An astrophysicist watches 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' for the first time

[Music] controls are still offline sir override [Music] [Laughter] why is this collapsing star giving off this like glowing lumpy asteroid thing oh god i love the 80s so much all right so i have a little bit of a confession to make and that is that i've never seen any of the original star trek series i know i know and i call myself a massive sci-fi fan as well i just i mean i've always been more of a star wars gal what can i say now i have seen the films with chris pine and emma which i enjoyed a lot which i don't know if that redeems me in the eyes of all the trekkies watching or not but i figured time to redeem myself it's streaming on netflix now we're in lock down here in the uk so there is no better time for me to start watching them and also i figured you know i should record my reaction as well as an astrophysicist 100 inspired by dr mike's doctor reacts series i found that through my obsession with grey's anatomy and i thought it'd be you know something fun to do over here as well and this is not sci-fi bashing in any way i'm very aware that you need the fiction part to make it science fiction and that's what makes it fun i'm just kind of reacting in the sense of okay if these programmers were bound by the real laws of physics then how would it be different so without any further ado let's get into this this is me reacting to star trek the next generation season 1 episode 2 the naked now [Music] captain's log stardate 41209 we are running at warp 7 to rendezvous with the science vessel s.s sielkovsky which has been routinely monitoring the collapse of a red supergiant star into a white dwarf hang on okay so we've already got some astro happening here and it's not even like 20 seconds in so uh he just said that they are looking at this star apparently a red supergiant star that's going to collapse into a white dwarf red supergiants don't collapse into white dwarfs they collapse into neutron stars it's just the plain old red giants that collapse into white dwarfs so that's anything that when it's a normal star it's something from like half the mass the sun to eight times the mass of the sun will become a red giant and then a white dwarf anything bigger so like eight times the mass of sun to say like thirty or so times the mass of the sun that's gonna become a red supergiant star and then collapse into a neutron star and it just all depends like how big the normal star is when it's happily turning hydrogen into helium through nuclear fusion in what it becomes at the end of its life and i guess here they just thought that red supergiant sounded more impressive than just red giant but it's the kind of thing i'd expect a program like star trek to get right now reveal no life science abort captain yeah so so this is the thing so red giants red supergiants both of them they're just really unstable stars right they're at the end of their life they've not got a lot of fuel left they're basically hanging on for as long as they can and trying all the tricks in the book to like you know instead of fuse hydrogenated helium they're fusing helium into heavier elements and carbon and heavier elements and so they're really unstable they tend to pulse as well they're not like sort of static like you see here and also they're throwing off a huge amount of material into space in what we call like a stellar wind it's just sort of streaming off it and they're incredibly incredibly hot too so i don't know how close you'd actually be able to get like i don't think you'd be able to get this close to a red giant star but yeah maybe this this star's more stable maybe that's why they've been able to monitor it i'll just keep watching oh i really like this opening like flying past all the planets yeah there's something something that's my favorite space the final frontier these are the voyages did you see that though though how the foreground stars moved with respect to the background stars that's really cool that's something we call parallax so i'm really glad that they actually put that in the opening sequence because that was one of the first ways that we were able to calculate distance to to stars in our nearby universe so if you think about how we move in our orbit on earth around the sun right so our perspective on stars changes and so you see like foreground stars that are closer to you move with respect to the background stars whether you look at them you know from from winter on one side of the sun when you're on the other side of the sun in summer you look at them and see them from a different angle and so then it's just like some really simple like trigonometry like what you learn at school to work out the distances to stars that are nearby and so it's really cool that they put that in the opening sequence you know that's a that's a little detail that i that i appreciate to boldly go where no one has gone before and then they make the jump to warp speed light speed hyperspeed whatever they call it in star trek right like just to point out that under our current understanding of the laws of physics nothing can go faster than the speed of light it's incredibly difficult to accelerate something even close to the speed of light you need an incredible incredible amount of energy the things that we can currently do it with are you know tiny particles like protons in these incredible particle accelerators like the lhc at cern so i think we're a long way off from ships like that that can travel at those those huge huge speeds unfortunately we are downloading the research information gathered on the collapsing star nearby i am concerned of being in such close orbit but that ziyakovsky's research records will no doubt predict the time of the star's final collapse okay so magneto is as concerned as i am about their relatively close orbit to this star that makes me feel better but one thing he said there about predicting like the time that the star will collapse i mean maybe in the future if you're studying it this close this close in orbit you might be able to get at that detail but like stars spend anything from thousands of years to millions of years in these red giant phases before they become white dwarfs so like pinpointing a time that that's gonna happen is pretty difficult you know like the best thing you can say is that it could be tomorrow it could be in a million years like look at beetlejuice for example beetlejuice is a red supergiant star coming to the end of its life it could go supernova and become a neutron star any day we've been saying that for decades now so it's anyone's guess i'm getting very strange reports from all decks such as such as the ship's training division ordering all officers to attend a lecture on metaphysics out of physics so fun fact metaphysics is not actually a branch of physics it's actually philosophy and in it they ask questions like you know how do we exist why do we exist what does it mean to exist i've never studied it myself but i imagine it hurts the brain a lot more than astrophysicists the brain anyway and there was a rather peculiar limerick being delivered by someone in the shuttlecraft bay i am not sure i understand it there was a young lady from venus whose body was shaped like a captain to security come in oh i'm stealing that one all right maybe it's mutated but i've got to isolate it in order to analyze we don't have that kind of time you brought diana yes she's infected and you touched her oh god and you touched me wait i'm just quarantine you stop touching each other stop touching each other in the workplace as well like it's not that hard god this this episode's hitting a little bit too close to home in 2020. sir the star is beginning to collapse so you see how the star changed color then it went from sort of a reddish color to a yellowish color that is actually what would happen like in real life right if you could watch this kind of process happening because it's all to do with what's going on inside the star itself in the very core where the nuclear fusion is happening right you've got this core of of hydrogen that's been turned into helium when the star was in its normal phase and now you've only got nuclear fusion going on this little sort of like shell around the outside where it's currently hot and it's kind of like an onion or something right and so there's this constant battle between nuclear fusion pushing outwards with all the energy it produces and then gravity like pushing inwards and eventually you use up all of the hydrogen whether it's doing helium burning perhaps as well in that shell around the outside and then all of a sudden there's no energy pushing back outwards again gravity starts to win the star contracts a little bit but then all of a sudden it gets hot enough to kickstart more hydrogen or helium burning around the outside in these shells again and so you've got this constant this is where you get this like pulsing as well but as it contracts the star gets hotter and so it changes color it goes from red to yellow because yellow is hotter than red which might be weird to some of you because like you know like taps have been telling us phrases right that red is hot and then like blue is cold but actually the blue end of the spectrum of like the color spectrum and blue end of the rainbow is the hottest think about it like um you know the flame on a gas cooker or hob or in a bunsen burner is blue right but the flame on a candle or like the dying embers of a fire is much more yellowy red right it's much cooler and so as the star contracts and get hotter it will go sort of from from red to yellow to blue to white eventually so yeah red is the colder end of the rainbow and blue is the hot end of the rainbow [Music] alright so this red giant star is now becoming a white dwarf right and it's undergoing collapse as they said i don't think collapse is necessarily the right word here i mean they didn't show a supernova which is right you wouldn't get a supernova but collapse isn't right either like i said these these stars are like pulsating and they're losing a lot of their material all the time to the space around them so in the sort of however many millions of years that this star spent in its red giant phase it probably would have shedded about 50 up to 70 of its outer layers of all that gas in into space until essentially all you're left with is just the inner helium core left over from nuclear fusion at the center which is the white dwarf and they leave behind these most spectacular nebula we call planetary nebula that just look incredible you can see you know all the regions around it where all this gas from these pulsations where it's ended up with and i think actually would have been more spectacular to show on screen if they decided to show that but i guess they needed like immediate danger from the star throwing off all of its material and its outer layers all at once which would have been more like a typical supernova but you know you wouldn't have got a white dwarf at the end you would have got something like a neutron star or even a black hole if you were lucky controls are still offline sir override [Music] [Laughter] why is this collapsing star giving off this like glowing lumpy asteroid thing oh god i love the 80s so much seriously though if this star had actually you know thrown all its outer layers off at once it would have done that in you know a sphere of gas that expanded outward it wouldn't have been in some weird lumpy rock it would have been like a shock wave traveling through space but this is science fiction and in science fiction apparently collapsing stars do little glowy asteroid poops also they said they were in orbit around this star before right so if that star collapsed you know the enterprise's orbit is going to be massively affected by that it wouldn't stay there at all you know it would get flung away kind of like um you know like a discus thrower when they spin around and then they let go of it and it goes off in a straight line like if you change the amount of mass that's in the center by by throwing off all those outer layers then you're going to change that gravitational field enterprise is going to get flung off to safety probably to be honest so you know they wouldn't be stuck around waiting for a big lump of glowing poopy asteroids well there you have it my very first star trek episode i kind of enjoyed it and at least i'll get all the wesley crusher references they make on the big bang theory now but if there are any other episodes of star trek either tng or any other series that you want me to watch or there are any other sci-fi programs or films you want me to react to let me know down in the comments below oh um netflix is about to play another episode and you know what go on i'll just watch another one it's fine a big thank you to this week's video sponsor brilliant brilliant is a problem-solving website with interactive courses on a huge range of science and maths topics that get you to learn by doing whether you want to be more like data from star trek and brush up on the principles of logic or maybe you want to learn more about how we measure distances with parallax like in the opening sequence of the next generation or maybe you want to learn more about how stars evolve through normal stars to red giants to white dwarfs like we just saw in that episode well brilliant has got you covered their courses teach you to work through problems and get you thinking like a scientist in no time so if that sounds like fun to you and there's something new that you want to learn then head to brilliant.org forward slash dr becky that's d-r-b-e-c-k-y and sign up completely for free plus the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20 off an annual premium subscription so by clicking on that link you let them know that i sent you so go ahead and sign up and say a big thank you to brilliant from me see in case you were wondering this this is how i focus when i'm alone in the house with this adorable adorable cat pillow oh it does make me laugh that he's called geordi this character like if you're in the uk you'll know a geordie is someone who comes from newcastle and half my family come from up from newcastle and i buddy love them and they all talk like this like oh jordy man what's wrong with you like why you sick man every time they call him jordy that's all that i can think of

Channel: Dr. Becky

Views: 359,556

Keywords: star trek, dr becky, doctor reacts, the next generation, the naked now, astrophysicist reacts, astrophysicist watches, how accurate is star trek, science fiction, astronomer reacts, astronomer watches, trekkies, picard, data, wesley crusher, patrick stewart, riker, beverly crusher, worf, geordi la forge, deanna troi, sci fi, syfy, astrophysics, physics, space, cosmos, universe, supernova, red giants, red supergiants, white dwarf, star collapse, netflix, female scientist, black hole

Id: 0VgAHq8xXWs

Length: 15min 42sec (942 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 26 2020