What's going on with Przybylski's Star?

Daniel and Jorge talk about how to explain one of the weirdest stars in the Universe.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Daniel, hard things. Oh you know, I'm down in
Irvine where nothing very exciting ever happens. Is there interesting
stuff happening in your neighborhood? Yeah, everything's good in my neighborhood.
I like my town, but I bet anything is better
than an academic suburb where you live. Well, I imagine
you must have some pretty cool neighbors, you know, like
you have that one house that has like a million

(00:29):
cactuses out front, or another one where the curtains are
always drawn and the lights are on all night long.
There is a weird house on our street, I have
to say, a lot of strange noises. Oh yeah, what's
so weird about it? My kids living in oh is
that the one with an accentric cartoonist who never leaves
the house. I wouldn't know that one sometimes spotted eating
cereal and his pajamas at six pm, and also nine

(00:51):
pm and also three pm. Yea, I am rhemmy cartoonists
and the co author of Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe. Hi,

(01:13):
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle of physicist and a professor
at u C Irvine, and I think it's been more
than a decade since I've had a bowl of cereal
more than a decade. I feel so bad for you.
Why do you deprive yourself of one of life's simplest
and tastiest pleasures. Well, you know, I don't need breakfast anymore,
and that's typically the time that normal humans eat cereal.
Though I know you don't feel bound by those constraints.

(01:35):
I do not feel bound by time zones now, So
always breakfast time somewhere in the world. If you just
think globally, you know, if you expand your mind a
little bit, so you get to travel the world and
your own kitchen, you're like, Oh, I'm having breakfast in Japan,
or oh I'm having breakfast in Venezuela. Yeah, there's always
somebody having breakfast right now. Somebody's having breakfast no matter
what time you're listening, somebody is probably eating a bowl

(01:56):
of cereal right now as they listen to this podcast. Yeah, crunch, crunch, crunch,
or not. If it's soggy. I guess some people like
it saggy. I don't know. We have a Danish exchange
student living with us this year, and he tells me
that in Denmark they don't eat their own meal cooked
they eat just raw oats with milk on them. M. Yeah,
don't they call like musically? I think they call that
horse food over here? Did you just insult all Danish people?

(02:20):
If you think being compared to a horse as an insult,
and I think you just insulted horses. I think you're
insulting the dictionary right now. I think I have to
say nay to that one. But welcome to our podcast
Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I
Heart Radio in which we try not to spend too
much time digressing about horses and cereal and died into
the mysteries of the universe, because no matter what you're

(02:43):
putting in your mouth, there are strange things going into
your brain. All of these signals from photons traveling across
the universe telling us that there are weird things happening
out there, deep deep in the skies. Things blowing up, things, exploding, things, collapsing,
things swirling around, things glowing ways that we do not
quite understand. On this podcast, we try to zoom you

(03:04):
forward the very edge of human knowledge so you can
understand all of the weird stuff that's out there in
the universe. As because it is a weird universe, and
we love to go out there, galloping out there to
explore the things in it and trot along as we
discover amazing secrets about the universe and talk about them
in this podcast until our voices are course. Wow, you

(03:25):
get three stars for all those horse puns in one
sentence to like that, that's really impressive. Yeah, well, how
is your knowledge of horse speeds? Does it extend beyond galloping, trotting,
and walking. Yes, there's also cantering, I think, and that's
my main knowledge of it. I think loping is a
thing also, isn't it. I don't know. You have a
daughter who's an expert in horses, right, that's right. I

(03:47):
hear her talking about loping and cantering and trotting. She
doesn't horse around. She's quite serious about it, just as
we are very serious about staying on topic on this podcast.
We try to rein in the puns. That's right, because
I guess this is a podcast about physics. Although horses
technically also follow the laws of physics. I'm not sure
how much that's been tested. One day we should do
an episode about the physics of horses. I'm sure we'll

(04:10):
have a nice audience there with thirteen year old girls.
But it is a pretty interesting universe full of mysteries,
even today where people think that maybe science has everything
figured out, but actually there are still interesting and amazing
and perplexing mysteries out there for us to solve. And
some of those are very accessible. If you are out
camping or just out walking late at night and you

(04:30):
turn your head up towards the night skies, you can
see the twinkling light that comes from huge flaming balls
of plasma that are zillions of miles away. It's incredible
that the photons make their way so far across enormous
vast reaches of transparent space to hit your eyeballs. And
people have been looking up at those stars and wondering
what they are and how they work for thousands of years,

(04:52):
maybe for hundreds of thousands of years, for at least
as long as people have been looking up at the
skies and asking questions. And we've made a lot of
progress and understanding what those things are and how far
away they are, and how they work and what powers them,
and yet important questions still remain. That's right. We have
an amazing view of the entire universe, all forty billion

(05:12):
light years wide of it, full of trallians of stars,
and that's one of the main things we see when
we look out into the universe stars and they bring
information about what kind of star they are, what kind
of planets they have around them, and how the whole
universe is arranged. One of the coolest things about these
hot stars is that they tell us something about the
story of our neighborhood. They contain so many clues about

(05:35):
what has happened in the long, deep history of the
universe before we started paying attention, before we started looking
out into the cosmos and noticing things. We do know
that the universe is very, very old, just as the
ground under our feet is old. And by asking questions
about how the Earth got to look this way or
how stars got to glow in these particular patterns, we

(05:55):
can start to understand how they form and understand the
story of our own universe, a context of our very lives, yeah,
including how our star form. Because I guess when you
look out into the university, Daniel, it sort of looks
like a bunch of pinpoints. All the stars look the
same from our point of view, but actually stars are
really diverse. They go in all kinds of sizes and colors, right,
and temperatures, absolutely, and they tend to resist our efforts

(06:18):
to categorize them. The human tendency is to put things
in groups and say, oh, this is this kind of thing,
this is that kind of thing. But the history of
astronomy and cosmology is discovering maybe those definitions don't quite work.
There's always a fuzzy thing right at the boundary that's like,
I'm kind of like this one. I'm kind of like
that one. Are break all the rules that you thought
were true about stars or planets. Just look at our

(06:40):
solar system. You know, there's a sun, there's planets, but
then there are dwarf planets, and then there are asteroids
and their comets, and there's things called centaurs. It's right
at the edge between asteroids and comets. It's a whole
huge spectrum of craziness out there. And every time we
look deep and carefully into the universe, we always find
something out there that surprises us, that doesn't fall neatly
into any of the categories. Yeah, and that happens even

(07:02):
with stars. We have all these categories for stars. We
know pretty well what happens to stars as they grow older,
as they get bigger, what kinds of stars and depending
on how big they started. Stars are pretty well studied,
but there are still mysteries about stars the scientists are
wondering about. That's right. At the same time, we do
know a lot about stars, and we have looked at
a lot of them and understood many things, there are

(07:23):
basic questions about them. We still don't understand our own son,
for example, even though it's nearby and very bright and
fairly accessible, resists our understanding. We still don't really understand
how it generates its incredible magnetic field, and why it
flips every eleven years, and why it has so many
weird cycles, and why it sometimes spits out enormous quantities
of plasma in our direction. So the sort of basic

(07:46):
component of the universe, stars, the thing that light up
the universe and make it visible, are something we still
have to understand more deeply. Did you say our son
is spitting at us? That's not very nice in the
same way the cloud spit at us. Absolutely, the Sun
causes so older weather. You know, it has a solar
wind made of particles that zoom out super high speeds,
and sometimes the solar weather gets stormy and creates these

(08:08):
coronal mass ejections. Yes, so we're still trying to even
understand our star here in our Solar system. But there
are also really extra odd stars out there in space,
out there in the universe exactly. Not all stars out
there are like our sun, as you said. They're ones
that are much bigger, some that are much hotter, some
of that are more magnetic, some that spin faster or slower,
and then there are some that seem to be impossible.

(08:30):
So to day on the podcast will be tackling the
question what's going on which she builds ki Star. I
was nervous about pronouncing that. How many letters are on
this twelve letters, only one fowl. Yeah, it's a pretty
amazing name. I love the way it's spelled. It's p

(08:51):
r z y b l y s k I. So yeah,
if you don't count wise, then it's all consonants and
then a vowel at the end. It feels like a
classic Superman villain Mr Mix bit look at all, but
you just make that up. It's classic Superman villas like Lex,
Luthor and Bizarro, And then there's Mr Look, which is

(09:12):
a huge name also without any vols. But this one
about the star does have at least one vowel. It
certainly does. And it's got a silent z in it.
I mean, it's got a Z in the name, but
you say it, push Bilski starts, you don't ever say
a Z sound to it. I feel like it has
a silent z, a sneaky y steal the z. Also,
I think part of it comes from transliteration from Polish.

(09:32):
You know, Polish has a bunch of consonants that we
just don't have. Like there's an L with a line
through it that sounds very different from our L. Maybe
that's a topic for a different podcast. But this is
an interesting start out there in the universe because it's
still kind of a mystery to physicists. Yeah, it's not
one that we understand. It's doing things that we think
are impossible, and it's generated a lot of controversy and

(09:53):
a lot of really out there explanations involving potentially aliens. Yeah,
and this is not just about its name. It's more
about its physics. So it's usually we were wondering how
many people out there had heard of this star and
maybe even had heard of its deep mysteries. So thank
you very much to everybody who participates in these questions.
If you'd like to hear your voice on the podcast,

(10:15):
please don't be shy. Right to us two questions at
Daniel and Jorge dot com to think about it for
a second. Do you know what's going on with Shibilski
Star with Tustatch? Maybe it's going to put another because
of the name. I don't know what Prizk Star is,

(10:36):
so I can't even begin to him agine what's going
on with it. What's going on with Posiabilisky's Star? I
don't know which star is that? And I'm also don't
know how to pronounce that name, despite the fact that
my wife is Polish. What is this? This sounds like

(10:58):
a guy from football team? Uh, probably Chicago Bears. I
don't know. Prison Bilsky Star is a star where the
gravitational pressure is so great that all the vowels have
been forced out and it is made up of almost
nothing but consonants. Alright, not a lot of name recognition.

(11:21):
I like the person who said it sounds like a
Chicago Bears football player. Maybe it is made to long
lost descendant of the original billy. Yeah, maybe he's a
star in his local high school football team. Now, yeah,
maybe he's one of those physicists m m. Or maybe
he's a star horseback rider. To bring it all in
a full circle. Oh my goodness. But not a lot
of people seem to have heard of this start. I

(11:42):
guess it's not dominating the headline. Yeah, I was surprised.
I thought it should be more famous. And it's actually
not as well known as it should be in scientific
circles either, because when he published his paper, originally the
journal misspelled his name, so people who went searching for
this paper weren't able to find it. Wait, they miss
spilled his name. How is that possible? I mean there

(12:03):
are so many z s wise and lack of vowels
in it. Yes, this, so you know, things were being
typed manually and somebody swapped a couple of letters, and
so for a long time it was harder to find
this paper than it should have been. I guess it's
not a very catchy name, you know. Maybe that's a
lesson if you do discover something one day, Daniel, maybe
using easy to remember name or easy to spell at

(12:24):
least so people can google it, right, yeah, I suppose.
You know, my family was Polish and they changed their name.
It used to be Golschewski on my mother's side, and
they changed it to Gail, just to make it easier
to spell and explain. Well, it's an interesting star because
there are still a lot of big mysteries about it,
and one of those mysteries might even lead us to
believe there are aliens out there in the universe. That's

(12:45):
a big claim. Yeah, this is a really fun start.
You're not horsing around here, No, I'm trotting out all
the craziest ideas that are out there. Well, you better
pointing up with some interesting facts here, Daniel, and explain
it to us. Well, my favorite thing about this whole
topic is just that we're trying to understand all of
the stars. You know, it's a basic idea in physics,
like let's build a model for what we think is
happening inside stars, and then let's compare it to what's

(13:07):
out there. And every time you do that, you always
find an outlier. You find something which breaks your model
that says there's something else going on that you don't understand.
And that's the whole process of physics. Right, develop a
simplified view of the universe in our minds and try
to use it to describe what we see outside of
our skulls. And if we were right the first time,
it wouldn't be very exciting. So it's always really fun

(13:28):
to see something unexplained, something which makes us stretch our models.
And this one is super exciting because we don't really
even know how to stretch our models to describe it. Yeah,
so maybe step us through this, Daniel, What is Shebilsky Star?
Why is it weird? So this is a star discovered
in nine by Anthony Shebilski, and it's weird in a
couple of ways. First, it's weird because it's both hot

(13:51):
and magnetic, which is unusual. And then it's also weird
because it has some very strange, very unusual elements in
it that we don't understand. How they out there? M
What do you mean? Well, first let's talk about how
it's hot and magnetic. So stars, of course are all hot, right,
they're all out there in space. They have enough mass
to ignite fusion at their cores and to give off light.

(14:11):
That's how we know they're out there. Otherwise it would
be like failed stars, and just like big jupiters that
didn't quite have enough pressure, they did the temperature going
for fusion. But the bigger stars are hotter, and they
tend to glow at different temperatures. So we classify stars
based on their temperature according to the light that we
get from them. Hotter things tend to glow and higher frequencies,
and cooler things tend to glow in lower frequencies in

(14:33):
longer wavelengths. So the whole spectrum of different temperature stars
out there from sort of cooler too hot, although all
of them are uncomfortably hot on our standards, right, And
it's kind of interesting that the blue stars are the
ones that are hotter, but the red stars are actually cooler, right,
A little unintuitive to meet. Blue is more intense. It's
like the ultra violet. But I guess here on Earth

(14:53):
we usually use you know, blue for cold and red
for hot. Oh, I guess that's true. Yeah, like icy blue,
but it's the opposite. And I guess what the term
is the temperature of a star. Well, it's mostly just
the mass. As you have more mass, you have more gravity,
which makes more pressure at the core, which increases the temperature,
and that temperature drives fusion. The higher the temperature, the

(15:14):
more effective fusion is and it burns faster. So really
big stars are hotter in their core, which give off
more blue light. And they also don't last very long,
so blue stars tend to be young stars, whereas red
stars can last much much longer because they burn cooler,
so it takes them longer to burn through their fuel.
They're cooler and I guess not it's excited and they

(15:36):
don't feel loud like the hot stars. It's also an
interesting connection between how hot stars are and their magnetic field,
which also is connected to how fast they spin. And
we don't really understand exactly how magnetic fields are made
inside all of stars. We think it has to do
with like currents of plasma. Most of the star is
a big ball of plasma, but we think that in

(15:57):
cooler stars are probably current of plasma, like there's convection,
you know, layers of plasma moving this way and then
sinking and then rising, and that those spinning currents can
generate magnetic fields. Magnetic fields typically come from moving charges.
Charges moving in a circle, for example, will generate a
magnetic field. If you have electricity moving in a circle

(16:18):
on Earth, you can generate a magnetic field. We think
the same thing is happening inside the Earth, and probably
the same thing is happening inside the Sun and inside
cooler stars. Yeah, like our Sun is filled with turmoil, right, Like,
it's got all kinds of things flowing and churning inside
of it. And in fact, it's magnetic field is flipped
a few times, right, Yeah, it actually flips every eleven years,

(16:40):
which is kind of bonkers. The Earth's magnetic field flips also,
but it's much less predictable, and it flips on much
longer time scales, hundreds of thousands of years or millions
of years. We don't even really understand it. Sun's magnetic
field flips very regularly every eleven years, and it's not
something that we understand. We think again, it comes from
how these plasma currents are flowing inside the Sun. But

(17:01):
it's not easy to see. It's easy to see the
outside of the Sun, but to penetry deeper into the
Sun and see what's going on inside it is quite tricky, right.
I guess it kind of depends on the overall spin
of the stuff inside the Sun, right, Like, everything sort
of spinning one direction clockwise than the overall magnetic fields.
You can point one way, but if the things inside
of it are turning the other way, then the overall

(17:22):
magnetic field would flip right. Yeah, And so for the
field to flip, that means things have to like change direction.
Imagine some like huge pot of sauce that's bubbling and
like some bubble like comes up and flips everything around
every eleven years. It's a very regular process. But this
is different than the sun spinning because the Sun is
also spinning at the same time. Yeah, the Sun is
spinning at the same time, and it's still spinning the

(17:43):
same direction. It's always been spinning. Now. Something that's interesting
is that stars that are hotter tend to not have
as strong magnetic fields as stars that are cooler. Started
are hotter have more fusion happening, and they're hotter inside,
and the energy transfer tends to be more radiative than convective.
Instead of like sheets of plasma current moving against each other,

(18:04):
the energy transfer tends to be more through photons passing
that energy. It's radiative energy, and so it's just sort
of like more turbulent and less organized, and so the
theory is that that tends to give weaker magnetic fields
in the hotter stars than in the cooler stars. Do
we know that for sure or is that just kind
of based on how we think the stars work or
or simulations. We definitely do not know that for sure.

(18:27):
And also that's a very simplified picture. Even this classification
of stars by temperature and their magnetic fields excludes a
lot of examples that break these rules. And we don't
understand turbulence well enough, Like we can't even model turbulence
like in sewer systems. We have tried, but it's a
chaotic process. You know, turbulence is very difficult. One little

(18:47):
ripple here or there can really change the way you know,
your sewer system functions. So if everybody's flushing the toilet
at the wrong time, you can get unpredictable results. You
gotta throw it all in the toilet. And so turbulence
is something that's always been a challenge to model scientifically,
and lots of people are working on that. You know,
air turbulence, water turbulence. It's a hard problem. And now
you're talking about a star sized turbulence and everything has

(19:09):
electric charges on it, so it's not just like forces
of compression, but there's also the magnetic fields and electrical fields.
It's a really complicated problem. We can't control plasmas in
tocomax here on Earth for that reason, because they tend
to go unstable. We lose control them, and our simulations
are not great at predicting how that happens. We had
a better understanding of it, we could probably solve fusion, right,

(19:29):
we could reverse engineer exactly how to keep a plasma
from getting too turbulent. But we don't understand it. But
we do see this trend that hotter stars tend to
be less magnetic, and we think it might be because
it's just more chaos going on inside the star. You
don't have these organized tubes of plasma because things are
too hot for that. Right. There may be a little
too explosive in the middle for things to kind of

(19:51):
flow around. They're just too busy getting exploded. I guess, yeah, exactly.
There's always fresh photons coming out from the interior breaking
things up, and so that will We think that's trend, right,
although we can measure I mean, we had our sun,
which is one data point, but the rest we think
it's from the theories and simulations. Well, we can measure
the temperature stars, and we can also measure their magnetic fields.
So we've measure the magnetic fields of other stars, not

(20:14):
just our own, and we do see these kinds of trends.
You can measure the magnetic fields of other stars by
seeing the effect of the magnetic field on the radiation
from that star. Like if there's a magnetic field, then
atoms tend to have different lines of excitation. The light
that we get from other stars comes from eating the
outer layers of the star and then having them glow

(20:34):
based on that temperature. And atoms can only glow at
certain wavelengths due to their quantum mechanical nature, and if
there's a strong magnetic field, some of those wavelengths gets split,
like the spin up and the spin down version of
the electron glow, it's slightly different wavelengths. So we can
measure the magnetic fields by seeing the small effects on
those wavelengths of the glow of the star. So we
can measure the magnetic fields of other stars. Interesting, Okay, Well,

(20:58):
then it seems like shability are has a weird combination
of both heat and a magnetic field. And so let's
get into that mystery. But first let's take a quick break.

(21:20):
All right, we're talking about the mysteries of Sabilsky Star.
Where is the star Daniel? Is it really far away
from us or is it closed by? It's about three
seventy light years away, so it's not super close, but
it's not super far. You definitely can't go there on
a day trip. And it's in our Milky Way galaxy, right, Yeah,
Almost all the stars that we can study in any
detail are in the Milky Way because other galaxies are

(21:41):
just so far away millions of light years away, that
the stars are much dimmer and it's harder to resolve
individual stars. And can you see this star in the
night sky or do you need like a super good telescope.
It's in the constellation of Centauris, so yeah, you can
look up in the night sky and see it, especially
if you're in the Southern hemisphere, especially or only you're
in the Southern hemisphere. Yeah, I don't know. It's a

(22:02):
bright constellation in the southern sky. I'm not sure exactly
where it's visible. All right, Well, there is a big
mystery about this star, enough that people have in papers
about this mystery. Right, Yeah, there are a couple of
exciting mysteries. One is one we were just talking about,
which is this combination of the star's temperature and its
magnetic field. We were saying that hot stars tend to
not have a very strong magnetic field. But Shebilsky Star

(22:24):
is a very hot star. It's called an A star,
which means it's one of the hotter stars that are
out there are stars. A G star is arbitrary classification.
What we're not even on the B list. We're on
the G list. We're cool, man, We're not hot. We're
so uncool. We're cool is everything? Yeah, exactly. Well, No,
our star is not one of the hotter stars or

(22:45):
the bigger stars. It's kind of a boring star in
the Solar system. But Shebilsky Star is an A star,
which means it's very hot. But it also, we think
has a very strong magnetic field, and so this is
an unusual combination when it comes to stars. It's a
hot star, that means it's a really massive star. How
big are or massive is it? So it is a
more massive star. It's only like one and a half

(23:06):
times the mass of the Sun. It's on the hotter
edge of the spectrum. So it's just hotter because it's
at that point in its life. A cycle or just
that extra half of a solar mass makes it that
much hotter to make the dai having one and a
half solar masses definitely makes it hotter for sure. And
we've measured it's magnetic field. We can do that from here. Yeah,
we can measure the magnetic field because, as we were

(23:27):
saying before, the magnetic field affects the atoms inside the star.
It changes how they glow. What do you mean, Well,
electrons are whizzing around the atoms, and the reason that
a star glows is not directly because of photons made
from the fusion. The energy produced by fusion gets transmitted
to the outer layers of the star and they get
hot and they glow. Everything in the universe glows as

(23:48):
it gets hot because getting hot means that things are
moving around. They have a lot of speed. For example,
electrons can move up in energy levels around the atom.
Remember that electrons are not little classical objects that are
in orbit around the atom the where the Earth is
in orbit around the Sun. There have a few quantum
states that they can sit in. It's more like a
ladder than a hill. And so if you give them energy,

(24:08):
they can step up the ladder, but then they like
to step back down the ladder because the universe likes
to spread its energy out and when they step back
down the ladder, they give off that amount of energy.
So every atom has like these levels of energy you
can be at, and if you add a magnetic field,
it changes those energy levels a little bit, which changes
the energy of the light that's emitted by those atoms.

(24:28):
And we can see that here on Earth. Do we
see it brighter or dimmer or only in certain frequencies?
Thinks shift, what's the evidence for the magnetic field? We
see a split. So if you have like hydrogen gas
and you heat it up, they'll tend to emit a
certain frequencies. Now, if you add a magnetic field, then
like the spin up electrons and the spin down electrons
are now slightly different energies. So instead of having a
single line from those electrons, you'll split it into two lines.

(24:52):
And by lines you mean like how much of certain
frequency the light has that comes from let star, right,
Like if it has a lot of energy as frequent
see it then you know that comes from a storing
atton in that star, and you're saying, if that spike
splits into two, that means there's a strong whitetic field. Exactly.
We can't go and measure these things directly. Almost all
the information we have about these stars comes from their lights,

(25:13):
so we have to try to suck out as much
information as possible from this limited stream of data. And
so one thing we do a lot of is not
just count the number of photons we see from the star,
but we measure all of their frequencies and we make
a spectrograph which says what frequencies are we seeing light
from this star. And we don't see light at every
frequency from the stars. It depends on what the star
is made out of and how hot it is, and

(25:35):
also the magnetic field. So it's incredible how much information
is stored and just the spectrum of light that comes
from a star, it really tells you a lot about
what's going on inside. Yeah, it's pretty wild because when
you get light from a star, you're getting like a
single stream of photons, right, It's not like you're getting
like a huge beam of light. You're just getting like
one photon at a time, and you have to get
all this frequency information from those photons, right, Yeah, although

(25:58):
every beam of light is really just one photon at
a time. Even from our sun, you're still just getting
one photon at a time. All though's just a lot
more photons per second, And so you can measure the
frequency of each photon, and that's what we do, and
then they pile up. They tend to be in certain
frequencies and that tells us this one must have been
emitted from an atom and this energy level. The electron
jumped down to a lower energy level and give us

(26:20):
this photon. So iron has a characteristic frequency at which
it glows, and helium has a characteristic frequency at which
it glows. And these lines all get split by the
magnetic field. So the photons go at higher or lower
frequencies based on the spin of the electron because the
spin interacts with a magnetic field. All right, So then
the mystery about this Sabilsky star, or at least one mystery,

(26:40):
is that it's both hot and highly magnetic. Is it
rare to see that or is it physically impossible to
do that? It's rare, it's not impossible, and it's also
not the only example of a hot magnetic star, but
it's not something that we understand. It's weird. It just
sort of like adds to the weirdness of this star.
I guess why would it be rare or weird. Maybe

(27:01):
it's just a really hot star with a lot of
turmoil inside, so it has that extra it factor that
makes it both hot and magnetic. Yeah, well, it means
that's something that is going on inside the star that
we don't understand, because we don't understand how a really
hot star can have the sort of convection necessary in
order to generate the magnetic field. It's just not something
that we understand. We don't have a model for it.
And we do see that it's rare. That's just an observation.

(27:23):
We don't see a lot of hot stars with strong
magnetic fields. Tends to be colder stars that have these
magnetic fields. But again, it's a sort of a forefront
of human knowledge here. We don't really understand magnetic fields
inside stars kind of at all, and so it's a
it's a big area of investigation, just kind of a
rare matchup of both temperature and magnetic field. Is there
the opposite like have we seen any cool stars with

(27:44):
little magnetic field? There's a huge population of stars out there,
so there's always something on the tail whenever we're talking
about these things. Were are we just talking about trends
or we're trying to describe a vast population of billions
of stars? And they never follow these things exactly. There's
always variation and fuzz So they're definitely are some cool
stars out there without strong magnetic fields, and also kind
of a mystery. All right, So that's one mystery about

(28:07):
bills Ki Star. What's the other mystery? The other mystery
is how it glows. We were talking about how the
different atoms in the atmosphere of a star make it
glow differently, and we can use that to tell sort
of what a star is made out of. Like we
can look at our sun and we can say, what's
our sun made out of? How would we figure it out? Well,
one thing you can do is go and take a
scoop of it and you can bring it back to

(28:28):
Earth and like study this stuff. But that's not very
practical because taking a scoop out of the sun is
pretty dangerous. But you can study the sun without actually
going there. You can just look at the light that
comes from the star and say what frequencies is it
coming at, and what stuff do I need to mix
at what temperature to get this spectrum? Can I reverse
engineer the spectrum and say I need to add a

(28:49):
certain amount of hydrogen, a certain amount of helium and
heat it all up to a certain temperature, and then
I should expect to see the spectrum that I'm seeing
from the sun. So that's sort of the general strategy
for how you can tell what a star is made
out of. Don't you see the lines in the spectrum
to like if it if it has certain lines in
a certain frecuncy that tells you, oh there's iron here.
Oh it's got some carbon too, yeah exactly. And it's

(29:10):
sort of like a fingerprint, yeah exactly, because every element
has a different set of lines that tend to glow
at different levels because they're constructed differently. In the solutions
to the Shorteninger equation for iron are different than they
are for helium and for hydrogen, So each element has
its own fingerprint. So you can look at the spectrum
of star and reverse engineer and say to explain this spectrum,
I need a bunch of hydrogen and a little bit

(29:31):
of helium and some iron and some nickels. So, for example,
we can look at our star and we can tell
it's about by mass seventy percent hydrogen and like almost
thirty percent helium, So that's almost the entire star. And
there's like a percent or so that's heavier stuff carbon, nitrogen,
oxygen all the way up, like iron and nickel and
a few other things. So we can tell what's in

(29:51):
our star by looking at the light that comes from it.
And the cool thing is, because you don't have to
go to the Sun to use this technique, you can
also apply the same technique two stars that are really
really fall are away that you could never visit. Yeah,
you can look at expectrum and actually it's the opposite
that tells you what's in it, right, Like if you
see light comes in and all frequencies except a certain frequency,
that's how you know that there's a certain element there, right,

(30:12):
because the element absorbs that bite. Right, So when you're
analyzing the light from a real star, it does get complicated.
You have like a whole spectrum. You see photons that
basically every wavelength, and then there are some spikes some
places where the atmosphere of the star has been excited
to emit just at that frequency, and there are also
dips there, dips when the atmosphere of the star is
absorbing light just at that frequency. So like photons that

(30:34):
come from inside the star get absorbed by the atmosphere
of that star. That's similar to like how we model
the atmosphere of an exoplanet. We can see the light
coming from the star behind it, and we can see
what frequencies the light of that atmosphere gets absorbed, and
so it's both lines and dips in that spectrum that
tell you something interesting is going on. Yeah, and that's
how we know what the star is made out of,

(30:56):
which is amazing, right. It's like we're getting this drip
of data from a pinpoint in the sky and we
can tell hey, it's got a little bit of this
and a little bit of that. Right. It's really incredible,
and it requires developing this model of saying we think
we know what's going on inside a star, and different
models should generate different fingerprints, and so we can reverse
engineer and say this fingerprint means this is going on
inside that distant object. It's really quite incredible, And when

(31:19):
we look at Shebilsky Star, we see a spectrum that
we really just do not understand. Interesting, what do you
mean what do we see in Shebilsky Star? Well, we
both see things missing and we see weird things that
we don't think should be there. We expect that most
stars will have some iron and some nickel in them,
Like even the Sun has iron and nickel in it,
even though it's not capable of making iron and nickel.

(31:40):
There's iron nickel in it from like the last generation
of stars that made that and blew up and then
gathered together. Just like there's iron and nickel inside the Earth,
even though the Earth is not capable of using hydrogen
together into iron and nickel. But Shebilsky Star has like
very very little iron and nickel, is like a tenth
of the iron that we would expect of a star
of its hype. Interesting, I guess why would we expect

(32:02):
there to be more iron because we don't really know
the history of this star or star system. Right, We're like,
we don't know what kinds of stars exploited before then, Right, Yeah,
that's true. You know, why do you expect any star
to have iron in it. It just comes from the
history of the stuff that formed that solar system. So
you have mostly hydrogen and then some helium and heavier stuff.
But that stuff we think is pretty well mixed around.

(32:24):
We've been studying like the stuff in the universe, and
mostly everywhere there's about the same amount of iron. So
any arbitrary star that you form, you don't expect a
huge variation in how much heavy metal it should have
inside of it. So to find a star with a
very very tiny amount of iron in it is weird.
It's like very far out there. Most stars have a
certain fraction of iron in them, and this is like

(32:45):
way out on the tails. So it's got some iron deficiency.
Maybe it just needs to eat more lentils or something,
or more cereal, right, aren't those iron fortified? Yeah, that's right. Yeah,
And it's the star, so it can eat sial all
day because every day is a day for a sun, right,
that's right. And maybe it has been eating weird stuff
because the star also has fingerprints of really strange, very

(33:06):
heavy stuff like strontium and caesium and new dymium has
even weirder stuff things we call actinides, like einsteinium, and
other weird elements high up on the periodic table. And
that's weird because these are super heavy elements, right, Usually
you only see these heavy elements when they're produced by supernovas. Yeah,
so these things are very heavy. They're heavier than it

(33:28):
can be produced by any star. Stars can only make
up to iron. We think that the really heavy elements
plutonium and platinum and uranium are made by supernovas or
by the collisions of neutron stars, etcetera. Now you do
expect to see them still in stars, Like our Sun
has elements inside of it that are heavier than it
can make. Again, they're just debris left over from previous stuff,

(33:49):
Like we see uranium in the Earth, right, it is
not made by the Earth or in our Solar system,
is made by a star long time ago. The thing
that's really weird about finding these elements inside a star
is that they have short half lives, like they do
not last for very long. Einsteinium lasts for four hundred
and seventy two days. So like, what's making einsteinium in
this star? Because if you see it in the star,

(34:11):
it must have been made in the last year or so.
But we think that all the heavy elements that are
inside of star must have come from before the star
was born, so it sort of doesn't add up. The
story doesn't make sense. You're saying these heavy elements themselves
aren't around along, they're still heavy that they break apart
by themselves. Yeah, they have very short half lives, so
they're very rare in the universe. Even if they are

(34:34):
made inside special reactors here on Earth or inside neutron
star collisions, they do not last for very long. So
you don't expect to see them in old stuff. Right,
This star itself not capable of making einsteinium. This star
is millions of years old. Einsteinium should only last for
a year or so, So why is there still einsteinium
in the atmosphere of this star or even like a

(34:56):
year ago? Right, Like, if you look at it over
the course of a couple of year, you should see
the amount of einsteinium decaying or decreasing, right, Yeah, exactly.
And we've been studying the star for six decades now
and it seems to be pretty stable. And it's not
just einsteinium. There are other weird isotopes in this star.
There's technidium, there's prometheum, and none of these have very
long half lives. This is the core mystery of Pushpilski stars,

(35:19):
Like how does it have these apparently impossible, short lived
heavy metals inside of it? Right? Right? And you forgot
horsinium also, Okay, so that's maybe even the bigger mystery
about this star, right, it's why does it have so
many heavy elements it shouldn't have or that it should
have run out of by now? Yeah, that's really the
core mystery. It's also really hot and strangely magnetic and

(35:40):
spinning really slowly. It takes like two hundred years to
rotate one time. So there's lots of things about the star,
and it's pulsating and oscillating in all sorts of crazy ways.
So this star is like an outlier basically every way
that you can measure it. But definitely the weirdest thing,
the best clue that the right we can pull on
easiest is this question about why it has so many
heavy things inside of it. But you're saying, our star

(36:03):
also has these heavy elements, but shouldn't our stars also
have decayed them? By now? Our star has some heavy elements, right, Look,
it has iron, has nickel, probably some uranium in it also,
But those things do decay for sure. But these things
are short lived, right, so if they existed inside our
star ear beyond, they would have decayed away by now,
so we don't see evidence for these things inside our star.

(36:25):
All right, Well, let's get into what might be possible
explanations of these mysteries about Shebilsky Star, including maybe that
it could be aliens, which is Daniel's favorite topic to
talk about. But first, let's take another quick break. We're

(36:50):
talking about a mysterious star out there in space called
Shebilsky Star, and it's weird and mysterious because first of all,
it's hot and magnetic, you know, that's pretty rare for
even Hollywood stars. And it's also has a lot of
heavy elements, and it's pretty heavy metal, which is also
rare for Hollywood stars. I guess to be that much
into heavy metal, we haven't had good heavy metal stars

(37:11):
in a couple of decades, you know, Motley Crue than
all these guys. What's the next generation of heavy metal?
I guess Azzi Osborne made a comeback. He's sort of
more heavy physically and less heavy metal. You know, he's
definitely passes half life. But there are deep mysteries about
the star. It's hot and magnetic, and it's got heavier elements,
and it should have What are some possible explanations, Daniel, Well,

(37:31):
let's go from the most boring explanation to the most exciting.
So the most boring explanation is that it's a mistake
that we're wrong about interpreting this spectrum to say that
there are heavy metals in it, because it's not an
easy thing to do. It's not like a very clear
smoking gun signature of einsteinium. What do you mean it's
not clear. Well, it's hard to do these analyzes. You know,

(37:52):
einsteinium if it exists in this star, it's not like
it's fifty percent einstein um. It would be like point
one percent einsteinium. So it's a mall signal. Doesn't like
jump out at you. It would be like a very
faint dip or spike in the spectrum of the star, right,
which might get mixed up with the noise exactly, might
get mixed up with the noise. And also we're not
very confident in understanding what einsteini Um should look like.

(38:15):
Einsteini Um, just as an example, for many of these
short lived isotopes are not things that are well studied
here on Earth in the laboratory, like hydrogen. We know
how hydrogen glows. It's not hard to study. We have
lots of examples of it. Hydrogen is very common einsteini um, emersium, paramythium, technetium.
We don't make these things in large quantities. We can't
just like order a bunch of it on Amazon and

(38:37):
study it in your laboratory. So we're not even exactly
sure what the spectrum of these things are. So interpreting
the spectrum of a distant star in terms of a
very faint line of rare elements that are not well
understood is not always conclusive. Oh you're saying, we're not
even ensure what a star with a lot of einsteinium
might look like because we don't know if it's going

(38:57):
to be blocking the light or glowing a certain frequencies
the way we think it might be exactly because it's difficult,
and we have models. We have calculations that suggest what
einsteinium should look like when you heat up a bunch
of it, just like we have models for what hydrogen
should look like. But we haven't tested those very well
in the lab to really be confident. Some of these things,
like promethium and technetium. People have been able to do

(39:19):
studies to verify what these things should look like. But
the sort of weirder things we see in Prishbilsky Star,
we're not certain what they should look like when they
do get heated up. I see, Okay, So then one possibility,
the most boring possibility, is that Bilsky Star is just
a weird hot and magnetic star that we think has
a lot of heavy metals, but maybe it just doesn't
have that many heavy metals. We're just may be wrong

(39:40):
about that. Yeah, and there's a possibility that we're wrong
about the crazier ones Einstein, Eum, etcetera. But the identification
of like technetium and permethium, those are pretty solid. Those
we do understand, and the lines there are easier to
pick apart. So I read one paper that said the
spectroscopic evidence is strong enough that we would declare promethium
to be present without hesitation. So there's a lot of
confidence that prometheum is there. And prometheum has a half

(40:02):
life of like twenty years, so it's still a mystery.
It's hard to brush this under the rug of saying
we're not sure about the spectroscopy of it. I think
you just made those names up. Then there was really
an element called promethea. There really is technetium. Horstium is
made up, but prometheum is not. How about Gideon gide
from gidium. You know, I'm gidium with excitement about this?

(40:25):
All right, Well, we could be a mistake, but some
people are pretty confident about at least some of these
heavy metal measurements. What else could it be that explains
Chibilski star. So you need a source of these heavy elements.
One way to make them in the university is to
collide neutron stars, because we think that these things might
be made at the heart of neutron stars or during
those collisions. So one idea was like, maybe there's a
neutron star nearby and it's somehow leaking this stuff into

(40:48):
Pshbielski star album. There is like, well, we don't see
any neutron stars nearby. We can measure the velocity of
Pushpilski star and we don't think it's part of a
binary star system like we would see a wiggle in
the frequencies that come from it if it was orbiting
some invisible, very massive object like a neutron star. So
we don't think that there's like a neutron star nearby

(41:09):
that's like spilling its guts into this star as the
source of these short lived heavy elements. Interesting, So a
neutron star can make these heavier elements, but I would
it give up its elements? Like that is, if it's
a neutron star, would be pretty intense and heavy. It
would suck. Actually the other star wouldn't. Why would it
give up its material? Yeah, it's not a great explanation.
You at, a neutron star has very strong gravity, and

(41:31):
so it's just as likely to pull things out of
Pushpilsky Star as to dump stuff in it. Another crazy
idea is like maybe Pushpielski Star passed through the remnants
of a neutron star collision and like accidentally gathered up
some of this stuff fairly recently, just before we started
observing it, and sort of just sort of like covered
in gunk from a neutron star collision that has all

(41:53):
these crazy things in it. That's like one other wacky idea. Oh,
I see, because when two neutron stars collide, they basically
kind of explode and spill out all their guts, right,
including these heavy elements that it made. Yeah, so that's
one idea, but we don't see any evidence for that.
There's no like other remnants of a neutron star, which
are pretty typical, you can identify these things, there's no
evidence for that as an explanation for what's going on

(42:16):
inside this star. Could it have a neutron star inside.
That's a really cool idea. We talked about that once.
It's possible for a red giant to absorb a neutron
star and to have it inside of it. It tends
to collapse the red giant and it wouldn't again spill
the materials and the neutron star out from inside the
neutron star. All right, So maybe it's not a neutron star.
What else could it be? So now we're getting into

(42:36):
the crazier ideas. It might be evidence of super heavy
elements that we've never identified before. Once we talked to
the podcast about how elements beyond the ones we know
might exist and might be stable, like we've seen elements
up to atomic number like one fourteen, one fifteen and
just beyond, it's possible that in neutron star collisions and

(42:58):
in other processes in the universe, you can make even
heavier elements, super heavy elements that might live a long
time and then decay into these other things. Oh, I see, like,
maybe it has the ingredients for some of these heavier metals,
but we can't see those because they're too heavy to see.
So maybe the source of these heavier elements are just
even heavier stuff breaking down exactly. We suspect that the

(43:20):
universe might be capable of making these ultra heavy isotopes,
that they could be formed in the collision of neutron
stars or other weird things, but they might not be
totally stable, so they might then break down and be
a source for these shorter lived isotopes like einstein um,
which are easier to see, right, because I guess the
heavier the element is, the harder it is to see it, right,

(43:40):
Like it's the further up into the spectrum. It isn't
the rarer. It is definitely the rarer it is. And
we don't know at all how these things would glow,
so we wouldn't even be able to identify them in
order to identify an element in the spectrum, you basically
have to know what it's going to glow like olthowise,
it's hard to disentangle. Remember, these spectra are messies, all
sorts of photons in them, and to pull anything out
of them basically have to know what the fingerprint looks like.

(44:02):
And so these super duper extra heavy elements would have
been made in like a supernova, right, Perhaps a supernova,
perhaps a neutron star collision, perhaps some other process that
we don't even understand. We have a whole fun episode
about the Island of stability, this hypothesis that there might
be stable or semi stable, very healthy elements that could
exist in the universe. And so that would be a
really cool explanation because that would be evidence for something

(44:25):
we've never seen before, right right, Yeah, the island of
stability sounds like a great place to go, sounds better
than our current state canal of chaos. So then what's
the most fantastical possibility that would explain Shibilsky star. So
the most ridiculous and funnest, but maybe also most plausible
explanation is, of course aliens. We're talking about natural processes

(44:47):
to create these short lived isotopes. But there are also
artificial processes to create these things. We can create these
things here on Earth using our laboratories. What if there
are aliens out there and they have some crazy process us.
Maybe they are generating energy from fission, or they have
some insane fusion process or they're just doing a bunch
of experiments to understand the universe, and in doing so

(45:08):
they create dangerous garbage. And this stuff is very radioactive.
What should you do with it? Well, maybe they decided
to like head it into the Sun, and so they
dumped it into their star. So maybe what we're seeing
is a glowing alien trash heap. Whoa wait, So so
you can make these elements without needing a neutron star
collision or supernova like we can make some of these

(45:31):
crazy super duper heavy metals here. Yeah, that's how we
verified that they can exist. We shoot protons or neutrons
into lighter elements at just the right speed so they
get absorbed into the nucleus. We can create these heavier
elements here on Earth. Can't create many of them, sometimes
just a few atoms, but that's how we've proven that
they exist. But you can imagine aliens might be able
to do it at larger scale for who knows what reason. Yeah,

(45:53):
I guess that's the question. Why why would they do that?
Is it kind of energy efficient like fusion? Could that
be their source of energy? These are very heavy elements,
so it's more likely to be fishing, like the waste products,
And people even here in our solar system have suggested
this idea, like what to do with nuclear waste? Well,
why not just dump it into the sun? Right, throw
out into space and it will eventually drift into the Sun.

(46:13):
It's like a real proposal people have made here in
our solar system for getting rid of nuclear waste. It's
not a great idea because it's very expensive, and launching
dangerous waste on top of an exploding rocket has its
own dangers. Also, you might miss and if you miss
the Sun, it will come back around back to you. Right,
there's a reason why we haven't pursued this. But you know,
maybe aliens are doing their experiments already out in space

(46:37):
and they have a reason to dump their stuff into
their sun. And it's really expensive, right, Like to get
anything to the Sun takes a huge amount of energy. Well,
to get things off of Earth takes a huge amount
of energy. Once you're in space, it doesn't take that
much energy to fall into the Sun. You just need
like a gentle push in that direction and the Sun
will take over. Well, you've got to slow it down
enough to fall into the Sun, right otherwise it's just
gonna shoot pass it. It depends, I guess on the

(46:58):
time scale you're interested. In Ventually, everything does fall into
the Sun. Comets, for example, whizz around the Sun, but
they do lose a little bit of speed, and every
time they come around they get a little bit closer
and closer to the Sun. So it's possible yet to
shoot something towards the Sun and just miss and have
it whizz around the other side, which you probably wouldn't want. Yeah. Well,
you know, maybe it's like their bonfire and they're just

(47:19):
you know, roasting marshmallows, giant planet size marshmallows, and they're
just feeding you know, some high energy stuff into the
Sun to make it last longer. Yeah, or maybe they're
using it to message us. Carl Sagan suggested that aliens
might do this kind of thing on purpose to their
own star as a way to indicate to other species
out there in the galaxy that they are there make

(47:41):
their star weird, So there's no other explanation for it
other than there's some technological civilization they're capable of doing that. Wow,
it sounds like they're very attention needy species, availing to
the extreme, like, Hey, let's spend all this money to
make our sun glow a little extra in this spectrum
so that people know we're here. Yeah. Well, it's a

(48:02):
pretty fun idea, you know. When challenge to that is
to understand that this star can't be made by natural processes.
You have to really really understand natural processes super well.
You have to understand exactly the probability of having this
start actually appear through all the normal processes. And so
it's not a great way to signal that you exist.
Because there's so many stars out there that are weird,

(48:23):
so hard to describe them. So to make one that
really stands out compared to all the other stars is
a challenge. Another hand, Sabielski star is a pretty weird one. Yeah,
I guess if everyone's weird, it's hard to stand out
as a weird person. You've got to be the weirdest.
But it's kind of wild. It's pretty interesting that the
most plausible explanation are aliens doing some weird things for

(48:44):
some unknown reason. Yeah, it's pretty fun to think about.
It's a reason this star has been weird for a
long time. People have been thinking about it. And in
the future, as we keep taking more data on this
star will get better and better measurements to see whether
those heavy elements really are there in its atmosphere. Now,
this is something that's actually than the paper like this
is actually write this in their conclusions at the end
of the paper, like or it could be aliens. I

(49:05):
don't know. I've seen it in blog posts and in conversations.
Were actually seen it in a paper suggesting aliens as
an explanation. It's just usually sort of left as a question.
The spectrum remains unexplained. I see you leave it for
the comment session. The internet will fill in those gaps
for you. Yeah, or Daniel, I feel like you're alien

(49:26):
triggers really light, You're like mystery aliens done. At least
we're trying to explain actual cosmic mysteries, not like the pyramids,
you know, in terms of aliens, what do you mean?
Don't get me started on that. They're also mysteries, aren't they.
What's more likely that a bunch of people were really
clever thousands of years ago and figured out how to
build the pyramids, or that aliens did it, or that

(49:47):
aliens are throwing some weird materials into the star just
to get attention. I don't know, man, I think Einstein
in this star is harder to build than pyramids. And
I don't think the Egyptians could be responsible for Einsteiny
in Shebilsky star, though I do give them credit for
the pyramids. Right well, I guess the end lesson here
is that there are still big mysteries out there in

(50:07):
the universe, and we should be, you know, kind of
thankful for stars like Sabilsky stars for delivering us weird
examples of things that can happen in the universe, because
that lets us understand more about the universe. Right. Yeah,
It pushes our envelope of understanding and forces us to
come up with ways to describe things that we do
not understand. Yeah, and maybe we shouldn't think too much
into it because you know, as they say, never look

(50:28):
at gift horse in amount might have dangerous radio active
medals in it. Yeah, it might have Einsteinium braces or
something or giddy up and braces. We'll stay tuned, I
guess as we learn more about stars like Shebilski and
we form a better understanding of how stars work in
this universe. Do you hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for
joining us, See you next time. Thanks for listening, and

(50:55):
remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast For my
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H