September 12, 2024 • 21 mins
How long can we enjoy the sunshine before we need a new star?
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
All the stars in the universe are constantly exploding nuclear bombs.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
That's a little frightening.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Well, go out there and warm your toes on the
you know, the thermonuclear fire of a huge bomb that's
constantly exploding. That sounds cozy.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
It's like a contain and continual explosion.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Yeah, you want to see a nuclear bomb go off,
Go outside and look at the sun. I mean, not directly.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Don't hurt yourself. You just made this advice. I shall
attract that previod advice. Yeah, we'll ask them to edit
it up. Hello, I'm Jorhek and I'm Daniel, and this
(00:50):
is our show. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Explain the entire universe, especially all the stars inside of it. Now,
I notice, Jorge, every time you introduce your our show,
you're about to say the universe, and then you have
to correct yourself and you're like, no.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Actually, yeah, we're still bitter about that. You know.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
My real job, you know, is as a particle to exists.
And I have five thousand collaborators. And when we write
a paper, we put everybody's name on the paper. And
the policy has put everybody's name alphabetical by last name,
regardless of who contributed more or less or whatever. Somebody
decided they didn't want to have the argument. Let's just
make it alphabetical.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Uh huh.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
And what that means is that there's some grad student
who's first author on like every paper.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Wow, it's like him or her at all.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
And it's sort of make some famous and also sort
of infamous because people grumble about it. No pressure, no pressure.
That's right in the Glaring Spotlight. But you know, today's
episode actually relates to that, to Glaring Spotlights, because today
we're talking about something very close to home. We're talking
about how long the sun is going to live?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
How long do we have before it burns out or
explodes or snuffs out?
Speaker 1 (02:09):
How many more projects can Daniel and Jorge or Jorge
and Daniel do arguing about order until life on Earth
is extinguished? Yeah, because the star is gone.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Yeah, do you have time to clean out your garage
or do that thing you've always wanted to do? Right
that sequel to We Have No Idea, our book now
available from Penguin Random Pass.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
That's right. So if you're currently procrastinating doing something you
should do, then you're actually going to learn something today
about how much time you have left to procrastinate?
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Right? Yep? So yeah, let's jump in for we as
usual asked people on the street how long they thought
that the sun would keep burning, And so the question
is how long do you think the sun will keep burning?
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Play along at home, think of your answer, and then
listen to these random on the street interviews. How long
do you think our sun is going to continue to
burn for?
Speaker 2 (03:01):
How long?
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I think a few billion years? I don't know millions, No,
not millions, sorry.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Probably a long time. I hope a long time.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
So like, doesn't this affect your plans? Come on, you
should know this?
Speaker 2 (03:16):
All right? Well, I guess the first thing is that
nobody seemed really concerned.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
That's right. Nobody's rushing home to finish up something before
the sun snuffs out or explodes.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Nobody's like, what the sun's gonna stop burning? At some point,
everyone seemed to know about the idea that the sun
won't shine forever.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Oh that's a good point. I never even considered that
that I would be the one informing people by asking
the question that the sun was not gonna last forever.
Oh my god, what what are you saying? No, everybody
seems to know that already, but maybe nobody seemed concerned
because everybody's answers were very far off in the future.
Nobody said, I don't know ten years or one hundred years.
(03:56):
Everybody's like random big number. Everybody feels like it's just
so off off in the future, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Well, let's maybe take a step back, like how the
stars to inform, right, Like I imagine out in space,
there's stuff like dust and little bits of rock, and
at some point the gravity pulls them together, like there's
some nearby each other until they clump together, and first
it's a giant rock, and then it's an even bigger rock,
and then it just gets more massive, and at some
point what happens.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Yeah, but it's not mostly rock. Stars are mostly made
out of gas, mostly out of hydrogen. So in the
Big Bang, most of the stuff that was formed after
the Big Bang was hydrogen, a little bit helium and
a few heavier elements, but mostly you just have huge
clouds of gas formed in the early universe, Okay, and
then gravity takes over and gravity slowly pulls those things together,
(04:45):
as you said, and accumulates these gas clouds and then
those gas clouds get pulled together by gravity, and they
get squeezed together more and more until it gets denser
and denser, and eventually it gets squeezed together by gravity
enough that it starts to burn. And by burn, I
mean fuse. I mean you have like nuclear bombs going
off because of the pressure inside these big clumps of hydrogen.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Right, but what do you mean they get dence and
denswer like just more and more hydrogen atoms just kind
of bunch up because they're all attracted to each other
by gravity.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Yeah, it's kind of about like a runaway process. I mean,
if you had a perfectly smooth universe filled with hydrogen atoms,
then no one would want to go anywhere because you'd
be tugged in every direction at the same strength.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Right, everybody would be attracted to everybody else equally.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Yeah, that sounds like a good party, right, universe party,
we're all attracted to each other.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah, created it's just a big by swinger party.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
That's right. Hey, you know the analogy works because we're
going to talk about fusion.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
And fission, so and thinks are going to get hot.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
You don't want your relationship to go super heova later
on in relationship advice from an astrophysicist.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yeah, yeah, they were just knocking out that to that advice,
children go out and look at the sun. People have
explosive relationships. This is our last episode by guys.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Right, So, but there were little areas in the universe
early on that were a little denser than others, and
that's just because of quantum fluctuations. And then those areas
were heavier because there's a little bit more stuff. Heavier,
you have more gravitational pull than anywhere else. So then
you start to attract more stuff, and the heavier you get,
the denser region becomes, the more gravity it has, the
(06:22):
stronger its ability to pull more stuff in, and then
it gets heavier and heavier, and it's a runaway process
where pretty soon it's accumulating stuff faster and faster.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
So you can imagine like at some point a giant
ball of really compressed gas, right, Like maybe at the
edges it's not as compressed, but in the middle, it's
just everything's trying to push it together, right, But it
doesn't immediately fuse because hydrogen atoms are also repelling each
other at the same time, right, Like they're attracted by gravity,
but they're repelling each other by other forces.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
That's right. Fusion is not easy to pull off. I
mean we're trying to do it in experiments all the
time here on Earth.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Like it's like trying to squeeze two mantic together that
are on the same polarity, right.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Yeah, trying to make two kids share one ice cream
or something.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
That's not a good idea. But the repelling they're being
attracted by gravity, repelling by electronic forces. But at some point,
if you get them close enough, then another force kicks in, right,
And that's what kind of fuses them together. Is that true?
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Yeah, And that's when you access the strong nuclear force,
and that fuses them together, and the strong nuclear force
very strong then therefore its name. And when you do that,
you release a huge amount of energy.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
And so that's what all of the energy is coming from,
is just these hydrogen atoms fusing together.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
That's right. Almost all the light from all the stars
in the universe is from hydrogen fusing together and creating
all that energy and shooting it out into space.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
But is it like a kind of like a chain reaction,
like you know, like a nuclear bomb, Like one explosion
causes the next explosion. Is that what's happening inside a
star or is it just just the pressure just kind
of makes it like popcorn, It just makes all these
kernels pop up up.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
So on Earth, it's a chain reaction you're thinking of
like fission. Fission is the opposite process. And you break
a nucleus up and it sprays out and stuff. I'm here.
You just have a huge blob of hydrogen in the
core and it's being squeezed by the outside and everything
around it, and it gets really hot. And you know
that's true of every object, like even the Earth. What's
at the center of the Earth. It's not cold at
(08:18):
the center of the Earth. It's hot, and it's hot
for lots of reasons, but one major reason is that
it's being squeezed by gravity. All that rock in the
center of the Earth is being squeezed by all the
rock on the outside, and it gets turned into lava. Right.
Why is lava hot Because it's been squeezed by gravity.
Gravity is pretty powerful if you give it enough time
and stuff.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
So our cloud of hydrogen it just kind of suddenly ignites,
or does it kind of like burns begins to burn slowly,
like does the stargo like fish or is it? Is
it kind of a long process?
Speaker 1 (08:48):
No? I think it It ignites pretty quickly once it
gets going, And what happens depends on how big it is.
So if you have a huge blob of gas, right
and it forms an enormous ball of hydrogen, then it
can burn really brightly and not for very long. If
it's smaller, then it doesn't get to be big enough
to burn like you know, like the Earth or Jupiter
(09:10):
or something. Jupiter is like a star that never got
started because it just wasn't big enough for the core
to start burning.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Oh, you need more stuff to basically weigh down and
squeeze the middle.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
That's right. Yeah, the core of Jupiter is not being
squeezed enough. I mean, it's massive gravitational pressure. You would
not like it. It. Do not recommend it as a
destination for your vacation, right, But yeah, that's right. There
are some common sense warnings on this show. But it's
not hot enough to start nuclear fusion.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Okay, so then things say squeeze and you got a
sun it Suddenly you have this big ball of gas
that's burning in the middle.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
That's right, and it's burning through nuclear fusion. It's turning
hydrogen into helium. Okay, cool, and I want to talk
a little bit more about that, but first a quick break.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
That's how stars are born, not just in Hollywood. And
and then it just keeps burning for a long time, right,
until all the hydrogen turns into helium.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Yeah, that's exactly right. You have fuel and you burn
that fuel, and when you've done burning that fuel, you're done.
But the interesting thing is that the output of fusion
is helium, right, And so what happens is that you
accumulate helium at the core of these stars, and then
if it keeps going, if it gets big enough, then
it can start to fuse helium.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Oh and then that it's like it goes into secondary
fuel burning mode.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Yeah, exactly, it's burning helium because you can fuse helium
into the element with number four, which I embarrassed and
can't even remember. Is that?
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Okay, So we're talking about what happens to a star
and at some point it makes it turns all the
hydrogen into helium and eventually into iron, and that's kind
of when that's kind of when a supernova happens, right.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Yeah, Well, it doesn't necessarily happen to have to be
a supernova depends on the mass of the star. So
let's talk just to be specific about a star like hours,
you know, the sunk and any object that's like about
up to eight times the mass of the Sun is
going to have an experience like our sun. And so
what happens is it starts to burn hydrogen like we said,
and then the hydrogen gets the core gets burned up
(11:23):
and you get helium, and then you start to burn
the hydrogen on the shell, and then the star starts
to grow. It gets bigger, like physically larger in space.
And the reason is that you're now burning the hydrogen
on the outside and that the burning there is pushing
stuff out. It's like the radiation pressure is making it grow.
So the Sun will keep burning and then it'll expand
(11:45):
and it'll cool, so it'll start to get larger and
it'll turn into a red giant so giant meaning it
gets bigger and red because it changes color.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Because the color is related to the temperature, right, like,
the cooler it is the red Like it's kind of counterintuitive,
the colder it is the star is the redder it is.
But then the hotter it is the bluer it looks.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Right, yeah, and that's related to the wavelength of those lights.
That light. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah. Like if you could you press fast forward on
life on Earth, you would see the Sun is this
yellow dot. But eventually you'll see it grow and grow
redder and then grow and eventually we'll take over ourn
entire sky and at some point it'll just snuff us out.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
That's right. Eventually we will be in the sun. Earth
will just get like eaten up by the Sun. Yeah exactly.
But that's again billions of years in the future. It's
like three billion years in.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
The future, three billion years. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
And so before but before we even get snuffed up,
you know, it'll get pretty hot and we wouldn't want
to be around anyway.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Oh I see.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
So first the ocean's boil and then we get snuffed up.
Yeah wow. And then that's that's like the last phase
before the Sun dies and then it's mostly used up
its fuel and you know, it's like a fire. You
use up the fuel and then the fire goes out.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
So everything turned to iron.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Maybe it's not every star that can make iron, right,
it depends on the size of it. Mostly iron is
made in much bigger stars. So our star is not
big enough to make iron, so we'll probably make helium
and a little bit of lithium and a few other things.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Oh I see. So some stars are bigger, so they
have more pressure so they can cook iron, but ours
cannot exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Ours is not by far one of the biggest stars
in the universe. It's relatively modest. Yeah, okay, And then
when it burns off all the hydrogen sort of on
the outside, then it'll go out, and what we'll be
left with is something they call a white dwarf, which
is basically just meaning a big cool blob, something that's
not burning anymore of what it's just sort of the
(13:39):
leftover stuff. You know, you have enough elements there to
sit there there. It's hot and so it's sort of glowing,
but it's not actually burning anymore. And you'll have some
helium and maybe some lithium and just be like a
dense blob, but it won't be bright the same way,
and it'll cool and eventually become a black dwarf, which
means basically a big lump of.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Rock, like just a giant meat right.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Yeah, though mostly made of like frozen.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Helium, frozen helium for real.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Yeah, yeah, because mostly what mostly what the Sun is
is burning hydrogen into helium. And again, some of that
helium will get burned into heavier stuff, but most of
it won't, I think.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
And so this is going to be like a giant
ice ball the size of what.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Oh, you'll be small, You'll be smaller than the current Sun.
Oh I see, it's just the core. Yeah, just the
core is left over because all the other stuff is
blown out when it turns into a red giant. But yeah,
some significant fraction of the mass of the Sun is
going to end up left over as a white dwarf
and then a black dwarf. Yeah, exactly. And you know
that has a future. It could be that that then
(14:36):
gets clustered together later on and becomes part of a
new star. You know, a lot of the stuff that's
in our star and in the Earth used to be
inside of a star. And so you know, everything that
we're that we're made out of is a remnant from
a star that died. So if it wasn't for stars
and these fusion furnaces making the heavier elements, then there
(14:57):
wouldn't be anything else to make stuff out of. It
would all just be hid helium. And so it's gravity
squeezing this stuff together over billions of years that makes
the heavier elements, and mostly in the bigger stars that
you get up to like iron. You know, the bigger
stars can do more exciting stuff. Like our sun is
not going to go supernova, it's just not big enough.
But a bigger star could have enough mass that it
collapses and it pushes it together and it can create
(15:18):
a supernova and then two weird things, either a black
hole or a neutron star, which I think is one
of the weirdest things in the universe. So it's more
of an implosion than an explosion. Actually yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's pretty crazy stuff.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
So you're saying that's when the heavier elements get mate, right.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Yeah, in some of these supernovas, because you have heavy
stuff flying around and it collides and it forms even
heavier stuff, yeah right. And then but the heaviest stuff,
like we were saying earlier, gold and all that stuff
gets formed when two of those remnants collide, Like say
you have one really massive star lives its whole life,
has a great time, blows up, turns into a neutron star,
(15:58):
and another one does the same thing, and then the
two neutron stars are orbiting each other, and eventually, because
they're so massive, they pull each other together and they
collapse and they collide into each other, and it's in
that collision that you can form the really heaviest stuff.
So all the super heavy metals in the universe are
made when neutron stars die.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Wow, and that's why they're so rare, so that you
need these crazy events just to make gold and titanium
and all these elements.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Right, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
But it's crazy that we have that stuff on Earth.
Yeah right, I.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Know, we have it here on Earth, and it's like
the leftovers these incredible cosmic events that happened billions of
years ago and then got sprayed out into the universe
with enough time for them to like have a whole
new life. You know. I love that everything in the
universe is getting recycled, right, Like our solar system didn't
even start forming until you know, five billion years ago,
(16:48):
which is nine billion years into the party. Right.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Yeah, let's talk about that, but first let's take a
quick break.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Right now. Is when the sun is like looking over
that hot, sexy sun in the next solar system.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
And looking to buy a corvette.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Right, Yeah, it's wondering, like do I look like a big,
fat red giant and tell me I still look small,
like a nice little yellow dwarf.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Tell me I'm so hot.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Yeah, exactly. And one thing that I think is really
interesting is that the smaller star is the longer it lives.
The bigger star is the shorter it lives. And the
first stars in the universe were massive, they were incredible,
and so they didn't live for very long. Like those
first stars we talked about, none of those are around anymore.
None of the stars that are in the universe now
are first generation stars. They're all second, third, fourth generation,
(17:41):
that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
All the stars were seeing the night sky in like
the pictures of galaxies.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
They're all None of those are among the first stars
that were formed about one hundred million years that's the
Big Bang. Yes, it's only recently people scientists even saw
the light from those first stars. It's really hard to see.
You have to use the infrared because the universe was
so dense back then. But yeah, our star is made
out of leftover bits from other stars earlier that burned
(18:05):
and exploded.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Wow. And recombined, right, and eventually you're saying, our big
ice ball of the sun is going to recombine with
something else maybe and form.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
But you can't do this forever, you know, Like there's
a limited amount of hydrogen, and you need hydrogen to
have these reactions to start. Eventually things get yeah, things
get denser and denser, and you run out of fuel.
So like think about the Milky Way galaxy. It's got
enormous blobs of hydrogen gas. Still it's still making stars,
but eventually it's going to run out, and then it's
(18:39):
going to stop making stars. And those stars are going
to burn for a while, but they're not going to
burn forever.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
So eventually everything's going to be like iron and heavier.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Metals, yeah, yeah, and then things will get dark.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Things are going to get rocky.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Things are going to get rocky, that's right. But some
of these stars, some of these stars are going to
burn a long time. Like there are stars that have
lifetimes of trillions of years.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
But that's not up us. So in five billion years,
we got to figure something out.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Yeah, we have to figure out how to find get
to another star. And we got less than you know,
three ish billion years to figure that out.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Oh man, so we have to jump to another start
that that is burning and or just learn to live
in dark kind of right.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Well, you know, fusion is not impossible. You know, we
can copy the energy source of the stars if if
we we don't necessarily sarily need a star, right, we
could power ourselves through our own controlled fusion if we
if we could figure that out.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
But do we have enough hydrogen or water to last?
Does that long? Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (19:41):
I mean the Sun is massively inefficient, right, Like most
of the energy of the Sun gets thrown off into
space and then and not even use. So we wouldn't
need anything nearly as big as the Sun to power
human civilization.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
So we could just go out there grab some of
that hydrogen floating around, or go to Jupiter maybe grab
all that hydrogen create our little mini sun here.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah yeah, oh wow. Well, you know, if you're living
out in space, you don't have to worry about pollution, like,
so you can just do fission, which is much easier,
and there's plenty of that stuff floating around, and you know,
you get radioactive waste to just jettison. You're already in space,
so who cares, right, Interesting people used to think the
ocean was too big and you could just pollute it
forever without consequences. We know that's not true, but it
is true of the universe.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
You say that now you're never going to fill.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
The universe with garbage. Yeah, I get you. Think in
a billion years, people are gonna say, I can't believe
they filled space with junk. Man, you're responsible.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
You're gonna be like, don't throw don't throw plastic bags
out into space because the space dolphins are gonna.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
It kills all those cute space animals.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Space dolphins, space dolphins joking on your cosmic ways?
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Why is that funny, Hardy, I don't think that's funny
at all, and I think you're a jerk for laughing.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Yeah. Sorry, Cool. Well, that's that's kind of interesting, that
the idea that maybe we will never leave our solar system.
Maybe we'll just figure out how to make our own
little mini sons to keep us warm.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Absolutely, wow, I think we could do that. Right until then,
I guess we're sunscreen.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
That's right, And don't worry too much about the sun
burning out. We have bigger problems to figure out than
whether the sun is going to explode. You've got lots
of time to work on that problem. Do you have
a question you wish we would cover, Send it to us.
We'd love to hear from you. You can find us
on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge One Word,
(21:28):
or email us to feedback at Danielandjorge dot com
All the stars in the universe are constantly exploding nuclear bombs.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
That's a little frightening.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Well, go out there and warm your toes on the
you know, the thermonuclear fire of a huge bomb that's
constantly exploding. That sounds cozy.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
It's like a contain and continual explosion.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Yeah, you want to see a nuclear bomb go off,
Go outside and look at the sun. I mean, not directly.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Don't hurt yourself. You just made this advice. I shall
attract that previod advice. Yeah, we'll ask them to edit
it up. Hello, I'm Jorhek and I'm Daniel, and this
(00:50):
is our show. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Explain the entire universe, especially all the stars inside of it. Now,
I notice, Jorge, every time you introduce your our show,
you're about to say the universe, and then you have
to correct yourself and you're like, no.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Actually, yeah, we're still bitter about that. You know.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
My real job, you know, is as a particle to exists.
And I have five thousand collaborators. And when we write
a paper, we put everybody's name on the paper. And
the policy has put everybody's name alphabetical by last name,
regardless of who contributed more or less or whatever. Somebody
decided they didn't want to have the argument. Let's just
make it alphabetical.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Uh huh.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
And what that means is that there's some grad student
who's first author on like every paper.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Wow, it's like him or her at all.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
And it's sort of make some famous and also sort
of infamous because people grumble about it. No pressure, no pressure.
That's right in the Glaring Spotlight. But you know, today's
episode actually relates to that, to Glaring Spotlights, because today
we're talking about something very close to home. We're talking
about how long the sun is going to live?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
How long do we have before it burns out or
explodes or snuffs out?
Speaker 1 (02:09):
How many more projects can Daniel and Jorge or Jorge
and Daniel do arguing about order until life on Earth
is extinguished? Yeah, because the star is gone.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Yeah, do you have time to clean out your garage
or do that thing you've always wanted to do? Right
that sequel to We Have No Idea, our book now
available from Penguin Random Pass.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
That's right. So if you're currently procrastinating doing something you
should do, then you're actually going to learn something today
about how much time you have left to procrastinate?
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Right? Yep? So yeah, let's jump in for we as
usual asked people on the street how long they thought
that the sun would keep burning, And so the question
is how long do you think the sun will keep burning?
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Play along at home, think of your answer, and then
listen to these random on the street interviews. How long
do you think our sun is going to continue to
burn for?
Speaker 2 (03:01):
How long?
Speaker 1 (03:02):
I think a few billion years? I don't know millions, No,
not millions, sorry.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Probably a long time. I hope a long time.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
So like, doesn't this affect your plans? Come on, you
should know this?
Speaker 2 (03:16):
All right? Well, I guess the first thing is that
nobody seemed really concerned.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
That's right. Nobody's rushing home to finish up something before
the sun snuffs out or explodes.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Nobody's like, what the sun's gonna stop burning? At some point,
everyone seemed to know about the idea that the sun
won't shine forever.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Oh that's a good point. I never even considered that
that I would be the one informing people by asking
the question that the sun was not gonna last forever.
Oh my god, what what are you saying? No, everybody
seems to know that already, but maybe nobody seemed concerned
because everybody's answers were very far off in the future.
Nobody said, I don't know ten years or one hundred years.
(03:56):
Everybody's like random big number. Everybody feels like it's just
so off off in the future, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Well, let's maybe take a step back, like how the
stars to inform, right, Like I imagine out in space,
there's stuff like dust and little bits of rock, and
at some point the gravity pulls them together, like there's
some nearby each other until they clump together, and first
it's a giant rock, and then it's an even bigger rock,
and then it just gets more massive, and at some
point what happens.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Yeah, but it's not mostly rock. Stars are mostly made
out of gas, mostly out of hydrogen. So in the
Big Bang, most of the stuff that was formed after
the Big Bang was hydrogen, a little bit helium and
a few heavier elements, but mostly you just have huge
clouds of gas formed in the early universe, Okay, and
then gravity takes over and gravity slowly pulls those things together,
(04:45):
as you said, and accumulates these gas clouds and then
those gas clouds get pulled together by gravity, and they
get squeezed together more and more until it gets denser
and denser, and eventually it gets squeezed together by gravity
enough that it starts to burn. And by burn, I
mean fuse. I mean you have like nuclear bombs going
off because of the pressure inside these big clumps of hydrogen.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Right, but what do you mean they get dence and
denswer like just more and more hydrogen atoms just kind
of bunch up because they're all attracted to each other
by gravity.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Yeah, it's kind of about like a runaway process. I mean,
if you had a perfectly smooth universe filled with hydrogen atoms,
then no one would want to go anywhere because you'd
be tugged in every direction at the same strength.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Right, everybody would be attracted to everybody else equally.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Yeah, that sounds like a good party, right, universe party,
we're all attracted to each other.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah, created it's just a big by swinger party.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
That's right. Hey, you know the analogy works because we're
going to talk about fusion.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
And fission, so and thinks are going to get hot.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
You don't want your relationship to go super heova later
on in relationship advice from an astrophysicist.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yeah, yeah, they were just knocking out that to that advice,
children go out and look at the sun. People have
explosive relationships. This is our last episode by guys.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Right, So, but there were little areas in the universe
early on that were a little denser than others, and
that's just because of quantum fluctuations. And then those areas
were heavier because there's a little bit more stuff. Heavier,
you have more gravitational pull than anywhere else. So then
you start to attract more stuff, and the heavier you get,
the denser region becomes, the more gravity it has, the
(06:22):
stronger its ability to pull more stuff in, and then
it gets heavier and heavier, and it's a runaway process
where pretty soon it's accumulating stuff faster and faster.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
So you can imagine like at some point a giant
ball of really compressed gas, right, Like maybe at the
edges it's not as compressed, but in the middle, it's
just everything's trying to push it together, right, But it
doesn't immediately fuse because hydrogen atoms are also repelling each
other at the same time, right, Like they're attracted by gravity,
but they're repelling each other by other forces.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
That's right. Fusion is not easy to pull off. I
mean we're trying to do it in experiments all the
time here on Earth.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Like it's like trying to squeeze two mantic together that
are on the same polarity, right.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Yeah, trying to make two kids share one ice cream
or something.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
That's not a good idea. But the repelling they're being
attracted by gravity, repelling by electronic forces. But at some point,
if you get them close enough, then another force kicks in, right,
And that's what kind of fuses them together. Is that true?
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Yeah, And that's when you access the strong nuclear force,
and that fuses them together, and the strong nuclear force
very strong then therefore its name. And when you do that,
you release a huge amount of energy.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
And so that's what all of the energy is coming from,
is just these hydrogen atoms fusing together.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
That's right. Almost all the light from all the stars
in the universe is from hydrogen fusing together and creating
all that energy and shooting it out into space.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
But is it like a kind of like a chain reaction,
like you know, like a nuclear bomb, Like one explosion
causes the next explosion. Is that what's happening inside a
star or is it just just the pressure just kind
of makes it like popcorn, It just makes all these
kernels pop up up.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
So on Earth, it's a chain reaction you're thinking of
like fission. Fission is the opposite process. And you break
a nucleus up and it sprays out and stuff. I'm here.
You just have a huge blob of hydrogen in the
core and it's being squeezed by the outside and everything
around it, and it gets really hot. And you know
that's true of every object, like even the Earth. What's
at the center of the Earth. It's not cold at
(08:18):
the center of the Earth. It's hot, and it's hot
for lots of reasons, but one major reason is that
it's being squeezed by gravity. All that rock in the
center of the Earth is being squeezed by all the
rock on the outside, and it gets turned into lava. Right.
Why is lava hot Because it's been squeezed by gravity.
Gravity is pretty powerful if you give it enough time
and stuff.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
So our cloud of hydrogen it just kind of suddenly ignites,
or does it kind of like burns begins to burn slowly,
like does the stargo like fish or is it? Is
it kind of a long process?
Speaker 1 (08:48):
No? I think it It ignites pretty quickly once it
gets going, And what happens depends on how big it is.
So if you have a huge blob of gas, right
and it forms an enormous ball of hydrogen, then it
can burn really brightly and not for very long. If
it's smaller, then it doesn't get to be big enough
to burn like you know, like the Earth or Jupiter
(09:10):
or something. Jupiter is like a star that never got
started because it just wasn't big enough for the core
to start burning.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Oh, you need more stuff to basically weigh down and
squeeze the middle.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
That's right. Yeah, the core of Jupiter is not being
squeezed enough. I mean, it's massive gravitational pressure. You would
not like it. It. Do not recommend it as a
destination for your vacation, right, But yeah, that's right. There
are some common sense warnings on this show. But it's
not hot enough to start nuclear fusion.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Okay, so then things say squeeze and you got a
sun it Suddenly you have this big ball of gas
that's burning in the middle.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
That's right, and it's burning through nuclear fusion. It's turning
hydrogen into helium. Okay, cool, and I want to talk
a little bit more about that, but first a quick break.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
That's how stars are born, not just in Hollywood. And
and then it just keeps burning for a long time, right,
until all the hydrogen turns into helium.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Yeah, that's exactly right. You have fuel and you burn
that fuel, and when you've done burning that fuel, you're done.
But the interesting thing is that the output of fusion
is helium, right, And so what happens is that you
accumulate helium at the core of these stars, and then
if it keeps going, if it gets big enough, then
it can start to fuse helium.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Oh and then that it's like it goes into secondary
fuel burning mode.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Yeah, exactly, it's burning helium because you can fuse helium
into the element with number four, which I embarrassed and
can't even remember. Is that?
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Okay, So we're talking about what happens to a star
and at some point it makes it turns all the
hydrogen into helium and eventually into iron, and that's kind
of when that's kind of when a supernova happens, right.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Yeah, Well, it doesn't necessarily happen to have to be
a supernova depends on the mass of the star. So
let's talk just to be specific about a star like hours,
you know, the sunk and any object that's like about
up to eight times the mass of the Sun is
going to have an experience like our sun. And so
what happens is it starts to burn hydrogen like we said,
and then the hydrogen gets the core gets burned up
(11:23):
and you get helium, and then you start to burn
the hydrogen on the shell, and then the star starts
to grow. It gets bigger, like physically larger in space.
And the reason is that you're now burning the hydrogen
on the outside and that the burning there is pushing
stuff out. It's like the radiation pressure is making it grow.
So the Sun will keep burning and then it'll expand
(11:45):
and it'll cool, so it'll start to get larger and
it'll turn into a red giant so giant meaning it
gets bigger and red because it changes color.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Because the color is related to the temperature, right, like,
the cooler it is the red Like it's kind of counterintuitive,
the colder it is the star is the redder it is.
But then the hotter it is the bluer it looks.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Right, yeah, and that's related to the wavelength of those lights.
That light. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah. Like if you could you press fast forward on
life on Earth, you would see the Sun is this
yellow dot. But eventually you'll see it grow and grow
redder and then grow and eventually we'll take over ourn
entire sky and at some point it'll just snuff us out.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
That's right. Eventually we will be in the sun. Earth
will just get like eaten up by the Sun. Yeah exactly.
But that's again billions of years in the future. It's
like three billion years in.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
The future, three billion years. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
And so before but before we even get snuffed up,
you know, it'll get pretty hot and we wouldn't want
to be around anyway.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Oh I see.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
So first the ocean's boil and then we get snuffed up.
Yeah wow. And then that's that's like the last phase
before the Sun dies and then it's mostly used up
its fuel and you know, it's like a fire. You
use up the fuel and then the fire goes out.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
So everything turned to iron.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Maybe it's not every star that can make iron, right,
it depends on the size of it. Mostly iron is
made in much bigger stars. So our star is not
big enough to make iron, so we'll probably make helium
and a little bit of lithium and a few other things.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Oh I see. So some stars are bigger, so they
have more pressure so they can cook iron, but ours
cannot exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Ours is not by far one of the biggest stars
in the universe. It's relatively modest. Yeah, okay, And then
when it burns off all the hydrogen sort of on
the outside, then it'll go out, and what we'll be
left with is something they call a white dwarf, which
is basically just meaning a big cool blob, something that's
not burning anymore of what it's just sort of the
(13:39):
leftover stuff. You know, you have enough elements there to
sit there there. It's hot and so it's sort of glowing,
but it's not actually burning anymore. And you'll have some
helium and maybe some lithium and just be like a
dense blob, but it won't be bright the same way,
and it'll cool and eventually become a black dwarf, which
means basically a big lump of.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Rock, like just a giant meat right.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Yeah, though mostly made of like frozen.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Helium, frozen helium for real.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Yeah, yeah, because mostly what mostly what the Sun is
is burning hydrogen into helium. And again, some of that
helium will get burned into heavier stuff, but most of
it won't, I think.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
And so this is going to be like a giant
ice ball the size of what.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Oh, you'll be small, You'll be smaller than the current Sun.
Oh I see, it's just the core. Yeah, just the
core is left over because all the other stuff is
blown out when it turns into a red giant. But yeah,
some significant fraction of the mass of the Sun is
going to end up left over as a white dwarf
and then a black dwarf. Yeah, exactly. And you know
that has a future. It could be that that then
(14:36):
gets clustered together later on and becomes part of a
new star. You know, a lot of the stuff that's
in our star and in the Earth used to be
inside of a star. And so you know, everything that
we're that we're made out of is a remnant from
a star that died. So if it wasn't for stars
and these fusion furnaces making the heavier elements, then there
(14:57):
wouldn't be anything else to make stuff out of. It
would all just be hid helium. And so it's gravity
squeezing this stuff together over billions of years that makes
the heavier elements, and mostly in the bigger stars that
you get up to like iron. You know, the bigger
stars can do more exciting stuff. Like our sun is
not going to go supernova, it's just not big enough.
But a bigger star could have enough mass that it
collapses and it pushes it together and it can create
(15:18):
a supernova and then two weird things, either a black
hole or a neutron star, which I think is one
of the weirdest things in the universe. So it's more
of an implosion than an explosion. Actually yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's pretty crazy stuff.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
So you're saying that's when the heavier elements get mate, right.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Yeah, in some of these supernovas, because you have heavy
stuff flying around and it collides and it forms even
heavier stuff, yeah right. And then but the heaviest stuff,
like we were saying earlier, gold and all that stuff
gets formed when two of those remnants collide, Like say
you have one really massive star lives its whole life,
has a great time, blows up, turns into a neutron star,
(15:58):
and another one does the same thing, and then the
two neutron stars are orbiting each other, and eventually, because
they're so massive, they pull each other together and they
collapse and they collide into each other, and it's in
that collision that you can form the really heaviest stuff.
So all the super heavy metals in the universe are
made when neutron stars die.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Wow, and that's why they're so rare, so that you
need these crazy events just to make gold and titanium
and all these elements.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Right, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
But it's crazy that we have that stuff on Earth.
Yeah right, I.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Know, we have it here on Earth, and it's like
the leftovers these incredible cosmic events that happened billions of
years ago and then got sprayed out into the universe
with enough time for them to like have a whole
new life. You know. I love that everything in the
universe is getting recycled, right, Like our solar system didn't
even start forming until you know, five billion years ago,
(16:48):
which is nine billion years into the party. Right.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Yeah, let's talk about that, but first let's take a
quick break.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Right now. Is when the sun is like looking over
that hot, sexy sun in the next solar system.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
And looking to buy a corvette.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Right, Yeah, it's wondering, like do I look like a big,
fat red giant and tell me I still look small,
like a nice little yellow dwarf.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Tell me I'm so hot.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Yeah, exactly. And one thing that I think is really
interesting is that the smaller star is the longer it lives.
The bigger star is the shorter it lives. And the
first stars in the universe were massive, they were incredible,
and so they didn't live for very long. Like those
first stars we talked about, none of those are around anymore.
None of the stars that are in the universe now
are first generation stars. They're all second, third, fourth generation,
(17:41):
that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
All the stars were seeing the night sky in like
the pictures of galaxies.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
They're all None of those are among the first stars
that were formed about one hundred million years that's the
Big Bang. Yes, it's only recently people scientists even saw
the light from those first stars. It's really hard to see.
You have to use the infrared because the universe was
so dense back then. But yeah, our star is made
out of leftover bits from other stars earlier that burned
(18:05):
and exploded.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Wow. And recombined, right, and eventually you're saying, our big
ice ball of the sun is going to recombine with
something else maybe and form.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
But you can't do this forever, you know, Like there's
a limited amount of hydrogen, and you need hydrogen to
have these reactions to start. Eventually things get yeah, things
get denser and denser, and you run out of fuel.
So like think about the Milky Way galaxy. It's got
enormous blobs of hydrogen gas. Still it's still making stars,
but eventually it's going to run out, and then it's
(18:39):
going to stop making stars. And those stars are going
to burn for a while, but they're not going to
burn forever.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
So eventually everything's going to be like iron and heavier.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Metals, yeah, yeah, and then things will get dark.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Things are going to get rocky.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Things are going to get rocky, that's right. But some
of these stars, some of these stars are going to
burn a long time. Like there are stars that have
lifetimes of trillions of years.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
But that's not up us. So in five billion years,
we got to figure something out.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Yeah, we have to figure out how to find get
to another star. And we got less than you know,
three ish billion years to figure that out.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Oh man, so we have to jump to another start
that that is burning and or just learn to live
in dark kind of right.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Well, you know, fusion is not impossible. You know, we
can copy the energy source of the stars if if
we we don't necessarily sarily need a star, right, we
could power ourselves through our own controlled fusion if we
if we could figure that out.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
But do we have enough hydrogen or water to last?
Does that long? Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (19:41):
I mean the Sun is massively inefficient, right, Like most
of the energy of the Sun gets thrown off into
space and then and not even use. So we wouldn't
need anything nearly as big as the Sun to power
human civilization.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
So we could just go out there grab some of
that hydrogen floating around, or go to Jupiter maybe grab
all that hydrogen create our little mini sun here.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah yeah, oh wow. Well, you know, if you're living
out in space, you don't have to worry about pollution, like,
so you can just do fission, which is much easier,
and there's plenty of that stuff floating around, and you know,
you get radioactive waste to just jettison. You're already in space,
so who cares, right, Interesting people used to think the
ocean was too big and you could just pollute it
forever without consequences. We know that's not true, but it
is true of the universe.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
You say that now you're never going to fill.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
The universe with garbage. Yeah, I get you. Think in
a billion years, people are gonna say, I can't believe
they filled space with junk. Man, you're responsible.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
You're gonna be like, don't throw don't throw plastic bags
out into space because the space dolphins are gonna.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
It kills all those cute space animals.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Space dolphins, space dolphins joking on your cosmic ways?
Speaker 1 (20:42):
Why is that funny, Hardy, I don't think that's funny
at all, and I think you're a jerk for laughing.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Yeah. Sorry, Cool. Well, that's that's kind of interesting, that
the idea that maybe we will never leave our solar system.
Maybe we'll just figure out how to make our own
little mini sons to keep us warm.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Absolutely, wow, I think we could do that. Right until then,
I guess we're sunscreen.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
That's right, And don't worry too much about the sun
burning out. We have bigger problems to figure out than
whether the sun is going to explode. You've got lots
of time to work on that problem. Do you have
a question you wish we would cover, Send it to us.
We'd love to hear from you. You can find us
on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge One Word,
(21:28):
or email us to feedback at Danielandjorge dot com
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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