The Supermassive Podcast - 58: BONUS - Nuclear Pasta & G-Astronomy

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

... Potentially the silliest bonus episode we've ever recorded.  The Supermassive Team takes on your questions; What are Brown Dwarfs? How can photons have different energies? Do frozen stars exist? And they get extremely distracted by the concept of nuclear pasta. Even Producer Richard gets involved.  Here's the paper mentioned by listener Hanna, Thermodynamics of Frozen Stars The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media production. The producers are Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham. 

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, science journalist Izzy Clark, astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethurst and the society's deputy director Dr. Robert Massey. Yeah, these bonus episodes are the place where we dive into the ever-growing Supermassive mailbox and answer your questions. Now some of you might remember our bonus episode back in April this year, where we had an Instagram DM from some of our listeners called The Adventures of Buckley.

They had recently found out that they were having a baby and had asked us to help find some astronomy themed names. No pressure from us, by the way. Yeah, I was like desperately anxiously being like, oh, come up with some good ones. Oh, gosh. Don't make a mistake. And we were so excited because we've had an update from them. And it says, hi, all me and my partner really loved the episode Wobbly Planets and Baby Names.

I was so gobsmacked and had pure excitement the day I got the notification of the episode and saw the name. I instantly listened to it without her. Thank you so much for answering our question. We absolutely fell in love with the name Lyra so much and it was instantly our top choice for a girl but we were having a baby boy. But I would still like to introduce you to our baby boy Leo, born September 18th under the super moon, which we unfortunately missed. I think we'll give you a pass this time.

Yeah. Especially your partner. We'll definitely give her a pass. Absolutely. So congratulations to Josh and Sarah and welcome to the world, baby Leo. And they wrote, PS Becky, your book, A Brief History of Black Holes was really helpful in passing the time at hospital. So there you go. Oh, well, that's amazing.

Josh, Sarah, Leo, congratulations. I'm so glad we could help in a small way in helping naming Baby Leo and maybe even a future baby Lyra. Yes, exactly. And before we get on to the questions, shall we have a quick comment update? Becky, did you see it? I did see it. Yeah, I saw it from my back garden, actually higher in the sky than I thought. When was this? Early October. And I followed my own advice and I took a long

exposure with my phone to find it first, like a long exposure image, and I was so impatient waiting for it. We were like sat outside having like a little outdoor fire and I kept like running away from it as it got darker to like try and take a photo of the part of the sky that I thought it was in and it just wasn't getting dark enough after sunset quick enough. And I was like, come on.

And then eventually spotted it, broke out the binoculars, managed to see that really big tail. Like it had a big tail, which I was surprised about. Much bigger than I feel like I remember Neowise in July, 2020, happening. Having? Having. And then I got my big camera out

and I managed to get a time-lapse, which you have reminded me I still haven't edited and put together or posted anywhere. So, gotta do that. That's future or posted anywhere. So got to do that. That's future Becky's problem. Don't worry about that. I in true style did not see the comment. I really tried.

No, I really tried. One part I went to a bridge over a main A road in London to try and- So you had all the lights and cars. Yeah, exactly. Cause I just, I couldn't, I just couldn't cause I thought it's going to be so much lower in the sky, but I just couldn't get it. Cause even when I was getting pictures from you guys at the times that you were seeing it, I was looking in the right place, but I just couldn't get it.

And I just assumed that's down to either me being totally incompetent or light pollution. Just be the bright sky though, light pollution. I think so. They are hard. Yeah. Bright pollution is just tougher. It was, I couldn't see it with my eyes is like, no, even where we were like, which is the pretty dark sky.

Yeah. Even with long exposures, nothing was coming up. So it was just like, right. I think I just have to accept. I've seen the Northern Lights from East London, but maybe a comet is asking too much. So just be grateful what I got last month. So, but also we've had a message from Bath Astronomers who said, thanks for the great podcast. The advice was really useful in spotting comet A3 and helping

lots of others to see it too. We even got to hear Saturn, OMG at a high pitch squeal when people saw their first ever comet. I know exactly what that sounds like. Yeah. So right onto some questions. Robert, oldblackcrow on Instagram asks, hi y'all. That sounds so bad in an English accent and I'm so sorry.

Hi y'all. Hi y'all. I heard about nuclear pasta from neutron stars. Can you go into more detail about this? Thank you. So Robert, can you explain that please? Yeah, I'm definitely a fan of regular pasta of all different types. As opposed to what? Like, the quick pasta? They're kind of durable stuff. The good stuff. The good pasta. It seems, yeah, exactly. Next up, a lesson from Robert on how to make regular pasta. I'm up for it.

It's some basically, I didn't realise it was the preferred analogy for what happens under the surface of neutron stars. These stars that are even denser with white dwarfs where the massive star ends up having so much material at the end that the neutral particles of the nuclei of atoms jam together and they have these different configurations as you go deeper into the star and the density goes up. So they start in these clumps which are described as the knocky phase, you know, past the type number one. Excuse me, can we pronounce knocky correctly? It is the most joyful word in any language

ever so it has to be pronounced knocky! Leave that to you! So carry on, the neutron starting clumps are described as the knocky phase! Right, noted. The G phase. Deeper down they become these long rods which is the spaghetti phase and deeper still the neutrons are found in sheets described as the lasagna phase and then there's also the bucatini phase which if you recall was you know like spaghetti with holes running down the tubes and the swiss cheese phase where the sheets have holes in them. So now in theory this sort of structure irregular structure movement around between should be sort of sources of weak gravitational waves and probably not very strong probably quite hard to detect but if we had sensitive

enough instruments we could detail what kind of pasta is inside Neutron Stars, or what kind of pasta model is inside Neutron Stars. Nobody's talking about Paneo, Fusilio, all these other things just yet, but maybe they will. Who knows? This is honestly perhaps one of my favourite topics that we have ever come across. Astro Pasta. Yeah, Astro Pasta. Gastronomy. Very good. And I like that they've just thrown in the

Swiss cheese face. Oh yes, that famous pasta. Yeah, somebody really didn't get the memo. They really need the Italian to invent like holy lasagna and then. There's bound to be one. What, they cut a What kind of lonely face? I've been there hundreds of times. Anyway, Old Black Crow, thank you so much for the most enjoyable question. I think we've had it quite a while. That's great. Knocky! Sorry, I can't help myself.

Becky, we've had this question from Matt in Australia. They say, hi Izzy, Becky, Robert and producer Richard. Oh, there you go Richard, a shout out. Do you want to use this as your in? Richard, would you like to say hello? Hello. I'm not going to drink all this time and no one knows. Oh gosh, this is derailing fast.

I was trying to think of Holy Pasta actually. Can't think of any. I've got to start Googling that while you carry on. OK, gosh, I'm losing it. Matt says, I've been listening to the new podcast with John Green and Dr. Katie Mack. Dr. Katie mentioned something about energised photons that confused me. My understanding was that photons are massless particles

that can act like a wave which travels at the speed of light. How can there be an energy difference between an energized and non-energized or less energized photon when it's a massless particle that travels at the speed of light, no matter, obviously depending on the density of the median it's traveling through? Where is the charge stored if not in momentum or mass? Just a bit confused about that one. Thanks. Hey, Matt. All right.

So I'm glad you're enjoying John and Katie's podcast because I think it's great. I think they're great together as well and everyone should give it a listen. So photons, they're weird. They're massless, as you say. So their energy is not the sort of energy that we think of in terms of like E equals MC squared or even E equals with M4C4 plus P squared C squared, P being momentum, right? So there's no mass or momentum there. You know, instead the energy is equivalent to HF. So E equals HF for photons, H being Planck's constant

and F being frequency. So a high energy or an energized photon is one that is super high frequency or a short wavelength. So something like gamma rays, X-rays, whereas a low energy photon or a less energized photon, as you put it, is a low frequency, long wavelength light. So like radio waves or microwaves, so radio light. And, you know, even if I just pictured them in my head, you know, like they do seem lazier, like less energized photons. When you picture those long, lazy wavelengths as opposed to like very energized photons, which is sort of like a, I picture it like a buzzing of a bee, just like, you know, just like really, really high frequency photons.

And I think it's actually really interesting that you raised this question from like a science communication perspective, because you know, I do a lot of communicating of science to the public. And I always think that this concept of wavelength is not something that people immediately grasp if like, they haven't done physics, you know, in a long time, for example, I think it's like a thing that we constantly almost overuse is physicists, especially as astronomers, when we talk about're seeing it this wavelength of light and it's been redshifted to the longer wavelengths and all this kind of stuff that we say all the time. But I think intuitively to a member of the public, it doesn't come up a lot.

And so I was like, hmm, I wonder if there's a better way to explain this. And I was like, oh, I'm just going to explain it in terms of energy from now on. You know, like we look at this in higher energy light or lower energy light. But it's really interesting to hear that, like Katie referring to, you know, higher energy photons actually cause more confusion for you in a way. So maybe we'll just all have to rethink how we explain, you know, the different energies, wavelengths and frequencies of light. Okay, thanks, Becky. And we've had some more great questions about stars that I couldn't fit into the main show, so I'm popping them in here.

Robert Space Jamber on Instagram says, Brand dwarfs, are they stars, gas giants or something in between? Yeah, great question, Space Jamber. They're absolutely something in between. They're best described as being, you know, bigger than gas giant planets like Jupiter, quite a lot bigger, you know, bigger than gas giant planets like Jupiter, quite a lot bigger, but a lot lighter than what we'd call the main sequence stars,

the one that's used hydrogen to shine, and you know, they're a lot brighter as a result. So they have masses between, the definition is roughly between 13 and 80 Jupiters. So, you know, they're big, but they're a lot smaller than the sun. And that's supposed to be enough to allow the fusion

of deuterium, which is a kind of a heavy form of hydrogen, but not hydrogen itself. And so that means they don't have that sort of sustainability, they just tend to cool down over time, actually, and then they become harder and harder to detect. Because they're, I mean, they're still hot, they can be thousands of degrees, but they're not as hot as the star like the sun. But that does mean that in many ways they're good targets for infrared telescopes too.

So yeah, in between is definitely, definitely I think the best way to describe them. It took a long time to find them and I can't remember when they were first suggested, quite a long way back in the 20th century but it wasn't until the late 1980s that even the first candidate, proper candidate, good candidate was found, not till the 90s that we started to find a lot more of them simply because telescopes got better. Yeah, we actually had a colloquium here in Oxford yesterday.

So I feel like this is- So timely. Very timely, this podcast to come after this seminar. But it was from Professor Michael Mayer at the University of Michigan, who studies sort of like round dwarfs and sort of gas giants and how many you expect to find around different masses of stars and things like this. And I remember he said in the cloakroom that like this criteria for classing whether

something is a brown dwarf versus a star versus a gas giant planet, they're really fuzzy boundaries. And this idea that we should use the deuterium like burning criteria for that classification actually isn't the best indicator. The problem is I've been going back through my notes from the cloakroom and I can't have written down what he said was. Well, if he's listening. Yeah, either he, you know, like that nobody's come up with something yet, or I just thought it was so obvious that I didn't write it down and I'd remember it. But here we are 24 hours

later with me going, oh. Happens to all of us. Yeah, it does. But very good timing that, you know, that question came in right as I sort of sat in a talk from someone yesterday about this sort of exact kind of work. Amazing. Okay, and Becky, Hannah on Instagram has linked us to a paper which is titled

Thermodynamics of Frozen Stars and asks, what are the likelihood of these being real? Yeah, so, I mean, never come across this before. You know, this is completely new to me if you sent me this paper Hannah, so I'll do my best. We'll put the link in the podcast description won't be as people wanna jump on the paper, but essentially they're talking about this idea

of a frozen star, which is something that looks like a black hole from the outside, but is in fact a star. So this is very much a classic theory paper. Like it's a lot of maths. It's a lot of equations to essentially show how you could get something that, you know, in terms of the maths, looks like a black hole in the fact that it looks like it has a singularity, but it doesn't actually is, you know, it's a star. As an observer, someone who uses telescopes, this this is a very unsatisfying paper to read,

because I was like, great, great, you've shown the maths that this could probably exist, great, how do we observe these things then if they do exist? And the authors say the only way they know that you could possibly get evidence for the frozen star to have existed is if one merged with an actual black hole, and then we could detect gravitational waves from it, sort of like the ripples through space, because of the fact that you've changed gravity so much as these two things merge, that the gravitational waves wouldn't be what we'd expect

from a black hole-black hole merger. It would be completely different for this frozen star-black hole merger. But we couldn't observe anything using normal light, annoyingly, to know this. And also, I don't know if we even know what we'd expect to see in gravitational waves yet. Like it was a very one-liner throwaway comment to be like, oh, we could do this in gravitational waves. And I was like, more detail. Yes, maybe

they're working on that. Maybe they're, you know, sort of like, that was beyond the scope of this paper and just sort of showing the math. So I think it was a really interesting idea. Yeah. But as an observational astronomer, I'm a bit like, that's sad that we can't see them in any way that we know of. Okay, so a bit more information needed on that one. But great question, Hannah. Yeah. Thank you. Obviously doing their homework. Yeah, totally. Papers to send to us. It's like a little journal club this podcast is turning into.

Yeah, thank you so much for getting in touch and thank you to anyone that sent us questions, please do keep sending them in. And I've also just loved seeing all the different Comet and Northern Lights images as well. They're so nice. Send them taggers. Keep them coming. You can email us.

Baby names, all those things. Pet names. We're here. Pet name requests. Yeah. Slightly less pressure on the pet names. Oh, no. Pet name requests. Slightly less pressure on the pet names. Oh, no. As much pressure.

Well, you can email us with any of the above requests on podcast at ras.ac.uk or find us on Instagram at supermassivepod. Oh, breaking news. Yes. Richard has a pasta update, which we obviously need to mention. Yeah. So we were talking about arrangements of neutron stars and talking about them being like Swiss cheese. So I've been looking at pictures of pasta.

Amazing. This is what you do while you're silent in the background. I was going to say busy, busy working. Compelling podcast. I've been looking at pictures of pasta. I think there's a picture of a pile of tortellini because that has the hole in the middle. So if you flattened tortellini, I think that would be a pretty good bet. So you could have flattened tortellini would work. There's also a pasta called Ratelli, which is sort of round, which has holes in it, but that's more like wheels. So not irregular, which I'm guessing is what they're talking about with the Swiss cheese.

So that'll really clear things up for the general public to tell them the inside of an interest that looks like tortellini. It's like flattened tortellini. It's got to be better than Swiss cheese though, hasn't it? I mean, that's a lack of imagination. Single lack of imagination. I love how there's nothing else that could substitute for Swiss cheese. There are like so many things in science.

The analogy always ends up on Swiss cheese. There are so many things in science. The analogy always ends up on Swiss cheese. There's nothing else that fits them out. Mason We'll be back in a couple of weeks with a main episode and I still in the show notes Izzy is blank. We still haven't decided what it's going to be. That's still going to be a surprise. Who doesn't love surprises? Yeah, who doesn't love surprises? Surprise pasta especially. But until next time everybody, happy stargazing.