StarTalk Podcast: Cosmic Queries – Between Planets and Stars, with Jackie Faherty

hello youtubers up next cosmic queries star talk the worlds between planets and stars [Music] this is star talk i'm your host neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist and today we're going to have a cosmic queries edition of star talk with my co-host chuck knight yes baby hey neil all right what's happening between us here that's right i got my friend and colleague yes not only professional colleague but museum colleague jackie faraday that's right in the house in two houses double house double house uh jackie is one of the world's experts on the the worlds that exist between planets and stars wow there's not a sharp boundary there you might have thought so or maybe you never thought about it she's thought about it yes and she and her her peeps she's got a whole community of people in fact after we hired her she brought other people after she came so this place the american museum of natural history right is one of the intellectual centers of this subject because of this woman right here that's correct that's that one no no i'm gonna take ownership of that you sure yeah we actually have a our research group has uh stickers and t-shirts and logo we have a logo uh and because our subway symbols in new york city are circles yes with letters inside yes they are so what are what is what's your design there so we are bd nyc oh stands for brown dwarfs right in new york city research group plus the b train stops at this it certainly does that's correct b and c there you go so so we've got uh we solicited questions from from our fan base telling them we're going to have the world's expert on this sort of nether world between planets and stars yes and came hundreds of questions hundreds yes hundreds hundreds of questions yes you've got them and i've got neither of us have seen it no you haven't and it's not that it's a test no no i love shows like this when i have one of my my astrophysics colleagues because then i'll have to say a thing right she knows everything i'll just i'm gonna go get lunch and then you you tell me when you're done right so i like that neil saying i know everything that's a nice that's a nice compliment thank you yeah all right well listen why don't we jump into it with our first question which is always from a patreon patron okay here we go this is amz industries wow we've gone corporate with patreon patrons amz industries new york stock exchange list tell me about it amc right um amz says um the sun is the biggest star in our solar system i believe it's also the only star in our solar system keep going okay yeah maybe i'm wrong i'm going to say that one yeah okay do we know a star or any other object in space or interstellar space that is bigger than our sun okay uh okay so just see it's they just mixed galaxy with solar system that's what they did that's thank you yes i'm trying to figure this out but you got it that's what they did so uh um also to jackie um do you believe in zodiac signs uh huh okay all right uh okay twofold question both of which are interesting to answer and they both sound completely unrelated to each other well i i think i believe i think one is a genuine interest in the cosmos and they and the other is a genuine interest in you i love it so i will go with the first one is the sun in our okay so yes it's the only star that we know of in our solar system although we have searched for another object that might be maybe not a star but one of these objects i study a brown dwarf brown dwarf that might be a companion to our own sun since it's alone it's by itself it doesn't have a partner so you're warming really far away yeah i was going to say because you're talking what i believe we're talking about to tell me if i'm wrong is that sometimes there are anomalies in the gravitational movement of objects in our neighborhood right so i think you're going with the planet nine explanations okay that's what it is yeah and that's also been been pulled on and is very popular right now not pluto just to be clear right right yeah we gotta be clear that's right and also we can discuss why that word planet's not very good in this context anyway right so an object outside of what's currently pluto's position that might be tugging on another in the outer part of the solar system the kuiper belt which is this this this area of things that are left over from when the solar system formed uh and whether or not there's something else that's well beyond that possibly there's indications theorists certainly think that um but um but there was this nemesis hypothesis that existed several several years ago for which that possibly you could link up mass extinctions that happened on this planet with a highly eccentric other object that might have been orbit is eccentric right yes orbit is eccentric not emotionally eccentric it could have been right although it does spend a lot of time alone so maybe you never know why are we giving emotions to the objects part of the problem people put so much emotion on these objects they want to feel them yeah yeah you just call the thing eccentric yes eccentric right so so that it would have an eccentric orbit uh and that possibly was every time it got into some area of the outer solar system it would kick a bunch of stuff in uh towards the uh towards our area and cause possibly mass extinction comets that would then hit yeah yeah comets uh asteroids um and so that's that's basically we've looked far and near and we haven't found anything gotcha so possibly that's out um so nemesis was the proposed name if such an object existed and that would have been its name had we found it yeah and nemesis is the idea that it's our nemesis right the earth's nemesis not necessarily the sun's right the earth's because if it's gonna uh it's launching [Laughter] why would you want that right that would feel like your nemesis right sure sure so that okay so beyond that the question is asking if there's a um a star that's bigger than our our own son and that's like yeah definitely there's so many my favorite star in this the nighttime sky is called ada karina aydah karina you know ada karina aydah korean love me some ada and i love the fact that it actually sounds like a pop star you know what i mean yeah yeah yeah it's in the constellation karina uh that makes a good ice cream flavor that ate a korean no i i ate a korean karina is the name of the flavor wow i wouldn't have put that in there but okay all right oh my god it's in the homunculus nebula can you make that like the homunculus nuts that somehow somebody could make that you put on the ice cream well so ada karina is a very large star um we now think that it's actually two stars a binary star system uh we call it a luminous blue variable it's this object that's very very massive and so we think it's two and so forty to fifty times the mass of our our own sun but probably two of them they go around each other eclipsing each other so that you can actually see the light of one dip very very periodically that's a variability you were talking about yeah yeah so let me just ask you this uh even though it's a body moving in front or transiting another body how is one slightly larger than the other because we're they're both luminous yeah so the idea of a transit is one blocks light from the other but if they're both glowing what are you measuring so they're not the exact same mass okay uh so you'd have one that's say 60 times the mass of the sun and the other is 30 times the mass okay there's even some hypothesis that there's a triple system in there there's three not just two wow so i'm noting ada karina because i think it is just an awesome star uh or star system but that's good photos of that right oh yeah you check that out yeah we might put one on the website here yeah you should cool because it was part of an hst legacy project space telescope sorry hubble space telescope yes we'll apologize yeah you're right in the lingo girl i'm in the lingo do the lingo thing hst and elementalp right okay thank you neil um and it it's a uh so there's there's a lot of data on and on adarina uh but it's not the most massive you get even more massive there's 100 200 times the mass of our own sun wow and these are not stable systems this is these again we're not referring to their motions right exactly stars and unstable stars i like where this is going we actually have degenerate stars as well that's another thing really yes it's an actual kind of stuff is that okay i i can't even tell you forget it i just my mind immediately went to a start just for constellation weenies out there uh carina is a constellation visible primarily in the southern hemisphere and it's part of the constant it's part of a much larger constellation that used to be one piece and it's the the ship of uh the argonauts okay argo novice is the ship and it's just it i queen is this is the is the keel i think the keel yeah yeah so what they did was that that concept was way too big for britches so they broke it up into parts there's a compass there's a sail there's the hull there's the there and so this is it is the ata if brightest right object in the constellation karina so alpha beta gamma delta epsilon zeta eta so it'll be the seventh brightest star and that's important also because it's not always the ada because that's what it was cataloged at but at one time it was one of the brightest stars in the nighttime sky because the thing is going through massive and insane explosions and it's just dumping material off which is creating that makes the beautiful photos yes the nebula that's around it is so unbelievably attractive to look at and that's just from the truck is really cool yeah it's really a crime scene right you're gonna see this gas just spilling out so something happened down in there yeah something bad happened and something is continually bad happening i mean i would love to fly close and have a look at that thing and you wouldn't want to be closed as a human because there's probably a lot of really bad radiation around there but man would it be a sight because it is really pretty that's very cool human eye so aydah karina yeah well so the sun is large enough if you hollowed it out right you could pour a million earths into it our sun our sun right and now we're told my star is bigger than that and so these these super massive stars these are these are the ones that become black holes like our sun couldn't become a black hole nobody no our sun couldn't become a black hole not massive enough but these are these are the ones like you look at these stars luminous blue variables and then there's another kind they're called wolf rayet stars so there's actually somebody here rayette yes yes actually debatable if it's wolf red well these are two people oh is that the deal so the people did they discovered this well they first studied them in an important way all right and so then realize that no other stars look like those do so they became their own category nice wolf what were you at r-a-y-e-t okay in french you believe you don't pronounce the trailing consonant right nice all right and for the second question uh re-read that which is do you believe in zodiac signs uh so what i i believe is such an interesting thing there are constellations in the nighttime sky which are the markers for where the ecliptic of the path that the sun takes and the sky and all the planets and the moon they take and so those are designations in the sky and that is it's where the the um the sun and the planets and the moon all move yeah i don't place any significance on um what people like to do in reading their astrological uh sign i'm actually not even sure what my sign is oh wow um when were you born not totally true i do know what it is but okay but you don't think about it okay don't think about it right mine is cancer i'm a festering malignancy thank you does it feel accurate oh man all right all right enough of that jackie yeah that was great wow i got so much out of that man what else you got there all right why don't we um let's see how about um this is uh sherman from san diego says are we still on the patreon this is a patreon page okay sherman from san diego sherman says uh hi dr tyson and hi dr fahrity understanding that it's only been a few decades since the discovery of the first exoplanet there is still a lot we don't know about even the closest ones to our solar system what tools and or resources are needed in the works or in the works to help us better understand the nature and composition of these objects so that's a very good question um is there is there anything new and exciting that question by asking you are your methods and tools to find the worlds between planets and stars do you have overlap with the methods and tools of those who are finding planets yeah and i actually think this would drive the question of what do we mean when we say the word planet in this particular instance because the objects that i study that are that i get the most excited about studying are ones that we sometimes refer to as rogue worlds as they are the same mass as the objects that others might want to call a planet those objects orbit a star and the ones that i studied don't orbit a star they're in between yeah they just they're off there they're alone they have no host star homeless there's nothing they're homeless yeah we call morphin to be nicer maybe wow the orphaned objects that are out there so that what i do because it's a lot easier for you to attempt to get to what's in the atmospheres of these objects when they don't have a host star that you have to block the light of because the contrast ratio is so large i haven't thought about that it's so much like like seeing a firefly in a hollywood searchlight you can't the brightness contrast is so high you can't see the dim things so you got objects where there's no main star so it's just the opposite it's good just it on its own but this is where it gets controversial right because it could be the exact same mass temperature gravity the whole deal that we would call an object around another star but because we find it alone we call them brown dwarfs and when they're the lowest mass so not getting too far down this rabbit hole which i assume you want me to define what a brown dwarf is at some point yeah probably important for your audience to understand what i'm an expert in but just quickly you're saying that location matters in how you classify such an object we don't have a good running definition right now for what it is that we'll call this high mass end problem outside of our own solar system high mass planet high mass planet high mass uh so planet or so what's a brown so brown dwarfs are these objects that exist in mass in between stars and planets or whatever the gray area in between and the idea being that when you form a star you have a giant molecular cloud of hydrogen and it fragments into pieces whatever causes the fragmentation the compression of the gas it it breaks off into pieces the smallest possible pieces that could fragment off wait wait so you have the main piece that's the main star well it for lots of pieces right like but one of them is gonna the big one is gonna be the star there could be hundreds of them that'll be stars yeah of course all right so now you've got the other bits and pieces go on yeah so there'll be a whole spectrum a whole distribution of objects that will break off out of a gigantic molecular cloud and this molecular cloud will break down into once you compress it so that all of the gas then gets pushed together and then uh enough so that the pressure there ignites the cores of these things that break off into tiny pieces the smallest of the pieces end up being these objects that don't even know that they don't have enough mass to get the core hot enough to get nuclear burning going but they do it anyway no no this is they think they're going to be a star but they're not so whatever now you guys are putting a motion on it don't know what they should or shouldn't be they're just existing and so this this is why people call them failed stars because they're not getting enough mass but i look at it and like whatever dude like who cares it is existing with not enough mass that's fine it doesn't have the mass instead it can't get that nuclear engine going that's at the center of our sun instead it's like a coal plucked from a fire it just cools through its life and that's it and that is in between basically what we say is the top mass for that that it happens is 75 times the mass of the jupiter 75 jupiter that would be a star that's above that right exactly and this is very metallicity dependent like how much how much metal is it how many how many times what's medalist oh okay yeah yeah heavy at the core like okay so how much of that was available will change like how much mass you need to get the core burning but then uh the lower end of it the low end i don't know what's the lowest mass fragment that you can break off this is a huge discussion in astronomy right now what is the lowest mass piece that breaks off and still becomes a thing and it is a thing that right all right that thing that doesn't know what it is wait one last thing on it one last thing because i know we have to stop but the planet would be opposite end of this can you form an object the planets form in a disk around a star but how big can it get around a star so now you've got two competing things you've got objects that form by breaking up a cloud that then self fragments and blah blah blah blah and then you've got a disk around a forming star and how big can that object get oh wow okay planet version take a quick break so that's the brown dwarf establishment right there as opposed to my brown dwarf which was uh the dwarf that was never painted by disney because he was racist the eighth dwarf yes chuck has issues with getting them through when we come back more with jackie ferrity on the worlds between planets and stars on star talk we're big fans of storyblocks here at star talk we have a small team that puts together your favorite show and we use storyblocks unlimited plan to get more 4k stock footage than we know what to do with i mean really they even have footage of a monkey on a rope and a gorilla with a piggy bank and that's the same gorilla with a pizza they've also got loads of audio and video too it's royalty free so you can use it anywhere create like a pro with story blocks swing on over to the description to learn more see what it did there that's storyblocks.com star talk we're back star talk cosmic queries the worlds between stars and planets where are they what are they we got a word for them but do we understand them and our best chance of understanding them is this woman right here yes jackie faraday in the house yes friend and colleague in the department of astrophysics right here at the american museum of natural history and you just went you just described something i hadn't fully appreciated just before the break that you have this humongo gas cloud a molecular cloud they call them and it'll break into bits and these are typically stars but some might not be stars in addition to that each one of these will have a disc of material surrounding it that will then break up into little bits beyond the bits that just broke off to make the thing that had the disc did i did i understand that you're doing good yeah yeah i will say right so though so two dynamic two different kinds of phenomenon going on two different formation mechanisms that's the phrase i'm looking for right and so we want to use that as definitional for saying like what kind of object are you looking at i'd prefer to know how it formed because can you eject these objects that form around a star yeah you do oh a hundred percent you do yeah they're launched off we probably we ejected stuff all sorts of ways we might have like 30 planets or something right yes exactly and now we're down to eight get over it um and so all those would be rogue planets by now rogue rogue worlds i like rogue worlds rather than planets or could have any of them become joined forces to become like get picked up by another yeah get picked up by another star yeah so we talk about that too that's pretty hard to do but not impossible okay it's possible that it could happen uh they could also they get scattered around and we have evidence for this material now like present day we have material that has passed through our own solar system after it probably got ejected from a totally different solar system this object called oh muammua which is a interstellar asteroid right rock that came flying through here and that probably got dumped out when uh its own sun was forming its solar system so the one thing on this that's right that ain't right i know yeah this is okay like don't let the doorknob hit you but don't you think by the way it's hawaiian for scout and it's repeated for emphasis so that's it's basically first scout and it was named that because it was on a tells it was found through a telescope in hawaii the pan stars telescope which is a wonderful telescope and uh as an homage to hawaii they chose this one language yeah right so so just i i did this calculation long ago this is a perfect time for me to invoke it all right because how often does one here make vocal calculations if there were four bumble bees flying in the continental united states okay the chances of them accidentally bumping into each other are greater than any two stars in our galaxy i have a response to this wait wow so but if you want to talk about how empty space is because that's how much stuff is not there it's not there if you have rogue things cast off there's still the unlikelihood that you would even come into the vicinity of another star but even if you did you can have a velocity that's hard to trap supposedly so um had hyperbolic velocity so we're not right it's coming through and it's coming through it's not even looking back right now right it has nothing gangbusters right like we didn't capture it we're not doing anything we're not doing a damn thing it just it came through like beep beep here i come there i go and even looking at its motion uh its velocity yeah it looked like maybe we were its first pass possibly this is very hard to tease out but there was a paper on that whether or not we were the first research paper a research paper that was looking at whether or not we were its first encounter after it departed and we traced we looked astronomers tried to trace it back and see where it might have come from right so now with that in mind did where the first pass did we alter its course oh great question yeah uh i don't know maybe probably a little bit oh yeah yeah yeah it feels good yeah you can you can you can you you cannot get captured but still feel what's going on here okay oh yeah yeah so if you if you look at they have the the trajectory oh yeah yeah yeah and the trajectories are right in response to the gravity of jupiter in the sun but when you primarily put enough of a change in the velocity that when it gets to the next star it's really obvious like oh this is its next stellar encounter i'm not sure we can tease it out quite yet because it still looks like a dis it's like a disc object just sort of flying around in the disk of the milky way nice um wait wait wait wait wait wait on this this is important because neil you want to take a tv show no the jetsons oh flying uh the flying cars yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i thought you were doing bp it's before your time sorry maybe she's like okay the objections were so before everybody's time i watched it when i was a kid so i don't know why it's because the roadrunner did a beep beep too yes he did yeah you don't just learn recently this had nothing to do with anything the roadrunner never left the road how about when he was standing on air and the coyote would fall no the coyote's standing on air roadrunner isn't that's true oh huh interesting yeah rona stops before it gets to the edge of the cliff and it's always on the road that's interesting hence the roadrunner yeah i have another point on stellar flight i want to just pull us back in here um you might like my pop culture references i love it i love it i love it i love it so great um but the one of the things that i think is massively uh interesting right now in astronomy is how many times stars not run into each other but interact with one ano one another so the issue of and this is this is my new thing i'm really in to the new villain of planetary architecture is the stellar flyby the unappreciated um influence that stars that move by each other can have and the reason why i say that fly by looting flybys that will change the court the change the structure of maybe your planetary system or now like okay so the question i think had something to do with what we're understanding about exoplanets and and learning about it in the future so here's one for everybody in one million years just about one million it's like 1.1 million years okay let me put that on my um put it on the calendar october 12th october 12th one million years plus or minus like 10 000 years yes but um but there will be a stellar flyby so at its closest encounter by a star that's smaller than our own sun but we're headed for each other and in one million years it's going to pass within our oort cloud it's coming straight in to the orc cloud the outer region of comets that's a spherical zone very distant but very there very there lots of material yeah this is like trillions of comets just okay that's just waiting to strike i was gonna say that sounds catastrophic [Music] [Laughter] astronomers have looked at it to see like is the dent you know is it going to be a disaster uh and the conclusion is it's uncertain but the impact that it'll have on the org cloud might not be super bad however jan ort was the dutch astronomer who first calculated the existence of the ore cloud it's so far away you can't see the objects that at that distance but when they come in you see them near the sun and you look at their trajectory they say oh this might terminate way out at this distance before it comes back again the calls are coming from inside the house so if you think about it the oort cloud actually stretches a third of the way to the closest star a third of the way it gets loose so i mean think about that you know i mean you get something that flies between us and that ah that next closest object it loosens up things because they've only barely held on to begin with so any any disturbance will completely right wreak havoc and most important here is the consideration of we're constantly doing mission planning like what are the next stages of mission planning right what's the what's the name of this star just right now so i it's gliese 78780 okay it's a it's one of these names that um i constantly mix it with 780 versus 781 i think so that's my fear not gleason g-l-e-i-s-e yes g-l-i-e-s-e e-s-e it's a catalog of uh with high moving fast moving stars right close bright so they're mostly fast-moving yeah yeah they're fast-moving uh in our field of view so in order for that to be the case they have to be nearby so man i was hoping it was gleason no no but just to be clear so this is not a catalog of stars that are actually moving fast it's a catalog of stars that are moving fast in our field of view so you can have a bird fly by in front of you and that's going maybe 20 miles an hour and a plane that's moving past your field of view much more slowly and you're not going to say that the bird is the bird the bird is not going 600 miles an hour right right so that angle matters and that angle it manifests by its distance so uh there's a catalog of selected for their for their fast movement in our night sky and those tend to be the nearest objects yeah right because and so that one had been known we've known about that star for a really long time it's a bright it's a very bright star and it's it's it's it's headed for us we are headed for it it's heading for us and just think about it it's probably got a solar system around it and a northwest why not they're probably the majority of stars why wouldn't they happen and so when you think i've got all of my every time i give a science wave but don't you wanna we'll we're gonna see it totally want to get in it like people bring it here wait that means our clouds will intersect more than that yes the oracle clouds the kuiper belts possibly like whatev whatever this thing's got around it we could fly something to it there's a lot of this discussion about going to proxima centauri because we all want to get there like now yeah yeah glee 780 man let's go that's gonna be even closer when it's close right it's gonna be so close she sounds like she's like ready to i was gonna say and i am so ready to do this one million years ago you got her telescope all ready for us this is very sad because you better take them longevity pills before that happens no by then we'll be able to upload your consciousness to a computer so you'll still be around that's good yeah i'd like to see it when it happens cool chuck what else you got all right so okay this is let's go for a quick one because i know we're running out of time in this segment this is from rossi king you can do a long one and then i tease the next segment dude this is how i do this well you know if we keep discussing this like this we'll be able to do it with this shirt go no this is rossy king from youtube uh actually i just wanted to ask this for myself too was jupiter a failed star and then the person says i'm really glad it failed because i love it in the night time that should be a quick answer yeah but it's super it feels so which you know yeah yeah no uh uh it's not no the quick answer to that would be no but again let's not call them failed stars let's just call them achieving planets i call them over-excited planets thank you for achieving planets i'm not kidding neil this is like terrorists this is a very modern teacher lingo right for excited planets that's what i sometimes call them but then i don't like don't star-shame me don't star-shame me you guys are going with it exactly exactly jupiter shouldn't feel any in any way shape or form like inadequate exactly right it is a behemoth of our solar system many times i say if i'm gonna find an earth-like planet uh that i'll be comfortable saying yes let's let's consider that habitable i want a jupiter at a jupiter radius away because you know what jupiter does for us it protects us in a lot of ways it's the bouncer of the solar system it's the one that's like taking hits for us because asteroids get dumped in and comets are coming in and what does jupiter do it takes a lot of hits sure it deflects some of them our way mm-hmm let's not talk about that part right but unless you want to but i do but most of what it does is protect it's potential protector so i'd really like to see if we find an object or the solar system out there right that's what it says to all the problems that they come in like nope id includes what your trajectory is right here trajectory please right right no not any happening keep walking so i would not call it a failed star i'd call it the bouncer of the solar system the most important of the planets for earth to consider right now so how much more mass would it need to for it to have ignited a core of energy or not even of course for it to not have ignited a core of energy well become the overachieving planet right so the brown dwarf regime uh is roughly the lower mass bound that we call is about 13 times the mass of jupiter but that not a great number that was a traditional number though about a factor of 10. and right and the reason is because at that mass you can get heavy hydrogen burning or deuterium burning and so because that tended to be a definitional thing where either the difference between a star and a brown dwarf is hydrogen burning nuclear burning and then it was kind of capped at the bottom end of like well at about 13 jupiter masses then it's deuterium burning that stops and so boom that was the definition and it's terrible so the way to think about it is just if jupiter had more than 10 times its current mass it would start entering the brown dwarf regime yeah it would be a massive okay but something about jupiter however that just would be proud i think is that it is emitting more energy than it is receiving from the sun yes so it is a net energy generating object in this solar it's like a blue state sorry that was that was very cool i'll fill in those details after this break when start talk continues the world between planets and stars my favorite thing to do on story blocks is to see how much work it must take to get all their stock videos while i can just download them in seconds just think what you'd have to do to get footage of santa you'd have to find reindeer you got to fly to the north pole mistik a cat for santa and once you finally found santa you ask him for a lot of money go surfing with the jolly man and then sit him down to get that shot with santa check out the unlimited plan on story blocks for all the 4k video your little heart desires links in the description that's storyblocks.com star talk we're back on star talk cosmic queries the worlds between planets and stars and we have one of the world's experts yes jackie ferry one of my colleagues she's my colleague right yes well while i'm sitting here i can be her colleague while i'm here yes exactly no we get comedians here they're your colleagues i get one of my people she's my colleagues somehow i lose in this deal so we were talking about jupiter as not a failed star but an overachieving planet but still it's a factor of 10 in mass away from having turned on as a star so that's still kind of far away it's not kissing the door you know kissing the boundary there right factor 10. no yeah it's a it's it's in squarely in though we're totally comfortable calling it a planet object it'd have to be quite a bit more massive before we start to feel awkward there are other systems there's one called hr8799 it's the name of the star uh and it has a name for the catalog out of which they come yeah yeah right and these stars also have multiple names but that's the most popular of the names i often call that system that's the catchiest name hr 799 that's the most popular so i sometimes call hr879 the brad pitt of planetary systems that have been directly imaged because if you have a camera aka coronagraph or an adaptive optics system for a special camera for this yeah yeah we point it at hr879 because it's so pretty nice the system and you can image four one two three four planets orbiting and one fell swoop yeah and i would highly recommend for your um for your brad pitt know this i have said it so much i hope so okay and that i'd like him to just feel like the honor of the brad pitt status of planetary systems hr799 he could just call himself the hr879 of uh i'm hollywood's hr 8799 baby switch it up just so you know just so point a camera so the year i was the sexiest astrophysicist alive okay this is 40 pounds ago by the way um i love that we are now measuring chronology in pounds brad pitt was the cover as sexiest man alive beyond category nice to meet him had to be in a category right in order to but he had no category what year is this next time next question oh that was great next question all right so i have a question personally that i i just i'm thinking now and i just i can't stop thinking about it as you were talking about these formation mechanisms what i want to know is is it possible to have those two formation mechanisms happen simultaneously so i'm sorry the three formation mechanisms happen simultaneously so that you have that star that's being surrounded by a brown dwarf and planets yes can that happen so you're asking a question that basically got asked at a seminar the other day i ask it all the time and the result would be uh is it possible that you can form a brown dwarf yeah what this thing is that we call a brown dwarf these objects that have deuterium burning and they're formed through the process of fragmentation of a giant molecular cloud and you can make that same kind of object deuterium burning through the accretion process or gravitational fragmentation around a star right and so can you get if you're going to count up all the objects you would see at a certain mass you would start to get more of the object because you're forming them two different ways and so you would see a higher number of objects popping out as you get down to like maybe it's at 10 jupiter masses maybe it's at 12 maybe it's at four whatever it is because you're doubling down on how you form the mechanism yes you would double the number of double maybe triple maybe quadruple or maybe just a little bit more but we're looking for this exact thing for counting up the numbers we get and then there's any signature i take it back i take it back pretty good pretty good yes yes 100 this is all right cool excellent so chuck this our final segment we got to go into like lightning round let's move into our lightning round okay go chuck well this is such a fascination so jackie your answer has to be a sound bite we're testing your sound bititude got it okay ready all right go check okay uh this is kristin davies and kristen says i'm a seventh grade science teacher in ohio and i asked my students for their questions on the topic today my students and i enjoy listening to clean episodes of star talk okay now you see why i'm reading episodes that don't have chucking that's what i'm saying thanks a lot kristin i'm the one reading your question christian just remember that uh during our study times i listen to other episodes of my commute to work and that gets me pumped up so here's what she says uh from the student how many stars are in the universe has anyone ever counted them and is it possible uh another student says can you turn a planet into a star one and two questions okay first question go all right so number of stars in the universe universe that number's insane number of stars in the galaxy we're gonna go with 200 billion probably and so then there's billions and billions of galaxies that's what i'm saying too too large for me to give the exact number second question can you turn a planet into a star awesome question people are trying to figure this out unlikely because you dump enough material onto it it probably gets fatter and you probably can't ignite unless you do a gigantic dump from something that happens take a dump on a star okay still clean answer still clean fantastic but we can do a quick jacket we can do the calculation yeah if for the for the number of stars if you if you just say our galaxy has like 100 billion stars let's say 200. let's go 200 billion but it's factor two between friends yeah yeah sure okay so and to keep the math simple 100 billion stars okay and this somewhere between 10 and 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe so 100 billion times 100 billion that's 10 to the 21st power okay there you go what do you call that that's uh one section sextillion that's a sextillion six tillian that seems very small uh well let's do it so a billion is stay with me nine zeros is a billion right trillion okay count the zero just 12 10 right 12. okay units three zeros at a time because it would have been 100 billion start again okay so 12 trillion trillion 15 quadrillion quadrillion 18 quinton 21. right yeah so that's what i'm saying yeah yeah so about six two but i'm saying when i say that seems small i mean it seems small sexillion is small to you yeah no plus plus i mean it's big that's a number i don't say because it's just it's just too crazy i'm talking about when you from where we're starting i i think because you said it's only 100 billion in our own galaxy in our galaxy yeah okay all right forget it then plus plus plus if if there's not a sextillion stars again then there's two sextillion right at those numbers these factors that don't make a difference they might want to get the sense of the scale of this more than what you still can't get this but one other thing and not all galaxies are our size they're so no there's small ones there's collide galaxies that have merged and come together but another thing they asked about counting the number of stars and there is this survey called the um it's a european survey it's called gaia and counting they have they're called the billion star survey 1.7 billion stars and that's that's that's huge those are not extrapolated they're actually counting counting they've counted about measure their distances how far away they are it's the greatest map that humans have ever produced 1.7 billion billion billion objects in a catalog that's like a drop the mic moment yeah i can't do that here okay you did okay he did it i was gonna say please don't let that hit the ground [Music] excellent next okay keep it moving go there we go all right this is from twitter and this is um says this i think that's the name who cares how do astronomers stop shot cares i'm sorry probably cares how do astronomers study the atmospheres of brown dwarfs and how do we even detect them yeah that's exactly what i do for a living yeah and the way that we detect it is directly so that's the actual message for a moment that you can do that for a living yeah no it's not that's a great thing to say just a moment just a moment oh let's all hold hands yes meditative moments yeah okay that's a wonderful thing that that that you can do that for a living yeah okay go yeah i also say the tagline for astronomers though is unlocking the secrets of the universe for a living like that's a good tag line right you know i mean sure studying the atmosphere of brown dwarf sounds good too but unlocking the secrets of the universe remember we're in lightning round i know sorry direct imaging is the technique that we use okay and i basically take a telescope i point it directly at the object for the most part i have to use infrared instruments though okay so a wavelength of light that you can't see with your eye a wavelength that's a bit longer than the than the radiation that we all give off the heat that we give off uh and um i'll take it and i'll take the light i pass it through a spectrograph and i look at what it's made what what is the chemical composition what kinds of lines do i see and mostly it's molecular features molecules okay all right cool all right excellent um there we go let's go uh this is tomcat thank you tom tomcat wants to know this do brown dwarfs have surfaces or are they just balls of hot gas yeah that is we're often asked this and there's no surface for you to stand on similar with jupiter and saturn you're not going there and standing and having a really nice time yeah yeah no we call them gas giants yeah gas giants and so brown dwarves are souped up gas giants okay very similar so there's no point deep enough where it's dense enough that you can call it a surface there might be we don't know could they have some sort of core similar to jupiter or saturn which would have some sort of core very well it could have that we don't know yet though excellent this is luigi luigi vane says this how do we know what a planet is made of and if it has an atmosphere if it goes by how much light passes through or by it so that sounds like they're asking about the transit method uh one of the ways that we detect planets is by looking at the planet pass in front of its host star between your eyeball and that host star and there's there's lots of methods that astronomers have developed to look at the light of the star very very carefully and see if there's any change in it as they are suspecting the transit is happening you have to have the timing down like smackdown to when that transit is happening you look right at the star and you can see what it's made of this is very complicated you see what the atmosphere of the planet the transiting planet is made of right right through the light of the host star it's a very complicated method my preference just to re re-gauge us back to brown dwarfs is we draw upon what we do in brown dwarf science since we directly detect the atmospheres we can guide any measurements that you want to make when you're trying to uh make detections oh so you have ground truth of what the atmosphere might be exactly for those who are looking for the transit in front of a much brighter star in the background we are a ground truth for transiting planets especially hot jupiters these objects that are pretty close in that are like jupiter cool all right here we go actually we i think we just ran out of time did we really we ran out of time oh yeah yeah i'm sorry all right that's sad so many questions i think we should have we should have put a few of those online and have jackie answer them too oh that's a good idea yeah yeah yeah yeah well put in for that it's amazing about i mean people really are about brown dwarfs man into what you get paid to do this for for living pretty good job pretty good job all right jackie thanks for being on star today it's not your first rodeo with us and so no well i've done all-stars with chuck but this is the first time we've been is it our first time our first time yeah yeah oh so you so you go way back yeah yeah i'm like hr 80 okay of course all right this brings this episode of star talk to a close i thank my co-host chuck nice always my friend and colleague jackie clarity thanks for coming on and as always i bid you thanks to storyblocks for sponsoring this episode of star talk we know a lot of you like science and that's why you listen to this podcast so if you also like making science videos storyblocks has so much science stuff they have chemical formulas to make you look smart scientists working in labs human anatomy and more it doesn't stop there you've seen us use space video before and they also have atomic stuff and for some reason this scientist in a bubble suit make yourself look like a professional filmmaker with storyblocks unlimited plan that's unlimited 4k royalty free stock footage they also have audio photo and video templates so what are you waiting for head to the link in the description and get started with storyblocks today storyblocks.com star talk you

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 251,526

Rating: 4.8887148 out of 5

Keywords: StarTalk, star talk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, Jackie Faherty, brown dwarfs, celestial objects, exoplanets, Eta Carinae, Sun, failed star, Jupiter, HR 8799, ‘Oumuamua, zodiac signs, Nemesis star hypothesis, phd, full episode, podcast, science podcast, space podcast, astronomy podcast, space, science, astronomy, planets, stars, astrophysics, physics, space exploration, jackie faherty phd, star talk jackie faherty, jackie faherty brown dwarfs, startalk radio

Id: wtIPRzPCGbk

Length: 50min 15sec (3015 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 05 2019