How Betelgeuse Will Explode | How the Universe Works

[Music] right now somewhere in the universe a giant star is detonating creating a huge cosmic explosion called a supernova supernovas are a big giant dramatic end to a star's life all stars die but only the biggest go out with a bang first star to go supernova we think it has to be at least eight times more massive than our Sun it's so easy to think of our Sun as this incredibly gigantic thing but our Sun is absolutely tiny compared to some of the giant stars in the sky we can see some of these giant stars with the naked eye and the tenth brightest in the night sky is a red supergiant around fifteen times the mass of the Sun beatlejuice beatlejuice is so big that if you're at a place in our own solar system it would stretch to the orbit of Jupiter this is one of the biggest beasts in the galaxy it's a star also that is on the verge of death Betelgeuse is less than 10 million years old but this huge stars days are numbered it's ready to blow and when it does we'll see a region of sky brighten for 14 days until it's nearly as bright as a full moon it is going to be one of the most spectacular shows in history [Music] and it could happen at any moment I mean this is the thing I often stand outside in my yard in the wintertime I look up at Orion and I see Betelgeuse I'd like explode so what will make beetlejuice goes supernova to understand a giant stars death we need to understand its life from the day it's born until the day it dies a star's life was a constant battle gravity is pulling in and energy pushing out the interior of a star is fusing countless atomic nuclei together atoms are ramming into each other getting very very close if they get close enough they'll actually stick and form a larger atom every second a giant star fuses seventh and a half billion tons of hydrogen that amount of energy is roughly equivalent to about 100 billion atomic bombs per second that's a big-ass explosion this explosive energy threatens to blow the star apart but the stars own massive gravity keeps the lid on everything in the universe is a fight between the inward force of gravity and the outward force of pressure or energy every single star in the sky even our own Sun is an incredibly dynamic battleground in many ways stars are an explosion that are actually too big to explode gravity holds it together this battle between these two opposing forces determines the life and death of the star and this is where size matters the more massive the star the more gravity pushes inward and the harder the star has to push outwards to keep itself alive very massive stars are like stars on steroids they have a lot of fuel to burn they're so powerful that they use up their fuel at a rapid rate massive stars like Betelgeuse are giant factories fusing lighter elements into heavier ones but the hard work doesn't start until their final years for around 90% of their life they fuse hydrogen into helium but eventually the hydrogen starts running out in the core of a supergiant star there's a sequence of fusion that goes from lighter elements to heavier elements and it gets faster and faster every step of the way the countdown to death begins the inward push from gravity takes over raising the temperature in the core helium starts fusing into carbon there's enough helium to last about a million years but it too runs out and things start speeding up carbon gets fused into neon and that takes about a thousand years neon fusing into silicon that takes about one year once it starts fusing silicon and iron that takes one day it gets more and more frantic it's it's kind of like a cooking contest show where as the clock is running down they're trying to do more and more things and they get more and more frantic until time's up the star is now in its death throes once iron production has started the clock is ticking towards the cataclysmic end of this star a giant ball of incredibly dense iron forms in the middle of the dying stars core this iron sphere is several thousand miles across and unbelievably hot it gets so hot there the temperature almost becomes meaningless I mean we're talking about a billion degrees in the center of one of these stars this extreme heat is caused by fusion reactions more and more reactions create heavier and heavier elements and with each step less and less energy is produced until iron is created when you try to fuse iron nuclei together that takes energy it doesn't generate energy so once the core starts to fuse iron its basically stealing its own energy the growing iron core sucks more and more energy from the star gravity continues pulling in overwhelming the outward pressure from inside the star everything gets crushed to unimaginable degrees all of a sudden there's no nuclear reaction to support the star against the crush of gravity with nothing left holding it up the star is doomed gravity wins the edges of the iron core collapse trillions of tons of dense iron fall inward at a quarter of the speed of light the star has now less than one second left to live things start to fall apart really quickly the core collapse is so fast that the outer layers of the star don't even have time to react they're just hanging there it's kind of like wily coyote when a cliff collapses underneath them and he doesn't even fall until he notices the rest of the star collapses a trillion trillion trillion tons of gas curdled inwards following the iron think about the entire mass of a star that has been held up by nuclear reactions inside all of a sudden those nuclear reactions go away in a split second everything rushes into the middle and that sets off the most dramatic explosion in the universe [Music] the spectacular deathblow can outshine all of the stars in the galaxy but there's a problem we still don't fully understand how a collapsing ball of iron and tons of falling gas create a giant fireball how this collapsing core triggers a massive explosion is one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics

Channel: Science Channel

Views: 690,187

Rating: 4.8285398 out of 5

Keywords: science, science channel, science channel episodes, science channel videos, How the Universe Works, science documentaries, universe, space, outer space, NASA, Mike Rowe, astronomy, astrophysics, supernova, black hole, stars, the sun, earth, planets, solar system, galaxy, milky way, physics, the big bang, neutron stars, betelgeuse

Id: k6uODhvkRh8

Length: 8min 57sec (537 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/mousefork]

Hmm. Looks like they figured out the mystery:

[8:48] How this collapsing core triggers a massive explosion is one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics.

"There the burnt out stellar iron core collapses due to electron captures and photo-disintegration of heavy nuclei to a neutron star or black hole thereby liberating the energy which causes the supernova explosion."https://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/84411/Core-collapse-supernovae

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photodisintegration
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_capture

[u/Echolife]

First time that I heard english pronunciation of the name. So will it explode if we call it three times: BeetleJuice, BeetleJuice, BeetleJuice?