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What's inside a neutron star? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Hey or hey, do you have strong opinions about pasta?
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: I mean, like in my pro pasta or antipasta. Yeah,
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: but I want to dig a little deeper, like, do
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: you have opinions about all of the varieties? Yeah? No,
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: I love that there are so many kinds of pasta,
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: the more of the tastier. So then in the opinion
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: of an artist, what is the prettiest pasta there is?
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: M I try not to judge pasta bytes looks, you know,
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: that seems kind of rude, So I just go by taste. Well,
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: to me, it all tastes the same. I mean, fundamentally,
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: it's all made of the same stuff. Though my kids
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: insist that some of them are tastier than others. I
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: think it's your kids. In an entire country called Italy
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: would argue the same thing. I mean, it's all made
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: of dough, right, which in the end just made of
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: like protons, neutrons and electrons. How can it taste different? Can?
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: We'll probably get a lot of hate mail from Italians
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: because you know your physicist, right, Like, each pasta has
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: a different cross section and a different ratio of volume
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: to surface area. Right. Welcome to the physics of pasta podcasting.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: That's right, we're all postic. I am Jorge. I'm a
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: cartoonists and the co author of Frequently Asked Questions about
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: the Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: a professor at u C Irvine. And I seriously can't
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: taste the difference between different kinds of pasta. And I'm
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: sure there are a lot of Italians right now feeling
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: kind of sorry for you. You can't see. It's like
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: nuts being able to see colors. I mean, I don't
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: even understand the chemistry of it. Right once it gets
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: into your mouth, it's just sauce and noodle. What does
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: it matter what the shape of the noodle was when
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: it was on your plate. Explain it to me. What's
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: the science of it? Are you and those people that
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: just blends all their food into smoothies, you know, salmon, steak, rice,
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: whatever it just said, it's all going to get digested.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: It might as will blended together. No, I'm a big
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: fan of texture. I get that absolutely, But you know,
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: in the end, the noodles they don't taste different. They're
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: not different texture when they go into your mouth. Maybe
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: I'm overcooking them. I don't know. Yeah, I think if
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: you overcook them, it's kind a big giant globe. But
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: you know, it's like the ratio between the volume and
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: the surface area, you know, makes the sauces kind of
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: coat the pasta a little differently. Right, taste makes makes
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: to taste different, I guess. So it definitely makes it
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: look different, and it gives my kids an excuse to
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: refuse to eat something like my son will not eat
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: or Ka and my daughter will not eat Farfalla. And
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: I'm like, look, it's just postable sauce on it. What's
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: the big deal. Wow, your kids are pretty picky there.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: Maybe I should just blend it into a smoothie before
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: I serve it to them. There you go. You could
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: blend it and then make your own pasta. We do
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: make our own pasta. Actually, sometimes we start from scratch,
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: We make the dough, we roll it out. It's pretty fun. Yeah,
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: it's kind of I guess. It's kind of like bread, right,
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: Like all breads are basically flour and water. But you
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: know you're gonna have a whole range of different breads
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: and they all taste different. Oh my gosh, don't get
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: into bread with me. Bread have very different mixtures of
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: flower and water. You've got your moist breads, You've got
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: your drier breads. You've got breads with more fat or
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: less fat. It's totally different ingredients. That's what makes different
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: kind of bread delicious. It's the same ingredients, isn't it.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: With different proportions? Oh, different proportions you mean, like different
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: proportions of surface area volume. Alright, good point, but anyway,
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: welcome to our I guess Culinary podcast. Daniel and Jorge
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio in
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: which to total lon experts argue about pasta when we
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: really should be talking about the deepest questions in the universe.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: What shape do fundamental objects take? How do they come
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: together to make this incredible universe with all of its
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: amazing and different shapes. How do we get baseballs and
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: fish and clouds and far falla and rikieta and spaghetti
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: and cappellini and all the incredible shapes that we find
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: here on our planet and the insane things going on
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: inside our planet and inside stars and inside neutron stars
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: and inside black hole. We dig into all of it
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: for you. We codd with the delicious sauce of explanations
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: and banana jokes and serve it up to you. That's right.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: It is a big, beautiful and delicious universe full of
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: oodles and noodles of interesting things to learn and discover
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: and to figure out how it works. Because somehow we
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: are able to discover how things work in this universe
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: using science. Absolutely, we think that it's possible to sit
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: here on the crust of our planet and to just
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: use our minds and our eyeballs to explore what's going
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: on deep within our planet in conditions we could never
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: replicate in our laboratories, and also what's going on inside
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: crazy things out there in the universe. These our minds
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: to try to extrapolate from the situations we can explore
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: from the laws we have discovered, and wonder if those
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: ideas and understandings hold up under very extreme conditions. Yeah,
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: because that is one way to do science, is to
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: observe things, and especially observe the crazy and the wild
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: and the extreme situations out there in the universe, because
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: they do teach us a lot about what can happen
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: in the universe, even if you don't see it in
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: an everyday basis, because one of our goals in physics
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: is not to have a special set of rules for
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: every situation. We don't want the physics of laundry and
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: the physics of pasta, and the physics of air and
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: the physics of water weight. That sounds like a great podcast. Actually,
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: maybe we should do more of those rather than amplitus
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: the physics of laundry. Yeah, I'll listen to that might
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: give me some pointers, you know, like what are the
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: physics of taking out post stains out of your white shirt? Wow?
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: Crossover episode with our culinary podcast series. Yeah, well, that's fascinating.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: You know. All the different applications of physics in different
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: conditions are interesting how these things emerge. But physics, you know,
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: in the end, is reductionists. We want to go down
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: to the lowest level. We want to understand a general
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: theory about the universe that applies everywhere that you could
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: take to your laundry or pasta or neutron star and
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: say I can start from these rules and I can
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: understand what's going on here, and the way to test that,
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: the way to make sure that the ideas you have
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: are not just specific to your pasta stains or to
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: the experiments you do in your laboratory, but our general
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: is to test them under extreme conditions, to say what
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: happens if I make this really really dense or really
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: really hot where we go really really fast. So that's
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: why the extreme conditions are the best places to learn
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: where your rules break down and to get clues about
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: how to make new rules about the universe. Yeah, we
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: like to look at extremes here on the podcast, and
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: we have a whole series of extreme things that we've
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: looked at in the universe, like the brightest things in
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: the universe or the hottest things in the universe, and
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: it usually comes down to only a couple of candidates.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: One of them are neutron stars. Neutron stars are one
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: of the most amazing laboratories for physics in the universe
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: because it's one of the few places where all of
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: the forces are important. And we talk a lot in
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: this podcast about quantum field theory and understanding three of
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: the forces electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: But we don't have many situations where we can put
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: those three forces up against gravity because gravity is so weak.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: It's only really in the heart of black coals that
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: gravity dominates and takes over. But in the inside of
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: neutron stars, we think that gravity is just about as
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: strong as these other forces. So it's a great laboratory
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: for understanding how gravity and these other forces talk to
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: each other and play together or don't play together. Yeah,
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: we've talked about neutron stars before, but we've never sort
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: of dug deeper into them to find out what it's
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: all made out of on the inside. So to be
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: on the program, we'll be asking the question what is
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: inside a neutron star? And what would Italians call it? Neutrinos? No,
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: that's taken. I think I know what the answer to
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: this question is, though, Daniel, what's inside a neutron star?
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: Isn't it just neutrons? Done? Thanks for joining us, see
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: you next time. I thought you were gonna say what's
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: inside a neutron star? One neutron star? I mean, that's
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: like the ingredients, right, It's like what is pasta made
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: out of pasta? Is that what you're saying? Is that
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: what physics has come down to, giving up? Giving up? Yes, exactly. No,
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: of course neutrons are inside a new tron star. But
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: what are they doing. Man, what's the conditions? How dense
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: are they? They form weird objects and shapes when they're
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: in that crazy conditions. Are they even really still neutrons?
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: Or they squeezed down into some other weird kind of matter,
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: maybe even a quirk gluon plasma. Wait wait, neutron stars
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: might not be made out of neutrons. I smell some
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: misnaming here exactly. That is the question of the podcast,
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: Our neutron stars fundamentally misnamed? That seems to be the
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: mission of the entire program here. You're just trying to
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: undermine people's confidence in physics, man or physicists. Is their
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: confidence in physics? I mean, think about all the technology
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: you're using to make this podcast and to listen to
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: this podcast. All of that is based on fundamental physics
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: that we understood through basic research. So I think, on
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: one hand, we've been doing a pretty good job of
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: exploring the universe and learning how to manipulate it for
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: our benefit. On the other hand, we definitely don't understand
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: a lot about the universe, so there's a huge amount
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: left to discover. Yeah, I know, physics, it's just a
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: big confident game, right, That's right. Keep paying us, and
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: we'll keep teaching you the secrets of the universe. Except
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: in this confidence game, the secrets are true, or at
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: least as true as you think they can be. But
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: I think maybe what you're saying that the question is
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: in this episode is actually more like what's it like
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: inside a neutron star? What's it like? You know, like,
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: what's going on inside a neutron star? Yeah? Exactly. We
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: did an episode on what's it like inside the Earth?
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: What we dug into the crust and talked about, you know,
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: the different layers. You could have answered that question what's
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: inside the Earth by saying Earth, but that's not as
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: satisfactory and answer. So, yeah, we want to understand like
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: are there layers? There is it one big soup of neutrons?
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: You know? Are there different phases of matter as you
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: get crazy hot and dense? What is going on inside
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: a neutron star? Can you find pasta inside? And apparently
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: the answer is yes, there is pasta inside of neutron stars.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: If Michael Bay could film a movie about journey to
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: the center of a neutron star, what would he show
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: you on the screen? You would have to bring in
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: some Italian consultants, because apparently the answer is pasta. Pasta
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: is everywhere turns out to be the fundamental building block
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: of the universe. Well, it's usually were wondering how many
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: people out there had thought about this question, what's going
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: on inside of a neutron star? So Daniel went out
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: there to the wilds of the internet to get people's opinions.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: And I'm eternally grateful to our volunteers who answer these
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: random questions and give us a sense for what people
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: know and what they might be curious to learn about.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: Thank you very much. And if you are out there
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: listening and they've never been on the podcast, we would
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: love to have your voice to add it to our library.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: So please write to us two questions at Daniel and
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: Jorge dot com. It's free, it's easy, it's fun. So
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: think about it for a second. What kind of pasta
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: would you like to see inside of a neutron star?
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: And what do you think it's doing. Here's what people
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: had to say. I've heard you guys talk about this
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: in the past. Um, I know, like there is a
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: crust and then as you go down deeper towards the core,
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: there's like I think they call it quantum spaghetti. And
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: then at the very center, I've heard you guys talk
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: about luans, and the neutrons are no longer associated, so
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: it's just like the soup of quarks and gluons floating around. Well,
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: I would say it's pretty tight. I wouldn't want to
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: be in there. Actually, in neutron stars are made out
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: of nutrons, and the core I would think is the
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: densest part of a star. So I would say there's
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: a lot of nutrons, really really packed with nutrons. I
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: would imagine it's hot and bright and chaotic, and if
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: it had a high enough mass and you were actually
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: inside it, then you might be able to find out
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: what's in a black hole. Oh boy, very hot, very dense,
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: very angry. I wouldn't want to be inside of a
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: neutron star. A neutron star, other than a black hole,
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: is the densest known object in the universe. It is
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: so dense, in fact, that it has high enough pressure
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: to merge to push all of the electrons and the
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: protons together to form neutrons. Fusion is over, but it
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: is very hot, and it is emanating very high frequency
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: black body radiation, and I know it must be spinning
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: very fast due to the laws of the conservation of
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: angular momentum. Well, it's very compressed, extreme pressure, lots of heat, radiation,
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: extreme electromagnetic fields, dizzy and spinning and death. I can
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: only imagine that being inside a neutron star is like
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: being inside of a bag of popcorn that is being
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: cooked in the microwave. Um. There's a lot of pressure,
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: a lot of build up, it's hot, and there's no escape.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: It seems like a prison. All right. People aren't painting
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: a very pleasant picture here of neutron stars. Yeah, but
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: they're reaching for a lot of food analogies. You know,
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: we've got soup, We've got spaghetti, we even got popcorn.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: I guess did you pull people right before lunch or something.
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: I think there's a deep and unexplored connection between physics
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: and food, you know. I think that's what we're discovering
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: here today because physicists like to eat a lot of
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: or is that just your personal perspective, Daniel. You know
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: I'm not a big eater. I don't eat anything actually
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: during the day. I only eat at night, So you know,
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: I can do physics all day long on an empty stomach.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: But I think that people reach for these analogies because
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: they're trying to explain something weird and unfamiliar in terms
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: of something that's familiar. And in the end, that's what
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: physics is, right. We explain the unknown in terms of
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: the known. So when you see something weird and new,
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: you try to say that reminds me of and then
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: you look for something familiar around you, like whatever you're
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: having for lunch. Yeah, and most people here seem to
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: have an idea that neutron stars are really hot and
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: dance and compressed. A lot of the answers were sort
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: of sort of people describing a pretty intense environment inside
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: of a neutron star. Yes, exactly, And that's what get
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: physicists excited, right, because we think it's a situation unlike
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: any other in the universe, one that's very hard, if
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: not impossible, to read create in our laboratory, and yet
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: there it sits out there, actually doing its thing. And
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: if we could know what was going on inside those
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: neutron stars, we would have the answers to lots of
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: questions about crazy conditions that we're curious about. You know,
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: what happens when you squeeze these particles really close to
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: each other, because remember that at the heart of a
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: neutron star, these things are dominated by the strong force
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: battling it out with gravity, and these are two forces
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: that we do not understand very well. Of all of
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: the fundamental forces in the universe. We understand the weak
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: force and electromagnetism the best. We understand the strong force
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: and gravity the worst. And so to get to see
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: them fight it out helps us understand both of them.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: The strong mystery. Break it down for the audience here,
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: what is exactly a neutron star. So a neutron star
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: is one of the most amazing and weird objects in
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: the universe, and it's also left over from one of
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: the most dramatic kinds of events we have in the universe,
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: which is a supernova. So you know, you start with
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: a normal star which burns, and they have the typical
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: battle between pressure from gravity squeezing in and fusion and
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: radiation pushing out, and it burns for millions or billions
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: of years, depending on its size, and at some point
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: the core of it gets so heavy because it's fused
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: all of these lighter elements and heavier elements carbon neon, oxygen.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: You work your way up the periodic table. At some
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: point the core gets so heavy that gravity wins and
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: the thing collapses. You get this shock wave that rushes
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: in towards the heart of the star and then bounces
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: back and comes out, and you get a supernova, and
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: that blows out most of the stuff from the star.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: You know, huge amount of energy comes out in neutrinos
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: and in photons and then just massive the stuff of
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: the star. But it leaves behind this very very dense core.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: And so that's what the neutron star is. It's the
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: remnant of a supernova from a super giant star. Yeah,
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: that's something that I think, I know we've talked about before,
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: but it's still pretty cool because I don't think a
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: lot of people suld have realized that a supernova. You know,
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: we think that maybe it's like an explosion or something
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: reacts and explodes, but it's actually like what happens when
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: stars and suns collapse. It's actually like the collapse of
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: a star, and it's that collapse that kind of causes
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: the big explosion. Yeah, you have the supersonic shock wave
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: of traveling inwards and then traveling outwards, right it bounces
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: back and explodes, and so it's a lot like you know,
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: the way a fusion bomb works where we talked about
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: laser fusion recently on the podcast, where you have this
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: symmetric implosion which creates very fast runaway fusion which then
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: triggers an explosion, right, and so it's really a dramatic end.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: It's incredible also the time scales, because these stars burned
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: for millions or billions of years happily in almost a
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: steady state, and then the end comes very quickly. You know,
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: you think of cosmic objects having long time scales. You
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: should do everything slowly, but when it dies, it dies
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: very quickly, and it leaves behind these little remnants, these
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: neutron stars, and they're super small, you know. These things
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: have a radius of like ten to twenty kilometers, you know,
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: so again we're talking about astrophysical objects. You used to
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: thinking about like millions of kilometers. These things are billions
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: of light years away, but we're talking about things like
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: the size of Manhattan or Los Angeles, and yet they're
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: super massive, like they still have the mass of an
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: entire sun, like our sun. So these things of a
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: mass of like one to maybe three masses of our
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: Sun compressed into a tiny little space. Yeah, that's how
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: That's exactly why I feel when I visit Manhattan actually
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: super dance and compressing and hot as well. But what's
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: interesting too is that, first of all, not every star
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: goes supernova, and not every supernova turns into a neutron star. Right,
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: that's right. The final fate of the star is determined
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: almost entirely by how massive it was when it was born.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: If it has a mass between like ten and twenty
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: or twenty five times the mass of our Sun, then
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: it will go supernova and then go neutron star. If
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: it has more mass than that, it'll go supernova, but
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: it'll leave a black hole at the center instead of
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: a neutron star. So if you have enough mass, then
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: you can overcome even the strength of the neutron star
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: and collapse it even further to a black hole. So
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: gravity wins there if you add more mass. If you don't,
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: if you had less mass, like less than ten times
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: the mass of the Sun, then you don't get a supernova,
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: and you get what's going to happen to our Sun,
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: which is is just gonna leave behind the original core,
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: which would be a white dwarf. So then for a
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: neutron star, you start with a regular star that's about
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: ten to twenty five times the mass of our sun.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: He's supernova that most of it I guess blows out
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: in the supernova, but some of it, like one to
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: three masses of our Sun, stays in the middle in
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: this super duper dense state that I guess had its
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: origin when the star collapse, right exactly, So you take
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: the core of the star and you squeeze it down
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: to this tiny little dot, this neutron star. So it's
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: like a white dwarf that's been compressed by a supernova.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: And it's fascinating to me because it's like the last
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: step before a black hole. You know, gravity is a
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: runaway effect. If you only had gravity and no other
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: forces in the universe, everything would eventually just collapse to
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: a black hole to be nothing to stop it, because
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: gravity just pull stuff in and it gets dense here
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: and denser, and the denser gets the stronger it is,
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: and then the stronger it is, the denser gets etcetera, etcetera.
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: So the way to avoid becoming a black hole is
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: to have something pushed back against gravity. So a star
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: doesn't collapse into a black hole while it's burning because
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: the fusion provides pressure outwards. The Earth doesn't collapse into
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: a black hole right now because all that dirt has
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: structural integrity. As the mass gets stronger and stronger, you
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: need stronger forces to resist it, and eventually it just
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: gives up and becomes a black hole. And a neutron
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: star is like the last line of defense against gravity.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: It's like the densest thing in the universe that's not
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: a black hole, right, Like, if you squeeze it a
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: little bit more, you would get a black hole. But
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: if you stop squeezing it or adding more mass right
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: before it turns into black hole, then that's what you get.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: You get a neutron star exactly. And so it's this
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: object which has enough strength to resist the incredible mass
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: and the incredible gravity that it does have, but if
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: you added a little bit more, yeah, it would collapse
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: into a black hole. And so it's really the perfect
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: way to understand this balance between the strong fo and
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: the quantum mechanics that's resistant collapse and the gravitational pressure
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: that's squeezing down on it. So like how many plates
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: of pasta would you have to throw in to turn
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: a neutron star into a black hole. It's a great question.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: We don't know actually, what is the maximum mass of
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: a neutron star. Biggest ones we've seen are like two
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: and a half up to maybe three times the mass
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: of the sun. There's some speculative observations for larger ones,
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: but we think it's probably impossible to have anything much
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: more than three times the mass of the Sun. Well,
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: that was kind of my next question, which is, you know,
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: have we actually seen these things or are they like
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: sort of like black holes that were sort of theoretical
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: for a long time. We have seen these things, so
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: they are not easy to see. These things don't have
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: fusion inside of them, so they're not glowing very very brightly.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: Most neutron stars are kind of dim, right, They just
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: sit there and they're cooling gradually, though you know, they
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: can get bigger if something else comes behind, like dumps
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: a huge load of pasta on them. So they're hard
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: to see unless they're like in a binary system. So
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: for example, there's another star nearby and they're strong gravity
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: is affecting that star. So if you see like a
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: normal star and then nothing nearby it, then you can say, oh,
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: there must be something there because of its gravity. You
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: can argue about whether it's a black hole or a
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: neutron star based on its mass. So it's one way
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: to know that they are there. You can also see
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: them directly if they are pulsars. So a neutron stars
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: is heavy, heavy object. It's also spinning really really fast,
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: right because remember, angular momentum is conserved. If you take
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: an object which was big and spinning and compress it,
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: it's still gonna be spinning, and now it's going to
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: spin much much faster in order to have the same
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: angular momentum. So sometimes these neutron stars spin super fast,
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: and they also sometimes shoot out energy from their polls,
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: and if there's a misalignment between where they're shooting energy
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: out and the spin axis, then this beam that they
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: shoot out sort of sweeps across the universe, and if
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: it passes Earth, then we see it. And that's what
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: a pulsar is. So some action of neutron stars we
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: can see because they are pulsars and they're pointed right
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: in the exact direction where we can see them. But
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: most neutron stars we cannot observe directly, right, because we
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: call them stars, but they're really not sort of shining
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: in the bright night sky unless, like you said, they
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: somehow have this spin and the somehows shooting a beam
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: in a particular direction, which is what pulsars are. Yeah,
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: you can argue about exactly what is a star and
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: whether these count. You know, there's sort of the endpoint
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: of the life of a star. You definitely wouldn't call
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: a black hole a star, right, even though it's also
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: the endpoint of the life of a star. So these
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: things do emit some light, and so the one way
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: to see them is if there are pulsars. Another way
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: to see them is to see X rays from their surface.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: So they don't glow in the visible light, but sometimes
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: X rays leak out of their surface. If there's like
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: a crack in the surface of the neutron star or
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: like a hot spot, it can emit some X rays.
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: And we have X ray telescopes that are able to
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: see those X rays see of photons from these distant stars,
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: and that can help us see that a neutron star
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: is there. So we think there's like a billion of
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: these things floating out there. In our galaxy, but most
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: of them are basically invisible to us. Yeah. I was
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: gonna ask next whether we have a picture of a
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: neutron star, but actually then I realized we don't really
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: have a picture of anything outside of the Solar system, right, Like,
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: we don't really have a full on picture of any
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: star out there in the universe. We just know them
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: as pinpoints. That's interesting. I mean, we certainly have a
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: picture of them, right Even a pin point is a picture.
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: It's light from the star. So yeah, I guess we
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: do have some, you know, pictures of these stars, but
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: not in a lot of great resolution, certainly not the
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: way we can look at our own son, for example.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: But yeah, we don't have pictures of these neutron stars
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: at all. In most of the cases, all we have
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: is like a stream of X rays, so like a
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: time series when we say, oh, we saw some X rays,
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: Oh we didn't see anymore. Now we saw some more,
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: because the entire neutron star doesn't admit X rays, just
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: little cracks and hot spots on the surface, and so
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: sometimes the hot spot will be like around the back
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: of the neutron star, and sometimes will be on the
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: front of the neutron star. So you can learn a
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: lot about the neutron star from these X rays. Yeah,
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: and maybe it'll let you see inside of him like
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: regular X rays. And so let's get into more amazing
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: facts about neutron stars and also talk about what could
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: be going on inside of him. But first let's take
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: a quick break. We're talking about neutron stars and what's
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: going on inside of them. I'm guessing it's non neutral things.
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: If we have a whole episode about them, Well, there's
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: definitely a lot of neutrons inside there. It's hard to imagine,
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: like and to really conceptualize what this stuff is that's
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: inside a neutron star because you've taken normal matter and
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: you've squeezed it down to incredible densities. You know, this stuff,
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: whatever it is, is a hundred trillion times denser than
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: anything we have on Earth. You know, you think you
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: ate a heavy lunch, that's nothing compared to like a
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: spoonful of neutron star. Yeah, Like, how much is a
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: spoonful of a neutron star weight? Well, here on Earth
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: they would weigh three billion tons just one table spoon
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: of neutron star material. Of course, if you had it
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: here on Earth, it would explode because it's under great pressure.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: But you know, just to sort of like conceptualize how
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: dense it is when it's in its location, it's a
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: crazy amount of mass. It would explode in your mouth.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: I guess like a flavor explosion, like a flavor explosion exactly.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: They should have like a summer drink called Neutron Star,
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: you know, added to our online store. I was thinking
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: like a seven eleven crossover episode. You know, you mean
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: like an icy kind of like a slushy. Yeah, a
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: Neutron Star slurpy. You know. My daughter went in to
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: get a slurpy recently and she came back with one.
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: I said what flavor is it? And she said blue?
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: And I was like, blue is not a flavor and
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: she said, well, the guy asked me what flavor I
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: wanted and I said blue, and this is what he
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: gave me. That's thought. She was going to say, all
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: of them, don't know what you're supposed to do mixing
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: them all up. I don't know. Then we'll get gray,
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: won't you. Nobody wants to get a gray slushy, and
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: I think it comes out chocolate chocolate color. That sounds delicious.
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: Maybe it's like neutron star chocolate. But anyways, back to
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: neutron stars, I guess the question is what would it
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: look like if I'm sitting in front of a neutron star.
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: I know we want to get into it, but like
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: if I was sitting outside of it and it's like,
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: you know, a few light year or a half of
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: a U from a neutron star, what would I be seen?
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: So if you're close enough to you know, this thing
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: is hot, so it's going to miss some light and
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: you're also gonna see hot spots from its surface. But
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: one thing about a neutron star is that the gravity
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: is so strong and near the neutron star that it
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: distorts the space around it, sort of the way a
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: black hole does. We're used to thinking about this for
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: black holes. You know that if you're in front of
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: a black hole, you're looking at the event horizon. You're
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: not only seeing the part of the event horizon that's
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: on your side of it. You can also see around
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: the back of the black hole because photons emitted near
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: there would be bent by the curvature of ace and
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: come to your eyeballs. The same thing is true around
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: neutron stars because they are so incredibly dense. Right, the
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: gravitational field at the surface of a neutron star is
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: two hundred billion times stronger than the gravitational forces on
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: the surface of the Earth. So if you're looking at
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: a neutron star, you can not only see the front
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: of it, you can also see the back of it
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: at the same time. So if you're on a neutron star,
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: you would wait two hundred billion times more than you
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: do now. Yeah, so start working out so I can
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: I can stand up, is that what you mean? Or
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: so I can lose weight so you can survive. Man,
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: that thing would tear you to shreds. Not only is
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: the force of gravity very very strong, but it varies
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: very quickly, you know, and so you get tidal forces.
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: The difference between the gravitational force on your head and
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: on your shoulders would be very strong enough to rip
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: your head off of your shoulders. So I wouldn't recommend
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: a trip to a neutron star. Would there be a
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: spectification point like in a black hole? Yeah, well, before
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: you got to the surface of the neutron star, you
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: would be torn apart because the title forces would be
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: very very strong. Remember, this thing only has the mass
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: of the Sun right so far away. It has the
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: same gravitational force as the Sun, but you can get
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: much much closer to all of that mass because it's
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: compressed down to just like you know, ten or twenty kilometers,
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: whereas our Sun is huge. So if you're on the
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: surface of our Sun, you're very far away from the
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: gravitational center of mass, whereas if you're in the surface
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: of the neutron star, you're only ten kilometers from an
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: entire star's worth of mass. That's why the gravitational forces
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: are so much stronger for the same amount of mass,
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: because you can get closer to it. So you and
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: the spaghetti head for lunch would turn into spaghetti exactly.
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: You would be postified. Right. Well, I guess the big
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: good question now is why is it even called the
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: neutron star? Like is it full of neutrons basically? And
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: how did a regular sun, which is what it was
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: before it's supernova and collapse into a neutron star is
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: made out of all kinds of stuff, right, like iron
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: and all kinds of complex elements and electrons and protons,
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: But now it seems to have collapsed into something that
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: you now call a neutron star. So is that everything
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: just turned into neutrons or what? Yeah, everything turns into neutrons. Right.
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: You have your atom which has neutrons, protons, and electrons
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: in it, right, Well, what happens if you squeeze that
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: down really really far, if you really push a bunch
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: of that stuff together, Well, if you get the electron
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: and the proton close enough to each other, well, you know,
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: they have opposite charges and so they actually kind of
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: like to hang out together. So if you squeeze them
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: down enough, the proton captures the electron, the electron gets
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: like eaten by the proton, and that converts it into
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: a neutron. It's exactly the opposite process of neutron decay
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: that we talked about recently on the podcast, where a
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: neutron turns into a proton and electron. This is the
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: reverse process. So you put enough energy into it, you
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: can reverse basically anything that happens in the universe. And
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: so this is what happens. If you squeeze down matter,
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: all the protons and electrons emerge and become neutrons. So
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: usually electrons and protons are attracted to each other, but
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: they don't get together and merge. Right, what's keeping them apart? Well,
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: what's keeping them apart usually is that the electron is
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: in a stable state, just the way, for example, the
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: Earth is in a stable state around the Sun. The
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: Earth and the Sun attract each other. There's gravity there. Right,
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: Why doesn't the Earth collapse into the Sun. Because it
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: has enough energy to resist that, right, it can stay
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: in a stable orbit. And so you shouldn't be thinking
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: about electrons as orbiting protons. But they have enough energy,
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: they have a minimum energy in their stable solution to
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: avoid collapsing into the proton. And so here you're overcoming that, right,
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: you are like squeezing the electron down. You're applying external pressure.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: And so that's why an electron doesn't collapse into the proton,
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: because it has enough energy to avoid it. But that's
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: if it's by itself. If you squeeze on if you
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: push on it from the outside, if you can find
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: it to a location the size of the proton, then
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: it gets captured by the proton. And then what happens
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: The proton eats the electron. Right, Because the proton is
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: made out of three quarks and a neutron is made
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: out of three quarks. So then does the electron just
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: sort of like flip one of the corks or or something. Yeah,
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: that's exactly what happens. Remember, a proton is two up
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: corks and a down and a neutron is two down
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: corks and an up. So what happens when an electron
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: is captured is that you're converting one of those up
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: corks into a down cork, and so that converts the
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: proton into a neutron. There's also one more step because
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: you can't just delete electrons from the universe, so you
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: also need to create an electron neutrino. Interesting, So it's
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: like the proton eats the electrons and then then they
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: become neutral. And then what happens to all of these neutrinos,
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: It just gets spit out into space. Yeah, they get
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: spit out into space because neutrinos mostly see stuff in
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: the universe as transparent, right, they hardly interact with anything.
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: They can go through a light year of lead without interacting,
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: and so mostly they just get shot out while it's collapsing. Remember,
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: supernova is the process that produces these neutron stars. Emit
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: most of their energy via neutrinos, right, something like of
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: the energy of a supernova is not emitted visually, not
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: in the optical, not via photo tons at all, but
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: via new trinos. And so this is part of the
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: process that creates all of those neutrinos when the supernova happens. Yeah,
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: supernovas are known to be silent, but deadly silent and invisible.
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: Supernovas are incredible because you can see them in with
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: a naked eye, right, that's how bright they are. All
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: of a sudden, a star becomes as bright as the
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: entire galaxy. And that's just the visible light we're talking about.
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: It turns out there's a hundred times more energy in
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: the new trinos. But a whole fun podcast episode about
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: how supernovas can be seen first in new trinos with
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: our new trino telescopes. And so this is part of
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: the process. Creating those neutron stars means making neutrons, which
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: also requires you to make the new trinos because you've
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: got to balance the books of particle physics in the end. Right,
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: So they're calling neutron stars, but actually not all of
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: it inside our neutrons, and so maybe can maybe step
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: us through a little bit, like asked, the supernova is collapsing,
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: and as things are getting squeezed together, like what's happening
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: to all those atoms of the bigger elements. They're just
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: getting broken up and squeezed together or they just explode.
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: What's going on? So some of them get broken up,
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: and depends on where they end up. So we'll learn
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: about it as we step through the layers of the
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: neutron star. But near the outside of the neutron star,
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: for example, the atoms don't get broken up. You get
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: atomic nuclei still, for example, so the outer crust of
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: a neutron star is atomic nuclei. You can have helium there,
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: you can have carbon, you can have oxygen, this kind
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: of stuff. It's only as you get deeper in that
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: these nuclei get squished together so far that the separation
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: between the nuclei breakdown, and then you just get like
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: a sea of neutrons, or maybe a sea of corks,
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: or maybe even weirder stuff. And so you can't really
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: think about it as like lead or iron or carbon
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: anymore because it's gotten broken up into its constituent bits
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: that's at the very center. But you're saying that the
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: crust of a neutron star you could get you just
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: have regular stuff. Then, yeah, at the crust you just
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: have regular stuff, like you might be able to like
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: stand on it maybe or is it all sort of
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: like in a liquid or gas form. So there is
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: an atmosphere of a neutron star. Actually there's like a
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: gaseous atmosphere, but it's micrometers thick, like micrometers. So this
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: thing is like ten kilometers or fifteen kilometers wide, and
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: it has an atmosphere and that's like micrometers of gas
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: just above the surface. And then the surface itself is hard,
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: it's like brittle, it's like a crunchy, right, and it's
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: made of atomic nuclei. So these are things that used
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: to be part of the star, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, whatever,
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: and now it's crystallized into this like lattice on the
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: outside of the star, which is very very smooth because
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: the gravity is so strong that you basically can't form
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: any hills. So they think that like the maximum elevation
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: on the surface of a neutron star might be like
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: one millimeter, or gravity like pulls it back down. So
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: if you're standing next to a neutron star. What you
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: would see is a basically a big, shiny smooth ball, right,
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: made out of some of these heavier elements, almost perfectly
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: shiny smooth ball. Really incredible how spherical this thing will be,
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: But there will be some exceptions because the crust is brittle.
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: The crust can crack, right, it's under incredible pressure gravity
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: squeezing it down, and sometimes you get like a little
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: bit of a weakness, and so you can get like
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: a star quake because you've got a crack in this
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: crust and things like a just a little bit, and
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: that's when, for example, X rays can leak out. So
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: the reason you get X rays is from these hotspots,
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: which can cause these little neutron star quakes on the surface.
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: But what if it's spinning, wouldn't it also kind of
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: give it a weird shape, right, It is spinning, and
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: so that changes it from a spherical a little bit, right,
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: But it's also very very compact gravitationally, how far something
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: goes from sphericals a balance between how fast it's spinning
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: and also how strong the gravity is. So we've never
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: seen one of these things. But you're right, it wouldn't
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: be perfectly spherical, though it still would be very very smooth.
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: All right, So I'm standing on top of a neutron star.
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: I wait, two hundred billion times more than I normally do.
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: And so I take a pick ax and I cracked
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: the surface. What do I see inside? So you gotta
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: dig a little bit wet. So inside the neutron star
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: is a little bit more crust. You've got to dig
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: a little bit into it before you get to sort
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: of like the next layer. And we're not sure, of course,
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: about any of this. A lot of this is speculation.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: These are models that we've developed based on our calculations
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: from our understanding of the strong force and gravity, etcetera.
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: But we think that this outer crust is like three
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: hundred to five hundred meters thick. Once you penetrate through
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: the crust, then these elements are no longer able to
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: hold onto themselves, right, They're squeezed together by pressure, and
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: so you get this like soup of neutrons that we
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: think are just sort of like floating around there where
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: the atoms themselves are getting broken up, so they're no
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: longer really like have their identity as an element. I see,
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: so on the shell you still had the heavier elements
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: like lead and carbon, but then now they're being squeezed
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: together so much they what they like, they just break
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: apart the nuclei or they merged together. They do both.
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: They sort of varies. As you go in near the
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: outer layers of this part. They first merged together because
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: they're getting squeezed together, and so you have weird fusion happening.
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: You have like weird heavy elements that couldn't exist in
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: other situations, you know, that wouldn't be stable out there
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: on their own in the universe. But under this crazy pressure,
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: we think you can form like ridiculously heavy elements, you know,
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: things with huge numbers of neutrons on them. As you
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: go further and further in, things become more and more
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: neutron e Right. It's not pure neutrons. You still have
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: some protons and some electrons. Not every single proton and
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: electron has been converted into a neutron. But as you
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: go inwards you have like a higher and higher fraction
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: of neutrons m Because I guess as you squeeze this
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: stuff together, that's what it all ends up as, right,
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: just play neutrons because all of the electrons, and the
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: protons eat each other exactly, and we think that overall
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: there's gonna be a charge balance. So there is a
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: proton for every electron, and so you squeeze it hard
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: enough and they'll find each other eventually. But so as
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: you go deeper and deeper, and you get like a
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: higher and higher fraction of neutrons, and then what happens
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: as you go in deeper. As we go in deeper
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: is where the real mystery is, right, and so you
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: have this inner core where we don't really know what's
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: going on, Like we think maybe there's some super fluid
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: neutron matter there, Like we think that maybe under these
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: conditions and neutrons just like slide around past each other
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: and have all this weird chemistry. This is a lot
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: of where the question marks are. You might wonder, like, well,
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: why is it a question mark? Can't we just take
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: the laws of physics that we have gravity and the
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: strong force and do the calculations and say what does
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: it predict? It's not always so easy, right to say
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: I know what the laws are, what's going to happen.
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: We can't even do that for lots of situations. You know,
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: if you just gave me quantum mechanics and a baseball
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: and said, here's ten to the twenty nine particles, what
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: do they do next? It would be very very hard
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: for me to come up with like parabolic motion. It's
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: not easy always to go from the underlying laws to
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: predicting what's going to happen on the macroscopic scale, and
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: especially when things are very very strong, when the forces
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: are very powerful. Here you have gravity, which is unusually
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: powerful because it's so dense, and you have this strong
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: force doing its thing with very short distances. These things
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: are exchanging incredible numbers of gluons. So we just don't
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: know how to do that calculation. Even if the laws
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: that we have, the ideas that we have about what's
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: fundamentally guiding it are true, we don't know how to
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: take those and predict in great detail what's going on inside.
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: It just gets too crazy. It just gets too crazy er.
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: It's too many things to keep track of. So we've tried,
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: and we have a few ideas. People make approximations this
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: way or approximations that way to say maybe it's like this,
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: or maybe this equation will work. But everybody's reaching past
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: the edge of what they really know. So there's a
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: bunch of speculative ideas and they're all really different, and
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: they're all totally different from each other, and so we'd
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: love to see it. We'd love to understand what's going
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: on there, because it would tell us, oh, this idea
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: is correct, or actually, none of your ideas are correct,
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: and something totally weird and unexpected happens. So that's what
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: we're trying to do. Unfortunately, of course, we can't see
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: the inside of the neutron star. We have to just
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: try to guess what's going on based on what we
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: can see from outside. All right, well, let's get to
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: the core of this mystery and think about what exciting
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: and maybe delicious things could be inside at the core
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: of neutron stars. But first let's take another quick break.
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: All right, we're talking about neutron stars and what is
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: inside of him, and I'm sort of getting the picture, Daniel, Dad,
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: inside of a neutron star are not necessarily neutrons. There
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: seems to be a lot of other stuff. They should
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: be called mostly neutron stars. Neutron star, yeah, or neutrinas stars. Well,
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: all the neutrinos have left the building. Right, they took
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: their little weak forces and they ran away. I see
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: there are no Italians in the room anymore. You're free
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: to make whatever pasta you want. All the rules are
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: out the window. How a d is the inside of
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: a neutron star? So we correct the heart surface of
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: a neutron star. We dug in a little bit. When
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: you get this soup of electrons, the neutrons maybe like
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: super deeper heavy atoms, but eventually those break down as
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: you go deeper and deeper into the neutron start to
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: you get basically just neutrons, right, like a sea of neutrons.
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: But then what happens as you go even further in,
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: So we don't know what those neutrons do, and that's
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: fundamentally the question, Like if you have a bunch of
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: neutrons and you squeeze them into these incredibly dense situations,
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: what do they do? Do they form a super fluid
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: or do they do something else? Something weird? But you're
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: still calling them neutrons because like, inside of a neutrons
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: are three quarks. But so you're saying at this point,
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: like each triplet of quarks is still held together. They're
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: just interacting with other triplets of neutrons, or have the
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: corks sort of even broken out of that. That's one
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: of the options, right, Do the neutrons stay together and
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: form weird shapes, weird emergence structures, or do they break down?
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: And really we should be talking about cork matter, you know,
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: and cork gluon plasmas. That's one of the options that's
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: on the table. But to me, it's a great example
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: of some of the deepest mysteries at the heart of
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: our understanding of the universe, you know, like what emerges.
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: You can take the basic rules of physics, and incredible
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: structures emerge, you know, atoms and ice cream and galaxies,
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: all these things sort of emerge from the underlying complexity.
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: And it's exciting to see a situation where we just
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: don't know what will emerge. You put the neutrons in
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: this situation, maybe they'll just be a crazy, chaotic soup,
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: but maybe new structures will form, right, And so people
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: have exciting ideas for what kind of weird structures might
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: form from neutrons in these configurations, right, because, as you said,
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: I think at this point it's so crazy and so dance.
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: There's only two forces involved. The gravity that's keeping them
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: all in and keeping them attracted to each other, and
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: also the strong force, which is what bringing in the
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: courts together, help holding the courts together, or what does
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: this strong force do? Does a strong force repel? Also
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: here it just attracts, right. The strong force is really
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: really weird and has a very strange behavior with distance,
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: but under short distance and will attract quarks and gluons
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: to each other. And we think of protons and neutrons
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: as sort of like balanced in the strong force, that
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: all the quarks are bound together into this state that
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: has overall no strong charge, no color. But that's not
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: really true. If you get close up enough to a proton.
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: If you get close up enough to a proton, then
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: you'll be like closer to part of it then to
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: the backside of it, and so you'll still feel a
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: little bit of that effective color, right, And so if
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: you get close up enough to a proton with your corks,
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: then your corks will start talking to the quarks inside
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: that proton. And that's for example, why a nucleus holds together.
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: Remember a nucleus is filled with protons and neutrons, is
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: only positive electric charges there, Why doesn't it blow apart
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: Because the quarks inside the protons and neutrons are talking
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: to each other. They're making it sticky. And so inside
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: a neutron star, the strong forces pulling these things together
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: the same way gravity is. Right, So you have all
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: these neutrons, then these triplets of corks held together by gravity,
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: and you're saying that they can sort of form matter
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: like they can you know, arrange themselves in special, maybe
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: delicious ways. Yeah, well, we don't know for sure, but
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: we have done supercomputer studies where we simulate these things.
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: We put in the laws of nature and we just
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: see sort of what happens, and interesting stuff does seem
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: to emerge. After like two hundred and fifty computer years
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: of calculations, they see these weird blobs form, and so
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: as things get denser, they form these sort of semi
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: spherical blobs of matter where things sort of like clumped
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: together into these huge blobs of neutrons with a few
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: protons mixed in. And so they called these things Nioki
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: might be Italian, you know, potato blobs that people enjoy
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: eating for lunch. I guess it's sort of like if
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: you take a whole bunch of carbon and atoms, loose atoms,
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: and you squeeze them together enough at some point they'll
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: sort of form into a diamond or some sort of shape. Right.
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: That's kind of what's happening here, is that you're taking
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: these neutrons and you're squeezing them so much they kind
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: of lock into these shapes. Yeah, and so instead of
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: having like a sleet ocean where everything is just mixed together,
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: they form a blobs of a certain size. Right, They
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: like distinguished themselves say, oh, we'd like to have this
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: many neutrons into a blob with a few protons mixed
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: in would have the same thing over there. So instead
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: of being like totally indeterminate, they seem to want to
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: form these structures. Right. And if you squeeze even further
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: than these blobs form these long rods. They like come
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: together to make these long rods, which looks sort of
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: like spaghetti. Well, I mean, they could look like a
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: lot of things, bread sticks, steel bars, but we're we're
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: you're you're staying with the pasta analogy. They sort of
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: look like spaghetti. I didn't name any of these things.
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: I'm just enjoying saying them but yeah, they could have
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: called them, you know, twizzlers or bread sticks or whatever.
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: But they look sort of like spaghetti, and they form
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: these long rods. They're parallel, right. Don't think of spaghetti
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: like a big mess on your plate. Think of spaghetti
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: sort of the way it comes in the package from
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: the store. They're all these rods in parallel with each other.
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: So they call this nuclear pasta, right, right, And so
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: they kept going, and all the other shapes that neutrons
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: can form have sort of a pasta analogy. Right. Yeah,
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: you keep going, you keep squeezing this stuff down, and
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: they think, or they predict from these calculations that the
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: spaghetti will merge together to form sheets. So then you
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: have nuclear lasagna, these like layers of this weird kind
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: of matter that's mostly neutrons with a few protons in it.
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: And it's very very strong stuff. In their calculations, this
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: stuff has incredible strength. It's like very hard to break
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: it apart. It might be some of the strongest stuff
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: in the universe. You mean, these lasagna sheets of neutrons,
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: and these Lasagna sheets of neutrons, they're not just like
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: forming and then breaking up and then reforming it's not
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: like a crazy gas or a plasma. Right. These things
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: are like very very strong sheets of a weird kind
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: of matter. Right. It's not like a solid or liquid
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: or exactly like a crystal made out of almost all neutrons. Right,
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: it's not like a regular lattice of atoms like the
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: way we think of like a piece of steel. Right.
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: And you're saying some of those strongest stuff in universe
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: because it's it's basically surviving these intense and crazy pressures
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: inside of the neutron star. But I guess if you
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: took it out of the neutron star, which is blow up, Yeah,
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: it would probably blow up. We don't know, right, Maybe
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: it's strong enough it will hold itself together. Right, Because,
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: for example, diamonds are formed under very crazy conditions, but
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: then they're stable, so you pull them out from the
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: heart of the Earth where they were made, they don't explode.
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: So maybe nuclear pasta doesn't explode. We just don't know.
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: But if you keep squeezing this stuff together, you squeeze
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: the Lasagna sheets together, it forms this thing called anti spaghetti,
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: which is like a blob of matter with holes in it,
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: like long, thin spaghetti holes sort of like drilled through it. Wait,
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: what kind of like pant pasta like Swiss cheese. More
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: like Swiss cheese, Yeah, than penna pasta, right, more like
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: parmiers Maybe should say parmesan or what's in the Italian
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: cheese with holds in it. But those holes are bubbles
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: right here. We're talking about holes that are like long tubes.
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: So it's like wormholes through a block of parmesan. It's
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: more like a clump of bucatinia then perhaps, yeah, like
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: a clumb of bukatina. Any They called it anti spaghetti
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: because it's like take the spaghetti state and flip it
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: so that everything that was matter is now a hole
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: and everything that was a whole is now matter. So
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: if you add spaghetti and anti spaghetti together, you get,
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: you know, like a complete block of matter. You get
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: anti pasta. You annihilate your stomach, and that's not even
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: like the core of the neutron star. Like if you
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: go further in then things start to even this pasta
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: can't survive. Yeah, so they think that this pasta is
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: maybe like a layer that's like a hundred meters thick,
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: and as you go even deeper, you know, we're in
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: a huge question mark territory. But some people speculate that
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: you might get a quark gluon plasma or something else,
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: this stuff called cork matter, or as you suggested earlier,
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: you no longer really can think about this stuff in
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: terms of neutrons and protons anymore, because everything is just
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: interacting with everything else. If it's a high enough energy,
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: if the high enough temperature, that doesn't really matter that
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: you used to call vs three quarks and neutron and
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: those three quarks of proton. Now they're all talking to
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: each other, so it's just like a big sea of
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: quarks and gluons. I thought at the center you would
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: find Daniel going, how this taste the same? That's all
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: the same stuff. I bet a bite of nuclear lasagna
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: and nuclear anti spaghetti tastes just about the same. The
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: pats on how the I guess quark glulon sauce coats
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: the shapes now. But I think what you're saying is
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: that you get to a point where it doesn't make
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: sense to call things uh neutron, because like the separation
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: between a triple of quarks and a triple of corks
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: here is sort of gone. Like you basically crack open
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: those neutrons and it's just a soup of of the
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: what's inside. Yeah, and that's the possibility, right. It might
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: be that the conditions are intense enough to create that,
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: but we're not sure, right, it might be that instead,
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: other things happen. So there are other possibilities on the list.
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: Some people think you might form weird, strange kinds of
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: matter inside things like hyperon matter or kaon matter. These
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: are other versions of nucleons. But instead of having just
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: up quirks and down quirks, now you have strange quirks
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: as well, just ing And then I guess you can
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: break things down further because corks are fundamental particles in
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: the universe, right, or could you maybe squeeze them down
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: to like just pure energy. Well, we don't know the
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: corks are fundamental, right, They are as fundamental as we
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: have discovered. We don't know that there's anything inside of cork,
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: but we have lots of hints that suggests that they
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: shouldn't be fundamental. They are all these unexplained patterns among
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: the corks, the kind of patterns you see when they're
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: made out of something smaller, something more fundamental, like we
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: saw patterns in the periodic table. Those were clues that
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: atoms were actually made of smaller building blocks you could
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: arrange in lots of different ways. We see similar patterns
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: in the corks that suggests that they should probably be
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: made of something smaller, but we've never seen it. So
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: it's possible that the heart of neutron stars, you go
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: beyond cork gluon plasma, and you can even go inside
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: the corks, and maybe the things inside corks break open
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: and talk to each other. We just don't know, all right,
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: So then, uh, I guess what's inside when nintron star?
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: The answer is we're not quite sure. I mean, defly
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: you had neutrons there, but maybe at the core you
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: get to something that is not even neutrons, or maybe
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: even quarts, is what you're saying. Yeah, we just don't know.
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: It's a big question mark, and lots of different calculations
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: lead to different predictions, which is confusing and also exciting
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: because it means that we can learn something about the universe. Unfortunately,
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: we can't see the inside of neutron stars directly. Right
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: Even if you were near a neutron star, how would
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: you see what's going on inside it. We have the
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: same question with our own star. We don't really understand
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: all the plasmac currens inside the Sun and why it
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: creates this magnetic field which flips every eleven years because
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: we can't go inside it. We can only look at
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: it from the outside. Well, these are even dimmer objects
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: much further away, so they're even harder to study. But
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: you know, we can use our X ray telescopes to
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: look for these photons from these cracks on the surface
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: of the neutron star, and those can give us a
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: lot of clues. They tell us something about the mass
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: and the radius of the neutron star, and we think
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: that knowing the mass and radius the neutron star will
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: help us try to figure out what's going on at
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: the core of it. Because you're building this neutron star
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: out of different kinds of stuff, So one idea for
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: what's of the heart of a neutron star will give
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: you different predictions for the masses and the radio you
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: see than another idea. M I guess the problem is that,
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: like in our son, the one we have here, we
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: can sort of look in using our equations because things
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: aren't that extreme yet, Like the regular laws of physics
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: still work. But you know, with a neutron star, you
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: start of getting up to that point where things start
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: to get a little crazy, right, Like you're sort of
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: starting to get into black hole territory where you don't
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: even know if your loss of physics are the same. Yeah,
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: we don't know if these hold. And you know, one
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: of the guiding equations of these things is called the
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: Tulman open hyber Molcov equation, which is the thing that
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: constrains the structure of a spherically symmetric object that's homogeneous.
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: It's all one kind of material which is in gravitational equilibrium.
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: So that's like the simplest model we have for a
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: neutron star, and it makes all sorts of predictions. And
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: some of those predictions are, for example, that there's a
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: connection between the mass and the radius of a neutron
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: star that if you fix the mass of it, that
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: also determines the radius. But when we look out into
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: the universe, does neutron stars don't seem to be following
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: that rule, Like we see some neutron stars that are
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: twenty five kilometers hy that have the mass of one
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: point four times the mass of the Sun and other
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: ones that are the massive two point one times the
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: mass of the Sun at the same radius, so they
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: break these rules, which, as you say, suggest that these
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: rules aren't complete, right, that something about what's going on
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: inside the neutron star is different from what we imagine,
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: from what our rules can currently predict, Which might mean
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: that it's like a new complex way that these rules
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: interact and new structures emerge. Or it might mean that
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: there is some new physics, something else going on, a
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: new force, something inside corks, something weird we haven't even imagined,
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: but I guess on like a black hole, like it
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: is maybe possible for us to one day get to
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: a neutron star and maybe actually sort of like touch
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: it and maybe even send probes into it. Do you
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: think it certainly is possible? Right? We can't even land
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: probes on the surface of Venus right now that lasts
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: more than like nineties seconds without getting crushed, And Venus
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: is the like, you know, a day on the beach
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: compared to the surface of a neutron star. But yeah,
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: you know, if you have a lot of faith in
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: our engineers and our pasta engineers, our pasta engineers maybe
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: they can imagine a way to drill into a neutron
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: star and see it. Yeah, it's not technically forbidden, it's
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: just very very difficult. Yeah, and they are out there,
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: and neutron stars just like black holes, and they have
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: lots of interesting secrets inside of them, right they do.
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: If we could know today what's going on inside a
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: neutron star, it would tell us so much about gravity
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: and the strong force, and also just like what our
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: universe can do. Remember that the part of the universe
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: we experience, this liquid, the solid, the gases, is just
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: a tiny, tiny slice of what the universe is capable of.
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: We don't really observe most of what the universe can do.
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: So I would love to let the universe show its colors,
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: you know, like go crazy in the kitchen universe, make
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: us some weird pasta. I want to see what you
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: can cook up. Yeah, it's almost like they're kind of
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: little lab experiments, right, or like they're like little labs,
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: Like you want to know what happens when you crushed
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: two quarts together. You know, that's what's happening inside of
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: a neutron star. So if you want to know what
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: happens go observe neutron stars. Yea, go observe neutron stars exactly.
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: I wish we could. But it's wonderful that these experiments
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: are happening, right Like, we can't create these things ourselves,
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: but it's fantastic that the universe has arranged for them
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: to happen so that we can study them. Unfortunately, they're
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: very difficult to approach and very very far away, so
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: there are some stumbling blocks there. But maybe one day
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: we'll be able to visit them, or we'll just get
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: more clever about observing them from the outside and using
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: that information to infer what's going on inside. Maybe it
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: will be the Italians to do it, since there are
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: the experts that's right, Maybe to be so offended by
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: these models of anti spaghetti that they will be motivated
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: to figure this out. And then your kids will be like, no,
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: I don't like that kind of pusta, not for me, thanks.
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: I want blue pasta. I want all the pastas squished together.
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: Next to you going to tell me that different colors
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: of pasta change the flavor, Well, depen's how they get
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: their color, but they do change. Do you really want
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: to spend another hour talking about this. Have you never
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: had squitting pasta or vegetable pasta? All right, that's a
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: topic for our spinoff pasta podcast. Daniel and Jorge argue
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: about food. Daniel and Jorge eat the Universe. Well, I
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: hope you enjoyed that discussion, and it's certainly made me
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: a little bit hungry. I need to go have lunch now,
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: So thanks for joining us, see you next time. Thanks
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. For more
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: podcast from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah,