What Are The Weirdest Stars?

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Speaker 1: So I wonder sometimes, why isn't the universe you know, more boring? You know, what, what do you mean more boring? Well, not only is so much of our universe beautiful from you know, like features on Earth too, incredible things in space, but it's also just seems to be filled with like really weird stuff, you know. Yeah, the universe always seems to top itself with more intense or more crazy stuff. I know. But I wonder is that a property of the universe or is that something about us? Like if we meet aliens and their physicists, would they be like, yawn, the universe is so simple and boring and we're the only ones who think is fascinating. Or they also just like stand a gape at the incredible features we see in the universe. Oh, I see you're asking a philosophical question, like is it not boring objectively or just subjectively as for humans given our experience? Yeah, is the universe not boring because of who we are? Because of what the universe is? Like? If we lived in a crazier part of the universe, maybe would be we would be more used to crazy things exactly if we had seen all the fascinating stuff early on, then all these discoveries would be ho hum, Right, But we grew up in a kind of a boring corner of the universe, and so we're blown away when we go to like the Manhattan part of the university, see all the crazy stuff that happens, all the extremes. Yeah, yeah, we're like the uh, the provincial ignor a miss of the universe. Y'all, y'all got a nice universe here. Now let's insult the United States. I mean we should come definitely, let's cut that. And I'm Daniel. Welcome to our podcast Annual and Jorge Explained the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio in which we take a tour of the universe and find weird, interesting stuff that's hard to understand and try to explain it to you. They ever going to take a topic and we're going to examine some of the weirdest examples of them, So the most intense and extreme examples of this very common thing you see every night. That's right, And this episode is dedicated to a listener who wrote in and asked us to do an episode about all the weirdest stars in the universe. This was requested by Callie Smith, who also in her email described yourself as a physics ninja or hey, what do you think that means? She must have gone to like a combination school where they teach physics and ninja skills. I imagine that a physics ninja is somebody who breaks into your office late at night, totally silently and solves all the problems you have on the chalkboard and escapes without leaving a tri wow. I would love to see a duel between her and like a physics samurai. What would happen a physics samurai comes in and chops your chalkboard in half? I think less subtle, less subtle problem solved. Isn't that what you do to your students? You like walking? This is not good? Yeah. No, I'm definitely not like a physics gladiator, and that's what you mean. I think I meself more as a physics architect, trying to build interesting stuff in physics and find interesting puzzles. Cool. Well, thank you Kelly Smith for submitting this idea, and it's a pretty interesting one. Just the idea that there are things out there that you might somebody might call weird stars. Yeah, and you know, you know that our sun is a star, and lots of other stars out there, and a lot of them are sort of vanilla. You know, they're out there, they're fusing hydrogen, they're enormous burning balls of gas. We can see them from billions of miles away, you know. But there's so many of them that becomes a little plain, right, like you're bored by that. Um. But it turns out there's a lot of stars out there that are weird, that are strained, that do incredible stuff that blows your mind. And so this episode is dedicated to talking all about those kinds of stars. Yeah, because it's it's funny to think that our star, our sun, is this giant, enormous, continual in men's atomic bomb. That's just that it's exploding all the time, and it's but it's it's weird. I think that that's the vanilla version. That there are versions of stars out there that would make art Star look boring. Yeah, you've gotta be pretty jaded to think an enormous, constantly exploding fugion bomb is the size of yesterday's news. Yeah, the size of the sun is yesterday's news, right that, um, But that's the world we live in, you know, you always need something more exciting, something as you're scrolling down your Internet feed, right, you need something to catch your eye. And so yesterday's ball of enormous plasma is boring, and you need something news, something exciting, and so that's what we're providing to you today. Yeah, so let's break it down. What do you what do you mean by weird stars or stars that are not like the typical star that you see out in the universe. Yeah, you know, astronomers like to look out in the sky and see what they look at and try to understand it. And they look at the population they see. Do the stars have the distribution of brightness that we expect, We see the sizes that we expect, the distances we expect, and they start to ask questions, you know, and when they do so, they find some odd balls. They find some stars out there that don't quite um act the way they might have expected, and it gives some clues that there's different stuff going on in the universe that's producing these weird stars. And so specifically today we're interested in things like neutron stars and pulsars and weird things called magnetars. Magnetars sounds like a Greek mythology monster. Yeah, I wonder what a magnetar would do against the physics ninja. Who do you think they like? Epic battle? That would be an epic battle. Would love to see some fan art if anyone's listening, who knows it draw magnetars, I'd I'd love to see that done. That would be awesome. Yes, so we are going to dig into what's weird and fascinating and interesting about all these kinds of stars. But of course, before we do so, I went around and I asked people what they knew about these weird categories of stars. Yeah, we ask people what they thought was a neutron star or a pulsar or a magnetar. That's right. So before you listen to these answers, think to yourself, do you know what a neutron star is? How's it made? Why is it weird? Do you know what a magnetari is other than a comic book villain in Jorge's imagination? Think about it for yourself, then listen to these answers. Here's what people have to say. Kind of, I don't know so much about it. I don't know big stars I've heard days before, but nothing about like amation, and I feel like I've heard about a neutron stars but not the other two. Make a guess what a neutron star is? Um. Neutrons are like um, it's like the atom, right, like the protons, electrons and neutrons. So I would assume it has to do something that that I know. Well, if you have to guess what a quasar was, what would you guess? It is like a type of star or something something like that, a fireball for the fun there. A pulsar, to my understanding, would be like a black hole. When a black hole is and I could be very wrong, but a black hole is like eating or you know, or just breaking apart like a planet, and as it's doing that, it's spewing you know, stuff out, And as the black hole spins, it kind of emits um like what it is like radiation or you know, frequencies that when we see it here on Earth, it seems like it pulses or flashes something that's like given emitting like a energy. I'm not sure al R p U L S A R I have, but as wach, I can't remember what it is, all right, how about a neutron star, I'm sure just like a at this star so far of energy that now he emits a sense of light as far as neutron I mean, that's that's actually my best guess. I mean they're from the newtron star because it's probably more neutrons than like what positrons and those other things. So what do you think of those answers for? Yeah? No, I think they demonstrated as much knowledge as me about these topics. I see, so like them, you're fascinated to learn more about neutron stars and pulstars and that. Like them, I would have just said, yeah, it's like a fireball, right or a big ball of energy. Yeah. So a lot of people seem to have heard the term, right neutron star is um not unfamiliar people. I think one reason is that Thor's hammer is supposed to be made out of neutron star material. Isn't that right? Oh? Is that true? I think so. I'm not an expert on the Marvel universe. I'm sure somebody's gonna write in and correct me, but please do um. I think it was forged by the energy of a neutron star ran according to the movie, but I'm not sure if it's comic booklore. Isn't it super heavy? Though? It's super heavy? Right, it's as dense as a neutron star. Right, I don't know if it's super heavy. I know that only four can pick it up. Yeah, there's some complicated physics rules and the Marvel universe there. Well, this is not Dale and Jorge explain the Marvel universe. So let's get back to our universe. Although that sounds like a great podcast, that's our spinoff podcast. Yeah, um exactly. Um yeah, I thought people you know, mostly had heard of this stuff, but they didn't really know a lot of details about what pulsars were, and nobody had any idea what a magnetard was. I mean, it sounds like it's magnetic. Yes, that's a good clue. Magnets oars are super magnetic, like a star that will stick to your fridge, or it's a star that will erase your credit cards. So the idea is that when you look out into the sky at night, you see a whole bunch of stars, but some of the ones that you're looking at are not like the others. That's right, Some of them are pretty weird and they're not always easy to spot. So let's dig into it. The first category of weird stars we want to talk about is neutron stars. Yeah, so what's a neutron star besides you know, a plot element in the in the Avengers movie. Um, well, I don't think they were created just for that purpose. Neutron star is some what happens after some stars go super nova. Right, So, the typical life cycle of a star is gas and dust come together, they're compressed by gravity. It starts to ignite in the center. It burns for billions of years. Right. Eventually it runs out of that fuel and and and the and the burning slows down and it can't any longer prevent itself from collapsing gravitationally, right, all this stuff gravity is trying to pull the star into as small adut as possible. But during its whole life, it's burning, and that's causing this outward pressure. Eventually that burning fades and fades and fades, and the star gives way to the inevitable forces of gravity and collapses like it's nuts out and and all that stuff to suddenly crunches down in the into the center. Yeah. Well, usually you get an implosion followed by an explosion which is a supernova, so a huge amount of light is emitted and then you have what's left over is a very very very dense, very small core. And if it's big enough, if it's like massive enough, then it can form a black hole, right, and and that's how a lot of black holes are made. But it's not quite massive enough. Sometimes it doesn't form a black hole. It just forms a super dense blob of stuff. So a neutron star is like a failed black hole. I don't want to pass any value judgments on neutron stars. I think neutron stars should be happy with how they look, you know, and not be aspiring to anything else. Um. But yeah, neutron stars are black holes that didn't go black. This is a stellar positive podcast. That's right. That's sorry. I love your body, stars, love who you are, But yeah they are. There are blobs of matter that weren't big enough, weren't dense enough to turn into black holes. What are you left with? This huge blob of matter and it's amazing amount of gravitational pressure and it's squeezes, squeezes down and in the end, you know, you start it out with this thing. It's millions of kilometers wide. All that stuff gets compressed into a little blob that's like ten kilometers in radius, which is pretty small. It's it's like the size of Manhattan. Yeah, exactly. And these things start out often much bigger than our son. Remember, our son is fairly small compared to a lot of suns out there. So this thing comes out to be like ten kilometers wide, but still have like one or two times the mass of our sun. So imagine taking our son and squeezing it down to like the size of Manhattan. And and what's holding it together is the gravity, right, that's right. Gravity is pulling this thing together, and nothing else is capable of sustaining it anymore. There's no pressure left to to keep it larger. So what's keeping it from becoming a black hole? We're din't it just keep compressing because of gravity? Yeah, well there's not enough gravity, right, There is some pressure there, and so the news what happens. The reason it's called the neutron star is that gravity is compressed it. And you know mostly these atoms have neutrons and protons and electrons, right, Well, it's so compressed that the protons and the electrons they have this interaction, and they turn into neutrons. Right, so you turn all the protons and electrons into neutrons. Member protons or plus one electrons are minus one. Wait waits there? Usually there one is plus and one is negative. So they attract each other. But you're saying, what if they get close enough they become a neutron, they turn into a neutron. Yeah, and it's not like, don't be confused, and neutron is not just a proton and electron stuck together, right, is the transformation of the quirks that are inside the proton. One of the corks inside the protons gets flipped from being like a down cork to an up cork, and that turns the proton into a neutron. And also it emits a neutrino. And so you turn all the protons and electrons inside these atoms into neutrons, so that all you're left with is neutrons. Why doesn't that collact into a black hole. Well, neutrons don't like to be on top of each other, right, And there's still gluons and things. The neutrons don't want to be like literally on top of each other, so there's still enough pressure there to prevent it from collapsing into a black hole. If there was more push each other out to you, don't they crowd each other out. Yeah, you know, it's like a bag of pink pong balls, right. You squeeze it and squeeze and squeeze it, and eventually they pack so tightly that they can't get any closer. And if you had enough neutrons you added another you know, if you double the mass or something, there'd be enough gravitational pressure it would form a black hole. But these are ones where there isn't enough gravitational pressure to overcome the neutrons pushing against each other. It's just stuck in this really dense state. Yeah, super dense. You know, if you had like a spoonful of this stuff, it would weigh three billion tons. It's hard to even really fathom, like how heavy this stuff is. A spoonful wigs three billion tons? Yeah, I mean you've taken something twice the size of the sun and compressed it to a sphere ten kilometers wide. Like it adds really dense stuff. Wow. So that's why it's called a neutron. Start said, it's mostly made out of neutrons. Yeah, it's a base eically just neutrons. Like you know, what is a neutron star? It's a star of neutrons. Right. For once, we have a great name in science that's compact, it's crisp, and it's totally accurate. Right, So kudos to the anonymous Physics naming Committee that we are often um crapping on their work, but today they did a great job. But why is it still called the star? Wouldn't it just be like a a neutron ball, wouldn't Why wouldn't you just call it a neutron ball. You don't even give it, You don't even want to give them this one. Huh? Why is it called the star? Yeah? Well, okay, that's a good question. I mean, let's talk about how you see them, right, A neutron star isn't actively fusing anymore, so it's not giving off a lot of lights. You can't see neutron stars in the sky the way you see other stars, right, just by seeing the light that comes off them. They're more like black holes, um in that they're intense sources of gravity and the stuff around them is getting sort of rubbed and compressed. They have an accretion disc, right, it's the stuff that's about to fall into the black hole of the neutron star, and that's giving off a lot of radiation. So you see the neutron stars not to but if they happen to have an accretion disc, it gives off a lot of ratian your radiation. So yeah, that's a fair point. That's a fair point. Maybe they shouldn't be called star that should be called like neutron rocks or scoops, oh neutron or something neutron balls. I feel like I should just get a Nobel price just for figuring out the Nobel Prize for star naming. Yeah. Nice, Maybe you can get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for naming stars. At least a sticker, you know, like a little gold star. That would be nice. I'll make you a gold neutron star or a ball technically, Okay, so I see what you're saying. So it's not like the thing itself, that super dense core is glowing itself. It's just that it's it's almost acting like a black hole that it's so heavy and stuff that's surrounded. It's such an intense gravitational field that the stuff around it kind of burns and and and gets shredded, and that's what gives us the light that we see. Yeah, exactly, it's a lot like a baby cole, Right, but it's cool because it's a black, baby black hole you can see into, right, the stuff is not hidden behind the gravitational event horizon. You can see it. You can study, you can ask questions like how fast it's spinning. You know, what is it like to be on the surface, And uh, it's pretty crazy because these neutron stars, you know, they contain the all the angular momentum of the original star. Right, So imagine, for example, think about like being a figure skater or being on the ice. If you're spinning any of your arms out wide, and then you bring your arms in closer and closer together, you go faster and faster. Right. The reason is angular momentum. You have to have the same amount of spinning momentum when your arms are out wide as when you're they're close in, Right, But having things close in means they have to go faster to have the same amount of angler momentum because it depends on the radius. So like it shrinks, like as a shrinks, it goes faster and it spins faster and faster until exactly it gets so small that it's it's probably spinning, spinning at a crazy speed. Yeah exactly. Some neutron stars we found spin like they rotate. The entire star takes like five or six hundred times per second. Five times per second per second, yeah, which means if you're like standing on the surface of the star, the surface is moving it like a quarter of the speed of light. Wow. But technically you could sort of like land on it, right, like if you maybe, right, if you match the speed maybe, And I don't know what would be like to be on the surface of a neutron star. I think it would be pretty hot and unpleasant. There's definitely a huge amount of radiation from all the stuff nearby. But yeah, technically you could. I mean, it's a thing, right, you could land on it, you could touch it would just send you a robotic probe first, but yeah, go for it. Well, I mean I think if you were spinning that fast, you would probably just get squitched against your chair, right, yeah exactly. I mean imagine landing on something that's spinning really really fast, right, You'd have to catch up to it in order to land on it, so you'd have to be orbiting it at a quarter of the speed of light. It would be pretty tricky maneuver. Okay, So, so how rare are these neutron stars? How many are there in the in the universe or in our galaxy? Yeah, well, we've identified a bunch of them, you know, we've seen We've identified pretty confidently, like thousands of them in our neighborhood, and the closest one we've ever seen is like four hundred light years away. And then we can extrapolate, We say, well, if there's a certain density of neutron stars around here that we've seen, you know, how many do we expect to see? And we can have models of stars and supernova collapses and and their's and their masses, and the estimates are that there are tens of millions of these things in the galaxy. Um. But and you know, that's a tiny fraction of the hundreds billions of stars that are in our galaxy. But it's not a small number. And right there's a lot of these crazy dense, super spinning um little tiny what do you call them, neutron balls? Neutron balls. Yeah, that sounds like something you'd order for dessert. You know, I'd like two neutron balls with chocolate syrup. Please, Can I get our ninja physics physics ninja to cook up the balls? Said, oh, no, you should have a dessert that's not quite so dense. Yeah. So they're they're a lot of them, and they spend really fast. They're super dance. They can't actually see them. Can you actually see them in the night scout? You can, right, because I heard they don't give a visible light. Yeah, exactly. They're like anything else that doesn't glow, you know, just like an asteroid. Right, You can't see an asteroid unless the sun shines on it. These things are too far away from any start to shine on them. We have to. We can only see them from the radiation that comes from nearby them because the gravitational pressure they exert on like gas and dust that's orbiting them. So you can't see them directly. You can't point your telescope and a neutron star and expect to see it. Just be like a black rock, but not a black hole, you see, like the chaos it's that it's causing around itself. Yeah, exactly, just the way if you see a star walk, you know, through the through the crowd of photographers at the oscars, right, you probably don't see the star directly. You just see like all the flashes of light from the cameras and all the whispering and all the people jockeying to get a quote right, and so often it's the secondary stuff that you see more directly. Yeah, and probably if you try to reach you and go into and touch touch them, probably also die, right. Probably. Yes, some of the stars are spinning at a quarter of this peaceful like burned myself. All right, cool, So those are neutron stars or neutron balls. So let's get into the other kinds of weird stars that we're gonna talked about today. But first let's take a quick break, all right. So let's keep going down our list of weird stars in the universe. And we already talked about neutron stars. Now, what's Daniel, what's our second kind of weird star in the universe. The second kind of weird star is one of my favorites. And this is something called a pulsar. That's that that sounds like a like a like a watch. They're very expensive. They're only made in Geneva and they cost like fifty dollars each because they're made by like tiny little dwarfs that are kept underground, never see the Sun or anything. Right, there's my strange watch fantasy pulsars. Pul Stars are actually a type of neutron star. Right, So neutron stars we just talked about, and neutron stars have strong magnetic fields, like really really powerful magnetic field because, as we talked about in our episode about why the Earth has a magnetic field, anything that has like a fluid inside of it that can conduct the electricity and is active is going to have a magnetic field. And neutron stars already have magnetic fields that are like billions of times as strong as the Earth's magnetic field. Because it's spinning. Is that why yet spinning? And because it has activity inside of it, So you know there must be stuff going on inside the neutron star. It's not just neutrons like crammed in and then and quiet right there moving around. There's like some fluid and some flow in order to get the magnetic field. So inside of this ten kilometer to Sun's mass, super dense thing, there's actually stuff going on inside of it, that's creating a magnetic field. Yeah, but we don't understand that very well. Like we even don't understand the magnetic field of our sun very well. You know, our son has this very strong magnetic field and it flips every eleven years, which is really weird, and we don't understand very well. So we have a very tentative understanding of the magnetic fields inside neutron stars. And even weirder is that some neutron stars have even stronger magnetic fields. Like alright, neutron stars already crazy hot, crazy dense, crazy fast, crazy, small, crazy, spinning, crazy magnetic fields. And in this category of them called pulsars, have extra powerful magnetic fields like a thousand or a million times more powerful, and and so. But other some stars don't have this magnetic field. Yes, some neutron stars have weaker magnetic fields. All neutron stars, we think, have magnetic fields, but some of them have such a strong magnetic field that something really weird happens. And remember that magnetic fields interact with charge particles, so a charge particle gets bent by magnetic field. And you know on Earth we see this all the time in the northern lights. Northern lights are just charge particles from the Sun or from some from somewhere else that got carried up to the north part of the Earth by the magnetic field. Right, we have these lines and the magnetic then the charge particles get bent by them and sent to the north or to the south. So something weird happens on a pulsar. That's sort of the inverse, which is that a lot of charge particles get shot out from the pulsar around the north pole and the south pole of the pulsar. It becomes like a like a death ray, yes, exactly two death rays, right, one from the north and one from the top of the south. And you know, there's all this radiation produced and it gets funneled up to the north and the south magnetic poles and then shot out into space. So it's not just like um sent everywhere like a glowing sun. It's like you take all this crazy radiation and you focus it into just two beams, one from the top and one from the bottom. Right. And the crazy thing is that this magnetic field is moving right relative to the star. Well sometimes, like on Earth, the magnetic field is not pointing the same direction as the rotation axis, right, So the Earth for example, right spins around one axis, and the north pole, as we talked about in that other episode, is not aligned right, So the direction of the north pole doesn't always point the same way as the direction of the magnetic north pole. So there's a it drifts in like an Earth. The magnetic are north poll is drifting into Russia right now, that's right, And as long as they're not aligned, then the magnetic north pole sort of like sweeping out a circle in space, right, like a cone in space. Now, imagine if you're blasting a hugely powerful laser, and that's basically what pulsars are doing. A hugely powerful laser out into space from your magnetic north pole. But the spinning north pole is in another direction. So the magnetic north pole is going to sweep through space, um, sending this huge blast of radiation in different places. And that's why it's called a pulse are because um it doesn't always point towards Earth. For example, sometimes that radiation sweeps across Earth and we're like, whoa, what was that? And then it turns black again, and it waits for the pulse are to spin around and then it covers us again. It's like a like a lighthouse, right, this spinning around you only see it sometimes it's always shining, but you don't always see it. It's kind of like the Death Star in Star Wars, right, like, um, how is it like the Death Star? Exactly? Yeah, No, follow me on this one, Daniel. You know the little circle that shoots the beam out of the death Star, that's kind of like the north pole of the pulsar, and so you can imagine the death Star kind of spinning along its access. Then that that that laser beam is going to be also rotating around kind of like a yeah yeah, Like like if you can shine a flash light out into the sky and you move your hand, it's going to be sweeping around, right, yeah, exactly. You know, I think a better name for pulsars would have been death stars, because they really are death stars. There are these big blobs, right fully operational battle stations, capable of delivering incredible amounts of radiation. Well, you know, this is our podcast, Daniel, we can name things whatever we want. Neutron balls, death stars exactly. In our little universe, we are in charge. The first pulsar ever discovered actually has a pretty cool name. It's called l G M. It stands for Little Green Men. That's because it was an exciting discovery, the first pulsar ever seen. You know, they saw it in their data and they saw it was bright and then dark and then bright and then dark and then bright and then dark, and it was regular. Right, It's not random. It's not like the pulse are just shines on you sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. It follows a very specific pattern, so like somebody was trying to um send us a signal, yes, exactly. So the first time they saw this, they thought, what are we getting a message from aliens? I mean, it's like Morse code or something, right, And so that's why they called it l g M one because they thought, well, maybe this is the first time we're hearing from aliens. And for the real little hesitant to publish, that's the real name, it's the l l g M. Yeah, the real scientific name of the first pulsar ever discovered was called l g M one. And they thought for a while, Wow, maybe the of sa this aliens. I mean, I love reading about those moments in science when people thought they discovered aliens, right, because maybe there are aliens out there, and usually aliens like in science are relegated to like the fringe of you know, the extremes, the crazy people, etcetera. But one day we might actually find aliens, and some like actual scientists doing careful work is going to stumble across evidence of it or hear a message from space or something. So I love hearing about those moments when a scientist is like, am I that person? Am I? The person is going to call it my colleagues and be like, no, I know this sounds crazy, but I think I found aliens. Well, they must have felt pretty confident if they named it LGM. I think that was mostly a joke between them. But then they found a second one coming from a totally different direction in the sky, and so they were like, oh, let's call this one little Blue Men, Big Green Men or something. Um, So they find a second one, so they thought, oh, there must be It can just be. There can be two civilizations of little green men sending us signals. It must be some natural phenomenon. Yeah, exactly. And the thing that made it seem like maybe it was aliens was just the fact that it was regular. And that's not that hard to explain, right, There's not that much information content in a regular message. If somebody wants to send you a message saying, hi, we're here, we're alive, come talk to us. You don't just send regular beeps, right, you want to send some information and uh. And so that's it wasn't very convincing as an alien message anyway. Yeah, So then they found the second one and uh. And then they found a bunch And so now we found lots of these things. So if we were to look at these out into you wouldn't see them in the night sky, right, You only see them in X ray the X ray spectrum. Right, that's right. I think they're mostly an X ray and you would see them as as kind of these blinking lights. Mhmm exactly. And some of them blink slow because they rotate slowly, and some of them blink really fast because they rotate like crazy fast. Like some of them blink on and off every millisecond. Wow. So it's like there's something ten kilometer is big with the massive two sons spinning once every millisecond. Yes, exactly. I mean, this is an enormous cosmic object doing these really extreme maneuvers um just to send us this blinking radiation. It's really crazy. And there's a mystery to them, right, like we don't really know why they're sending this how or how they're sending these beams of radiation. Yeah, you know, the how the magnetic field is generated and how the magnetic field turns into this beam of radiation is not something that's well understood. It's an area of active research. And you know, there's some models here and there, but nobody is really fully confident that they that they understand it. It's pretty weird. I think it's pretty clear there's probably some some guys in black helmets inside turning a lever and that's what's costing these beams. I mean, obviously it's a death star. I find your lack of faith in science disturbing horhe um. And you know it costs these guys energy. Right, you can just beam a huge amount of energy into space for free. That energy comes from some where. So what happens is as the years and the millions of years go by, these pulsars start to slow down. Essentially shooting out all this energy into space is like friction on the on the pulsar and it slows down and they last, Like you know, we think like ten to a hundred million years, so only a little while in Yeah, only a little while. And they're unique, you know, each one has its own pattern, and that makes it really cool because you can use them for things like um cosmic locations, kind of like beacons. Yeah, you can say I'm this distance from that pulsar, and I'm that distance from this other pulsar, and I'm this distance from this third pulsar, and that's enough to say uniquely where you are in the galaxy. That's pretty cool. It is cool. We actually we used it because when we sent out some of those early satellites that we just sort of like lofted out into space, thinking maybe one day they'll crash land on an alien planet, we included on on that spacecraft a plaque that describes our location using pulsars. So then what happens after a hundred million years, after they run out of energy, they just become regular neutrons neutron balls, Yeah, yeah, exactly, they start to slow down, They just become dark neutron balls, yeah exactly. Hopefully the aliens find us before our address becomes obsolete. Yeah, alright, let's get into the last type of weird star out there in New universe. But first let's take another break. Okay, So the last kind of weird star that our listener our physics ninja, our physics ninja. Yeah, Kelly Smiths suggests that we talked about is something called a magnetar. Yeah, magnetar. Magnetars are like the extreme version of pulsars. So pulsars are the extreme version of neutron stars, which are already extreme, and magnetars are like the crazy of the crazy. Huh. But wait, if we're naming neutron stars neutron balls, you're saying this is the bossiest of all the neutron balls. That's right, these are the ballsiest balls of all um and a C d C would love these. Um, we have neutron stars sometimes have crazy magnetic fields, and they call them a pulsar. But when they have super crazy magnetic fields, like ridiculous, then you call it a magnetar. And so these are things that are spinning incredibly fast and have incredibly powerful magnetic fields. We think these are the most powerful magnetic fields basically anywhere in the universe. What do you mean, So it's just something, It's just a neutron star or neutron balls. It just happens for some reason to have started off with a giant magnetic field and rotation. Is there something that would you know? How do you what what causes um a neutron ball to to have these higher or higher energy and fields. I think Thor's hammer has to strike at it just the right moment. Now it was it was bitten by a microwave spider. Now, um, we don't know, you know, we don't understand. We know that it's not super rare. You know, something like one inten um of these pulsars is a magnetar, so it's not super rare, but they're super powerful. And you know, we don't even really have a strong grasp on magnetic fields of ordinary stars. So understanding like the crazy extreme magnetic fields of some really strange neutron stars is definitely an area of active research and not something that we understand very well. So wait, are these things are made out of pure neutrons? They like, there aren't There aren't any more atoms, basically, is what you're saying. It's just pure neutrons clump together. That's right. If you want to source of pure neutrons, you want to go to whole foods and like go in the both food sections, they don't have neutrons. You gotta go out to the neutron stars to get a pure spoonful of neutrons. Because remember Adams started out with protons and electrons and neutrons. But in the vicinity of a neutron star and the internal crazy compressed bits of a neutron star, the protons and electrons react to give neutrons. Then also neutrinos, which fly out into outer space and are not kept inside the star. But neutrons don't have any electric charge, right, They're not neither positive nor negative. So how can they have a magnetic field. Well, there are quarks inside the neutron, right, which have charge. So it's the spinning of spinning of those it's causing maybe these fields. Yeah, exactly, And as I said, we don't really understand it very well. Um, but these things are crazy and they're moving really fast, and they're moving so fast that they don't last very long. Like we said that pulsars take like a hundred or ten to a hundred million years to give up all their energy because they're spinning and beaming all this energy into space. Magnetars use of all their energy in like ten thousand years or something. Wow, that's super quick. That's like a like a it's like a blink in the in the age of the universe. Yeah, exactly, it's hardly anything, right, It's it's basically an explosion right from the from the time scale of the universe. It's an explosion. And they basically don't last at all. It's like a flash. Yeah, exactly, the flash. Um, but you know before they before they die, they do even weird or stuff. So the surface of the of this magnetar is very intense, right, it's a huge amount of pressure, and we think that maybe it's not stable, and that sometimes what happens is the same thing that happens on Earth when you have huge dense bits of matter pushed against each other, which on Earth you get an earthquake. So on the surface of this magnetar you might get a star quake. Huge blobs of these neutrons like push against each other and slide and slip, and you get cracks and the thing reforms. And yeah, I know it sounds like science fiction, right, but we think it's actually literally happening in this universe. Because they're spinning faster, you're seeing these spin even faster than a thousand times a second. Yeah, some of them do exactly, and they have crazy magnetic fields. And the reason we think that sometimes they have these star quakes is that we see these really strong flashes of light, these gamma ray bursts that we think are essentially like light escaping from the inside the neutron star during one of these starquakes, and so it releases this huge out of energy. And you know, we should do a whole podcast episode on gamma ray bursts. They're fascinating. They're not very well understood. But one idea is that they might be caused by star quakes on the surface of magnetars. Wait, so doesn't that sound like fiction. It just sounds like fiction. Star quakes on the surface of magnetars. Well, it doesn't sound that impressive if you switch to balls, right, ball quakes and the surface of neutron balls. And that's why we're not using balls because it doesn't sound as good. Um, alright, so them, then how do we see these magnetars? Are they do they also see them blinking like the pulsars. Yes, they also admit a lot of radiation. That's why they slow down. So they're essentially like the super duper version of pulsars, and pulsars are super duper neutron stars, then magnetars are super duper pulsars, and we can see them in that same way. And then also sometimes they admit these huge flashes of gamma rays, which coincidently is what gave another Avenger his superpowers. What which one? You don't, uh, I'm not of my moral universe details. It's the it's the Hug. The Hug everyone knows got his powers from gamma rad Yeah, but not from gamma ray burst from outer space, right, that would affected everybody? Well, we don't we When he was getting one of his seven pH ds, he was doing an experiment that immersed him in gamma rays, right, yeah, all right, so um so those our magnetars are like super charged pulsars, which are like supercharged neutron stars, which are like actually neutron balls exactly exactly. And you know these things are not just ideas, right, these things they are out there there, literally there. You could take a spaceship and go and look at one and visit them and interact with them. Right. The universe really has this stuff in it, right, And I always try to remind myself in astronomy that we've only seen the tip of the iceberg. You know, every decade we find something else super weird that astronomers twenty years ago would have thought, No, that's incredible, that's crazy, that's too weird to exist, Which means that there must be lots of stuff out there. We haven't even imagined crazy stuff to trip over. We haven't even begun to think about. Well, there are even crazier things that we think might be out there, right, hypothetical crazy stars. Yeah, there's no shortage theorists out there thinking up other crazy stars that might exist. So let's transition from talking about real weird stuff to hypothetical weird stuff. What are some of the things that physicists think might be out there that are even weirder. Well, one of them is called a quark star, And so we talked about how the neutron has quirks inside of it, right, and that in a neutron star is really compressed and the neutrons are all pushed up against each other. Well, it might be that you get a neutron star that's so dense that has enough gravity not to become a black hole. But to break up the neutrons right where the bond between the quarks um is weaker than the energy of the gravity and so basically breaks them up. And then you just have a ball of quarks, a quirk ball, a cork ball. And you know, we don't see even though we're made out of protons and neutrons, which are made out of quarks, we never see quarks by themselves. Even in particle colliders, we never see that because corks have really really strong bonds with each other. They have this really strange kind of force. You know how gravity, How gravity gets weaker as things get further apart. Well, the bonds between quarks is really weird. He get stronger as things get further apart, which means it's very very difficult to pull things apart because the amount of energy stored in that bond becomes enormous. But where would this pressure come from, Like, what would be the difference between a regular neutron star and a quark star. I don't know, that's a great question. I think it must just have to do with the mass of it and the gravitational pressure. Right, So if it's bigger than if it's enough mass to form a neutron star, but not quite enough to form a black hole. Then under some conditions it might break down those neutrons into corks, but that's not something we've ever seen. So you would just see like a ball of solid quarks, yes, exactly. And I'm not sure how you would observe that, right, that's a great question. How would you tell the difference between a neutron star and a star with the neutrons have broken down into quarks. There must be some sort of strange radiation that that's generated from that kind of star you just asked, right, like on on the red carpet here over here, over here, that's right. And the kinds of quirks that are in um neutrons are just up corks and down corks, but there are other kinds of corks. There's the strange cork, and the bottom cork and the charm cork. And so some people thought of like, well, what if you had a star made exclusively of strange quirks, for example, And so they called that, of course, the strange stars. And that's another just crazy hypothetical example of something. But it could be out there, right, It could be this enormous ball of pure strange corks just out there floating in the universe. Well, that's a different that's a whole different avenger. I think that's right, that's the strange hulk, right. But I also read that there is something that might be called a dark matter star. Yeah, exactly. Remember that stars are formed from gravity, right, it's gravity pulling stuff together and squeezing it, making denser and denser. Well, we know that dark matters out there. In fact, there's more dark matter than anything else, and we do know that it's affected by gravity. That's how we discovered it. So it's entirely possible that in every star this dark matter, but that there are some stars that have huge fractions of dark matter, or that in the early universe some of these uh, some of these stars were formed primarily from dark matter, or even you might have stars that are pure dark matter, like a dark star, a dark star exactly. That that sounds like a science fiction novel. I'd like to me. You could get enough dark matter condensed in the same spot that it might actually start to like combust or burn. Well, that's a question. We don't know, the institute, because we don't know if dark matter has any interactions with itself other than gravity, so gravity can cluster together. The reason that normal matter starts to burn is because of the other forces, right, the strong force and fusion. All that stuff comes from the other interactions. We don't know anything about dark matters interactions. If it has some sort of crazy interaction with itself, then yeah, it could combust and start to burn. But then it might admit some sort of radiation we can't see, right, It might admit dark photons, for example. So again you're just talking about dark matter balls. Back to the balls as always, dark balls. Welcome to Daniel Jorge, explain the balls now. But do you know what I mean? Like you're you're really just talking about clumps super danse dark matter clumps, Yes, exactly, But they might be so dnse and so crazy that they might uh amid some sort of lighter radiation. They might that part of pure speculation. I would not be surprised if dark matter formed clumps. That was at least his dances stars, right, so you could call that a star. I think, Um, we don't know anything about dark matter interactions for generating radiation, so that is just pure wild guesses. It might be the dark matter has no other kind of interaction, in which case it just sort of quietly gets clumped together by gravity to form these structures but never radiates anything. It could be, I don't think so. I think dark matter must have some kind of interaction with normal matter, otherwise it wouldn't have come into equilibrium in the early universe. But we haven't figured that out at all. That's like one of the biggest questions in science right now is doesn't dark matter feel any forces other than gravity? Does it feel anything? It's so cold and distant, just like all those other stars so em so full of itself, all right? Or those are the all the weird stars that um Kelly Smith wanted us to talk about. And I think the lesson is here is that the universe always has more surprises waiting for us. That's right. Don't be bored by the universe. It's always got something on the next page to just turn the page, dial that telescope up one more notch and you'll see something else to entertain you. All right, Thanks everybody, Thanks for listening everybody, and tune in next time. And if you have questions about something we said, or you have questions about something else, or you on an episode where we talk about your questions. Just send us your suggestions to Questions at Daniel and Jorge com. All right, see you next time. If 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 at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or 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 more podcast from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.