StarTalk Podcast: The Life and Death of Stars with Jackie Faherty

[Music] this is star talk i'm your host neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist and this is a cosmic queries edition on the birth life and death of stars who didn't know we know know all about them did you and who do i have is my co-host today nagin facade nagin welcome back star talk oh my gosh i'm so excited about today's topic i don't understand any of it well you're in the right place at the right time and you you're a comedian and you're host of fake the nation which i was recently a guest on i was delighted neil you were so great uh people should listen to that episode and you're also author of the book how to make white people laugh now i'd laugh just reading that title and that's the entire book is just the title that's it and there's no it's actually just a notebook where you can write your own thoughts i don't know if they're like the laugh police no you're not white you can't laugh at that it's a thing so i i as an astrophysicist have some background in the birth life and death of stars it does not compare to who we brought in as a special guest a friend and colleague jackie faraday jackie welcome hi hi all right all right jackie like lives in the lives of stars and she knows where they come and where they're going where they've been and i finally got your full title here jackie senior scientist and senior education manager at the american museum of natural history and you're also a part of our department of astrophysics as an associate there and you're also an astronomy professor for outlier.org so what is that yeah outlier.org is this company that was started by the co-founders of master class and they yeah which you you did a master class right i did a master class yeah yeah they're good people all good people so you know that they put like they put production value as very important in the course creation but they also like they don't skim on content so they contacted me and a couple other astronomers to put together an introduction to astronomy class that would bring all the things that you need to know about the universe at the 101 level you know yeah astro 101 excellent yeah excellent but critical to this though is that they came to the hayden planetarium before they even talked to me about this because they loved our visualization space there and so that is it and you have access to data that helps inform so many of our visualizations in the shows that we produce so you're you're like a key cog in that turning wheel of bringing the universe down to earth that's a nice wave so jackie let me just lead off with a question for you just to get so we're all on the same page and nagin since she doesn't know anything we got to make sure she joins the page that you and i are on all right if stars live millions and billions of years and we look up at the night sky and just get a snapshot of them what right do you have to possibly claim that you know how they're born yeah it's uh it's pretty offensive that we we decide we know how they're born that's just audacious it's like taking a snapshot of negan saying again we know when and where you were born and when you're gonna die and where you're going to die and but you just have a snapshot of it one moment it's like the worst retroactive gender reveal party well right so so the thing with stars which i think is it's really fascinating is sometimes we project human emotion onto them so we talk about the life of stars as if they live somehow and that they die and that this is sad but there's really no life or death it's just sort of morphing from one kind of thing into another and this is what stars do and when we look up at the nighttime sky we look for signatures in the vast numbers that we now know are out there that tell us that this one is recently in the stellar form that we see it or this one's heading out of looking like the stars as we know and love them and it's going to start to look like something a little bit different so we do know a lot we also know very little but we do know a lot that's a disclaimer we know so much but really we don't know much at all but we know so much um this makes you sound a little bit like a lawyer and not a scientist when you say stuff like that you know you have to put a clause on everything because you can't have people thinking that we know everything there that there is because then there'd be no reason for us to continually like say they're so mysterious the cosmos are so mysterious and vera rubin actually i think she famously said something like we're like kindergartners right now humans that are looking up into the sky and trying to figure stuff out no one should say we're advanced when it comes to like everything that we know and understand there's so much to know and understand and learn but we do know quite a bit about stars well you can't just blow by vera rubin without a little bit of bio so she was one of our more senior members of our community died a few years a couple of years ago and she discovered dark matter in galaxies so that sort of brought dark matter home in a way that was like whoa this stuff is not just exotic at the edges of the universe it's in our face and and we just named a telescope after her jackie right the um that's right yep the the large synoptic survey telescope which no one wanted to pronounce and we say it's time to just fix that up and so now it's the very ruben telescope she's one of our uh heroes in our field so go on yeah yeah yeah and i actually overlapped with vera when i was a postdoctoral fellow the phase you get to when you have a phd and you're in between like faculty or whatever next stage you get into and i was at the carnegie institution for science in washington dc and that's where vera did a significant amount of her career and she was a huge advocate for women in science i mean massive advocate for women in science so she was it was amazing to be in the same department that she was by the way jackie who among us hasn't been at the carnegie institute for science as a postdoctorate fellow i'm just you know talking to the choir here i mean it's just a thing it's just a thing although nagin did i hear jackie say that being a postdoc is what you are before you have your faculties is that should i say that before you have you touch and and feel you you get your post before you have your faculties your faculties are still being owned uh so that so that's great so uh we saw we solicited questions from uh our uh uh patreon members i so apparently we're playing hardball now you want to get a question done in on this you got to sort of get in the in the patreon circle so negan you collected them i haven't seen them before i think jackie knows the topic but i don't know that she's seen them either so we're hitting that at this cold so let's do it okay you guys are up for some treats here from cameron bishop we have this question my cosmic query is about life and death after this sorry my cosmic query is about life after the death of stars specifically for any planets unfortunate enough to be in orbit how are their orbits affected and could life prepare in advance yeah you're worried about the family yeah i know the um the idea that you could exist around a star that once was and i actually think about this question a lot nowadays it for a number of reasons but we are finding planets around dead stars around see there i go again i just said that we always project these emotions on stars but stars that have morphed into their new counterpart so white dwarfs these end products of stars like our sun or neutron stars which are higher mass than our sun would be and you can find worlds around these things like planets that have either survived they've survived whatever this thing was that was like to have your star basically lose its ability to be a nice core hydrogen burning thing that provides you nice sunshine and light and it fades into this other other phase so so planets can survive this so we should talk about our own solar system because we have eight worlds planets that we call in our solar system pluto's out there as a dwarf planet neil i know that's your favorite um topic [Laughter] you know when our son starts to lose its hydrogen and burn out it's going to expand and it's going to absorb the inner solar system mercury venus earth probably and maybe out to mars is going to get engulfed in the sun this sounds like a spin-off series to the biggest loser like a really galaxy-wide spin-off series yeah yeah yeah so jackie what you're saying is in death or in its transition to not fusing hydrogen in the core uh it will eat its children that's what you're saying you could say it like that i think that as long as we're going to anthropomorphize right it dies and right while it's dying it eats and vaporizes its children yeah yep and there is evidence at least some observational evidence that this does happen that planets do get gobbled up during this process there's objects that we look at the white dwarfs that we're white dwarfs as these evolved states of stars like our sun after they've run out of their hydrogen um they we've found they've got signatures of basically pulling in the last of this material that might have come from a rocky world like the earth and so we do see signatures of that planet on the white dwarf it's a really cool new thing inside you're saying it's like it you're saying it's like it's got food on its lips that it didn't wipe away it still has evidence of eating of eating the planet still in its mouth nice yes it's like a lot like my toddler all day long you know exactly what they've been eating all day the ice cream drip the the candy cane right all right by the way i just want to point out are we uh are we allowed to say white dwarfs i just want to make sure we don't get canceled here yeah we're the black dwarf i think we can say that you think we can say that all right yeah right yeah but white dwarfs so planets around stars that have evolved is a thing i don't think you want to live around it necessarily oh but a cool thing in our own solar system when it does happen that our sun ends up doing its thing and bloating out eugene what did you call it the um the biggest loser aspect yeah a spin-off series of the biggest loser so when that happens it's gonna get hotter farther away from earth so pluto might thaw down and be an interesting world to look out uh at that stage just i'm moving to pluto don't don't travel that ain't happen that ain't happening i'm just saying i'm the same too all right so what it means jackie is that if we figure out how to as a species outlive the sun we need to find another star system to travel to and i would hope in five billion years we have enough space travel to enable that well you know we could maybe stay in our own solar system neil but we'd have to stay within because we've got a lot of interesting planetary bodies outside of the planets there's the moons in the outer solar system that are intriguing so we planted hop our way away from the sun as the sun is dying we keep thinking about our own solar system before we decide like let's kick it from this side of the you know orion armed galaxy and head out okay all right just to suggest it all right keep it coming again all right from ben sellers um he writes neil and others have said the beautiful words that we are all made of stardust by the way ben if you really mean it you should get the tattoo okay he writes atoms forged within stars that later spread through the universe after star dies but how do we know that the atoms in our bodies are from stars is there a stoller bar code on mine uh nitrogen atoms a stellar zip code for my oxygen couldn't these elements have been generated from in the big bang or during other processes yeah jackie what's up yeah i love this question there is something that uh is kind of new into pop culture or even pop science culture i would say it's called the astronomers periodic table have you seen this neil no i haven't i haven't it's really cool so an astronomer named jennifer johnson at ohio state was getting so frustrated with this concept that gets thrown around that all heavier elements formed through uh supernovas so that you need supernovas that are to form anything that's heavier than hydrogen i can say so um you know hydrogen helium we think come from the big bang that that that one i hope ben wasn't necessarily disputing it's the higher elements and you get some lithium from the big bang too but it takes higher level explosions to get the rest of the stuff and jennifer johnson is getting frustrated with it so she created on a bar napkin one day this this diagram of the periodic table as shown through what processes developed those elements and then it got turned into a graphic that gets used out so i suggest anyone look this up because it's an awesome beautiful graphic if you want to know where gold comes from where astronomers think gold comes from or silver or copper you have to look at this diagram it will show you what we think the physical process was that led to that element emerging onto your periodic table so jackie you're saying when i was in high school and my chemistry teacher said uh here all these elements on the periodic table and i asked them where did they come from he said oh we dig them out of the earth um i was i was little i was unsatisfied with that answer it would be a few more years when i'd learned that this stuff came from the universe if we had that periodic table next to the regular one i would have been totally satisfied from early on in life what you're telling me we should use this periodic table in those exact kind of classes because even in the if i could get on a little soapbox about new york state's curriculum oh oh uh oh here come here we have this amazing program at the american museum of natural history it's a master's program that we teach teachers how to teach science and they come out and become earth science teachers and one of the core elements in the new york state curriculum is uh elements higher than iron on the periodic table come from supernova and i'm like no no no no we know more now we should be able to say like there's neutron neutron star mergers there's the death of low mass stars which ends up producing quite a bit of the material that makes up all of us and then there's cosmic ray fission that you can see there's there's a couple of processes and if you saw it on the periodic table you might start to feel a little bit more connected to stellar processes to stars to the kinds of stars that are out there so i suggest looking at the the astronomers periodic table by the way i love it we're all connected is what you're saying in more ways than previously known that's i like that yes i love by the way as you say that i love that this scientist drew started drawing this periodic table on a bar napkin which indicates she got drunk and started making a new periodic table where most people get drunk and just draw penises on a bar napkin so it's a little different it's just a little different yes or some people junk text people but if you're if you're a quality scientist you drunk and invent new ways of understanding she probably drunk yeah she drunk texts and new elements is what she's doing i want to make sure that i qualify it too though because i may have inserted that anecdotal note i'm not positive it was a bar no no no it was a bar napkin it was a bar now leave it it's good let that one stick we got to take a quick break when we come back more cosmic queries with jackie faraday we're talking about the birth life and death of stars we're back cosmic queries i'm with my co-host nagin farsad nageen always good to have you on star trek oh i love being sure thanks for having me i want more of you on star talk so we got to work that out totally and this is cosmic queries always a popular variant on the star talk model and today the topic is the birth life and death of stars and we've got my friend and colleague jackie ferrati from the american museum of natural history it's what she does is what she breathes she thinks about stars day and night jackie yeah right all right let's do this so nageem give me some more questions okay woody asks does a star becoming a black hole count as star death seems like more of an evolution but if that's true and jupiter is a failed star does that make stars failed black holes oh i know snapped he got real hot there he got he got all philosophical on you jackie i i dig out of that one jackie there's a couple of triggers in there for me when it comes to words that one as i'll start with the biggest one which neil knows that my my super expertise in astronomy is on these things called brown dwarfs so we talked about white dwarfs white dwarfs are stars that have evolved off from like our kind of our sun's mass ground dwarfs are objects that exist in between stars and planets now what people like to call them because of various reasons which i could get into is failed stars because they don't have enough mass to get their core hot enough so that they can burn have to have a nuclear engine like the sun does so they call them failed stars but does anybody want failure in the title of what they are let's just all say no right we don't we don't advocate for them thank you jackie you're welcome yes i know they have feelings too right okay yeah there's more on this feeling thing but they are not failures in any way shape or form i i sometimes call them over excited planets because that you know the word planet everybody loves and so that's nice but jupiter is certainly not a failure at what it is and i would not call it in any way a failed star number one because that would also imply that it's a brown dwarf from some rules that people are putting in and and jupiter's not big enough you have to be around 13 times the mass of the of jupiter before you can actually get some heavy hydrogen burning and start entering a category which we sometimes call the boundary of brown dwarfs so jupiter is totally good with where it is and i'm sorry to pick on ben was it i feel like i'm woody woody woody i'm sorry woody this feels like i'm picking on you but sometimes it happens and then as far as stars being failed black holes well i mean black holes aren't stars either black holes are the evolved take on stars and some stars will become black holes if they have a high enough mass but most stars are not massive enough to become that but you got to be a really massive star and those are actually the rarest kinds of stars that we have um high mass stars the ones that are eight and more 10 15 20 times the mass of our sun those are the ones that start entering a territory where they may end up be having enough mass to go supernova and um and then become a black hole those stars now would become black holes so it's a different category not to pick on woody too much but let's not let's remove failure from our thinking let's go positive well we could also buy that token jackie we could say that the sun is a failed jupiter yeah if you wanted to reverse the negativity we could yeah let's do that just just to balance it out over time and then we can neutralize it in 10 years how about that yeah if jupiter wanted to throw shade on the sun it would call the sun a failed jupiter jackie is handing out participation trophies basically to all of the stars and planets i think that's what's happening here and to be explicit there if jupiter eclipses the sun for another civilization that's looking at the discovery of planets then jupiter is literally throwing shade on the sun that's good that's pretty good well done well done yeah yeah all right so they gained keep going okay jesse de la rosa asks once a star has entered its death sequence how long do they take also have there been any stars that have come back into life or have come back to life i like that zombies yeah zombie stars yeah that's the thing neil you might remember we were at a science coffee recently and we were talking about zombie but tell people what science coffee is just so it's not like you're studying coffee right so once a week in our department of astrophysics at amnh we all get together and we review the papers that have come out over the week so every day astronomers are posting their peer-reviewed here it is this is what my result is it's gone through a process where other experts in the field have put their check mark on it i'm putting it out in the literature for everybody to reference to read to think about to comment on to contradict and so that happens every day you probably get somewhere between 30 and 70 papers that'll come out i would say 70 is a big day but sometimes that does happen and so at the end of the week hopefully all of us have at least looked at some of them and um we get together and we start discussing like okay so who says what and what do we think and so that happens on fridays and we used to do it all in person where we would have coffee and cookies and it's nice it's jovial but we don't we do it on zoom now so we should call it something else i don't know what but science zoom bc before covid and then before good times yeah but right so the the question is about i've already i've already forgotten what it was it was on sorry i distracted you sorry yeah how long does the death sequence take and do they ever come back to life right okay so the death sequence and i think this is an interesting thing to think about it really depends on your mass how massive you are so for low mass stars versus the highest mass stars it's going to be totally different values that i could give you for the lowest mass stars that exist which by the way they are the most populous stars in the galaxy they're everywhere and if you want to know how good star formation is at making a kind of star it's really good at the lowest mass stars but those the lifetimes of the lowest mass kinds of stars they actually live for longer than the age of the of the universe right now they can live for 100 billion years which means that every low-mass star that was ever born is still around it hasn't started its death cycle yeah i like that phrasing um high mass stars on the other end of it they they're they live wild and they die real fast so they go very quickly through all of their fuel there's a good analogy here somewhere of the kinds of people that might be low mass stars versus but i don't have to and the highest mass stars are they only live for 100 million years the lowest mass things like i said they'll go for 100 billion years can you believe this this is insane so they're everywhere and they're beacons of the history of the galaxy and now once they do start going through the phase like our sun for instance is about four and a half billion years old as by our metrics of measuring it and we think it's got enough hydrogen enough fuel to go for another four and a half billion years or so before it it's out and it's a red giant and it blows off its outer layers and then the whole chaos ensues in the solar system but there'll be a lot happening in say a billion years it's going to get super hot in our area of the solar system because the hat the the sun is losing a bit of mass it's got a nice solar wind it's losing a bit of mass temperatures getting a little bit hotter and so because of that um conditions will change in the solar system it's not necessarily the death cycle but you could say it's it's the aging process it's the aging process for stars all right so so how much of a star's life does it spend dying but maybe that what fraction of its life so you if i live 100 billion years now i'm ready to die how quickly do i die so in astronomy we define your like you're solid you're a star you're not dying as the time that you spend um what we call the main sequence the main sequence the time when you're stably burning hydrogen and you've got a core that's nicely balanced where the pressure that's coming from the core is balanced by gravity trying to contract you so that's that's a stable situation and that's what we technically call the main sequence so you're referring to astrophysically stable as distinct from emotionally stable the emotionally stable star you could probably make a really good comic out of like the stability strip for stars there is an instability strip you know there i'm not making this up stars live on their main sequence and when they start to go off they go on an instability strip where they are wobbling around they're unstable because gravity and the pressure coming from their cores is trying to find a new balance and because they need more sleep you know and they need to be hydrated it's like they need to meet some of their basic self-care needs there it is all of that and so i would agree i'm in a complete agreement with this even though i said i don't think we should have more uh give emotions to these but it's it sometimes it helps they need they need loving environments they need to be in an area where they feel good you don't want to be in a highly irradiated area that's not good for you that's very unhealthy or in a place where the too many other objects that could do a gravitational uh slingshot around you and mess with your orbital stability that that's bad too exactly do you want to live so that some of this could be um like urban life if you want to live at the center of the galaxy that is not a solid healthy place for most of us let's just all be honest there's too much radiation if someone is training as someone who lives in manhattan i take issue with that characterization i hear you that just means you're irradiated and that's all that means a radiation so tell me about zombies now tell me about zombies so that was the other half of the question yeah so can a star come back to life after it's already passed through a um it's evolved state and so the answer to that is yes sort of so it depends on what you mean by like what stage it might be and the thing that we were talking about at science coffee was these zombie neutron stars so these evolved versions of stars so they've already passed through like can you become a star again that question i don't have an answer to i don't think that that's an easy thing to come back from you can get stripped down so imagine yourself as a star and i'm going to give you a companion that's going to be really close to you and that companion is just going to start yanking on all of your material so that you're in a companion scenario where one object is pulling material from the other getting bigger one's getting bigger the other is getting skinnier and so the bigger star the star that's pulling material from you will eat you and become a really interesting kind of object which we think leads to eventually it might lead to a supernova explosion but then that other object maybe you strip it down to where it goes from being a star to being a brown dwarf where all of a sudden the core of it can't process material the same way it can't get hot enough to burn like a star so you shut it off you just shut off its process and then you can keep going and strip it down to it's basically a planet to it's like jupiter and it's it could even go down all the way to some rocky semblance of an object so there is that that can happen uh and then it's possible that a companion or material that gets dumped onto you can trigger you to have a new sort of sense of an object so neutron stars might have this with a companion that triggers them back into life where they start pulsating or they get a bunch of material that ends up looking like they've come back to life they get um they become bright once again companions can do that for you no object is going to naturally come back into some sort of stellar state though it needs to have some sort of outside material or outside mechanism that ends up contributing so to be a zombie you need to have a friend yeah that's a good way of putting it just to help you out of the grave that this does not track with the way the walking dead works by the way i think it's an episode it's a way an unwritten episode of this yeah it's like a nice capsule episode i like that let's let's send that idea to them neil all right we gotta take another break when we come back the third and final segment of cosmic queries the birth life and death of stars we're back star talk cosmic queries edition the birth life and death of stars nagin farsad my co-host mcgee you're on social media right i am richard what's your you got a twitter handle what do you what are you going to i'm at uh at nagin farsad on all of the things and that's any genius yes all of the social literal any social media you can think of that's what it is and it's any g-i-n-f-a-r-s-a-d no one was vying for that name no i know would it be funny if i was like nagin farsad 343 on twitter it's like dang there's a lot of us neil there's there's a lot of us no there's only one you i'm certain and jackie what's your social media presence uh i'm on twitter twitter and instagram and my twitter is at jfahrity that one's easy i feel like is it that's my name you know yeah f-a-h-e-r-t-y yeah yeah thanks neil and then at instagram it's at jferrity17 so there were 16 other jay faradays i don't know if there was i just like the number 17. so as soon as one is taken and then i automatically just jumped to 17. i got you 17. twitter's just jay ferrity and anybody on tick tock yet no i'm not so it's just for the young ends that's just for the evening i don't like admitting going to that so account today and it's going to be called it uh let's redo this at j parity 17 okay because i'm young there you go all right so we have questions this is our third and final segment and nagin let's see how many we can squeeze in go for it at par parker graham asks when a star begins to die and starts his expanding phase can that phase be long enough for it to be possible for far-orbiting planets to become inhabitable and even possibly create new life yeah so i guess jackie it's not does it reach the right temperature but will that last long enough for biological evolution to do its thing which we know takes time yeah so i think that there's there's two points to this number one is that during the the death cycle of stars i'll just start calling it that what happens is the habitable zone around the star does start moving this is part of why we're going to have such a problem around the sun in about a billion years because by that time the habitable zone where liquid water doesn't have a liquid water is the definition of the habitable zone where it can bubble on the surface and so unless you're in that habitable zone water is going to be an issue so for these giant stones liquid water liquid water is going to be liquid water is going to be an issue on the surface i should say too that's very important because you can have water deep down under a crust of ice or something you can you can have water but liquid water bubbling on the surface is one of our metrics for defining like that might be a good place to look for for life so the habitable zone that area moves around a lot as that star is moving through the phase and so how long you need for biological life to show up it has to get there somehow if your world already has an ocean so let's say in our own solar system as an example when our sun starts to bloat out and some of the outer objects in our solar system there's awesome moons like enceladus and europa even pluto i know neil doesn't love pluto discussions at some level when it's talking about it as a planet but that's why i like to call things worlds the habitable zone will start stretching away from our sun and they're already created objects which may already have a lot of the ingredients that you need for organic life and so i would i would not count it out as impossible but you do need some of the ingredients there already so the prescription is have something there be ready and maybe the habitable zone will show up at your door and you'll melt down and life could emerge fluently right yeah i like it all right keep it coming mcgee okay uh jared sims says uh hello dr tyson dr faraday and of course the hilarious nagin i included that part because there's a compliment to me in there um jared asked what would happen favorite comedian ever in the whole universe yes that was in parentheses um what would happen if you could split a star right in half would it come back together from gravity and other binding forces or is there a sufficient distance where they would be two separate pieces lifespan question mark wow this sounds like a science fiction something that the death star weapon from star wars might want to try to do i'm done killing planets now let's cut a star in half yeah yeah yeah i will say a lot of these questions are are a little dark and a little dangerous like i don't know what the what people were thinking when they were submitting them but there's definitely a little bit of darkness here uh could you split it like take a knife like some knife and split it down the middle uh just a laser just laser cut the thing in half and then what happens next my immediate reaction to that is absolutely not but um that's in part because you'd have to be so sw this is so science fiction because you'd have to be so swift and in order to figure out how to get certain physical properties to not immediately react so that you could get a scissor through it i mean a better answer maybe is to a question that this person isn't asking but i want to answer and i think it does help here is um when you hit one star with another star what happens because that starts with two halves and number one how often does it happen and that answer is the stars don't collide very often but it can happen they swirl around each other because gravity is something that's not that interested in seeing the two objects smash into each other they have to overcome that then when they do they can coalesce into a new thing to get two halves uh is very science fiction in my in my quick reaction but i'm imagining but let's but if it is science fiction and you have these big old hands let's say it grabs two sides of the star and pulls it apart there's a distance you could pull them apart where i think they would just coalesce into two separate stars each with half the mass that the previous one had right so but i think you end up with a contact binary scenario yes you could because we do have contact binaries where two stars end up sharing the same amount of material that's orbiting between them they're very dangerous and ultimately when you have two stars that are coalescing they do go through a period where they're kind of evolving as two separate cores into a solid core so i'm just thinking how you reverse that process you'd have to pull those two stars so yeah the answer to that one is yes there is a distance which if you could rapidly separate them and pull them apart where you're good and you will have two smaller objects that is that is possible so if we were infinitely powerful or we were the programmers of this simulation in which we all live and there's one star that has just way too much mass and there's some needy planets out there you could have the power to just pluck off uh material and just put it where you want it and scatter the stars so one star can become ten well there is there's definitely enough mass in some stars to pluck out hundreds of stars where there's still stars they're still stable objects and so that is possible but you'd have to redistribute the material uh i'm thinking of it like as a play-doh like you'd have to make sure that the outer core and the inner core because there's plus it's very socialist and we can't have that [Laughter] [Music] you have too much math but i love the idea that jared sees the stars kind of like our senate uh just split in half down the middle but i just want to say jared the stars are not that partisan and if they are kamala harris will come in and be the tie breaking star break that out um another question all right yeah let's do it robert weaver another dark one okay robert river weaver asked what would happen if the nearest star to us blew up oh i like this question um so i'm not sure which star they mean because sometimes they might mean our sun do they mean our sun this is that's that that would be an a end game scenario for us here on earth clearly uh because that's our that's our life force so if the closest star to us which is the sun blows up um blows up we're we're goners ball game over okay ball game over 100 yeah uh the next closest one to us this is always a fun pop quiz is a triple system actually there's three stars in that system none of them are actually going to go supernova if any of them did we'd still be in severe danger because it's actually not that far away from us the closest star to us is our oort cloud the like surrounding area of our solar system stretches a third of the way out to that system so we're already pretty close to it when it comes to like our extended family of the solar system so the nearby vicinity what i call the spitting distance area around our solar neighborhood like the suburbs of our solar neighborhood suburbs well we're in the suburbs of the galaxy that's true oh gosh okay yeah we're definitely in the suburbs of the galaxy but if any of the like 100 hundred parts said 300 light years stars go supernova it's it's gonna be a and once they get far enough away it's not that bad i don't know the exact distance where we start to say like we've got a severe problem here but it'd certainly be something that we could observe in a major way and it would and i guess if it's if it's the office century system it would be visible in broad daylight right i mean yeah yeah yeah it would be like so and and fortunately we know what that would be if it happened uh and we don't have to worry about whether the kings will die or whether to be a change in the kings who are the kings neil that's what i'm saying they're not anymore you know but yeah today the change of emperors you know a new star in the sky that something different is going to happen yeah no none of that is an issue but like is it is something pelting us in the face like if one of those star like it or it's just it's dark or what like i don't know well when when the supernova when a supernova occurs it uh blows off highly energetic highly energetic particles in um in multiple directions and if we so um a supernova that went off nearby have um one that i could use as a great example is one that happened in the year 1987. i think we were all alive yes it's the one that we saw happen in 1987 right we saw it happen and that actually happened half a million years ago yeah something like that yeah right exactly it's it's a far away object and in 1987 i think it um there was an operator at las companus observatory which was one of the first to see it i believe but it was a notice thing it was like oh this thing got bright and then the um they detected they actually detected the earth got hit by a couple of highly energetic particles called these neutrinos hit the earth and were detected and we collected like you know it was like 15 of them but we did get hit with them but that thing is so far yes and you do not want to get slammed by the radiation that comes from a supernova so as much distance as you can put between yourself and that if you're a habitable world then keep that distance if you're something else though there are things that probably want the supernova to go off because the supernova when it goes off it's actually enriching the area around it it's dumping all this material right that comes from that massive star that was churning away at all this nice higher mass elements and it dumps them out into the area enriching giving feedback to the galaxy and so next generations of stars really benefit from supernovas going off so so there are there our frenemy they can kill us but really we like them it's um well we don't we don't know if the supernova went off that triggered our own solar system being formed well our sun being formed with blood to our solar system being formed but start you know supernovas going off will trigger star formation in the galaxy so it is a good thing but once you're alive you want to stay away from them you sound like we have the option to run away keep your distance right well i think if you're going to find a new star to live around you know look around make sure you don't have any super giants around that look like they're going to be going supernova anytime soon so that should go into your like you know when you go on zillow and it's the real estate map yeah very cool yeah like don't pick an area with a super like a giant if you see a star that's got a really low real estate yeah that's such an amazing star like look a little closer i bet it's got a super giant around it but it's like right next to it it's like buying a house next to a friend like buying a house next to a frat house or something you don't want to do that right so negan we have time to like if if jackie is good at this we're going to send three lightning round questions to her let's try it okay go here we go john david newman on average are the stars we observe furthest away from us older bigger and shorter live than the stars that we see closer to us and what's the shortest and longest living star we've found go gosh that's so much um so the closest stars to us should not be a unique sampling in the galaxy because they we should not be in a unique place in the galaxy we have both young stars that are nearby and old stars that are nearby so we do get both the youngest stars that are near us are on the order of um depends on what you mean by near but like let's go to 300 light years away then you start getting things that are like 2 million years old there's 3 million years old but we've also got stars sweeping in that are like 10 billion years old that are near us and so that's all what i would call spitting distance away at like let's just say a hundred light years or so away from the sun i feel like i answered that okay yeah but i that was a little long for a sound bite let's see if we can make it even shorter go next one nagin james uh senior asks what starts the gravitational pull that brings the elements together to form a star i'm guessing that in a nebula there is an abundance of the correct ingredients to form a star but how did stars form before there were any nebulas yeah first stars are the best stars in some ways and that was a bunch of hydrogen coming together pull the hydrogen together because gravity is your friend and gravity pulled the hydrogen together and the first stars were mostly hydrogen they were unstable and they blew up big time right but you speak you're speaking like gravity is something separate from the hydrogen the hydrogen atoms have gravity yeah right and you get enough of them pulls them together they'll have a collective gravity so it's the mutual gravitational attraction not like gravity is just something hanging around or it might be how about dark matter isn't dark matter of gravity minding its own business i think we should be honest too neil we are gravity is very confusing gravity is not exactly the easiest thing for us as scientists to understand so many mixed signals i know well what transports it what's it's what's its particle how does gravity work this is that's why again that's why we go to the bar yeah you get some good conversations yeah it bought me a drink but then it didn't really want to talk to me what so we've got to end it there but great jackie thanks for coming back on star talk yeah it's always good to see you i mean i see you in the offices and during uh science coffee and it's great to have you part of this star talk uh enterprise and and nagin always good to have you and your kids doing well you they're grandma grandma taking care of him now oh yeah they're getting they're doing their back breaking work of running after a toddler okay so that means it's not as fun with them running into your zoom screen they've managed to keep her at bay all right so this has been star talk cosmic queries i'm neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist as always beating you to keep looking you

Channel: StarTalk

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Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics

Id: 0R7a99k9lD8

Length: 49min 34sec (2974 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021