Warning: DO NOT TRY—Seeing How Close I Can Get To a Drop of Neutrons

okay today we're going to be seeing how close you can get to a drop of a neutron star so before we can test this let's talk about what a neutron star actually is so you have normal stars like our Sun and our Sun has a lot of mass and when you have a lot of mass mass has gravity and it wants to compress together and it wants to attract each other and compress tighter and tighter together but the reason our Sun doesn't just collapse in on itself is because there's another force that's pushing it apart and that force is due to the explosion that's constantly happening in the Sun due to nuclear fusion so hydrogen is constantly forming into helium and it's exploding the Sun so this exploding force is pushing it out and gravity is pushing it in more and more together but what can happen sometimes is if there's enough mass then the mass will keep collapsing in on itself in the star and it'll collapse more and more and more and more until actual electrons are becoming so close together that they become as close together as they can possibly get and the only thing that's stopping them from overlapping each other is the Pauli exclusion principle and the Pauli exclusion principle says that you can't have two electrons in the same place at the same time in the same state but what happens if you try to force them more and more together is the only thing that's holding them apart is due to the Pauli exclusion principle but it doesn't stop there if you have too much mass the mass still wants to attract each other and not even the Pauli exclusion principle can keep the electrons from getting closer together so as it keeps compressing stronger and stronger together the electrons and the protons get so close together that you have electron capture and it turns a proton and electron into a neutron and you end up with a pure neutron soup and that's called a neutron star and it's so dense because you no longer have these protons and electrons but you have just pure neutrons with no electric charge that can come very close together so today I want to show you what would happen if you had just a very tiny drop of a neutron star and brought it on earth so I have here a magic cube and once cool about this cube is we can increase the density up to the density of a neutron star and see what happens so to start off let me show you what it looks like so I have a cube here just at normal earth density put it on there it weighs around only five grams now I'm gonna do my magic touch on this cube so now this is getting really heavy for the size of it now you can see how heavy it is put it in there weighs 50 grams instead of five okay now let's increase the density even more and go whoa holy cow broke my thing broke through my jar got so heavy holy cow so you can see it's extremely heavy now for the size of it barely pick it up look at that Wow so I would say this weighs around one pound now can see how heavy it is here now okay I'm increasing the density I can't even hold it anymore oh we went through the table okay so we're gonna need a stronger base but let's just go ahead and turn it all the way up to neutron star and see what happens three two one whoa it just shot through the earth so right now it's basically vaporizing the mantle in front of it and leaving a trail of hot plasma behind it in a while as it falls it'll eventually just become lodged in the Earth's core so let's try this again with a holder that will actually stop it from falling through the table and through the earth okay now let's redo this experiment with a magic stand that can support the weight of the hundred billion kilograms and that time little centimeter cubed there now because this is so dense it has its own gravity force that I can feel and what this feels like to me is that when I start to walk closer to it it kind of feels like I'm starting to walk down a steep downhill because the gravity is pulling me towards the neutron star instead of straight down towards the earth so I kind of feel like I'm walking down a hill so even just sitting next to on a table it's like gravity is pointing that way towards the drop of the neutron star instead of straight down towards the Earth whoa okay now because gravity is proportional to the square of distance it becomes increasingly hard to pull away from the neutron star drop the closer you get to it so if you get closer than a critical distance then you won't be able to get away from it ever so that means that if I want to touch this neutron star drop I'm gonna need another plan and that plan has to do with water okay so I managed to get some water around this and if I didn't have this box around it it would look like this it would be a complete sphere around it with the drop at the very center because gravity is now pulling it all towards the center now normally the point of no-return with a drop this size of a neutron star is around 8 inches around 8 inches away your arm would become too heavy to ever pull back and then it would just get sucked in and probably get ripped off and it would pull your whole body in and you compress down into the neutron star but if you put water around it something interesting happens so let's see if this orange gets sucked in huh it just floats so at this range it's hundreds of times of Earth's gravity but it's floating on top here so that means that buoyancy has nothing to do with the strength of gravity and the reason it works like this is because the neutron star drop is pulling on the water just as much as it's pulling on the orange but it pulls on the water a little more because the water is a little more dense so the orange still floats on top of the water so this means on different planets whether it had stronger or weaker gravity than Earth both would still be able to float just fine they'd have the same buoyancy as on earth because buoyancy is independent of the gravitational factor so that means my hand should be okay because my hand is less dense than water so my hand will never get pulled towards the neutron star stronger than water so as long as I keep it in water I should be able to get as close to it as I can but what happens when I get close to it is it's like there's the this impenetrable layer I can't get past because my fingers are less dense than water basically I can't penetrate this layer of water because the neutron star is pulling down on the water no matter what harder then it's pulling down on my finger and so no matter what I can't get through the layer of water around the ball so even in this situation even when you have water around it you're protected from the gravity but that means that you're gonna end up with a very small layer that you can't penetrate with your finger as long as you're less dense than water now if you put some alcohol in this water and you actually became more dense than the water then it would suck your finger in and you wouldn't be able to pull it off so no matter what even in this situation you wouldn't be able to touch a neutron star you could get very close if you surrounded it with water but you can never actually touch it hey everybody thanks for watching the ideas for this video and a lot of the information from it came from the book from Randall Munroe what if that I've mentioned before one of my favorite books now in case you couldn't tell this video was a simulation I did not actually have a drop of a neutron star but if you do manage to get a drop of a neutron star don't try to touch it and thanks for watching everybody I hope you enjoyed it if you haven't subscribed yeah hit the subscribe button for the action lab and head over to the action lab comm to check out the action lab subscription box thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 11,354,834

Rating: 4.3013067 out of 5

Keywords: neutron star, gravity, heavy, negative mass, how closer to neutron star, neutrons, protons, physics, the action lab, neutron star collision, neutron star vs black hole, neutron star sound, neutron stars colliding, what is neutron star, black hole, sun, plasma, density, dense, vacuum chamber, venus fly trap, action lab, iron man, foil ball, stretch armstrong, hydraulic press, vac man

Id: jAgBiFWd-yA

Length: 8min 25sec (505 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 25 2018