Is Betelgeuse about to explode?

Betelgeuse appears to be dimming. Is it about to explode?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Ay, Daniel, what do you think would happen if something
in the night sky suddenly did something totally new, like
wiggling and shaking or dancing around something doing the flaws
the star flaws. I mean, like, what happens if a
star suddenly started doing something it had never done before? Oh?
You know what, I would think that this would be

(00:29):
an amazing opportunity to learn something new about the universe. Nope,
this is an amazing opportunity for a major discovery. Only
we're talking about discovering aliens. Hi'm JR. I a cartoonists

(00:58):
and the creator of PhD Tomics. Hi. I'm Daniel Whitson.
I'm a particle physicist, and I really really want to
believe in aliens. You're an alien enthusiast or an alien
or a professional alien believer. I'm a believer enthusiast. I'm
enthusiastic about people who believe in aliens who do it professionally.

(01:21):
Is somebody out there paying people to believe in aliens?
Because I want to sign up for that or maybe
that's this job right here? Well, welcome to your weekly
career conspiracy advice podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe
a production of I Heart Radio, in which we talk
about all of the amazing and crazy things about the universe.
We explain to you how the universe really works, on

(01:43):
the stuff that's happening out there in the center of
stars and here on Earth and inside the tiny little
particles in your fingertip. That's right. All the things that
we can explain about the universe, and all the things
that we cannot currently explain about this weird and mysterious universe,
only some of which we chalk up to aliens only
some Do you have a giant column in your physics organization.

(02:06):
I'm only allowed to declare aliens two times a day,
So if I would already used that explanation twice in
one day, then I'm going to come up with actual
physics theory to explain what I'm seeing. Oh no, you
actually have to work. Yeah, you know, like, oh, that
program didn't work. Must be the aliens. That's right, My
my Latti is too cold. Aliens latte's who drinks lattees anymore? Man?

(02:29):
That's so a pre alien bam milk. When the aliens come,
I wonder what kind of coffee beverage they will like.
Hopefully not human coffee. Are you saying like human milk?
Like they don't want cow milk or almond milk, they
want like human milk. We don't want to hopefully theyn't
want to brew us, is what I'm saying. I see, Well,

(02:51):
I think I'd rather be a you know, on a
human dairy farm than on a human coffee human coffee.
But anyway, yeah, like, let's not go into let's not
go into free podcast. That's right, human lactose free podcast. Please.
I think most people would vote for that, that's right.

(03:13):
But you know, if we're talking about discovering aliens, then
that's mostly about looking out into the universe and seeing
some crazy stuff. And you know, we haven't yet, of course,
discovered aliens, but we have learned a lot of amazing
stuff just by looking out into the night sky. Yeah,
and I think the way we would discover something like
that is by looking at the sky and then seeing
if weird things happen, like if you know, suddenly things

(03:38):
change or things things happen that don't seem natural. Yeah.
We talked once on the podcast about a really strange
star that seemed to be obscured. It was almost like
somebody was building a huge superstructure that was blocking the
light between that star and us, like a Dyson sphere.
And that's the kind of thing that you might see
if you keep looking into the universe and watching stars

(04:00):
and looking for sort of unnatural phenomena, right, and sometimes
those phenomenon can lead to pretty interesting scientific discoveries, even
if they're not about aliens. Or that's right. In nineteen
eighty seven, we saw a supernova go and that was
the first time and sort of modern astronomy thing, we
got to watch a supernova happen. Not in real time,

(04:21):
of course, it happened, you know, thousands and thousands of
years ago, but the light from it arrived here on
Earth in seven and we learned a tremendous amount about
supernovas and how they work and what happens by getting
to watch that one. Really, it was only seven that
we saw our first supernova or I guess maybe with
a telescope. Yeah, that was the first one that that

(04:43):
came in the era of our modern awesome telescopes. So
astronomers saw a few supernova earlier this century. We have
records of supernova's sort of like in the Antarctic ice
where they deposited all sorts of crazy radiation um going
back hundreds of years. But it's sort of modern supernova
watching when was the first really sort of big science
supernova And we should do a whole podcast episode about

(05:05):
what we learned about science from that one supernova. Oh,
I see. So that's the kind of thing that astronomers
do is they look at this guy and they kind of,
you know, to check all the marks there and on
their list of how how things should act. But then
if they see something new, then that's something worth exploring more, right, Yeah,
And that's something sort of fundamentally different about astronomy and

(05:28):
astrophysics than the rest of physics. Like a lot of
us in physics, we make experiments happen. I want to
know what happens when a proton smashes another proton, Well,
I go and I do it. I smashed two protons together.
But if an astronomer wants to know what happens when
you crash one galaxy against another one, you can't build
a galaxy collider, right, that's sort of even practical. Instead,

(05:49):
they just watch it happen in the universe. They look
out into the universe to see their experiment happening. Wow,
did you just call a whole field of physics tush potatoes?
Is that basically what you're saying. And like those guys
who sit around in their couches in Hawaii looking up
at the sky and wait for things to happen, Yeah,
the equivalent is like, if you had some other physicists,
you're like, I really wish this experiment would happened. Maybe

(06:12):
I'll just sit in my living room and wait and
see if it happens in front of me. That's basically
the plan, as opposed to particle physicists who in danger
of the whole human race by building things that mike
create black holes, And don't you rather study a nice
little black hole close to home than one super far
away you can barely see. I think I would rather

(06:33):
stay away from black holes as much as possible. All right, Well,
that's good to know. It's a very powerful couch that
they're sitting on. They get to see the entire universe
and the amazing things that basically anything you want to
watch happen is happening out there somewhere in the universe.
Neutron stars are crashing into each other and all sorts
of strange galaxies exist. They can't make things happen, but

(06:55):
you know, they have a view to one of the
greatest test of experiments in the history of the universe.
It's quite a drama going on out there in the universe.
And so today we are going to be talking about
one such discovery or one such phenomenon that we're seeing
out into the next guy that is kind of weird, inexplicable,
almost and totally we're and might be who knows, of

(07:18):
some weird alien origin. It might be. I think almost
anything can be categorized as potentially of alien origin, which
is one reason why I love that explanation. But this
is something that's been capturing the minds of astronomers and
even popping up in the news media recently. There's something
weird happening with one of our favorite stars in the sky.
That's right. So today on the program we'll be tackling

(07:40):
the question, is beetle jews blowing up? That's right, And
we don't mean blowing up on social media. It's not
going viral um. But you know, just like anything that's
blown up on social media, you do have to wonder
is it about to die? And so we're gonna be
talking about the star beetle Juice, right, not the Broadway

(08:02):
play musical, not the movie with Michael Keaton, the the
original beetle Juice, that's right, And not some weird new
beverage that Gwyneth Paltrow is pushing on people. When you
squeeze beetles um as to stimulate your alkaline intake in
the morning. I think her beetles are sustainably and humanely squeeze.
They're gently massaged to get a little bit of one

(08:23):
drop of juice out of each beetle every day. But
it's not it's not actually beetle juice. It it's actually
a different spelling. It's or is it Uh? It's kind
of an old word, right, it's I think it's Isn't
it originally like the name of a demon or something. Yeah,
it comes from Arabic, I think. And so it has
nothing to do with beetles or juices. Um. It looks

(08:44):
like you might pronounce it like beatel goose or something,
but it's pronounced beetle juice. Yes, it's just just go
with that. Beetle goose. That sounds like the name of
my character. And d and D or something. It's like,
it sounds like a different Qwyneth Paltrop product. I'm gonna
roll my forty seven sided diet. He cast a spell
from my wizard beatel Goose while you're playing with Gwinne Paltrow.

(09:10):
I don't think Paltrow plays D and D. But you know,
I don't know. I don't know. I shouldn't say. You
never know. Maybe she listens to the podcast No. But
there are a lot of people have been watching this
star and noticing something really strange happening with it recently.
And that strange thing is that it's actually dimming, right.
It's like somebody is slowly turning it down. You imagining

(09:33):
some sort of cosmic dimming switch, and somebody on the
wall of the universe there's a giant mob who's playing
with the dimming switch. Alien dat out there or may
it's connected to the universal Alexa. You know what I mean.
Nobody's like Alexa dim No. Bill Juice is a huge star.

(09:53):
It's an enormous, super giant red star and it's very
bright in the sky. It's one of the used to
be one of the ten brightest stars in the sky,
and now it's been dropping. It started in October. It's
been dimming, dimming, dimming, and nobody knows why. Okay, So
we were wondering, and it sounds pretty recent October. That's

(10:15):
it's it's a pretty recent Oh yeah, we are topical
on this show. Yeah, I mean months. I mean to
a physicist that's like on the dot. I don't know
how to respond to that. Maybe a few months you
will come up with a response. Give me till October.
I'll come back with a really clever comeback. Yeah, there

(10:36):
you go. There's something involving how cartoonists are always on deadline.
That's right, we are. Yeah, And so it's a recent development.
And so we were wondering how many people out there
knew that one of the stars in our sky, a
famous one, even beele Juice, is actually dimming. So I
walked around campus and I asked students at UC Irvine,

(10:57):
fresh back from their holiday break, if they knew what
beetle Juice was the star, if they had heard it
was dimming, and if they were worried about a potential
supernova that could fry their eyebrows off. And so here's
what people had to say. I think I've heard of
it before, but I don't know I remember much about it.
Did you know that the star appears to be dimming

(11:17):
in the night sky? No, I didn't know that I
have yet. Did you know that it's dimming dramatically? I
did not. Are you worried about it? Not really? No? No? Yes?
Did you know that it's dimming in the sky dramatically? No?
Does that make you worried? Should I be a red star? Yeah,
it's a bright red star? Yeah. Um, I guess I'm

(11:40):
a little bit worried. I think I've heard of it,
but like, I have no idea anything about it. Did
you know that it's dimming in the sky, like right
now it seems to be fading. Does that make you worried?
Not too much, because I know like stars die and
stuff all the time, but it's still a little concerning
star view juice. No. Sorry though, No, so you didn't

(12:02):
know it was dimming in the sky. Does that make
you worried? I mean, it doesn't sound like something that's
worrying for me. It's just found something very interesting now
that you brought it up, So I would want to
know a little bit more about it and what it is,
and maybe then I could decide if it's worrying when
they're dimming, doesn't just mean their light is going away.
So that started that galaxy is or universe or whatever

(12:25):
it represents. Been that for a while. So I don't
really think it affects us much unless there's something I'm
listening al right, not a lot of concerned or even
a lot of people who had heard of this star. Yeah.
I thought there was going to be sort of more
penetration in the sort of general student population about this
incredible astronomic event that's happening above our heads every single night.

(12:48):
And we had a bunch of listeners to the podcast
right in and ask us, hey, can you talk about
what's going on with Beetlejuice explaining to us. So I
was expecting the students that have maybe heard about it,
but maybe they were too focused on the start of
classes and all their new homework assignments, right or I
imagine most college students now weren't even born when the
movie Beetle Juice came out. That might be an issue also,

(13:13):
But even when I told them about it, they seem
to feel like, you know, hey, this is a supernova.
It's going to happen somewhere super far away, so I'm
not too worried about it. There's maybe a supernova involved here.
But the main mystery is that Beetle Juice you're saying
recently in October started dimming like it was one of
the brightest stars in the universe, and then suddenly it
wasn't as bright. Yeah. People just watch these stars, you know,

(13:35):
And some stars burned constantly. They're just pretty stable. There's
just like a huge fire and going off in the
sky and burning at the same brightness. But other stars
are sort of variable stars, and they wiggle, they go up,
they go down, they go brighter, they get dimmer. It's
like not a not a stable process, like it's it's
going through some motions. Yeah, And you know when you're
looking at a fire, sometimes the fire burns brighter as

(13:57):
it gets to a good bit of fuel, and then
it dims out a little bit. We can talk a
little bit more about the physics of that in a
little bit, But people have been watching Beetle Juice for
like more than a century and taking some pretty detailed
measurements of its brightness, and starting in October nineteen, it
started to dim and people thought, oh, it's just going
into one of its dimming phases. But then it just
kept dimming and dimming and dimming, and now it's dimmer

(14:20):
than it has ever been seen before and more than
a hundred years. Okay, so it has dimmed before, but
now it's dimming more than ever. Yeah, used to sort
of wiggle up and down a little bit here and there,
but now it's much dimmer than it ever has been. Wow.
And how do we notice this? Like, are there people
looking at every star in the sky all the time
or is there a dedicated Beetle juice grad student and telescope.

(14:46):
We assigned one student per star, and that's just your job.
And you've got to hope that you know something interesting sky,
that's right, otherwise you'll never graduate. Um, that's sort of
my problem with astronomy. I mean, I was always interested
that I do a personal one, which is when I
was a kid, the thing that attracted me to science

(15:07):
and the physics was astronomy. I was like, wow, look
at the night sky is amazing. And I got a
telescope and I looked at a star. But then after
a few minutes, you're just sort of like looking at
a dot in the sky. It's not that exciting. Uh,
it's not that often that anything interesting happens. And so
as opposed to when you smash point particles, you're looking
at things that are not points. Exciting stuff happens every

(15:29):
twenty five nanoseconds. So yeah, you have stuff blowing up.
It's pretty dramatic in comparison. But you know, I don't
mean to impugne any astronomers. I love astronomy and astronomers,
and I'm glad that there's lots of different fields of
science and different personalities to go into each different fields
just not my personal choice. But there are people who
do watch the sky and they look for things like supernova.

(15:51):
We're always watching to see more supernova coming because they
help us measure the size of the universe and its expansion.
So yeah, we have surveys that are constantly watching. This
guy just scanning out there looking for things that changed,
Like it takes a picture and then takes another picture
and compares the two pictures to see if anything is changed. Yeah,
there are these very general surveys, and that's how you

(16:12):
discover things like a new planet or you know, Omuamua
is something that's coming towards the Earth. But in this case,
I think Beetle Juice is a star of interest because
it's so big. It's so huge, it's coming near the
end of its life, and it has a really interesting
pattern of variability. M hmmm. Alright, let's get into more
details about our friend Beetle Juice and what could maybe

(16:34):
be happening to make it dimmer. But first let's take
a quick break, all right, Daniel, So, Beetle Juice, one
of the brightest stars, or what used to be one

(16:55):
of the brightest stars in the sky, has been dimming recently,
getting less and less bright, and nobody knows why that's happening. Yeah,
And there's lots of different kinds of stars out there
in the sky, and some of them burn for billions
of years and some just for millions of years. And
what we're doing is looking at all of them and
trying to understand, like, how many different ways is there
to be a star? And you know, there are a

(17:16):
lot like the star that is our sun, it's not
even one of the most typical stars in the galaxy.
And some of them are crazy, and Beetlejuice is one
of the most extreme stars out there. Really all right,
tell me about beetle juice. Let's get into that a
little bit. What do we know about beetle juice and
how is it different than our son? Well, first of all,
beetle juice is huge, Like, it's about twenty times the

(17:39):
mass of our Sun. Twenty times. Yeah, it's an enormous
amount of stuff, So we should call it beetle huge.
I don't think it likes when you call it that,
you know, big old, huge beetle, huge beetle juice. It's
been trying to cut back recently on the amount of
amount it's on the keto astronomical diet. Yeah, and it's

(18:00):
not just huge in terms of mass, like twenty suns
is a lot of stuff. It's actually physically just the
volume is enormous. It has a diameter of close to
a billion miles. Wow, and that's much bigger than our sun. Right, Like,
if if if something that big was in our solar system,
it would probably take up most of the space. Yeah, exactly.

(18:21):
If you put beetle juice in place of our Sun,
then Mercury, Venus, Earth, mars Um, even up to Jupiter
would be inside the radius of the Sun. Right, So
that would like a little juice. Beetles not good. So

(18:43):
it's huge. It's huge, and and why is it that big?
It's just that that's how it happened to be put together. Yeah,
the size of a star just depends on you know,
the sort of the clumps of stuff that are around
to form it, and the dynamics of it, whether it
breaks off to form its own little cloud and stuff.
That's something that people are still really trying to understand
is how stars form and what makes stars form. And

(19:04):
we have parts of the galaxy where stars are still
forming and parts where they're not forming anymore. And that's
not something we understand very well. But what we do
know is sort of the connection between the size of
the star and how long it's going to live. Interesting,
you mean how bright it is or how big it is. Yeah,
the larger the star, the sort of bigger it is

(19:25):
than the brighter it burns, and the shorter it's life.
Like our sun is billions of years old and we
expected to keep burning for another few billion, but beetlejuice
is only eight and a half million years old. It's
like a baby. Really, what but you can have a
star that young and wait and you're you're tip telling

(19:47):
me it's near the end of the end of its life. Yeah,
stars this size only burn for like eight point six
or eight point seven million years, people think. And this
one it's at eight point five million. Wow. So these
things burn bright and they burn hot and they're huge,
but they just don't last as long in the universe.
Like the Sun is sort of the the turtle of stars.

(20:09):
It's gonna keep burning for a long time after Beetle
Juice blows. Interesting, it's kind of like a career in
Hollywood for a Hollywood star. I think, Actually, in Hollywood
it's better to be small, isn't it isn't the thin
still in Well? I mean you burn bright and then
and then nobody cares about you. Yeah, yeah, I think

(20:29):
that's probably a good analogy. All right. So that's beetle juice.
It's different, it's bigger. It's beetle huge. And where can
I find beetle juice? Is it on constellation that I know? Where?
Where could I find it if I wanted to see
it from Earth? Yeah, it's sort of a Hollywood star
because not only is it one of the brightest stars
in the sky, it's in one of the most famous constellations.

(20:50):
It's in the Orion constellation, so it's a big one. Yeah,
and it's um, it's not that close to the Earth.
It's like six hundred and twenty five light years away.
But I think that's kind of close, isn't it. Isn't
it close fair and relatively astronomical distances? That depends. Yeah,
I mean the galaxy is, you know, a hundred thousand
light years across, so yet in our neighborhood. But there

(21:12):
are other stars that are, you know, four or five
ten light years away, So there's definitely a lot of
stars that are closer. And it's not just in the
Orion constellation. I think, isn't it like the central one? Like,
if you look at the three stars that make up
the belt, isn't Beetle Juice one of them? The middle one?
I think the managers of the careers of the other
stars argue about which is sort of the most important

(21:32):
star in a come on, Beetle Juice is of the
Arian constellation, Let's be honest. I mean, I think that
without beatle Juice wouldn't really be Ariyan, you know, wouldn't
have that same magic to it. Um. But people differ,
but it is. It is one of the ones in
the belt, right like, and that's pretty recognizable in the
night sky. If you see three stars pretty evenly space,

(21:55):
that's that's the Orion constellation. Yes, so Beetle Juice doesn't
provide part of the belt, but it's critical. You know,
it's the top left shoulder of Ride, and that's his
throwing shoulder, I think, and you know he's a hunter,
and so I think people just can make a pretty
good argument to being sort of a foundational star. And
that's why I'm not in a strong war with any reason.
Number I love musum number. You don't even need to

(22:18):
count them. Really, I would just cartoonists. I would just
draw it wherever. Yeah, exactly. We'll fact check that later.
All right. So then you guys noticed that it started dimming,
and so that's kind of weird, right like, starts on
just suddenly Dim't like that so much. Yeah, well it's
sort of weird, but it's also sort of not weird.

(22:38):
And so to understand how weird it is, we have
to know what the context is. It turns out there's
a huge population of stars out there, like a good
fraction them are variable, Some of them do dim and
brighten and dim and brighten. And these are stars we
call them variable stars. Yeah, you mean there's a lot
of stars out there twinkling. Well, twinkling is actually because

(22:59):
the light is being mitigated by dust and atmospheric effects
and stuff like that. So that's what causes twinkling. But
there are stars that if you were like in a
spaceship near them, you would notice them brighten and then
dim and brighten and dim. And some of those stars
played in a really important role in our understanding of
the universe. And I guess that would be weird of
our sun did that as well. Yeah, that would be

(23:21):
really weird because every years we're like, yeah, like solar seasons. Yeah,
there are some solar seasons, like the sun has eleven
year magnetic cyclum cycle, I think, whereas magnetic field flips
every eleven years, and there are seasons when there's more
solar wind and less solar wind. But these effects are
very small compared to what we're talking about. You know,

(23:42):
the Sun doesn't significantly brighten and dim compared to what's
happening in these other variable stars. It's really noticeable effect.
And so we talked about these stars, these sephids recently,
these are the stars that pulsate. All right, let's get
into that, and like, what could be happening with beetle jews,
because you guys know is it's dimming and that's kind
of unusual and it could mean some pretty um dramatic things.

(24:06):
So what are some possibilities for what could be happening
to beetle juice? All right? Well, I have sort of
three categories of explanation for what might be happening to
beetle juice? Okay, and there you're gonna tell tell us
in order of how alarmed we should be. Yeah, so
the most boring possibilities, right, and then we got them
maybe more exciting crazy ideas, and then we got the

(24:29):
alarming everybody builds a bunker and starts to live underground
for the next time of years situation. Everybody start eating
beetle juice and praying to the greeneth paltry demons out there,
that's right, or invest in lentil futures. All right, So
what are the three possibilities that could be causing beetle
juice to go dimmer? Right? Well, the first thing to understand,
as we've mentioned, is that some stars just do this.

(24:51):
They are variable stars. Now some of them when this happens,
usually it's very regular. So the stars we talked about before,
their stars called set fids. They pulsate and it's very regular.
In fact, the key thing about sefids is that how
fast they pulsate tells you how bright they are at
the source. And that's a key thing to knowing like
how far away the star is, because you have to

(25:13):
know how far bright it is at the source compared
to how bright it is here. That's how you how
far away it is. So you make a bunch of measurements.
You measure how often it gets dimmer and brighter and
dimmer and brighter. It does it sort of like a clock,
and that tells you something about how bright it is
over there near the star. So it's it's really key
for those stars that they are very regular, right, they're
variable and something happening inside them to make them pulsate.

(25:36):
And these are not stars that are rotating. It's not
like a flashlight swinging through the universe that's just flashing
over us. It's really like a like a pulsating reaction
kind of. Yeah, it's a radial pulsation, so no matter
where you are around the star, you would see going
brighter and dimmer. Beetle Juice is not one of these
very regular stars. It's not a sefid. It has some

(25:56):
variation and it it goes up and it goes down,
but it's not like a talk Okay, so I see.
So it's normal for a star to change to like
get brighter and dimmer. But you say, most stars sort
of do it on a clock like regularly, but Beetle
Juice maybe is different. Yeah, Beetle Juice has sort of
two different cycles that people have been noticing over the
last few decades. It's got like a long cycle that

(26:18):
takes about six years to go up and down, and
it also has sort of a shorter cycle that's less
than a year. And so we don't know what's going on.
We don't have an explanation for how Beetle Juice has
these two weird cycles in it. You're saying that it
might be two kinds of aliens interfering with the star,
fighting inside the star star. It's a star war, right

(26:41):
the beet Juice. And for those of you who are
interested in, like how can that happen? How can a
star burn more brightly and dimly? Remember that it's not
just that the star itself is like burning hotter or colder.
It's about the light we're seeing from the star. And
so sometimes what's happening inside the star can make like
the outer shell of the star more opaque because it

(27:01):
changes it from like helium too to helium three. Or
it can make a contract which makes it heat up,
or can make it expand which makes it cool down.
So all this stuff can happen to a star. It's
not just about how hot and bright it is. It's
about like the shells and the layers and the folks
who study this have these amazing models of these enormous
cosmic fusion explosions that they can Frankly, it's blows my

(27:23):
mind that they can understand them at all. So it's
like if you're standing next to the Sun, you wouldn't
see it get bigger or smaller, you just see it
get brighter and dimmer. Well, if you're standing next to
one of these stars that is variable, then they know
they do expand and contract. Certainly they do. They do,
and the outer shell of the star can become more
opaque or less opaque, and so what you see from

(27:44):
far away is just of course it's brighter or dimmer,
but it's a lot of really complex stuff going on.
It's not just that the star gets bigger and hotter
and smaller and colder, but it's all about sort of
the mechanics of the reaction inside the star, like the
reacting sort of lean one way but then leaned the
other way, and you know, things sort of are constantly influx, yeah,

(28:05):
sort of slashing back and forth, not in a stable situation.
But Beetlejuice has these two cycles, sort of the shorter
one and the longer one, and so you know, the
most boring explanation for what's happening Beetle Juice is that
it might just be sort of the combination of these
two different cycles happening at the same time that both
are sort of in their dimming mode. I see, it's

(28:26):
just like a low point in its career as a star. Yeah, precisely,
But it doesn't really explain it because Beetle Juice has
these two cycles that are like on a year and
a six year timeline, so you would expect to see
those things sort of line up more often than every
hundred years. Oh, I see, so there's something else going
on here. I think there's probably something else going on.

(28:47):
There's something else to learn. Um, there could be another
longer time scale variation that's happening. It could be these
two things when they do line up in some way,
they sort of like accentuate each other, you know, but
we don't understand them mechanism, the physics behind either one,
and so it's hard to just to know specifically what
might make this happen. All right, So that's possibly a

(29:09):
is that it's just a normal cycle of a you know,
hormonal cycle of a teenage star with crazy moods. Um.
But then there are other possibilities, some of which we
might want to be concerned about. So that's sort of
like taking the normal, boring stuff and saying, maybe it's
a little weird, but there's other really weird stuff that
does happen to stars that could be explaining this. And

(29:31):
you know, sometimes stars don't just burn happily. They have
like you know, indigestion and you get like an enormous
eruption and it's stuff into space a starbourb yeah, or
you could have like a star quake or like cracks
on the surface of the star and internal stuff shoots
out and you could get an enormous eruption of plasma.
So you know, it could be that that's what happened.

(29:53):
It happened on the other side of the star, and
it's dimming as a result. This is really just really speculative.
Stars are not um these constant balls of fire there.
They can have big events. They can have big events,
especially big stars that tend to be more dynamic and
more violent and started near the end of their life.
They get to be a little bit less predictable as

(30:15):
the fires is sputtering out, kind of like that older
uncle you have, that's just the one who's no longer
invited to Thanksgiving. That's a lot of weird starburbs. At
least now he puts on pants every time he comes
to dinner, Right, that's an improvement. At least when it
adjects star material, it has pants on. Yeah. Or it

(30:36):
could just be some really weird thing happening with the
magnetic field of the star. You remember, what we're seeing
is dimming. That doesn't mean that the star is dimmer.
You could also mean that there's some like it's ejected
some matter, which then cool, and it's now blocking our
view of the star. It could just be winking at us.
It could be winking at us. Yeah, or of course,

(30:57):
you know, my favorite explanation is that there's you know,
some awesome civilization out there that's like building some structure
between us and beetlejuice. Or really they've just now closed
the blinds since since October. You know, it's a long
construction project, and maybe they've just now started to know
ramp this thing up and uh and turn on their

(31:20):
dicen sphere or whatever. Maybe it's aliens burping too or
and or flirting with us. Maybe that maybe maybe it's
alien uncles, you know, and they're grumpy they didn't get
invited to Thanksgiving dinner. I don't know. But anytime something
happens in the night sky that's sort of rapid, that's
unusual and changes quickly, then you've got to wonder, you know,
is that a sign of sort of intelligent life, of

(31:41):
somebody's being like activist and constructing something, actively changing the
way the universe is organized, not just sort of watching
it happen. Okay, so I'm getting that idea a for
what might be happening to beetle juice is just a
normal phase in its cycle. Idea number two is that
maybe it's some kind of event that's happening like a quay,
or a starbourb or um an ejection, or or an

(32:05):
aliens and or all of those things at the same time.
Aliens causing a star quake because of their burping, that's right,
while flirting with you. All right, let's get into the
third idea for what might be happening to to beetle juice,
which might be an explosive idea, a cataclysmic finish to
beetle juices run on the Hall of Fame, that's right,

(32:25):
not just a burb but a big boom perhaps, don't
you all don't we all want to end our career
so like mel Gibson exploding in a firing disaster with
a big racist grant. Yeah, sounds like a great way
to go, beetlejuice to your astronomical racist uncle. All right,
let's take a quick break first, All right, So beetlejuice

(32:57):
is dimming. It used to be like the number one
to start in the universe, but now it's stock has
gone down, Daniel, Yeah, and it's not the number one
bright star in the universe, right, so I see, and
if to us to my universe, yeah, to our to
the Jorge universe. It was one of the times we
all live. We're all just big players on your stage, sir.

(33:18):
That's right, that's right. But yeah, and we're trying to
figure out what could explain that, and we talked about
the sort of boring ideas, but there is one more
sort of explosive possibility. All right, sounds exciting. What else
could be happening to beetle Juice. Well, remember that Beetle
Juice is a massive star and it's near the end
of its life. And what happens to really big stars

(33:40):
when they go out is you often get a supernova.
So some stars, when they get old, they go into supernova.
And you're saying this dimming could be like a sign
of that. Yeah, if Beetle Juice is about to go,
then you know, the last few hundreds or thousands of
years before it goes supernova could be a little more volatile.
It could be hard to predict. And you know, Beetle

(34:01):
Juice is expected to last, you know, up to maybe
another hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, years. But there's a
lot of uncertainty in these predictions for when it will
go supernova, right, I mean it's it's like it's eight
and a half million years old, what's plus or mine
is a hundred thousand years? Yeah, it's basically months. Yeah,
it's you know, it's seventy five in star years, right,
it's been retired for a while, and it's sort of,

(34:23):
you know, ready to go. Yeah. I mean that's kind
of why I'm always late with my deadlines, to be honest, Daniel,
because you're waiting for what's a hundred thousand years in
the grand scheme of the universe? Nothing three months to
a physicist, years to a cartoonist. Yeah, there you go.
Just wait for me to go supernova. Yeah, and um,

(34:45):
but there's not too much to worry about here for
a couple of reasons. One is, when we've seen supernova,
the stars don't usually dim just beforehand. Usually they get brilliant,
they like ramp up to the explosion. Yeah, they ramp
up to the explosion, and so dimming is not usually
a precursor of a supernova. So you don't really have
to worry. Now we don't know because we haven't seen

(35:07):
a lot of stars like this this close ghost supernova.
We don't have a huge amount of data. Um, we
just have one, right then, do you say? Or we've
seen many over the years. We've seen a few supernova
over the years, and we've seen a lot of the
type one A supernova recently and so and since then,
we've gotten much better capturing supernova and seeing more of them.
So we don't but we still you know, we're talking

(35:27):
about hundreds of of examples, maybe thousands, so this could
be a weird one. You're not sure it's none of
them have dim right before exploding. Yeah, it's not a
typical thing for a start to do just before it explodes.
It's not gathering its energy, kind of like a do
kidding in Street Fighter, too finish him. We know that
was the wrong that was the wrong thing. That's the

(35:50):
wrong fighting again, but good try, good try. I always
wondering why we can't have Street Fighter versus Mortal Kombat,
you know, like sort of the epic balance, the epic challenge.
I would buy the video that vidego. But the other
reason not to worry is that Beetle Juice is sort
of far enough away that even if it were about
to go supernova, we'd be pretty safe. Okay, it wouldn't.
We wouldn't again roasted by this explosion. No, it's six

(36:12):
hundred and fifty light years away, so if there were
a supernova then we'd be good for six two years.
That's what you're saying. No, it's not about that. It's
not about the time difference. It's just about the fact
that the further you are away from the explosion, the
less you feel it. It's why in the movies everyone's
always running away from the explosion, right, because the further

(36:34):
you are away, the more the energy, the temperature, the heat,
all the radiation has had had chanced to dilute, to
diffuse over a larger volume. We but what would we
see when we see it go bright? Or will we
see like a big fun explosion? What will we see? Well,
it's really fascinating. The first thing you would see from
a supernova is not the light. You would actually first

(36:55):
see the new trinos. Interesting if you can see nedrinos, Yeah,
and we can see neutrinos because we have neutrino detectors,
And fascinatingly, you might wonder, like, how can neutrinos get
to Earth before photons. Right, Photons travel at the speed
of light, being because they travel backwards in time. That article.

(37:16):
Neutrinos do not travel fast in the speed of light.
They do not travel backwards in time. They travel almost
at the speed of light. But they are emitted first
from the supernova. And the reason is that is that
the supernova sort of happens from the beginning out and
the neutrinos can penetrate the star. They can. Neutrinos made
in the middle of the star can make it out

(37:37):
of the star, whereas light made in the middle middle
of the star gets absorbed by the star. So the
supernova sort of makes neutrinos first, and then you don't
see light from the star until the shock wave of
the supernova has hit the surface of the star and
then it starts to glow. Oh, I see, like the
explosion has to make it through the star before it

(37:58):
actually makes it out. Yes, so we see newtrinos here
on Earth from the supernova before we see the light
from it, which is kind of awesome. It's like a
pre warning system. Are you trying to argue for more
funding for a neutrino detectors? You get about two or
three hours notice, So it's not that much, you know,
And what do you do in two hours to organize

(38:18):
your life? I'm gonna order more Palter products, all the
ones I've always wanted to order, or and or play
um Sweet Fighter. But so first, we've see an enormous
amount of neutrinos. And also things people probably don't understand
is that most of the energy of supernova is not
emitted in the form of light. Most of it comes
out in the form of neutrinos and then in ejecting

(38:40):
the mass of the star. So while we would see
a really bright light here on Earth, like the star
could be as bright as the full moon in the
sky when it eventually does do supernova, that's just a
tiny fraction of the energy it's released. Oh I see,
But isn't that the stuff that can actually kill you? Though?
It can kill you because the light that's emitted from
the star comes along and it's an X rays and

(39:02):
X rays are pretty deadly, but beetle juice is far
enough away that by this time the X rays get here,
they'll be dilute enough that our atmosphere can mostly absorb them,
so you don't really have to worry, I see, But
then it doesn't shoot other things too. Yeah, most of
the mass of the star is actually blown out also,
and so Beetle Juice, which is hugely massive star. Remember

(39:23):
it's twenty times the mass of the Sun. It will
blow out something like ten to the sixty protons. Ten
to the sixty protons. Yeah, it was actually disintegrate, and
I mean some of it will be left behind to
form a neutron star or black hole, but somebody like
half the mass of the star will get blown out
into space. And so if you're two year that thing,

(39:43):
you're just gonna get riddled with tiny little proton bullets, right,
which are super dangerous, right, they are dangerous. Yeah, and
you know we are constantly being hit by proton bullets
from our own star, not because it's coming supernova. It's
just a normal thing for a start to do. But
these will be come at a much higher velocity the
solar wind the protons just from our sun coming about

(40:05):
four fifty kilometers per second, which seems pretty fast, but
from a supernova, these things would come at like ten
thousand kilometers per second. But again, we don't have anything
to really to worry about because Beele Juice is far
enough away that the flux will not be very high,
and our magnetic fields should be strong enough to protect us. Remember,
charge particles get bent by magnetic fields, and so we

(40:26):
have this force field that prevents charged particles from sort
of raining down on us, so we don't have to
worry about it. But it is. It would be sort
of interesting, right because I think you're telling me that
Beetle Juice, if it goes supernova, which you don't now
tomorrow sixty years, when it goes supernova, it would be

(40:48):
kind of like the closest supernova to Earth ever. Yeah,
it would be the closest one ever to Earth. Um
And you know, there have been supernova in the past,
and there may have been one closer Earth in the past,
but if so, they could have like sterilized all life
on Earth, and so we're on the watch out for
nearby supernova's. This one would be the closest one to Earth,

(41:08):
which would be sort of spectacular from the point of
view of astrophysics, but not close enough to fry us.
Will we would we see it in the nice sky?
We're like, would it look cool? What did you see
an explosion? Or would you just see the star get brighter.
From our point of view. You might see what the
telescope from interesting features because Beetle Juice is not only
one of the brightest stars in the sky, it's one
of the biggest, and so it sort of takes it

(41:30):
the largest area in the sky of any star in
the night sky. When a star goes supernova, it makes
this ring and explodes out. It's like not just like
a Michael Bay movie. It's beautiful, and so you might
be able to see that with the telescope in your backyard.
Plus it would be really bright. It would be as
bright as the full moon. So that should be pretty cool.
And it could happen at any moment, or maybe we

(41:51):
would see it. We could see it at any moment.
But technically if it happened, it would already have happened,
right because it's so far away. Yeah, this thing is
six hundred and fifty light years away, and so anything
we're seeing today happened six hundred and fifty years ago. Um,
so we can blame it on whoever was live on
that back then, from whatever they did to trigger it.

(42:12):
And um, so we're looking into the past for sure. Um,
but it could happen anytime, right, we don't really understand
how these stars work. I think most astronomers think it's
more likely to happen in a hundred thousand years than tomorrow.
But you know, astronomers also weren't expecting Beetle Juice to
dim this much, so it's not like they really understand
the insides of the star that well. Alright, so it

(42:34):
sounds like our mystery why Beetlejuice is going dimmer is
tbd to be determined. I mean, we don't really have
a good explanation for it. But it's happening, and it's
happening right now. It's going dimmer. Yeah, it's probably not
a signal that aliens are coming. It's unlikely that it's
going to go supernova tomorrow or next week or next year.

(42:56):
But it's very likely that we're going to learn some
interesting astrophysics. We're gonna learn about how these enormous cosmic
furnaces blow and how they burn and how they change.
And so astronomers will keep watching and see is it
going to keep getting dimmer? Is it gonna go brighter again?
It's like everybody wants to know the answer to this.
This question that the end of this story, and every day,

(43:16):
every week they keep watching it just to see, like,
what's it gonna do today. It's exciting. It's really amazing
to me. That's something like a son a star. I mean,
it's so bright, but we we don't really know what's
going on inside of it or uh, you know, all
the mechanisms inside and what makes it burn or or
dim like this. Yeah, well, it's amazing to me that

(43:36):
you would think we could understand it. I mean, it's
like ten to the fifty eight protons. I can hardly
understand what happens when two protons interact with each other.
It's incredible to me that plasma physicists and astrophysicists can
do the magneto hydrodynamics to understand a system like that.
It's crazy to me. It's impressive. I'm in all of
those folks. Yeah, pretty good for some cone potatoes, Pretty

(43:58):
good for some conj preatos. Turns out, sit on your
couch and think about the universe. You can learn some things, yeah,
and be very comfortable at the same time. And they
probably have the best snacks astronomers, really good snacks. The
best day of late all the time drink lattes made
out of coffee beans and alien milk. You mean, like

(44:20):
the green milk in that Star Wars movie. I don't
know what you're talking about, but every milk that's not
cow milk tastes like alien milk to me. My wife
likes this macadaemia nut milk. I can't even all right, well,
um lactic products discussions aside um galactic galactic and galactic

(44:41):
discussion side. It's it's all coming together, the milk away,
the milk in your coffee. It's all part of the
part of the same crazy universe and the same crazy podcast.
So keep watching the skies and we'll keep learning about
the universe. Thanks for joining us, See you next time. Yeah,

(45:07):
before you still have a question after listening to all
these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to
hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter,
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email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain
the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio from

(45:29):
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