Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseListener Questions 11: Deep questions about gravity and particles.
Can gravity waves kill you? Why do we have particles? Can fission power a star?
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Hey Daniel, how's our email inbox looking these days?
Oh man? Like usual, it is jammed full. We have a big pilot question.
Really, people still have questions.
You thought maybe we'd like answered all the questions in the universe.
Well, we have done about two hundred episodes and ten listener question episode. I figured, you know, eventually people might be as satisfied and know all the answers to the universe.
I think that the more we answer people's questions, the more questions they have.
Oh man, science is like that, isn't it, always teasing you with an answer and then dropping more questions.
And thank goodness, otherwise we would run out of episodes.
And then we wouldn't be here. Hi Am Horehan, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm a professional email question answer.
Oh wow, really you get paid for that.
I just feel like a professional when I'm doing it.
I feel like that's what I have to do to get paid, which I don't do very well, which probably explains a lot.
No.
But sometimes people write into the podcast and I think this might be the only time this person has asked the question to a physicist and gotten an answer. So I feel a little bit like I'm representing physics in some ways.
Oh wow, you're the ambassador of the physics need.
A little bit. Yeah, So I feel some responsibility to be polite and funny and insightful and all that stuff.
You know.
It's like that first day of class in college. Sometimes I get to teach freshman eight am on the first Monday, and I feel like, wow, I am college for them. So there's a bit of pressure there.
Yeah, and if someone walks out, you're like, well, I guess I failed physics.
Nobody walks out on my emails.
Fortunately, But anyways, welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we tackle all the questions in the universe, all the things that science wants to know and all the things that everybody wants to know. How did the universe begin, what is it made out of? How is it going to end? Why are we all here? And should you eat your bananas when they're black or green?
That's right, it's a very important physics question. What can kill me out there, Daniel? And how and when?
Basically everything can kill you out there if you're creative about it.
Love love can't kill you, Daniel.
Have you seen Titanic?
Oh Man left and kill Lenardo de Capu But exactly Anyways, Yeah, it's our podcast where we talk about the universe and all the amazing things in it, and we also talk about the questions that not only scientists and physicists have at the cutting edge of knowledge and research, but also the questions that everyday people have about how things work and why things are the way they are.
That's right, because questions belong to everybody, and asking questions is part of being human. It's impossible to be a conscious being in this world and out look around you and wonder why things are the way they are, why they aren't different, and what it means about the way the universe works. And scientists aren't just like that. They're just people who've answered more of their questions so far, and they're on to the most interesting, cutting edge questions. And so our goal today is to bring you up to speed, to introduce you to the forefront of knowledge, and tell you all about the questions that scientists are asking. And it turns out the scientists are asking a lot of the same questions that you are.
It's right where you're trying to tell me not to look to scientists for answers, Daniel, or just look to them more questions.
I'm trying to tell you that we're all scientists, we're all asking these deep questions about the universe, and we'd all like to know the answer.
Great, So to me. On the program, we'll be doing another one of our famous listener question episodes where we answer questions from listeners, So to be. On the podcast, we'll be tackling listener questions number eleven.
Eleven Level.
No.
We've answered a lot of these and we have a big pile left. So if you've submitted your question and haven't gotten an answer yet, stay tuned. We're getting to them. We love these listener Questions episodes.
And I always love these episodes because people send in the most interesting questions.
These are the really fun ones. People writing questions all the time be email and sometimes I'll fire off a quick answer, but if it's a really good, juicy question that I think a lot of people would like to hear the answer to, or frankly I need a little bit of time to research, then we'll do it on the podcast.
Cool. So today we have three pretty cool questions from listeners from all over the world, and they have to do with gravitational ways, use about the nature of matter and whether or not you can have a different kind of star than the ones that we are used to. So let's jump right into it, Daniel, let's start. But this first question from Henrik Sumberg from Sweden, who asks.
Cand a gravitational wave kill you or what will you feel when you're closed wave like the one that was found by Lego.
Wow, what an awesome question and a little terrifying, you know, having even thought about gravitating with dying from gravitational waves, which I just assume we're rolling through us, but apparently they can kill us? Can they kill us? I? Guess that's a question.
Well, it is a great question. You know, these things are ripples in space itself, and it's cool that we build observatories that can spot them. But the ones that we've seen so far are really far away. So it's a totally valid question to ask what would happen if you got close to it?
I guess it's kind of like asking, like, kind of an ocean wave kill you? Right?
I suppose. I mean ocean waves certainly can kill you. I think it's more like asking, you know, can the sun kill you? And the answer is basically the same as from a great distance, the sun will just make it nice and toasty, but if you get too close to almost anything, I'll shuld.
Well, let's maybe recap for people who don't know. So gravitational wave is like a wave with like a ripple in space time itself.
That's right. And the idea is that gravitational information doesn't move instantly, like if the Sun disappeared, we would still feel its gravity for the eight minutes it took for that information to get to us, because gravitational fields ripple, Right, you delete something from the universe, then the information propagates out the field itself ripples.
Right, it's not instantaneous because nothing since instantaneous in the.
Universe exactly, nothing is instantaneous. No information can move faster than the speed of light. And so gravitational waves are when you have really strong, very powerful objects that are accelerating around each other, so they're making waves in space itself. Remember, gravity is just the bending of space. You put the Sun in the center of the Solar System, it bends the space around it so that the Earth's most natural path is one to move in a circle around the Sun. And so when you move masses around, when you accelerate them back and forth around each other, it makes these waves in space. And that's what gravitational waves are. They're like the contracting or the pulling on space itself. It's really kind of bonkers.
It's like the changes in the gravitational field. Kind of Yeah, you can think about it two different ways. If you like to think of space as flat and having gravitational fields in it, then you can think of it as the rippling of those gravitational fields in space. But if you like to think about it like Einstein did, then you know there is no gravity. There's just sort of changes in the shape of space, and from that perspective, gravitational waves are ripples in the shape of space, like things get closer and then further apart, and closer and further apart. That's what happens when a gravitational wave passes you by, and I guess that we're like a wash in gravitational waves. Like if I move my arm around in a circle, I'm creating gravitational waves, but they're just so small that nobody can notice that.
That's right, Just like there's gravity between you and your arm and you in that box in front of you, and you and that banana, you just can't feel it because gravity is just so weak. Anytime an object with mass moves and accelerates, it generates a gravitational wave. But because gravity is so weak, you usually just can't sense it. We can only sense gravitational waves from really really big things, really massive things, precisely because gravity is so weak.
Right, It's almost kind of like we're all swimming in like a thick goog or something like if space was a goo and we're all swimming in it. You know, any motion that I make, or any motion that any planet makes, will sort of generate a little ripple in that goog.
Yeah, precisely, and we are listening for those ripples, and we've been listening for them for a few decades, and recently, just a few years ago, they actually detected these ripples. As an incredible story because people had thought these ripples existed for a long long time, but they thought it might be impossible to detect them because they are so small, because they are so faint, because gravity is so weirdly weak, and they had to build a really powerful device it's called a laser interferometer with two long arms on it that measures the length of these like kilometer long arms to see if they shrink a tiny bit like the width of a proton. So it's a really really difficult measurement to make because these gravitational waves are very very subtle.
Right because you know, like if I shake my fist, I'm generating waves. But there's probably no way that anything that we have could possibly measure the right. Probably you need like these giant machines just to measure that the big ones coming from space.
That's right. But you know, I thought for a long time, even the big ones coming from space would be impossible. When I was a grad student thinking about what field of physics to work in. I considered going to Countech and working on the gravitational wave system. But I remember thinking, these guys are never going to spot that man. They're gonna be working forever and never see it. And hey, I was wrong, and I'm glad to have been proven wrong. They found something amazing about the universe and won themselves a Nobel Prize along. So what you think is impossible today might be totally routine in twenty years. You never missed out on that wave I did it, didn't get to surf all the way to Sweden.
You didn't catch the wave. Yeah, and we could have made a caltag. Isn't that weird?
Yeah, let's true.
Imagine an alternate reality where you did go work in Lego and then we somehow met there.
Yeah, but then we would have met in person and probably wouldn't have gone along, probably wouldn't have started working together anyway. So there are gravitational waves all around you, but only really massive objects create gravitational waves that we can detect.
Right, And that's what we measure with Lago. We measure waves that are coming from space from really crazy events and so I guess Henrik's question is can one of these waves kill you? Like, if you're standing there and a big wave comes through you, is it going to affect you or could you even feel it? Because you know, if it's bending and stretching space, wouldn't all my particles still sort of stay together?
Yeah, in principle, these things do have an effect on you also, right, you do get bent and stretched when gravitational waves go through you. The ones that hit Earth, they affect things that are a kilometer long by about the size of a proton, So the effect on you is totally ngible. You can't feel them. But these are black holes that are like one point three billion light years away, and one of the reasons why they're so faint is because the black holes are so far away. So it's reasonable to ask, like, if it was closer, if there was black holes colliding nearby, making big gravitational waves closer, what would be the effect on your body? And it's certainly true that it would pull and push you as well.
Wow, Yeah, because I guess like if you're really far away from an explosion or something, then you don't feel the effects very much, because like you might feel a little bit of the wind or the air kind of hitting on you, but you wouldn't necessarily be heard. But like what if do you're right next to the explosion. That would be bad news.
Absolutely, it would be bad news. And the closer you get to these things, the more powerful they are. The thing is, though, gravitational waves never really that powerful. Like take one of these events, these black holes that are one point three billion light years away. The wave is really really weak over here. It's one part in ten to the twenty one. So that means that if something is like ten to the twenty one meters long, then it shrinks by one meter. Now ten to the twenty one meters is ridoculously big, right, which is why these things are so hard to see. So bring yourself closer, right, say you get, for example, just one light year away from these black holes.
Right, and just to paint a picture, logo, measures like spinning black holes, like black holes that are collapsing into each other, and so there's like the death sworld of two black holes.
Yeah, because to make gravitational waves, you can't just have static mass. That doesn't make a wave. You need stuff that's accelerating. And so these black holes that are swirling around each other, attracting each other, spinning in to their eventual collision. There are great opportunities to see gravitational waves because there's huge amounts of mass and there's a lot of acceleration because they're spinning around each other.
So now we're talking about being one point three light years from two black holes gliding, and you're saying this is where it starts to get dangerous.
Well, it doesn't actually get dangerous from the gravitational wave point of view, because the power of that is like still one part in ten to the twelve, you know, So like if you brought the whole earth within a light year of these black holes, then the whole earth would shrink by like a hundredth of a millimeter, and one part in ten to the twelve is very.
Small the whole earth. So would that affect me? Like, it doesn't sound like it would, but I don't know, Like maybe we'll scramble all of my atoms or something.
No, One, one hundred of a millimeters full of the whole earth is unmeasurably small just for you, right, so you wouldn't even notice it and be very difficult for you to notice.
It could break up molecules or something at that level. No molecules, you know, because if you're stretching molecules, molecules are pretty small.
Molecules are pretty small, but they're pretty tough. You know. They're basically held together by these little bonds which are like springs. And so it's like if somebody came and tugged on you with the force, you know, enough to pull you by one hundredth of a millimeter, you would pretty much survive that.
Wow.
Right, It's like it's a very gentle tug on the entire Earth, right, so even just on you, it would be almost imperceptible.
M all right, So it's still pretty safe with a light year. What if I get closer.
Yes, if you get within like you know, ten thousand kilometers of the center of this black hole, then we're talking about gravitational waves that are now serious. They're like one part in a thousand.
Like I would shrink and contract by you know, a couple of millimeters, a.
Couple of millimeters. Yeah, and so again I think you would survive that. Like really, you shrink and contract more than that every day just walking around. Your height changes more than a millimeter because of the compression on your spine from walking around. I don't know. Maybe you never get up from your chair so you don't shrink as much as other people.
But somethings I lay down on my chair, there's some stretching going on.
Well, that's good for your back and for your height. But you know, your height change is by a lot more than that just during the day, so I don't think I would have any effect on your health.
I see, we're pretty squishy.
Again, we're pretty squishy, but you know safe example, you're in a spacesuit, having your spacesuit get pulled by one part in one thousand, you know that could like crack the glass or break something important. Or if you're in a space ship, you know maybe the electronics are sensitive. So I wouldn't recommend.
What about my bones? Could my bones taken.
Yeah, your bones could take it, for sure. I mean one part in a thousand is not very much your bones, even though they feel pretty tough, there's some spring to them.
You're telling really close. Ten thousand kilometers from the center of a black hole is like you're like right there.
It's very close, and you're not even going to survive getting that close, like you're going to be torn apart by the gravitational forces that exist just from the black holes, well before the gravitational waves do anything to you. Really, yeah, because remember near a black hole, the gravitational force is just the static ones, not the changing ones, not the ripples in the gravitational field, just the field itself is really really strong. And the closer you are to the black hole, the stronger the forces. So if your toes are closer than your head and there's a stronger force on your toes than there is on your head, which is the same thing as the black hole pulling you apart. So if those forces that's called tidal forces, the force on your head and your toes is very different, then you get yanked apart. And you don't have to be very close to a black hole before those forces start to be larger than your body can take.
Wow. So most likely the waves won't kill you, it'll be something else.
That's right. The shredded pieces of your body that survive that close to the black hole will not be damaged very much by the gravitational wave. You'll already be torn apart, all.
Right, So then I guess the answer for Henrich is is no, like a gravitational wave can't really kill you. Because if that's right, if there's anything causing a gravitational wave that big, then it's probably gonna kill you in some other way.
That's right exactly, So if gravitational waves get big enough to do any damage, you're probably already dead.
All right, Phew, Well I feel a lot better. I was getting kind of concerned there. I was like, it's something else I have to worry about.
No, just avoid black holes is good general advice.
Stay at least ten thousand kilometers from them, if not more.
Somebody should put up signs or something.
Caution universe singularity ahead. All right, well, Henry, I hope that answered your question, and I hope you can sleep a little better at night knowing that gravitational waves can't really kill you.
Maybe those gravitational waves will begin rocking him to sleep.
We'll sleep to the sound of the universe. All right. Well, let's get into some of these other questions about the nature of matter and alternate stars. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're back answering questions from listeners. Which are the best questions? And I have to say, Daniel, these questions we got today are pretty intense. I feel like usually people ask sort of like funny situations or you know, more basic things, but these are like intense, like can a gravitation wave kill you? And making me question the nature of matter?
Well, we are living in strange times, and everybody's at home thinking deep thoughts. I guess.
All right, Well, the next question we have for today comes from one Ignacio Vadagas. And he didn't say where he's from, so we're just going to assume Jupiter. Maybe he emailed his you know, fourteen years ago and he only just got the email. All right, Well, here's what Juan wanted to know.
I was just wondering whether we have any idea as to why there is mutter, what causes energy to be sequestered in what do we call particles?
Well, that is deep stuff.
That is deep, Like why are we here? He's basically asking.
Yeah, there's a lot of possible angles to this question. I really wish I could chat with one and figure out, like what is he asking? Is he asking like why do we have matter not just radiation? Or why is there matter not anti matter? Or why is there something rather than nothing? Or why is energy sort of clumped together into particles? Or there's a lot of really fun angles on it.
You want to ask him questions about his question.
I want to make sure we're answering the like deep deep curiosity that's wormed its way into his brain. I want to make sure that we are We're going to touch on the question he really wants answered.
Well, it sounds like a pretty interesting question. I guess he's asking. We have the universe and we know about energy, but why do we have matter? Like why does matter exist in the universe? Like why did energy suddenly decide to, you know, form into little particles of matter?
Yeah, that is a great question, and you know, the short answer is, we really just don't know. But how much we don't know sort of depends on what you think is the most basic element of the universe.
Bananas.
No, Like we have talked on this podcast before that sort of historically we discovered that things are made out of particles. You know, that all the stuff around you can be broken up into smaller pieces, and those pieces can be broken up into smaller pieces, and those can be broken up into even smaller pieces, and it gives you the sense sort of that like particles are the basic unit of the universe, that everything is made out of particles, right, And the way particles interact is through these things called fields. So that's sort of historically the way our understanding the universe was developed. But more recently we have sort of a new view on what the basic element of the universe is, and that suggests that particles are not really the building block of the universe of matter itself, but that the deepest thing are actually the field.
Oh wait, aren't they the same thing? Like, isn't a particle like what they call an excitation of that field or like a blip in the fields?
Yeah? Well, this new view says exactly that that particles are just a weird state of a field, But that says that the fields are the deepest thing. You know, that particles aren't the fundamental building blocks. They're just like a configuration of the fields. It's like, you know what's more fundamental, your hand or a fist. Your fist is just your arrangement of your fingers in a certain.
Way, right, Or like what's more fundamental a wave or the ocean?
Yeah, precisely, And so the fields are the ocean, and the particles are the waves in that ocean. And so more modern view is that everything in the universe is filled with fields. We have an electromagnetic field, and the waves in that field are photons. We even have an electron field. It's different from the electromagnetic field. Waves in the electron field are electrons. And then every particle that we're familiar with has a field, and those particles are just wiggles in those fields.
Yeah, like little ripples, like a little echo or a little blip.
Yeah, like a little packet. And then it's a really interesting and fun question to ask, like, well, why do those fields have packets?
Right?
Why don't those fields just sort of slosh around and have energy everywhere. Yeah, I think this is sort of what he was asking, Like, why is energy clustered together into these little blip called part of it?
Where did those blips come from?
Yeah? And why do we have blips and not just you know, blushes or squishes or squashes.
Or whatever you call, because then we wouldn't be here to answer it's a question.
Yeah, And so you know, the first, the deepest answer is we really just don't know. But we have sort of two suggestions, maybe sort of directions of thought where people sort of you know, groping in the dark towards ideas. And one is that these fields are not just fields, they're quantum fields. These fields can't just have any particular value. They seem to have certain discrete set of states that they can take. You know, they can go up one unit of energy or two of energy, but not one point three seven nine.
Oh, I see, they like they're kind of fussy. You can move this field in like half of up wave.
Yeah, exactly. And we associate these quantum units with particles, like when the field gets one more unit of energy that that field can absorb, we consider that one more particle, and in quantum mechanics we actually do the math becall these things, counting operators, we like create new particles, destroy particles. That's how you put energy into the field. So one way to think about it is that that a particle is just like a quantized unit of energy in the field.
I guess maybe is it kind of like if you throw a whole bunch of water into the air, Like water tends to you know, kind of clump into droplets, you know, it doesn't just kind of spread out when you throw it up into the air.
Yeah, it certainly does. I'm not sure if that's because it's quantized or there's surface tension, or if surface extension leads to quantization. That's actually really cool thought. It probably is a connection there.
But that's kind of the idea is that it tends to cluster, or it tends to like clump in ear little.
Bit, tends to clump into little bits. And the second idea, which is connected, is that we've noticed that there are some symmetries to these fields, Like these fields don't just do anything, you know, they have rules that they follow, Like the field follows the same rules over here as they do in another part of the universe, or if you spin yourself in the field, it follows the same rules as if you hadn't spun yourself. So there are these symmetries translational and rotational symmetries to the fields themselves. Right, And this is going to sound like a really weak and fuzzy argument, but essentially a particle is the simplest thing that can exist in those fields that satisfies those symmetries.
Mmm, Like that's how you explain why it forms into particles.
Well, there's this feeling in quantum mechanics that sort of everything that can happen does happen. So if it's not explicitly forbidden by some rule, then you will see it happen eventually. And so particles are sort of like the simplest thing that can exist that isn't ruled out by some basic symmetry or conservation rule or whatever. So therefore they do exist. Now that's a pretty weak argument because there's lots of times that we expected something to exist, like a new particle or whatever, we don't see it exist, and so we say, well, therefore there must be some new rule that eliminates it. We just add that rule to the list. So you know, it's not like a lot of these rules have deep understanding them. Some of them do. Some of them come out of like really beautiful symmetries of nature, et cetera, but some of them seem a little ad hoc. So it's a totally valid open question sort of at the edge of physics and philosophy, like why do these particles exist? Why do we have any particles at all? Why do the conservation laws allow for these particles? Why not something else bigger and squishier.
Maybe a way to interpret this question is like, could you have a universe without particles? Could the universe just kind of could there be a version of this universe where no particles ever formed and everything is just kind of like the fields are just totally un blip, where the fields are just sitting.
You know, there are some other configurations of fields, but you know, those universes would not lead to people asking questions about those particles and those podcasts. So it's possible that those universes could exist, but they wouldn't be as interesting or as rich, and so they wouldn't be in them asking this question. So there's sort of this selection effect that we only tend to ask these questions in universes where there are interesting things happening. But we already we have ideas for like other ways you could arrange quantum fields that are not particles, these things called like squirre meyons that are not the same kind of clusters of energy in the quantum fields, but in fact are these like weird not these other stable configurations of quantum fields that are not quite particles. They don't act the same way interesting.
I guess maybe the answer you tell me is that you know quantum physics, it's all kind of like statistical, and so if a field can kind of form into a particle, it probably will.
It probably will.
Yeah, particles will just spontaneously occur, and probably especially if you have like energy, right, if if there's energy around, those particles are gonna pop up. And that's where we come from.
And I would say that like probably half of the theorists out there, the people who think really deeply about quantum theory, think in that way. They think the fields are the basic thing and the particles are like manifestations of those fields. But you know, the other half the community thinks about it the other way. They think, no, no, no, the basic thing in the universe are particles and fields. Those are just you know, virtual particles, So those are just how particles talk to each other. They think of the fields as you know, just like a huge swarm of very briefly living particles, because the particles are the things we interact with, right, The fields are a little bit more abstract. The particles are the things that we like, we can see, we can detect, we're made of them. So there's a bunch of people out there that think that particles are the basic element of the universe and not the fields.
Like if you didn't have particles, you wouldn't have fields.
Yeah, yeah, precisely. And if you ask those people are like, well why are their particles? Well, you know, they have no idea because they just start from the.
Particles just because that's the answer.
Just because it's like asking the other half, like, well, why are their fields? You're telling me particles are made of fields? Great, why are their fields? Well, we don't know, you know, that's that's down to, like why is there anything we just this is as deep as we've gotten so far. We don't know what the next layer of knowledge or ignorance is so we're struggling to understand what it means. But you know, this is why we do it. We look for the patterns. We try to identify the weirdness in those patterns, and those lead to these questions which eventually, we hope in fifty one hundred, two hundred years, will lead to really deep insights about like why the universe exists at all.
It's like the classic chicken fields and egg particles. Probably you know which came first, which is more fundamental and or tasting?
Obviously the egg came first. I never understood that one. The egg led to the chicken.
What do you mean, who laid egg?
The pre chicken? Mom of the egg mutated pre chicken.
It's a pre chicken, a chicken, Daniel.
Well, if it annihilates with an anti chicken, then and that's why this is not a biology podcast, right.
Well, it sounds like the answer for one here is why not or stay tuned. Like he's asking pretty basic questions of like why are things things?
Yeah, we just don't know one and we're trying to figure it out. And these are the deepest, funnest questions to think about, So don't give up we'll figure it out.
All right. Well, I guess one won't be sleeping better at night after that one. But we have one more question, and this one's about alternate stars, which I thought was pretty cool, and so let's get into it. But first, let's take a quick break.
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Hi.
I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I mean neuroscientists at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret, When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories. I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, we're answering questions from listeners today and we've had two pretty good ones, and this last one kind of blew my mind a little bit. So somebody here has a question about whether or not as stars can be different.
I really enjoyed your recent episode on turning Jupiter into a star and how what would it be involved with that. I was wondering, since you were talking primarily about fusion based stars, what would happen if you had a fission based star?
Do they exist? Are they theoretically possible?
What would they look like?
All right? A pretty interesting question. I guess he's asking whether you can have a star that works based on fission and not fusion?
Yeah?
Or is he asking whether stars can be fizzy?
What would it taste like to sip a star? How long a straw would you need to safely sip a star?
It might be a little hot, better blow on it first.
Is there you some gravitational waves to cool it off?
Yeah? There you go? All right, But I guess the question is could you have a fission st And so maybe let's recap what are fusion powered stars?
So the reason that the sun is a star, the reason glows, the reason that it's giving off energy is that it's doing something that releases energy, and that's fusion. And fusion is taking lighter elements like hydrogen or helium, things that have just like a couple of protons and sticking them together, and when they stick together, a lot of energy is released. So that's called fusion. You join things together, and anything on the periodic table that's like lighter than iron because of the way the protons and neutrons are stuck together and the vagaries of the strong force. When you join them together, you release energy, so it gives off energy. You can essentially combine this stuff, make bigger, heavier elements and make your star glow. And that's what powers all of the stars in the universe, right.
And that's always been a little bit confusing that the idea that by joining things together it releases energy.
Yeah, joining things together releases energy. It takes energy to pull them apart. Think about it like that.
Mmmm, I see. So Like it's kind of like when you bring to magnets cloth together, they snap together and they make a sound.
Yeah.
That sound is almost kind of like the energy released in the center of a star.
Yeah. And it's all about the configuration of these protons and neutrons together. And it's a bit counterintuitive because it's all the same particles. Right, there's just protons and neutrons, and either they're attracting or they're repelling. And remember that all the protons they're repelling each other. The whole reason the nucleus holds together is because of the strong force. The strong force sends these gluons back and forth between the neutrons and the protons and really ties the things together. The fact that the protons are positively charged and pushing away from each other is really not even relevant anymore because the strong force is so powerful. And it's also really hard to do calculations, like it's not a simple thing to figure out what some arrangement of protons and neutrons will feel like. But we do know that for elements lighter than iron, when you stick them together, you get energy, and that's fusion, right.
So that's most stars that we know at least are star works on fusion. It's fusing hydrogen and helium. It's joining things to create that energy to power the star.
And also to make the heavier elements. Right, Fusion needs light elements. You need stuff that's lighter than iron, and in the Big Bang we got mostly hydrogen, the tiny little bit of helium and lithium, et cetera. But most of the heavier stuff in the universe was made by fusion. That's how you do it, right.
All of our atoms in our bodies, we were all made at the center of stars.
That's right. All the uranium and all the iron and all the heavy stuff in the universe was made in these stars. That's how you do it. So all the stars that are out there, they're fusing and making this stuff.
There, making particles. But where does the particles come from, Daniel.
They come from the banana universe. They slipped in through a wormhole.
Take you go, all right, So that's one way to make energy fusion, fusing things together. But you can also make energy by splitting atoms apart. That's called fission.
That's right. If you have stuff that's really heavy, heavier than iron, then you get energy by doing the opposite, by breaking stuff apart. Like uranium is really heavy, much heavier than iron, has more protons in the nucleus, right, and when it splits open, it releases energy. So it's the opposite. Above iron, you get energy, when you split Below iron, you get energy when you fuse.
Right, there's like energy stored in that. It was somehow these elements came together and they're storing energy. They have energy inside of them, stored in their bonds, and then when you break them apart, that energy flies off.
Yeah, if you like mechanical analogies. You can think of it like they're tied together and the springs are compressed, and when you cut the string, they fly apart and all that energy is then released. So you're releasing all that energy. And so this is another way to generate energy, and we do this in nuclear power plants. You find heavy uranium in the crust of the earth and you let it decay and you gather that energy.
That's fission, right, m that's what all of our nuclear reactors use. It is fission, that's right.
We have not been able to make fusion work on Earth in a sustainable way. A few brief spits and spats of it here and there. We don't have like a fusion reactor yet. I mean, people will work. It's an awesome proadject.
And if we could, we would be said in terms of energy.
Right, absolutely, yeah, because fusion doesn't create dangerous byproducts. You know, it works with very light elements and creates very light elements, and it's much more efficient. The fuel source for it would basically be hydrogen, which we can get a lot of in the ocean. So fusion would be pretty awesome, right.
You don't need uranium or any of these radioactive elements. That's right, all right, So then the question is can you have a star that works using fission? Like could you have a star where things at its center are being broken apart instead of fuse together.
Yeah, And it's a great question, and it's exactly the kind of question of physicists would ask, you know, like, well, if you can do it this way, can you do it the other way? You know, you have two ways to make energy. Could you use either of them to power a star? It's a really great question. But the first part of his question was like do they exist? Like, are they stars out there that are fissioning and that's why they are burning?
Right? So do they exist? Are there stars that work from using fission?
We do not think so. We think that every single star out there in the night sky is fusing. And the reason it's pretty simple is that the universe is almost all hydrogen. In the Big Bang, the universe was made, and it was almost all hydrogen after a few hundred thousand years, and a little bit of helium was made during the Big Bang, but basically it's all hydrogen, and so that's the only fuel that's out there. You got a universe filled with fuel for fusion and very very tiny amounts of the fuel you would need for fission, right, and the only way to make them is through those other.
Stars, not even like the dimmer stars like the red dwarfs or something.
Even the brown dwarfs like those are fusing. Yeah, those are fusing special kinds of fusion. Sometimes you have deuterium in there or tritium or whatever, but it's all fusion. And that's just because the fuel in the universe is the fuel you need for fusion, not for fission. I mean, if we had a different universe where the Big Bang mostly made uranium and plutonium, then yeah, you might have like fission based objects out there, but those heavy elements are very very rare. In fact, like we're sitting on top of a pretty rare clump of stuff. You know, the Earth is mostly iron and nickel and really heavy stuff that's pretty rare in the universe, like by mass.
Yeah, and that's what's kind of keeping the Earth hot at its center.
Yeah, part of it is gravitational pressure, but another big part of it is the fact that we have radioactive heavy stuff in the center of the Earth that's decaying and it's emitting energy, and so in some sense you can sort of think of the Earth as like kind of a fission powered star because it's a really dense blob of stuff that's being kept molten by the energy from fission.
Wow. Yeah, Earth is pretty heavy metal.
Yeah, if you'd like to think about it, you can imagine that we're sort of living in the atmosphere of a fission powered star.
Yeah, cools. But the Earth is not called a star, I guess. Yeah, it has kind of a fission engine and it's core inside, but you wouldn't call it a star.
You wouldn't call it a star because it's not glowing, right. The Earth doesn't give off light, and I think to be called a star even like in the red well, the Earth does glow in the infrared, like everything does. You're right, everything in the universe glows at some temperature, but it doesn't glow in the visible. It doesn't glow in the in the X ray, And so I think to be a star you really need to be like glowing and burning consuming the fuel. We don't sparkle. We don't sparkle exactly. You can imagine trying to do that, like you know, play sort of a play god and say, all right, I'm gonna take a huge amount of fission fuel like uranium, make it into a gas and just like drop it somewhere in deep space and think about, like what would happen? Then?
I think that's what Mike is asking. Is it theoretically possible to have a star that works from fission? So this is what you are experimenting with here, Like, like, how would you even make one if it's possible at all?
If you could get enough uranium we're talking about, like an enormous amount of uranium, make it into a gas and drop it in space, Well, gravity would do its thing, just like it did for the formation of the Sun. It would gather all that stuff together, pull all those uranium and nuclei, all those atoms together, eventually get them close enough so that when they decay, they knock into each other and create chain reactions, and you would get real fission. You would get you know, in effect burning, and would be powering this thing through.
Fission, because I guess that's how nuclear bombs work, right, Like, if you put enough unstable uranium together, at some point, it's going to cause a chain reaction which will explode.
Yeah, and that's how the Sun works, just with fusion. That it's the energy from fusion is providing the energy needed to create fusion. That's called ignition, right, And so if the release of energy then enables the next release of energy, then you have something which is self sustaining.
And oh really, you know our sun, I thought like what causes things to fuse was the gravitational pressure, But it's also you mean, like the the energy pressure from the other explosion.
It's a balance, right. The reason the Sun is not exploding is because of gravity, and the reason it's not collapsing is because of the energy pressure. And so in our theoretical uranium star, something similar would happen eventually, Like gravity would pull the stuff together, which would increase the rate at which stuff is decaying because you know, the decay products are not bouncing into each other more often. But eventually the energy being released from fission would balance out the gravity. You get some like interesting you know balance there. And I don't think it would be as dense as our sun. Fission is not as powerful as fusion. It doesn't releases much energy. I'm not sure exactly what it would look like, but theoretically, that kind of thing is possible.
You just have to get enough uranium and compress it.
Yeah.
The recipe is, get a galaxy is worth a uranium the galaxies uh huh isolated in space and then wait a few million years.
And the gravity will bring it together and then it'll ignite.
Yeah. And I'm not sure exactly what it would look like, like how dense it would get, and whether it would be hot enough to get the surface to be like a glowing plasma, or whether like other things would take over before you even got there. But I think theoretically, you know, it might be possible.
Wouldn't it be unstable like a nuclear bond, Like would the chain reaction would run away and it would just explode.
Right, But you have that pressure would keep blowing it out, which would lower the density. The same thing happens in the sun.
Right.
It's sort of like self regulates because the hotter it gets, the more it's pushing out, the less dense it gets, and that lowers the rate of the reaction.
Oh all right, So it sounds like the answer for Mike is that, yes, fission stars are possible, but not likely to exist because they are pretty difficult to make.
Work, that's right, because the fuel just isn't out there, we think, and we're also not exactly sure what they would look like, and take a pretty sophisticated simulation to get like a realistic answer for what that star would look like. But theoretically the process is very similar to fusion, so you just need the right fuel and the right conditions.
And in the meantime we are sort of kind of sitting in a fission star, right, which is the Earth?
That's right. Fission is warming your feet, all right?
Cool? I think Mike can sleep well at night.
Have you been having trouble sleeping?
Orge?
I feel like all these questions and I related to like your mental wellbeing.
I'm just getting a lot of empathy for these curious people.
Well, curiosity does keep me up at night, but what lets me go to sleep is knowing that we just need to think about it and work on it, and eventually we will get these answers. The history of science is filled with people wondering about basic stuff that one hundred or two hundred years later even school children know the answer to. So eventually our deepest fundamental questions will be you know, like in story books in the year three thousand and be talked to preschools.
All right, Well, thank you to Henry Kwan and Michael for sending in their questions, and thanks to everyone who's sent their questions. And it's always kind of amazing and cool to think about all those people out there thinking about the universe and coming up with their questions and even more exciting stumping Daniel.
So thank you everybody for trusting us with your questions, for taking the time to write in and giving us feedback on the show and letting us know what you'd like to know more about. We want to hear from you, so please write to us at questions at Dannilhorge dot com.
Yeah, and thanks to everyone also who has been leaving us ratings and comments and telling all their friends about this podcast. We really appreciate it. Well, thanks for joining us, See you next time.
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. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact, but the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emission. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digesters to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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