Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / What weird thing in space is pulsing every 20 minutes?

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What weird thing in space is pulsing every 20 minutes? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, is there still more stuff to discover out
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: there in space? Oh?
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: My gosh, so much more stuff. Are you looking forward
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: to some more new discoveries?
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: Well, I just kind of hope I'm not too.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: Late, too late for what?
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: What do you mean, too late to get to name
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: one of these crazy things?
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: Do you have a particularly good idea for a name?
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: Well, I feel like scientists needs some new material like quasar, pulsar, blazar, masar, magnetar.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: We need a new direction, we need some freshness.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: All right, I'm terrified to hear what you have in mind.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: I was thinking something like the Katie Orb. That has
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: a nice ring to it.
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: Right, all right, I'll send that in. But are you
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: as sured that's what you want? I mean, what if
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: we discover something gross, like a planet made of slime
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: and it gets called the Katie Orb?
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: Daniel, I would be honored.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: Be careful what you wish for. Hi. I'm Daniel, I'm
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: I do want to discover a planet made of slime.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: I am Katie Golden. I'm stepping in for Jorge. I
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: typically do a podcast on animals, but I love talking
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: about planets because they're kind of like big animals, but
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: round and.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: Weird planets out there might have weird animals on it. Right.
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: Have you thought about starting a podcast on exozoology?
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: I feel like I would need a pretty good spaceship first,
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: and recording equipment that could span quite a bit of
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: broadcast distance.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: Well, I'm sure as soon as we discover planets filled
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: with slime and the creatures swimming around in them named
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: the Katie Orb, of course somebody will jump on the
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: podcast opportunity a podcast all about these weird, slimy aliens.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: It'll just be called a blobcast.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: The slime Cast. Well, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio, in which
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: we cast our minds out into the universe to think
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: about planets made of slime, planets made of diamonds, planets
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: made of all sorts of weird things, to wonder about
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: whether there are planets out there like ours, or whether
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: our planet is weird and unusual. We think about all
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: the strange stuff that's out there in the universe and
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: all the strange stuff we find here on Earth. The
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: quantum particles, frothing up between our toes all the way
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: up to the hearts of galaxies and the mammoth black
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: holes that live in them. We try to understand the
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: entire universe and explain it all to you while keeping
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: you laughing.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: All right, I'm ready to learn about the entire universe
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: in about an hour.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: My usual friend and co host Orge can't be here,
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: but we are very happy to have Katie along for
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: the ride to learn about weird stuff in outer space.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: I love weird stuff in outer space. I always like
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: to imagine there's some kind of giant space whale out
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: there making its way slowly towards us.
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: See. I knew you think about the universe and space
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: in terms of critters, right Who is out there? Who
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: is swimming through space? Who is jumping through an ocean
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: of slime?
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: It's hard not to anthropomorphize the universe otherwise it feels
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: very lonely. So I like to think that there's stuff
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: out there wriggling and slimming it up, and when you meet.
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: These space wheels, you're going to give them like a
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: nice slimy hug.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: Well, there is something fascinating about space and the universe
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: because it's such a vast frontier. We are trapped here
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: on this tiny little planet, looking up at the sky,
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: wondering about what's out there in space, and knowing that
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: it is chok full of discoveries waiting to be made.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: Every time we look up at the sky and invent
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: some new kind of eyeball for peering further out, or
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: hearing in a new frequency, or listening to a new
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: kind of particle, we always find something shocking, something weird,
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: something unexpected. Because space really is the final frontier. It's
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: a place to explore and to discover and to learn
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: what's out there in the universe, which of course is
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: the first step to understanding it.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: I do think it's an interesting way to look at things,
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: because there's this feeling sometimes I get of, well, science
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: has progressed pretty far, what more do we really have
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: to discover? But then when you try to think about
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: all of these unknown things about the universe, it becomes
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: pretty apparent that we know actually very little about the universe.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: Our understanding of the universe is very it is a
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: fraction of what is actually out there.
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, we know very little about how the universe works,
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: and part of that is because we have seen very
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: little of the universe. We have not significantly left the
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: Earth or its neighborhood. Right. Everything we have learned about
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: the way that stars form and galaxies come together in
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: the history of the universe, and dark matter and all
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: these big mysteries have come just from observing the universe
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: from Earth, which means we're limited to capturing photons and
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: other particles that happen to make their way to Earth.
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: And because things are very very far away, a lot
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: of the stuff gets missed. So if you think about
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: like the fraction of the Milky Way that we have
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: studied in detail, it's a tiny little tea spoon of
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: all the stuff that's out there. And the most interesting stuff,
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: of course, is the weird stuff, the rare stuff. So
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: as we continue to build our capabilities and develop new
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: techniques for looking out into the universe, we're going they
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: keep stumbling over weird cases, things that we thought were
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: impossible or that we never imagine we're out there in
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: the universe. Take an analogy from particle physics about learning
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: things from rare examples. When we smash protons together, we
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: make Higgs bosons sometimes but not very often. It takes
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: like trillions of collisions to make one Higgs boson. So
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: now apply that to astronomy. How many stars do you
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: have to look at until you find that one that
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: reveals something deep and true about the universe.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: I think that's also very unique because in a lot
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: of science, the key is looking at things that are replicable,
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: things that happen commonly, and it's not so much looking
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: at the extreme extraordinary cases. But I love that when
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: we look at the universe and the science of the universe,
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: like looking at these extreme cases can teach us so
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: much about the universe in general.
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, And one really valuable clue we have when we
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: look at the night sky is how it changes. And
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: humans have been doing this for thousands of years, the Mayans,
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: the Chinese, the Indians, the Greeks, the even the Babylonians.
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: We're looking up at the sky and noticing, of course
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: how it changes with the seasons, and learning from changes
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: in the sky, how things worked out there, how the
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: planets remove mo and all this kind of stuff. And
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: modern astronomy does the same thing. We look at the
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: night sky and we look for things changing, because things
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: changing are clues, their hints. When the star explodes, you
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: have an incredible opportunity to learn something about the life
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: cycle of a star, or if a new star appears.
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: Anything that's flickering or changing in the night sky is
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: literally sending you a message that something exciting is going on.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: The night sky. It's interesting because it has this feeling
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: of something permanent, right, Yes, it does. As we rotate
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: around the Sun and as we spin on our own axis,
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: the sky also will change. But the idea that there
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: are actual changes happening to the stars in the sky,
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: I think it's something that is somewhat unexpected, right because
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: you look at the sky and you think, like, well,
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: sky's going to be the same, those stars are going
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: to be their stars are permanent, but they're not. They
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: can have their own lifespan. And then sometimes we're lucky
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: enough to actually see changes in the stars themselves during
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: their lifespans exactly.
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: And it's a really important clue about the nature of
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: deep time. It gives us this different perspective. We know
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: actually that the universe is quite chaotic and quite dynamic.
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: You know, even our Solar system. The planets move in
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: and out and migrate. We used to have another big
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: planet that got ejected when Saturn and Jupiter came into
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: the Inner Solar System and then went back out to
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: where we find them. Now we know that the whole
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: galaxy is histories of collisions with other galaxies. Everything is changing,
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: it's just doing it on a much, much, much longer timescale.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: And we are used to thinking about not seconds, not minutes,
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: not days, not hundreds of years, but sometimes millions of years.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: So when we are lucky enough to see something change
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: in the night sky, we're looking at a very rare moment,
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: a transition between periods that might last millions of years.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: So thinking about the night sky changing is really fun
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: because it helps you get that deep time perspective to
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: realize that the universe looks very different when you found forward.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: So when you say that these things take a lot
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: of time, are most of these changes very slow or
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: are there certain changes with stars that we can actually
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: see happening in real time, like an explosion or something
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: seems like it might actually be something that you see
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: over the course of minutes or hours or days. So
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: do we actually get to see things that happen rapidly
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: even though it took you know, an unfathomable amount of
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: time to get to that point.
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we do. Sometimes it's really exciting. There are things
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: like supernova that happen over minutes or days or months,
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: and you can actually find records of these. In ancient astronomy,
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: the Chinese were keeping track of what they called guest stars,
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: which are comments, and supernova's all the way back to
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: you know, a thousand BC. It's really incredible how long
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: their records go back. And so these are the moments
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: when we can really learn something about the night sky,
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: things that do happen on our time scale. Things we
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: can observe change in minutes or hours or even months,
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: and so that's a really fascinating opportunity to learn something
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: about the night sky. And today that's exactly what we're
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: going to talk about. An accidental discovery by an undergraduate
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: student of something very weird in the night sky, something
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: different from anything we have ever seen before.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: Flying slime monster visitor.
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: From the Katie Orb. Today on the podcast, we'll be
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: asking the question, what's the weird thing in space that's
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: pulsing every twenty minutes.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: You're telling me this isn't about a giant slime monster.
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: Though I'm saying, we don't know, I'm not ruling it out.
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: You know, maybe there is a giant slime monster out
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: there that burps every twenty minutes, and that's going to
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: be the answer, right. That's the joy of science is
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: not knowing the answer going in. So this is a
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: fairly recent result and one that astronomers have been puzzling over.
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: And if you listeners sent it to me and said,
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: what's going going on here? Can you explain it? And
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: I love digging into recent science discoveries to help people
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: understand the context of them, what we've learned, what really
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: is mysterious about it, and what the various possible explanations are.
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: And this one's especially fun because we get to talk
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: about all the things in the sky that pulse. But
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: before we dig in, of course, I wanted to know
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: if people already had heard about this and had ideas
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: for what might be pulsing in the sky every twenty minutes.
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: So thank you very much to our group of volunteers
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: who answer these questions. If you would like to join them,
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: please don't be shy. Everybody is welcome. Just write to
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: me too questions at Danielandjorge dot com. You can record
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: the answers in the privacy of your own living room
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: and then just delete them before sending to me if
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: you don't like so, think about it for a moment
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: before you hear these answers. Do you know what kind
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: of things in the sky can pulse every twenty minutes?
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: Here's what people had to say.
• 11:52
  Speaker 3: What pulses every twenty minutes? It can't be a pulsar,
• 11:55
  Speaker 3: because that's way too easy of a question for you guys.
• 11:57
  Speaker 3: But I believe that there's a heavenly body out there
• 12:00
  Speaker 3: that is producing a radio wave every eighty six seconds,
• 12:04
  Speaker 3: which I seem to believe is about twenty minutes, And
• 12:07
  Speaker 3: it was the little Green Man signal.
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: What object pulses every twenty minutes?
• 12:13
  Speaker 4: Well, I believe that pulsars pulse much more rapidly than that,
• 12:19
  Speaker 4: so I'm going I guessed, and might be something more
• 12:21
  Speaker 4: like a quasar. Pulsing makes me think of pulsars, so
• 12:27
  Speaker 4: spinning neutron stars, that's my guess. But I feel that
• 12:32
  Speaker 4: they can pulse they pose much faster than that, so
• 12:35
  Speaker 4: I'm not sure it.
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: Is a pulsar that blips every time. Jeff Basos earns
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: one million.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: Dollars, so I'm somewhat surprised that only one person mentioned
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: the idea of this being like the doings of aliens
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: or the handiwork of some organical life form.
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: Well, that's interesting. Is organic life typically that regular? I mean,
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: I know that humans can sense signals that pulse very
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: regularly because it's part of our sort of like digital
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: technological civilization. But are there examples in nature of things
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: that like pulse very regularly every twenty minutes?
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: Well, maybe not every twenty minutes, although there are some
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: animals that have very slow rates of this. But our
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: heart beats or something that makes me think of something
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: with a very regular pulsating mechanism. But yeah, something that
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: pulsates with this sort of regularity does actually make me
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: think of biological processes. They may not be exact down
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: to the nanosecond, but there are a lot of biological
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: processes where you have a sort of pulsing I'm not
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: sure what animal would have a heartbeat that is once
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: every twenty minutes, but some animals can slow down their
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: heart rates quite a bit when they go into a
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: sort of a state of torpore.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: Well, isn't heart rate connected to body mass like the
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: larger you are, the slower your heart rate.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: Generally speaking, it can also be dependent on your metabolism.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: So like a small thing like a wood frog that
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: freezes itself in the winter can slow its heart rate
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: down quite a bit, whereas a large thing that's running
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: is going to have a really fast heart rate. So
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: it has to do with your metabolism, which may have
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: something to do with your species or your size. Often
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: large things do have slower metabolisms, but it can also
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: depend on the state that you are in. So if
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: you're exercising, your heart rate's going to be pretty quick.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: If you're a wood frog and you've frozen yourself in
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: the winter to kind of hibernate, then your heartbeat is
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: going to be really really slow.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: Well, the direction I was thinking was, you know, a
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: little mouse has its heart rate very very fast, and
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: a human is slower, and a big whale is even slower.
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: So I was wondering, like, how big of a space
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: whale do you have to have to have a twenty
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: minute heartbeat? Maybe it's a planet sized slimeball space whale.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: I like where this is going.
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: Yes, we don't know, of course, whether this is an
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: actual alien slime whale or not. But we do know
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: that there are things in the night sky that pulse,
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: and lots of our listeners mentioned one of them pulsars
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: that we're going to dig into in a moment. But
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: there might be more things in the night sky that
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: pulse and that vary and that change than you might expect.
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: A lot of people look up for the night sky
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: and think that it's static, that it doesn't change, but
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: actually all stars have cycles. They're not just like static
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: burning balls of gas. They vary, they get brighter, they
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: get dimmer. Even our Sun, for example, changes its brightness
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: over an eleven year cycle.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: They're like huge and sort of deadly lava lamps.
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: That's exactly right, because there are these big balls of plasma.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: They're not just fire the way we have like a campfire.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: There's fusion going on, and there's all sorts of convection
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: and lots of complicated processes that we still do not
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: really understand very well. Our own star, the Sun, has
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: this weird eleven year cycle where it's magnetic field flips
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: every eleven years with crazy regularity as far as we
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: can tell, going back a very long time. And this
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: has to do with the currents of plasma inside the
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: Sun like flopping over on top of each other. You
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: can think of these things like big spaghetti noodles and
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: they get bound up by magnetic fields and then they
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: snap and twist. So something is going on inside our sun.
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: That's like a clock. It's like a universe clock. And
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: every eleven years the Sun flips its magnetic field, and
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: it also changes its brightness, not that much, like zero
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: point one percent over eleven year cycles, but it does change.
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: It is variable.
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: So this big bright spaghetti clock you were talking about currents,
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: it sounds like it has like these complex almost weather
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: patterns that follow a sort of timeline.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they have these big plasma tubes inside the sun,
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: these currents of these hot protons and electrons that are flowing,
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: and that helps make the magnetic field. Remember, the fields
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: come from moving charges, and the Sun is basically just
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: ionized hydrogen. You take the proton and the electron and
• 17:07
  Speaker 2: you give them so much energy that they don't want
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: to hang out together anymore. They want to be free,
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: so they are just flying around all of these charges
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: and then they flow in these big tubes and that's
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: what makes magnetic fields. But they like slip and slide
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: on top of each other, and sometimes they snap and
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: break and relax in various modes. It's extraordinarily complicated. We
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: don't have the technology to model the inside of the
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: sun very well because it is very complicated each of
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: the particles. Not only does it have location and momentum,
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: but you also have to think about their electromagnetic forces
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: between each other. These things can get very turbulent and
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: very chaotic, meaning that like a very small change in
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: one electron can cascade into a big effect for other electrons.
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: So you make a little mistake and it becomes very
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: quickly a big mistake. That's one of the things that
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: makes the Sun hard to model. It can be very
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: chaotic on its insides, and that's a weak point in
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: our science that sometimes we can simulate things because we
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: understand the fundamental rules, like we know electromagnetism, but we
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: can't necessarily model a lot of them all at once,
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: And the Sun is a lot of electrons to model.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: So you mentioned that it's very chaotic, but it also
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: may follow a sort of eleven year cycle. How do
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: you get things like cycles or regularity out of such
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: chaotic processes.
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they're chaotic in the sense that a small change
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: in the initial conditions can lead to a large change,
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: and that's a problem often for our simulations, that if
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: we don't get things exactly right, then our simulations go wrong.
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: Inside the star, the process can be quite stable. Actually,
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: there are things that keep it on track, you know,
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: the magnetic field configuration of these plasma tubes have energetic
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: minimums that they like to settle into. But then the
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: magnetic fields get stretched and twisted, and then there's a
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: new energetic minimum that forms and they snap over into that.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: And so that's the kind of thing that can give
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: you these regular processes. And our star is pretty constant
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: when it comes to this, but other stars are much
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: more dramatic. There's stars out there in the universe that
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: are very dramatically pulsating. They swell in size and they
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: also shrink, they get like bigger and smaller. Some of
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: these things pulse with a fairly regular frequency, or sometimes
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: multiple frequencies that can be either very regular or stochastic.
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: A classic example of these is very famous the cephids.
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: These are the ones that Hubble use to discover that
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: the universe is expanding because it's a very clever trick
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: to figuring out how far away these stars are by
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: how they are pulsating. It turns out if you measure
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: the period of their variation, like as they get brighter
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: and dimmer and brighter and dimmer, the time between being
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: bright and dim allows you to know the true brightness
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: of the star, Like there's a relationship there, whereas stars
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: that are pulsating faster might be brighter and stars that
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: are pulsating slower might be dimmer. And then you can
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: know how far away the star is because you can
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: measure the brightness here on Earth compared to the brightness
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: you know to be the case that you got from
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: the pulsation from the periodicity of the star, and that
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: tells you how far away it is. That was very
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: important early on for understanding the expansion of the universe,
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: because we just looked out of the sky and we
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: didn't know how far away are all these dots. Some
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: of them might be closer, some of them might be further.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: It's not always easy to tell. So the variability of
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: the night skies actually are very important handbills scientifically for
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: understanding like the three D structure of what we're.
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: Looking at so these sephids that were studied, we found
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: that they were starting to get demmer, so they were
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: starting to get further from Earth, showing that there was
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: an expansion of the universe.
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: So for the cephids, we can measure their velocity relative
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: to Earth because we look at the light from them
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: and we see how it's shifted. Stars that are moving
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: away from Earth are red shifted. The wavelengths of their
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: light has been extended because they're moving away from us.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: It's like a Doppler effect. So we can measure the
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: velocity of these stars. And then Hubble also was able
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: to measure the distance to these stars. He was able
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: to tell which ones were closer and which ones were
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: further away using this trick where he measured how they pulsed.
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: How they pulsed told him how bright they were, which
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: tells him how far away they are. So if he
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: knows how far away they are and he knows their velocity,
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: then he can compare those two things. And what Hubble
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: noticed was that stars that are further away seemed to
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: be moving away from us faster, and stars that are
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: closer by are moving away less fast. And what that
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: tells you is that the universe is expanding, that everything
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: is moving away from us, and things further away are
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: moving away faster. And that's the original Hubble's law, and
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: Hubble's constant relates these two things. How fast things are
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: expanding relative to how far away they are.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: Wow. So that's like we're able to tell things about
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: our universe just from the movement of stars. And because
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: these stars are pulsating, that gave us enough information to
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: be able to measure distance and velocity, which was the
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: key to understanding the.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And also this other great mind blowing moment of
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: understanding because we didn't know until then that there were
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: other galaxies in the universe. We thought we just had
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: this one galaxy and it was a bunch of stars
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: and that was it. And we saw these other little
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: smudges up in the sky that we now know are
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: other full galaxies, but we didn't know that at the time.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: They couldn't tell how far away they are, so they
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: thought they were just little clouds of gas that were
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: inside our galaxy. They didn't realize they were mammoth collections
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: of other stars much much further away until Hubble measured
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: their distance using these variable stars. Using these things pulsating
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: in those other galaxies, and he could tell, oh my gosh,
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: these things are super far away. We totally got this wrong,
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: and all of a sudden instantly your whole mental picture
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: of the universe expands from we have this one galaxy
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: floating in space to while the universe is littered with galaxies.
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: It's a complete mind blowing moment to realize that the
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: universe has so many more galaxies than just ours.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: It is also kind of wild that we once thought
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: we were the only galaxy. I find that somewhat I
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: guess egocentric. I'm not really sure I get it. I mean,
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: at one point we thought Earth was the center of
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: the universe, so to think we're the only galaxy kind
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: of makes sense too. But also it is a little
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: bit We're a little bit full of ourselves here in
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: the Milky Way, aren't we.
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: It can be really hard to put yourself in the
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: mindset of people who made assumptions one hundred years ago
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: or five hundred years ago. It seemed totally natural to
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: them at the time, and now to us seemed kind
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: of bonkers and obvious. It really goes to show you
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: how much our intuition is informed by science. You know,
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: what we think is obvious and natural has changed over
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: time as we've learned about the universe. And so that
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: tells you really shouldn't trust your intuition at all. It's
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: totally biased by what you've been told and how things
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: have been described to you.
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: So I shouldn't be trusting my intuition. That's saying it's
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: time for a nap break.
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: No, there you are on.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: All right. So we are back and we are talking
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: about the dynamic stars out there that pulse and change
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: and things that we can actually measure. So we talked
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: about these stars, the sephids that they're pulsating. Were the
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: pulsating of the sephids told us a lot about the
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: nature of the universe that it was expanding. It allowed
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: us to measure the distance to these stars. What are
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: other examples of stars changing that we can observe here
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: on Earth?
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: So pulsating stars are not the only example of stars
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: changing out there in the universe. We see all sorts
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: of things changing, and every time this happens, we try
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: to understand it, like what's going on? You know, people
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: have been working on understanding sephids for a long time.
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: Because we'd like to know, so, what's going on inside stars?
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: How does the energy dynamics work. In the case of stephids,
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: we have sort of an idea. People think that, like
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: something inside the star might become opaque so that the
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: radiation basically can't escape, and that makes the star a
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: little bit darker. And then the star puffs up because
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: it's absorbing that radiation instead of emitting it. It puffs
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: it up, and then it collapses again due to gravity.
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: So there's some sort of cycle there. But these stars
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: just go to do this thing over and over again.
• 25:26
  Speaker 2: There are other kinds of stars that are much more dramatic,
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: where you have like huge amounts of material blown out
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: of the star, called like flare stars. Some of these
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: things can get very dramatic, Like the star can grow
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: in brightness by a factor of five or six in
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: just like thirty minutes. So imagine you're like sitting on
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: a planet near one of these stars, your sun bathing nicely,
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: and all of a sudden, the star is like six
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: times as bright as it was just a half an
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: hour ago.
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: It's like that black Hole Sun music video, which gives
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: me a migraine I watch it is this a repeating
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: pattern or does it just happen one and once and done.
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: These things are unpredictable. They're not like very regular. So
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: you'll be watching the star and all of a sudden,
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: it'll get much much brighter, very briefly, and then it'll
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: dim back down again, and they think it might be
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: something going on inside the star that's blowing out a
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: huge amount of material, and then it's settled down again.
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: There must be something chaotic happening inside these stars. But
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: this is not the kind of thing we expect our
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: son to do. Most of the flare stars that are
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: out there tend to be of the red dwarf variety.
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: And remember that red dwarfs are much more common kind
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: of star than ours. Our stars kind of unusual in
• 26:38
  Speaker 2: the universe, and most of the flare stars that we've
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: observed are these red dwarfs. And that's actually one hypothesis
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: for why life evolves around the not most common star,
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: because you might imagine, if red dwarfs are the most
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: common star in the universe, why is it that we
• 26:54
  Speaker 2: evolved around a weird star? And it might be that
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: red dwarfs are common, but they're just sort of like
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: inhospitable to life because it takes a lot of sunscreen
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: to survive. Your star getting six times as bright all
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: of a sudden, unpredictably.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: That's really interesting. So if most stars out there are
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: red dwarves, what kind of star is our sun?
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: Our star is one of the category that they call
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: an F or G type star, So it's a bigger star,
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: and it's yellower, and so it tends to burn brighter.
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: Remember that smaller stars are cooler, which is why smaller
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: stars are redder, because red indicates longer wavelengths, which means
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: lower surface temperatures. And our sun is more yellow, it's
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: a little bit hotter than the typical red type of star,
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: So we live on an unusually hot kind.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: Of star, and so our sun doesn't have these sort
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: of star sneezes like these red dwarves have, and so
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: that protects us from having suddenly needing one hundred spf
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: every so often.
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: Not entirely though, right our sun does have little sneezes,
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: you know. These coronal mass ejections can be fairly dramatic events,
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: where like loops of plasma get ejected, and some of
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: them can even bathe the Earth we had this event
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: in the eighteen hundreds where like all wires on Earth
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: were suddenly electrified because of the crazy magnetic and electric
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: fields that were coming from these events. So they do happen.
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: They're not neatly as dramatic as flare stars. But even
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: our sun can burp in our direction.
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: Oh dear, uh oh what if Twitter goes down? Oh no,
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: that would be so bad.
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: Blame the sun, not elon Musk.
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: So we've got pulsating stars like the sephids, We've got
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: the red dwarfs who have their explosive sneezes. What other
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: kinds of star pulsating do we have?
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: One of my favorite and the kind that was mentioned
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: by listeners when we ask them about this, are pulsars.
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: These are a very very cool kind of star and
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: they represent the end of the life of many stars.
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: So you know, stars form from having a huge block
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: of cold gas and dust that gravity gathers together until
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: eventually it's hot enough and dense enough that fusion can start.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: And then fusion is fighting back against gravity. If we
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: only had gravity and then a blob of gas and
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: dust would just form a black hole straight away. But
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: because it starts to burn it emits radiation that's like
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: puffing back up against gravity, and it keeps it in
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: balance for millions or billions or trillions of years, depending
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: on the size of the star. Smaller stars burn longer
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: because they burn cooler. Bigger stars burn shorter and faster
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: and hotter and don't last for very long. And the
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: mass of the star also sort of determines what happens
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: to it. Like a star that's smaller, like less than
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: eight times the mass of our Sun, will eventually turn
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: into a red giant. It puffs up and then eventually
• 29:47
  Speaker 2: collapses and you get like maybe a white dwarf at
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: its core, which is just like a hot leftover blob
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: of the stuff that fusion produced.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: I knew blob monsters were out there. I knew it.
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: And that's probably the phase of our star. It's going
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: to become a red giant and puff out all of
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: its material and eventually just be left as a white
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: dwarf which will cool over trillions of years to a
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: black dwarf. But if you have more stuff in that
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: initial scoop of matter, then you have like a massive
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: star that can become a red super giant. And when
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: that collapses, you've got a supernova, which can leave a
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: neutron star or a black hole, and a neutron star
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: is what forms a pulsar. A neutron star is a
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: blob of mass so dense that the electrons and the
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: protons that used to be in the hydrogen have gotten
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: squeezed together to form neutrons. Usually it goes the other way.
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: Neutrons like to decay into a proton and an electron,
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: but if you push them together hard enough, they will
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: actually reverse that process and make neutrons. So neutron stars
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: are some of the densest things in the universe, and
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: they're like the last step before gravity finally takes over
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: and collapses this thing into a black hole. So they're
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: very weird, very interesting things. Scientifically, we don't really underderstand
• 31:00
  Speaker 2: what's going on inside a neutron star, how it all works,
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: but they do something really really fascinating, which is that
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: they send us these regular pulses from space.
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: So I imagine if I wanted to scoop like a
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: tea spoon of neutron star, it would be pretty heavy.
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: It would not be good for your diet to eat
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: even a tea spoon of neutron star.
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: It's a little too rich. So are these still emitting light?
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: What is pulsing for these neutron stars?
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: So these things are not undergoing fusion, right, They're not
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: glowing the way that other stars are. And Jorge Make,
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: for example, quibble about whether we should call it a
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: star or not. And so these things are not glowing
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: in that sense. You can't look up at the night's
• 31:41
  Speaker 2: side and see a bright dot and say, oh, that's
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: a neutron star. We can see them sometimes because they
• 31:45
  Speaker 2: emit X rays, but the best way to discover neutron
• 31:49
  Speaker 2: stars is through their pulses. Because neutron stars are also
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: spinning really really fast. They have to spin because the
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: original blob of stuff that made them was spinning, and
• 31:59
  Speaker 2: now they've gotten really really small. Neutron stars are like
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: a few kilometers in size, but they have the mass
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: of like the sun or five times the sun.
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: That kind of sounds like an ice skater, like a
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: figure skater. They can start a spin and then when
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: they collapse, like they kind of go into a ball,
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: they can spin even faster.
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: That's exactly right, And they have to spin faster because
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: they're smaller and so to maintain the angular momentum, you
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: have to spin faster with a smaller radius. That's just
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: because the law of angular momentum is conserved in the
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: universe and it forces these things to spin faster as
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: they get smaller. Now that's spinning also makes a magnetic field, right,
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: because again you got charge particles in there and things
• 32:41
  Speaker 2: are spinning, so you get a magnetic field, and that
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: magnetic field will funnel some charge particles up towards the
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: pole the same way that like on Earth, we have
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: a magnetic field and it protects us from charge particles
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: from space. If an electron hits the Earth, it doesn't
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: just go all the way down into the Earth. The
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: magnetic field will funnel it up to the pole, which
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: is why you see like northern lights and southern lights.
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: Those are cosmic rays, charged particles from space that have
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: been swept up to the northern and the southern parts
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: of the Earth by our magnetic field. And so the
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: same thing can happen on these neutron stars. They have
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: charged particles that are swept up to the poles and
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: then emitted, so you get these very powerful beams being
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: emitted from the north and south poles of this planet,
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: because the magnetic field is sort of like focused it
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: instead of just like shooting particles off in every direction,
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: it shoots them up in these two beams, one north
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: and one south.
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: Now, if you could stand on this neutron star, which
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: I'm assuming you can't without being grievously hurt, when you
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: look up at one of the poles, would you see
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: something like an aurora before you're presumably squished or tossed
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: off the planet.
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: Well, the scale of these things is ridiculous. I mean,
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: the gravity is so strong on a neutron star that,
• 33:56
  Speaker 2: like the tallest mountain on a neutron star is about
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: a millimeter, and the atmosphere of the neutron star is
• 34:01
  Speaker 2: like a few more millimeters. So you'd have to be
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: like ant sized to be looking up from a neutron
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: star and see any atmosphere above you. It'd be pretty tough. Also,
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: you'd have to be like an Olympic strong man or
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: strong woman to be able to stand up on a
• 34:15
  Speaker 2: neutron star without being crushed or pulled apart by its
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: tidal forces.
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: I mean, good news is on a neutron star, I
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: could scale the tallest mountain bad news. All my bones
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: would be jelly.
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: Exactly. So you have this neutron star and it's spinning,
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: and you have this magnetic field which accelerates any protons
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: and electrons on the surface into these beams which shoot
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: out into space. And the fascinating thing is that sometimes
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: the magnetic field is not aligned with the spin of
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: the star, so you have like the star itself is spinning.
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: Now you have this beam shooting off the surface. But
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: the beam is not shooting on the spin axis. It's
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: shooting a little bit off, which means the beam is
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: like sweeping around through space. It's like forming a cone
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: of light and it sweeps around. And so these pulsars
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: are not actually variable in that sense. Their beam is constant,
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: but if the beam sweeps by you, it seems variable
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: because it sweeps over you and then it passes you
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: and then it comes back again. So it's sort of
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: like that figure Skaters holding a flashlight and as she
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: turns she blinds you once every revolution.
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: I hate it when they do that at the Olympics.
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: But yeah, no, I mean it sounds like an intergalactic lighthouse.
• 35:28
  Speaker 2: It's exactly right, just like a lighthouse. And when they
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: were first discovered. It was super fascinating. The first one
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: to be discovered had a period of about one point
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: thirty three seconds, one in a third second. So they
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: were looking up at the night sky and actually listening
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: for other stuff, and they saw this signal that went
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: like beep beep beep, very very regular and so of
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: course the first astronomer is to see this. Jocelyn Bell Burnell,
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: who unfortunately was overlooked for the Nobel Prize for this,
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: she at first thought, maybe this is aliens, giant space
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: whales or something else us a message because we didn't
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: expect the night sky to pulse and to pulse with
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: such regularity. It seemed artificial, it seemed technological.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that is interesting. As humans, we love a pattern,
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: and I think that patterns to us seem to signal
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: some intention. I guess like it's very easy to anthropomorphize
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: a pattern because we think of well, if something acts
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: in a regular pattern, it's got some kind of volition,
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: it's got some sort of consciousness because it is acting
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: in this pattern. But of course patterns can exist in
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: ways that have nothing to do with being alive or
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: having a brain. Like when we notice patterns, we have
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: this sense, and I think there have been some psychology
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: studies on this. When people see things like inanimate objects
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: like a marble or something and that's sort of doing
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: some kind of patterned behavior, they perceive it as having
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: sort of a like it desires, or having its own
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: sort of consciousness. But yeah, it's not necessarily indicative of
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: as much as I would like it to be a
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: giant space whale spouting its space spout, but it feels
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: that way very much. I think patterns feel very human,
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: they feel very intentional.
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: But I suspect this is just human bias.
• 37:20
  Speaker 4: You know.
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: We imagine that like nature is messy and doesn't form
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: things like perfect circles and perfect pulses and squares, because
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: that's the kind of thing that we like to make,
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: and we imagine that differentiates us. But you know, there
• 37:32
  Speaker 2: are like squares in nature. You can find weird formations
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: of rock that are like almost perfect cubes or whatever.
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: So I imagine that when we do get to an
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: alien planet sometime we will be tripped up by this
• 37:43
  Speaker 2: expectation that things that form straight lines or geometric patterns
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: must be artificial and technological and intelligent, and maybe not right.
• 37:51
  Speaker 2: Maybe those aliens are messy slobs and their cities don't
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: look anything like all of this, right, And there are
• 37:56
  Speaker 2: of course examples in the universe when things are very
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: regular and yet not artificial, and these pulsars are a
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: great example. And because they spin so fast, their pulses
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: are very very short. You know, on a cosmological time scale,
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: these things are super fast. Right, we expect stars to
• 38:14
  Speaker 2: pulse to vary on the scale of millions or billions
• 38:16
  Speaker 2: of years. These things are pulsing at like seconds, and
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: some of them are spinning so fast millisecond. Pulsars pulse
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: literally every millisecond and with extraordinary regularity. You know, they
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: are more precise, more accurate, more repeatable at least than
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: our best atomic clocks.
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: There's something that's hard for me to kind of visualize
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: with that, because when I think of space and you know, stars,
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: I think of very slow movements. But something that is
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: spinning that fast and flashing that fast, it's hard to
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: conceive of on that scale.
• 38:51
  Speaker 2: It is really amazing. And there's another sort of time
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: scale for pulsars, which is that they do slow down,
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: like as we watch them, they seem very very regular,
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: can't spin and emit light forever, right, that would be
• 39:02
  Speaker 2: like an infinite energy source. This rotation and this beam
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: actually SAPs energy from the star and eventually they do
• 39:09
  Speaker 2: slow down. We think that it takes like ten to
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: one hundred million years for a pulsar to basically give
• 39:15
  Speaker 2: up its energy by beaming it out into space. And
• 39:18
  Speaker 2: that's actually kind of a short amount of time. Right.
• 39:20
  Speaker 2: Pulsars don't last very long, which means that like most
• 39:24
  Speaker 2: of the pulsars in the history of the universe are
• 39:26
  Speaker 2: now quiet. They did their pulse, they spread their lighthouse
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: information through the universe, and now they're dead. They're quiet.
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: So in something like ninety nine percent of the pulsars
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: that ever pulse are no longer pulsing.
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: What happens to them after they stop pulsing? Do they
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: just remain a neutron star or do they turn into
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: something else?
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: We hope they have a long career as emeritus stars.
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: You know, they continue to participate in the galactics discussions. No, exactly,
• 39:53
  Speaker 2: then they're just neutron stars. Right, there's still hot blobs
• 39:57
  Speaker 2: of neutrons, they're just not emitting anymore. They're not spin
• 40:00
  Speaker 2: as fast.
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: I see. Well, the glory days are over for them,
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: maybe they can retire. Well, I'm gonna try to do
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: some spinning around to see if I can see what
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: it feels like to be a neutron star, and we
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: will be right back. So I just got really dizzy
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: trying to method act as a neutron star spinning around.
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: I feel nauseous, and I guess that's how these neutrons
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: stars feel too, if they can feel things. And I
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: sympathize and mentioned I.
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: Like that you're trying to get in the head of
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: your giant spinning space whale. That's really very empathetic of you.
• 40:49
  Speaker 2: And when they do come to visit, I think that's
• 40:51
  Speaker 2: going to make you sort of like last on the
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: list of people to.
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: Be eaten exactly. I think ahead, I plan for the
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: long game.
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: My point is that it sounds like you're being altruistic
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: and empathetic, but really it's cynical, right, You're just really
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: looking at it for Katie.
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: Like I'm hedging all my bets when it comes to
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: giant space whales. So I apologize for nothing. So we
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: just talked about pulsars, these neutron stars that's been incredibly
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: fast and sort of has that flash it like almost
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: like auroras that can flash really quickly, which kind of
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: blows my mind. So is this is have we gone
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: through all of the methods of pulsing in the universe.
• 41:31
  Speaker 2: Yet those are the primary methods of pulsing. There are
• 41:33
  Speaker 2: other things like supernovas that do change in the night sky,
• 41:37
  Speaker 2: but really these are the biggest categories of things we
• 41:39
  Speaker 2: expect to see flare stars, Sephid's pulsating stars, and then
• 41:44
  Speaker 2: pulsars themselves. But of course there's always the opportunity to
• 41:47
  Speaker 2: discover something new. And I was so excited to read
• 41:51
  Speaker 2: this paper for so many reasons, not just because they
• 41:54
  Speaker 2: found something new that we don't understand in the universe,
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: but because how the discovery was made. This discovery was
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: made by an undergraduate physics student who is looking through
• 42:05
  Speaker 2: old data that had been sitting on disc for years
• 42:09
  Speaker 2: and nobody had looked at in this way. He was like, well,
• 42:12
  Speaker 2: looking for a research opportunity, found a professor and the
• 42:15
  Speaker 2: professor said, hey, I have this data. Why don't you
• 42:17
  Speaker 2: look through this and see if you can find something weird.
• 42:20
  Speaker 2: So he's analyzed this data looking to see if you
• 42:23
  Speaker 2: could find things that pulsed at rates that were longer
• 42:26
  Speaker 2: than anybody looked at before.
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: This is a lesson to all undergraduates when you are
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: given what you think seems like busy work just to
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: get you out of the hair of some professor. Maybe not,
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: maybe you'll discover something new.
• 42:39
  Speaker 2: And this is not the first time undergraduates looking through
• 42:42
  Speaker 2: old data have found something dramatic that has taught us
• 42:45
  Speaker 2: something about the universe. Check out our episode on fast
• 42:48
  Speaker 2: radio bursts. It's also something very similar and interesting. And
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: the lesson here also is sometimes you have to know
• 42:54
  Speaker 2: what to look for when you're looking through the data.
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: Like you can't just stare up at the night sky
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: and say, Universe, tell me what's out there.
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: Wait, I've been doing, Mattgan, Well.
• 43:03
  Speaker 2: You have to ask a question, and you have to say,
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: you know, are there big pulses in radio bursts or
• 43:08
  Speaker 2: are there things that pulse very very long periods, Because
• 43:12
  Speaker 2: the kind of things we know of that are out
• 43:13
  Speaker 2: there pulsars, and they're very magnetic versions magnetars tend to
• 43:17
  Speaker 2: pulse on seconds or faster. And so this guy went
• 43:21
  Speaker 2: into the data and looked for things that pulsed with
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: longer time scales, and surprise, surprise, surprise, he found one.
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: His undergrad's name is PJ. Hancock, and he was looking
• 43:31
  Speaker 2: through data from the Australian Murchison wide field Array.
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: So when we talk about arrays, are these these are
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: big fields of detection equipment.
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. The Murchison whitefield Array is not the kind
• 43:45
  Speaker 2: of telescope you find imagine where you're like looking through
• 43:48
  Speaker 2: an eyepiece up at the universe. It's actually just a
• 43:50
  Speaker 2: bunch of antennas. There are four thou ninety six sort
• 43:54
  Speaker 2: of like spider like antennas that all just receive radio messages.
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: Each one is just like an intent to listen to radio,
• 44:01
  Speaker 2: but instead of listening to you know, Kiss FM or whatever,
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: it's listening to messages from space. And you have this
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: big array of antennas, which helps you, number one, capture
• 44:10
  Speaker 2: more signals and also tell where the signals came from,
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: because if you see the signal first on one side
• 44:16
  Speaker 2: of the array, then it like sweeps over the array,
• 44:19
  Speaker 2: then you can tell where you're in the sky it
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: might have come from.
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: I love how we reverse engineer things that you find
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: in nature in terms of like detection. Animals that have
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: really good sensory organs that can really pinpoint where something
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: is coming from usually have this spatial element to it.
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: And I love that we have created as humans basically
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: all these sensory antenna on our Earth to turn our
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: Earth into like a giant et all detecting things out
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: in the universe.
• 44:53
  Speaker 2: Well, I hope the space whales don't like to eat
• 44:54
  Speaker 2: beetles when they come here.
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: It's a big space bird been. We're in trouble.
• 45:01
  Speaker 2: So he found this thing in the data that releases
• 45:04
  Speaker 2: big bursts of energy kind of like a pulsar. But
• 45:08
  Speaker 2: the weird thing is that it pulses every twenty minutes. Actually,
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: it's even weirder. It pulses every eighteen point eighteen minutes.
• 45:15
  Speaker 2: And this is a very long frequency for something in space,
• 45:19
  Speaker 2: Like we don't have models for magnetars or pulsars that
• 45:22
  Speaker 2: pulse this long. And in seconds, this is like one
• 45:25
  Speaker 2: ninety one seconds. And when it does pulse, it pulses
• 45:28
  Speaker 2: for like thirty to sixty seconds at a time, sometimes
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: with shorter bursts. If you look inside the paper, it's
• 45:34
  Speaker 2: really fascinating. They have like a sketch of all the
• 45:37
  Speaker 2: different pulses that they captured. Once they found a few
• 45:40
  Speaker 2: examples of this. They went back into the data and
• 45:42
  Speaker 2: scanned more deeply and they found a bunch of these examples.
• 45:46
  Speaker 2: So they have like seventy one pulses from this thing
• 45:49
  Speaker 2: over like a three month period when this telescope was
• 45:52
  Speaker 2: observing data in just the right direction.
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: Now I'm not a medical doctor, but if this was
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: the heart rate for someone, I would be concerned, because, yeah,
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: this looks this is a lot like there's a big
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: kind of spike and then there's a lot of little
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: spikes going on.
• 46:10
  Speaker 2: You're like, this thing needs a pacemaker.
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: Please help. My star is very sick.
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: Well, we don't know, right, maybe this is a very
• 46:18
  Speaker 2: healthy signature for a giant space whale, but it's definitely
• 46:20
  Speaker 2: something very weird for a pulsar. Again, pulsars tend to
• 46:25
  Speaker 2: be much much faster. And so when they found this thing,
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: this undergrad took it to his advisor, astrophysicist Natasha Hurley Walker,
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: and she dug in more deeply. But she said, quote,
• 46:36
  Speaker 2: I was concerned that it was aliens when he brought
• 46:39
  Speaker 2: it to her. And I have so many questions about that, like,
• 46:42
  Speaker 2: what do you mean concerned? Why are you concerned?
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: Not elated? And not ready to show them how you've
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: been trying to empathize with them by spinning around really fast.
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: This is why I plan exactly.
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: So they dug into this to try to understand, like,
• 46:57
  Speaker 2: what is this thing? Where is it coming from? And
• 46:59
  Speaker 2: one of the first things they had to do was
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: to understand the period of the pulses. But they noticed
• 47:04
  Speaker 2: the pulses didn't actually line up in a very nice period,
• 47:06
  Speaker 2: like the separation between the pulses wasn't perfect. And that
• 47:10
  Speaker 2: turned out to me because this thing is not coming
• 47:13
  Speaker 2: from our solar system. It's coming from something much much
• 47:16
  Speaker 2: further away. And as the Earth goes around the Sun,
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: it changes the frequency with which we observe these things.
• 47:23
  Speaker 2: So once they corrected for the Earth moving around the
• 47:26
  Speaker 2: Sun and like not capturing the signal at the same
• 47:29
  Speaker 2: place in our orbit as we go around, they found
• 47:31
  Speaker 2: a much more precise fit. So that tells us, Okay,
• 47:34
  Speaker 2: it is really very regular, and it's coming from somewhere
• 47:37
  Speaker 2: far away. It's not like, you know, behind Jupiter or
• 47:40
  Speaker 2: something like that. This thing is outside of our solar system.
• 47:43
  Speaker 2: It's not also orbiting our Sun.
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's kind of comforting. I'm glad that this
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: pulsating mystery object isn't just hiding behind Jupiter ready to
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: jump out at us. So we don't We don't even
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: know what it is. We don't know if it's like
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: a neutron star. We don't, like, what do we know
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: about it other than it has this weird twenty minute
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: ish interval and it's super far away.
• 48:08
  Speaker 2: We don't really know. We know that it's about four
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: thousand light years away, and they can use another trick
• 48:14
  Speaker 2: to tell the distance, which is how the light of
• 48:15
  Speaker 2: different frequencies is arriving on Earth. It doesn't all travel
• 48:19
  Speaker 2: through the universe at the same velocity, even though of
• 48:21
  Speaker 2: course light always has the same speed in a vacuum.
• 48:24
  Speaker 2: Space itself is not a perfect vacuum. There are electrons
• 48:28
  Speaker 2: all over the place, and that tends to effectively slow
• 48:30
  Speaker 2: light down, but just so at a different rate for
• 48:32
  Speaker 2: different frequencies. This is called dispersion. So the dispersion of
• 48:37
  Speaker 2: the signal tells us how far it's gone through this
• 48:41
  Speaker 2: like electron gas that's filling space, because we know something
• 48:45
  Speaker 2: about the density of the electron gas, so sort of
• 48:47
  Speaker 2: reverse engineering that you can tell by the dispersion that
• 48:50
  Speaker 2: it's about four thousand light years away from Earth, which
• 48:54
  Speaker 2: means that it is in our galaxy. It's not in
• 48:57
  Speaker 2: like another galaxy, which would be millions of light years.
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: Okay, so we do have to share the galaxy with
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: whatever this is. So I do want to understand it better,
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: so if it ever decides to visit, it knows I'm
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: on its team. What else do we know about this?
• 49:12
  Speaker 2: So we know that it's kind of got a broad signal,
• 49:14
  Speaker 2: meaning that it admits not just at a single radio wavelength, right,
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: And this convinces some people that it's not aliens. People think,
• 49:22
  Speaker 2: if we're going to get a message from aliens, it's
• 49:24
  Speaker 2: going to be at like one frequency, the way that
• 49:26
  Speaker 2: we tend to send radio messages, you know, kiss FM
• 49:29
  Speaker 2: is different from another frequency, like you know one to
• 49:31
  Speaker 2: one point one rocking from the eighties or whatever. All
• 49:34
  Speaker 2: your different stations are different frequencies, and so people imagine,
• 49:37
  Speaker 2: if we're going to get a message, it's going to
• 49:39
  Speaker 2: be at one frequency, and this one is sort of broad.
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: I don't know though, because like what if the aliens
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: want to really reach out to whoever, so they're trying
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: to send it out as on as many frequencies as
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: possible to make it more likely someone picks it up.
• 49:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, We don't know, right, It's another case of
• 49:56
  Speaker 2: like anthromorphizing, how aliens might send their messages. So another
• 50:00
  Speaker 2: thing to look at is the potential magnetic field of
• 50:03
  Speaker 2: this object, if it's a pulsar or a magnetar, which
• 50:07
  Speaker 2: is just a pulsar with a very large magnetic field
• 50:09
  Speaker 2: that affects the kind of light that comes from it.
• 50:12
  Speaker 2: Like the photons that come from these stars have a
• 50:15
  Speaker 2: different polarization based on the magnetic field, and this seems
• 50:19
  Speaker 2: to have a very strong magnetic field on it. It's
• 50:21
  Speaker 2: a very bright object, so that points toward it being
• 50:24
  Speaker 2: a magnetar, but it would be very strange because it's
• 50:27
  Speaker 2: a very long period magnetar. Like if you look at
• 50:30
  Speaker 2: the distribution of pulsars magnetars that we've seen so far,
• 50:34
  Speaker 2: they all clustered have very short periods. So this is
• 50:37
  Speaker 2: like a big outlier. This is like a very weird
• 50:40
  Speaker 2: one from the point of view of like how fast
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: it seems to be spinning.
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: What is something that could affect the speed of its spinning,
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: Like would that be size of it or something else.
• 50:51
  Speaker 2: It might be that it's just kind of old. Remember,
• 50:53
  Speaker 2: these things eventually do slow down because they are emitting radiation,
• 50:58
  Speaker 2: and so they last for tens or hundreds of millions
• 51:00
  Speaker 2: of years. So it might just be that we're seeing
• 51:02
  Speaker 2: one sort of at the last moment. But the weird
• 51:05
  Speaker 2: thing is that we've never seen one like this before,
• 51:07
  Speaker 2: and we've seen lots and lots of pulsars in the universe.
• 51:10
  Speaker 2: So either these things are rare and it just takes
• 51:12
  Speaker 2: a while of observation before we see one of these
• 51:15
  Speaker 2: kinds of things, you know, like there's a tale of
• 51:17
  Speaker 2: a distribution. You have most of them in the bulk
• 51:19
  Speaker 2: and a few very slow ones that are sort of
• 51:22
  Speaker 2: fading out, and you just have to keep looking for
• 51:24
  Speaker 2: a long time, the way we have to like collide
• 51:26
  Speaker 2: particles for a long time before we see a Higgs boson.
• 51:29
  Speaker 2: You have to keep looking before you see the rare ones,
• 51:31
  Speaker 2: and there's just now emerging because we've been paying attention
• 51:34
  Speaker 2: for so long. Or it might be a new kind
• 51:36
  Speaker 2: of thing, right, it might be something else out there,
• 51:38
  Speaker 2: not a magnetar, some new kind of astrophysical object that
• 51:42
  Speaker 2: has a different kind of behavior. And that's frankly my hope,
• 51:45
  Speaker 2: because that means that there's something new that the universe
• 51:48
  Speaker 2: can do, right, and it's sending us literally sending us information.
• 51:52
  Speaker 2: It says, be be beep, there's something going on here.
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: I do like the sort of funny irony though, if
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: it is just a grandpas star, just like.
• 52:00
  Speaker 2: Oh, what's going on over there?
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: Just gotta slow down a little bit, you know, and
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: we think it's some new exciting thing, but it's just
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: old star, old and slow. Somehow. That's cute to me
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: that stars slow down when they get older, just like people.
• 52:17
  Speaker 2: So people are trying to study this thing in further detail.
• 52:19
  Speaker 2: They're like looking at it across a range of frequencies,
• 52:23
  Speaker 2: understanding its X ray emissions because magnetars tend to be
• 52:27
  Speaker 2: fairly quiet in the X rays. So they look for
• 52:29
  Speaker 2: X rays from this thing and didn't see any, which
• 52:31
  Speaker 2: is sort of consistent with being a magnetar, but not
• 52:33
  Speaker 2: really a smoking gun because you're like not seeing a
• 52:36
  Speaker 2: signature instead of seeing a signature. So what they're doing
• 52:39
  Speaker 2: now is they're looking for more of these things, Like
• 52:41
  Speaker 2: we have a bunch of data that nobody's analyzed that
• 52:44
  Speaker 2: might have more examples. It might be like that data
• 52:47
  Speaker 2: set that undergrad was looking at could have dozens of examples,
• 52:51
  Speaker 2: or other radio telescopes around the world might have taken
• 52:53
  Speaker 2: data with this in it and nobody else had noticed.
• 52:57
  Speaker 2: So it's exciting that you can make discoveries like in
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: the data that we already have like sitting on computers.
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it seems that the key is knowing.
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: Like you said earlier, the key is knowing what to
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: look for. It's hard to spot a pattern if you
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: don't even know what you're supposed to be focusing on,
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: or like what timescale you should be looking at.
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's something really deep there about how we make
• 53:20
  Speaker 2: discoveries and how we look out in the universe, what
• 53:23
  Speaker 2: we notice and what we don't notice. Because the universe
• 53:25
  Speaker 2: is like a tsunami of information, you can't pay attention
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: to everything. You can't notice everything, so our brains tend
• 53:32
  Speaker 2: to filter and pattern match. We can only really see
• 53:34
  Speaker 2: a tiny fraction of what's out there in the universe,
• 53:37
  Speaker 2: even just surrounding us. Right, people are very oblivious to
• 53:40
  Speaker 2: obvious stuff if they're not looking for it. So what
• 53:43
  Speaker 2: we see in the universe depends on what we look for,
• 53:45
  Speaker 2: which means we might be missing all sorts of crazy
• 53:48
  Speaker 2: stuff that's happening out there just because we haven't been
• 53:51
  Speaker 2: asking the right questions and we didn't have patient undergrads
• 53:53
  Speaker 2: to sift through the data in the right way. Right,
• 53:57
  Speaker 2: and in one hundred years or five hundred years, people
• 53:59
  Speaker 2: might laugh that how obvious these discoveries were to make
• 54:02
  Speaker 2: if we'd only known to ask the right questions.
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: That's why it's really important for people in academia to
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: remember that undergrads are people too.
• 54:12
  Speaker 2: And for you out there to remember that there's lots
• 54:14
  Speaker 2: more things to discover in the universe, really basic, low
• 54:18
  Speaker 2: hanging fruit that almost anybody could figure out if they
• 54:21
  Speaker 2: have the interest and the patience. So if you have
• 54:24
  Speaker 2: aspirations to become an astrophysicist one day, don't worry. This
• 54:28
  Speaker 2: plenty of stuff for you to discover, all right. Thanks
• 54:30
  Speaker 2: very much Katie for joining us on today's tour of
• 54:33
  Speaker 2: pulsating space whales and slime orbs or maybe just magnetars.
• 54:38
  Speaker 2: And thanks to our listeners for coming along another ride
• 54:40
  Speaker 2: as we talk about the weird stuff that's out there
• 54:42
  Speaker 2: in the universe.
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: I'm going to do some more spinning to see if
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: I can feel what it feels like to be this mysterious,
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: pulsating object.
• 54:51
  Speaker 2: And when they get here, they're not going to love you, Katie.
• 54:53
  Speaker 2: I'm sorry, they just could eat you like everybody else.
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: I don't know. If I'm so dizzy that I've thrown up,
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: they may not to eat.
• 55:00
  Speaker 2: Me, or maybe that makes you delicious. Either way, Thanks
• 55:03
  Speaker 2: everybody for listening in tune in next time. Thanks for listening,
• 55:15
  Speaker 2: and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
• 55:17
  Speaker 2: a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
• 55:22
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• 55:26
  Speaker 2: your favorite shows.