Short Wave - Life Lessons From Supernovae

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

For many scientists, science isn't something they check in and out of — it permeates their whole lives. That's true for Sarafina El-Badry Nance, an astrophysicist and science communicator. In her new memoir, Starstruck: A Memoir of Astrophysics and Finding Light in the Dark, Sarafina brings the stars down to Earth, rooting her personal journey in the lessons of the stars. This episode, Regina and Sarafina chat supernovae, cancer and what supernovae reveal to us about life.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. The universe is not is. It appears. The sun and stars appear to rise in the east and set in the west. The constellations and solar system appear to rotate around the earth, tracing lines of stardust across the night sky. But this isn't the truth, or rather the full truth. Sarah Fina El-Badry Nance has dedicated her career to investigating the illusions and truths of the universe.

It's what she does as a PhD candidate studying astrophysics, and it's one of the things she writes about in her new memoir, Starstruck. Our eyes can't possibly reveal the truth, that we're on a rock hurtling through space at 30 kilometers per second, and that our cosmic neighborhood, our solar system, is in fact orbiting the center of our galaxy. Throughout her book, Serafina marries this quest to explore the universe to expand human knowledge with the personal, with the quest to understand her human condition. We view the world and our place within it through the lens of our lived experiences, our own struggles and dreams.

But it is in this messy place of complexity that we have a chance of learning something fundamental and true. We just have to be brave enough to question our perception. But she had to put this journey on hold for a bit. Right before grad school, Sarapina tested positive for a mutated brackagee that predicts a very likely cancer diagnosis in the future. In this personal quest to understand what I call the universe within myself, I have to move beyond the perception. I have to move beyond the surface level of what might appear to be true.

Today on the show, a perspective shift. Why investigating the universe gives us an even more powerful tool, the ability to investigate ourselves. We start with a tour through exploding stars and then end with what they can teach us. I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Before we get into Serafina's life and the trials of her diagnosis, let's dive into her research. specifically a type of event in space that gives us both joy. Supernova. What is so neat about supernova are that they're exploding stars.

And that is- Explosions are cool. So cool. Exactly. I mean, an explosion in space of a whole star? Like, that's amazing. And I don't know. I still think this is bonkers that our son, which objectively seems huge to us here on Earth, Earth is too small to explode as a supernova.

Right. That is, so we're talking about stars that are 10, 15, 20 times the mass of our sun. And that's for a core collapse supernova. So those are the types of stars that I research. Basically what happens for a massive star, single massive stars that explode at the ends of their lives, these stars fuse heavier and heavier elements in their cores as they kind of go through their lives until they reach a point where they are so hot and fusing elements that are so massive that they can't jack it up their temperatures high enough to fuse those

elements into even heavier elements. And what ends up happening is the core collapses and then rebounds in a shock wave and explodes the rest of the star. We are, also seeing with telescopes today, you know, a star right before it explodes, which is a bright light. And then the bright light disappears. And that's the star after it explodes and really pinpoint the explosion date and really try to do really cool physics with that. We as humans have seen these things explode over like the history of human civilization. Like in 1054 ID, there was this giant explosion. Yeah. So they basically. Basically, there is a supernova that was nearby enough for us to see.

And there are records of these explosions. Some of them are literally etched into cave drawings. Some of them are on, you know, old records. The 1054 ID one is so interesting, in my opinion, because it's in this like very recognizable constellation, Taurus. And it was so bright you could see in the daytime for almost a month. This idea of seeing something just appear in the sky. for two years at night. It's very amazing. This is one of the things that I love about transience.

So the field of astronomy that studies things that kind of brighten and then fade away and basically change. Yes. When we're talking about galaxies or, you know, it's, it's the timescales make it more difficult for it to, for us to be able to relate to it or to have a personal investment in it. But with supernova, sure, stars' lifetimes are on timescales of, you know, billions of years. However, a supernova takes place in the core collapses in under a second. And then the explosion occurs in days. And so we get to see the aftermath of that. And, you know, a star that is near and dear to my heart, Beetlejuice.

Not the Michael Keaton movie. Not the red star. Yes. Yeah. You're safe to. say Beetlejuice three times and I don't think anything will happen. But maybe you'll make the star explode, in which case, thank you. And that star is actually people can see that star with their naked eye. It's like, I like to say it's the armpit of Orion, the Orion constellation, which is right

next to Torres. Oh, yes, exactly. So tell us about Beetlejuice. There's been like recent speculation by astronomers that it's going to explode because it's been dimming and brightening. I think the jury is still out. So the first portion of my research on Supernova was specific to Beetlejuice and trying to determine when this red super giant will explode. So you can pick it out by literally seeing that reddish color. And it's about, we estimate to be 20 times the mass of our sun. So it's a, it's a big, big star and one of these days it will explode as a supernova and the question is when. And so I published a paper a few years ago basically estimating that it'll explode in another 100,000 years or so, which is maybe seems like a very long time for us here on Earth, but in the astronomical

sense of things, it's like a blink of an eye. But over the last couple of years, we've actually, like, visibly watched Beetlejuice dim and brighten and dim and brighten and wondered whether that means it's going to explode soon. Right. And also there's a recent paper that just came out that basically tries to determine when Beetle Juice will explode and puts that at about tens of years from now. Wow. I really hope it is, honestly.

I, like, I'll pray that it actually explode. I want it so bad. Me too. I have never more wanted to be wrong. I really hope I am wrong. Yeah. I mean, totally. But there was a time when suddenly the joy was sucked out of you. In the middle of your academic journey, just before grad school, your dad was diagnosed with a really aggressive cancer, right? Making him the second generation in your family to have cancer. So you both took tests to see if it was genetic, right? and you found out some alarming news. I learned that I too carry the BRCA mutation, which gives me an 87% lifetime risk of breast cancer

and an over 30% lifetime risk of ovarian cancer. Yeah, so my second year of grad school, I had my first screening MRI and I was 25 at the time. And it came back that they found something. So I had to go in for a biopsy and I was terrified. And thankfully, the biopsy came back benign. But my team wanted to screen me every six months for basically the rest of my life until this sort of amorphous possibility that I would come back with them

actually finding something cancerous. I didn't know how to really reconcile the anxiety that I was feeling around my cancer risk. I don't know. I just couldn't understand how to move forward with it until I learned that I could get a preventative or prophylactic double mastectomy, which would reduce my risk from 87% to less than 5%. Wow. Yeah. When I was told that that was an option, I immediately might, I don't know if it was my science brain, my anxiety brain, but like solution. Literally, I was like, oh my God, what are we talking about here? Like, yeah, this is the way to go. And, you know,

I think it's a hard decision. And this is not to diminish how difficult that was, but in a time where I felt so powerless and so helpless, I, you had a choice. Had a choice. I had a choice. And I immediately started reaching out to surgeons and combing through PubMed. And it's funny, I went to my oncologist with this packet of research. And she was like, you know, we should publish a paper together. Oh, that's really sweet. It was very sweet. But, you know, what I found when I started reaching out to surgeons and telling them my story, they, I, I, was often met with you're too young. You don't have cancer. You should wait. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of women, especially women of color, are met with that, especially young women. But thankfully, I finally connected with a surgeon who was a fellow breast cancer survivor herself. And I had three surgeries in one year. I was, you know, it was very very, very.

tough, but I remember waking up for my mastectomy and just feeling so proud and empowered and just, I don't know. Like, I remember saying out loud, I did it. I did it. I was so happy that this anxiety around breast cancer no longer had to be top of mind for me. People try to make sense of science, right? They use analogies.

But what struck me about your book is that you're using the universe and how unknown vast and imperfect our ideas are to explain your life. What lessons have supernova taught you? You know, I think there are a lot of parallels between what happens in the night sky and what happens within us. And that's sort of what the format of the book is supposed to hopefully represent. So for me, this is actually one of the first things that I wrote when I set down to write this book. I personally deal with a lot of anxiety, and the night sky is this sort of reprieve from my anxiety. And supernova, to me, are very similar. They experience these violent periods of turbulence, and they, you know, shed mass and do all of these crazy things on their surfaces and within the core.

But what remains is something beautiful. You know, you look at any picture of a supernova remnant, and it's, I challenge you to say it's not the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. And there's beauty in that turbulence, and there is a way to find peace and strength within that. For a long time, I thought that anxiety was inherently bad and the reason that I was in a lot of pain emotionally. And what I ultimately learned is that anxiety is not good or bad. It just is. And that's a way to reclaim agency over what I'm feeling and find a sense of peace and beauty within it. I want to thank you so much for talking to us.

That was wonderful. Thank you so much. I am so, so happy I got to chat with you. Serafina Elbodry Nance is the author of Starstruck, a memoir of astrophysics and finding light in the dark. Out now. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy, edited and fact-checked by our managing producer Rebecca Ramirez.

Our audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Beth Donovan is our senior. Director of Programming and Anya Grenman is our Senior Vice President of Programming. I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.