit the Earth, for example, they could wipe out humanity. It's an incredible source of energy and a real danger. So if a star comes nearby, they could disturb one of those. And if they come even closer, they could even like toss a planet out of the solar system.

Wow. You could get booted off the island or the solar system. Yeah, because our orbits are fairly fragile. We have to be going in the right direction, at the right velocity, and at the right radius for everything to balance. So orbits are not that hard to perturb and they're sort of hard to recover. And so you're saying that even if our star doesn't collide with another star, just having a near miss could be potentially fatal to us. It could be fatal, yeah. Earth could get tossed out of our solar system into the galaxy itself without a star, or we could get hit by a comet that gets perturbed by a passing star. So how close do we need to come to another star for it to be sort of dangerous?

In order for the Earth to get like tossed out of orbit, the star would need to come sort of within a few AU of our star in order to have like the gravity to really perturb the orbit. In order to perturb the orbit cloud, well, we don't really know. And there's actually a lot of really interesting theories that suggest that there might be another star out there. It's called the nemesis that every like 30 million. years swoops around near our sun and perturbs all those objects in the org cloud and rains down comets on us. People look back at the history of cometary impacts on Earth and they think they might

see like a pattern, like a 30 million year cycle. And that suggests there could be something out there doing this regularly every 30 million years. Maybe that's how we got our water. It was one of these comet showers, right? Yeah, it could be exactly. A lot of the water on Earth came from comets. And so So maybe it fed us, nurtured us, and then it's going to come back and kill us. Well, we just have to get umbrellas to fend off all that water raining down giant ice blocks. So you're saying if another star comes within a few AUs, and AU is sort of the distance between the sun and the earth, right? So if it comes within a few distances of Earth and the sun, then it could be big trouble. But if it comes far away, it could still cause some trouble by raining comets on us.

Yeah, anything less than like a light ear or so could be serious problems. What about a direct hit? What would happen when two stars sort of directly hit each other? Yeah, so this is much more exciting. If another star comes in sort of at high speed, then basically what's going to happen is the sun would be destroyed. If you imagine, for example, like a white dwarf, which is a solar remnant, like a big hot chunk of metal, and it plows into the sun. People actually have done simulations about this. It would trigger the whole sun to start burning.

Currently, fusion is happening, but mostly at the heart. of the sun. If a white dwarf comes in, it would increase the pressure and the temperature of the sun so dramatically that it would release as much energy through fusion in an hour as it would have otherwise in a hundred million years. Well, you mean like just from the impact, it would sort of, as it's impacting or crashing into the sun, it would actually cause fusion on its way in. Exactly. It would increase the temperature. And so the rate of fusion depends on the temperature. So basically the sun was just like burn up super duper fast as this thing passes through it. But then it would also explode. Like that much fusion would blow the star out.

And so a huge chunk of the sun's energy would be burned up in this rapid fusion. A lot of it would get blown out because of the radiation from this fusion. And then also the sun might lose its cohesion. Like it might get sprayed out like, you know, an egg yolk or something against the wall sprayed out into the galaxy. Whoa. And there goes plans for an overeasy solar system. But I guess you're saying, you know, the sun is not. not solid, right? It's sort of a giant cloud of plasma. And so when something crashes into it, it doesn't like crack or break or, you know, sort of break apart. It sort of takes in whatever it comes at it. And maybe if that's a lot of energy, then it just starts to burn faster.

Yeah. But if it comes in with enough energy, it could also like pop that yolk and spread it everywhere. Imagine like, you know, a big fraction of the sun getting ejected out into the solar system. It could just like totally vaporize a planet. What about if it comes in at low speed? If it comes in at a smaller speed, then there's a chance that it wouldn't actually impact the sun, that the sun could capture it. You could end up with like a binary star system. Or if it comes in at just the right angle, it could just get absorbed. It's sort of like, you know, two yokes forming one mega yoke. If it comes in sort of gently and gradually, then the two stars could just sort of like merge into one bigger star.

Interesting. Like it can suck it in, kind of. Yeah, it could just suck it in because there's not that much interesting structure to the sun. We don't actually really know that much about the convection and the currents inside the sun because things like the solar magnetic feel are still a mystery to us. But, you know, our best model is that it's basically just a bag of hydrogen. So you add another bag of hydrogen to it and, you know, it would take a little while to stabilize. We'll get brighter and have shock waves and all sorts of stuff for a few million years. But eventually it would settle down and just be a bigger star.

So I guess what you're saying is that, you know, the collision itself is sort of rare and you would need sort of a high speed and just enough luck to actually have the two stars hit each other. lot of interesting things going to happen, even if there are near misses. Yeah, even if they're near misses. So if this is star coming near us anytime soon, it's going to be dramatic no matter what happens. All right. Well, let's talk about other places in the universe where collisions between stars are actually inevitable. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything

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Listen to America's Crime Lab, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking about when stars collide, the ones in space, not the ones here on Earth that make movies. Although those are the best crossover events, right? Yeah, those make the best headlines. Batman versus Superman.

Marvel versus DC. When is that movie coming out? I'm looking forward to that. Yeah, I know. But we're talking about stars colliding, and we talked about how they're sort of rare in our neighborhood, but they happen a lot in other places in the galaxy, in the center of the galaxy, in globular clusters. And there are sort of other particular situations where these collisions happen a lot and almost all the time. Yeah, and our solar system is a little bit unusual because it just has one star. If you look out into the night sky, it turns out that a lot of the solar systems out there are binary star systems, stars that were born together.

near each other from the same huge cloud of gas and dust doesn't always just coalesce into a single star sometimes you get two dense points there and you get two stars forming it's a lot more common than we used to think and a binary star system like that is really cool it's fun to imagine but also it's not stable that kind of situation can't last forever eventually those two stars will collide Interesting. Now, why are two-star systems unstable? Like, is our solar system unstable? Or are all orbits unstable? Or is it just the ones between two stars that are particularly unstable? Fundamentally, all orbits are unstable. And the reason is that when you move in a circle, that's acceleration. Like, acceleration is anytime you change your velocity and not just the magnitude of your velocity, not just your speed, but your direction. So when the Earth is moving around the sun, for example, it's accelerating. It's a velocity vector goes from pointing in one way to pointing another way.

And any time there's acceleration, there is radiation. Like when an electron turns and goes left, it has to kick off a photon in the other direction. It radiates. This is actually a major puzzle in early quantum mechanics. People were wondering, like, why do electrons orbit the atom in a stable way? Why don't they emit photons and just collapse into the center of the atom? Now, of course, we understand the answer to that is quantum mechanics prevents it from happening. But what about planets? When planets orbit a star or when stars orbit each other or two black

holes orbit each other, they are giving off gravitational radiation. They are emitting gravitational waves. Any acceleration of an object emits gravitational waves. So two huge objects in orbit around each other eventually will radiate away some of that energy and collapse in. into the center. Interesting. And that's sort of true also for even our solar system, right? Like eventually in the far, far, far, far, far future, our orbit will eventually fall into the sun.

That is true. There's competing effects there because the Earth is not nearly as massive as another star, so it doesn't generate as much gravitational radiation. But you know, even the Earth moving through sort of the solar wind, right? The solar system is not empty. As we move through that stuff, we lose energy and so we are slowing down. So eventually the Earth will fall into the sun. sun, but that's going to happen in a long, long time. But when two stars orbit each other,

two very massive objects, there's a lot more gravitational radiation emitted. So two stars orbiting each other, that orbit will decay faster than just planets orbiting a star. Interesting. And so we also had a whole episode about binary star systems and multi-star systems, and we talked about how unstable and fun they are. But you're saying that if you have a binary star system, pretty soon it'll become, I guess, a one-star system when the two-star systems. And the two-star collide? Either something will come by and perturb it, like you have a planet and the planet will get thrown out or it'll perturb the orbits of the stars around each other and they'll just sort of like run off in other directions. But if they don't, if nothing comes along to perturb it, then eventually

they will spiral into each other because they'll lose that relative energy and they will collide. It's inevitable. Wow, that's kind of tragic, I guess. Because, you know, the binary star systems are pretty cool. They're pretty beautiful, right? Like in Star Wars, when Luke Skywalker looks out into the sunset, he sees two stars. Yeah, they are beautiful, but also their collisions are beautiful. These cataclysmic events are really important for creating the elements that help make up you and me and the very nature of the universe. So I'm glad that these events exist.

They're pretty awesome to study. As long as we're not living around one of those stars. Yeah, as long as we're not, Luke Skywalker. That's right. Not in my star yard. And actually, one kind of supernova out there in the universe is, due to stars colliding, right? It's like not all supernovas are just stars imploding.

Some of them come from stars colliding. Yeah, one of the most important kinds of supernova, type 1A, come exactly when that happens. You have a binary star system, and one of the stars has died to extinguished itself, but it wasn't big enough to go all the way down to a black hole. Like it burned and it generated a lot of light and it came to the end of its life and it blew out its outer layers. And what's left is a hot core, this thing we call a white dwarf. And this is like the future of our sun. Our sun doesn't have enough energy in it to go supernova or to go black hole.

It's just going to sort of like burn, explode out its outer layers and then leave us with a hot, dense mass at the center. Not dense enough to become a neutron star or to go supernova or become a black hole. So that's sort of the future of our star and stars like it. Like it just becomes like a white hot object floating in space, right, made out of sort of heavier elements? Yeah, it's just like white hot metal, you know, like carbon or wherever the price. process stopped. It's the hot, heavy core of the star. Remember, these stars start burning hydrogen, and then they make helium, then they make heavier elements. And they just keep burning as long as they can. But eventually, they make so many heavy metals that they can no longer fuse that they

basically go out. But what you're left with is a huge white hot chunk of those heavy metals, just glowing in space. No more fusion happening. So it's sort of like a dead end for a star, and it just sits there radiating away its energy until eventually it cools. It takes like trillions of years to become a black dwarf unless it gets a second act unless it makes a comeback unless somebody casts him in an indie movie that gets critical acclaim that's right we call this going john travolta and what happens is that if you have another big star nearby then this white dwarf can steal some of its mass and so it like gobbles up the outer layers of like a red giant and so this happens especially when a white dwarf is part of a binary star system it can gobble up some of the mass of the

other star when it gets close enough. And then it has enough stuff in it to go supernova. So the supernova that didn't happen during the first part of its life can now get triggered after the star is basically already died because it's getting this additional mass, this extra helping of stuff. And it sucks it out of the other star. It's just from gravity, right? Like they're near each other. They're circling around each other. And it's just the gravity. Sometimes the stuff from the red giant sort of hops over to the white dwarf. Yeah, because the stars have to get closer and closer as time goes on because they're radiating away energy and because that other star is also going to be expanding its radius. Stars get bigger as they get older. And so now the white dwarf is just going to be

siphoning off some of that mass and the outer layers of that star. And so at some point it gets enough and that it collapses, right? Or it doesn't start burning again. It just sort of collapses, right? It collapses into a supernova and goes boom. Yeah. Yeah. Like it turns into iron, right? Like it gets enough pressure to actually collapse. What happens to the core depends a lot on where it's stopped and its fusion process. But yeah, the key is, but now gravity can overcome the structure of that material. It can compress it even further. So you get this shock wave, which causes the supernova. Interesting. And so that's the type 1A supernovas. So it's not like a star naturally exploding. It's like another star came in and like excited it and then it collapsed, right? Exactly. And it's fascinating

because these are really, really important for measuring distances. Like when that happens, it happens in a very specific way and the stars have this peak brightness. The whole thing lasts just a few days or weeks depending on the star, but we can calibrate that brightness. We know how bright these things are, which means when we see them here on Earth, we can tell how far away they are by measuring how bright they appear in our telescopes. So they've become a really, really useful way to measure distances to other galaxies, which are otherwise very hard to estimate. Right. Yeah, because I think you know, we understand stars so well now at this point that we know that if we see a certain process, we know that it involved a star of this size and another star of that size and it

couldn't have happened any other way with a bigger or a smaller star. So we can sort of standardize it, right? And we can say that little bright spot there. That's when this size star collided with that size star and that lets us know just exactly how far away it is. Yeah, it's really pretty cool. We have a whole episode about how to know the distance two stars. You should check that out and it requires, you know, calibrating. We use in other ideas and other strategies for measuring distances and overlapping ladders so we can cross calibrate different metrics. It's really like an amazing tour to force of modern science. And so that's one interesting thing that can happen when two stars collide. What are some other interesting mergers or collisions

that we see out there in the universe? So something we've discovered recently is that we can actually see this gravitational radiation when stars collide. Einstein predicted this a long long time ago that when two stars aren't orbit around each other, they will give off gravitational radiation. And that radiation increases as the stars get closer and closer and they spin around each other faster and faster and faster. And this was sort of first detected indirectly when people found a pair of pulsars that were orbiting each other and they watched them over a few years and they were able to tell that the orbit of the pulsars around each other was getting faster and faster, that they were sort of like falling into each other. The distance between them was decreasing and

they were speeding up how fast they were going around each other. That was sort of indirect. But then decades later, we developed this gravitational wave observatory that can see those actual ripples in space time itself. The radiation of that energy we were talking about when two heavy objects orbit each other. And what happens is they go faster and faster and eventually they do collide.

And cataclysmic collisions like between two neutron stars actually happen out there in the universe and we have seen it. Yeah, you consider pictures. it like two bowling balls in a giant rubber sheet sort of circling around each other and like if they're going fast enough they sort of cause ripples in this rubber sheet and that's kind of what these gravitational waves are right yeah and it's incredible we can see them out here on earth we have these lasers underground in mile long tunnels bouncing laser beams off of mirrors and we can tell when a gravitational wave has passed because it makes the path of that laser a tiny bit longer or a tiny bit shorter because again it's a ripple in space itself we have a whole podcast episode about gravitational waves you should check out. But today what we're talking about is the source of those gravitational waves, which can be, for example, the collision of two neutron stars. These things are crazy objects, things that are like the mass of the sun, but compacted into something like 10 kilometers wide. So it's just a really incredible, dense stellar remnant, like left over from

when a star burned and collapsed. This is the leftover core, the neutron star. Now you get two of these things, zipping around each other and eventually slamming into each other as they radiate away all of their energy. Yeah. I think it's that density that makes them special, right? It's like they can get so close to each other that the gravity gravitational forces are huge, right? Like bigger than anything that we can see here in our solar system. Yeah, there's like this hierarchy of density, like a normal star and then like a white dwarf is very dense. And then if you get enough stuff added to the white dwarf, it could become like a neutron star. And then of course, even denser than neutron star is a black hole, which we think is the densest thing in the universe. So it just also depends on how much stuff

the star started with because that determines how much gravity there is, which lets you sort of overcome these thresholds, compacting something. Like imagine taking the Earth and trying to turn it into a neutron star or a black hole, you'd have to really squeeze it down hard to get to be that dense. A Earth mass black hole would have to be like a centimeter wide. How can you possibly squeeze the whole Earth down to a centimeter? We'd take incredible. incredible forces. That's why it's hard to get these things to be so dense. You need a huge mass to get the gravity to make it that dense. Right. Yeah. And, you know, when we listen out for those gravitational waves, you can sort of reconstruct what happens when these things

collide, right? Like you can see them from the waves, wave pattern. You can see them like circling each other slowly and then it picks up speed and it goes faster and faster. And then they're like circling each other super fast and then suddenly pop. You actually sort of see the pop where they collide with each other, right? Yeah, absolutely. It's like those little machines. at science museums, where you put a penny in and it slowly rolls around the top of a funnel, and by the time it spirals down to the core, it's going super duper fast. So you have two of these things. And you're right, you can see this in the gravitational waves. Like the gravitational waves, they start out slow and sort of low amplitude, and they get louder and louder and faster

and faster. The period decreases a lot. And so you can see this exactly happening. It's really sort of incredible. And then when they collide, of course, you get something very spectacular. Yeah. I was going to use the analogy of like, when you, you flush the toilet, not a science museum demonstration. But like when you flush the toilet, right, you see things circling around the drain and then as they get closer, they go faster and faster and then they collide before they fall down the hall. Yeah. Also, sort of depends on what's in the toilet, but yes. Yeah. Well, it could be a brown dwarf, for example. Yeah, a brown dwarf. A black hole. All right, well, let's get into more interesting collisions of stars out there

in the universe and what our future of our star and our galaxy. might be. But first, let's take another quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking about Star Colleges, And we're talking about interesting collisions. We just talked about what happens when a neutron star or a black hole or two black holes or two neutron stars collide with each other. It's pretty dramatic. What are some of the other fun things that can collide out there in the universe? Well, we've been talking about neutron stars colliding with each other, which is pretty awesome. And before we move on from that, I just want to make the point that that's really important for the whole nature of the universe.

We used to think that the production of really heavy metals, things heavier than iron, for example, that can't happen inside stars. We used to think that mostly happened in supernova, but now we actually know different. We know that that mostly happens when neutron stars collide. So most of the gold and the platinum and the uranium in the universe came from events like that, two neutron stars colliding. To me, it's just sort of awesome. Like every piece of jewelry you see out on somebody's arm or on their ear or somebody's finger came from the collision of two neutron stars billions of years ago.

Interesting. So it's not made out of star dust. It's made out of like star debris or, you know, star shrapnel. Star glitter. Yeah. Dead stars, kind of. Kids out there playing with glitter, that's all from dead stars. I don't know.

I don't know about that. But what are some other interesting collisions that can happen? Well, sometimes a neutron star collides with something that's not a neutron star. Like when it's a dual neutron star collision, you have two objects, really dense, boom, very cataclysmic. Another time, you can get a neutron star colliding with something like a red giant. A red giant is a dual neutron. a star near the end of its life. It's red, it's cooled down a little bit, and it's a giant, which means that it's like puffed out its outer layers because its core has become really

heavy. And so now fusion is happening more in the outer layers. And that's the future of our star. So these really big, puffy stars. Well, if a neutron star hits one of these guys, it's really interesting. It might just sort of like fall into it. And it could just sort of like hang out inside the red giant. It's so dense that it could like survive inside another star. Like it's in orbit around that star, but it's actually sort of inside the limits of it. Yeah. This is called a Thorne Zitao object after two astrophysicists that predicted it. And we think it's very, very rare, but there are a few objects out there in the sky

that sort of have the characteristic signature of one of these things. So it might just happen. So maybe step me through it. So the super dense neutron star, which is not burning, but it's super bright. It falls into a bigger star that is burning. And so it lives inside of it? Does it disrupt it? Does it sort of like stir things up and suck stuff out of it?

Yeah. And remember, neutron star is not that bright. There's no fusion happening in a neutron star. So like a white dwarf, it's just sort of like a big hot chunk of metal. And we think they mostly glow in the x-ray. At least that's how we study them. So what happens is that it orbits in the outside part of the star, but eventually it spirals in towards the center for the same reason that the neutron star like falls into this red giant.

Eventually, it'll fall and become like the core. and it'll suck up stuff from that red giant and become a black hole and just like eat the entire rest of the star. Whoa. It's like a bad virus kind of, it's like it comes in. It's like an impurity, right? Like the star is happily burning along

and then this thing comes in and it totally disrupts it and takes over it. Yeah, they like eats the star from the inside out and we've seen a bunch of these red giants and people think that you might be able to tell what's happening on the inside of the star by looking at what's happening on the outside of the star, like the fraction of various kinds of nuclei

that appear on the surface depend on the temperature of the inside of the star. And if you have one of these red super giants with a neutron star at its core that's turning into a black hole, that would make the star much hotter so it would burn a little differently, so it would look a little bit different on the outside. But it's pretty interesting.

Yeah, and you can actually see maybe one of these events happening out there, right? I mean, space is so big, you probably can find an example of it. And there's a sort of a cool one that you can see called the necklace nebula, right? Yeah, the necklace nebula is this beautiful sort of like glitter of shiny diamonds in the sky like surrounding a central object. And astronomers think that 10,000 years ago, one star expanded, sort of like sucked up its neighbor companion star, which then continues to sort of orbit inside the larger star, which, you know, sort of like stirred it up like a, you know, a spoon in batter. If you mix up your spoon too fast, you end up like spewing batter outside of the bowl. And so this sort of happened to the bigger star. The little star inside of it sort of like ruined it and spewed bits of it out.

And so now what we see is this like pattern of basically splashes in the sky. Yeah, you can look it up on the internet, the necklace nebula. And it sort of looks like a necklace, right, with a shiny diamonds in it. Yeah, exactly. And that's what happens when one star totally messes with another star. Like it stirred it up and spread it out. It made beautiful jewelry. Made bling for all the Hollywood stars.

That's right. Universe bling. All right. Well, those are some pretty cool collisions we can see out there in the universe. What about our future? Like what's going to happen to our star, our galaxy? I mean, we talked about how it's sort of rare that it probably won't happen to us anytime soon, but there is another galaxy coming our way.

There is another galaxy coming our way. Our neighbor galaxy andromeda is going to impact the Milky Way in about four and a half billion years. It's coming right for us. And people who look up at the sky, you know, you're familiar with the moon, of course, and a bunch of stars and maybe even like the splash of the Milky Way, but also up there in the sky are galaxies. You can see galaxies up there in the sky. The problem is that mostly they're very, very dim, so you need a telescope to see them. But they're out there, and that's sort of like the vast cosmic sweep of your view. You can see out there billions of light years past our Milky Way.

Yeah, and you can see a ton of galaxies out there. There are trillions of them out there, right? That's right. And mostly they're really, really distant. And so they're super duper small and not very bright. Andromeda, however, is our neighbor. And so it's actually quite near and quite large in the sky. You can't see it with the naked eye because it's so dim.

But if it were brighter, it would appear larger in the night sky than the full moon. It's like really big and quite close. Interesting. And it's coming our way, sort of like, right? we're on a collision course with it. We are on a collision course with it, exactly. So the gravity of all those billions and billions of stars are tugging on our billions and billions of stars

and eventually we will collide because Andromeda and the Milky Way are part of this cluster of galaxies we call the local cluster. There's sort of like a loosely bound group of clusters. They're held together by each other's gravity and it's sort of swirling around each other. It's all very slow motion

and takes billions of years for anything interesting to happen, but galaxies do collide. And if you look out there in a space, we can see so many galaxies that there are lots of examples of galaxies colliding, perturbing each other, then settling down again into spiral galaxies. And we think, for example, the Milky Way has already survived several collisions. Really? You can see sort of the scars of it, or like, are you saying some of these globular clusters, maybe were collisions? Maybe the globular clusters. But also, if you look at the shape of the Milky Way, for example, it's not flat.

Like, it's not a flat disk. It has a bit of a warp to it. And some people think that might be because we're still settling down from a recent collision or merger with another galaxy. So now we just went up a level, right? We went up from stars colliding to galaxies colliding. And so kind of what happens when two galaxies collide? Because galaxies don't have sort of a structure, right? They're mostly like sort of clouds of stuff.

Yeah, there is a structure in the sense that there's like density of the core and sometimes a super massive black hole. But yeah, mostly there are just big diffuse clouds of stars and gas and dust. And you might imagine that when two galaxies collide, it would be really dramatic. All the stars would explode, et cetera. But actually, stars are really far apart. And so when two galaxies collide, you don't actually get very many collisions, maybe just like a few, you know, five or ten stars might actually collide. Mostly it happens sort of slowly and they just kind of merge.

It's like two crowds walking into each other, right? They just sort of like become one bigger crowd, very few actually like, you know, accidents. Really? So I'm not a surprise only five to ten collisions of stars would happen. Like, doesn't each galaxy have, you know, trillions of stars? Wouldn't that just sort of increase exponentially the likelihood of collisions happening? Like things just got twice as crowded, right? Well, it becomes a bigger galaxy, so it's not necessarily twice as crowded.

Just a larger number of stars. Like Andromeda is already much bigger than the Milky Way, probably because it's already eaten other galaxies. And so what happens is you just become. like a bigger galaxy orbiting like a common center of mass. So you don't actually get that many star collisions. You just get this sort of like new shape. It takes like sometimes a billion years or so to settle down into a steady path. But the stars are pretty far apart from each other. Wouldn't they merge though? Wouldn't like the Adromeda cloud sort of merge with our cloud and suddenly things are more

dense? Well, they definitely do merge. But because of the rotation speed, things don't all collapse into the center. So you get a lot of stars that are still far out from the center that are moving really, really fast. The reason that the galaxy doesn't collapse into like a super dense blob of stars is because all these stars are moving pretty fast around the center. The same reason the earth doesn't fall into the sun immediately. So when these galaxies collide, they keep that spin and they keep going around the center and sometimes even faster because now you have like the relative angular velocity of the two galaxies. And so they don't all just collapse into a dense blob. It can become like a really huge spread out new galaxy. Right. Yeah. But also like the collision with

disrupt the structure of both galaxies, right? Just like if you have two stars or two solar systems colliding into each other, like it would be chaos, kind of, right? Like, everything would be thrown out of balance. It would, but those things are typically much more separated. Like a solar system is a very dense object compared to a galaxy. The distances between stars is much, much bigger, relatively speaking, than the distances between planets.

But also galaxies of other stuff in them, and they're not just stars, right? Galaxies also have huge clouds of gas and dust, places that need. new stars can form. And when two galaxies collide, what does happen is that those clouds of gas and dust collide. Those are not like diffused. Those are really thick clouds, relatively speaking. So that triggers a lot of activity because that triggers like new star formation. You shoot one big cloud or another big cloud, and those shockwaves can trigger the gravitational

runaway effect that leads to new stars being formed. Wow. So mostly we should be looking at the collision of gas and dust, because it's, and that makes new stars. Exactly. Mostly what happens when galaxies collide is the collision of the gas and dust that makes new stars.

And so we'll have some stars from the Milky Way, some stars from Andromeda, and then some brand new stars from this new galaxy. New neighbors are moving in. Hopefully not too close. But that's if we survive long enough

to even see that collision. Yeah, I guess 4.5 billion years is a long time, right? Like by then, we might not even be on Earth. The sun is going to peter out right around then. And so we got a few billion years to make a plan for, you know, get to a new home because the sun will no longer be a

happy place to orbit in five billion years. Sounds like a good time to hop over to our new galaxy. Jump ship. That's right. There's lots of empty apartments over there. Hopefully. Maybe they're crowded too. But there's some dangers coming well before four billion years have passed.

You mean not from Andromeda? Yeah, we talked about how it's very unlikely for our star to collide with another star. But astronomers have looked at all the stars nearby. and try to calculate, like, when there might be a near miss. And there is another star. It's called Gleas 710. And astronomers think that in a million years, it's going to pass within one 15th of a light year of our solar system.

So not a direct collision, but, like, pretty close to our neighborhood. Interesting. So what do you mean we think? Like, we can see all the stars in our neighborhood, and we can probably track them. Where is the uncertainty? I was just trying to make people feel better. Yeah, it's pretty certain.

It's going to happen. I see. It's coming. It's coming. Yeah, exactly. So at one-fifteenth of a light year, how much is that in like kilometers or AUs? So that's about 4,000 AUs. So it's well within our solar system. If you include, for example, the Oort Cloud, which goes out like tens of thousands of AUs, but it's much further out than like the most distant planets.

But plenty close to disturb the Oort Cloud. It's going to pass right through the Oort Cloud. It's going to create crazy showers of comets. So it is. we are sort of technically going to collide. Our solar system, if you include the orc cloud and all those things out there in the fringes, it is going to collide with this other star.

Yeah. And, you know, our org cloud is probably always getting little gravitational tugs from close by stars. And that might be what's driving comets. But yeah, this star is going to come smash right into our org cloud and it's going to be a crazy meteor shower. I hope that we survive it. Wow.

Well, again, we need a pretty big umbrella. And it's probably coming with its own orc cloud, right? Like, every solar system probably has a collection of these icy objects. So when our icy objects collide with its icy objects, who knows what's going to happen? Right. Like our solar systems might make. So do scientists know what's going to happen? Are we going to merge with it?

It's just going to be a drive-by? Is it going to start orbiting our solar system? What's going to happen? Well, it's going to pass through fast enough that it's not going to form a binary star system, but it's very likely to perturb the orbits of the planets and to cause a lot of cometary showers. Exactly what happens depends on exactly where the point. planets are when it comes by, and we don't have enough certainty to make that prediction. But we'll probably see it in the night sky, though, right? Like we'll see the star swinging by.

Yeah, it's going to be brighter than the planet Venus, and you'll be able to see it during the day. So, you know, put a notification in your calendar. Siri, set a reminder for one million years from today. Look for this star. Look outside. And bring an umbrella. All right. Well, that might be maybe the closest to a star collision, our sun will ever get, right? I mean, that's about it, right? Let's hope. What do you mean? Could something unexpected happen? I don't want a collision even closer than that. Anything close to that is guaranteed to be a

cataclysm for humanity. But you're saying that's the closest we can expect, at least in the next, you know, a few billion years. A few million years, yes. All right. Well, I guess it's a pretty wild and crazy universe, you know, collisions do happen. Stars do collide. Even though there's a lot of space out there and there are, there's a lot of space between stars, it does happen because it's the big universe. Yeah, we are in a tiny little cosmic rowboat floating on a huge, crazy, chaotic ocean. And it seems stable only because it's moving so slowly. Yeah, so make sure you bring an umbrella, wear a helmet when you jump into the stellar mosh pit of the universe, and hope for the best. Keep an eye out, I guess. Well, maybe we'll bump into the stellar version of

Brad Pitt at the grocery store. And just don't steal his cookies, you know. That might anger Angelina Jolie. And then you'll have two stars, you know, colliding with you. 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.

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We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. Listen to Family Secrets, Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grasias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition?

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