Thousands of Objects Called Yellowballs Found - But What Are They?

hello wonderful person this is anton and today we're going to be talking about another interesting discovery that was made by citizen scientists essentially amateur scientists working on a project known as the milky way project whose main purpose was to try to catalog and analyze a lot of different stars in the milky way galaxy and over the years the citizen scientists once again discovered something that no one else knew existed something that the scientists currently refer to as white bees or yellow balls and in this video i wanted to briefly talk about what this is and what some of the recent studies discovered but first of all where exactly does all of this come from and what exactly are these citizen science projects now back in the days i think possibly about four to five years ago i've actually tried to pitch a few of them because i was actually participating in a lot of these projects as well with one of these older projects being the milky way project but if astronomy is not really your thing and if you actually want to participate in a project that's maybe in a different field there are literally hundreds and hundreds of projects you could technically join and so here we have projects in arts climate history language and a lot a lot more all of this part of a brilliant website known as xuniverse the link for which you can find in the description that essentially has the kind of a community between the scientists needing help and the citizen scientists providing the help now normally the way this works and here let's actually just jump into one so i can show it to you so let's see what this iberian camera trap project is you basically go through a very brief training where it kind of shows you what the scientists are looking for and your goal is then to go through various slides or various pictures and to try to identify things in them using a kind of a mini game so for example right here we see that the camera captured something i personally don't think i know what this is but there are some examples that are already given to us and we basically just have to click on this now i think if i zoom in it sore looks like a pig or some sort of a pig-like creature so i'm just going to go for a wild boar and once you're done with one picture it shows you the next one and depending on your interest or what sort of scientists you want to help there's also usually a forum you can join where a lot of people are generally discussing the ideas discussing their discoveries or asking questions but one of these projects that originally started back in 2012 was the milky way project the purpose of the original project was to try to identify various somewhat massive stars located in the milky way galaxy and essentially helping citizen scientists to mark them and to identify them for further analysis especially if they were particularly massive but as the citizen scientists started working on them several forum posts started noticing something unusual something that they really didn't understand in a lot of these observations of various stars out there the citizen scientists started noticing these unusual yellow blobs kind of like the ones you see right here and it wasn't just one or two it was like a lot of them pretty much all over the place at first they found a few dozen then they found a few hundred and eventually it was in the thousands and so back in 2016 the scientists behind this project decided to kind of change the direction of milky way project and focus specifically on identifying these yellow blobs or yellow balls as they're known now and because a lot of these objects were only appearing in the infrared light and were still invisible in the optical light basically you would not be able to see this with a typical telescope and this data was actually coming from the spitzer telescope using the infrared filter it wasn't really long until scientists realized that they were actually looking at a completely new type of an object that nobody has ever seen before and while eventually over the years over the past five years or so the scientists were able to identify over 6 000 of them in a region of about one-third of the size of the milky way but what exactly are these bowls and what exactly is going on here well even early research was pretty clear in establishing that what we're looking at are very likely these early formations that eventually become typical stars but to be more exact or to try to understand what's really happening here we need to start with this picture right here this shows us the so-called main sequence stars our sun is right here this is the g-type star the most common type of a star is this m-type or red dwarf and some of the brightest and most energetic stars are usually o-type these stars on the left will usually long very very long time up to several trillion years whereas the stars on the right such as o-type will normally have lifespans of maybe a few million years possibly even less than 1 million years mostly because they end up eating up through a lot of energy really quick and then go supernova but prior to becoming a main sequence star a star will actually undergo through something known as well for the lack of better acronyms pms three main sequence and depending on how massive the final star becomes it will usually have one of two main pms stages or pre-main sequence stages so for example let's take a look at this image what this is showing us is what's known as the herbic aeb e star and it's essentially a pre-made sequence star for some of the more massive stars out there normally anything that's between 2 and 10 masses of the sun is going to start its life as this in a nutshell these are really really powerful nebula-like clouds that have a lot of different emissions with these really really powerful stars in the middle usually embedded in this gas-like formation that resembles a typical nebula and so a lot of the more massive stars usually begin their life this way but for less massive stars for stars less than two masses of the sun they actually begin their lives in much smaller clouds known as t-tory stars that will also have some sort of a cloud-like formation nearby but generally be a lot less massive and sometimes also possessing some sort of early planetary disk or some sort of a flat like formation nearby you can even see some of these formations in this image right here and lastly stars that are more than 10 masses of the sun normally don't even go through these stages and just directly collapse into a very massive and extremely active object but the thing is what happens before these stages what happens before this pms stage pre main sequence star and this is something that the scientists haven't really been certain about until they started discovering these unusual yellow balls pretty much all over the galaxy because now it's actually pretty clear that before the stage before these two stages that i just showed you there's another very obvious stage that pretty much most of the stars if not all of the stars go through that stage being the i guess yellow ball stage doesn't have a better name just yet but that's what the scientists are calling it for now and essentially what we're looking at in this particular picture are these extremely early stars possibly only a few thousand maybe hundred thousand years in age way way before they start forming anything else and still actually creating a lot of gas into themselves and as all of this happens they actually start emitting this yellow glow that's visible in the infrared now remember this is not optical yellow light this is infrared light that was converted into yellow light for us to see and so what these yellow blobs of matter represent are almost like cocoons they're basically like these regions of space where new stars are going to be worn not just one or two stars but like a lot of stars possibly even a hundred so it's sort of like this birthplace of a lot of different stars so in a sense it's like a something that will eventually probably become a star cluster but at the same time might just become just a bunch of separate stars and so according to the scientists pretty much all of the stars no matter their mass usually start their life this way this is basically that one stage that seems to unite all the stars in the galaxy and probably all the stars in the universe but the thing is not all of them will end up the same obviously and according to the recent study it seems that approximately 20 of these yellow balls will then turn into really massive stars whereas about 80 of them will actually become a collection of much smaller stars possibly stars similar to the sun similar to some of the nearby smaller stars and the ones that do become these really gigantic stars very massive and very powerful o or b type will also probably end up blasting away so much energy that the entire cloud near them will dissipate really quickly leaving almost nothing behind and some of these more massive and more powerful stars such as the o type or even the b type stars might end up releasing so much energy and so much material that they will probably also leave behind their own bubbles afterwards which means that even though a lot of these yellow balls might start the same they do end up progressing and evolving completely different afterwards but it's really interesting how all of them do seem to start from the same formation that the scientists refer to as yellow balls and of course what all of this suggests is that well they do seem to possess similar material on the inside the yellow glow is very likely produced by some sort of an organic molecule that emits exactly the same light when a very powerful energetic object starts to emit certain frequencies in the middle so basically all of these early stars all of these yellow balls are producing pretty much the same colors simply because of all of this organic material that's present in this really really large cloud or this really large cocoon of new stars but the vast majority of all of these yellow balls discovered or close to about 5 000 of them or so will end up producing intermediate-sized stars so in this case k-type f-type and g-type stars similar to our sun but because of this discovery we can now kind of make more sense of how the stars progress through their lives and even start making more sense of what happens to early stars and how they develop as well so now we know that even before the previously mentioned t-tory stage or the more powerful herbic ae be stage all of the stars seem to also undergo the yellow ball stage and if all stars start as a yellow ball stage it means that now or at least in the future the scientists might be able to look at a certain yellow ball find out certain properties coming from this region and then be able to predict what sort of a star or what sort of stars this will end up producing which is pretty much the goal of some of the recent studies focusing on these unusual objects but i guess for now we don't really know much else it seems that this is definitely one of the earliest stages of star development we've discovered so far it also seems to be a stage that pretty much all the stars go through but the scientists still need to try to understand how these yellow balls differ from one another and what exactly happens for some stars compared to other stars in order for them to become really massive or in order for them to create a lot of smaller stars this is not something we understand really well just yet but for me personally the best part of all of this is of course once again that this is coming from the citizen scientists this is coming from community of people interested in these topics that by accident discovered something unusual just like back in the days the scientists discovered the unusual demon star that today is referred to as the tabby's star or some of the other incredible discoveries that we've talked about on this channel so if you are interested in these topics and if you actually want to participate as always the link for xenoverse and all of these other projects is in the description below but i guess until we discover something else well that's pretty much it there is unfortunately nothing else to mention about these yellow balls until the scientists discover something else also hopefully they will get a better name for them on that note thank you for watching subscribe if you still haven't share this with someone who has learned about space and sciences maybe come back tomorrow to learn something else and maybe support this channel on patreon by joining the channel membership or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find in the description i'll see you tomorrow stay wonderful and as always bye [Music] so you

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 169,554

Keywords: anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, steven universe, space engine, yellowballs, yellow balls, citizen scientists, milky way project, yb, ybs, zooniverse, massive stars, milky way stars, identifying stars, yellow blows, space blobs, what are yellowballs, early stars, baby stars, developing stars, pre main sequence, herbig, t tauri, yellowball

Id: BBSLDv35lFE

Length: 13min 3sec (783 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021