Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge sing a scientific
song about the many reasons a star might twinkle.
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Terms apply. Hey or Hey? Do you know the song Twinkle Twinkle Little Star?
I do? Yeah? Are we taking song requests now on the podcast?
No, I'm just trying to see something. How about the alphabet song? Is that something you heard as a.
Kid, I've heard of the alphabet? Yeah, do you have me to get my guitar?
Do you also know Bab Bab Black Sheep?
That one I'm not super familiar with, but it's another kid song, right, mm hmmm?
Well did you ever realize these all have exactly the same music?
What you just blew my mind? Are they all called the same like Twinkle Twinkle, Little Alphabet black Cheap?
Yeah? They all end with three bags full of twinkling ABC's.
And a bunch of lawsuits, maybe apparently for copyright infringement. I am Hoorehemdmay, cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at U C Irvine, And like every other professor, I also play the guitar.
Is that a requirement for professors?
I don't know, but I live in a neighborhood of professors, and I feel like every single house I go into has a guitar on the wall. I don't know if they play it or if it's just like a demonstration object, but there's lots of guitars in this neighborhood.
It's like when they were visiting some foreign country. They picked up a guitar or something on a field trip or a conference.
Yeah, or maybe it's just a conversation piece.
Nobody actually plays it.
Are you supposed to play guitar? Or you just have one on your wall? Right?
To look cool, you get to ask something to look cool. I guess if you're a professor.
But you're quite an accomplished guitar player, aren't you.
I don't know if I would say accomplished. But I am in a band now.
Is there anyone else in your band?
No, I'm a one man band.
Now.
I'm in a rock band with some friends.
Oh wow, awesome.
Yeah, a bunch of middle aged men having middle aged crisis.
I've never heard of that happening before. That's amazing.
Yeah, we're called the Grateful Dads, So shout out to my band members. But I don't think they listen to this podcast. But anyways, Welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which these two dads are grateful for our ability to understand anything out there in the universe and dive deep into all of the mysteries the crazy, bonkers weirdness of our universe, the amazing quantum frothing foam, the incredible cosmic conundrums, all of the stuff that you want to know, the answers to the things that frame our existence, that tell us how we got here and where the universe is going. We explore all of these questions and more.
Yeah, because it is a pretty amazing and incredible universe, full of exciting and crazy things happening, all at the same time as a lot of sleepy things happening, a lot of interesting tunes to put you to sleep.
I was wondering what you were talking about there, sleepy things happening. It was like, as Jorgel, are we losing him? Is he falling asleep over there? I don't think Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star is supposed to put anybody to sleep, is it?
It's in it a bedtime song? Oh maybe not. Maybe I didn't grow up here, so these were odd songs that I was sung too.
I think it's more of a campfire song. You're sitting there out in nature, looking up at the stars and wondering, you know what they are. It's one of the oldest questions humans have been asking about the nature of the cosmos. What is out there? What is sending us those beams of light?
Yeah, it's pretty incredible to think that, you know, the earliest humans were looking up at the same sky we were, and we're probably asking themselves the same questions, like what is that shiny little dot there? And how far away is it exactly?
And how many quarks are inside the heart of a neutron star? I think that's a question people have been asking for thousands of years, right.
If they were pretty smart caveman, I guess weren't caveman the original particle colliders getting rocks.
Together exactly me make smaller rocks. But it's true, it's an age old question, and there's a grand cosmic scale to these questions because those photons departed those stars millions of years or billionsions of years before even cavemen evolved.
Yeah, it definitely starts have been around for billions, maybe trillions of years, way before people were looking at them, and they've been sending their light to us for all that time, and some of that light is just now getting to us right now.
And it's incredible to think about how that light actually arrives here. A tiny little photon emitted by a star billions and billions of miles away, has to fly through an incredible amount of universe, dodging all sorts of kinds of stuff just to land in your eyeball. It's an incredible journey, and frankly, it's amazing to me that any of the photons survive it.
Yeah, I mean, who knows what that photon has been through, right, Like they could have maybe gone around a black hole or barely dodged an asteroid or a comet, you know, made it through an atmosphere, dodge all those boleykules of air in our atmosphere, and just to go into your eyeball, or just.
To hit a rock and nobody even observes it. That's the thing that frustrates me is how many photons, caring tiny little clues about the universe, just go totally unobserved.
They fade away like a bold rock star.
They're like little presents that nobody unwraps. You know, each one has a clue at the kind of star that it came from, the history of that star, what was going on in that star at that moment, and then just boom, nobody gathers it. It just goes like splat on the sidewalk.
Yeah, it's pretty cool to think that every star you see, I mean, it was generated by a whole sun, right, basically a giant ball of a fusion powered fire that was shooting photons in every direction, and some of them make it out to here.
It gives you a sense for the incredible size and brightness of these stars that you can see them from so far away. Imagine if your friend in Los Angeles had a flashlight that you could see in New York, you would think, oh my gosh, that must be a crazy, crazy bright flashlight. Right. Well, these stars are so much further away, and yet you can see them with your naked eyes. It's incredible that these photons make it over this distance.
I feel like something I realized only recently was the fact that the reason why stars looked like the little pinpoint in the sky. It's not that they are pinpoints, or it's not that the sun is so far away that the sun keeps getting smaller as it goes away. It's literally just like one photoreceptor in my eyeball getting activated by one photon.
You're saying that stars are like single eye pixels in your mind.
Basically, right, Yeah, there's just well, what I think of as a star, or what I see as a star is really just one eyepixel, right, Like, it doesn't really tell me anything about its shape or size.
Yeah, it's fascinating to think about how photons spread out from that star and then sort of get more and more distant from their neighbors. And to see a star that's really far away, you only really just need one photon. And even if that photon was created with billions of other photons really near it, they all shoot out at slightly different angles, and so by the time that it arrives on Earth, it's basically alone. It's the only photon that came from that star. Of course, there are more coming behind it, but that's why the stars seem much dimmer, of course, the further away they are, because the photons are now spread out over a much larger area, and so only a single coney your eye might register a photon from that star. Yeah.
It kind of makes you wonder like if we had bigger photoreceptors in our eyeballs, you know, like if our pixels were bigger, the stars would look bigger, right, and if they were smaller, they would look like smaller pinpoints.
I suppose if they were smaller, eventually we could even resolve the size and the shape of the stars. You think, so eventually eventually, right, because there is that information there. I mean, if you have a large enough telescope for close enough stars, you can definitely resolve the size of the star.
You think, maybe like a hawk can see somehow the contours of Alpha Centauri or something, or the Sagittarius.
We shouldn't be inviting eagles to astronomy conferences for sure.
Yeah, or at least on the podcast. I have questions for them.
I want to interview the first hawks astronomer.
Now I hear they're just a bunch of hawks.
Yeah, astronomis for the birds.
But I hear they have a lot of feathers in their polishing caps. But anyways, it is interesting to look at a star in the night sky and see it twinkle, right. It kind of makes you wonder, like, why is it twinkling? Is it actually twinkling or is it does it just look like it's twinkling.
Yeah, this is a question that people have been asking for a long long time, not just what are the stars, but what is the fact that they're twinkling, tell us about them? Why do different stars seem to twinkle different amounts? And it's a question with lots of different layers of answers, because it turns out there's lots of different reasons that stars can twinkle.
Yeah, And it's a question that apparently inspired a song a long time.
Ago, three different songs.
Hmmm, have you dug into it? Which one came first? Twinkle Tinkle lit a Star or the ABC song?
Yeah. Actually turns out the song for twinkle Twinkle is derived from something composed by Mozart, which was inspired by something even earlier, and then later an American music publisher adapted the tune to fit the Alphabet song. So Twinkle Twinkle came first, and then the alphabet.
Interesting, but even twinkle Twinkle was based on something else.
All music, of course, is inspired by previous music. Right.
It's all derivative, right, right, And we're all made out of star to us, even the songs about stars.
Does your band play original music or only covers?
So far we're only covers.
Yeah, I see, you got Twinkle Twinkle, you got Bob about black Sheep, you got the Alphabet song, and a huge variety.
That's right, we cover everything from bod to pink Floyd. But anyways, this is an interesting question, and so today on the podcast, we'll be asking what makes a star twinkle? Twinkle? Right, not tinkle.
It's not that kind of podcast. We don't ask stars about their personal.
Habits, about their bodily functions. We do sort of ask a lot about how the insights of stars though, right, and the gases that are rupt from it.
That's true, And we do talk about the waste products of stars and how they can be the compost that nourishes the formation of a future solar system. They're all part of the life cycle. Yeah.
Yeah, it's all physics. And so maybe next time we should ask what makes the start tinkle?
Welcome to our spinoff podcast, Inappropriate Physics. But it's a fascinating question. I think a lot of people might have some sense of the common answer to this question, but if you dig deeper, it turns out there's lots of different fascinating physics that might make stars twinkle.
Yeah, it turns out there's not just one reason stars twinkle. There are several reasons. But the basic effect is that when you look at a star in the night sky, it sort of doesn't look like a constant dot right, or a constant dot shining. It looks sort of like it's blinking on and off a little bit.
Yeah, exactly, stars look a little bit like they blink like they're not just like a laser focused at your eyeball.
Yeah, it's almost like something is turning it on and off a little.
Bit, or something is interfering with it, something's getting between you and the star.
All right, So we'll dig into this question what makes a star twinkle? But first we were wondering how many people out there had thought about this question when they were singing the song or otherwise, And so Daniel went out there into the did you go into the internet or to the UCI campus this time?
These are answers from the internet, So thank you to everybody who participated. And if you like to put your mind to the test for future episodes and let people hear what you think about hard physical problems, please don't be shy right to us. Do questions at Danielandjorge dot com.
That's right, and you can also go visit Daniel d you see Irvine right and hope to run into him in the middle of campus.
That's right, I'm on canvas at you see Irvine, and I have office hours, so come on stop.
By to think about it for a second. Why do you think stars twinkled? Here's what people had say.
I don't think stars twinkle.
I think their photons are disrupted by temperature and pressure differentials in our atmosphere, giving us the appearance of twinkling. I imagine it's the same phenomenon that one witnesses looking over hot asphalt and seeing the horizon waggle. And I'd venture to guess that they don't twinkle when observed from the International Space Station.
Well, I guess it depends what we mean by blink. The first thing that comes to mind is if we're observing a star and something moves between us and the star, like a planet, it's going to appear to have blinked, I guess. But the star itself isn't actually doing anything. It's just something's moved in front of it, so it looks like something's happened to it. I think that might be what the blink is.
In general. I don't think stars actually blink, but I can envision dust clouds or particularly large planets moving between us and that star. Making them appear to blink or dim significantly.
It makes a star blink when the star is about to explode.
That is one reason the atmosphere makes a star blink too, right. And then a lot of stars are binary pairs actually, and some of them I think can be rotating around really quick, and that would make the star appear like it's blinking.
Well, I know, the blinking that we see from here on Earth, like the twinkling star, that's more to do with our atmosphere than the star itself. But I do know that stars all so blink over the course.
Of you know, weeks and months.
I know people just did recently. I'm not sure what the cause was, though, so if I had to guess, I would think it would be maybe gas clouds or even transiting planets.
I don't know. I think that what makes us start blink maybe some kind of interference with any object object that may cross in the path between the star and the person who observes the blinking.
I would say that what makes us star blink is the disturbances in the atmosphere, similar to what we see when looking at distant street lights. There are you know, small air currents, pockets of warm and cold air that are constantly moving that through refraction, cause distant, tiny light sources such as stars to blink when viewed, although that just might be my view as an amateur astronomer.
All right, people seem to have pretty strong opinions here. I mean a few people didn't know, but a lot of people seem to think what was going on.
Yeah, there's a strong vein here of people thinking that stars are interfered with by our atmosphere. Yeah.
A lot of people say that it's not that the stars actually blink like at the source, like the star itself. It's just that it just looks like it's blinking.
And that's a fascinating answer because it suggests that the photons are like uninterrupted for billions and billions of years, and then just like micro seconds before they hit your eyeball, that's when they get twinkled.
Yeah, that's what we tell people who come listen to our band. It's not that we sound bad. It's just that the you know, our perfect sounds somehow, guess is stored it on the way to your ear.
That's right, that's why you forced them to plug indirectly to your instruments, right, so they can hear the unadulterated intended version of your music.
That's right, Yes, the direct neural download, that's the next step.
Actually, I know somebody with hearing loss and they have a new kind of hearing aid that allows for a Bluetooth connection so that the sound doesn't have to go through the air. They can just hear the original unadulterated sound. Wow, that's really interesting. I wonder if it sounds better or different. Oh, it's much clearer. They can go to presentations, they can hear in church. Now, it's much better than just amplifying the sound through the air.
Sounds great, And that means you can also hit the mute button I imagine at church or at a professor lecture.
That's right. It probably also means that you can have them and you can like pipe in the Grateful Dads or something else.
Yeah, much better than a professor lecturer for sure, especially if you're getting it at the source. But anyways, it's some interesting ideas here. A lot of people say it's not the stars that are actually blinking, it's somehow like the atmosphere that's making them blink or somehow making them look like they're blinking. So Daniel, maybe step us through. What are some of the actual reasons why stars sprinkle?
Well, our atmosphere is the number one reason, and this is basically why we have space telescopes, because it's not very nice to look at distance stars through the atmosphere because while the air seems clear to you, it actually can make light zig and zag a little bit because it's a slightly different temperatures and slightly different densities. And that's sort of like looking through glass with impurities in it.
That's interesting. But I guess like if I look at something through a glass or like a hazy glass, it doesn't make this light source twinkle. It just makes it look dimmer.
Well, what a glass does is it bends the light, right, That's how a lens works. And so if you have glass that has like varying densities and varying temperatures in it, for example, then it will change the path of that light. And so what happens to the photons is the hit the atmosphere is not that they're like destroyed, is that they're just changed direction. And so for you to see a star, you need like a direct line of sight between you and the star. But if some photons are deflected, then you don't see them. Those photons might land to your left, or to your right or somewhere else. They still hit the earth, but they're not hitting your eye anymore. So to your eye, it looks like the star is twinkling because the stream of photons is interrupted.
Right. But I guess what I mean is that the difference between like a glass and the atmosphere is the atmosphere is sort of like always changing.
Right.
There is wind, and there's you know, variations and clouds, and so it makes the stars twinkle because the air is sort of like moving and waving around in front of you, whereas it like a glass doesn't. Right, Like a glass doesn't make a star twinkle.
That's right. A glass wouldn't make a star twinkle. It might deflect the path, but if you find the right location, you could see a constant stream of light flowing through the glass. But as you say, air is constantly changing, right, the wind, the atmospheric conditions are constantly changing, and so the path of a photon through the air is not constant. So if you're just standing there with your eyeball in one location, you're not going to get all the photons that come from that star.
Well, it's kind of interesting because the atmosphere makes the stars twinkle, like it makes the photons sometimes reach your eyeball and sometimes not. But you're saying that it can also bend the photons, But it doesn't make the stars kind of wavy? Does it? Right?
In principle, it does. If you could capture all of those photons, like if you had a huge collection device, then you would still see the star because the deflected photons would land in your collection device, and then you would think the star came from a different place. And so because you have a small collection device just your eyeball, you're missing some of those photons. So it looks like the star twinkles rather than dances. There's actually another really interesting effect called stellar aberration, which means that the stars are not actually where they look like they are because they have relative velocity to the Earth. So by the time the light gets here, the stars have sort of moved away from where they appear to be. But that's a different thing. It doesn't cause the stars to twinkle, It just causes them to be somewhere other than where they appear to be.
I see that's a different song altogether. That's more like a Baba Black stellar aberration.
Yeah. Historically, it's actually really important because it's one clue that we use against the ether hypothesis. People are trying to understand how light propagated through the universe, and they thought maybe there's ether, but then Michael Sin and Morley showed that there couldn't be ether, so people thought, oh, well, maybe we are stuck in a blob of ether that travels with the Earth, but then we wouldn't have stellar aberration. But anyway, back to twinkling stars.
Yeah, I think what you're saying is that the star is shooting this train of photons adds and they're all coming sort of in a street line to our eyeballs. But some of them, like hit a pocket of hot air and get deflected, or they happen to hit a molecule of nitrogen in the atmosphere and it doesn't make it out to us, and so this train of photons is interrupted, and that is making it look like it's turning on and off to our eyeballs.
That's exactly right. And then if you look at something slightly bigger, like a planet, which is closer, you're getting multiple streams of photons from that planet. It's not so far away that it just looks like a point source. It's like a little disk in the sky. And so while some of those photons may get scattered from one stream, you're pretty much always getting them from another stream. And so a planet looks like a little hazy because the atmosphere or its edges might wiggle a little bit. But a planet doesn't twinkle because it doesn't get like all of its streams interrupted at once.
Interesting unless it's maybe like a super cloudy day, right, or you know, a particularly kind of hazy night.
Yeah, it could be. You know, if something passes between you and a planet, like an eagle or something, it can block the view, or if there's like a huge blob of gas hot gas somewhere in the atmosphere, it could distort it. But twinkling is not something you're going to see regularly from a planet because it appears larger in the sky and so it's not as often actually interrupted.
All right, Well, that's one source of twinkling of the stars, and there are others, and there are things we can do to correct that twinkling. So we can actually study stars, but let's get into that after we take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about Twinkle twinkle, little stars or big stars. I guess yeah. Technically stars are not little.
Some stars are little, you know, Neutron stars are only like ten kilometers across. That's pretty little by star standards, and some of them are enormous. We have an episode about the biggest stars in the universe, and some of them are bigger than our solar system.
So maybe it should be more like Twinkle Twinkle gigantic star.
You say it that way, it sounds flattering, like wow, your swollen star. You've been working out.
Twinkle twinkle ripstar.
Stars always skip leg day.
So we were talking about how the twinkling, most of the twinkling, or a lot of the twinkling we see of the stars is due to our atmosphere. Like we have this kind of hazy layer of air and gas around the Earth which is constantly moving, maybe has pockets of hot air, cold air, different you know, clouds and things like that, and so that is what a lot of what makes stars twinkle because they kind of obscure or interrupt the train of photons coming to our eyes from the stars.
Yeah, and that's a big challenge for ground based astronomy because we want to study the star and we want to get great resolution. You know, this fuzzes out one star that might be next to another one. It makes it harder to observe things in space and get really really crisp images.
Yeah, I guess you know, the way astronomy started is that it was pretty good for like basic stuff of star observing, but then as we wanted to get more detailed or you know, look further out than the atmosphere, and the twinkling became a problem.
Yeah. Well until recently, we couldn't do anything about it. We couldn't avoid the atmosphere. Now, of course we have things like space based telescopes, which are awesome and it can avoid atmospheric effects. But there are limitations on space telescopes, right. They're expensive, they're hard to fix, they have to fit within a rocket. Sometimes they blow up. And so there's sort of two very complementary paths for astronomy. One space based where you get crisp clear pictures, and the other ground based astronomy where they've come up with some really really clever techniques to try to overcome some of the app spherical limitations.
Yeah, just called adaptive optics, Like they actually constantly move the mirrors to correct for the twinkling.
It's totally bonkers and it sounds like it would never work, but you're right. They have these mirrors that are deformable, meaning you can change the shape of the mirror so when the light hits it, it bounces off at a different angle. And if you know the effect of the atmosphere on your light source, then you can calculate in real time how to deform your mirror to undo it, to like enhance to defog it to defuzz it, And so they do these on really fancy telescopes on like the millisecond time scale. It's like constantly varying in small amounts the shape of the mirrors.
But I guess I'm a little confused now because earlier we said that, you know, the twinkling is sort of not it's not making the star wavy or fuzzy. It's actually just kind of interrupting the stream of photons. So how can moving the mirrors correct for photons that didn't get to me?
Well, it doesn't get to you if you have a tiny little collection device like an eyeball, But if you have, you know, like a thirty meter telescope, then it's more likely that you are going to get that photon. And the photon has just been deflected a little bit in one direction. And now if you have a few objects near each other, then when the atmosphere changes, it's changing the path of all those photons, and those objects get fuzzed together instead of getting a clear, crisp image. So if you change the shape of your mirror, you can sort of undo that and send the photons back as if the atmosphere hadn't happened.
Oh, I see this is for a different song. I guess right, this would be for like Fuzzy Fuzzy Little Star.
Yeah, exactly. But it's a hard problem to solve. Like, to do this, you have to know what the atmosphere has done to your photons. You might wonder, like, well, how could you possibly know? You're trying to get a crisp image. You don't know what the true image should look like, so how can you like invert the atmosphere. It's a really hard problem.
Yeah, and I hear they use lasers for that.
Right, Sometimes they use lasers. What you need, ideally, is some point source near the thing you're looking at where you know what it should look like like something else you're buying the sky, where you know exactly how it should look, and that lets you calculate what the atmosphere has done to it. You don't always have that, because you don't have like something we have a hubble image of it nearby your star. So sometimes they use lasers and they create these artificial guide stars, like we know what it should look like when you shoot a laser into the upper atmosphere to like excite the gases and create some emission. We know what that should look like, and so we can sort of calculate what the atmosphere has done to that light and then undo that to the light from the stars.
I see you use the laser or the reference like a control and it actually sort of tells you what the atmosphere is doing. Oh, it's distorting your image.
Yeah, it's probing the atmosphere. That's why sometimes you see these telescopes with these lasers shooting out of it. It's not like we're defending the Earth from aliens or sending messages or zapping eagles or anything like that. We're just creating a reference image, so we know what the atmosphere has done to our star light.
All right, Well, that's kind of what the atmosphere is doing. It's doing a lot of the twinkling. So does that mean that like a space telescope like the Whole or the new James Webb that's out there in space doesn't get twinkling stars.
It doesn't get twinkling stars for that reason, right, there's no atmosphere up there in space to interfere with the Hubble, and that's one reason why its pictures can be so awesome and crisp and clear. So it's definitely an advantage of space based telescopes. But when the hubble looks out of stars, it still sometimes sees their light getting interrupted.
Interesting, it still sees twinkling stars. It still sees twinkling stars. And because we can remove the atmosphere from the explanation, that means there must be something else interfering with these stars or something else going on at the actual star itself. Whoa, So there are other sources of twinkling for a star, like even if you get out of the atmosphere, you might still see some twinkling.
Yeah, and it's totally fascinating. There were a lot of articles a few years ago about this star called Tabby's Star. Were in twenty fifteen, some citizen scientists saw this dimming of this star that nobody could explain. And you might remember there were a lot of articles written about how like it might be an alien Dyson sphere, huge megastructure built to gather all of the energy from the star that might be explaining why it seemed to be eclipsed.
WHOA, did you say a Tabby star like a cat?
It's called Tabby's Star. I'm not sure if it's named after a person named Tabby or a person's cat named Tabby, it's called Tabby's Star.
I feel like we've hit the whole zoo here talked about black sheep and hawks and now cats.
It's also sometimes called WTF star, though I won't speculate on what that stands for.
MM why toroid formation.
Yes, I'm sure that's what they meant.
Or what the physics in Spanish.
But it turns out, of course that it's likely not a dice in swarm. A dice in sworm would block light at all wavelengths because it would basically be opaque. But the light that's coming from Tabi Star has been interfered with in some way that's not consistent across the spectrum, like some frequencies of light can penetrate still from Tabi Star and other frequencies can't. We don't have a great idea for what it is that's interfering with the light. People thought maybe it's a planet that blew up and created a big ring of dust, but that's also not creating the amount of infrared glowing people would see. So it's really fascinating when a star twinkles when it dims because it lets us understand what might be going on in that star's system.
Right, It tells us a little bit about its internal body bowel movements.
Pratt I like to think about it as like telling us about its neighborhood. Hey, what's going on over there, tabby star? Who are your friends? Who you hanging out with? Did you blow up a planet?
All right, so you're saying, that's kind of one example of us seeing a star out in space sort of changing its brightness, but not due to the atmosphere.
And people who are interested in exoplanets, of course, know that seeing a star's light dimmed by a tiny little bit is an excellent way to observe exoplanets in that star. Right When we get like eclipsed by a planet that passes in front of the star, it can cause a very slight dimming, and if you observe that carefully, you can deduce the presence of that exoplanet. I wouldn't call that exactly twinkling, but it's an example of a star getting a small eclipse from an exoplanet.
Right, Because these planets, they don't come in front of the Sun that often, right, Like maybe every couple of most like a couple of hours, right, it'd be a slow twinkle. A slow twinkle be more like a twinkle.
And of course it depends on the exoplanet and what its orbit is. Sometimes it's like once in a hundred years it passes around, or maybe it's every few hours. If it's zooming around really close to the star, it really limits our ability to discover this kind of thing. But sometimes we see stars with much more dramatic dimming than we could ever explain with exoplanets, or even dust swarms.
Interesting. I guess my question is like how common are these other phenomena? Like if I was at in space in my spacesuit and I looked at the stars, would I see the stars twinkling or would they look pretty overall pretty constant?
To my eyeball, this is pretty unusual. Most of the stars are pretty constant. Sometimes there are things that interfere with the star light, and that's fascinating for astronomy, and there's like a short list of these objects. But most of the stars would look pretty bright and pretty even if I was out in space. If you're out in space, yeah, so if you're observing from the iss or you're living on the Moon. If you're flying in Elon Musk's roadster, for example, then the stars are going to look pretty clear. Oh.
Interesting, So this song Twinkle Twinkle Little Star kind of doesn't apply in space.
Yeah, nobody's gonna be selling the galactic rights to that song. It's really just the Earth territories or.
Any planet with atmosphere, right, that's right. Or maybe like if you're in the middle of a nebula, maybe like a space cloud maybe.
But there is one star that's really interesting that astronomer has been struggling to understand for like ten years now. What is it. It's a star called vvv W zero eight and it's in the Sagittarius constellation about twenty five thousand light years away. This is a giant star. It's like one hundred times the size of the Sun. And about ten years ago it seemed to be eclipsed and not just slightly dimmed. This light was reduced by ninety seven percent.
Whoa, it like it almost turned off completely.
It almost turned off exactly. And they've been observing this star for like seventeen years since. This is the only time it ever happened. And it dimmed by ninety seven percent for a few hundred days and then came back up to full brightness.
Wait what like in like the space of a few months.
Yeah, they watched this star for years and nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, boom, it's knocked down by a factor of thirty and then it stays pretty dark for a few months, and then it goes back up to full brightness.
Whoa like all of a sudden or was this a gradual thing?
It happened very quickly once it began, and then it stayed dark for months, right, And so this is fascinating because this is a huge star, right, this is not an eclipse from a small object. No planet passing in front of this giant star could reduce its light by ninety seven percent.
Yeah, it's a big twinkle.
I guess it's one big twunk.
Really, you know, it made all this tournumer tinkle after observing it.
They were so excited, exactly, And so people are wondering what could this thing be and they've done some calculations. You know, if this thing is going to eclipse such a big star, it has to be huge, it has to be The minimum size of this thing would be zero point two five au, like a quarter of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. We're talking about a single object that size.
Wait, the thing that blocked the star, because you're saying the star is so big, it would have to be that something really big to block it. But that's only if we assume that the thing that blocked it is close to the star, Like it could have maybe been something closer that blocked it.
Yeah, it could have been something in between us and the star, right, because you can block an entire star with the tip of your finger, which is not a quarter au wide if your finger is really close. But that would require like a bunch of just dark objects floating through the universe passing between us and these stars. And they did a calculation to see, like how many of those dark objects would have to be randomly floating around the galaxy in order to block stars like this, and it would be a huge number. So that's an explanation. But it's less likely than some huge object closer to the star, some remnant of the stellar formation.
WHOA, but this doesn't happen that often, right, does it?
This does not happen that often, But for it to ever happen, space would basically have to be filled with these big dark objects because it's very hard to cross the line of sight between a star and us unless you have a lot of stuff out there in space. Space is really really really big.
Interesting, So they think it's maybe something in the orbit of the star and it's something huge.
Yeah, But they don't really understand it because we don't have models for solar system formation that include stuff like this, Like, what could it be? We have ideas of planets and maybe even rings around stars. People have this theory that maybe it's like a huge ring with a big blob in it that got exploded or torn apart by tidal forces, something like a circumstellar disc with a huge object in it, but it's much bigger than any model can predict.
Interesting. Could it be like a giant cloud of something like an asteroid cloud?
Maybe it certainly could be. And perhaps, for example, another solar system passed by and lost some of its stuff to this solar system, So it could be something that happened fairly recently, because these things wouldn't last for very long. If you have like a huge cloud of stuff in your solar system, eventually gravity is going to pull it together. After a few million years and form it into like a planet or into something else. And so like huge clouds of gas and dust around a star and to be short lived objects on astronomical time scales.
WHOA, all right, so that's one. I guess twinkling that puzzled signed. It's like a big blunkle that caused this one start to twinkle. What are some other famous examples of twinkling stars.
Yeah, so we have a short list of them. There's another one called Epsilon ORJ, and this one is eclipped every twenty seven years by some giant dust cloud which orbits it, and it's eclipsed by fifty percent.
Well meaning like we see the star called Epsilon RJ, and it dim every twenty seven years. We've been looking at it that long to notice this pattern.
Yeah, it was first observed in eighteen twenty one, so we've been looking at this thing for like hundreds of years, which is why we have a handle on like a twenty seven year cycle.
So it's like a twinkle, but on a hundred year scale.
Exactly. If you fast forward at the universe, this one would seem to twinkle. It's like a very slow motion twinkle.
You have to play the song one note per year.
Exactly, and the dimming here lasts for like two years, and then it happens every twenty seven years. So it's like a giant, slow moving dust cloud.
And this when we do know what causes how do we know what causes this eclipse?
Mostly we can study these things by looking at the spectrum, like we can study the kind of light that can penetrate, and that tells us why this thing is transparent and why this thing is opaque, because remember every object is either transparent or opaque to light at different frequencies depending on what it is, because the atoms that make things up can only absorb photons specific frequencies. And so by looking at the light that passes through, for example, a cloud of gas, you can tell, oh, this hydrogen, or there's helium, or there's sodium, or its gas or its dust or whatever. You can tell by seeing which frequencies of light are filtered out by that object. And so by studying it we can tell, oh, this is probably a big cloud of dust.
I say, like the shade of the light that comes through tells you kind of what it went.
Through exactly, just like you know, you can throw things into flames and they make different colors. That's because different elements emit at different frequencies. They also absorb at those same frequencies. And so if you shine white light through a cloud of random gas, an astronomer can tell you what was in that gas based on whether green was removed or red was removed, or the infrared was removed or something. It's like a fingerprint.
All right, that's another twinkling star in space. What are some other examples, So.
This is a short list of them. VIV fourteen hundred centauri, which is also called Mama Jet's object, is also eclipsed by something we don't really understand, but astronomers suspect that it's something that's point four au wide. That's an object that's like forty million miles wide.
Well, it's not maybe one object it's at that scale. It's probably like a cloud of something or a cluster of something.
Right, Yeah, it's probably like a big cloud of gas or dust, or a huge rain of rocks.
Right.
It's probably not a single solid object that big, because if it was like a huge block of iron that big and gravitationally would probably collapse into a black hole.
All right, well, those are different things that could make a star twinkle out in space that is not our atmosphere. But it turns out there are other reasons why a star might twinkle, and it might have to do with their inner bowel movement. So let's get into that. But first, let's take another quick break.
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All right, we're talking about twinkling and twinkling stars, both big and little, and also babba black chips that might be eclipsing stars out there in space. So Daniel, we talked about how, like most of the stars we see twinkle here on Earth, it's because of the atmosphere. It's the air around us is making the light kind of dim on and off. But you can also see them out twinkling in space because there are other things in space that might be blocking our view. But it turns out that even if you are sort of standing next to the star, you might even then see a twinkle.
This is one of my favorite explanations for twinkling stars because it really goes to the heart of like your original idea. When you're looking up at the night sky and you're looking at the star and it's twinkling, you're wondering, like, hmm, is it getting brighter and dimmer or is the light getting blocked? Well, it turns out that stars can actually get brighter and dimmer. That's something that a bunch of stars can do. And I was surprised to learn that the Sun does this as well. The Sun varies its brightness. It's not just like a constant stream of photons every year.
Wait, what like our sun that the one that provides our daylight is not constant. It's twinkling.
Also, Yeah, it turns out all stars are variable. Some of them are much more variable than others, and we'll talk about those, but every single star has some variability to it. You know, our sun has like an eleven year cycle where something mysterious is going on at the heart of this swirling, crazy plasmas with these enormous tubes and magnetic fields that flip every eleven years. And so the brightness of our sun varies, but only a small amount. It's like zero point one percent over the eleven year cycle.
Whoa.
Meaning like, if you took a film of the Sun and you fast forwarded it, you would see it kind of like twinkle, right, you'd see it kind of blinking on and off abou zero point one percent, but still you might notice it.
Yeah, you have a good camera, you could definitely detect that, and people have and people who study the sun see this kind of cycle. You know, there's another longer term trend, which is the sun is over. We're all getting brighter and brighter as it gets older and over like a billion years, it's going to get maybe ten percent brighter. That's not something we can observe with our telescopes today. But this kind of gentle twinkling is something that the sun.
Does and that I guess that's because the Sun. I mean, it's not like a machine, right, It's like a process. It's like a giant nuclear chemical reaction, right, Like there's stuff going on inside of it that maybe causes it to kind of grow brighter or dimmer.
Sometimes you're suggesting that if it was a machine, like designed by a stellar engineer or something, it would be more reliable.
Well, all engineers are stars than all engineers are stellar. We're all stellar engineers.
I mean, the sun has been burning for five billion years without a breakdown, so you know, I think it's pretty effective.
Well, I guess what I mean is it's kind of like it's an organic process, right, Like it's not perfectly imbalanced. Maybe sometimes it gets a little overexcited and sometimes a little under excited.
Yeah, it's a different process than combustion. But it's sort of like a fire. You know, it has fuel, it keeps burning, and that flame fluctuates and so it's not like designed or orchestrated in order to provide a certain amount of light. It's just a thing that is there and does what it's doing. And that means that it has cycles because of the internal workings of the sun vary and it's incredible that it's so regular too. It's not something that we understand the source of this eleven year cycle for the sun.
WHOA So I wonder like if we were a different species of animal and we had like a thought process that was a lot slower like to us, maybe the sun would look like a stroke light almost if we thought about things in the scale of like centuries, it would look like it was blinking on and off, kind.
Of Yeah, that's fun to think about. Or another idea is, what if we were species that was extraordinarily sensitive is the amount of sunlight, so that we could like observe and notice this eleven year cycle, and it affected our evolution the way like the day night cycle and the winters have affected the evolution of light on Earth. If you're interesting, if you had species that were sensitive to these eleven year cycles.
Whoa like, maybe you're sleepier for eleven years and then you're less sleepy. Maybe that's why I've been late this past eleven.
Years, Dan, Yeah, all right, well, then how do you explained the previous eleven years?
I was a lot more on time eleven years ago.
May I believe that I've known you for more than eleven years, so I can contest that data.
Well, you just don't have enough data points. You need at least what's the NCIS frequency that you need at least twice the periosity.
All right, I'll get back to you in ten years.
Yeah, wait another thirty years and then we'll talk about my nags.
All right, I'm putting it on my calendar series schedule appointment for thirty years from today.
But anyways, I think what you're saying, is that, Like, maybe I wonder if there are things on Earth that are sensitive to that cycle, right, Like, maybe it might affect our atmosphere too, Right, every eleven years, maybe things get a little bit warmer or colder.
Yeah, Well, the brightness of the Sun definitely affects the atmosphere and the climate here on Earth. But there are larger effects. The Earth goes through these cycles that affect like the ice ages and glaciation, because the Earth's orbit changes a little bit, and the tilt changes a little little bit. Is it's tweaked by like Jupiter. So I think those effects are larger than the variability of the Sun itself.
So the Sun is a twinkling star. It's pretty interesting. But then then there are other ways in which a star can change.
To Yeah, so all stars vary, and some of them vary a lot. They are these stars that are called pulsating stars, and they get brighter and dimmer and brighter and dimmer, sometimes by huge amount. A classic example of these are the cephids. These are the ones that Hubble use to discover that the universe is expanding. These aren't like pulsars, which shoot out a beam of light which spins around and sweeps over the earth. These are like radially shrinking and growing. They get bigger and brighter and then smaller and dimmer.
Whoa, they're like a beating heart almost like the star is growing and shrinking.
Yeah, they pulse with a regular frequency.
Well what kind of frequency are we talking about.
There's a big range in the periods, but it's on the order of days. Some of these things have a period of like ten days or eighty days or ninety days. So this is not like a pulsar that can be spinning in life, like millisecond frequencies or something. It's more like on the order of days. But sometimes they have like multiple frequencies. They can have like a major frequency, and then they have like another cycle that's going on inside of that that can constructively or destructively interfere.
Whoa, but even a period of days seems a lot right, Like can you imagine a start changing that quickly, like a star size of our sun changing that quickly every couple of days. That would be pretty dramatic.
It would be crazy to be in a system like that where things got a lot brighter and then a lot dimmer, and also the star itself is getting bigger. Right, This is like an astrophysical thing you can observe, Like the star is expanding and now it's shrinking. It has to do with what's going on inside the star, you know, like is the star opaque to its own energy, so that there's all this pressure from the radiation being generated at the core that's pushing out the outer layers, or it does a cool down and then become like transparent to that energy and it can collapse a little bit. So this this cycle that's going on inside every star, but in some stars it's very dramatic.
Right, because is we've talked about it are kind of a balance between gravity squishing everything in and the fusion exploding everything out. And like our star is pretty steady, like it's pretty well balanced, but maybe there are stars out there that are not as well balanced, and so they kind of swing back and forth more wildly between squishing and exploding.
Yeah, and it's something we're still trying to understand in detail. People are building models to try to explain this kind of thing, and it's a great way to probe what's going on inside the star. Also because for Cephades, at least there's this close connection between the period, how long it takes to go from like bright to dim and bright to dim, and how bright it is at its brightest point, which of course is super helpful if you want to understand how far away the star is, but also helpful if you want to understand what's going on inside the star, what crazy processes are driving these things.
Uh, it's got like a lot of turmoil inside of it, but predictable turmoil.
Anes yeah, precisely, okay, cool.
And then there are also erupting stars or farting stars.
There are some stars that are even more dramatic than these pulsating stars. They are called erupting stars. These stars like blow out material. They're like puff away material, and then they lose it. You know, it's like gone out into space. These are not like explosive events. It's not like, you know, the star has exploded. It's not like a supernova. It's more just like the star has very rapidly grown and then loses some of its material.
It's not like a gas pocket. It's more like it has one of these flour ups and in the process that shoots out a big bunch of stuff.
It shoots out a big bunch of stuff, and it can also accreate a big bunch of stuff, like sometimes they're near a source and so they're gathering more fuel and that can make the star brighter. In extreme cases, it can be really dramatic. One example is called a flare star. These kind of stars can grow in brightness by a factor of six and then fade back down. And this whole thing happens in like half an hour.
That's huge, But it's not is it constant or is it just happens every once in a while.
These things are not regular the way like pulsating stars are, and it's not something that we understand, you know, we don't even understand it as well as we understand like solar flares on the surface of our sun, which have to do with like magnetic field lines snapping and reconnecting. So it's something we observe by, something we still don't understand the process of Oh icee.
It's more like one twinkle like it twinkles ones sometimes.
No, it's regular and it's unpredictable, but it does seem to happen much more often to red dwarfs, like these dim red dwarfs that are all over the galaxy. One of the most common types of star. These are the ones that turn into flare stars.
Hmm, interesting, regular and unpredictable. I feel like it's a good description of myself as well.
Maybe I should have said not uncommon and unpredictable. It's sort of cool because the galaxy is filled with these unassuming, sort of generic, dim red dwarfs, but occasionally one of them becomes like ridiculously bright for just like a half an hour and then goes back to being a boring star.
So these are examples of stars kind of twinkling by themselves. Like you said, like, it's not something that's blocking it. It's not the atmosphere that's the storty. It's like the star itself kind of twinkles, even if it's on a pretty big timescale.
Exactly, and it's sort of across the whole spectrum, you know, the whole star lights up in many different frequencies, and so it's pretty cool because that means that the twinkling you're seeing is not just something local, not just your atmosphere, but it's actually information about what's going on inside the stars. So it's like there's science there. It's like it's sending you a message.
Oh interesting, It's like there's, yeah, there's hidden mechanics going on that you could maybe figure out if you could study this, this twinkling Yeah.
And I think about this kind of thing every time I'm out in nature enjoying a dark sky night, which you know is harder and harder to get these days.
Right, But you go camping a lot, right, is that when you look at stars mostly.
Yeah, when you go camping is when you're far away from the city and all the light pollution, and hopefully you don't see too many clouds.
That's when you break out the guitar and you start lecturing to your kids about the twinkling stars in music.
I try not to force them to listen to it, but you know. By the way, we got a comment from a listener about something you said about the weather in Spokane, Washington and how likely they are to have clear skies.
Wait, what happened? What did I say? And what did they say?
Apparently you said that it rains eleven months per year in Spokane, Washington, and this listener, Jeremy wrote in it said, I just want you to know that Spokane is basically a desert and it's pronounced Spokane. So thanks Jeremy for the fact checking.
So I was wrong on many many counts.
Yeah, and actually I looked it up and it rains seventeen inches a year in Spokane and twenty inches a year in your hometown of Pasadena. So it's even drier in Spokane than it is where you live.
Interesting. Wow, Well I was wrong.
But it means that observing the night sky in Pasadena and in Spokane, you won't get blocked by a lot of clouds.
I am wrong. Every eleven years it does happen due to the sun variations.
You know.
It's not something I can help.
That's right. Every star has their variability, and this is yours.
That's right. Every stellar engineer has a cycle. All right. Well, it's interesting that, you know, something as simple as a kid song like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star has so much signs behind it. You know, it tells us it's inspired by, you know, the effects of our atmosphere that we have, how it blocks our view of the universe. And it also maybe has something to do with the mechanics of stellar you know, fusion and processes inside of these incredible exploding machines.
Yeah, It's really an outstanding way to think about the universe and the journey that these photons make across it, from when they're born in this hot ball of plasma billions and billions of miles away to finally landing on your eyeball. The fact that they get there tells you something about the universe between here and there, and the fact that some of their brothers and sisters didn't get there also tells you something about what's between us and that star.
Yeah, only the lucky ones make it through Spokane.
Question, the unlucky ones make it to Pasadena or Irvine? Is that that's right?
The lucky ones get here and they have to listen to my band planes.
I'm going to file a noise complain the.
Universe already did it all right? Well, the next time you hit listen to the song, think about the stars and think about how our view of the universe is still not completely clear. We hope you enjoyed that. 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 on greenhouse gas emissions. House US Dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit usdairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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