Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What weird thing in space is pulsing every 20 minutes?

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

Daniel and Katie talk about things in the sky that pulse, and a recent discovery of a puzzling set of pulses.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Monica Patton. Elaine Welteroff. Learn how to get comfortable pivoting because your life is going to be full of them. Listen to these women and more on She Pivots. Now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I was diagnosed with cancer on Friday and cancer free the next Friday. No chemo, no radiation, none of that. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business,

and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. Professionally, I started at Death World Records. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into the soul of the music and the purpose that drives it. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey Daniel, is there still more stuff to discover out there in space? Oh my gosh, so much more stuff. Are you looking forward to some more new discoveries?

Well, I just kind of hope I'm not too late. Too late for what? What do you mean? Too late to get to name one of these crazy things. Do you have a particularly good idea for a name? I feel like scientists need some new material, like quasar, pulsar, blazar, mazar, mazar, magnetar. We need a new direction. We need some freshness. All right, I'm terrified to hear what you have in mind.

I was thinking something like the Katie Orb. That has a nice ring to it, right? All right. I'll send that in, but are you sure that is what you want? I mean, what if we discover something gross like a planet made of slime and it gets called the Katie Orb? Daniel, I would be honored. Be careful what you wish for. Hi, I'm Daniel.

I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I do want to discover a planet made of slime. I am Katie Golden. I'm stepping in for Jorge. I typically do a podcast on animals, but I love talking about planets because they're kind of like big animals, but round. And weird planets out there might have.

have weird animals on it, right? Have you thought about starting a podcast on exozoology? I feel like I would need a pretty good spaceship first and recording equipment that could span quite a bit of broadcast distance. Well, I'm sure as soon as we discover, planets filled with slime and the creatures swimming around in them named the kitty orb, of course, somebody will jump on the podcast opportunity, a podcast all about these weird slimy aliens. It'll just be called a blob cast.

The slime cast. Well, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio, in which we cast our minds out into the universe to think about planets made of slime, planets made of diamonds, planets made of all sorts of weird things, to wonder about whether there are planets out there like ours

or whether our planet is weird and unusual. We think about all the strange stuff that's out there in the universe and all the strange stuff we've, find here on Earth, the quantum particles frothing up between our toes all the way up to the hearts of galaxies and the mammoth black holes that live in them. We try to understand the entire universe and explain it all to you while keeping you laughing. All right, I'm ready to learn about the entire universe in about an hour. My usual friend and co-host Jorge can be here

today, but we are very happy to have Katie along for the ride to learn about weird stuff in outer space. I love weird stuff in outer space. I always like to imagine there's some kind of giant space whale out there making its way slowly towards us. See, I knew you think about the universe and space in terms of critters, right? Who is out there? Who is swimming through space? Who is jumping through an ocean of slime? It's hard not to anthropomorphize the universe. Otherwise, it feels very lonely. So I like to think that there's stuff out there wriggling and sliming it up. And when you meet these space whales, you're going to give them like a nice slimy hug. Exactly. Well, there is something fascinating about space and the universe because it's such a vast frontier. We are trapped here on

these tiny little planet looking up at the sky, wondering about what's out there in space and knowing that it is chock full of discoveries waiting to be made. Every time we look up at the sky and invent some new kind of eyeball for peering further out or hearing in a new frequency or listening to a new kind of particle we always find something shocking something weird something unexpected because space really is the final frontier it's a place to explore and to discover and to learn what's out there in the universe which of course is the first step to understanding it i do think it's an interesting way to look at things because there's this feeling sometimes i get of well science has progressed pretty far. What more do we really have to discover? But then when you

try to think about all of these unknown things about the universe, it becomes pretty apparent that we know actually very little about the universe. Our understanding of the universe is very, it is a fraction of what is actually out there. Absolutely. We know very little about how the universe works. And part of that is because we have seen very little of the universe. We have not significantly left the Earth or its neighborhood, right? Everything we've learned about the way that stars form and galaxies come together in the history of the universe and dark matter and all these big mysteries have come just from observing the universe from Earth, which means we're limited to capturing photons and other particles that happen to make their way to Earth. And because things

are very, very far away, a lot of stuff gets missed. So if you think about like the fraction of the Milky Way that we have studied in detail, it's a tiny little teaspoon. of all the stuff that's out there. And the most interesting stuff, of course, is the weird stuff, the rare stuff. So as we continue to build our capabilities and develop new techniques for looking out into the universe,

we're going to keep stumbling over weird cases, things that we thought were impossible or that we never imagined we're out there in the universe. Take an analogy from particle physics about learning things from rare examples. When we smash protons together, we make Higgs bosons sometimes, Sometimes, but not very often.

It takes like trillions of collisions to make one Higgs boson. So now apply that to astronomy. How many stars do you have to look at until you find that one that reveals something deep and true about the universe? I think that's also very unique because in a lot of science, the key is looking at things that are replicable, things that happen commonly. And it's not so much looking at the extreme, extraordinary cases. love that when we look at the universe and the science of the universe, like looking at these extreme cases can teach us so much about the universe in general. Absolutely. And one really valuable clue we have when we look at the night sky is how it changes. And humans have been doing

this for thousands of years. The Mayans, the Chinese, the Indians, the Greeks, even the Babylonians. We're looking up at the sky and noticing, of course, how it changes with the seasons and learning from changes in the sky, how things worked out there, how the planets were moving and all this kind of stuff. And modern astronomy does the same thing. We look at the night sky and we look for things changing because things changing are clues, their hints. When the star explodes, you have an incredible opportunity to learn something about the life cycle of a star or if a new star appears. Anything that's flickering or changing in the night sky is literally sending you a message that something exciting is going on. The night sky, it's interesting because it has this feeling

of something permanent, right? Yes, it does as we rotate around the sun and as we spin on our own axis, the sky also will change. But the idea that there are actual changes happening to the stars in the sky, I think it's something that is somewhat unexpected, right? Because you look at the sky and you think like, well, sky's going to be the same. Those stars are going to be there. Stars are permanent, but they're not. They can have their own lifespan and then sometimes we're lucky enough to actually see changes in the stars themselves during their lifespans. Exactly. And it's a really important clue about the nature of deep time. It gives us this different perspective. We know actually that the universe is quite chaotic and quite dynamic. You know, even our solar system, the planets move

in and out and migrate. We used to have another big planet that got ejected when Saturn and Jupiter came into the inner solar system and then went back out to where we find them now. We know that the whole galaxy is histories of collisions with other galaxies. Everything is changing. It's just doing it on a much, much, much, much longer time scale than we are used to thinking about. Not seconds, not minutes, not days, not hundreds of years, but sometimes millions of years. So when we are lucky enough to see something changed in the night sky, we're looking at a very rare moment, a transition between periods that might last millions of years. So thinking about the

night sky changing is really fun because it helps you get that deep time perspective to realize that the universe looks very different when you fast forward. So when you say that these things take a lot of time, are most of these changes very slow or are there certain changes with stars that we can actually see happening in real time? Like an explosion or something seems like it might actually be something that you see over the course of minutes or hours or days. So do we actually get to see things that happen rapidly, even though it took, you know, an unfathomable amount of time to get to that point? Yeah, we do sometimes.

It's really exciting. There are things like supernova that happen over minutes or days or months. And you can actually find records of these in ancient astronomy. The Chinese were keeping track. what they're called guest stars, which are comets and supernovas all the way back to, you know, a thousand BC. It's really incredible how long their records go back. And so these are the moments when we can really learn something about the night sky, things that do happen on our time scale, things we can observe that change in minutes or hours or even months. And so that's a

really fascinating opportunity to learn something about the night sky. And today, that's exactly what we're going to talk about, an accidental discovery by an undergraduate student of something very weird in the night sky, something different from anything we have ever seen before. Flying slime monster. Visitor from the Katie Orb. Today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question. What's the weird thing in space that's pulsing every 20 minutes? You're telling me this isn't about a giant slime monster, though.

I'm saying we don't know. I'm not ruling it out. you know, maybe there is a giant slime monster out there that burps every 20 minutes and that's going to be the answer, right? That's the joy of science, is not knowing the answer going in. So this is a fairly recent result and one that astronomers have been puzzling over and a few listeners send it to me and said, what's going on here? Can you explain it? And I love digging into recent science discoveries to help people understand the context of them, what we've learned, what really is mysterious about it and what the various possible explanations are. And this one's

especially fun because we get to talk about all the things. in the sky that pulse. But before we dig in, of course, I wanted to know if people already had heard about this and had ideas for what might be pulsing in the sky every 20 minutes. So thank you very much to our group of volunteers who answer these questions. If you would like to join them, please don't be shy. Everybody is welcome. Just write to me to questions at danielanhorpe.com. You can record the answers in the privacy of your own living room and then just delete them before sending to me if you don't like. So think about it for me. moment before you hear these answers. Do you know what kind of things in the sky can pulse every

20 minutes? Here's what people had to say. What pulses every 20 minutes? It can't be a pulsar because that's way too easy of a question for you guys. But I believe that there's a heavenly body out there that is producing a radio wave every 1,286 seconds, which I seem to believe is about 20 minutes. And it was the little green man signal. What object pulses every 20 minutes? Well, I believe that pulsars pulse much more rapidly than that. So I'm going to guess it might be something more like a quasar. Pulsing makes me think of pulsars. So spinning neutron stars, that's my guess.

But I feel that they can pulse much faster than that. So I'm not sure. It is a pulsar that blips every time Jeff Bezos earns $1 million. dollars. So I'm somewhat surprised that only one person mentioned the idea of this being like the doings of aliens or the the handiwork of some organic life form. Well, that's interesting. Is organic life typically that regular? I mean, I know that humans can send signals that pulse very regularly because it's part of our sort of like digital technological civilization. But are there examples in nature of things that like pulse very regularly every 20 minutes? Well, maybe not

every 20 minutes, although there are some animals that have very slow rates of this, but our heartbeats are something that makes me think of something with a very regular pulsating mechanism. But yeah, something that pulsates with this sort of regularity does actually make me think of biological processes. They may not be exact down to the nanosecond, but there are a lot of biological processes where you have a sort of pulsing. I'm not sure what animal would have a heartbeat that is once every 20 minutes. But some animals can slow down their heart rates quite a bit when they go into a sort of state of torpor.

Well, isn't heart rate connected to body mass? Like, the larger you are, the slower your heart rate? Generally speaking, it can also be dependent on your metabolism. So like a small thing, like a wood frog that freezes itself in the winter, can slow its heart rate down quite a. a bit, whereas a large thing that's running is going to have a really fast heart rate. So it has to do with your metabolism, which may have something to do with your species or your size. Often large things do have slower metabolisms, but it can also depend on the state that you are in.

So if you're exercising, your heart rate's going to be pretty quick. If you're a wood frog and you've frozen yourself in the winter to kind of hibernate, then your heartbeat is going to be really, really slow. Well, the direction I was thinking was, you know, a little mouse has its heart rate very, very fast, and a human is slower, and a big whale is even slower. So I was wondering, like, how big of a space whale do you have to have to have a 20-minute heartbeat? Maybe it's a planet-sized slime ball space whale. I like where this is going, yes. We don't know, of course, whether this is an actual alien slime whale or not. But we do know that there are things in the night sky that pulse.

And lots of our listeners mentioned one of them, pulsars, that we're going to dig into in a moment. But there might be more things in the night sky that pulse and that vary and that change than you might expect. A lot of people look up in the night sky and think that it's static, that it doesn't change. But actually, all stars have cycles. They're not just like static burning balls of gas.

They vary. They get brighter. they get dimmer. Even our sun, for example, changes its brightness over an 11-year cycle. They're like huge and sort of deadly lava lamps. That's exactly right, because there are these big balls of plasma. They're not just fire the way we have like a campfire. There's fusion going on and there's all sorts of convection and lots of complicated processes that we still do not really understand very well.

Our own star, the sun, has this weird 11-year cycle where it's magnetic. The magnetic field flips every 11 years with crazy regularity, as far as we can tell, going back a very long time. And this has to do with the currents of plasma inside the sun, like flopping over on top of each other. You can think of these things like big spaghetti noodles and they get bound up by magnetic fields and then they snap and twist. So something is going on inside our sun that's like a clock. It's like a universe clock. And every 11 years, the sun flips its magnetic field and it also changes its brightness. Not that much, like 0.1% over 11 years cycles.

But it does change. It is variable. So this big bright spaghetti clock, you were talking about currents. It sounds like it has like these complex, almost weather patterns that follow a sort of timeline. Yeah, they have these big plasma tubes inside the sun, these currents of these hot protons and electrons that are flowing. And that helps make the magnetic field. Remember, magnetic fields come from moving charges. and the sun is basically just ionized hydrogen.

You take the proton and the electron and you give them so much energy that they don't want to hang out together anymore. They want to be free. So they are just flying around all of these charges and then they flow in these big tubes and that's what makes magnetic fields. But they like slip and slide on top of each other and sometimes they snap and break and relax in various modes.

It's extraordinarily complicated. We don't have the technology to model the inside of the sun very well because it is very complex. Each of the particles, not only does it have location and momentum, but you also have to think about their electromagnetic forces between each other. These things can get very turbulent and very chaotic, meaning that like a very small change in one electron can cascade into a big effect for other electrons. So you make a little mistake and it becomes very quickly a big mistake. That's one of the things that makes the sun hard to model. It can be very chaotic on its insides.

And that's a weak point in our science, that sometimes we can simulate things because we understand the fundamental rules like we know electromagnetism but we can't necessarily model a lot of them all at once and the sun is a lot of electrons to model so you mentioned that it's very chaotic but it also may follow a sort of 11 year cycle how do you get things like cycles or regularity out of such chaotic processes yeah they're chaotic in the sense that a small change in the initial conditions can lead to a large change and that's a problem often for our simulations that if we don't get things exactly right, then our simulations go wrong. Inside the star, the process can be quite stable, actually.

There are things that keep it on track. You know, the magnetic field configuration of these plasma tubes have energetic minimums that they like to settle into, but then the magnetic fields get stretched and twisted, and then there's a new energetic minimum that forms, and they snap over into that. And so that's the kind of thing that can give you these regular processes. And our star is pretty constant when it comes to this, but other stars are much more dramatic. There's stars out there in the universe that are very dramatically pulsating. They swell in size and they also shrink.

They get like bigger and smaller. Some of these things pulse with a fairly regular frequency or sometimes multiple frequencies. They can be either very regular or stochastic. A classic example of these is very famous, the sephids. These are the ones that Hubble used to discover that the universe is a. expanding because it's a very clever trick to figuring out how far away these stars are by how they are pulsating. It turns out if you measure the period of their variation, like as they get brighter and dimmer and brighter and dimmer, the time between being bright and dimmed

allows you to know the true brightness of the star. Like there's a relationship there where stars that are pulsating faster might be brighter and stars that are pulsating slower might be dimmer. And then you can know how far away the star is because you can measure the brightness here on Earth, compare it to the brightness you know to be the case that you got from the pulsation, from the periodicity of the star, and that tells you how far away it is. That was very important early on for understanding the expansion of the universe because we just looked out of the sky and we didn't know how far away are all these dots. Some of them might be closer.

Some of them might be further. It's not always easy to tell. So the variability of the night sky is actually a very important handle scientifically for understanding like the 3D structure of what we're looking at. So these sephids that were studied, we found that they were starting to get dimmer. So they were starting to get further from Earth showing that there was an expansion of the universe. So for the sephids, we can measure their velocity relative to Earth because we look at the light from them and we see how it's shifted. Stars that are moving away from Earth are redshifted. The wavelengths of their light has been

extended because they're moving away from us. It's like a Doppler effect. So we we can measure the velocity of these stars. And then Hubble also was able to measure the distance to these stars. He was able to tell which ones were closer and which ones were further away. Using this trick where he measured how they pulsed, how they pulsed, told him how bright they were, which tells them how far away they are. So if he knows how far away they are and he knows their velocity, then he can compare those two things.

And what Hubble noticed was that stars that are further away seem to be moving away from us faster, and stars that are closer by are moving away less fast. And what that tells you is that the universe is expanding, that everything is moving away from us and things further away are moving away faster. And that's the original Hubble's law and Hubble's constant relates these two things, how fast things are expanding relative to how far away they are. Wow. So that's like we're able to tell things about our universe just from the movement of stars. And because these stars are pulsating that gave us enough information to be able to measure distance and velocity, which was the key. to understanding the expansion.

Yeah. And also this other great mind-blowing moment of understanding because we didn't know until then that there were other galaxies in the universe. We thought we just had this one galaxy and it was a bunch of stars and that was it. And we saw these other little smudges up in the sky that we now know our other full galaxies, but we didn't know that at the time. They couldn't tell how far away they are. So they thought they were just little clouds of gas that were inside our galaxy. They didn't realize they were mammoth collections of other stars much, much further away until Hubble measured their distance using these variable stars, using these things pulsating in those other galaxies. And he could tell, oh my gosh, these things are super far away. We totally

got this wrong. And all of a sudden, instantly, your whole mental picture of the universe expands from, we have this one galaxy floating in space to, wow, the universe is littered with galaxies. It's a complete mind-blowing moment to realize that the universe has so many more galaxies than just ours. It is also kind of wild that we once thought we were the only galaxy. I find that somewhat, I guess, egocentric. I'm not really sure. I get it. I mean, at one point, we thought Earth was the center of the universe. So to think we're the only galaxy kind of makes sense too, but also it is a little bit, we're a little bit full of ourselves here in the Milky Way, aren't we? It can be really hard to put yourself in the mindset of people who made assumptions 100 years ago or 500 years ago that seemed totally natural to them at the time.

And now to us seem kind of bonkers and obvious. It really goes to show you how much our intuition is informed by science. You know, what we think is obvious and natural has changed over time as we've learned about the universe. And so that tells you you really shouldn't trust your intuition at all. That's totally biased by what you've been told. and how things have been described to you. So I shouldn't be trusting my intuition that's saying it's time for an outbreak?

No, there you are spot on. 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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I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So we are back and we are talking about the dynamic stars out there that pulse and change and things that we can actually measure. So we talked about these stars, the sephids, that they're pulsating where the pulsating of the sephids told us a lot about the nature of the universe, that it was expanding, it allowed us to measure the distance to these stars. What are other examples of stars changing that we can observe here on Earth? So pulsating stars are not the only example of stars changing out there in the universe. We see all sorts of things changing.

And every time this happens, we try to understand it, like what's going on? You know, people have been working on understanding Cepheds for a long time because we'd like to know what's going on inside stars. How does the energy dynamics work? In the case of Cepheds, we have sort of an idea. People think that like something inside the star might become opaque so that the radiation basically can't escape. And that makes the star a little bit darker. And then the star puffs up because it's absorbing that radiation instead of emitting it. It puffs it up.

And then it collapses again. to gravity so there's some sort of cycle there but these stars just go to do this thing over and over again there are other kinds of stars that are much more dramatic where you have like huge amounts of material blown out of the star called like flare stars some of these things can get very dramatic like the star can grow in brightness by a factor of five or six in just like 30 minutes so imagine you're like sitting on a planet near one of these stars you're sunbathing nicely and all of a sudden the star is like six times as bright as it was just a half an hour ago. It's like that black hole sun music video, which gives me a migraine when I watch it.

Is this a repeating pattern or does it just happen once and done? These things are unpredictable. They're not like very regular. So you'll be watching the star all of a sudden it'll get much, much brighter very briefly. And then it'll dim back down again. And they think it might be something going on inside the star that's blowing out a huge amount of material and then it's settled down again. There must be something chaotic happening inside these stars.

But this is not the kind of thing we expect our sun to do. Most of the flare stars that are out there tend to be of the red dwarf variety. And remember that red dwarfs are much more common kind of star than ours. Our star is kind of unusual in the universe. And most of the flare stars that we've observed are these red dwarves. And that's actually one hypothesis for why life evolved around the not most common star because you might imagine if red dwarves are the most common star in the universe, why is it that we evolved around a weird star? And it might be that red dwarves are common, but they're just

sort of like inhospitable to life because it takes a lot of sunscreen to survive your star getting six times as bright all of a sudden unpredictably. That's really interesting. So if most stars out there are red dwarves, what kind of star is our sun? Our star is one of the category that they call an F or G type star. So it's a bigger star and it's yellower. And so it tends to burn brighter. Remember that smaller stars are cooler, which is why smaller stars are redder because red indicates longer wavelengths, which means lower surface temperatures. And our sun is more yellow. It's a little bit hotter than the typical red type of star. So we live on an unusually hot kind of star. And so our, our doesn't have these sort of star sneezes like these red dwarves have. And so that protects us from

having suddenly needing 100 SPF every so often. Not entirely though, right? Our son does have little sneezes. You know, these coronal mass ejections can be fairly dramatic events where like loops of plasma get ejected and some of them can even bathe the earth. We had this event in the 1800s where like all wires on Earth were suddenly electrified because of the crazy magnetic and electric fields that were coming from these events. So they do happen. They're not nearly as dramatic as flare stars, but even our sun can burp in our direction. Oh, dear. Uh-oh. What if Twitter goes down? Oh, no, that would be so bad. Blame the sun, not Elon Musk. So we've got pulsating stars like the Cephids. We've got the red dwarves who have their explosive sneezes. What other kinds of star pulsating do we have?

One of my favorite and the kind that was mentioned by listeners when we asked them about this are pulsars. These are a very, very cool kind of star and they represent the end of the life of many stars. So, you know, stars form from having a huge blob of cold gas and dust that gravity gathers together until eventually it's hot enough and dense enough that fusion can start and then fusion is fighting back against gravity. If we only had gravity, then a blob of gas and dust would just form a black hole straight away. But because it starts to burn, it emits radiation that's like puffing back up against gravity and it keeps it in balance for millions or billions or trillions of years depending on the size of the star. Smaller stars burn longer because they burn cooler, bigger stars burn shorter and faster and hotter and don't last for

very long. And the mass of the star also sort of determines what happens to it. Like a star that's smaller, like less than eight times the mass of our sun will eventually turn into a red giant. It puffs up and then eventually collapses and you get like maybe a white dwarf at its core, which is just like a hot leftover blob of the stuff that fusion produced. I knew blob monsters were out there. I knew it. And that's probably the fate of our star. It's going to become a red giant and puff out all of its material and eventually just be left. as a white dwarf which will cool over trillions of years to a black dwarf. But if you have more stuff in that initial scoop of matter,

then you have like a massive star that can become a red super giant. And when that collapses, you get a supernova, which can leave a neutron star or a black hole. And a neutron star is what forms a pulsar. A neutron star is a blob of mass so dense that the electrons and the protons that used to be in the hydrogen have gotten squeezed together to form neutrons. Usually it goes the other way.

Neutrons like to decay into a proton and an electron. But if you push them together hard enough, they will actually reverse that process and make neutrons. So neutron stars are some of the densest things in the universe. And they're like the last step before gravity finally takes over and collapses this thing into a black hole. So they're very weird, very interesting things scientifically. We don't really understand what's going on inside a neutron star,

how it all works. But they do something really, really fascinating, which is that they send us these regular pulses from space. So I imagine if I wanted to scoop like a teaspoon of neutron star, it would be pretty heavy. It would not be good for your diet to eat even a teaspoon of neutron star. It's a little too rich. So are these still emitting light? What is pulsing for these neutron stars? So these things are not undergoing fusion, right?

They're not glowing the way that other stars are. And Jorge might, for example, quibble about whether we should call it a star or not. And so these things are not glowing in that sense. You can't look up at the night sky and see a bright dot and say, oh, that's a neutron star. We can see them sometimes because they emit x-rays. But the best way to discover neutron stars is through their pulses because neutron stars are also spinning really, really fast. They have to spin because the original blob of stuff that made them was spinning. And now they've gotten really, really small.

New John stars are like a few kilometers in size, but they have the mass of like the sun or five times the sun. That kind of sounds like an ice skater, like a figure skater. They can start a spin and then when they collapse, like they kind of go into a ball, they can spin even faster. That's exactly right. And they have to spin faster because they're smaller. And so to maintain the angular momentum, you have to spin faster with a smaller radius. That's just because the law of angular momentum is conserved in the use. universe and it forces these things to spin faster as they get smaller. Now that spinning also

makes a magnetic field, right? Because again, you have charged particles in there and things are spinning. So you get a magnetic field and that magnetic field will funnel some charge particles up towards the pole. The same way that like on earth, we have a magnetic field and it protects us from charge particles from space. If an electron hits the earth, it doesn't just go all the way down into the earth. The magnetic field will funnel it up to the poles, which is why you see like Northern lights and Southern lights. Those are cosmic rays charged particles from space that have been swept up to the northern and the southern parts of the Earth by our magnetic field. And so the same thing can happen on these neutron stars. They have charged particles

that are swept up to the poles and then emitted. So you get these very powerful beams being emitted from the north and south poles of this planet because the magnetic field is sort of like focused it. Instead of just like shooting particles off in every direction, it shoots them up in these two beams, one north and one south. Now, if you could stand on this neutron star, which I'm assuming you can't without being grievously hurt, when you look up at one of the poles, would you see something like an aurora

before you're presumably squished or tossed off the planet? Well, the scale of these things is ridiculous. I mean, the gravity is so strong on a neutron star that like the tallest mountain on a neutron star is about a millimeter. And the atmosphere of the neutron star is like a few more millimeters. So you'd have to be like ant-sized to be looking up from a neutron star and see any atmosphere above you. It'd be pretty tough. Also, you'd have to be like an Olympic strong man or strong woman to be able to stand up on a neutron star without being crushed or pulled apart by its tidal forces.

I mean, good news is on a neutron star, I could scale the tallest mountain. Bad news, all my bones would be jelly. Exactly. So you have this neutron star and it's spinning and you have this magnetic field which accelerates any protons and electrons on the surface into these beams which shoot out into space. And the fascinating thing is that sometimes the magnetic field is not aligned with the spin of the star. So you have like the star itself is spinning. And now you have this beam shooting off of the surface, but the beam is not shooting on the spin axis. It's shooting a little bit off, which means the beam is like, sweeping around through space. It's like forming a cone sort of of light and it sweeps around. And so these pulsars are not actually variable in that sense. Their beam is constant.

But if the beam sweeps by you, it seems variable because it sweeps over you and then it passes you and then it comes back again. So it's sort of like that figure skaters holding a flashlight. And as she turns, she blinds you once every revolution. I hate it when they do that at the Olympics. But yeah, no, I mean, it sounds like a. galactic lighthouse. It's exactly right, just like a lighthouse.

And when we were first discovered, it was super fascinating. The first one to be discovered had a period of about 1.33 seconds, one in a third seconds. So they were looking up at the night sky and actually listening for other stuff and they saw this signal that went like, beep, beep, beep, very, very regular. And so, of course, the first astronomers to see this, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who unfortunately was overlooked for the Nobel Prize for this, she at first thought, me. be this is aliens, giant space whales or something else sending us a message because we didn't expect the night sky to pulse and to pulse with such regularity. It seemed artificial. It seemed

technological. Yeah, that is interesting. As humans, we love a pattern. And I think that patterns to us seem to signal some intention. I guess like it's very easy to anthropomorphize a pattern because we think of, well, if something acts in a regular pattern, it's got some kind of volition, it's got some sort of consciousness because it is acting in this pattern. But of course, patterns can exist in ways that have nothing to do with being alive or having a brain. Like when we notice patterns, we have this sense. And I think there have been some psychology studies on this when people see things like inanimate

objects, like a marble or something, and it's sort of doing some kind of. a patterned behavior. They perceive it as having sort of a, like it desires or having its own sort of consciousness. But, yeah, it's not necessarily indicative of as much as I would like it to be a giant space whale spouting its space spout. But it does, it feels that way very much. I think patterns feel very human. They feel very intentional. But I suspect this is just human bias. You know, we imagine that like nature is messy and doesn't form things like perfect circles and perfect pulses and squares because that's the kind of thing that we like to make and we imagine that differentiates us. But you know, there are like squares in nature. You can find weird formations of rock that are

like almost perfect cubes or whatever. So I imagine that when we do get to an alien planet sometime, we will be tripped up by this expectation that things that form straight lines or geometric patterns must be artificial and technological and intelligent. And maybe not, right? Maybe those aliens are messy slabs and their cities don't look anything like ours, right? And there are, of course, examples in the universe when things are very regular and yet not artificial. And these pulsars are a great example.

And because they spin so fast, their pulses are very, very short. You know, on a cosmological time scale, these things are super fast, right? We expect stars to pulse to vary on the scale of millions or billions. of years, these things are pulsing at like seconds, and some of them are spinning so fast, millisecond pulsars pulse literally every millisecond. And with extraordinary regularity, you know, they are more precise, more accurate, more repeatable at least than our best atomic clocks. There's something that's hard for me to kind of visualize with that, because when I think of space and, you know, stars, I think of very slow movements, but something that is spinning that

fast and flashing that fast. It's hard to conceive of on that scale. It is really amazing. And there's another sort of time scale for pulsars, which is that they do slow down. Like as we watch them, they seem very, very regular. But something can't spin and emit light forever, right? That would be like an infinite energy source. This rotation and this beam actually saps energy from the star. And eventually they do slow down. We think that it takes like 10 to 100 million years for a pulsar to basically give up its energy by beaming it out into space. And that's actually kind of a short amount of time, right? Pulsars don't last very long, which means that like most of the pulsars in the history of the universe are now quiet. They did their pulse. They spread their lighthouse information

through the universe and now they're dead. They're quiet. So something like 99% of the pulsars that ever pulsed are no longer pulsing. What happens to them after they stop pulsing? Do they just remain a neutron star or do they turn into something else? We hope to have a long career as emeritus stars, you know. They continue to participate in the galactic discussions. No, exactly. Then they're just neutron stars, right? There's still hot blobs of neutrons.

They're just not emitting anymore. They're not spinning as fast. I see. Well, the glory days are over for them. Maybe they can retire. Well, I'm going to try to do some spinning around to see if I can see, see what it feels like to be a neutron star, and we'll be right back. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

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Tim McGraw. Tickets are on. Sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today. AXS.com. So I just got really dizzy trying to method act as a neutron star spinning around. I feel nauseous. And I guess that's how these neutron stars feel too, if they can feel things.

And I sympathize immensely. life that you're trying to get in the head of your giant spinning space whale. That's really very empathetic of you. And when they do come to visit, I think that's going to make you sort of like last on the list of people to be eaten. Exactly. I think ahead. I plan for the long game. My point is that it sounds like you're being all altruistic and empathetic, but really it's cynical, right? You're just really looking out for Katie. Like I'm hedging all my bets when it comes to giant space whales. So I apologize for nothing. So we just talked about pulsars, these neutron stars that spin incredibly fast and sort of has that flash, like almost like

auroras that can flash really quickly, which kind of blows my mind. So is this is, have we gone through all of the methods of pulsing in the universe yet? Those are the primary methods of pulsing. There are other things like supernovas that do change in the night sky. But really these are the biggest categories of things we expect to see. Flair stars, Cephids, pulsating stars. and then pulsars themselves. But of course, there's always the opportunity to discover something new. And I was so excited to read this paper for so many reasons, not just because they found something new that we don't understand in the universe,

but because how the discovery was made. This discovery was made by an undergraduate physics student who was looking through old data that had been sitting on disk for years and nobody had looked at in this way. He was like, well, looking for a research, opportunity, found a professor and the professor said, hey, I have this data. Why'd you look through this and see if you can find something weird? So he's analyzed this data looking to see if you could find things that pulsed at rates that were longer than anybody looked at before. This is a lesson

to all undergraduates. When you are given what you think seems like busy work just to get you out of the hair of some professor, maybe not. Maybe you'll discover something new. And this is not the first time undergraduates looking through old data have found something dramatic that has taught us something about the universe. Check out our episode on fast radio bursts. It's also something very similar and interesting. And the lesson here also is sometimes you have to know what to look for when you're looking through the data. Like you can't just stare up in the night sky and say, universe, tell me what's out there. Wait, I've been doing that. It's not working? Well, you have to ask a question. You have to say, you know, are there big pulses in radio bursts or are there

things that pulse very, very long periods because the kind of things we know of that are out there pulsars and their very magnetic versions magnetars tend to pulse on seconds or faster. And so this guy went into the data and looked for things that pulsed with longer time scales. And surprise, surprise, surprise, he found one. His undergrad's name is PJ Hancock and he was looking through data from the Australian Merchison Wide Field Array. So when we talk about arrays, are These are big fields of detection equipment. Yeah, exactly. The Murchison Whitefield Array is not the kind of telescope you find imagine where you're

like looking through an eyepiece up at the universe. It's actually just a bunch of antennas. There are 4,096, sort of like spider-like antennas that all just receive radio messages. Each one is just like an antenna to listen to radio. But instead of listening to, you know, Kiss FM or whatever, it's listening to messages from space. And you have this big array of antennas, which helps you, number one, capture more signals and also tell where the signals came from. Because if you see the signal first on one side of the array, then it like sweeps over the

array, then you can tell where in the sky it might have come from. I love how we reverse engineer things that you find in nature in terms of like detection, like animals that have really good sensory organs that can really pinpoint where something is coming from, usually have this spatial element to it. And I love that. We have created, as humans, basically all these sensory antenna on our earth to turn our earth into like a giant beetle detecting things out in the universe. Well, I hope the space whales don't like to eat beetles when they come here.

It's a big space bird. Then we're in trouble. So he found this thing in the data that releases big bursts of energy. kind of like a pulsar, but the weird thing is that it pulses every 20 minutes. Actually, it's even weirder. It pulses every 18.18 minutes. And this is a very long frequency for something in space. Like we don't have models for magnetars or pulsars that pulse this long. In seconds, this is like 1,091 seconds.

And when it does pulse, it pulses for like 30 to 60 seconds at a time, sometimes with shorter bursts. If you look inside the paper, it's really fascinating to have. like a sketch of all the different pulses that they captured. Once they found a few examples of this, they went back into the data and scanned more deeply and they found a bunch of these examples. So they have like 71 pulses from this thing over like a three month period when this telescope was observing data in just the right direction. Now I'm not a medical doctor, but if this was the heart rate for someone, I would be concerned. Because yeah, this looks This is a lot, like there's a big kind of spike and then there's a lot of little spikes going on.

You're like, this thing needs a pacemaker. Please help. My star is very sick. Well, we don't know, right? Maybe this is a very healthy signature for a giant space whale. But it's definitely something very weird for a pulsar. Again, pulsars tend to be much, much faster. And so when they found this thing, this undergrad took it to his advisor, astrophysicist Natasha Hurley Walker. and she dug in more deeply, but she said, quote, I was concerned that it was aliens when he brought it to her. And I have so many questions about that. Like, what do you mean? Concerned? Why are you

concerned? Not elated, not ready to show them how you've been trying to empathize with them by spinning around really fast. This is why I plan. Exactly. So they dug into this to try to understand like, what is this thing? Where is it coming from? And one of the first things they had to do was to understand the period of the pulses, but they noticed the pulses didn't actually line up in a very nice period. Like the separation between the pulses wasn't perfect. And that turned out to be because this thing is not coming from our solar system. It's coming from something much, much further away. And as the earth goes around the sun, it changes the frequency with which we observe these things. So once they corrected for the earth moving around the sun and like not capturing

the signal at the same place in our orbit as we go around, they found a must. much more precise fit. So that tells us, okay, it is really very regular and it's coming from somewhere far away. It's not like, you know, behind Jupiter or something like that. This thing is outside of our solar system. It's not also orbiting our sun. I mean, that's kind of comforting. I'm glad that this pulsating mystery object isn't just hiding behind Jupiter ready to jump out at us. So we don't, we don't even know what it is. We don't know if it's like a neutron star. We don't, Like, what do we know about it other than it has this weird 20 minute-ish interval and it's super far away? We don't really know. We know that it's about 4,000 light years away.

And you can use another trick to tell the distance, which is how the light of different frequencies is arriving on Earth. It doesn't all travel through the universe at the same velocity, even though, of course, light always has the same speed in a vacuum. Space itself is not a perfect vacuum. There are electrons all over the place. And that tends to effectively slow light down, but just so at a different rate for different frequencies, this is called dispersion. So the dispersion of the signal tells us how far it's gone through this like electron gas that's filling space because we know something about the density of that electron gas. So sort of reverse engineering that you can tell by the dispersion that it's about 4,000 light years away from Earth, which means that it is in our galaxy. It's not in like another galaxy, which would be millions of light years away.

Okay, so we do have to share the galaxy with whatever this is. So I do want to understand it better. So if it ever decides to visit, it knows I'm on its team. What else do we know about this? So we know that it's kind of got a broad signal, meaning that it admits not just at a single radio wavelength, right? And this convinces some people that it's not aliens. People think if we're going to get a message from aliens,

it's going to be at like one frequency. way that we tend to send radio messages. You know, Kiss FM is different from another frequency, like, you know, 101.1 rocking from the 80s or whatever. All your different stations are at different frequencies. And so people imagine if we're going to get a message, it's going to be at one frequency. And this one is sort of broad. I don't know, though, because like what if the aliens want to really reach out to whoever? So they're trying to send it out on as many frequencies as possible to make it more likely someone picks it up. Yeah, exactly. We don't know, right? It's another case of like anthropomorphizing how aliens might send their messages. So another thing to look at

is the potential magnetic field of this object. If it's a pulsar or a magnetar, which is just a pulsar with a very large magnetic field, that affects the kind of light that comes from it, like the photons that come from these stars have a different polarization based on the magnetic field. And this seems to have a very strong magnetic field on it. It's a very bright object. So that points toward it being a magnetar. But But it would be very strange because it's a very long period magnetar. Like if you look at the distribution of pulsars, magnetars that we've seen so far, they all cluster to have very short periods.

So this is like a big outlier. This is like a very weird one from the point of view of like how fast it seems to be spinning. What is something that could affect the speed of its spinning? Like would that be size of it or something else? It might be that it's just kind of old. Remember these things eventually do slow down. because they are emitting radiation. And so they last for tens or hundreds of millions of years.

So it might just be that we're seeing one sort of at the last moment. But the weird thing is that we've never seen one like this before. And we've seen lots and lots of pulsars in the universe. So either of these things are rare. And it just takes a while of observation before you see one of these kinds of things. You know, like there's a tail of a distribution.

You have most of them in the bulk and a few very slow ones that are sort of fading out. And you just have to keep looking for a long time the way we have to like collide particles for a long time before we see a Higgs boson and to keep looking before you see the rare ones and there's just now emerging because we've been paying attention for so long or it might be a new kind of thing right it might be something else out there not a magnetar some new kind of astrophysical object that has a different kind of behavior and that's frankly my hope because that means that there's something new that the universe

can do right and it's sending us literally sending us information that says beep beep there's something going on here. like the sort of funny irony though if it is just a grandpa star just like oh what's going on out there and just just got to slow down a little bit you know and we think it's some new exciting thing but it's just old star old and slow somehow that's cute to me that stars slow down when they get older just like people so people are trying to study this thing in further detail they're like looking at it across a range of frequencies understanding its x-ray emissions because magnetars tend to be fairly quiet in the x-rays. So they look for x-rays from this thing and didn't see any, which is sort of consistent

with being a magnetar, but not really a smoking gun because you're like not seeing a signature instead of seeing a signature. So what they're doing now is they're looking for more of these things. Like we have a bunch of data that nobody's analyzed and might have more examples. It might be like that data set that undergrad was looking at could have dozens of examples or other ratings. telescopes around the world might have taken data with this in it and nobody else had noticed. So it's exciting that you can make discoveries like in the data that we already have like sitting on computers. Yeah, I mean, it seems that the key is knowing, like you said earlier, the key is knowing what to look for. It's hard to spot a pattern if you don't even know what you're supposed

to be focusing on or like what time scale you should be looking at. Yeah, there's something really deep there about how we make discoveries and how we look out in the universe, what we notice and what we don't notice because the universe is like a tsunami of information. You can't pay attention to everything. You can't notice everything. So our brains tend to filter and pattern match. We can only really see a tiny fraction of what's out there in the universe, even just surrounding us, right? People are very oblivious to obvious stuff if they're not looking for it. So what we see in the universe depends on what we look for, which means we might be missing all sorts of crazy stuff that's happening out there just because we haven't been asking the right questions and we didn't have

patient undergrads to sift through the data in the right way right and in a hundred years or 500 years people might laugh at how obvious these discoveries were to make if we've only known to ask the right questions that's why it's really important for people in academia to remember that undergrads are people too and for you out there to remember that there's lots more things to discover in the universe really basic low-hanging fruits that almost anybody could figure out if they have the interest and the patience. So if you have aspirations to become an astrophysicist one day, don't worry, there's plenty of stuff for you to discover.

All right, thanks very much, Katie, for joining us on today's tour of pulsating space whales and slime orbs, or maybe just magnetars. And thanks to our listeners for coming along another ride as we talk about the weird stuff that's out there in the universe. I'm going to do some more spinning to see if I can feel what it feels like to be the mysterious pulsating object. And when they get here, they're not going to love you, Katie. I'm sorry.

They just can eat you like everybody else. I don't know. If I'm so dizzy that I've thrown up, they may not want to eat me. Or maybe that makes you delicious. Either way, thanks everybody for listening in. Tune in next time. Thanks for listening. And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I

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