Let's Find Out - Nebulae of the Hubble Telescope | ASMR

Episode Date: August 13, 2019

Our galaxy is more active than these beautiful pictures seem to show. Let's find out just what some of the Hubble's most beautiful pictures actually tell us. Thanks for watching. #ASMR #Hubble #Astronomy ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ►socials... The podcast (audio versions) of my content: ▸🎧 Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2u11T58 ▸🎧 iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/letsfindoutasmrs-podcast/id1448116527?mt=2 ▸📧 Email................... [e-mail] ▸📧 Instagram........... @lets_find_out_asmr ▸📧 Twitter................. @Glycoversi ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ►Support for the channel... ▸Shop on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/2LnNXd6 ▸PayPal ......... https://www.paypal.me/LetsFindOutASMR ......... [e-mail] ▸Patreon ........ https://www.patreon.com/LetsFindOutASMR Want to just give a gift? ▸📩 Wishlist (for the channel): http://a.co/9vUJ8eF ▸📪 If you'd like to mail me something: Let's Find Out ASMR (Rich) P.O. Box 1582 Palm City, FL 34991 Or do you transact in nerd? ▸₿ Bitcoin: (A scannable QR code) ........ http://i.imgur.com/wKIsPIB.png (wallet address) ........ 1XPhPoyeqc3Xf1uktCPXCzfdEdi9PA7Xh

So we recently passed the 50th anniversary for the moon landing. But if you're a 90s kid or a millennial, someone who had a childhood mainly in the 90s, you undoubtedly were inundated with constant news about the Hubble Space Telescope. And amazingly, it's a piece of technology that since the early 90s, I believe, we're gonna find that out has been in commission and it's been shedding it's been able to pierce

deeper and further into the cosmos than we ever have yet other than the at least in the visible wavelengths i believe of course being humans seeing in the visible spectrum or the visible range i guess of the e m spectrum it's is most impactful for us so let's let's look at the um i guess we'll section it off this will be kind of a companion piece for my uh my upcoming video about starbirth so let's look at we're going to look at nebula today nebula the diffuse ends sometimes hundreds of light year wide cloud structures in the Milky Way that are both the homes are the structures within which the stars are born and die in a continual cycle and it really sheds light on the universe as well as being incredibly beautiful to look at and like Richard Feynman said when he

was discussing the merits of science versus art in the you know the intuitions that go along with each um when he picked a flower up off a lunch table they were at and looked at it and said the fact that i know that photosynthesis is happening and you know like i used in my last video the the green leaves that i see coming off this stem are absorbing all the the wavelengths of the visible portion of the spectrum except for the ones that correspond to the color green which is why we see it as green because it reflects off it's the only color that bounces back off the leaf and isn't absorbed by it um the fact that i know all these details about a flower does not take away from the beauty and in fact it might even add to the beauty

that I experience when looking at it. So we're going to look through this book and hopefully get a little more knowledge, but also a lot more visual detail about the universe and in particular our galaxy that surrounds us because we are made of star stuff. We are the children of the cosmos.

We really are. And to me that's amazing to really think about, which is why. We got our buddy, Carl Sagan, here, in spirit, even, I guess, because he's off, he's off the camera. So, yeah, let's find out. More about our local island universe that we live in, in the molecular clouds out of which stars

and the material that we're made of came out of. Shout out to my local library, by the way. amazing books like this. So it opens with really, it's probably one of the most beautiful pictures here. It's a diffuse nebula. This is a, looks like a,

that famous ant-like structure. Looks like a supernova remnant, maybe. And here at much, much deeper scales, more distant scales. We have, it's kind of like a galaxy merger. These are extra galactic structures outside our own galaxy.

So, and up here it says, so the first one is a colorful cauldron of creation. These swirling clouds of gas and dust in the tarantula nebula are vast stellar nurseries. So they continually collapse and spawn new stars by the thousands. So this one is this one is actually

a nebula that exists in the satellite galaxy to us, one of the largest. That's actually a cluster of millions of stars that's orbiting our galaxy. That somehow has managed to retain its own gravitational tie between its individual

stars. and not been ripped apart by the Milky Way's central force. We have the planetary nebula Menzel 3. It's well-named as the ant nebula. No one knows why the central star ejects matter into such a strange pattern. It could be a magnetic effect, maybe even two stars at work here. And of course this book is from like the early 2000. So some of the pictures are a little pixelated, but

There's still you get you know, we can get the gist Then the last one two spiral galaxies pass each other Like cosmic ships in the night strong gravitational forces From the large one in gc 2207 and On the left have caused stars to be flung out of the smaller one I see 2163 in streamers stretching a hundred thousand light years detailed a little bit inspired script uh i say inspired because i ended up writing a little intro um just off the cuff and then i

i wanted to set the tone of the video to be um you know one like all my videos especially with space um these are topics i'm particularly specifically interested in in for my own purposes you know just my own passion and I wanted to try to create a sense of all you know a sense of wonder and you know I was I'm gonna dive into the science of the actual astronomy of how we know what type of matters in the stars and you know how we can visually detect the movement and the parallax of stars so we know distance and then we can tell the different absorption lines of the spectra emitted from the stars to tell us the mass and temperature and we can group them and you know i wanted to get into the details of that but

science can often be really cold and and you know rigidly logical and and and and ruthlessly rational and sometimes that takes some of the the human element that the you know the awe and intrigue and inspiration you know and the passion out of it when you're just barraged with a list of facts and so I wanted to put it in the proper context of like this picture here with these galaxies it's so it's so amazing that um you know we used to think that we were the center of the universe then it went to okay we're we're not the center but our sun that we orbit is the center and then we're like okay well maybe our sun is one of you know millions of stars that are in orbit around the uh the universe the thing we we call our galaxy now is what we used to call the whole universe we didn't

think there were much there was much more than um you know a few tens of thousands of light years of worth of material distant from us and then we discovered that we can detect red shifts and these particularly varying type of stars tell us

based on you know deduction of gathering evidence and making a bunch of logical correlations we're able to tell that we saw these stars up close and we could actually measure their distances and then we with more more powerful telescopes in the early 1900s were able to eventually see some of these nebula that we're about to look at in our own galaxy were really tiny but still diffuse too diffuse to be a star and we found out

that they ended up not even being nebula. So we do have big light years across gaseous clouds in our own galaxy, but it turns out some of the smaller ones ended up being millions of light years away from us and completely outside our galaxy. And they weren't nebula, but they were actually island universes of their own.

And it's... So amazing, and the largest of which, which is about the, on a really clear night, you'd be able to see it, it's about as wide, visibly at least, as about six moons stacked up next to each other. That's the Andromeda Nebula. That's the largest galaxy close to us. That's of comparable size. And once we discovered that, that opened up a whole, literally a whole universe. a door to a scale of distance that we weren't ready to comprehend, really.

You know, this has all happened over the course of, you know, maybe a few thousand years if you really, really go back. But astronomy itself proper in the scientific form has only been around for maybe 500 years since Galileo first was able to detect the dots around Jupiter that were not orbiting or transversing the sky like the other stars or even the planets, how they kind of followed the stars. But these dots with his telescope, he was able to determine that they were objects orbiting around the point of light in the sky we call Jupiter.

So that was the initial foot in the door. And then Hubble, the namesake of, you know, whose namesake this book is about. And it's full of pictures from was the guy who, along with many other scientists, and conceptions that he built his theories on top of, Hubble was able to determine that the universe is not only hundreds of millions

if not billions, you know, thousands of millions of light years across. It was also able to determine that we are living in a universe filled with, we're living in a galaxy, inside a universe filled with billions of other galaxies, between which

the space, you know, of millions of light years that exists, is somehow intrinsically expanding. So if we were to take the space and slice it up into a million little pieces and look at each one of those pieces individually, those pieces themselves are expanding. It's just so beautiful. So it's learning about interesting things like that. You know, universe is expanding.

we don't even know into what. We don't even know what that means. We don't know the nature of things like dark matter, and we don't know how to synthesize our understanding of the subatomic world with massive objects that are unfathomably large, but still yet composed of these subatomic particles and that make atoms which coalesce in the stars

and fuse together, to create bursts of energy from the tiny bits of matter that are lost in the interactions that drive these galactic scale dynamics that we are studying. And so the universe is just one big playground. It's one big science experiment. And we're part of it. And somehow in some meta concept, we're also observers. of the universe out of which we emerged.

So I think Hubble, I think that's the right way to look at these photographs. So with that said, let's look. And hopefully enjoy on a deeper level some of these photographs. Have been some of the most stunning pictures taken. This one's named a spirograph. the spirograph nebula, intricately woven structure. It's actually just kind of pixelated, so that's why it doesn't too clear. But they said it defies explanation, so it's just amazing to think about that.

And we're able to witness these things. Probably like cavemen looking at cell phones and not knowing what really is behind them. I mean, we have so much more idea than they would, but I guess that's a bad analogy. Um, yeah, we're just so fortunate to be around to even observe this stuff, I think. Circling silently, circling silently in space a few hundred miles above our heads. It's one of the most amazing scientific instruments ever made. It's the Hubble Space Telescope. it's actually got a rocky start

and a pretty disastrous debut even though the mirror was it was distorted it was distorted in returning blurry images so I'm sure it was billions of dollars were if not hundreds of millions of dollars were spent

on this program developing this telescope and sending it into orbit but the imperfection and it was only two 50ths of the width of a human hair but that was enough to distort and blur images that are of course these are from you know billions of years uh light years away and in our local galaxy at least hundreds of uh you know hundreds to thousands tens of thousands of light years.

So luckily, I guess, it was imperfect, imperfect in a certain way that allowed for a... Their phrase was kind of tongue-tying, but they said it was... Where is it? Let's see, it's a... The very perfection of the imperfection of the primary mirror made it relatively easy, optically speaking,

to correct. So in 1993, spacewalking astronauts, they recovered the telescope. They rendezvoused with it in orbit, which is a feat in and of itself. Put a corrective lens on it. And since then, it's been, you know, almost 30 years since then. We've gone up and returned and, you know, added new corrections to make it see even better and do even more. It's pretty amazing. And the reason in, and to put it in the perspective, again, it's all about perspective. Look at this thing. I always got the idea that it was only about

10, you know, 10 feet or so long. I thought it could fit in a room, but this whole structure is actually the size of a, of a school bus. So it's, um, it's got a pretty big aperture, huge. lens through which light can come through, but it's nowhere near as big as some of the Earth-based ground-based telescopes, both I'm sure because it's really heavy and costly to lift payloads up in orbit, but also because it doesn't necessarily need to have a huge lens to see more than any ground-based telescopes are able to. And that's because our atmosphere creates a window. They call it a dirty window.

And I know it about chaos. And so we actually have to see through clouds of interstellar gas floating between the stars. And unless they're lit up by local starlight, we actually don't know how much there is out there. because the only way we can actually detect them is in like 99% I'm sure of astronomy it's all visual um it's about detecting electromagnetic radiation um of course bubble is uh primarily geared towards the visible spectrum end of the spectrum but we have other wavelengths as well and radio waves for instance are long enough so if you have a particle maybe this big they're long enough to go around them in gamma being the highest frequency the highest

rate of cycling up and down cycling through periods shortest wavelength also the most energetic the particles in space can be atomic size or they can be molecules and bits of actual dust which are larger and depending on how big they are if they're smaller than the wavelength than the wavelength like radio waves and and infrared rays and a lot of times can pass around them but as the particles get bigger and bigger the radio waves or the the the light waves bounce and they're not long enough to be able to be able to

go all the way around them and further information to be transferred through them so if they're shorter than the length of this penny this quarter then they're going to get absorbed by the quarter much more frequently than longer wavelengths so I guess that's all to say that um to say that material in between the stars and of course the atmosphere being much, much thicker and denser, diffract and obscure the light from stars to make it different and not a pristine image of its emitting source. So Hubble avoids the atmosphere in the really, really dense, thick oxygen, nitrogen atoms in our atmosphere. and has a crystal clear eye on the cosmos, and that's what's amazing about it. So it already is way ahead of the game.

It's the size of a school bus. It weighs as much as two bull elephants, and it can be turned to laser-sharp precision and stay focused on one area of space, even as it orbits the earth with tiny thrusters. It's really just an amazing piece of technology. I wrote here some thing to kind of put in perspective the scale. I think that's one thing also that I enjoy is that the scale of these objects are so much more meaningful when you understand the scale of, you know, things closer to us,

I guess, like our solar system. Even that itself is immense. And yet it only takes about five hours to hit, Pluto and maybe, you know, most, as you can imagine, most coalesced matter, more massive matter would be closer, closest, rather, to the center of a gravitational source like our sun. And so the furthest extent of our son's dominion, the point at which the sun's gravitation becomes so insignificant as to kind of not even count anymore and maybe other stars start to be more gravitationally dominant it would take so Pluto takes about five hours at the speed of light

five light hours it would take months it would take about three two to three months of traveling at the speed of light away from our sun before our sun's gravity becomes insignificant. Months seems like you know I think from the distance to the moon I had a globe. Why do I say that? This thing is

I'd say about 14 inches across probably says it somewhere but the distance to the moon is about this is supposed to represent 7,900 miles or 8,000 miles across in diameter. That's our whole Earth, which in cosmic scales, is really, really insignificant. The distance from Earth to the moon, the true enormity of distance between everything in space,

starting with our planets and our neighborhood, you know, distance to the sun to the sun is 90. 3 million miles Distance to the moon is just 200,000 miles roughly rough numbers The diameter of Earth here is 8,000 miles So you know again round numbers that's like 20 25 times The diameter of this earth that means if I'm in this room here See you know round numbers if we say this is a you know a foot foot and a half this room is 13 feet long so that's

only roughly about 10 times the diameter so I'd have to go all the way to the end of this room twice that basically the distance away from the earth that the moon is you can see it maybe we can show me walking away oh here's our earth right here And all that time showing you that's because, well, for one, Hubble is about a thousand times closer. So since we have this, Hubble would literally be like, it's really just on the surface. Really, it's just a couple hundred miles up. Yet it takes light only two seconds to get two room lengths away from Earth. takes eight minutes to get 93 million miles from the earth to the sun

five hours of light speed to go just to Pluto and then a couple months which that only gets us out to the furthest stretches of our solar system and then from there he has to travel for another 40 months or so before you hit the nearest star four years going at the speed of light so these distances are so vast it's it's you know and that's just the nearest star four years it's going to take another 20 multiply that by about 5,000 so 5,000 sets of four years and then maybe you'll get to sagittarius a the center of our galaxy around there I heard the other day, and I think this was in regards to someone saying how unfair it was that billionaires have so much money, but they were relating the concept, the distinction between a million versus a billion of something. And when they did time, I think it was seconds.

Yeah, yeah, that's what I have here. If you do a million seconds, that's only about, well, I mean it's a lot, but it's only about 11.5 days. that's a million seconds a billion seconds isn't just 11 days no it's a thousand times that it's 32 years 32 years so that brings us back to 1987 that's luckily a bit older than i am so the distinction when you hear you know uh andromeda is two million miles away um it'd be uh that'd be like a 45th of the way to the sun, two million light years away. And then you hear something being two billion light years away, another whole set of galaxies, galaxy cluster.

That's the distance between 11 days ago and 30 years ago. So, you know, the universe is immense and this and that, but you can't get an accurate depiction when you use the word immense. for 200,000 miles to the sun or to the moon and two billion light years to, you know, another galaxy, you can't accurately appreciate those distances. Those distances, distances are so, so vastly different, that it, you know, that's where science comes in, and having an understanding of, you know, putting things in terms of human, scales, I think, really helps appreciate the things that we're finding out about in the universe. So we have our solar system, we have our sun, which is really everything that we...

Sorry for the squeaky pages. That we base our observations of other stars on. and these nebulas are the nurseries of star birth. In a very crude overview, what happens is that stars explode. Impulse of these incredibly energetic explosions, they send shock waves, and we have different areas of the galaxy that have these huge, very, very roughly singular structures. you know they're they're very loosely tied together but you have areas that we can distinguish as separate clouds molecular clouds light years across

um i think we're currently actually on the edge of one um as far as we know as well and you can imagine when you're looking at something spinning across something as large 100,000 light years across you're going to have varying velocities and even a small tangential a small radial velocity difference how should I do this like so they're both you know orbiting around but maybe the one inside's orbiting a little bit closer and even that small difference

it could be hundreds of thousands of kilometers a second or at least meters a second difference and that's enough to where the edges of those cloud structures, especially when they're catalyzed by huge impulses of energy like supernova, they could collapse and create a kind of wavefront.

These wavefronts, the initial collapse or rotation that will lead to the eventual collapse of stars is created, and that emerges. So although... space and we could see here the uh we could see here the we have stellar nursery of the tri-fid nebula dramatically lit and intense by intense radiation of a nearby massive star over time the radiation will eat away the cloud and expose many stars that have managed to form within it so we see here in view but yeah we have traditional conventional means of

heat and just like when you turn your stove on if it's an electric one you can see the burner go from black when it's completely room temperature to slowly dimly red and when it gets bright hot maybe it's orange like a glowing neon orange and that's the same way with these stars they actually nebula right here zones and that's what makes the spiral arms of our galaxy is that there's actually these zones of star formation. We can see here, nebula. It's a huge pillar of gas and dust. It's lit up by ultraviolet radiation from young hot stars from behind. It's one of the first images taken April 2002. This is amazing. So all this darkness here, I believe, is light obscured by the molecules and the nebula of gas between us and the stars behind it and the horsehead nebula again obscuring the light behind it creating a silhouette that looks a lot like a horsehead and a long flowing mane but you have these massive and then this is these areas and the spiral arms and it's a lot like a lot like I guess it's a lot like the waves of a traffic jam where one person breaking creates a ripple effect and even though the individual cars end up moving on

you know you go and this person breaks and this one goes and this person breaks and even though you end up moving on individually the effect the phenomena of cars getting closer to one another and then moving off, that effect, the bottleneck effect, still somehow exists. And it's kind of an emergent phenomenon. And there are periods or areas of our galaxy that create the spiral arms that we can see that we think our galaxy is made of.

Of course, we're in it so we can't get a bird's eye view. but we can look at plenty of other spiral and bar galaxies and we think that they're pretty similar to the ones that were in the one that we're in so this is the edictorina nebula this is the keyhole curving filaments of glowing gas and a lacework of silhouetted cold dark clouds make up the keyhole nebula It's pretty beautiful.

Although that definitely looks like someone's flipping them off. Flipping them off through the geol. So, and here we have the Orion Nebula, which is one of the closest large nebula. And I think in some very general way, we're actually a part of the Orion Nebula, or at least we're right up, next to it because the nebula itself is what you could see right here.

That's what you would see if you look through a very nice telescope. You would see a very, much more blurry and diffuse and small version of that if you look through some binoculars, maybe. But it's in the traffic jam that is the arms of our galaxy is where most of the star formation tends to take place. And we'll go into that further into detail in the starbirth episode. So the Orion Nebula is perhaps the most finest constellation of all the heavens. Spanning the celestial equator, which for us is, I guess, it's the part of the sky that is directly overhead for us,

directly opposing the sun, facing away from the sun. that transits perfectly overhead from east to west. It's visible to stargazers anywhere in the world, and it's really the only nebula, or constellation, rather, that I know. Orion is one of the few constellations that bears more than a passing resemblance to its actual, to the namesake, you know, it looks, it's got, it's a rectangle-ish, but it has, you know, two shoulders,

two feet, and three stars going across where it's its belt, and then it has some stars going down that look that are most likely it's sword or some other phallic symbol the individual stars individual stars that make up Orion are spectacular the bright orange super giant star beetle juice and we all know

from beetle juice and I won't say it a third time marks his right shoulder so on the night sky it's going to be the top right While the brilliant white Rigel marks the left knee, defining Orion's belt are three slightly less bright stars. Hanging from the belt is his sword, and also called the handle. And so it's only 1600 light years away, which is 1,500 thousand times or 400 times. the distance to the nearest star proximate centauri but it's still really really close for us for such a large structure

um it's called m42 because this guy messier was the i think in the late 1700s he was one of the first astronomers to properly catalog all the major celestial objects. And so Andromeda is M-301, I think, the galaxy that we just got a picture of the black hole of. Whose black hole we just got a picture of is M-87, Messia 87. Orion Nebula is M-42. So the star question, the question. is Theta Orionis. It's a multiple star system actually known as the trapezeum

because it's like a trapezoid. It's arrangement of four stars. Only about 300,000 years old. So these are fresh off the press. These stars have just in galactic cosmic timescales, these stars have just started igniting, and having enough mass to, and been around long enough, to have a core that is gravitationally under such pressure

that the hydrogen, mainly hydrogen, that's always the first atoms to nucleically, I guess, nuclear fusion, and then it takes much more pressure, almost exponentially more. Don't hold me to that, though. It takes a lot more pressure, though, to start binding heavier atoms, even the next one-up helium.

So, you know, these stars are, I think, in some of these stellar clouds, and it might even be in the Orion Nebula, they've been able to detect with infrared proto-stars that haven't quite hit nuclear fusion yet, because it's pretty rare cosmically, again, most, you know, if we were just probabilistically just going to be thrown into the universe at some random point in time, you would imagine that most of the objects you see are going to be the objects that have endured for the longest spans of time.

All the things that come and go, or at least the faces of stars that come and go real quick, those things are going to be relatively rare because of the sheer age of the universe it's 14 billion years old and remember the million distinction between a million and billion so something even a million years old is ridiculously fast and rapid

compared to billions of years not even let alone 300,000 years It's really amazing that we're so close to this nebula and we can witness this phase of starbirth and Hubble has been great in representing this to us. So, and where I was kidding at with that is that before fusion even takes place in this small time span, there's enough, it's almost like a hot Jupiter. If Jupiter were I think 10 times more massive, they would just have enough mass to collapse the core into a fusion-making reactor, you know, to press ionized or plasma hydrogen together so close that the, I think,

one out of every 10 to the 20-second reactions, which is a lot, would create fusion, would overcome the... strong force, I believe, between protons and bind the protons together, releasing a little bit of a particle in terms of a, in the form of a positive positron, I believe, of energy, which is minuscule in terms of the mass. It would follow Einstein's equals MC squared, which is the energy created from that mass is going to be the mass multiplied by the speed of light, squared square which is enormous enormous so even before it hits that there's still enough without fusion there's still enough convectional and always

forget the words there's convection there's radiation convection is the flow of thermal activity radiation is light pressure and heat emitted by light and conduction conduction that's what it is so there'd be enough thermal activity in those three forms to um to create a glowing proto star that hasn't quite hit fusion yet um but it will still emit some light if we're close enough to see it at least in the um particularly like our bodies emit light in the infrared spectrum, not visibly, of course, that would be bad. We can see like infrared goggles. We can see many stars that aren't visible in the

human range of sight, but we see them just about to light up, and especially in these nurseries, we see that. So there are two... See what it says here. 300,000 years old. These stars are in their infancy and they're pumping out vast amounts of energy in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum.

So this isn't the only region in Orion where star formation is taking place. Installation is embedded in a vast billowing cloud of gas and dust. Though there are two particularly dense areas known as the southern and northern molecular clouds. M42 is part of the southern cloud, which nearly merges into the northern cloud around Zeta Orion is the most southerly star in Orion's belt.

The outstanding feature of the northern cloud is the horse head, the horsehead nebula. Okay, so the horse head nebula is the one we just saw. And so structure of this part of Orion right here, what we're seeing is polyps at there. They're calling them polyps, which are these little concentrated balls of dense molecular dust and material that are, you know, ultimately going to form stars. and some mosaic of 15 separate images expanding a region of about two and a half light years across among the features seen in this turbulent factory in 50 of their solar systems in embryo very cool we have down here similar to uh similar i guess in light maybe maybe a little brighter.

These are brown dwarfs down here. We have the four main, very bright stars in the trapezium cluster. But all, at least many of these around them, are called brown dwarfs, which are stars that I think either didn't hit nuclear fusion or just... Yeah, so they're way too big to be planets, but they didn't hit true nuclear fusion. so they do glow but I think by conventional means only or they just didn't have enough mass to glow really brightly at all if they are hitting nuclear fusion god this this is really beautiful right here I think this is called the waterfall if I remember right

the enigmatic waterfall both polar jets photo star can be seen slamming into an interstellar gas using the very large telescope image. Yeah, very creative names from these telescopes. This is a ground-based telescope, I guess, seeing this one. So the nature of the prominent waterfall is a mystery. So we have a stream, a stream of yellow-green, you know, dust that's being condensed. probably, you know, maybe some other stars billowing radiation out this way. But this one certainly right here, we can see two wave fronts right here.

And it's jetting out, and particularly with this one, it almost looks like the jet from the M87 cluster. That's really beautiful. That's amazing. It's really astonishing just the amount of energy that would take, you know? Thank God we haven't been hit by you. We haven't been hit by any supernovas yet. And thank God our sun is a pretty tame star by galactic universal standards. Then over here we have, uh, see what it says. Cool.

The, um, another, you know, titillating, if I can say that, titillatingly terrifying. Or I would just say meaningfully, interesting perspective to take is you know we we get raptured by these myths about titans and ancient gods being you know and in the in the Vedic tradition they have are they Brahmins that are you know billions and billions of years old and that's what these galactic celestial objects are you know they're it says here some of these clouds they not only stretch hundreds of light years across but they can be quiet for millions of years and then they get impacted by they get brushed by another cloud coming by

or they you know a supernova explodes and expands and emits and propels particles and radiation and energy enough to compress waves as it goes through um these clouds that other than that for hundreds of millions of years were very you know slumbering they were inactive they were very stagnant and still a nice trigger takes place catalyzes a uh you know impulse of energy gets absorbed by it and then maybe somehow just enough gravity is just dense enough to be a little bit denser than other areas of the clouds and in an interesting you know mathematical probabilistic thing which um is like a feedback loop where you know really what supermassive black holes um in a way can be characterized as are these huge concentration of matter and gravity and the more you have concentrated in one particular area the more

likely it is to have more matter be gravitationally attracted to it and therefore the less matter remains in these giant molecular clouds for other stars to be anywhere near as massive as just the first few big some of the biggest but shortest lived stars because more massive the star is and we know this they've they've observed stars being as massive super giants as they possibly can and they recognize that there is a limit there is an upper threshold of course past which a black hole is probably going to occur but beyond which stars are way too unstable way too gravitationally

pressurized to be able to even be held in balance by the outward pressure exerted by nuclear fusion reactions and so these stars I believe they end up just collapsing on themselves

and they die extravagant super novistic deaths deaths in a very very tiny tiny time span of their lives and then much more rapid almost yeah even human timescales of their deaths the actual explosion they actually create all the heavy elements heavier than iron which i think has 25 or 26 protons or maybe it's

27 so all the elements with protons all elements are defined by how many protons they have so there are no two elements two different elements that have the same number of protons that that is what defines which element they are so hydrogen has one helium as two oxygen as eight and these all these heavier elements with more than 25ish protons they're all formed in these very large short-lived rapidly dying expiring stars there's so much pressure created with the core is not able to withstand the outward pressure of you know things that make our star look like moon next to Jupiter or maybe even something smaller than that maybe you know maybe a continent next to Jupiter these pressures overwhelm the core and just they collapse it and they and they create a superheated diffusion reactions that are going to take iron and fuse it together with iron and this you know complex series of interactions domino-like effect this I think they call it a cataclysmic runaway chain

reaction so I just made that up but I think I used some of the keywords right yeah it's just amazing to you know we had some things in our in our blood or at least I guess we have iron arrow blood but that's created by regular stars anything on earth you know and gold and silver and all these heavier elements are all created in these supernova booms so that's just amazing I am so I'm just amazed by this so so you have dark clowns float sereneuve against the backdrop of light. Down here and a cluster of young.

Sorry, that's my dad talking to this buddy from Canada. For some reason they love hopping on speakerphone and yelling like they're at a baseball game sitting ten seats apart. Anyways, down here we have. Dark clouds float serenely against a backdrop of young, of a loose cluster of young massive stars in a stellar nursery known as 29. 4944 I see 2944 these dust clouds are named Thackeray's globules for the

astronomer Thackeray and who first spied them in 1950 here we have some colorful jets at the center of this image is a is the Hubble image of the Herbig hero object 32 the H. 32. It's a young star blasting jets of matter onto space in polar jets into space. One jet at the top we can see plowing into interstellar gas, making it glow in the light of hydrogen atoms, which are roughly green spectrum. So I guess that's something I didn't mention yet is different atoms. They're different. sizes and so they get excited in different ways and every time they get excited by energy or light you know in the form of energy hitting it energy in the form of light rather they their electrons jump up a certain specific wavelength or a

certain energy level rather to an excited state and when that excited state settles down as energy tends to you know Entropy in the universe tends to make energy dissipate, you know, and things like to always take the path of least resistance, and things tend to like to be in the most low energy state as they can, when they can, like all of us, the same. They re-emmit some of the light, or at least they re-emit energy that creates light. that corresponds that that's wavelength corresponds to that energy level so um in a way it's not the exact same light or anything but in a way it's like they absorb it and temporarily get a little bigger in this excited state and then there are electrons after a while jump back down to a lower energy state and that jumping down releases potential energy or uh quantum energy in the form of protons, sorry, photons, that specific wavelength. So hydrogen gets excited and absorbs a certain energy, and then it releases, when it gets closer to a lower energy level, it releases light in the form of green, a green wavelength.

And we could see that through spectroscopy, looking at, light through a prism and we see these absorption lines that tell us that. In sulfur is sulfur another atom creates a blue hue. The jet streaming in the opposite direction is mostly obscured by dust but we can see a little a little excerpt of it right down there. And this one over here is actually pretty interesting looking. It's a bubble, a cocoon gas and dust surrounds a small cluster of young odd stars in the large Magellanic cloud. They lie inside a certain nebula, one of many star-forming regions in the galaxy.

How they're talking about. So we were kind of seeing, we started off looking at diffuse nebula, and then we went into nebula that have just been, you know, initialized into collapsing and forming new stars. And now they're talking about nebula that have created new stars and the stars are undergoing this dynamic process. They call the, that's for a specific type of star. The T-T-R-E-T-R-E-T-A-U-R-I, after the first star of its kind that was discovered. in this phase they think is a you know it's like an adolescent phase it's a trans um it's a transition period i guess if you will it's where the star is trying to find it's it's it's varying in size and pressure because it's trying to find its equilibrium at which

you know stars like our sun have finally been able to settle down and find a perfect balance between internal emission of nuclear radiation perfectly balancing the outward seemingly external or inward I guess force of gravity pulling in pulling matter in on top of it and so we have you know as you can imagine with nuclear reactions on the scales of billions of times more than any atomic bomb we've ever created there would be a lot of violent volatile throws of energy during this cooling down or balancing process here so up here we have we have in this kind of a wide one here jets are common exhaust products of star formation revealed when they ram into surrounding gas and dust Here we have the central stars are hidden within the masses of infalling material, but typically the twin jets from a fledgling star span a region of about two light years across. And we can see here there's obscuring gas. As we can see the effects in there are big.

From the very young star LL.L.Ory. Sounds kind of like A.A.A. RONL.O.O.E. colliding with the tenuous interstellar medium creating a bowel shock around it so it's pretty amazing it was pretty wild to think about is that as you can imagine we've had a taste for the interstellar medium the the medium in which you know all the stars kind of exist in our galaxy it's pretty violent it's pretty energetic it's pretty fast and luckily our star for all the the violent things it throws out at us it's kind of like a like a really hard parent that's being a really disciplinarian parent that protects you from you know keeps a keeps you fed keeps your

you know shelter uh a roof over your head and loves you but still lays the hammer down when they need to that's kind of our star and uh You know, it's interesting that our planet life wouldn't be able to exist because of the sheer enormity of stellar, of interstellar radiation, cosmic rays and energy that, you know, gamma rays and other high energy, energy radiation out there that exists, that our star, with its billowing, solar winds constantly keeps at bay and the Voyager spacecraft actually recently just plowed right through there and I think they realized it was about twice as powerful of stellar interstellar winds as they

had previously thought so over here we have oh so these are some more jets, you know, being propelled from, uh, from new, from the polar, north and south. How do you have a star? I guess. And here, uh, here are the beautiful, beautiful, beautiful pillars of creation. And, God, these are so amazing to look at. They, uh, there we go. So serpents. The serpents. The serpents. is an oddity among constellations and then it's split in two serpins kaput the serpent's head and serpents cauda the serpent's tail in between the in between is the constellation Ophesus the serpent bearer so Ophesius the serpent itself is not an easy constellation to identify because it's has no particularly bright stars

One of its claims to fame though is what it's not, which is a not considered by astrologers to be a constellation of the zodiac. And it should be because the sunset spends longer passing through Ophesius than it does through Scorpius, which is a Zodiac constellation. The omission of those Ophesias as a star sign or Zocirius, zodiac constellation is just a serious weakness they're saying for astrology. Interesting. Anyways, the actual globular cluster itself, M15, M15, M1M15, M1 the actual globular cluster is M15, and then Serpents Cowda, the tail, is M16, which is a bright nebula vaguely shaped like a bird without spread wings.

Known as the Equal Nebula, M16, was subject to one of the most dramatic images of the Hubble Space Telescope ever taken in 95. They called it the pillars of creation in this dark columns of gas in which stars are being born and the columns or pillars are etched and silhouetted by light of the young, hot, massive stars beyond. So the pillars on the left are about one light year long. And the finger-like, so the finger-like protrusions at the top of the pillars are dense regions that probably contain newborn stars,

or at least proto-stars, termed EEGs, which are evaporating gaseous globules. They've been revealed because intense ultra-violent radiation from hidden massive stars has blown away less dense gas. Even the radiation will blow away the gas in the EEGs as well, revealing the star inside for the first time. the close-up of this, this highest pillar right here, down here. So this says, this is the close-up of the tallest pillar, and it shows globules.

They're about as wide. Each of them are about as wide as our solar system. That's so beautiful. That's awesome. You can see the radio lines of gas kind of being emitted, being blown over, blown away. That's pretty amazing that you know the stellar winds created by these newborn stars they have so much force that they clear away all the dust and molecules and so that they kind of it's almost like they're they're claiming their territory to anthropomorphize it and their all the light elements hydrogen and helium and whatnot are going to be blown away for the most part by their powerful ultra-violent radiation just streaming constantly from it now

now that nuclear fusion has started and um what's left are the heavier elements that usually form planets and that's why earth you know for instance is so um you know mercury so iron-rich earth has so much gold on it and um or not a lot but it's also iron-rich and and it prevents, you know, other stars, I guess, from forming too close to it. So it's an interesting law, that, you know, going back to that feedback loop we were talking about. And up here lastly is the embedded cluster. Okay, so this view up here shows the entire nebula itself. You know, that's glory there. And so it says the pillars are found near the center.

of the glowing cloud. So I guess they're okay I see so this that's the main pillar right there. Very cool. The nebula though is easily spotted through binoculars it says. All right guys. I'm gonna close it up for today for tonight. Hope you enjoyed looking through this pretty amazing book. It was it's fun and the more I learn about it the more of course I have a social instinct to want to communicate it with you and like everything. I always learn. I hope it was somewhat enlightening. If not, I hope it was relaxing.

And for our next episode, it's going to be a lot more detail, a lot more structured, a lot more hopefully interesting. And it's going to be focused on the science. and the amazing, amazing process of star formation and how it really itself is a constant feedback loop that keeps our galaxy, and in turn our galaxy keeps it thriving and going and new stars being born all the time. So we're in an active universe

amid other active, you know, galaxies and star systems and I guess really we're the only living planet, but certainly there's a lot of dynamical forces constantly at play in the universe for us still to learn and better understand our place in the universe. So thanks a lot for tuning in. Look forward to that new episode,

and we'll catch you next time.