What Would Happen If You Fell Into A Magnetar? | Random Thursday

this video is supported by brilliant one of my favorite videos in this channel is the one where i ask what would happen if you fell into jupiter the answer is it would be bad it would it would be very bad don't don't do that i like it because it shows just how crazy jupiter is how far outside of our experience jupiter is and how you can watch a human being get turned into a burnt potato and that's always fun but while jupiter might be the big hot shot in our solar system in the galaxy it doesn't even register on the crazy meter i mean it's not even big enough to become a brown dwarf which itself isn't even big enough to become a star of which only some are big enough to become a neutron star or even crazier a black hole so if we really want to get creative with our destruction of the human body we're going to need something with a little bit more kick to it so what would happen if you fell into a magnetar [Music] there's no shortage of extreme objects in our universe and after a while the names start to just sort of blend together you know black holes pulsars quasars blazars magnetars are these stars or dc villains if all of these start to sound the same it might be because they're all basically variations on the same mind-blowing concepts let's start with black holes the only black hole we have a picture of is m87 star also known as poehy it's a supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy m87 in the virgo cluster and besides from being a beast it's several billion times the mass of the sun power he is basically a pretty typical black hole you can see the whole part the singularity in the event horizon there in the middle the glow surrounding the hole is an emission ring black holes capture gas and dust that get heated up by friction as they whirl around the central mass emitting light in the infrared that our telescopes can pick up some supermassive black holes also radiate energy in powerful beams if the beam's bright enough we say the black hole is a quasar if the quasar appears exceptionally bright and whole or in part because the beam is pointed our way we say it's a blazar do you want the full skinning on quasars i've got a whole video on them you can go check that out so quasars are bright black holes and blazars are bright quasars they have different names because they look different to us but essentially they're the same thing mass that has collapsed down into a singularity similarly neutron stars pulsars and magnetars are basically the same thing stars that have collapsed down but just not quite far enough to become a black hole so stars are basically a fight between nuclear fusion and gravity with the nuclear fusion forcing energy out and the gravity trying to pull it back in which causes the fusion to happen and when it runs out of fuel for that fusion usually hydrogen gravity wins out and the star collapses down and if it's more than three stellar masses it usually will become a black hole the smallest black hole ever observed was 3.3 solar masses but we don't really know exactly how small a black hole can get for those paying attention in my interview with dr becky a few weeks ago we talked about what the smallest possible mass for a black hole could be and how we don't really have a name for that surprisingly so she joked that we should call it the scott smith hearst limit i insist that her name should go first on that but in the researching of this video i found that there is actually sort of a barrier there it's called the tomen oppenheimer volkov limit and it says how big a neutron star can get before it turns into a black hole but not necessarily how small an actual black hole can be but she did set me straight in an email she said the tov limit is the maximum mass of neutron star can get before becoming a black hole rather than the minimum mass of black hole can form in a supernova they're not necessarily the same thing so she said that the scott smith hurst limit could still be a thing she's saying but now it's kind of hard to say because we can't exactly collapse stellar material down in an experiment in the lab but it's thought to be between 2.01 and 3 solar masses less massive stars can produce white dwarfs which are pretty extreme in their own way but we're not talking about that here basically every form a star can take after a supernova is extreme in some way supernovas are basically star's ways of saying physics i make my own physics so black holes are basically kyles punching through the drywall of space-time and neutron stars are more like their little brother clint who don't punch all the way through but damage it a little bit mess up the paint that kind of thing come on clint you have to do everything like your brother the point is neutron stars are smaller much smaller only like 10 to 15 miles in diameter yeah usually when we talk about space stuff we're talking light years and millions of miles and whatnot but no neutron stars wouldn't even cover new york city like staten island would be fine i mean it's still a staten island but you know actually staten island wouldn't be fine and neither would texas or japan for that matter because the neutron star would almost immediately devour the entire planet or to quote neil degrasse tyson a neutron star the size of mjolnir would weigh as much as 300 billion elephants if somehow that helps to contextualize it but like other stars neutron stars exist in layers and the outermost layer is called the atmosphere it's only about 10 or 15 inches thick but it's nothing at all like our atmosphere here on earth it's usually made up of lighter elements like hydrogen and helium but there is one neutron star that we know of that has an atmosphere made out of carbon carbon's so tightly packed that it has a density of a diamond it's essentially a diamond star it's the liberace of the cosmos below the atmosphere is a solid crust of ionized elements and subatomic particles but below that is where things get really weird of course we have no way of actually seeing this because we can't really get up to a neutron star or anything but some models show that it might be kind of flat layers and others suggest it might be a little noodley star noodles ladies and gentlemen in fact this is so prevalent that astronomers actually use different names of pastas to classify neutron stars names like gnocchi spaghetti and lasagna and these are some of the strongest hardest substances in the universe actually it's kind of funny how much pasta gets invoked when you talk about astronomical things they also say that you get spaghettified if you fall into a black hole so now there's space noodles and neutron stars i mean if that's not proof of flying spaghetti monster i don't know what is but whatever's going on in the core neutron stars tend to spin really fast and this is because of the conservation of angular momentum basically everything in the universe spins nothing stands still so if you have a star twice the size of our sun and then it gets shrunk down to the size of new york city just like an ice skater pulling their arms in to to spin faster that leftover neutron star then absorbs all that angular momentum and this rapid spin produces a powerful magnetic field that funnels light up to the poles and it goes out in those different directions but this magnetic field can drift from the poles over time meaning that spinning rotation causes them to fling in all kinds of directions and if that beam starts to point towards earth we see that as a pulse hence pulsars pulsars are so regular and powerful that astronomers basically use them as lighthouses of the universe in fact on the voyager record they use pulsars to try to give any alien that might find it a little bit of a map to earth which good idea actually there's nothing to worry about astronomers have found way more pulsars since 1977 there's basically like a billion of them in our galaxy so they think that the map would probably be impossible to decipher so we weren't as clever as we thought we were but yeah i kind of just breezed past this point a second ago and this rapid spin produces a powerful magnetic field that funnels light up to the poles and it goes out in those different directions a magnetic field that can funnel light it sounds like a pretty damn powerful magnetic field this magnetic field wouldn't just erase the information on your hard drive it would erase the hard drive from existence magnetic fields are measured in gauss for example the earth's magnetic field at the surface is about half a gauss the strongest stable electromagnet ever created was 45 000 gauss now there have been experimental ones that have gone up to 12 million gauss but those fall apart immediately they're they're not stable at all now there have been theories around creating magnetic fields so strong they could actually make matter out of light but these are theoretical and they even they pale in comparison to what you could see in a neutron star we're talking trillions of gauss like we can't even conceptualize that but some neutron stars have magnetic fields up to a quadrillion gauss that is a 1 followed by 15 zeros and these other cosmic monstrosities are known as magnetars how these things get so swole what's their routine even physics bro there are theories but they're impossible to test it's hard to even study there's only 30 magnetars that we found so far the dominant theory is that the magnetar inherits its magnetic feel from the star that it collapsed from so it's an abnormally strong neutron star because it was an abnormally strong star to begin with but some critics of this theory suggest that a magnetic field so strong would actually prevent the collapse down to a neutron star to begin with an alternative theory suggests that the magnetic field gets a boost at the time of collapse one detail i skipped earlier that when we talk about the collapse of a star we're actually talking about the collapse of the atoms themselves the force is so strong it actually forces electrons and protons together to make neutrons hence the name think station from bill and ted's bogus journey electron proton neutron that matter that i was talking about earlier that would stretch across new york city all neutrons you know how they say like 99.9999 of an atom is empty space like the the nucleus of an atom is basically like a fleck of dust floating around in a cathedral no it's a cathedral full of neutrons these are the lucky charms all marshmallows of the universe but every time this electron and proton fuse into a neutron it fires out a neutrino to equalize the charge now neutrinos are particles that have near zero mass like they barely interact with other matter at all so they fire out of there really quickly and they carry heat away with it which can sometimes form a convective mass flow and we have these inside of our own planet basically these molten convection currents of molten rock down in the core that over time can cause the north and south poles to drift from the center of rotation and eventually flip but in a magnetar it's so strong it actually creates its own dynamo which boosts the magnetic field to insane levels it's it's like the magnetic field that powers the magnetic field now again that's the alternative model it's speculative but it has been borne out in computer simulations now another way that a magnetar might form is if it was originally a binary system in at least one case an especially massive magnetar was seen in a star system that also had a runaway star that was kind of headed in the opposite direction from it so it's thought that it was a binary star system and the larger one collapsed and when it did it kind of siphoned energy off of the other star and multiple star systems are actually pretty common in our galaxy so this could be an explanation for a lot of them all right now we come to the fun part what would actually happen to you if you fell into a magnetar first of all the gravity of any neutron star would accelerate you so fast that you would be approaching the speed of light this acceleration would stretch your body into atomic filaments yes black holes are not the only things that can spaghettificate it would take you just a few seconds to spaghettify from the perspective of somebody watching you but since time is being dilated for you it would probably take good 10 to 15 seconds of your body being ripped apart adam by adam go beans and if that's not enough of a rush your atoms would smash into the neutron star at about two-thirds the speed of light which thanks to equals mc squared would create explosions larger than every single nuclear weapon on the planet going off at the exact same time that's a more epic death than the iron giant but actually actually no actually no the magnetic field would rip you apart first once you slip inside the magnetic field of a magnetar your atoms would distort and begin to fall apart the atomic bonds would break as gravity and magnetism fight over who gets to turn you into paste first now let's be honest it would be the acceleration that kills you first i mean i i don't know how many g's you would pull accelerating from zero to two thirds the speed of light but i think that it's safe to say that it would do more to you than give you a tesla grin because it would liquify you immediately it would liquify you it would liquify you maybe that should be the next speed after plaid hey elon musk the next speed after plaid should be spaghettify mode what say you yeah that'll change the world but let's just say you survived that you won't but let's just say you do what would all that magnetism do to you well at a far lower gauss than a neutron star exerts your nervous system would start to fail because the ion channels would shut down i did a video about anesthesia where i talked about how the ion channels in your nerves create the action potentials that send signals along the nerves up to your brain so under this much magnetism those channels wouldn't work which means no pain signals traveling down the nerve so you wouldn't feel any pain you wouldn't feel anything actually and you wouldn't be able to move your heart wouldn't pump and your automatic muscles would fail your brain would literally just switch off though you might have some crazy hallucinations for a second there which is actually a pretty lucky way to go considering you're being pulled apart atom by atom by a magnetic field that's strong enough to wipe out every single credit card in the world from 100 000 miles away yeah and that nuclear pasta i was talking about earlier it can crack the struggle between magnetism and gravity can sometimes pry apart the surface and release insane amounts of energy in an incredibly short amount of time in fact some believe this is the source of gamma ray bursts one observed magnetar called sgr 1806-20 is thought to be responsible for a massive gamma-ray burst detected on december 27 2004 it releases much energy in 200 milliseconds as the sun puts out in 250 000 years another huge gamma-ray burst associated with a magnetar was detected in december of 2011. grb-111209a lasted for more than seven hours this was so much longer than the previous record that astronomers had to invent a new category to describe it any grb lasting longer than two seconds is considered a long duration grb this is considered an ultra long grb it's not very creative but it works another notable magnetar is sgr 1745-2900 it orbits our galaxy central supermassive black hole so close that it's kind of a problem because the astronomers trying to get pictures of the black hole often have their telescopes bombarded by massive amounts of x-rays from this magnetar it's kind of like trying to look at a star in your backyard and your neighbor turns on their porch light now for the most part these are just massive objects out there in the deep universe but there is reason to believe that they might have an effect on us about 450 million years ago something wiped out 60 percent of marine species on this planet it's called the ordovician extinction and we don't really know what caused it but one of the major theories is a gamma ray burst scientists have calculated that the chance of grb could have caused an extinction over the last half a billion years is at about 50 percent take it up to about five billion years and that becomes about ninety percent given what we know about grbs and magnetars what are the chances that one of these bad boys may have taken out a whole tree of life on our planet and how much different would life look today without it as i said only 30 magnetars have been identified so far but scientists think that there could be between a million or 100 million in the milky way alone there's so much we don't know about them i mean who knows mostly though magnetars are just fascinating objects that are perfectly harmless at a distance so you will probably not be struck dead by a magnetar but it is often quoted as one of those random space events that could pose a threat to a single planet species so if the fear of that urges us to go out there and explore a little more then i'll allow it oh and by the way magnetars are also a prime candidate to explain fast radio bursts fast radio bursts are super powerful super brief super random bursts of energy that scientists have been finding and been completely flummoxed by for years well one recent burst was actually correlated to a nearby magnetar about 30 000 light years from earth which is actually kind of weird because we thought they were coming from outside our galaxy but in this case anyway they were actually able to track it to a known magnetar so if they are a source of fast radio bursts that could be the case for the rest of them too so sorry frbs are probably not aliens unless aliens have the ability to create starquakes on neutron stars which if that's the case we'd really better hope that they can't actually decipher that voyager golden record and hey you think magnetars are crazy do you dig astronomy well hey there's an astronomy course on brilliant y'all and it's a big one for a big universe over 30 interactive quizzes and more than 300 exercises you'll learn everything you ever wanted to know about the cosmos including black holes dark matter hubble's law black body radiation and everything else if everything i've said here about magnetars is mind blowing just wait till you see what you can learn from this and once you've absorbed all that you can move on to some of the other courses on brilliant like classical physics courses the quantum mechanics courses applied science computer algorithms even competitive math and the thing about brilliant that's so well brilliant is it teaches you these things by solving problems this wires your brain to think like a scientist and superpowers your problem-solving abilities that can pay off in every area of your life plus you can do it on your mobile device and even offline so you can take it with you wherever you go and they've got daily challenges so if you want a little random brain nugget every day to keep you sharp it's a great way to spend 10 minutes or so while you're procrastinating getting work done and if you want to get a taste of what i'm talking about they do have some free weekly brain teasers and puzzles that you can go and check out and see what you like about it and if you sign up for a premium subscription that gives you access to other courses at brilliant.org slash answers with joe the first 200 people that sign up will get 20 off of your subscription so if you haven't checked out brilliant i do recommend it it's worth doing it's a lot of fun so links down in the description brilliant.org answers with joe go check it out big thanks to brilliant for supporting this video and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon that are really keeping things going around here and helping me out in so many different ways uh i got some new people to join let me murder their names real quick we've got todd bailey d mason maris mehek andre beacon cough uh biedenkoff karen elizabeth smith tiny riley peter gladstone the imaginary that's the name i was given uh dustin leskowski ray's dad otter ruin i love that one uh thomas vekital choo choo tattoo sam root and william cb thank you guys so much if you would like to join them and get access to me exclusive live streams and all kinds of other fun stuff you can go to patreon.com answers with joe please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here google thinks you'll like that one as well or you can go check out any of these over here on the side they're a lot of fun and if you enjoy them i invite you to subscribe i come back with videos every monday all right that's it for now i hope you guys enjoyed that please go out there have an eye opening week be safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 520,999

Rating: 4.9283104 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, magnetars, astronomy, neutron stars, black holes, pulsars, what is a magnetar, spaghettify, star collapse, stars, supernovas, Dr. Becky

Id: K8sCG0rJitI

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020