Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What's going on with Przybylski's Star?

Episode Date: January 24, 2023

Daniel and Jorge talk about how to explain one of the weirdest stars in the Universe.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer.

her screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Daniel, how are things? Oh, you know, I'm down in Irvine

where nothing very exciting ever happens. Is there interesting stuff happening in your neighborhood? Yeah, everything. is good in my neighborhood. I like my town, but I bet anything's better than an academic suburb where you live. Well, I imagine you must have some pretty cool neighbors, you know, like you have that one house that has like a million cactuses out front or another one where the curtains are always drawn and the lights are on all night long. There is a weird house on our street, I have to say. A lot of strange noises. Oh, yeah? What's so weird about it? My kids live in it. Oh, is that the

one with an eccentric cartoonist who never leaves the house? I wouldn't know that one. Sometimes spotted eating cereal in his pajamas at 6 p.m. And also 9 p.m. and also 3 p.m. I am Jorge McCartunist and the co-author of frequently asked questions about the universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine. And I think it's been more than a decade since I've had a bowl of cereal. More than a decade, I feel so bad for you. Why do you deprive yourself of one of life's simplest and tastiest pleasures?

Well, you know, I don't eat breakfast anymore. And that's typically the time that normal humans eat cereal, though I know you don't feel bound by those constraints. I do not feel bound by time zones now. It's always breakfast time somewhere in the world. If you just think globally, you know, if you expand your mind a little bit. So you get to travel the world in your own kitchen. You're like, ooh, I'm having breakfast in Japan.

pan or ooh, I'm having breakfast in Venezuela. Yeah, there's always somebody having breakfast. Right now, somebody's having breakfast, no matter what time you're listening. Somebody's probably eating a bowl of cereal right now as they listen to this podcast. Yeah, crunch, crunch, crunch, or not if it's soggy, I guess. Some people like it's soggy, I don't know. We have a Danish exchange student living with us this year and he tells me that in Denmark, they don't eat their own meal cooked. They eat just raw oats with milk on them. Yeah, don't they call like musely with the omelat in the yew? I think they call that horse food over here. Did you just insult all Danish people?

If you think being compared to a horse is an insult, then I think you just insulted horses. I think you're insulting the dictionary right now. I think I have to say nay to that one. Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeart Radio. In which we try not to spend too much time digressing about horses and cereal and dive into the mysteries of the universe.

Because no matter what you're putting in your mouth, there are strange things going into your brain. All of these signals from photons traveling across the universe telling us that there are weird things happening out there deep, deep in the skies. Things blowing up, things exploding, things collapsing, things swirling around, things glowing in ways that we do not quite understand. On this podcast, we try to zoom you forward to the very edge of human knowledge so you can understand all of the weird stuff that's out there in the universe. Yes, because it is a weird universe and we love to go out there galloping out there to explore the things in it and trot along as we do. discover amazing secrets about the universe and talk about them in this podcast until our voices are horse. Wow, you get three stars for all those horse puns.

In one sentence, do you like that? That was really impressive, yeah. How is your knowledge of horse speeds? Does it stand beyond galloping, trotting, and walking? Yes, there's also cantering, I think. And that's my main knowledge of it. I think loping is a thing also, isn't it? I don't know.

You have a daughter who's an expert in horses. Right? That's right. I hear her talking about looping and cantering and trotting. She doesn't horse around. No, she's quite serious about it. Just as we are very serious about staying on topic on this podcast, we try to rein in the puns. That's right, because I guess this is a podcast about physics, although horses technically also follow the laws of physics. I'm not sure how much that's been tested. One day we should do an episode about the physics of horses. I'm sure we'll have a nice audience there with 13-year-old girls, but it is a pretty interesting universe full of mysteries even today where people think that Maybe science has everything figured out. But actually, there are still interesting and amazing and perplexing mysteries out there for us to solve.

And some of those are very accessible. If you are out camping or just out walking late at night and you turn your head up towards the night skies, you can see the twinkling light that comes from huge flaming balls of plasma that are zillions of miles away. It's incredible that the photons make their way so far across enormous vast reaches of transparent space to hit your eyeballs. People have been looking up with those stars and wondering what they are and how they work for thousands of years, maybe for hundreds of thousands of years, for at least as long as people have been looking up in the skies and asking questions. And we've made a lot of progress in understanding what those things are and how far away they are and how they work and what powers them. And yet important questions still remain. That's right.

We have an amazing view of the entire universe, all 40 billion light years wide of it, full of trillions of stars. And that's one of the main things we see when we look out into the universe, stars, and they bring information about what kind of star they are, what kind of planets they have around them, and how the whole universe is arranged. One of the coolest things about these hot stars is that they tell us something about the story of our neighborhood. They contain so many clues about what has happened in the long, deep history of the universe before we started paying attention, before we started looking out into the cosmos and noticing things. We do know that the universe is very, very old, just as the ground under our feet is old. And by asking questions about how the Earth got to look this way or how stars got to glow in these particular patterns, we can start to understand how they form and understand the story of our own universe, the context of our very lives. Yeah, including how our star form.

Because I guess when you look out into the universe, Daniel, it sort of looks like a bunch of pinpoints. All the stars look the same from our point of view. But actually, stars are really diverse. They go in all kinds of sizes and colors, right? And temperatures. Absolutely. And they tend to resist our efforts to categorize them. The human tendency is to put things in groups and say, oh, this is this kind of thing.

This is that kind of thing. But the history of astronomy and cosmology is discovering maybe those definitions don't quite work. There's always a fuzzy thing right at the boundary that's like, I'm kind of like this one. I'm kind of like that one. Or break all the rules that you thought were true about stars or planets. Just look at our solar system. You know, there's a sun.

there's planets, but then there are dwarf planets. And then there are asteroids and there are comets and there's things called centaurs. It's it right at the edge between asteroids and comets. It's a whole huge spectrum of craziness out there. And every time we look deep and carefully into the universe, we always find something out there that surprises us that doesn't fall neatly into any of the categories. Yeah. And that happens even with stars. We have all these categories for stars.

We know pretty well what happens to stars as they grow older as they get bigger. what kinds of stars, and depending on how big they started, stars are pretty well studied, but there are still mysteries about stars that scientists are wondering about. That's right. At the same time, we do know a lot about stars, and we have looked at a lot of them and understood many things. There are basic questions about them we still don't understand.

Our own sun, for example, even though it's nearby and very bright and fairly accessible, resists our understanding. We still don't really understand how it generates its incredible magnetic field and why it flips every 11 years and why it has so many weird cycles and why it sometimes spits out enormous quantities of plasma in our direction. So the sort of basic component of the universe stars the thing that light up the universe and make it visible are something we still have to understand more deeply. Did you say our sun is spitting at us? That's not very nice. In the same way the clouds spit at us. Absolutely. The sun causes solar weather. You know, it has a solar wind made of particles that zoom out super high speeds.

and sometimes the solar weather gets stormy and it creates these coronal mass ejections. Yes, so we're still trying to even understand our star here in our solar system, but there are also really extra odd stars out there in space, out there in the universe. Exactly. Not all stars out there are like our sun. As you said, there are ones that are much bigger,

some that are much hotter, some that are more magnetic, some that spin faster or slower, and then there are some that seem to be impossible. So today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question. What's going on with Shibilsky Star? I was nervous about pronouncing that.

How many letters are on this? 12 letters, only one vowel? Yeah, it's a pretty amazing name. I love the way it's spelled. It's P-R-Z-Y, B-L-Y, S-K-I. So, yeah, if you don't count Y's, then it's all consonants and then a vowel at the end. It feels like that classic Superman villain,

Mr. McSjit-S-Pit-Look. I don't know that one at all, Did you just make that up? It's classic Superman Villis, like Lex Luthor and Bizarro, and then there's Mr. Mitzkisitlick, which is a huge name also without any vowels. But this one about the star does have at least one vowel. It certainly does, and it's got a silent Z in it. I mean, it's got a Z in the name, but you say it Pushpilsky Star.

So you don't ever say a Z sound to it. I feel like it has a silent Z, a sneaky Y, a stealthy also. I think part of it comes from transliteration from Polish. You know, Polish has a bunch of content. that we just don't have. Like there's an L with a line through it that sounds very different from our L. Maybe that's a topic for a different podcast. But this is an interesting star out there in the universe because it's still kind of a mystery to physicists. Yeah, it's not one that we understand. It's doing things that we think are impossible. And it's generated a lot of controversy

and a lot of really out there explanations involving potentially aliens. Yeah. And this is not just about its name. It's more about its physics. So as usually we were wondering how many people out there had heard of this star and maybe even had heard of its deep mysteries. So thank you very much to everybody who participates in these questions. If you'd like to hear your voice on the podcast, please don't be shy. Write to us to questions at danielanhorpe.com. So think about it for a second. Do you know what's going on with Shibilski's star?

Wait, who's that? Britsbibbilliski. Bridgebilski. Maybe it's going to put it in a hour because of that. I don't know what Prisibulski's star is, so I can't even begin to imagine what's going on with it. What's going on with Przublisky's star? I don't know which star is that, and I also don't know how to pronounce that name despite the fact that my wife is Polish. What is this? This sounds like a guy from a football team.

Probably Chicago Bears. I don't know. Prisibilski's star is a star with a gravitational pressure is so great that all the vowels have been forced out. And it is made up of almost nothing but consonants. All right. Not a lot of name recognition. I like the person who said it sounds like a Chicago Bears football player. Maybe it is.

Maybe it's a long-lost descendant of the original Shibilski. Yeah, maybe he's a star in his local high school football team now. Yeah, maybe he's one of those. Or maybe he's a star horseback rider to bring it all in a full circle. Oh, my goodness. But not a lot of people seem to have heard of this star. I guess it's not dominating the headline. Yeah, I was surprised.

I thought it should be more famous. And it's actually not as well known as it should be in scientific circles either. Because when he published his paper originally, the journal misspelled his name. So people who went searching for this paper weren't able to find it. Wait, they misspelled his name? Yeah. How is that possible? I mean, there are so many Zs why.

and the lack of vowels in it. Yes, this is 1961, so you know, things were being typed manually and somebody swapped a couple of letters. And so for a long time, it was harder to find this paper than it should have been. I guess it's not a very catchy name. You know, maybe that's a lesson. If you do discover something one day, Daniel, maybe use an easy-to-remember name or easy to spell at least so people can Google it, right?

Yeah, I suppose. You know, my family was Polish and they changed their name. It used to be Galshefsky on my mother's side. And they changed it to Gail, just to make it easier to. spell and explain. Well, it's an interesting star because there are still a lot of big mysteries about it. And one of those mysteries might even lead us to believe there are aliens out there in the universe.

That's a big claim. Yeah, this is a really fun star. You're not horsing around here. No, I'm trotting out all the craziest ideas that are out there. Well, you better point you up with some interesting facts here, Daniel, and explain it to us. Well, my favorite thing about this whole topic is just that we're trying to understand all of the stars. You know, it's a basic idea in physics.

like let's build a model for what we think is happening inside stars, and then let's compare it to what's out there. And every time you do that, you always find an outlier. You find something which breaks your model that says, there's something else going on that you don't understand. And that's the whole process of physics, right? Develop a simplified view of the universe in our minds and try to use it to describe what we see outside of our skulls. And if we were right the first time, it wouldn't be very exciting. So it's always really fun to see something unexplained, something which makes us stretch our models. And this one is super exciting because we don't really even know how to stretch our models to describe it. Yeah. So maybe step us through this, Daniel. What is Shibilski star? Why is it weird?

So this is a star discovered in 1961 by Anthony Shibilski. And it's weird in a couple of ways. First, it's weird because it's both hot and magnetic, which is unusual. And then it's also weird because it has some very strange, very unusual elements in it that we don't understand how they got there. What do you mean? Well, first, let's talk about how it's hot and magnetic. So stars, of course, are all hot, right? They're all out there in space. They have enough mass to ignite fusion at their cores and to give off light.

That's how we know they're out there. Otherwise, it would be like failed stars. And you're just like big Jupiters that didn't quite have enough pressure to get the temperature going for fusion. But the bigger stars are hotter and they tend to glow at different temperatures. So we classify stars based on their. temperature according to the light that we get from them. Hotter things tend to glow in higher frequencies and cooler things tend to glow in lower

frequencies in longer wavelengths. So we have a whole spectrum of different temperature stars out there from sort of cooler to hot, although all of them are uncomfortably hot on our standards. Right. And it's kind of interesting that the blue stars are the ones that are hotter, but the red stars are actually cooler, right? It's a little unintuitive. To me, blue is more intense.

It's like the ultraviolet. But I guess here on Earth we usually use, you know, blue for cold and red for hot. Oh, I guess that's true. Yeah, like icy blue. Yeah, but it's the opposite. And I guess what determines the temperature of a star? Well, it's mostly just the mass. As you have more mass, you have more gravity, which makes more pressure at the core, which increases the temperature. And that temperature drives fusion. The higher the temperature, the more effective fusion is, and it burns faster. So really big stars are hotter in their core, which give off more blue light. And they also don't last very long. So blue stars tend to be young stars, whereas red stars can last much, much longer

because they burn cooler. So it takes them longer to burn through their fuel. They're cooler and I guess not as excited and they don't fizz loud like the hot stars. It's also an interesting connection between how hot stars are and their magnetic field, which also is connected to how fast they spin. Now, we don't really understand exactly how magnetic fields are made inside all of stars. We think it has to do with like currents of plasma. Most of the star is a big ball of plasma, but we think that in cooler stars, there are probably currents of plasma, like there's convection, you know, layers of plasma moving this way and then sinking and then rising, and that those spinning currents can generate magnetic fields. Magnetic fields typically come from moving charges, charges moving in a circle,

for example, will generate a magnetic field. If you have electricity moving in a circle on Earth, you can generate a magnetic field. We think the same thing is happening in the earth and probably the same thing is happening inside the sun and inside cooler stars. Yeah, like our sun is filled with turmoil, right? Like it's got all kinds of things flowing and churning inside of it. And in fact, its magnetic field has flipped a few times, right? Yeah, it actually flips every 11 years, which is kind of bonkers. The Earth's magnetic field flips also, but it's much less predictable.

And it flips on much longer timescales, hundreds of thousands of years or millions of years. We don't even really understand it. Sun's magnetic field flips very regularly every 11 years. And it's not something that we understand. We think, again, it comes from how these plasma currents are flowing inside the sun. But it's not easy to see. It's easy to see the outside of the sun, but to penetrate deeper into the sun and see what's going on inside it is quite tricky. Right.

I guess it kind of depends on the overall spin of the stuff inside the sun, right? Like if everything's sort of spinning one direction clockwise, then the overall magnetic fields you can point one way. But if the things inside of it are turning. the other way, then the overall magnetic field would flip, right? Yeah, and so for the field to flip, that means things have to, like, change direction. Imagine some, like, huge pot of sauce that's bubbling, and, like, some bubble, like, comes up and flips everything around every 11 years. It's a very regular process.

But this is different than the sun spinning because the sun is also spinning at the same time. Yeah, the sun is spinning at the same time, and it's still spinning the same direction. It's always been spinning. Now, something that's interesting is that stars that are hotter tend to not have as strong. magnetic fields as stars that are cooler. Star that are hotter have more fusion happening and they're hotter inside and the energy transfer tends to be more radiative than convective. Instead of like sheets of plasma current moving against each other, the energy transfer tends to be more through photons passing that energy. It's radiative energy. And so it's just sort of like more turbulent

and less organized. And so the theory is that that tends to give weaker magnetic fields in the hotter stars than in the cooler stars. Do we know that for sure or is it? Is that just kind of based on how we think the stars work or simulations? We definitely do not know that for sure. And also that's a very simplified picture. Even this classification of stars by temperature and their magnetic fields excludes a lot of examples that break these rules. And we don't understand turbulence well enough.

Like we can't even model turbulence like in sewer systems. Have we tried? We have tried, but it's a chaotic process. You know, turbulence is very difficult. One little ripple here or there can really change the way, you know, your sewer system functions. So if everybody's flush in the toilet at the wrong time, you can get unpredictable results. You got to throw it all in the toilet. And so turbulence is something that's always been a challenge to model scientifically. And lots of people are working on that. You know, air turbulence,

water turbulence, it's a hard problem. And now you're talking about a star-sized turbulence and everything has electric charges on it. So it's not just like forces of compression, but there's also magnetic fields and electrical fields. It's a really complicated problem. We can't control plasmas was in Tokomax here on Earth for that reason, because they tend to go unstable. We lose control of them and our simulations are not great at predicting how that happens. We had a better understanding of it.

We could probably solve fusion, right? We could reverse engineer exactly how to keep a plasma from getting too turbulent, but we don't understand it. But we do see this trend that hotter stars tend to be less magnetic. And we think it might be because there's just more chaos going on inside the star.

You don't have these organized tubes of plasma because things are too hot for that. Right, there may be a little too too explosive in the middle for things to kind of flow around. They're just too busy getting exploded, I guess. Yeah, exactly. There's always fresh photons coming out from the interior breaking things up. And so that, well, we think that's a trend, right?

Although we can measure, I mean, we have our sun, which is one data point, but the rest we think it's from theories and simulations. Well, we can measure the temperature of stars, and we can also measure their magnetic field. So we've measured the magnetic fields of other stars, not just our own. And we do see these kinds of trends. You can measure the magnetic fields of other stars by seeing the effect of the magnetic field on the radiation from that star. Like if there's a magnetic field, then atoms tend to have different lines of excitation.

The light that we get from other stars comes from heating the outer layers of the star and then having them glow based on that temperature. And atoms can only glow at certain wavelengths due to their quantum mechanical nature. And if there's a strong magnetic field, some of those wavelengths get split, like the spin up and the spin down version of the electron glow. with slightly different wavelengths. So we can measure the magnetic fields by seeing the small effects on those wavelengths of the glow of the star. So we can measure the magnetic fields

of other stars. Interesting. Okay, well then it seems like Shibilski stars has a weird combination of both heat and a magnetic field. And so let's get into that mystery. But first, let's take a quick break.

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All right, we're talking about the mysteries of Shibilski Star. Where is the star, Daniel? Is it really far away from us or is it closed by? It's about 370 light years away, so it's not super close, but it's not super far. you definitely can't go there on a day trip. And it's in our Milky Way galaxy, right? Yeah, almost all the stars that we can study in any detail are in the Milky Way because other galaxies are just so far away, millions of light years away,

that the stars are much dimmer and it's harder to resolve individual stars. And can you see this star in the night sky or do you need like a super good telescope? It's in the constellation of Centaurus. So yeah, you can look up in the night sky and see it, especially if you're in the southern hemisphere. Especially or only if you're in the southern hemisphere? Yeah, I don't know. It's a bright constellation in the southern sky. I'm not sure exactly where it's visible.

All right. Well, there is a big mystery about this star, enough that people have written papers about this mystery, right? Yeah. There are a couple of exciting mysteries. One is one we were just talking about, which is this combination of the star's temperature and its magnetic field. We were saying that hot stars tend to not have a very strong magnetic field.

But Shibilski star is a very hot star. It's called an A star, which means it's one of the hotter stars that are out there. Our star is a G star. is arbitrary classification. What? We're not even on the B list. We're on the G list. We're cool, man.

We're not hot. We're so uncool. We're cool. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, exactly. Well, no, our star is not one of the hotter stars or the bigger stars. It's kind of a boring star in the solar system. But Shibilski star is an A star, which means it's very hot, but it also, we think, has a very

strong magnetic field. And so this is an unusual combination when it comes to stars. It's a hot star. That means it's a really massive star. How big or massive is it? So it is a more massive star. It's only like one and a half times the mass of the sun. It's on the hotter edge of the spectrum.

So it's just hotter because it's at that point in its life cycle? Or just that extra half of a solar mass makes it that much hotter to make the alist? Having one and a half solar masses definitely makes it hotter for sure. And we've measured its magnetic field. We can do that from here. Yeah, we can measure the magnetic field because as we were saying before, the magnetic field affects the atoms inside the star. It changes how they glow.

What do you mean? Well, electrons are whizzing around the atoms, and the reason that a star glows is not directly because of photons made from the fusion. The energy produced by fusion gets transmitted to the outer layers of the star and they get hot and they glow. Everything in the universe glows as it gets hot because getting hot means that things are moving around. They have a lot of speed. For example, electrons can move up in energy levels around the atom. Remember that electrons are not little classical objects that are in orbit around the atom. the atom, the way the Earth is in orbit around the Sun, they have a few quantum states that they

can sit in. It's more like a ladder than a hill. And so if you give them energy, they can step up the ladder. But then they like to step back down the ladder because the universe likes to spread its energy out. And when they step back down the ladder, they give off that amount of energy. So every atom has like these levels of energy you can be at. And if you add a magnetic field, it changes those energy levels a little bit, which changes the energy of the light that's emitted by those atoms and we can see that here on Earth. Do we see it brighter or dimmer or only in certain frequencies things shift? What's the evidence for the magnetic field?

We see a split. So if you have like hydrogen gas and you heat it up, it'll tend to emit its certain frequencies. Now if you add a magnetic field, then like the spin up electrons and the spin down electrons are now slightly different energies. So instead of having a single line from those electrons, you'll split it into two lines. And by lines you mean like how much of a certain frequency the light has that comes from that star, right? Like if it has a lot of energy in a certain frequency, then you know that comes from a certain

Atten in that star. And you're saying if that spike splits into two, that means there's a strong magnetic field. Exactly. We can't go and measure these things directly. Almost all the information we have about these stars comes from their light. So we have to try to suck out as much information as possible from this limited stream of data. And so one thing we do a lot of is not just count the number of photons we see from the star, but we measure all of their frequencies.

And we make a spectrograph, which says what frequencies are. we seeing light from this star. And we don't see light at every frequency from the stars. It depends on what the star is made out of and how hot it is. And also the magnetic field. So it's incredible how much information is stored in just the spectrum of light that comes from a star. It really tells you a lot about what's going on inside.

Yeah, it's pretty wild because when you get light from a star, you're getting like a single stream of photons, right? It's not like you're getting like a huge beam of light. You're just getting like one photon at a time and you have to get all this frequency formation from those photons, right? Yeah, although every beam of light is really just one photon at a time. Even from our sun, you're still just getting one photon at a time, although it's just a lot more photons per second. And so you can measure the frequency of each photon, and that's what we do.

And then they pile up. They tend to be in certain frequencies, and that tells us, oh, this one must have been emitted from an atom at this energy level. The electron jumped down to a lower energy level and gave us this photon. So iron has a characteristic frequency at which it glows, and helium has a characteristic frequency at which it glows. And these lines all get split by the magnetic field. So the photons go at higher or lower frequencies based on the spin of the electron because the spin interacts with the magnetic field. All right. So then the mystery about this Shibilski star, or at least one mystery, is that it's both hot and highly magnetic.

Is it rare to see that or is it physically impossible to do that? It's rare. It's not impossible. And it's also not the only example of a hot magnetic star, but it's not something that we understand. It's weird. It just sort of like adds to the weirdness. of this star. I guess why would it be rare or weird? Maybe it's just a really hot star with a lot of turmoil inside.

So it has that extra it factor that makes it both hot and magnetic. Yeah, well, it means that something is going on inside the star that we don't understand because we don't understand how a really hot star can have the sort of convection necessary in order to generate a magnetic field. It's just not something that we understand. We don't have a model for it. And we do see that it's rare. That's just an observation.

We don't see a lot of hot stars with strong magnetic fields. tends to be colder stars that have these magnetic fields. But again, it's sort of a forefront of human knowledge here. We don't really understand magnetic fields inside stars kind of at all. And so it's a big area of investigation. Just kind of a rare matchup of both temperature and magnetic field. Is there the opposite? Like, have we seen any cool stars with low magnetic field?

There's a huge population of stars out there. So there's always something on the tail. Whenever we're talking about these things, we're always just talking about trends, where we're trying to describe a vast population of billions of stars. And they never follow these things exactly. There's always variation and fuzz. So there definitely are some cool stars out there without strong magnetic fields and also kind of a mystery.

All right. So that's one mystery about Shbilski star. What's the other mystery? The other mystery is how it glows. We were talking about how the different atoms in the atmosphere of a star make it glow differently. And we can use that to tell sort of what a star is made out of. Like we can look at our sun and we can say, what's our sun made out of? How would we figure it out?

Well, one thing you can do is go and take a scoop of it and bring it back to Earth and, like, study the stuff. But that's not very practical because taking a scoop out of the sun is pretty dangerous. But you can study the sun without actually going there. You can just look at the light that comes from the star and say, what frequencies is it coming at? And what stuff do I need to mix at what temperature to get this spectrum? Can I reverse engineer the spectrum and say, I need to add a certain amount of hydrogen, a certain amount of helium, and heat it all up to a certain temperature? And then I should expect to see the spectrum that I'm seeing from the sun.

So that's sort of the general strategy for how you can tell what a star is made out of. Don't you see the lines in the spectrum too? Like if it has certain lines in a certain frequency, that tells you, oh, there's iron here. Oh, it's got some carbon too. Yeah, exactly. Right? It's sort of like a fingerprint. Yeah, exactly.

Because every element has a different set of lines. It tend to glow at different levels because they're constructed differently. And the solutions to the Schrodinger equation for iron are different than they are for helium and for hydrogen. So each element has its own fingerprint. So you can look at the spectrum of a star and reverse engineer and say, to explain this spectrum, I need a bunch of hydrogen and a little bit of helium and some iron and some nickel. So for example, we can look at our star and we can tell it's about by mass 70% hydrogen and like almost 30% helium.

So that's almost the entire star. And there's like a percent or so that's heavier stuff, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all the way up to like iron and nickel and a few other things. So we can tell what's in our star by looking at the last. light that comes from it. And the cool thing is, because you don't have to go to the sun to use this technique, you can also apply the same technique to stars that are really, really far away that you could never visit. Yeah, you can look at a spectrum. And actually, it's the opposite that tells you what's in it, right? Like, if you see light comes in in all frequencies, except a certain frequency, that's how you know that there's a certain element there, right? Because the element

absorbs that light, right? So when you're analyzing the light from a real star, it does get complicated. You have like a whole spectrum. You see photons at basically every wavelength. And then there are some spikes, some places where the atmosphere of the star has been excited to emit just at that frequency. And there are also dips. There are dips when the atmosphere of the star is absorbing light just at that frequency. So like photons that come from inside the star get absorbed by the atmosphere of that star. That's similar to like how we model the atmosphere of an exoplanet. We can see the light coming from the star behind it and we can see what frequencies the light of that atmosphere gets absorbed. And so it's both lines and dips in that spectrum that tells you.

you something interesting is going on. Yeah, and that's how we know what the star is made out of, which is amazing, right? It's like we're getting this drip of data from a pinpoint in the sky and we can tell, hey, it's got a little bit of this and a little bit of that, right? It's really incredible. And it requires developing this model of saying, we think we know what's going on inside a star and different models to generate different fingerprints. And so we can reverse engineer it and say, this fingerprint means this is going on inside

that distant object. It's really quite incredible. And when we look at Shibilsky Star, we see a spectrum that we really just do not understand. Interesting. What do you mean? What do we see in Shibilski Star? Well, we both see things missing and we see weird things that we don't think should be there. We expect that most stars will have some iron and some nickel in them. Like even the sun has iron and nickel in it. Even though it's not capable of making iron and nickel, there's iron nickel in it from like the last generation of stars that made that and blew up and then gathered together.

Just like there's iron and nickel inside the Earth, even though the Earth, that's not capable of fusing hydrogen together into iron and nickel. But Shibilski Star has like very, very little iron nickel. It's like a tenth of the iron that we would expect of a star of its type. Interesting. I guess why would we expect there to be more iron? Because we don't really know the history of this star or star system, right? We don't know what kinds of stars exploded before then, right?

Yeah, that's true. You know, why do you expect any star to have iron in it? It just comes from the history of the stuff that formed that solar system. So you have mostly hydrogen and then some helium and heavier stuff, but that stuff we think is pretty well mixed around. We've been studying like the stuff in the universe and mostly everywhere there's about the same amount of iron. So any arbitrary star that you form, you don't expect a huge variation in how much heavy metal it should have inside of it. So to find a star with a very, very tiny amount of iron in it is weird. It's like very far out there.

Most stars have a certain fraction of iron in them and this is like way out on the tails. So it's got some iron deficiency, maybe it just needs to eat more lentils or something. Or more cereal, right? Aren't those iron fortified? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And it's the star so it can eat cereal all day. That's right. Because every day is a day for a sun, right? That's right. And maybe it has been eating weird stuff because the star also has fingerprints of really strange, very heavy stuff like strontium and cesium and neodymium. It has even weirder stuff, things we call actinides, like Einsteinium and other weird elements.

high up on the periodic table. And that's weird because these are super heavy elements, right? Usually you only see these heavy elements when they're produced by supernovas. Yeah, so these things are very heavy. They're heavier than it can be produced by any star. Stars can only make up to iron. We think that the really heavy elements, plutonium and platinum and uranium are made by supernovas or by the collisions of neutron stars, et cetera.

Now, you do expect to see them still in stars. Like our sun has elements inside of it that are heavier than it can make. Again, they're just debris left over from previous stuff. Like we see uranium in the Earth, right? It was not made by the Earth or in our solar system. It was made by a star a long time ago. The thing that's really weird about finding these elements inside a star is that they have short half lives. Like, they do not last for very long.

Einsteinium lasts for 472 days. So like, what's making Einsteinium in this star? Because if you see it in the star, it must have been made in the last year or so. But we think that all the heavy elements. elements that are inside of star must have come from before the star was born. So it sort of doesn't add up. The story doesn't make sense. You're saying these heavy elements themselves aren't around that long.

They're so heavy that they break apart by themselves. Yeah, they're very short half lives. So they're very rare in the universe. Even if they are made inside special reactors here on Earth or inside neutron star collisions, they do not last for very long. So you don't expect to see them in old stuff, right? This star itself not capable of making. Einsteinium. The star is millions of years old. Einsteinium should only last for a year or so. So why is there still Einsteinium in the atmosphere of this star? Or even like a year ago, right? Like if you look at it over the course of a couple of years, you should see the amount of Einsteinium decaying or decreasing, right? Yeah, exactly. And we've been studying the star for six decades now and it seems to be pretty stable. And it's not just Einsteinium. There are other weird isotopes in this star. There's tecdenium. There's prometheum. And none of these have very long half lives.

This is the core mystery of Pushbilski Star is like, how does it have these apparently impossible short-lived heavy metals inside of it? Right, right. And you forgot Horsinium also. Okay, so that's maybe even the bigger mystery about this star, right? It's why does it have so many heavy elements it shouldn't have or that it should have run out of by now? Yeah, that's really the core mystery. I mean, it's also really hot and strangely magnetic. And spinning really slowly, it takes like 200 years to rotate one time.

So there's lots of things about this star and it's pulsating and oscillating in all sorts of crazy ways. So this star is like an outlier basically every way that you can measure it. But definitely the weirdest thing, the best clue, the thread we can pull on easiest is this question about why it has so many heavy things inside of it. But you're saying our star also has these heavy elements, but shouldn't our stars also have decayed them by now? Our star has some heavy elements, right? Like it has iron, it has nickel, probably some uranium in it also. But those things do decay for sure. these things are short-lived, right?

So if they existed inside our star very early on, they would have decayed away by now. So we don't see evidence for these things inside our star. All right, well, let's get into what might be possible explanations of these mysteries about Shibilski Star, including maybe that it could be aliens, which is Daniel's favorite topic to talk about. But first, let's take another quick break.

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the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're talking about a mysterious star out there in space called Shibilsky Star. And it's weird and mysterious because, first of all,

it's hot and magnetic. You know, that's pretty rare for even Hollywood stars. And it also has a lot of heavy elements and it's pretty heavy metal, which is also rare for Hollywood stars, I guess, to be that much into heavy metal. We haven't had good heavy metal stars in a couple of decades, you know, Motley Crew and all these guys. What's the next generation of heavy metal? I guess Ozzy Osbourne made a comeback, sort of, right?

Or he's sort of more heavy physically and less heavy metal. Yeah, he's definitely past his half-life for sure. But there are deep mysteries about the star. It's hot and magnetic and it's got heavy. elements and it should have what are some possible explanations Daniel well let's go from the most boring explanation to the most exciting so the most boring explanation is that it's a mistake that we're wrong about interpreting this spectrum to say that there are heavy metals in it because it's not an easy thing to do it's not like a very clear smoking gun signature of einsteinium what do you mean it's not

clear well it's hard to do these analyses you know einsteinium if it exists in this star it's not like it's 50% Einsteinium. It would be like 0.001% Einsteinium. So it's a small signal. It doesn't like jump out at you. It'd be like a very faint dip or spike in the spectrum of the start, right? Which might get mixed up with the noise. Exactly. It might get mixed up with the noise. And also, we're not very confident in understanding what Einsteinium should look like. Einsteinium, just as an example for many of these short-lived isotopes are not things that are well studied here on Earth in the laboratory. Like hydrogen? We know how hydrogen glows. It's not hard to study. We have lots of examples of it. Hydrogen is very common.

Einsteinium, Amerisium, Pyramithium, technetium. We don't make these things in large quantities. You can't just like order a bunch of it on Amazon and study it in your laboratory. So we're not even exactly sure what the spectrum of these things are. So interpreting the spectrum of a distant star in terms of a very faint line of rare elements that are not well understood is not always conclusive. Oh, you're saying we're not even unsure what a star with a lot of of Einsteinium might look like because we don't know if it's going to be blocking the light or glowing at certain frequencies the way we think it might be. Exactly because it's difficult. And we have models. We have calculations that suggest what Einsteinium should look like when you heat up a bunch of

it, just like we have models for what hydrogen should look like. But we haven't tested those very well in the lab to really be confident. Some of these things like prometrium and technidium, people have been able to do studies to verify what these things should look like. But the sort of weirder things we see in Prishibilski Star, we're not 100% certain what they should look like when they do get heated up. I see. Okay. So then one possibility, the most boring possibility is that Shibilski Star is just a weird, hot and magnetic star that we think has a lot of heavy metals, but maybe it just doesn't have that many heavy metals. Yeah.

We're just maybe wrong about that. Yeah. And there's a possibility that we're wrong about the crazier ones, Einsteinium, et cetera. But the identification of like technetium and permitium, those are pretty solid. Those we do understand. And the lines there are easier to pick apart. So I read one paper that said the spectroscopic evidence is strong enough that we would declare Prometheum to be present without hesitation.

So there's a lot of confidence that Prometheum is there. And Prometheum has a half-life of like 20 years. So it's still a mystery. It's hard to brush this under the rug of saying we're not sure about the spectroscopy of it. I think you just made those names up, Daniel. There was really an element called Prometheum. It really is. Technetium.

Horseum is made up, but Prometheum is not. How about Gidio. Gidiof him? Gideom. I'm Gideon with excitement about this. All right. Well, it could be a mistake, but some people are pretty confident about at least some of these heavy metal measurements. What else could it be that explains Shibilski Star? So you need a source of these heavy elements. One way to make them in the universe is to collide neutron stars because we think that these things might be made at the heart of neutron stars or during

those collisions. So one idea was like maybe there's a neutron star nearby and it's somehow leaking this stuff into Shibilski Star. Problem there is like, well, we don't see any new We can measure the velocity of Pushbilski star, and we don't think it's part of a binary star system. Like we would see a wiggle in the frequencies that come from it if it was orbiting some invisible, very massive object like a neutron star. So we don't think that there's like a neutron star nearby that's like spilling its guts into this star as a source of these short-lived heavy elements. Interesting.

So a neutron star can make these heavier elements, but would it give up its elements like that? is if it's a neutron star, it'd be pretty intense and heavy. It would suck actually the other star wouldn't. Why would it give up its material? Yeah, it's not a great explanation. You read, a neutron star has very strong gravity and so it's just as likely to pull things out of Pushbilski Star as to dump stuff in it. Another crazy idea is like maybe Pushbilski Star passed through the remnants of a neutron star collision and like accidentally gathered up some of this stuff fairly recently just before we started observing it and sort of just sort of like covered in. gunk from a neutron star collision that has all these crazy things in it that's like one other

wacky idea oh i see because when two neutron stars collide they basically kind of explode and spill out all their guts right including these heavy elements that it made yeah so that's one idea but we don't see any evidence for that there's no like other remnants of a neutron star which are pretty typical you can identify these things there's no evidence for that as an explanation for what's going on inside this star could it have a neutron star inside that's a really cool idea we talked about that once it's possible for a red giant to absorb a neutron star and to have it inside of it it tends to collapse the red giant and it wouldn't again spill the materials of the neutron star out from inside the neutron star all right so maybe it's not a neutron star what else

could it be so now we're getting into the crazier ideas it might be evidence of super heavy elements that we've never identified before once we talked in the podcast about how elements beyond the ones we know might exist and might be stable. Like we have seen elements up to atomic number like 114, 115, and just beyond. It's possible that in neutron star collisions and in other processes in the universe, you can make even heavier elements, super heavy elements that might live a long time and then decay into these other things. Oh, I see.

Like maybe it has the ingredients for some of these heavier metals, but we can't see those because they're too heavy to see. So maybe the source of these heavier elements are just. even heavier stuff breaking down. Exactly. We suspect that the universe might be capable of making these ultra-heavy isotopes.

That they could be formed in the collision of neutron stars or other weird things, but they might not be totally stable. So they might then break down and be a source for these shorter-lived isotopes like Einsteinium. Which are easier to see, right?

Because I guess the heavier the element is, the harder it is to see it, right? Like the further up into the spectrum it is and the rarer it is. Definitely the rarer it is. And we don't know at all how these things would glit, so we wouldn't even be able to identify them.

In order to identify an element in the spectrum, you basically have to know what it's going to glow like. Otherwise, it's hard to disentangle. Remember, these spectra are messy. There's all sorts of photons in them. And to pull anything out of them, you basically have to know what the fingerprint looks like. And so these super duper extra heavy elements

would have been made in like a supernova, right? Perhaps a supernova, perhaps a neutron star collision, perhaps some other process that we don't even understand. We have a whole fun episode about the island of stability, this hypothesis that there might be stable or semi-stable, very heavy elements that could exist in the universe. And so that would be a really cool explanation because that would be evidence for something we've never seen before. Right, right. Yeah. Island of stability sounds like a great place to go. That's better than our current state, Canal of Chaos. So then what's the most

fantastical possibility that would explain Shibilski Star? So the most ridiculous and funnest, but maybe also most plausible explanation is, of course, aliens. We're talking about natural processes to create these short-lived isotopes, but there are also artificial processes to create these things. We can create these things here on Earth using our laboratories. What if there are aliens out there and they have some crazy process? Maybe they are generating energy from fission or they have some insane fusion process or they're just doing a bunch of experiments to understand the universe.

And in doing so, they create dangerous garbage. This stuff is very radioactive. What should you do with it? Well, maybe they decided to like yeat it into the sun. And so they dumped it into their star. So maybe what we're seeing is a glowing alien trash heap. Whoa. Wait, so you can make these elements without needing a neutron star collision or a supernova?

Like, we can make some of these crazy super duper heavy metals here. Yeah, that's how we've verified that they can exist. We shoot protons or neutrons into lighter elements at just the right speed so they get absorbed into the nucleus, and we can create these heavier elements here on Earth. Can't create many of them, sometimes just a few atoms, but that's how we've proven that they exist. But you can imagine aliens might be able to do it at larger scale for who knows what reason. Yeah, I guess that's the question. Why would they do that? Is it kind of energy efficient? Like fusion, could that be their source of energy? These are very heavy elements. So it's more likely to be fission,

like the waste products. And people even here in our solar system have suggested this idea like what to do with nuclear waste. Well, why not just dump it into the sun? right? Throw it out into space and it'll eventually drift into the sun. It's like a real proposal people have made here in our solar system for getting rid of nuclear waste. It's not a great idea because it's very expensive and launching dangerous waste on top of an exploding rocket has its own dangers. Also you might miss and if you miss the sun it'll come back around back to you right? There's a reason why we haven't pursued this but you know maybe aliens are doing their experiments already out in space and they have a reason to dump their stuff into their sun. And it's really

expensive, right? Like to get anything to the sun takes a huge amount of energy. Well, to get things off of Earth takes a huge amount of energy. Once you're in space, it doesn't take that much energy to fall into the sun. You just need like a gentle push in that direction and the sun will take over. Well, you got to slow it down enough to fall into the sun, right? Otherwise, you're just going to shoot past it. It depends, I guess, on the time scale you're interested in. Eventually everything does fall into the sun. Comets, for example, whizz around the sun, but they do lose a little bit of speed. And every time they come around, they get a little bit closer and closer to the sun. So it's possible. Yeah, to shoot something towards the sun and just miss and have it whizz around the other

side, which you probably wouldn't want. Yeah. Well, you know, maybe it's like their bonfire and they're just, you know, roasting marshmallows, giant planet-sized marshmallows and they're just feeding, you know, some high, high-energy stuff into the sun to make it last longer. Yeah. Or maybe they're using it to message us. Carl Sagan suggested that aliens might do this kind of thing on purpose to their own star as a way to indicate to other species out there in the galaxy that they are there. Make their star weird so there's no other explanation for it other than there's some technological civilization. They're capable of doing that. Wow. Sounds like they're very attention needy, like a species of alien to the extreme. Like, hey, let's spend all this money to make our sun glow a little

extra in the spectrum so that people know we're here. Yeah. Well, it's a pretty fun idea. You know, one challenge to that is to understand that this star can't be made by natural processes, you have to really, really understand natural processes super well. You have to understand exactly the probability of having this star actually appear through all the normal processes. And so it's not a great way to signal that you exist because there's so many stars out there that are weird, so hard to describe them. So to make one that really stands out compared to all the other stars is a challenge. On the other hand, Shibilski star is a pretty weird one. Yeah, I guess if everyone's weird. It's hard to stand out as a weird person.

You've got to be the weirdest. But it's kind of wild. It's pretty interesting that the most plausible explanation are aliens doing some weird things for some unknown reason. Yeah, it's pretty fun to think about. It's a reason this star has been weird for a long time. People have been thinking about it. And in the future, as we keep taking more data on this star, we'll get better and better measurements to see whether those heavy elements really are there in its atmosphere. Now, is this something that's actually mentioned in the paper? Like this is actually write this in their conclusions at the end of the paper like or it could be aliens i don't know i've seen it in blog posts and in conversations i've never actually seen it in a paper suggesting aliens as an

explanation it's just usually sort of left as a question the spectrum remains unexplained i see you leave it for the comment section the internet will fill in those gaps for you yeah or daniel you're like your alien trigger is really light you're like mystery aliens done hey at least we're trying to explain actual cosmic mysteries, not like the pyramids, you know, in terms of aliens. What do you mean? Don't get me started on that. There are also mysteries, aren't they? What's more likely that a bunch of people were really clever thousands of years ago and figured out how to build the pyramids or that aliens did it?

Or that aliens are throwing some weird materials into the star just to get attention? I don't know, man. I think Einsteinium in the star is harder to build than pyramids. And I don't think the Egyptians could be responsible for Einsteinium in Shibilsky Star. though I do give them credit for the pyramids. Right. Well, I guess the end lesson here is that there are still big mysteries out there in the universe. And we should be, you know, kind of thankful for stars like Shibilski stars for delivering us weird examples of things that can happen in the universe.

Because that lets us understand more about the universe, right? Yeah, it pushes our envelope of understanding and forces us to come up with ways to describe things that we do not understand. Yeah, and maybe we shouldn't dig too much into it because, you know, as they say, never look at gift horse in the mouth. It might have dangerous radioactive metals in it. Yeah, it might have Einsteinian braces or something, or giddy-up embraces. Well, stay tuned, I guess, as we learn more about stars like Shibilski, and we form a better understanding of how stars work in this universe. You hope you enjoyed that.

Thanks for joining us. See you next time. iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, season two, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation,

a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. One Tribe, save my life twice. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Do we really need another podcast with a condescending finance brof trying to tell us how to spend our own money? No, thank you. Instead, check out Brown Ambition.

Each week, I, your host, Mandy Money, gives you really. Real talk, real advice with a heavy dose of I feel uses, like on Fridays when I take your questions for the BAQA. Whether you're trying to invest for your future, navigate a toxic workplace, I got you. Listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.