Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseBetelgeuse appears to be dimming. Is it about to explode?
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Hey, Daniel, what do you think would happen if something in the night sky suddenly did something totally new?
M like wiggling and shaking or dancing around something.
And doing the flaws the starflaws. I mean, like, what happens if a star suddenly started doing something it had never done before?
Ooh, you know what, I would think.
That this would be an amazing opportunity to learn something new about the universe. Nope, this is an amazing opportunity for a major discovery.
Only if we're talking about discovering aliens.
Hi.
I am Hojre, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi.
I'm Daniel Whitson. I'm a particle physicist, and I really really want to believe in aliens.
You're an alien enthusiast or an alien or a professional alien believer.
I'm a believer enthusiast. I'm enthusiastic about people who believe in aliens who do it professionally. Is somebody out there paying people to believe in aliens? Because I want to sign up for that, or maybe that's this job right here?
Well, welcome to your weekly career conspiracy advice podcasts. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio in which.
We talk about all of the amazing and crazy things about the universe. We explain to you how the universe really works, all the stuff that's happening out there in the center of stars and here on Earth and inside the tiny little particles in your fingertip.
That's right, all the things that we can explain about the universe, and all the things that we cannot currently explain about this weird and mysterious universe.
Only some of which we chalk up to aliens only some.
Do you have a giant column in your physics organization.
I'm only allowed to declare aliens two times a day, So if I already use that explanation twice in one day, then I got to come up with actual physics theory to explain what I'm seeing.
Oh, no, you actually have to work.
Yeah, you know, like, oh, that program didn't work. Must be the aliens.
That's right, My lot is too cold, aliens lattes.
Who drinks lattes anymore? Man, that's so a pre alien almond milk. When the aliens come, I wonder what kind of coffee.
Beverage they will like, hopefully not human coffee.
Are you saying, like human milk? Like they don't want cow milk or almond milk, they want like human milk.
Hopefully they want to brew us, is what I'm saying.
I see. Well, I think I'd rather be a you know, on a human dairy farm than on a human coffee than a source of human coffee.
But anyway, yeah, let's not go into let's not go into lat free podcast. That's right, human lactose free podcast. Please. Well, I think most people would vote for that.
That's right. But you know, if we're talking about discovering aliens, then that's mostly about looking out into the universe and seeing some crazy stuff. And you know, we haven't yet, of course, discovered aliens, but we have learned a lot of amazing stuff just by looking out into the night sky.
Yeah, And I think the way we would discover something like that is by looking at the sky and then seeing if weird things happen, like if you know, suddenly things change or things happen that don't seem natural.
Yeah. We talked once on the podcast about a really strange star that seemed to be obscured. It was almost like somebody was building a huge superstructure that was blocking the light between that star and us, like a Dyson sphere. And that's the kind of thing that you might see if you keep looking on to the universe and watching stars and looking for sort of unnatural phenomena.
Right, And sometimes those phenomenon can lead to pretty interesting scientific discoveries, even if they're not about aliens or alien lattes.
That's right. In nineteen eighty seven, we saw a supernova go and that was the first time in sort of modern astronomy, think we got to watch a supernova happen. Not in real time, of course, it happened, you know, thousands and thousands of years ago, but the light from it arrived here on Earth in nineteen eighty seven, and we learned a tremendous amount about supernovas and how they work and what happens by getting to watch that one.
Really, it was only nineteen eighty seven that we saw our first supernova or I guess maybe with a telescope.
Yeah, that was the first one that came in the era of our modern awesome telescopes. So astronomers saw a few supernova earlier this century. We have records of supernova's sort of like in the Antarctic ice where they deposited all sorts of crazy radiation going back hundreds of years. But it's sort of modern supernova watching when nineteen eighty seven was the first really sort of big science supernova And we should do a whole podcast episode about what we learned about science from that one supernova.
Oh, I see. So that's the kind of thing that astronomers do is they look at the sky and they kind of you know, to check all the marks there and on their list of how things should act. But then if they see something new, then that's something worth exploring more.
Right, Yeah, And that's something sort of fundamentally different about astronomy and astrophysics than the rest of physics. A lot of us in physics, we make experiments happen. I want to know what happens when a proton smashes another proton? Well, I go and I do it. I smash two protons together. But if an astronomer wants to know what happens when you crash one galaxy against another one, you can't build a galaxy collider, right, that's sort of impractical. Instead, they just watch it happen in the universe. They look out into the universe to see their experiment happening.
Wow, did you just call a whole field of physics couch potatoes? Is that basically what you're saying. Do guys just sit around in their couches in Hawaii looking up at the sky and wait for things to happen.
Yeah.
The equivalent is like, if you had some other physicists, You're like, I really wish this experiment would happen. Maybe I'll just sit in my living room and wait and see if it happens in front of me. That's basically the plan.
As opposed to particle physicists who endanger the whole human race by building things that might create black holes in.
They would you would rather study a nice little black hole close to home than one super far away you can barely see.
I think I would rather stay away from black holes as much as possible.
All Right, Well, that's good to know. It's a very powerful couch that they're sitting on. They get to see the entire universe. And the amazing thing is that basically anything you want to watch happen is happening out there somewhere in the universe. Neutron stars are crashing into each other, and all sorts of strange galaxies exist. They can't make things happen, but you know, they have a view to one of the greatest tests of experiments in the history of the universe.
Yeah, it's quite a drama going on out there in the universe. And so today we are going to be talking about one such discovery or one such phenomenon that we're seeing out into the next guy that is kind of weird, inexplicable, almost and totally we're and might be who knows, of some weird alien origin.
It might be. I think almost anything can be categorized as potentially of alien origin, which is one reason why I love that explanation. But this is something that's been capturing the mind of astronomers and even popping up in the news media recently. There's something weird happening with one of our favorite stars in the sky.
That's right. So today on the program we'll be tackling the question is Beetlejuice blowing up?
That's right, And we don't mean blowing up on social media. It's not going viral. But you know, just like anything that's blown up on social media, you do have to wonder is it about to die?
And so we're going to be talking about the star beetle Juice, right, not the Broadway play musical, not the movie with Michael Keaton, the original Beetlejuice.
That's right, And not some weird new beverage that Gwyneth Paltrow is pushing on people. When you squeeze beetles as to stimulate your alkaline intake in the morning.
I think her beatles are sustainably and humanely squeeze.
They're gently massaged to get a little bit of one drop of juice out of each beetle every day.
But it's not actually beatle juice. It's actually a different spelling, or is it. It's kind of an old word, right, it's I think it's isn't it originally like the name of a demon or something.
Uh. Yeah, it comes from Arabic, I think, and so it has nothing to do with beetles or juices. It looks like you might pronounce it like batel goose or something, but it's pronounced beetle juice.
Yes, So just just go with that battle goose.
That sounds like the name of my character in D and D or something.
That sounds sounds like a different Quyneth Paltrow product.
I'm going to roll my forty seven sided die to cast a spell from my wizard batel.
Goose while you're playing with Gwyneth Paltrow.
I don't think Gwyned Paltrow plays D and D. But you know, I don't know. I don't know. I shouldn't say you never know. Maybe she listens to the podcast. No, but there are a lot of people have been watching this star and noticing something really strange happening with it recently.
And that strange thing is that it's actually dimming right. It's like somebody is slowly turning it down.
You're imagining some sort of cosmic dimming switch, and some on.
The wall universe there is a giant little knob.
Who's playing with the dimming switch. Some alien dat out there.
Or Mary's connected to the universal Alexa, you know, and nobody's like Alexa. Dim Beetlejuice.
No, Beetle Juice is a huge star. It's an enormous, super giant red star and it's very bright in the sky. It's one of the where it used to be one of the ten brightest stars in the sky. And now it's been dropping. It's started in October twenty nineteen. It's been dimming, dimming, dimming, and nobody knows why.
Okay, so we were wondering and it sounds pretty recent October twenty nineteen. That's it's it's a pretty recent.
Oh yeah, we are topical on this show.
Yeah, I mean months. I mean to a physicist, that's like on the dot. I don't know how to respont it that maybe in a few months you'll come over with the response.
Giving until October twenty twenty. I'll come back with a really clever comeback.
Yeah, there you go.
There's something involving how cartoonists are always on deadline.
That's right, we are. Yeah, And so it's a recent development. And so we were wondering how many people out there knew that one of the stars in our sky a famous one, even Beetlejuice is actually dimming.
So I walked around campus and I asked students at UC Irvine fresh back from their holiday break, if they knew what Beetlejuice was as a star, if they had heard it was dimming, and if they were worried about a potential supernova that could fry their eyebrows off.
And so here's what people had to say.
I think I've heard of it before, but I don't know or remember much about it.
Did you know that the star appears to be dimming in the night sky? No, I didn't know that I have.
Yeah.
Did you know that it's dimming dramatically?
I did not.
Are you worried about it? Not?
Really?
No?
No? Yes?
Did you know that it's dimming in the sky dramatically?
No?
Does that make you worried? Should I be correct?
Is it a red star?
I forgot? Yeah, it's a bright red star.
Yeah, I guess I'm a little bit worried.
I think I've heard of it, but like, I have no idea anything about it.
Okay, did you know that it's dimming in the sky, like right now it seems to be fading? Is yeah? Does that make you worried?
Not too much, because I know like stars die and stuff all the time.
But solo concerning star biod ue, No sorry.
No, no, so you didn't know it was dimming in the sky. No, does that make you worried?
I mean, it doesn't sound like something that's worrying for me. It just sounds something very interesting now that you've brought it up, So I would want to know a little bit more about it and what it is, and maybe then I could decide if it's worrying or when.
They're dimming doesn't just mean their light is going away. So that started with that galaxies or universe or whatever it represents s been dead for a while, so I don't really think it affects us much.
There's something I listen.
All right, not a lot of concerned or even a lot of people who had heard of this star.
Yeah. I thought that was going to be sort of more penetration in the sort of general student population about this incredible astronomic event that's happening above our heads every single night. And we had a bunch of listeners to the podcast right in and ask us, hey, can you talk about what's going on with Beetlejuice explain it to us. So I was expecting the students to have maybe heard about it, but maybe they were too focused on the start of classes and all their new homework assignments, right.
Or I imagine most college students now weren't even born when the movie Beetlejuice came out.
That might be an issue also. But even when I told them about it, they seem to feel like, you know, hey, this is a supernova. It's going to happen somewhere super far away. So I'm not too worried about it.
There's maybe a supernova involved here, But the main mystery is that Beetle Jews you're saying recently in October started dimming like it was one of the brightest stars in the U and then suddenly it wasn't as bright.
Yeah, people just watch these stars, you know, and some stars burn constantly. They're just pretty stable. They're just like a huge fire going off in the sky and burning at the same brightness. But other stars are sort of variable stars, and they wiggle, they go up, they go down, they go brighter, they get dimmer.
Huh, it's like not a not a stable process, like it's going through some motions.
Yeah, and you know, when you're looking at a fire, sometimes the fire burns brighter as it gets to a good bit of fuel, and then it dims out a little bit. We can talk a little bit more about the physics of that in a little bit. But people have been watching Beetlejuice for like more than a century and taking some pretty detailed measurements of its brightness, and starting in October twenty nineteen, it started to dim and people thought, oh, it's just going into one of its dimming phases. But then it just kept dimming and dimming and dimming, and now it's dimmer than it has ever been seen before in more than one hundred years.
Oh okay, so it has dim before, but now it's dimming more than ever.
Yeah. Used to sort of wiggle up and down a little bit here and there, but now it's much dimmer than it ever has been.
Wow. And how do we notice this? Like, are there people looking at every star in the sky all the time or is there a dedicated Beetlejuice grad student and telescope.
Yeah, we assigned one student per star. And that's just your job. And you've got to hope that you know something interesting.
That's right, otherwise you'll never graduate.
That's sort of my problem with astronomy. I mean, I was always interested.
In you have a problem with astronomy.
I do a personal one, which is, when I was a kid, the thing that attracted me to science and the physics was astronomy. I was like, wow, look the night sky is amazing, and I got a telescope and I looked at a star. But then after a few minutes, you're just sort of like looking at a dot in the sky. It's not that exciting. It's not that often that anything interesting happens, and so.
As opposed to when you smash point particles, you're looking at things that are not points.
Exciting stuff happens every twenty five nanoseconds. So yeah, you got stuff blowing up. It's pretty dramatic in comparison. But you know, I don't mean to impugne any astronomers. I love astronomy and astronomers, and I'm glad that there's lots of different fields of science and different personalities to go into each. Different fields just not my personal choice. But there are people who do watch the sky and they look for things like supernova. We're always watching to see more supernova upcoming, because they help us measure the size of the universe and its expansion. So yeah, we have surveys that are constantly watching the sky.
Just scanning out there, looking for things that change. Like it takes a picture and then takes another picture and compares it to pictures to see if anything is changed.
Yeah, there are these very general surveys, and that's how you discover things like a new planet or you know, Omuamua, something that's coming towards the Earth. But in this case, I think Beetlejuice is a star of interest because it's so big. It's so huge, it's coming near the end of its life, and it has a really interesting pattern of variability.
All right, let's get into more. Tell us about our friend Beetlejuwice and what could maybe be happening to make a dinner. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, Danield, So, Beelejuice, one of the brightest stars, or what used to be one of the brightest stars in the sky, has been dimming recently, getting less and less bright, and nobody knows why that's happening.
Yeah, And there's lots of different kinds of stars out there in the sky, and some of them burn for billions of years and some just for millions of years. And what we're doing is looking at all of them and trying to understand, like, how many different ways is there to be a star? And you know, there are a lot like the star that is our sun, it's not even one of the most typical stars in the galaxy. And some of them are crazy, and Beetlejuice is one of the most extreme stars out there.
Really, all right, tell me about beetle Juice. Let's get into that a little bit. What do we know about beetle juice and how is it different than our Sun.
Well, first of all, beetlejuice is huge. Like, it's about twenty times the mass of our Sun.
So twenty times.
Yeah, that's an enormous amount of stuff.
So we should call it beetle huge.
I don't think it likes when you call it that, you know.
Big old, huge beegle, huge beetle juice.
It's been trying to cut back recently on the amount of amount.
Of the kating it's on the keto astronomical diet.
Yeah, and it's not just huge in terms of mass, like twenty suns is a lot of stuff. It's actually physically just the volume is enormous. It has a diameter of close to a billion miles.
Wow, and that's much bigger than our sun. Right, Like, if if something that big was in our solar system, it would probably take up most of the space.
Yeah, exactly. If you put a beetle juice in place of our Sun, then Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, even up to Jupiter would be inside the radius of the Sun. Right, So wow, that would totally us Like little juiced beetles.
Not good. So huge, it's huge, And why is it that big? It's just that's how it happened to be put together.
Yeah, the size of a star just depends on you know, the sort of the clumps of stuff that are around to form it, and the dynamics of it, whether it breaks off to form its own little cloud and stuff. That's something that people are still really trying to under stand is how stars form and what makes stars form. And we have parts of the galaxy where stars are still forming and parts where they're not forming anymore, and that's not something we understand very well. But what we do know is sort of the connection between the size of the star and how long it's going to live.
Oh interesting, you mean how bright it is or how big it is.
Yeah, the larger the star, the sort of bigger it is than the brighter it burns, and the shorter it's life. Like our sun is billions of years old and we expect it to keep burning for another few billion. But Beetlejuice is only eight and a half million years old. It's like a baby.
Really, what But you can have a star that young and wait, and you're telling me it's near the end of it end of its life.
Yeah, stars this size only burn for like eight point six or eight point seven million years, people think, And this one it's at eight point five million.
Wow.
So these things burn bright and they burn hot and they're huge, but they just don't last as long in the universe. Like the Sun is sort of the turtle of stars. It's gonna keep burning for a long time after Beetlejuice blows.
Interesting. It's kind of like a career in Hollywood for a Hollywood star.
I think, actually, in Hollywood it's better to be small, isn't it. Isn't it thin?
Still in.
Well?
I mean you burn bright and then and then nobody cares about you.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's probably a good analogy.
All right. So that's beetle juice. It's different. It's bigger, it's beetle huge. And where can I find beetle juice? Is it on a constellation that I know? Where could I find it if I wanted to see it from the Earth?
Yeah, it's sort of a Hollywood star because not only is it one of the brightest stars in the sky, it's in one of the most famous constellations. It's in the Orion constellation. So it's a big one. Yeah, and it's it's not that close to the Earth. It's like six hundred and twenty five light years away.
But that's I think that's kind of close, isn't it. Isn't it close for relatively astronomical distances.
That it depends? Yeah, I mean the galaxy is you know, one hundred thousand light years across, so yet in our neighborhood. But there are other stars that are you know, four or five ten light years away. So there are definitely a lot of stars that are closer.
And it's not just in the Orion constellation, I think, isn't it like the central one, Like if you look at the three stars that make up the belt, is in Beetle Juice one of them, the middle one.
I think the managers of the careers of the other stars argue about which is sort of the most important star.
Come on, Beetle Jews is the Beyonce of the Orion constellation. Let's be honest.
I mean I think that without Beatle Juice wouldn't really be Orion. You know, we have that magic to it. But people differ, but it is.
It is one of the ones in the belt right like, and that's pretty recognizable in the night sky if you see three stars pretty evenly spaced. That's that's the Orion constellation.
Yeah, so Beetle Juice doesn't provide part of the belt, but it's critical. You know, it's the top left shoulder Ryan, and that's his throwing shoulder, I think, and you know he's a hunter, and so I think people just can make a pretty good argument to being sort of a foundational star.
And that's why I'm not an astronomer with anyone reason number what I've lost jack reason number. You don't even need to count them. Really, I would just actually cartoonist. I would just draw it wherever.
Yeah, exactly, Well in fact check that later.
All right, So then you guys noticed that it started dimming, and so that's kind of weird, right, Like stars don't just suddenly dim like that so much.
Yeah, well it's sort of weird, but it's also sort of not weird. And so to understand how weird it is, we have to know what the context is. It turns out there's a huge population of stars out there, Like a good fraction of them are variable. Some of them do dim and brighten and dim and brighten, and these are stars we call them variable stars.
Yeah, you mean there's a lot of stars out there twinkling.
Well, twinkling is actually because the light is being mitigated by dust and atmospheric effects and stuff like that. So that's what causes twinkling. But there are stars that if you were like in a spaceship near them, you would notice them brighten and then dim and brighten and dim. And some of those stars played in a really important role in our understanding of the universe.
And I guess that would be rid of our sun did that as well put an.
End, Yeah, that would be really weird because six.
Years we're like, yeah, like solar seasons.
Yeah, well, there are some solar seasons, like the Sun has eleven year magnetic CycL cycle I think, where it's magnetic field flips every eleven years, and there are seasons when there's more solar wind and less solar wind. But these effects are very small compared to what we're talking about. You know, the Sun doesn't significantly brighten and dim compared to what's happening in these other variable stars. It's a really noticeable effect. And so we talked about these stars, these cephids recently. These are the stars that pulsate.
All right, let's get into that, and like, what could be happening with beetlejuice because you guys, notice it's dimming and that's kind of unusual and it could mean some pretty dramatic things. So what are some possibilities for what could be happening to beetlejuice?
All right? Well, I have sort of three categories of explanation for what might be happening to beetlejuice.
Okay, and you're going to tell tell us an order of how alarm we should be.
Yeah, So the most boring possibilities, right, and then we got them maybe more exciting crazy ideas, and then we got the alarming Everybody builds a bunker and starts to live underground for the next one hundred year's situation.
Everybody start eating beetle juice and praying to the Greenith Paltra demons.
Out there, that's right, or invest in lental futures.
All right, So what are the three possibilities that could be causing beetle juws to go dimmer? Right?
Well, the first thing to understand, as we've mentioned, is that some stars just do this. They are variable stars. Now some of them when this happens, usually it's very regular. So the stars we talked about before. There are stars called sephids pulsate and it's very regular. In fact, the key thing about sephid's is that how fast they pulsate tells you how bright they are at the source. And that's a key thing to knowing like how far away the star is, because you have to know how far bright it is at the source compared to how bright it is here. That tells you how far away it is. So you make a bunch of measurements. You measure how often it gets dimmer and brighter and dimmer and bright. It does it sort of like a clock, and that tells you something about how bright it is over there near the star. So it's really key for those stars that they are very regular, right, they're variable and something happening inside them to make them pulsate. And these are not stars that are rotating. It's not like a flashlight swinging through the universe that's just flashing over us.
It's really really like a pulsating reaction kind of.
Yeah, it's a radial pulsation. So no matter where you are around the star, you would see it going brighter and dimmer. Beetlejuice is not one of these very regular stars. It's not a cephid. It has some variation in it. It goes up and it goes down, but it's not like a clock.
Okay, so I see. So it's normal for a star to change to like get brighter and dimmer. But you're saying most stars sort of do it on a clock like regularly, but Beetle Juice maybe is different.
Yeah, Beetle Juice has sort of two different cycles that people have been noticing over the last few decades. It's got like a long cycle that takes about six years to go up and down, and it also has sort of a shorter cycle that's less than a year. And so we don't know what's going on. We don't have an explanation for how Beetlejuice has these two weird cycles in it.
You're saying, there it might be two kinds of aliens interfering with the star inside the start it's a star war, right, the Beetlejuice.
And for those of you who are interested in, like how can that happen? How can a star burn more brightly and dimly? Remember that it's not just that the star itself is like burning hotter or colder it's about the light we're seeing from the star. And so sometimes what's happening inside the star can make like the outer shell of the star more opaque because it changes it from like helium two to helium three. Or it can make it contract, which makes it heat up, or it can make it expand, which makes it cool down. So all this stuff can happen to a star. It's not just about how hot and bright it is. It's about like the shells and the layers and the folks who study this have these amazing models of these enormous cosmic fusion explosions that they can Frankly, it's blows my mind that they can understand them at all.
So it's like if you were standing next to the Sun, you wouldn't see it get bigger or smaller. You just see it get brighter and dimmer.
Well, if you're standing next to one of these stars that is variable, then they know they do expand and contract. They certainly they do, Oyeah, they do, And the outer shell of the star can become more opaque or less opaque. And so what you see from far away is just, of course is it brighter or dimmer, But it's a lot of really complex stuff going on. It's not just that the star gets bigger and hotter and smaller and colder very I see.
But it's all about sort of the mechanics of the reaction inside the star. Like'll the reaction will sort of lean one way, but then it'll lean the other way. And you know, things sort of are constantly in flux.
Yeah, sort of sloshing back and forth. Not in a stable situation. But Beetlejuice has these two cycles, sort of the shorter one and the longer one, and so you know, the most boring explanation for what's happening in Beetlejuice is that it might just be sort of the combination of these two different cycles happening at the same time that both are sort of in their dimming mode.
I see. It's just like a low point in its career as a star.
Yeah, precisely. But it doesn't really explain it because Beetlejuice has these two cycles that are like on a year and a six year timeline, so you would expect to see those things sort of line up more often than every one hundred years.
Oh, I see. Oh, so there's something else going on here.
I think there's probably something else going on there, something else to learn. There could be another longer time scale variation that's happening. It could be these two things when they do line up in some way, they sort of like accentuate each other, you know, But we don't understand the mechanism physics behind either one, and so it's hard to know specifically what might make this happen.
All right, So that's possibly a is that it's just a normal cycle of a you know, hormonal cycle or a teenage star with crazy moods. But then there are other possibilities, some of which we might want to be concerned about.
So that's sort of like taking the normal, boring stuff and saying, maybe it's a little weird, but there's other really weird stuff that does happen to stars that could be explaining this. And you know, sometimes stars don't just burn happily. They have like you know, indigestion and you get like an enormous eruption and it's stuff into space a starburb. Yeah, or you could have like a star quake or like cracks on the surface of the star and internal stuff shoots out and you could get an enormous eruption of plasma. So you know, it could be that that's what happened. It happened on the other side of the star and dimming as a result. This is really just really speculative.
Stars are not these constant balls of fire there. They can have big events.
They can have big events, especially big stars that tend to be more dynamic and more violent, and stars near the end of their life they get to be a little bit less predictable to sort of as the fires is sputtering.
Out, kind of like that older uncle you have that's just.
The one who's no longer invited to Thanksgiving.
Does a lot of weird starburds.
At least now he puts on pants every time it comes to dinner, Right, that's an improvement.
At least when it ejects star material, it has pants on.
Yes, yeah. Or it could just be some really weird thing happening with the magnetic field of the star. And you remember what we're seeing is dimming. That doesn't mean that the star is dimmer. It could also mean that there's some like it's ejected some matter which then cooled and is now blocking our view of the stars.
See, it could just be winking at us.
It could be winking at us, yeah, or of course, you know, my favorite explanation is that there's you know, some awesome civilization out there that's like building some structure between us and Beetlejuice. Or really they've just now closed the blinds.
Since since October.
You know, it's a long construction project, and maybe they've just now started to ramp this thing up and turn on their dice and sphere or whatever.
Maybe it's aliens burping too or and or flirting with us. Maybe that is how they diffurt.
Maybe maybe it's alien uncles, you know, and they're grumpy they didn't get invited to Thanksgiving dinner. I don't know. But anytime something happens in the night sky that's sort of rapid, that's unusual and changes quickly, then you got to wonder, you know, is that a sign of sort of intelligent life, of of somebody's being like activist and constructing something and actively changing the way the universe is organized, not just sort of watching it happen.
Okay, so I'm getting that idea. A for what might be happening to Beetlejuics is just the normal phase in its cycle. Idea number two is that maybe it's some kind of event that's happening, like a quake or a starburb, or an ejection, or an aliens and or all of those things at the same time.
Aliens causing a starquake because of their burping.
That's right, while flirting with you. All right, let's get into the third idea for what might be happening to Beetlejuice, which might be an explosive idea.
A cataclysmic finish to Beetlejuice's run on the Hall of Fame.
That's right, not just a burb, but a big boom.
Perhaps, don't we all want to end our career so like mel Gibson exploding in a firing disaster.
With a big racist grant. Yeah, sounds like a great way to go.
Out, Beetlejuice, your astronomical racist uncle.
All right, let's take a quick break first.
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All right, So Beetlejuice is dimming. It used to be like the number one brightest star in the universe, but now it's stock has gone down, Daniel, Yeah.
And it's not the number one bright star in the universe.
Right, Oh, I see hey to us to my universe.
Yeah, to our to the Jorge universe.
It was one of the time which we all live.
We're all just bit played on your stage, sir.
That's right, that's right.
But yeah, and we're trying to figure out what could explain that. And we talked about the sort of boring ideas, but there is one more sort of explosive possibility.
M all right, sounds exciting. What else could be happening to Beetlejuice.
Well, remember that Beetle Juice is a massive star and it's near the end of its life. And what happens to really big stars when they go out is you often get a supernova.
So some stars, when they get old, they go into supernova. And you're saying, this diming could be like a sign of that.
Yeah, if beetle Juice is about to go, then you know, the last few hundreds or thousands of years before it goes supernova could be a little more volatile. It could be hard to predict. And you know, Beetlejuice is expected to last, you know, up to maybe another one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand years, but there's a lot of uncertainty in these predictions for when it will go supernova.
Right, I mean it's it's like it's eight and a half million years old. What's plus or minds one hundred thousand years?
Yeah, it's basically a few months. Yeah, it's you know, it's seventy five in star years, right, it's been retired for a while and it's sort of, you know, ready to go.
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of why I'm always late with my deadlines, to be honest, Daniel, because you're waiting for what's one hundred thousand years in the grand scheme of the universe.
Three months to a physist is one hundred thousand years to a cartoonist.
Yeah, there you go. Just wait for me to go supernova.
Yeah, But there's not too much to worry about here for a couple of reasons. One is, when we've seen supernova, the stars don't usually dim just beforehand. Usually they get.
Brellier, they like ramp up to the explosion.
Yeah, they ramp up to the explosion, and so dimming is not usually a precursor of supernova. So you don't really have to worry.
Now.
We don't know because we haven't seen a lot of stars like this this close go supernova. We don't have a huge amount of data.
We just have one. Right then, you say, or we've seen many over the years.
We've seen few supernova over the years, and we've seen a lot of the type one A supernova recently, and so since then we've got much better capturing supernova and seeing more of them, so we don't, but we still you know, we're talking about hundreds of examples, maybe thousands, so this could be a weird one.
You're not sure none of them have dimmed right before exploding.
Yeah, it's not a typical thing for a start to do just before it explodes.
It's not gathering its energy, kind of like a d kid in Street Fighter, too finish him.
We know that was the wrong that's the wrong.
Way, that's the wrong fighting Beata, But good try, good try.
I always wondered why we can have Street Fighter versus Mortal Kombat, you know, like sort of the epic balance, the epic challenge.
I would buy the video that video game.
But the other reason not to worry is that Beetlejuice is sort of far enough away that even if it were about to go supernova, we'd be pretty safe.
Okay, it wouldn't. We wouldn't again roasted by this explosion.
No, it's six hundred and fifty light years away, so if there were a supernova, then.
It would be good for six and fifty two years.
What you're saying, No, it's not about that. It's not about the time difference. It's just about the fact that the further you are away from the explosion, the less you feel it. It's why in the movies everybody's always running away from the explosion, right, because the further you are away, the more the energy, the temperature, the heat, or the radiation has had a chance to dilute, to diffuse over a larger volume.
Oh, I see, but what would we see? Would we see it go bright or would we see like a big fun explosion. What would we see?
Well, it's really fascinating. The first thing you would see from a supernova is not the light. You would actually first see the neutrinos.
Interesting if you can see neutrinos.
Yeah, and we can see neutrinos because we have neutrino detectors. And fascinatingly, you might wonder, like, how can neutrinos get to Earth before photons? Right? Photons travel at the speed of light, being.
Mighty because they travel backwards in time.
That article, Neutrinos do not travel fast than the speed of light. They do not travel backwards in time. They travel almost to the speed of light, but they are emitted first from the supernova. And the reason is that is that the supernova sort of happens from the beginning out and the neutrinos can penetrate the star. They can Neutrinos made in the middle of the star can make it out of the star, whereas light made in the middle of the star gets absorbed by the star. So the supernova sort of makes neutrinos first, and then you don't see light from the star until the shock wave of the supernova has hit the surface of the star and then it starts to glow.
Oh, I see, like the explosion has to make it through the star before it actually makes it out.
Yeah, so we see neutrinos here on Earth from a supernova before we see the light from it, which is kind of awesome. It's like a pre warning system.
Are you trying to argue for more funding for a neutrino detectors.
You'll get about two or three hours notice, so it's not that much you do in two hours to organize your life.
I'm going to order more grizth Palk products, all the ones I've always wanted to order, and or play Sweet Fighter.
But so first we would se an enormous amount of neutrinos and also things people probably don't understand is that most of the energy of supernova is not emitted in the form of light. Most of it comes out in the form of neutrinos and then in ejecting the mass of the star. So while we would see a really bright light here on Earth, like the star could be as bright as the full moon in the sky when it eventually does do suprinova, that's just a tiny fraction of the energy it's released.
Oh, I see, huh, But isn't that the stuff that can actually kill you?
Though? It can kill you because the light that's emitted from the star comes long and it's in X rays, and X rays are pretty deadly, But Beetlejuice is far enough away that by the time the X rays get here, they'll be dilute enough that our atmosphere can mostly absorb them, so you don't really have to worry.
I see. But then it doesn't shoot other things too.
Yeah, most of them. The mass of the star is actually blown out also, and so Beetlejuice, which is a hugely massive star. Remember it's twenty times the mass of the Sun. It will blow out something like ten to the sixty.
Protons, ten to the sixty protons.
Yeah, ess actually disintegrate, and I mean some of it will be left behind to form a neutron star or a black hole, but something like half the mass of the star will get blown out into space. And so if you two near that thing, you're just going to get riddled with tiny little proton bullets.
Right, which are super dangerous, right they are, which.
Try to be dangerous. Yeah, and you know we are constantly being hit by proton bullets from our own star, not because it's coming supernova. It's just sort of a normal thing for a star to do. But these will come at a much higher velocity the solar wind. The protons just from our sun come at about four hundred and fifty kilometers per second, which seems pretty fast, but from a supernova these things will come at like ten thousand kilometers per second. But again, we don't have anything really to worry about because beal juice is far enough away that the flux will not be very high, and our magnetic field should be strong enough to protect us. Remember, charged particles get bent by magnetic fields, and so we have this force field that prevents charged particles from sort of raining down on us.
So we don't have to worry about it, but it is. It would be sort of interesting, right, because I think you were telling me that Beetlejuice, if it goes supernova, which you don't actually will when it go now tomorrow six and fifty years, when it goes supernova, it would be kind of like the closest supernova to Earth ever.
Yeah, it would be the closest one ever to Earth. And you know, there have been supernova in the past, and there may have been ones closer to Earth in the past, but if so, they could have like sterilized all life on Earth, and so we're on the watch out for nearby supernovas. This one would be the closest one to Earth, which would be sort of spectacular from the point of view of astrophysics, but not close enough to fry us.
Would we see it in the nice sky? Were like, would it look cool? Would you see an explosion or would you just see the star get brighter from our point of view.
You might see with a telescope from interesting features because Beetlejuice is not only one of the brightest stars in the sky, it's one of the biggest, and so it sort of takes it the largest area in the sky of any star in the night sky. When a star goes supernova, makes this ring and explodes out, it's like not just like a Michael Bay move. It's beautiful, right, and so you might be able to see that with a telescope in your backyard. Plus it would be really bright. It would be as bright as the full moon.
So that should be pretty cool. And it could happen at any moment, or maybe we would see it. We could see it at any moment. But technically if it happened, it would already have happened, right, because it's so far away.
Yeah, this thing is six hundred and fifty light years away, and so anything we're seeing today happened six hundred and fifty years ago. So we can blame it on whoever was live on that back then, whatever they did to trigger it. And so we're looking into the past for sure, But it could happen at anytime, right. We don't really understand how these stars work. I think most astronomers think it's more likely to happen in one hundred thousand years than tomorrow. But you know, astronomers also weren't expecting beetlejuice to dim this much. So it's not like they really understand the insides of the star that well.
All right, so it sounds like our mystery why Beetlejuice is going dimmer is tbd to be determined. I mean, we don't really have a good explanation for it. But it's happening, and it's happening right now. It's going dimmer.
Yeah, it's probably not a signal that aliens are coming. It's unlikely that it's going to go supernova tomorrow or next week or next year, but it's very likely that we're going to learn some interesting astrophysics. We're going to learn about how these enormous cosmic furnaces blow and how they burn and how they change. And so astronomers will keep watching it and see is it going to keep getting dimmer? Is it going to go brighter again? It's like everybody wants to know the answer to this question the end of this story, and every day, every week they keep watching it just to see, like, what's it going to do today. It's exciting.
It's really amazing to me that something like a sun a star, I mean, it's so bright, but we don't really know what's going on inside of it. Or you know all the mechanisms inside and what makes it burn or dim like this.
Yeah, well, it's amazing to me that you would think we could understand it. I mean, it's like ten to the fifty eight protons. I can hardly understand what happens when two protons interact with each other. It's incredible to me that plasma physicists and astrophysicists can do the magneto hydrodynamics to understand a system like that. It's crazy to me. It's impressive. I'm in all of those folks.
Yeah, pretty good for some couch potatoes.
Huh, pretty good for some couch potatoes. Turns out, sit on your couch and think about the universe. You can learn some.
Things, yeah, and be very comfortable at the same time.
And they probably have the best snacks astronomers, really good snacks. They stay up late all the.
Time, drink lattes made out of coffee beans. Alien milk, give me like the green milk in the Star Wars movie.
I don't know what you're talking about, but every milk that's not cow milk tastes like alien milk to me. My wife likes this macadamia nut milk, oh I can't even.
All right, well, lactic products discussions aside la galactic galactic and galactic discussion side. It's all coming together, the milky way, the milk in your coffee. It's all part of the part of the same crazy universe, that's right, and the same crazy podcast.
So keep watching the skies and we'll keep learning about the universe.
Thanks for joining us, See you next time.
Before you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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