March 1, 2016 • 26 mins
Join Robert and Christian as they consider the beauty and composition of the Medusa nebula in this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from housetop works
dot com. Hey, hey, hey, welcome to stuff to Blow
your Mind. I guess uh my name is Robert Lamb.
(00:26):
It says it right here on the side of my
cryo tank. Yeah, I'm Christian Sager. That's it, right, that
was the name I was using. Yeah, that's what it
says on your cryo tank. You like Christian? Here we are?
Where where are we? Let me check the read out here? Okay, good,
we're we should be We should have arrived at the
(00:49):
Medusa Nebula, which is where we set out for two
thousand years ago. Yeah, I'm remembering this now. It was
light years, so we were We've been alive for almost
two thousand years, well something like alive. We've been suspended
in a state of suspended animation in these tanks. Uh,
(01:10):
perhaps even before the the ships set out, So maybe
it's more than two thousand years, because it took us
around two thousand years for this ship to reach the
Medusa Nebula. And before that, I seem to remember, we
were frozen along with Joe awaiting the wait, where is Joe? Joe?
Who's Joe Joe? We had another podcast partner, and it
(01:32):
was his name was Joe, Joe McCormick. Oh, look it
says it right here on this cryotank. Let's opened this
one as well. It's just fingernails and hair. Uh, there
was more to him than that, as I recall. Um,
well I don't, I don't recall it, Joe, but um,
but you know, I mean, we can always eat the
fingernails and hair if there aren't any, you know, rations
(01:54):
aboard this thing. Oh yeah, but maybe we woke up early.
It should do it we set out to do. Maybe
maybe we should look at this Medusa nebula. Yeah, yeah,
I I'm remembering more. Yeah, because this was the topic
that made us decide to abandon the list of the
rest of our lives and to turn it across the cosmos.
And well, it's so hauntingly beautiful. Of course you would
(02:15):
just say, screw everything, let's just do this. Yeah. It's
one thing to see these wonderful NASA images of the Nebula.
We wanted to get up close and personal and use
these special fancy goggles to look at it from within
the nebula itself, and like the monster from which it
is named, once you look at it you then die.
Maybe that's what happened to Joe. It could be maybe
Joe turned to stone. Yeah. Maybe we got here early
(02:36):
and he just woke up on time. So maybe it's
way more than two thousand years. All right, So let's
let's refresh ourselves because it's been a while. I'm hazy
on this whole thing. So the Medusa nebula, that's just
very pretty nebula that we were able to not we
you and I, but uh, in fact, the European Space Organization,
and we're able to get some really beautiful shots of
(03:00):
from Earth. They have telescope centers in Chili that they
used to do this, So I guess, like I'll try
to describe it. Uh, it's this gorgeous mass of colorful
gases floating around in space. I mean, it's part of
a galaxy. It's not even a full galaxy, but it's
blues and yellows and reds and greens, and they're all
(03:22):
kind of swirling around together, and they're these super hot,
bright blue stars in the center of everything. Yeah, one
in particular does look like an eye. Yeah. Yeah, I
suspect that's where the idea for the whole Medusa thing
came from. So it's so named because of the colorful gases. Uh.
(03:45):
And it looks kind of like the Medusa monster, which
you know we like monsters on the show. In fact,
you've done work on the Medusa before. I believe I have.
Two thousand years ago you did a video, babe, remember that.
So I'm sure those signals are bouncing around the coffmos.
Maybe they still have YouTube out here, but they there's
they look like snakes, right, Like these these tendrils of
(04:06):
gases look like different types of snakes. They were referred
to as serpentine filaments. And each type of elemental gas
produces a different color, right, So those reds those are hydrogen.
The greens are from oxygen, and the oxygen is particularly
important to this specific nebula. And these are planetary nebula.
(04:28):
We need to make that distinction. Um. But basically, this
is the mass being objected from a star nearby, and
that's what's making these serpentine structures. So what what exactly
is a planetary nebula? Well, as I recall is my
is all my memories come back online here. I recall
that a planetary nebula's heart is a very old star
(04:51):
and in terms of stellar age, so nothing compared to
the mere few thousand years they were talking about with
our journey. Here, this is a star. This is a
star as last phase before it transforms into a white dwarf,
specifically a star. This between one to eight times the
size of our Sun when it is worn. That's right,
because we used our Sun as like a measurement system
(05:14):
for all other stellar bodies, right, so anything that's like
we use our Sun's size and mass really and to
determine stellar age and and other you know, measurements. Typically
these nebula have a radius of one light year with
the gas of about thirty percent of our Sun. So this, uh,
this phase of its life CEC, which is short compared
(05:34):
to a star's life, but it's still thousands of years long. Yeah,
I mean it's uh right again, we're getting into that
scale thing again, right, like the tiniest of life that
only lives for like a couple of human years at
the bottom of Earth's oceans. And then there's the Medusa
nebula that it's hundreds of thousands of of years. Uh,
(05:57):
and it's all because of gravity. Uh. So gravity really
is pushing in on these stars and on all stars,
and to keep them from collapsing on themselves, they maintain
a high internal gas pressure by creating energy through nuclear fusion.
You know, that's how stars work. Uh. And it's when
all those available fuels run out, the star becomes unstable
(06:21):
and so it just starts shedding off all these different
gaseous layers. That's what we're seeing here with the planetary nebula.
This expansion is proportional to the distance from the central star, right,
so the amount of gases when we see them emanating outwards,
they're all actually coming from one central star. You know.
Anytime that I've covered the stars in the past, and
(06:42):
you know the life cycle of stars, how they're born,
how they die. I often think of it in terms
of like a corporation or a business, you know, like
they used to have an older there um where you
see these these just gigantic industries just building up power
and energy, and it reaches this point of just instability
(07:04):
where things fall apart, things collapse, things explode, just like
you see with with various businesses out there. And that's
why these are so important to look at, right and
and it's probably how we got funding to to fly
out here anyways. Is that we're basically talking about sun
death here, and so by observing a planetary nebula and
(07:24):
the gases that come off of it and all the
chemicals involved, we understand more about our own son and
it's evolutionary process and what's going to happen to it
and subsequently us. Yeah, that sun business star business is
the business upon which it is kind of our planet depends. Yeah,
And to use your metaphor, it's kind of like getting
an m b A and studying how corporations fall apart,
(07:46):
so that you know when to jump ship, right and
you know, of course you have to have the technology
to jump ship, and maybe Old Earth has that, maybe
it's not even the same place anymore. Well they got
us here. Yeah, then, and here's the thing. We estimated
the distance to this nebula by observing the measurements of
about forty different objects within it. So there's that central star,
but there's obviously other objects that are moving around. Uh.
(08:08):
And these have to be objects that have favorable properties
that we could have seen from Earth. Uh. It's it's
really difficult actually to see these things from Earth because
they're all a variety of different shapes and masses, and
they're all swirling around within this ionized gas. So they're
not homogeneous. Uh. And when I say they're not homogeneous,
I'm not just referring to the forty objects within the nebula,
(08:30):
referring to all planetary nebula. They're all completely different. Uh.
And that alone is kind of fascinating. So, yeah, we
learned from them, but what happens with our son when
it dies is going to be different. So okay, So
once we figured out the distance, you know, we did
all this math before we left Earth. We figured out
the distance from our calculations. Then we found the size
of the nebula and we also figured out its age
(08:53):
by dividing the speed of its expansion. Since the central
stars started objecting layers off. So as the star gets hotter,
it sheds off layers of elements, and this is what
forms the colorful clouds of gas, uh that they're surrounded
by for tens of thousands of years. That's also the
reason why it's glow is ultraviolet radiation produced by the
(09:15):
stars heat. It's constantly getting hotter and smaller. There between
five thousand and two hundred thousand kelvins and that's essentially
what thousand, five hundred degrees fahrenheit to fifty nine thousand,
five hundred degrees fair enough, So we've got a cozy
ship that's well protected here from all the heat. Right,
(09:35):
otherwise we would be not even like marshmallows. We must
be be utterly incinerated. Uh. Yeah, it's maximum output is
ten thousand times as luminous as our sun. So this
is really what happens to two stars of this type.
They generate an intense amount of heat due to gravity.
(09:55):
They get smaller and smaller as they shed off their
gash and just create a ton of heat and then
eventually kind of you know, fade away. Oh I hope
the ship can hold up to this heat. Uh, we'll
have to look into that after after we've finished chatting. Well,
you know, let's see. So based on the math, we
estimate that these nebula are losing up to one percent
(10:17):
of Earth's mass per day in gases. So I don't
have the numbers in front of me. Here is how
large it was when we left, But you know, it's
been almost two thousand years, as we said, so a
good amount of that is just floating around out here
as gas now instead of just like you know, super
hot mass. Uh. And once it peaks, it eventually cools down.
(10:37):
Maybe that's where we're at now. It takes ten thousand
more years for that to happen, though, and then it
eventually becomes that white dwarf star and it's barely larger
than the Earth when it's at that size. Uh. And
these white dwarves they're super dense. Uh, so dense that
thousands of kilograms are are fit into per cubic centimeters.
(10:59):
That's a that's intense. So not only do we have
a ship that's really you know, well built for handling heat,
but it's also taking on the pressure of all that density,
you know. Um. I'm also reminded that white dwarves are
also known as degenerate dwarves. Well, that sounds offensive. Are
they gully dwarves? Gully from d and d Oh? I
(11:22):
don't remember. You remember gully dwarves and Dutton dungeons and dragons.
I wonder if they still have dungeons dragons on Earth.
Gully dwarves were like these, they were they were dwarves
that lived in the streets of dragon Lance. I never
encountered the gully dwarves ever near with the Great Dwarfs. Yeah,
they're related. Drgar live underground gully dwarves were like, uh,
(11:44):
they're basically like like homeless dwarves now, not to be
confused with the darrow, who are kind of homeless dwarves. Yeah,
I believe they're different. Yeah, there's there's a lot of
subspecies of dwarves, not including the White Dwarf, which is
a son and not a fantasy creature, right though White
Dwarf is a fantasy publication or was uh you know
(12:07):
two thousand years ago about desktop a tabletop role playing games.
So many connections. Yeah, maybe that's really what our purpose
here is to bring this information about dwarves and uh
and fantasy games into the distant future. Well, like we've
been saying, I guess it's too late for it now.
We've always been talking about doing a how stuff works
Dungeons and Dragons table match, where we just record the
(12:31):
whole experience, like a mash up of all the hosts
from shows. Well, if I find everybody else is probably
dead Joe. Well yeah, if we can find Joe, maybe
he's around the ship here somewhere hopefully, so you know
what might have gotten him is the ultra violet radiation though,
because that is also pouring off of these stars, uh,
and they're super hot, they're emanating ultra violet radiation. So
(12:51):
the center of the nebula causes atoms in the outward
moving gas to lose their electrons, and this is what
creates the ionized gas. This is what makes it so
difficult to see from Earth. Originally, you know why they
call them planetary nebula. I mean they might even call
them something different now, but it was because earliest stronomers
(13:11):
they didn't have like great telescopes, so they saw them
as just like round balls in space and they were like, oh,
it looks kind of like Uranus and Neptune in the telescope.
So yeah, planetary nebula. There you go. And uh, you know,
at least when we left her, if they were still
calling them that, I don't know, i'd call it like
a stellar nebula or something like that, right, Yeah, I
don't know. Of course, when we also left Earth, uranus
(13:32):
was still a funny word. I don't know if my
modern listeners out there will even find the humor in
the dully dwarf nebula. Yeah, that's what I would call it. So,
a galaxy like the Milky Way is estimated to have
several thousand planetary nebula at any one time, and we
think they're about twenty thousand objects that we call planetary
nebula and the Milky Way, but because of the dust
(13:54):
around the galaxy, that makes them difficult to observe. So
we've only cataloged about eighteen. Wow, So that's crazy. Think
about like, we are in a huge system of a
planetary nebula, but it is only one of twenty thousand.
That's just in the Milky Way galaxy. Wow. Life always
finds a way. Like I was saying, I mean, this
(14:14):
provides us with a great opportunity to analyze a star
that was once like our son. Right, we can study
their chemical composition. We can understand how a star is formed.
We look at elements like carbon and nitrogen, and we
figure out the processes like nuclear fusion that are happening
within the star's lifetime. And maybe, maybe, just maybe we
will learn more about how our son will change and
(14:37):
evolve and eventually envelop us in colorful gases. Yeah. I
mean that's assuming if you and I get back. Yeah,
we're gonna have to really figure out how to pilot
this thing now because it's been on Autophile. Well, and
you know, once we go out there, we'll have to
decide what we're gonna do about Joe. Like if we're
gonna bother, look at how long we're gonna bother looking
for him? Well, yeah, we I mean, you never leave
(14:57):
a man behind. But I don't know what might have happened.
Maybe he merged with Carney and they're one cybernetic organism. Now,
maybe he stepped out through the airlock. Maybe he died
of old age, Will clicked all of his nails and
shaved his hair and then just walked right out the airlock.
Maybe we're supposed to clone him. Maybe that's why he left.
He's like, please reclone me. If there's cloning services available
on board here, I'm happy to do that and then
(15:18):
we can just fly back home. Okay, So where are we?
Where is the Medusa, Nebula? This thing? I mean, I
know I said at the top. We flew fifteen hundred
light years away from Earth. We're in the direction of
the Gemini constellation right in terms from Earth. So if
you're on Earth, you stand up you're outside at night
(15:39):
and you look up, you locate a Ryan. That's another constellation. Uh.
Gemini is to the northeast of that, and it's between
Taurus and Cancer. Uh. And it's best observed during February
on Earth. In that month, you can look straight up
around ten thirty PM and uh, the whole Gemini constellation
should be directly overhead, so you'd be looking at us.
(16:01):
If you can hear this, you'd be looking at us. Yes,
I'm not sure if you'll see us. And then of
course you have to account for the for the light. Yeah.
Well yeah, actually you might be looking at something that
happened way before we even got here. Yeah, we're gonna
wave anyway. When we get up to the viewing, a
deck will wave, and maybe the telescopes are powerful enough
(16:23):
for you to see us. You'll definitely be able to
find two stars that make up Gemini. These are twins
POLLOCKX and Castor. Uh. Fun fact, Robert on Earth. Do
you remember that expression by Jiminy that so many people
used by Jiminy, I think I do. It's actually a
corrupted version of by Gemini, which was used as an exclamation.
(16:44):
Now that we're here, I think we should bring that back,
Like where's Joe by Jimini. All that's left here are
his hair and fingernails. Yeah, let's bring it back. I mean,
we're we're in out here. We're in a new civilization
of humanity, so we can just make up all the rules.
And the only reason we know any of this stuff
about the Medusa Nebula, or at least what it looked like,
(17:05):
was because of a program that was going on on
Earth that was the European Space Organization. They had it
called the e s O Cosmic Gems Program. It sounds
like a fun cartoon show or something like that, but
it's actually an outreach initiative to share the E s
O S telescope findings. So the e s OS based
out of Europe. It's supported by sixteen different countries, not
(17:26):
including the USA, UH and Chili. The country of Chile
hosts UH their telescopic observatories. There's three there and they're
currently working or I guess not now it must be built,
but they were working on the European This is a
great name for a telescope, the European extremely Large Telescope,
(17:47):
which they gave the acronym e DASH E l t
uh and it was thirty nine meters uh and I
believe in diameter. And it was purportedly going to be
the world's biggest eye on the sky. So that's important, right,
because it was on the sky, it wasn't in the sky.
I believe that James Webb telescope being produced by NASA
was going to be larger than that. So the main
(18:08):
mission here was created in in a nineteen sixty two
convention to provide state of the art research facilities for
astromoterers and astrophysicists. And they have an annual contribution budget
from their countries of a hundred and forty million euros.
The headquarters themselves are near Munich in German name, but
the telescopes are in Chile. So what's so special about
(18:29):
the Medusa nebula? Like, why did we bother to come
here and not to the other you know twenty thousand
some odd nebula that are out there. Well, I mean
it looks like Medusa sort of, that's right. We like monsters. Okay,
that's a good reason. Um, yeah, I hope we had
some better reasons for them for that. Maybe we've we've
forgotten something important. Maybe we you know, we brought a
(18:51):
convenience to our something. Let me look at my notes here. Um.
It says here that the more generic name for this
was Abbowl twenty one because it was discovered by an
American astronomer named George O. Abol in nineteen And they
actually didn't even realize that it was a planetary nebula
(19:13):
until the seventies because when they were looking at they thought, oh,
this must be the remnants of a supernova nova explosion. Um,
because it had all the properties of the cloud. Then
they figured out, oh, that's a nebulah. And so astronomers
today what they do, well, I guess it's not today,
it would have been two thousands ago. Astronomers apply various
(19:34):
filters to telescopes so they can isolate the radiation from
the gases that they see. Because the nebula is specifically
the Medusa nebula, is actually quite dim in comparison to
other nebula. Yeah. I think that's one of the reasons
we decided to go to it, because it's it's not
as bright, it's a little more. It's probably cooler about it. Uh.
It is only four light years across, only only only
(19:57):
four light years across. So think about that. I mean, like, uh,
the gas expands to quite a huge distance compared to
actually the size of the star itself. Yeah, it's it's
as far as human perceptions of these things, it's a
fairly large region of space, I mean. And then of
course as far as space goes, it's not big at all.
And an important thing like if if you're back on
(20:17):
Earth made you probably have better pictures by now. But
those photos and you know, I'm assuming if this goes
up as a podcast and we still use thumbnail images
like we used to, will use this image of the
Medusa Nebula from the E s O. But if you're
looking at that image, you think, oh, the star in
the center, the one that's glowing the brightest, that's got
to be the stellar core that's giving off all these gases.
(20:39):
It's actually not. It's actually dimmer. It's a blue star
that's just off center of this crescent gas shape. Uh.
And in the right hand part of the image there's
a dimmer blue star that's just off center of the
crescent shape. And that is it. That's the one that's
giving off all the gas. Uh. And this is my
favorite part. The double ionized oxygen part So the reason
(21:04):
why this one in particular has these weird greens, which
is why I imagined Medusa came into play serpentine green snakes,
it's because the radiation combines with the gas. Uh. And
actually scientists thought they'd found a new element. They called
it nebulum nebulium. I think what we're learning from this
is that astronomers in the late twentieth century weren't that
(21:27):
creative when it came to coming up with names dream things.
But it's symbolized double oxygen. Double ionized oxygen is symbolized
by within brackets the letter oh followed by three Roman
numeral ones, so it's it looks kind of like oh
one one one or something like that, yeah, oh three
(21:49):
oh three yeah, uh, and it's uh. That's how we're
basically able to spot this so easily. Like I said,
it's fairly dim nebula. The greens were really standing out,
so they basically realized, okay, this is a radiation wavelength
that's not a new element. They put those filters on
and then they could see it much better. And indeed,
(22:10):
I look forward to looking at it through our special
goggles that will allow us to to see these, uh,
these details from these here on site when we're just
surrounded by a four light year across entity that's everywhere.
Really it's kind of hard to see the colors. But
we've we brought these these great goggles. Yeah, really much
(22:31):
better than Google Glass turned out to be. Yeah, I
mean unless it. I mean it had to two thousand
additional years to get awesome. So maybe a Google glass
two thousand. You know. We mentioned earlier that the nebula
that we now inhapned was discovered by American astronomer George O. A.
Bell In. I was actually researching him a little bit.
He was a noted skeptic in the day and involved
(22:52):
in that skeptic interest, you know, taking taking down magicians
and uh and and fraudulent you know, hypnotists and the like.
Oh well, maybe he would have been a fan of
our sister show stuff they don't want you to know
where they you know, explore that that type of stuff. Yeah,
him trails. I bet he'd be really big on chem trails. Um. Okay,
(23:15):
so this thing's expanding pretty quickly, so we need to
get our work done and then get out of here.
The Medusa nebula, we knew this before we even got here,
because of all the measurements that I mentioned earlier. It
expands at a rate of fifty kilometers a second, so
that gas is just constantly pouring out of that central
stellar area. Uh. And it's much lower than is actually
(23:39):
expected for most supernova remnants. Uh. Well, well, what they
thought was a supernova remnant. Uh, And it's how they
figured out that it was a nebula. In fact, a
typical planetary nebula expands somewhere between twenty four fifty six
kilometers a second, so around an average of thirty kilometers
per second. That's that's nuts to me, especially when you
(24:00):
compare that that this huge system right that's floating around
out in space. And then we go back to what
we talked about earlier this week. The osadax worm down
to one centimeter and they're they're both kind of beautiful
in their own way depending on the scale, also kind
of terrifying and monstrous, uh, depending on the scale at
(24:21):
what you're looking at them at. Yeah. Indeed, and also
ephemeral depending on when you're looking at them, whether you're
looking at the life cycle of a planetary nebula versus
the life cycle of of a whale fall. Who knows,
maybe maybe like an osadax worm, the Medusa nebula has
tiny little male versions of itself, hundreds of them inside it.
(24:41):
Those might be coming to devour us right now. One
can only wonder. Hey, let's go ahead and put these
goggles on and head upstairs. Now we're not gonna we're
I think we're gonna run out of out of time
to record anymore, so we're not gonna be able to
really share what we see. I'm sure it's gonna be wonderful. Otherwise,
this whole trip was kind of a bust. But but
maybe everyone would like to chime in on what they
(25:03):
think we'll see. What would you see if you took
a two thousand year journey out to a planetary nebula
and attempted to look outward from its center? Yeah, let
us know. I guess maybe these are still platforms. I
mean they were popular at the time, Facebook, Twitter, and tumbler.
Tumblers probably not around anymore. Well, let's hope. Let's hope
(25:25):
the story maybe the only thing that's around maybe older
just tumbling. I don't even mean humans anymore, there's only tumbling.
We'll write us if you can write us on those platforms.
But I bet, I bet this one's still up there.
Uh email, that was a thing when we left, right
us to our email address at blow the mind at
how stock works dot com, well more almost pathans of
(25:55):
other topics how stuff works dot com. The busses many
four start U
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from housetop works
dot com. Hey, hey, hey, welcome to stuff to Blow
your Mind. I guess uh my name is Robert Lamb.
(00:26):
It says it right here on the side of my
cryo tank. Yeah, I'm Christian Sager. That's it, right, that
was the name I was using. Yeah, that's what it
says on your cryo tank. You like Christian? Here we are?
Where where are we? Let me check the read out here? Okay, good,
we're we should be We should have arrived at the
(00:49):
Medusa Nebula, which is where we set out for two
thousand years ago. Yeah, I'm remembering this now. It was
light years, so we were We've been alive for almost
two thousand years, well something like alive. We've been suspended
in a state of suspended animation in these tanks. Uh,
(01:10):
perhaps even before the the ships set out, So maybe
it's more than two thousand years, because it took us
around two thousand years for this ship to reach the
Medusa Nebula. And before that, I seem to remember, we
were frozen along with Joe awaiting the wait, where is Joe? Joe?
Who's Joe Joe? We had another podcast partner, and it
(01:32):
was his name was Joe, Joe McCormick. Oh, look it
says it right here on this cryotank. Let's opened this
one as well. It's just fingernails and hair. Uh, there
was more to him than that, as I recall. Um,
well I don't, I don't recall it, Joe, but um,
but you know, I mean, we can always eat the
fingernails and hair if there aren't any, you know, rations
(01:54):
aboard this thing. Oh yeah, but maybe we woke up early.
It should do it we set out to do. Maybe
maybe we should look at this Medusa nebula. Yeah, yeah,
I I'm remembering more. Yeah, because this was the topic
that made us decide to abandon the list of the
rest of our lives and to turn it across the cosmos.
And well, it's so hauntingly beautiful. Of course you would
(02:15):
just say, screw everything, let's just do this. Yeah. It's
one thing to see these wonderful NASA images of the Nebula.
We wanted to get up close and personal and use
these special fancy goggles to look at it from within
the nebula itself, and like the monster from which it
is named, once you look at it you then die.
Maybe that's what happened to Joe. It could be maybe
Joe turned to stone. Yeah. Maybe we got here early
(02:36):
and he just woke up on time. So maybe it's
way more than two thousand years. All right, So let's
let's refresh ourselves because it's been a while. I'm hazy
on this whole thing. So the Medusa nebula, that's just
very pretty nebula that we were able to not we
you and I, but uh, in fact, the European Space Organization,
and we're able to get some really beautiful shots of
(03:00):
from Earth. They have telescope centers in Chili that they
used to do this, So I guess, like I'll try
to describe it. Uh, it's this gorgeous mass of colorful
gases floating around in space. I mean, it's part of
a galaxy. It's not even a full galaxy, but it's
blues and yellows and reds and greens, and they're all
(03:22):
kind of swirling around together, and they're these super hot,
bright blue stars in the center of everything. Yeah, one
in particular does look like an eye. Yeah. Yeah, I
suspect that's where the idea for the whole Medusa thing
came from. So it's so named because of the colorful gases. Uh.
(03:45):
And it looks kind of like the Medusa monster, which
you know we like monsters on the show. In fact,
you've done work on the Medusa before. I believe I have.
Two thousand years ago you did a video, babe, remember that.
So I'm sure those signals are bouncing around the coffmos.
Maybe they still have YouTube out here, but they there's
they look like snakes, right, Like these these tendrils of
(04:06):
gases look like different types of snakes. They were referred
to as serpentine filaments. And each type of elemental gas
produces a different color, right, So those reds those are hydrogen.
The greens are from oxygen, and the oxygen is particularly
important to this specific nebula. And these are planetary nebula.
(04:28):
We need to make that distinction. Um. But basically, this
is the mass being objected from a star nearby, and
that's what's making these serpentine structures. So what what exactly
is a planetary nebula? Well, as I recall is my
is all my memories come back online here. I recall
that a planetary nebula's heart is a very old star
(04:51):
and in terms of stellar age, so nothing compared to
the mere few thousand years they were talking about with
our journey. Here, this is a star. This is a
star as last phase before it transforms into a white dwarf,
specifically a star. This between one to eight times the
size of our Sun when it is worn. That's right,
because we used our Sun as like a measurement system
(05:14):
for all other stellar bodies, right, so anything that's like
we use our Sun's size and mass really and to
determine stellar age and and other you know, measurements. Typically
these nebula have a radius of one light year with
the gas of about thirty percent of our Sun. So this, uh,
this phase of its life CEC, which is short compared
(05:34):
to a star's life, but it's still thousands of years long. Yeah,
I mean it's uh right again, we're getting into that
scale thing again, right, like the tiniest of life that
only lives for like a couple of human years at
the bottom of Earth's oceans. And then there's the Medusa
nebula that it's hundreds of thousands of of years. Uh,
(05:57):
and it's all because of gravity. Uh. So gravity really
is pushing in on these stars and on all stars,
and to keep them from collapsing on themselves, they maintain
a high internal gas pressure by creating energy through nuclear fusion.
You know, that's how stars work. Uh. And it's when
all those available fuels run out, the star becomes unstable
(06:21):
and so it just starts shedding off all these different
gaseous layers. That's what we're seeing here with the planetary nebula.
This expansion is proportional to the distance from the central star, right,
so the amount of gases when we see them emanating outwards,
they're all actually coming from one central star. You know.
Anytime that I've covered the stars in the past, and
(06:42):
you know the life cycle of stars, how they're born,
how they die. I often think of it in terms
of like a corporation or a business, you know, like
they used to have an older there um where you
see these these just gigantic industries just building up power
and energy, and it reaches this point of just instability
(07:04):
where things fall apart, things collapse, things explode, just like
you see with with various businesses out there. And that's
why these are so important to look at, right and
and it's probably how we got funding to to fly
out here anyways. Is that we're basically talking about sun
death here, and so by observing a planetary nebula and
(07:24):
the gases that come off of it and all the
chemicals involved, we understand more about our own son and
it's evolutionary process and what's going to happen to it
and subsequently us. Yeah, that sun business star business is
the business upon which it is kind of our planet depends. Yeah,
And to use your metaphor, it's kind of like getting
an m b A and studying how corporations fall apart,
(07:46):
so that you know when to jump ship, right and
you know, of course you have to have the technology
to jump ship, and maybe Old Earth has that, maybe
it's not even the same place anymore. Well they got
us here. Yeah, then, and here's the thing. We estimated
the distance to this nebula by observing the measurements of
about forty different objects within it. So there's that central star,
but there's obviously other objects that are moving around. Uh.
(08:08):
And these have to be objects that have favorable properties
that we could have seen from Earth. Uh. It's it's
really difficult actually to see these things from Earth because
they're all a variety of different shapes and masses, and
they're all swirling around within this ionized gas. So they're
not homogeneous. Uh. And when I say they're not homogeneous,
I'm not just referring to the forty objects within the nebula,
(08:30):
referring to all planetary nebula. They're all completely different. Uh.
And that alone is kind of fascinating. So, yeah, we
learned from them, but what happens with our son when
it dies is going to be different. So okay, So
once we figured out the distance, you know, we did
all this math before we left Earth. We figured out
the distance from our calculations. Then we found the size
of the nebula and we also figured out its age
(08:53):
by dividing the speed of its expansion. Since the central
stars started objecting layers off. So as the star gets hotter,
it sheds off layers of elements, and this is what
forms the colorful clouds of gas, uh that they're surrounded
by for tens of thousands of years. That's also the
reason why it's glow is ultraviolet radiation produced by the
(09:15):
stars heat. It's constantly getting hotter and smaller. There between
five thousand and two hundred thousand kelvins and that's essentially
what thousand, five hundred degrees fahrenheit to fifty nine thousand,
five hundred degrees fair enough, So we've got a cozy
ship that's well protected here from all the heat. Right,
(09:35):
otherwise we would be not even like marshmallows. We must
be be utterly incinerated. Uh. Yeah, it's maximum output is
ten thousand times as luminous as our sun. So this
is really what happens to two stars of this type.
They generate an intense amount of heat due to gravity.
(09:55):
They get smaller and smaller as they shed off their
gash and just create a ton of heat and then
eventually kind of you know, fade away. Oh I hope
the ship can hold up to this heat. Uh, we'll
have to look into that after after we've finished chatting. Well,
you know, let's see. So based on the math, we
estimate that these nebula are losing up to one percent
(10:17):
of Earth's mass per day in gases. So I don't
have the numbers in front of me. Here is how
large it was when we left, But you know, it's
been almost two thousand years, as we said, so a
good amount of that is just floating around out here
as gas now instead of just like you know, super
hot mass. Uh. And once it peaks, it eventually cools down.
(10:37):
Maybe that's where we're at now. It takes ten thousand
more years for that to happen, though, and then it
eventually becomes that white dwarf star and it's barely larger
than the Earth when it's at that size. Uh. And
these white dwarves they're super dense. Uh, so dense that
thousands of kilograms are are fit into per cubic centimeters.
(10:59):
That's a that's intense. So not only do we have
a ship that's really you know, well built for handling heat,
but it's also taking on the pressure of all that density,
you know. Um. I'm also reminded that white dwarves are
also known as degenerate dwarves. Well, that sounds offensive. Are
they gully dwarves? Gully from d and d Oh? I
(11:22):
don't remember. You remember gully dwarves and Dutton dungeons and dragons.
I wonder if they still have dungeons dragons on Earth.
Gully dwarves were like these, they were they were dwarves
that lived in the streets of dragon Lance. I never
encountered the gully dwarves ever near with the Great Dwarfs. Yeah,
they're related. Drgar live underground gully dwarves were like, uh,
(11:44):
they're basically like like homeless dwarves now, not to be
confused with the darrow, who are kind of homeless dwarves. Yeah,
I believe they're different. Yeah, there's there's a lot of
subspecies of dwarves, not including the White Dwarf, which is
a son and not a fantasy creature, right though White
Dwarf is a fantasy publication or was uh you know
(12:07):
two thousand years ago about desktop a tabletop role playing games.
So many connections. Yeah, maybe that's really what our purpose
here is to bring this information about dwarves and uh
and fantasy games into the distant future. Well, like we've
been saying, I guess it's too late for it now.
We've always been talking about doing a how stuff works
Dungeons and Dragons table match, where we just record the
(12:31):
whole experience, like a mash up of all the hosts
from shows. Well, if I find everybody else is probably
dead Joe. Well yeah, if we can find Joe, maybe
he's around the ship here somewhere hopefully, so you know
what might have gotten him is the ultra violet radiation though,
because that is also pouring off of these stars, uh,
and they're super hot, they're emanating ultra violet radiation. So
(12:51):
the center of the nebula causes atoms in the outward
moving gas to lose their electrons, and this is what
creates the ionized gas. This is what makes it so
difficult to see from Earth. Originally, you know why they
call them planetary nebula. I mean they might even call
them something different now, but it was because earliest stronomers
(13:11):
they didn't have like great telescopes, so they saw them
as just like round balls in space and they were like, oh,
it looks kind of like Uranus and Neptune in the telescope.
So yeah, planetary nebula. There you go. And uh, you know,
at least when we left her, if they were still
calling them that, I don't know, i'd call it like
a stellar nebula or something like that, right, Yeah, I
don't know. Of course, when we also left Earth, uranus
(13:32):
was still a funny word. I don't know if my
modern listeners out there will even find the humor in
the dully dwarf nebula. Yeah, that's what I would call it. So,
a galaxy like the Milky Way is estimated to have
several thousand planetary nebula at any one time, and we
think they're about twenty thousand objects that we call planetary
nebula and the Milky Way, but because of the dust
(13:54):
around the galaxy, that makes them difficult to observe. So
we've only cataloged about eighteen. Wow, So that's crazy. Think
about like, we are in a huge system of a
planetary nebula, but it is only one of twenty thousand.
That's just in the Milky Way galaxy. Wow. Life always
finds a way. Like I was saying, I mean, this
(14:14):
provides us with a great opportunity to analyze a star
that was once like our son. Right, we can study
their chemical composition. We can understand how a star is formed.
We look at elements like carbon and nitrogen, and we
figure out the processes like nuclear fusion that are happening
within the star's lifetime. And maybe, maybe, just maybe we
will learn more about how our son will change and
(14:37):
evolve and eventually envelop us in colorful gases. Yeah. I
mean that's assuming if you and I get back. Yeah,
we're gonna have to really figure out how to pilot
this thing now because it's been on Autophile. Well, and
you know, once we go out there, we'll have to
decide what we're gonna do about Joe. Like if we're
gonna bother, look at how long we're gonna bother looking
for him? Well, yeah, we I mean, you never leave
(14:57):
a man behind. But I don't know what might have happened.
Maybe he merged with Carney and they're one cybernetic organism. Now,
maybe he stepped out through the airlock. Maybe he died
of old age, Will clicked all of his nails and
shaved his hair and then just walked right out the airlock.
Maybe we're supposed to clone him. Maybe that's why he left.
He's like, please reclone me. If there's cloning services available
on board here, I'm happy to do that and then
(15:18):
we can just fly back home. Okay, So where are we?
Where is the Medusa, Nebula? This thing? I mean, I
know I said at the top. We flew fifteen hundred
light years away from Earth. We're in the direction of
the Gemini constellation right in terms from Earth. So if
you're on Earth, you stand up you're outside at night
(15:39):
and you look up, you locate a Ryan. That's another constellation. Uh.
Gemini is to the northeast of that, and it's between
Taurus and Cancer. Uh. And it's best observed during February
on Earth. In that month, you can look straight up
around ten thirty PM and uh, the whole Gemini constellation
should be directly overhead, so you'd be looking at us.
(16:01):
If you can hear this, you'd be looking at us. Yes,
I'm not sure if you'll see us. And then of
course you have to account for the for the light. Yeah.
Well yeah, actually you might be looking at something that
happened way before we even got here. Yeah, we're gonna
wave anyway. When we get up to the viewing, a
deck will wave, and maybe the telescopes are powerful enough
(16:23):
for you to see us. You'll definitely be able to
find two stars that make up Gemini. These are twins
POLLOCKX and Castor. Uh. Fun fact, Robert on Earth. Do
you remember that expression by Jiminy that so many people
used by Jiminy, I think I do. It's actually a
corrupted version of by Gemini, which was used as an exclamation.
(16:44):
Now that we're here, I think we should bring that back,
Like where's Joe by Jimini. All that's left here are
his hair and fingernails. Yeah, let's bring it back. I mean,
we're we're in out here. We're in a new civilization
of humanity, so we can just make up all the rules.
And the only reason we know any of this stuff
about the Medusa Nebula, or at least what it looked like,
(17:05):
was because of a program that was going on on
Earth that was the European Space Organization. They had it
called the e s O Cosmic Gems Program. It sounds
like a fun cartoon show or something like that, but
it's actually an outreach initiative to share the E s
O S telescope findings. So the e s OS based
out of Europe. It's supported by sixteen different countries, not
(17:26):
including the USA, UH and Chili. The country of Chile
hosts UH their telescopic observatories. There's three there and they're
currently working or I guess not now it must be built,
but they were working on the European This is a
great name for a telescope, the European extremely Large Telescope,
(17:47):
which they gave the acronym e DASH E l t
uh and it was thirty nine meters uh and I
believe in diameter. And it was purportedly going to be
the world's biggest eye on the sky. So that's important, right,
because it was on the sky, it wasn't in the sky.
I believe that James Webb telescope being produced by NASA
was going to be larger than that. So the main
(18:08):
mission here was created in in a nineteen sixty two
convention to provide state of the art research facilities for
astromoterers and astrophysicists. And they have an annual contribution budget
from their countries of a hundred and forty million euros.
The headquarters themselves are near Munich in German name, but
the telescopes are in Chile. So what's so special about
(18:29):
the Medusa nebula? Like, why did we bother to come
here and not to the other you know twenty thousand
some odd nebula that are out there. Well, I mean
it looks like Medusa sort of, that's right. We like monsters. Okay,
that's a good reason. Um, yeah, I hope we had
some better reasons for them for that. Maybe we've we've
forgotten something important. Maybe we you know, we brought a
(18:51):
convenience to our something. Let me look at my notes here. Um.
It says here that the more generic name for this
was Abbowl twenty one because it was discovered by an
American astronomer named George O. Abol in nineteen And they
actually didn't even realize that it was a planetary nebula
(19:13):
until the seventies because when they were looking at they thought, oh,
this must be the remnants of a supernova nova explosion. Um,
because it had all the properties of the cloud. Then
they figured out, oh, that's a nebulah. And so astronomers
today what they do, well, I guess it's not today,
it would have been two thousands ago. Astronomers apply various
(19:34):
filters to telescopes so they can isolate the radiation from
the gases that they see. Because the nebula is specifically
the Medusa nebula, is actually quite dim in comparison to
other nebula. Yeah. I think that's one of the reasons
we decided to go to it, because it's it's not
as bright, it's a little more. It's probably cooler about it. Uh.
It is only four light years across, only only only
(19:57):
four light years across. So think about that. I mean, like, uh,
the gas expands to quite a huge distance compared to
actually the size of the star itself. Yeah, it's it's
as far as human perceptions of these things, it's a
fairly large region of space, I mean. And then of
course as far as space goes, it's not big at all.
And an important thing like if if you're back on
(20:17):
Earth made you probably have better pictures by now. But
those photos and you know, I'm assuming if this goes
up as a podcast and we still use thumbnail images
like we used to, will use this image of the
Medusa Nebula from the E s O. But if you're
looking at that image, you think, oh, the star in
the center, the one that's glowing the brightest, that's got
to be the stellar core that's giving off all these gases.
(20:39):
It's actually not. It's actually dimmer. It's a blue star
that's just off center of this crescent gas shape. Uh.
And in the right hand part of the image there's
a dimmer blue star that's just off center of the
crescent shape. And that is it. That's the one that's
giving off all the gas. Uh. And this is my
favorite part. The double ionized oxygen part So the reason
(21:04):
why this one in particular has these weird greens, which
is why I imagined Medusa came into play serpentine green snakes,
it's because the radiation combines with the gas. Uh. And
actually scientists thought they'd found a new element. They called
it nebulum nebulium. I think what we're learning from this
is that astronomers in the late twentieth century weren't that
(21:27):
creative when it came to coming up with names dream things.
But it's symbolized double oxygen. Double ionized oxygen is symbolized
by within brackets the letter oh followed by three Roman
numeral ones, so it's it looks kind of like oh
one one one or something like that, yeah, oh three
(21:49):
oh three yeah, uh, and it's uh. That's how we're
basically able to spot this so easily. Like I said,
it's fairly dim nebula. The greens were really standing out,
so they basically realized, okay, this is a radiation wavelength
that's not a new element. They put those filters on
and then they could see it much better. And indeed,
(22:10):
I look forward to looking at it through our special
goggles that will allow us to to see these, uh,
these details from these here on site when we're just
surrounded by a four light year across entity that's everywhere.
Really it's kind of hard to see the colors. But
we've we brought these these great goggles. Yeah, really much
(22:31):
better than Google Glass turned out to be. Yeah, I
mean unless it. I mean it had to two thousand
additional years to get awesome. So maybe a Google glass
two thousand. You know. We mentioned earlier that the nebula
that we now inhapned was discovered by American astronomer George O. A.
Bell In. I was actually researching him a little bit.
He was a noted skeptic in the day and involved
(22:52):
in that skeptic interest, you know, taking taking down magicians
and uh and and fraudulent you know, hypnotists and the like.
Oh well, maybe he would have been a fan of
our sister show stuff they don't want you to know
where they you know, explore that that type of stuff. Yeah,
him trails. I bet he'd be really big on chem trails. Um. Okay,
(23:15):
so this thing's expanding pretty quickly, so we need to
get our work done and then get out of here.
The Medusa nebula, we knew this before we even got here,
because of all the measurements that I mentioned earlier. It
expands at a rate of fifty kilometers a second, so
that gas is just constantly pouring out of that central
stellar area. Uh. And it's much lower than is actually
(23:39):
expected for most supernova remnants. Uh. Well, well, what they
thought was a supernova remnant. Uh, And it's how they
figured out that it was a nebula. In fact, a
typical planetary nebula expands somewhere between twenty four fifty six
kilometers a second, so around an average of thirty kilometers
per second. That's that's nuts to me, especially when you
(24:00):
compare that that this huge system right that's floating around
out in space. And then we go back to what
we talked about earlier this week. The osadax worm down
to one centimeter and they're they're both kind of beautiful
in their own way depending on the scale, also kind
of terrifying and monstrous, uh, depending on the scale at
(24:21):
what you're looking at them at. Yeah. Indeed, and also
ephemeral depending on when you're looking at them, whether you're
looking at the life cycle of a planetary nebula versus
the life cycle of of a whale fall. Who knows,
maybe maybe like an osadax worm, the Medusa nebula has
tiny little male versions of itself, hundreds of them inside it.
(24:41):
Those might be coming to devour us right now. One
can only wonder. Hey, let's go ahead and put these
goggles on and head upstairs. Now we're not gonna we're
I think we're gonna run out of out of time
to record anymore, so we're not gonna be able to
really share what we see. I'm sure it's gonna be wonderful. Otherwise,
this whole trip was kind of a bust. But but
maybe everyone would like to chime in on what they
(25:03):
think we'll see. What would you see if you took
a two thousand year journey out to a planetary nebula
and attempted to look outward from its center? Yeah, let
us know. I guess maybe these are still platforms. I
mean they were popular at the time, Facebook, Twitter, and tumbler.
Tumblers probably not around anymore. Well, let's hope. Let's hope
(25:25):
the story maybe the only thing that's around maybe older
just tumbling. I don't even mean humans anymore, there's only tumbling.
We'll write us if you can write us on those platforms.
But I bet, I bet this one's still up there.
Uh email, that was a thing when we left, right
us to our email address at blow the mind at
how stock works dot com, well more almost pathans of
(25:55):
other topics how stuff works dot com. The busses many
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