Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWhat are gamma ray bursts, and are they dangerous?
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Hey Jorge, do you worry much about things from space coming to kill you?
Not until right now? Why should I? Well, it depends depends on what. Well, if there was nothing you could do to prepare for to prevent it, would you still want to know? Yeah? I think so. It'd be nice to know I can get my things in order and you know, get a couple, finish that TV series I've been watching.
In that case, I highly recommend you pay attention to this episode of our podcast because it's going to prepare you.
Why should I listen? To the episode or finish my TV series. I'm confused. What should I do? Daniel?
I imagine how I have while we're recording this episode. You do sound distract sometimes?
Well, I say, she'd multitask.
Exactly. There's a you know, death from space is coming, so you got to get stuff done.
I feel like the universe is huge and there's there's a million things out there that can kills instantly at any time. Are you saying there's something in particular I should be worried about?
Stay tuned find out. Hi.
I'm Borhan. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of the comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper or PhD Comics.
He's also a shill for big Banana corporations, but you'll hear more about that later. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a part time podcast host and amateur bakery.
And also a shill for Marvel Comics.
And DC whatever. Man, I'm totally a DC guy.
That's why he sold out to Marvel because it's the most successful, more successful franchise.
Oh, I am still waiting for that check, by the way, for selling out to Marvel.
I think I think they're waiting for Tony Stark to sign it.
Yeah. Well, I was fact checking their Pim Particle episodes and I sent them a long list of corrections and never heard back. So maybe I'm maybe they don't want to hear from me anymore.
I know the scientific advisor of the AT movies. He's it buddy, So I could we could just have a whole podcast with.
Him, really, because I got a few things to say about the pim particle and the quantum realm.
Now he's a quantum physicist. Are you sure you're off for the for the challenge.
Well, he's either right or he's wrong. There's no in between, right, No, he is, he's both. No, he's right and wrong at the same time.
That's right.
Yeah. Anyway, this is our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.
A production of iHeartRadio, where we talk about all the amazing and mysterious things that are out there in the universe that may or may not kill you instantly.
That's right.
I know.
Sometimes we talk that's about the real universe. Sometimes we talk about the Marvel universe, or the DC universe or the Banana universe. Whatever is interesting today.
Yeah, and so today on the podcast, we are going to talk about a very interesting topic.
That's right. Today's topic is gamma ray bursts. A bunch of listeners wrote in and asked us to explain gamma ray bursts. What are they? Can they kill us? Can they really turn Bruce Banner into the Hulk? What's going on? Please break it down?
Wait, gamma ray bursts. I thought we were talking about Billy ray Syres. I thought, isn't that the weird from space that we're doing.
No, Billy ray Cyrus' career is based on getting irradiated by gamma ray bursts. That's the connection. He used to be a mild mannered singer and then he got gamma rays and now he's like the crazy Billy ray Cyrus.
Oh all right, and so gamma rays are involved until.
I totally made that up. That is completely fabricated. I apologized to Billy ray Cyrus and all of his fans for implying that a mere mortal could not have written that music, the Pokey. He didn't write the hockey Pokey anyway. But but gamma rays do play a big role in the Marvel universe, right because back when gamma rays were the crazy thing people were worried about. It showed up in comic books all the time, and that's how Bruce Banner got turned into the Hulk.
That's right. And I'm surprised you know this fact about the Marvel universe. I thought you were a DC guy.
Well, you know, Marvel is not paying me, so I figured i'd do some research.
Yeah. So he he gets a rate it by gamma rays and some kind of accident, and that's what turns it into the Hulk. And so these are like magic mysterious rays.
Right, that's right. And you know, I gotta wonder about this origin story the Hulk, Like do you think they're trying to make it seem like it's his fault? Like crazy scientist just wants to learn about the universe, doesn't care about the risks to humanity, gets irradiated. Like is that like a moral punishment like tisk tisk. You shouldn't be playing with these forces you don't understand?
Yeah, for sure, way are you saying that comic books can have like literary you know, secret messages and themes.
And there's definitely literary. I don't know if it's so secret though. I just wonder about, like how is interpreted at the time. You know, like, are scientists like the leading edge they're bringing us into the atomic age? You look at all the wonderful things we're getting out of science, or is it like I'm kind of scared of science. Scientists don't seem trustworthy, look at all the crazy stuff they're doing.
M I think it was a It's supposed to be kind of a take on you know, Doctor Jekyll and mister Hyde, you know, the scientists who's trying to understand things and playing maybe with things he doesn't quite fully understand, and then he gets turned into superhero and into a multi billion dollar franchise. So it kind of worked out for the scientists.
Yeah, so the lesson is everybody should do crazy radiation experiments in their basement, right. No, but gamma rays do feature a lot in comics from a long time ago, and they are real thing. Gamma rays really are a real thing, and gamma ray bursts are a real thing, and so we thought it'd be fun to do an episode where we explained it. It turns out that they are quite a scientific puzzle. For a long time, physicists have not understood where they came from and what's generating.
Them and should we be worried about them?
Yeah? Should we worry about them? Exactly?
And are we all going to turn into the Hulk?
And how do you feel about that anyway? And should you watch your TV show? Well, you mean, what happens if you turn into the Hulk and you have all those TV shows recorded? Do you think the Hulk likes to watch the same TV show as you do? Do you need like separate tvrs for when you're in Hulk mode when you're not in Hulk mode?
You know, I don't think the Hulk would get past you know, the pilot episode of most TV shows. You know, you'd probably smashed the TV right away.
No, no stars from no unnecessary dialogue. That sounds like how my son reviews most television shows.
Really too much talking, too much.
Talking, where's the action? Exactly exactly?
But they sound pretty cool. Gamma rays, right, gamma rays? I mean it sounds like some sort of new kind of ray energy.
Yeah, exactly. Does it have a positive connotation to you, like, oh my god, look at this amazing source of energy, all the good we can do for the world, or does that have a negative connotation like is this a weapon? That's going to kill me.
I think it just sounds like something out of science fiction. You know, like if you called it like puppy dog rays, I'd be like, oh, that's cute, it's safe. Or she called it like a you know, kind of superhero cancer inducing rays.
I can't let that go. I can't let it go. What if a scientist is experimenting with puppy dog rays and gets irradiated, what kind of superhero does he turn into? The Hulk puppy.
Yeah, the hush puppy.
Goes around looking everybody snuggling with them.
The husky, the husky there you go, exactly, the green husky, which sounds pretty adorable. But no, yeah, they sound mysterious. They sound very sci fi, right, like Gamma, Like, oh, you have to just pick a Greek letter and marry it to like a scientific physics term and you have something sci fi.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, you're right, it does sounds fictiony, But the cool thing about it is that it's actually also science y, Like there's a lot of really interesting science behind Gamma ray bursts.
Yeah, and a big mystery, right, there's a big mystery about them.
Yeah, So I was wondering what people knew about gamma ray bursts? Were they worried about them? Do they know what they mean? Do they know what a gamma ray is at all?
So, as usual, Daniel went out there and ask people on the street, random strangers, what they thought a gammory was.
And these interviews happened partially on the campus if you see Irvine, and also partially at the Irvine spectrum. So you're gonna get a selection of students and random people.
What's the Irvine spectrum?
What's the Irvine spectrum? Oh my god? How do you not know about that? People like people like fly from Japan?
The range of colors in Orange County? Is it like the range from a dark base to dark baby?
I never realized the dramatic irony of Irvine calling anything a spectrum because there is no spectrum. You're right, No, it's a big mall here in Irvine. People actually like fly here from Japan, stay in a hotel and just show up of the mall and then like fly back. It's crazy.
Really, is it like a fancy or is it like a mega Minnesota Maldi Mercas.
I'm not the right person to evaluate malls. I spent as little time in them as possible. I was there because my kids were on spring break and I took them to a movie, and while they were in the movie, I interviewed people about gamma rays.
You didn't go into the movie with them.
No, No, I stood outside looking like a weirdo asking people weird science questions.
All right, Well, those of you at home, think about it for a second. If you if a random physicist approach you outside of a movie theater in a fancy mall and ask you what is a gamma ray? What would you say, go a good step away, sir.
You'd say, I didn't fly here from Japan just to answer your questions.
Security security.
One fascinating thing is that on campus at UCI, ninety nine percent of people will answer my questions, whereas that the spectrum, only like one in ten are willing to answer questions.
Really huh yeah, why that is?
I don't know.
So here's what people had to say.
First question is, have you ever heard about gamma ray burst? Do you know what that is?
No?
No, I don't know, but I've heard of it because it definitely has to do something with UV light.
It's like a sun ray, I'm assuming.
Yeah, it's just I know that it modifies like your DNA or something.
I could just blast your DNA and it could cause some.
Damage to you, like severely. Yeah. Yeah, so that's about it, but not too into it. Gamma reavers a kind of gam or I don't know. Okay, Yes, but the star explodes and it'll admit a lot of frequency of photons and if it be a large exposure, then the prectation will be high. I will be gammera explosion something, okay? And is it something to worry about?
I don't think it will be that powerful that makes us worry depends on how close the star is, Honestly, I cann't tell you.
I'm not sure, all right?
Is that something to do with stars? So it's when the sun explodes or something?
Right? Is something?
Is it something to worry about?
I would seem so? Yeah?
All right, So pretty binary response. Right. Most people said no, or they knew all about.
It, Yeah, exactly a lot of people never heard about them or like it tickled something in their brain maybe, but they were not able to say anything concrete about it. But some folks clearly had done some reading.
Yeah, but nobody mentioned the Hulk.
No, nobody mentioned the Hulk though. You know, I've been bulking up recently, so I was sort of digging for compliments there, but I didn't get any.
Did you paid yourself green as well?
No, you're not allowed to be green and irvine. It's only beige allowed.
Oh, the beige Hulk.
Exactly, That would be the irvine version.
So that sound they sound pretty mysterious. Gamma rays, so what are they done? Now, let's break it down for people. What are gamma rays?
So, in the end, of gamma rays not as exotic as it sounds. It's just a kind of photon. So remember, photons are the particle that carry electromagnetic radiation. So all light you know, radio waves to visible light, to X rays and all the way up to gamma rays, they're all just photons of different frequency. They're just light wiggling at different wavelengths. And we call different parts of the spectrum different things because they were discovered different times where we treat them differently or they're qualitatively different. But in the end, they're all just parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
So wait, did they think before that they were different, like a different kind of ray or particle or was this before they we even knew about particles.
Yeah, before we even knew about particles, and we knew about rays, like we had cathode rays and stuff like that, and X rays, and we didn't understand for a long time that rays were particles. And then later they unified a lot of these different things and understood them to all just be parts of the same thing.
So they just thought it was like a just like a different kind of ray, yeah, like a different kind of beam of something.
Yeah, because particles at different energy, photons of different energy act really different. You know, photons that are the visible wavelength, you can see them. They look green, for example, Photons that are high enough energy to penetrate through you and give you a picture of your bone. And you know, we call those X rays. They're just photons of a higher energy. But qualitatively they seem different, right, And so before we understood a lot more about how things worked, we treated them like different things. But that's that's the whole goal of physics, right, is to take a bunch of disparate phenomena, things that don't seem related, and discover that they're actually connected. They're all just different parts of the same thing, different sides of the same die.
Oh, I guess they thought there were different things because they they're made differently, right, Like you make cather raise one way, and you make visible light another way, and you make gamma rays a different way, and so they thought, hey, these are just different things that come out when you do these other things.
Yeah, you make them differently, and they behave differently, like one of them can penetrate through the wall and the other one can't write, And so if you don't have a microscopic understanding of it, it makes sense to categorize them differently. So it's pretty cool later when you stitch it all together and realize that these are all just different flavors of the same thing, or different colors quite literally of the same thing. And gamma rays typically are the very very high edge of that spectrum. So anything that's you know, like a million times more energetic than a visible photon, you call it a gamma ray. And it's not like a hard cut off and not like a little below and like sorry, you don't get to be a gamma ray. You know, it's sort of a rough thing, but there's no upper limit.
It's like a it's like a soft definition. Yeah, that's what point does it and the photon become turned from a regular photon to a gamma ray.
Well, you know, I think photons would be insulted to be called regular photons. You know, they're all special. Okay, they all can do something that no other photon can do.
That's right. Sorry, they're all bright, shining points of light.
Yeah, I mean, is there some colors that you like more than others? Or hey, are you a you know, are you a colorist? Exactly?
Yeah, but I've worked with a lot of colorists.
Yeah, that's true. You are a cartoonist. You should be pro colored man. Yeah. So you got radio waves a very very low edge, and then you've got infrared right just below what we can see. Then you got the visible spectrum.
The radio ways are the bottom.
Radio waves are the very longest wavelengths. They have the lowest energy. Exactly the way you said at the bottom makes it sound judgmental. You know, radio waves are awesome, they're super powerful and fantastic and the reasons that we can see black holes and stuff like that. But yeah, radio waves are at the bottom in terms of energy. Then you get infrared, Then you get the visible spectrum, then you get x rays, right, and then you get they're just above the ultraviolet, you get X rays, and then you get gamma rays. So gamma rays are the hardest, fastest, most energetic kind of photon you can have.
But they're all photons, Like, they're all the same particle. They're just kind of vibrating differently or the different wavelengths or sizes. What's the difference.
Yeah, they're all photons. They all travel at the speed of light. But the difference is the frequency, right, how often they are wiggling? Right? Remember, photons are vibrations of the electromagnetic field, right, and they oscillate, and the speed at which they oscillate that gives you the frequency. Right, how many times per second do they go up and down? Does the electromagnetic fields go up and down?
And they're all moving at the speed of light. One radiophoton is moving at the same speed as a gamma ray photon.
That's right. If you had a race and you had a source of radio waves and a source of gamma rays, and you shot them at each other, they would have different energies but move at the same speed. They all travel at the speed of light, even if they have different energies. That feels kind of weird, right, because you're used to thinking of energy and speed as closely connected. But this is something different. They have no mass and they travel at the speed of light. They all have the same speed, but they have different energies, which means they have different frequencies and different wavelengths. Right. The wavelength and the frequency are closely connected. The higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength.
And yeah, let's talk about that a little bit more. But first quick break.
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Okay, so, Gamma rays are photons, but they have not just a little bit, but a lot more energy than the regular photons that we see every day.
That's right.
A million times. That's yeah, that's a lot.
It's a lot. If I shot gamma rays at you, they would deposit a lot more energy in you than normal light, right, And also they can penetrate into you much further.
Like, well it would, they would deliver a million times more energy. Right, You need to alien photons to be equal to one gamma ray photon, exactly.
And so gamma rays are dangerous. They can't turn you into the Hulk probably, but they could give you cancer, right, they can shatter your DNA and all sorts of crazy stuff inside your body. You don't want gamma rays.
Okay, So they're just regular photons, but they're they're just an upper spectrum of light.
That's right, they're the high ended spectrum. They are dangerous, much more dangerous than normal light because they can damage your DNA, right, they can. They can cause errors in DNA which get copied and that's a big source of cancer.
So what they are is not very mysterious, right, Like we can make them here on Earth.
That's right, Yeah, exactly, we can make gamma rays here on Earth. And gamma rays are produced by radioactive elements all the time. Right, They're just high energy photons. From radioactive decays. So there are gamma rays around one of them just hit you right now. Yeah, So gamma rays themselves not mysterious. We know all about them. We can make them. The question is what out there might be made gamma rays. And that's the fascinating part of the story. That's the interesting mystery, right, is that we know the gamma rays are produced when we do experience with nuclear weapons, right, you do you blow up a nuclear bomb, You're going to produce a lot of gamma rays. So when in the Cold War, when we had trees with the Russians saying, oh, no testing or whatever, we sent up a bunch of satellites to verify that they weren't testing, try to detect gamma rays from nuclear explosions. And I don't know if they found any to haven't release that, but what they did discover is a bunch of gamma rays not coming from the Soviet Union, not coming from somewhere else on Earth, not coming from the mountain volcano layer of some evil villain, but instead coming from deep in space.
So the mysteries that we're getting bombarded by gamma rays, we don't know. We didn't know where they came from.
Yeah. And the really fascinating thing about them is that it's not like a continual source. It's not just like you know, the solar wind where it's just like constant coming. They come in bursts, and that's really interesting because it makes you think like something happened, something created this, like some big event occurred and must have produced this burst, right, And that's a clue. It's like, what's going on on there seems to feels like a message or a clue about something fascinating that's happening somewhere else in the universe.
So what do you mean by a burst? Like we suddenly, suddenly we're washed by a bunch of gamma rays and then it stops.
Yeah, And it's exactly like a huge pile of them come all at once, you know, it's like a big flash in the sky, like quite literally a big flash in the sky. And then the other fascinating thing is that there are two kinds. Is like short gamma ray bursts ones that last much less than a second, like less than half a second, and then there's ones that last like twenty or thirty seconds. And it's not like a continuous range. It's not like you know, every gamma ray burst is you know, some somewhere less than thirty seconds, and there's a smooth distribution. There's like two bumps if you made a histogram, like.
Really a lot of them.
A lot of them peak at like zero point three seconds, and a lot of them peak at like thirty seconds. So there's definitely two kinds of bursts happening.
It kind of sounds like Morse.
Quote exactly, some very slow message. That's the exciting thing, Right, you don't know what's creating this. You don't know is out there making it, and it could be anything. It could be like some new kind of star you never saw before, or it could be some bizarre galactic race sending you messages over decades, right, who knows?
Planet Hulk?
Yeah, because it's they're not very common. It's not like they're happening all the time. You know, these days are estimate is that we about one per day hits the Earth.
So we first that taked these with Cold War satellites. Yeah, exactly what did people think, Like, did they think was a glitch or.
At first they had no idea They're like, what you know, first I'm sure they thought are the Soviets testing in outer space. Maybe they're already at the Moon or something.
Right, Oh, we could tell that were coming from out of space.
Yeah, we could tell that were coming from out of space. Absolutely, we could tell the direction. And you know, they didn't release a lot of details because all this information comes from like classified satellites. As scientists, we sometimes wonder, like, we spend all this money trying to get satellites up in space to answer scientific questions, but the budget for defense is much bigger, and there's a huge network of defense satellites listening for stuff and telescopes and all sorts of stuff, and we wonder sometimes like could we use that network for science, Like it's so much bigger and more powerful. Of course it's not designed to do science, but sometimes it can accidentally do science, and that's what happened here. So we don't know a lot of details about the technical capabilities of these Department of Defense satellites. But after a few years, the DOOD realized, Okay, this is not Russians, this is something weird and interesting from outer space, and so they declassified this data and shared it with the scientific community.
And that's what they used to discover what they were.
Yeah, that was the first hint. And then the scientists were like, we have no idea, what is this. Hm, let's study it some more. And this is a lesson. They're also folks like if the government did discover aliens, they would probably turn it over to the scientific community to help them figure it out. Right, that's basically what happened here, right.
Weird may not watch enough Hollywood movies, Daniel, and they always try to cover it up.
You know, I should be a consultant in some of those Hollywood movies because I have better ideas. So then the scientific community said, well, wow, we have no idea what could make this And it was really it was a puzzle for a long time.
So because it's they knew it wasn't coming from the sun, right, And these these weren't just like a small burst. These are really bright bursts, right.
That's right, They're really bright. And so the first thing you do in astronomy when you see a signal you don't know what it is, You try to figure out where it's coming from. Right, You point it in the sky. If you can connect it with something in the sky, then you think, oh, it's came from there, right, pretty simple stuff, so they know it didn't come from the Sun. They also didn't seem to be coming from anything in our galaxy. Like, we know where we are relative to the galaxy, and so if some signals being generated by some like new kind of star or some activity in our galaxy, it's going to be mostly coming from the direction of the center of the galaxy or the plane of the galaxy. Right, But these things were coming from every direction, like random directions, So suggest that's not something happening in our galaxy but something coming to us from other galaxies.
Wow. So for something to be that far away and for us to feel it and to get so many of these photons, it like at the source, it must be huge, right, Like it must be like a huge bright explosion.
Yeah. Absolutely, It's kind of scary to think about because these gamma ray bursts they're like as powerful as like a star, you know, when they hit us. The light from the gamma ray burst is about as much energy as the lighte from a star in our galaxy. Right.
But but if it came from really far away, then yeah, exactly, I mean that must have and it probably sprayed that much in all direct right.
Well, we actually don't know about that. We don't know that much about how they're made. So it could be like blazars and pulsars, that they're concentrated in some directions, like along the magnetic poles. But whatever it is, they're super bright at the source because remember, other galaxies are crazy far away, Like other stars are far away inside our galaxy, but other galaxies are like an order of magnitude further away. So to even see those galaxies as hard, you have to add up all the hundreds of billions of stars in those galaxies just to see them. So to see one object from that galaxy being as bright as the star in our galaxy, I mean, you have to do the math. That's crazy, no, I think, Yeah, you were telling me earlier. You did the math, and it's about one million trillion times brighter than the sun exactly. That's how far away these things are. In order for us to see them as bright as a star in our galaxy, they have to be a million trillion times brighter than the sun. Well that's a fun thing to say, isn't it a million trillion?
Like how you say a gazillion? You know, it don't even bother I don't even know how many zeros that.
Is, No, a lot, I like million, like body swoops of ice cream? Would you like a million trillion?
Just a whole bunch, more than more than a million. It's a million times a trillion.
It's a million times a trillion times the Sun, which is already really bright, you know.
Wow. That means there's stuff going on in the universe out there all the time. That's a million trillion times brighter than the Sun.
Yeah, exactly. And so we think they come from other galaxies. But that's a bit of a puzzle, right, Like why only from other galaxies and not from ours? How are these what are these things that are making these gamma ray burds? How can they be so crazy powerful?
You mean we should be if they were common in our galaxy, we would be getting them a lot more from the sides of the galaxy, right, like we would notice.
Yeah, Well, either they don't have happen very often, in which case it's more likely to see them from other galaxies than from ours, right, because there are more other galaxies than ours, right, or our galaxies different from other galaxies in some way, which is why we don't see them from our galaxy.
Wow, well you were telling me also that there's more energy in one second of these gamma ray burs than possibly all the energy that our Sun will give in its entire life.
That's right. It's a huge amount of energy. And this is one of the funnest things about space and about astronomy, right, it's just the crazy numbers, you know, like, can you wrap your mind around how much energy is going to be put out by the Sun over billions of years. I don't think it's possible for humans to grasp this kind of stuff. I mean, even just the timescale billions of years. You know, it's hard for humans that live for such a flicker to understand and then integrate all the energy of this million earth ball of fire and then focus that all into one second. I mean it it burns a hole in my mind.
Wow, it turns in to the Hulk.
Yeah, exactly. If you took the Earth right and you collided it with the anti Earth, like an anti Mattter version of the Earth, right, so you converted all of the mass from the Earth into energy, you know, it's it's it's crazy powerful. Right. For example, if you collided two raisins out of raisin and an anti raisin it would have as much energy as a nuclear weapon. Right, So it's a huge amount of energy is stored in a raisin. Now imagine doing that for the Earth. Right, you'd have to do that for a one hundred copies of the Earth to get as much energy as is stored in these gamma ray bursts.
Wow, what if you collide a hulk in an anti.
Hulk they both get pissed off?
It mash. It's each each other to an anti smash. They would, you know, hook.
Up as well. I don't know, but you are generating a huge list of great ideas for the next Marvel movies. I hope you're you're patenting these.
I know, Yeah, yeah, Mark call me but yees. So okay, let's so let's get into what it could be generating these gamma ray burs and are they dangerous? But let's take a quick break.
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All right, so we're talking about Gamma ray bursts, which are different than billy ray sires. We've established that, and that they're also just regular photons, but super highly energetic. And we're getting these crazy bursts from out of space. So Daniel, what could be causing these birds? What could be out there making these that were feeling them so energetic here on Earth?
Well, the short answer is we don't really know very well. We have now recently some hypotheses that might work, but the truth is we don't really know. And remember, there's two kinds of gamma ray bursts's the short and the long. Short last less than a second, and the long lasts like thirty seconds. And the best guesses these days are that the short ones are due to neutron stars that are in a binary system, so they're orbiting each other, and when they do this, they lose energy slowly so that they rotate around each other and get closer and closer and closer and eventually collide. And this is exciting stuff astronomically because we recently saw like gravitational waves coming from neutron star collisions, and we confirm that like all of the gold in the universe is probably made in neutron star collisions, and all sorts of crazy stuff, but we think it might also produce these gamma ray bursts because it's a huge amount of energy and if you read the details about it, it's crazy.
That means that they're the short bursts, right, they are point three seconds long, and you're saying they generate, like, that's how fast these neutron stars are crashing into each other, the whole thing that's about point three seconds.
No, it's the burst itself they think comes from the crust of the neutron stars being crushed by the gravitational pressure from the other neutron stars. So remember, if you're close to a really heavy object, you get these tidal forces because gravity acts differently on things further away and closer up, so you basically get massaged. So two neutron stars are like massaging each other just before they collide, which is making the crust of them basically shake and crack. So you're getting these like earthquakes on the surface of neutron stars just before they collide. That might be generating these crazy fast bursts of gamma rays. I mean it sounds like science fiction, right. If I pitch that to Marvel, they'd be like, that's sorry. That's too far out there, but we think that's actually happening.
It's really like you're colliding to suns, right, you're exactly. You take a neutron star, take another neutron star and used tomash them together and in that point three seconds it explodes. Right.
Yeah, But I have to remind you that in our previous episode about neutron stars, you complain that neutron stars aren't really stars. They should just be called neutron balls. They don't glow.
Okay, so when you smash the balls together, that's where you get together.
And I have to say a lot of our listeners on Twitter agreed with you that they should be called balls. Yeah, exactly, they should be demoted from stars to balls. Yeah.
You sound surprised that people on Twitter agree with me.
I'm surprised that people it's on Twitter agree with anybody. So congratulations, you've unified social media with overballs. Yeah exactly. We have located a few of them. Like neutron star collisions, we can see in other ways. Right. We can see them from their gravitational wave of emissions that that's pretty rare. But we can see them from the bright flashes of visible light that they produce, and so the trick has been watching these things for years and basically constructing dedicated satellites that are looking for these things. And the key is that they don't last very long. So what you want to do is as soon as you see one, you've got to point all your good telescopes at it. So the science community become much better at that building dedicated telescopes that look for these things, and then everybody swivels over to look at it at the same time, which gives you a good review of it.
But you only have point three seconds.
Yeah, exactly. You got to be fast for these really fast ones. And so some of these telescopes are all hooked up, like the Fermi telescope that's orbiting the Earth has a gamma ray burst detector and when it when it finds something and it immediately sends a message. And then telescopes on Earth point in that direction and try to capture, you know, the last bits of the of the burst before it disappears, and also to capture anything else coming from that direction. And that's where we got these clues. We started watching the sky more carefully and seeing what else was coming from the direction of the gamma ray bursts, and that gave people ideas about what could be happening that could be causing them. So you get an idea like, oh, maybe it's neutron stars, in which case we should see this and that and the other thing also, and then they started to pick those things up.
Okay, so that's the short burst, that's where they we think they come from. What about the long burst? Yeah, the thirty second ones.
Yeah, the long bursts come from super duper super right.
Yeah, super duper supernovas. Is that the technical is that like a million trillion supernovas.
That's a super duper ice cream Sunday. No, the technical term is a hyper nova hyper nova.
Yeah, oh man, but I.
Prefer super duper supernova because it sounds better than supernova.
So they're not just a supernova or like extra special.
Extra special, extra big big emplosions. And this is still something that's not very well understood. You know, why do some supernovas produce gamma ray bursts and some don't. But they did this modeling and they said, Okay, if there is a big supernova, then we expect that after the gamma ray bursts, we should see a bunch of X rays because the gas nearby the supernova is going to collide and then emit, And so they did some complicated modeling and made predictions, and in fact they see this afterglow, after the after these long gamma ray bursts, they see X rays. So those are slightly lower energy photons in the spectrum that they epect if it was a supernova. So it partially answers the question because it tells us these long gamma ray bursts probably come from these crazy hypernovas. But we have hypernovas in the Milky Way, and there's lots of hypernovas and not that many gamma ray bursts. So is it like a special kind of hypernova or only in some cases? Or that's the kind of thing they're still trying to figure out.
Wait, you saying we need another term special super duper supernovas.
All hyper novas are special. I don't know why you have to be so judgmental today.
What's nice? So you can have to call go for like hyper special, extra.
Cool, super califragilistic, carry on top super duper nova. Yeah, so it's still a puzzle. We don't understand it, right, we don't understand why they made Sometimes some people think that that if a supernova collapses, like in a certain way, then it creates this cloud of stuff around it which absorbs the gamma rays and other times the gamma rays poke through and then shoot out everywhere else. But it would make sense that a supernova or kilo nova or hypernova or whatever could generate this much energy because that's a huge event, right, these massive stars imploding, So that definitely could explain it.
I feel like next time you should start a little bit more modestly so that you have room to grow, you know, mini, nobody you discover something big, just call it like a modest nova or like a just a nova.
A regular note.
You have room to grow.
No, I like going the way McDonald's went for their drink sizes. You know, you start with medium, which is already huge, and then you escalate. Yeah, exactly, And so that's that's probably what's causing it. But we don't really understand it in detail, and it's important that we understand it because we want to understand, like, is one of these things going to happen in the milky way? How often are these things going to be hitting us? Do we have to worry? So it's important to understand this stuff.
Yeah, it's weird that there would be things that we were not we can't quite explain out there.
Yeah, exactly, especially things that could kill us. Right, So it's like, I think it's worth funding politicians out there with the purse strings, you know, maybe by one less fighter jet and pay for another telescope to look at gamma rays.
Wait, so could these things kill us? I think you're telling me earlier that you know, if the right concentration hits us at the right moment, it could really fry us and it turns into toast.
Yeah, exactly. The key is how far away it happens, right, So, gamma ray bursts from other galaxies, we're far enough away that by the time it gets here, you know, those gamma rays are filling out a sphere that's the size of the distance between galaxies. So it's a huge number of gamma rays, a lot of energy, but it's spread out over a huge sphere. If a gamma ray burst happens nearby, yikes, You know, a gamma ray burst could basically sterilize an entire solar system. If it happened nearby, that would be pretty Yeah, we would literally be toasted.
We would what would the Earth look like. Well, it'd be like a flash sunburn, wouldn't it. Like half the Earth would be okay, but the other half would be toast.
Yeah, exactly half the Earth would be totally fried and the other half would be okay. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. And it depends again on the intensity. If it's really really intense, you know, then it's gonna get down through the atmosphere and we're all gonna either get fried or get cancer or die pretty quick. If it's slightly less intense, right, our atmosphere does protect us. The ozone in the atmosphere and stuff like that protects us from gamma rays, Like Folcus of you out there wondering if we're getting hit once per day from these gamma rays from other galaxies, why don't we all have cancer already? Well, some of us do have cancer, and some of that is because of gamma rays, but mostly the atmosphere protects us. And so if it's not too close, then our atmosphere will protect us. But the atmosphere has a limit, Like the gamma rays they use up the ozone. So if you have a really big burst of gamma rays from pretty nearby, not close enough that it's going to fry you instantly, but it might use up a lot of the ozone in the atmosphere and then we'll be sort of left unprotected for a while until the ozone builds back up. So that be a bad situation.
Well, I think it's interesting to think that maybe you were saying that maybe these these could be the limiting factors in how life could how widespread life could be in the universe, right, Like these are basically kind of a like a check on life in the universe. Like, if we didn't have gamma ray bursts, maybe there would be more life out there in the universe.
Yeah, it's actually interesting because it goes both ways, right, Like some galaxies, if they have a lot of these stars that are going supernova and making these gamma ray bursts, then it's pretty hard to get life started because it's just so much crazy radiation. On the other hand, you also need a bit of radiation, right. Remember, like having a particle fly through and change your DNA is a key element to evolution. It allows us to explore the evolutionary landscape by adding random mutations. So if you had zero radiation. Then you wouldn't then evolution wouldn't be as effective. Really, yeah, you need some amount.
Of evolution depends on gamma ray bursts.
Well you know how does evolution work?
Right?
Need your children to be slightly different from you? Right, they're not just a combination of union.
Then that happened randomly through biological processes like it. Really you're saying really needs radiation from out of space.
Well, you know there's two main sources there. There's transcription errors like when the DNA gets copied, there are mistakes that are made. But also yeah, radiation plays a role as well, and so you would have a slower rate of mutation if you didn't have gamma rays, if you didn't have radiation, and so you could explore different evolutionary paths not as quickly if you didn't have radiation. So you want just the right amount of radiation.
Right, So, I think what you're saying is a physicists here is making a statement that basic we're all hulk?
Is that kind of what you're exactly.
Every human being is kind of like a hulk.
It's not about being the hulk, It's about the radiation you absorbed along the way. Yeah, but so far, the closest gamma ray burst we've ever seen is like one hundred and thirty million light years away, which is still really really.
Far away, which is in another galaxy.
Right, Yeah, that's in another galaxy, and if one happened in our galaxy, that would be tough. But we think, I mean, the current estimates these are all really really rough. But is that there's like one gamma ray burst per galaxy per thousand years. I remember, there's a lot of stars in a galaxy, right, hundreds of billions of stars, so for one of them to give a gamma ray burst every thousand years means it's a pretty rare event. And that makes sense. So the reason we haven't seen any from our Milky Way is probably just that hasn't happened yet.
So wait, if we get an extra special super duper supernova in the Milky Way, that's it, right, We're toast. Well, it depends.
The Milky Way is a big place, so if it happens in the other side of the Milky Way, it's a big difference then if it happens like next door. Also, we think that these gamma ray bursts are directional, that they happen that they fly out in jets from the supernova, just like from the pulsars and quasar as we talked about. So it might not even be aimed at us. It could happen next door and we could be fine, or it could fry us.
Like it it's used these gamma rays in one direction and we might get lucky.
Exactly. We're basically playing cosmic Russian Roulette all the time. So we brought it back to us.
They're crazy. We brought crazy.
Exactly. So so we don't really know the details of how gamma ray bursts are formed, though we have a lot better understanding than we did a few decades ago. We don't know how often they happen. We just sort of hoping that one doesn't happen. But to me, the crazy thing is that gamma ray bursts travel at the speed of light, and that is an important consequence.
Yeah, because you wouldn't see it coming right exactly.
You can't possibly have any warning, right unless you can predict that a star is going to go supernova and give off a gamma ray burst. You're not going to watch every single star and try to predict which one. There's no advanced notice, right, the first thing you hear about a gamma ray burst is when it's washing over you and frying your DNA. Right, so there could be one on its way right now. How does that make you feel?
Makes me feel a little crazy toasty? Well, I think you know, it seems like there are many surprises out there in the universe, and we should be ready for them, and we should be excited for them, and we should appreciate the being here and the life we have because you know, it could really literally be snuffed out in a second at any time.
That's true. And you know, most of these cosmic mysteries just help us understand what a beautiful and crazy place this universe is. Very few of them are actually going to kill us, and so don't worry about it too much, folks. And there's nothing you can do anyway, So don't worry about.
It, that's right. Just relax, lower your heart rate that the sun is coming down, just be at peace, like Bruce Banner.
There you go, exactly. We're all Bruce Banner, see you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one Word, or email us at Feedback at danielanforge dot com. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production at 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 emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestive 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.
As a United Explorer Card member, you can earn fifty thousand bonus miles plus look forward to extraordinary travel rewards, including a free checked bag, two times the miles on United purchases and two times the miles on dining and at hotels. Become an explorer and seek out unforgettable places while enjoying rewards everywhere you travel. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank NA member FDIC subject to credit approval Offers subject to change. Terms apply.
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