SIO373: Headline Claims Neutron Star 'Defies Laws of Physics.' What Does Astrophysicist Bryan Think?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:17 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 373. I'm Thomas Smith. Boy. Well, super excited about this episode. It's a lot of fun. We got more astrophysics for you and Brian, Dr. Brian Gillis and I are going to, well, let's face it, it's him. Dr. Brian Gilliss is going to rewrite a science headline in hilarious fashion because I saw a headline and it seemed like from a moderately legitimate source, not obviously.

And the headline is, NASA confirms that cosmic object is so bright that it defies laws of physics. It's definitely not an optical illusion. So that caught my eye. It was really interesting. What I love about having the show is if I see something like this, I just send it to an expert that I know. And I'm like, hey, is this real? Is this something? What is this?

And after some back and forth, Brian thought this makes for a perfect episode because we can evaluate some bad science journalism, or maybe it's not so bad. We'll see. And he can teach us some really cool physics. On and see how it stacks up. That, a couple quick notes. For one, we're actually scheduled to record Armageddon, this month's bonus for Serious Movies. Seriously bad, awful movies. Addition to Brian Gillis, Lydia will also be joining us and another bonus guest. Going to be so much fun.

Please, patreon.com/seriouspod, second tier and above. We'll get access to that. It'll be so much fun. You don't want to miss it. Secondly, you may have noticed this episode is around late, which I hate, but it's because I just finished the final part on the James Webb telescope for Where There's Woke. Sure you've heard me plug that by now, but I just have to say, I have never worked so hard on anything in my life. I really haven't.

And really matter because if you like it, then it sucks that I worked hard on a thing that sucks. But like, I just want to communicate how much I put into this. Last episode goes into the history, the actual history of the Lavender Scare and James Webb's alleged role in it. I easily, easily [many] hours into this one episode. I've never done anything like it. It's the reason that this episode is late. It's a reason that some other deadlines have been shifted a little bit.

Anyway, I just wanted to give a plug for that. Seriously, there's so much in there. It's hardcore history, really. Think. So please check it out. The whole series is now up. And hope you'll check it out on Where There's Woke. Just search Where There's Woke in any podcast thingy. All right. That said, let's take on some science journalism, some possibly bad science journalism with Dr. Brian Gillis. Here we go. And I'm once again joined by Dr. Brian Gillis. Been too long. How you doing?

0:02:57 Bryan: Thomas. I'm doing great. How are you today?

0:02:59 Thomas: I am doing great. I am so happy because this is our first recording after the format change and it's like one of the first things I did when I thought of that was like, oh yes, now I can talk to Brian even more. I'm excited to do that that. Um, And this was I saw an article that was, you know, it seemed maybe clickbaity. It seemed like you see a lot of these from time to time that are like, yeah, this thing violates Newton's or fucking whatever, you Know, Einstein's relative, blah, blah. And I never know, like, all right, is this some bullshit or like, is it just something that's phrased a certain way or set up a certain way? But this one looked like a pretty reasonable source. You know, It wasn't like obviously one of those clickbait Facebook news bullshit things. So I sent it to you. I was like, hey, is this anything? And, you could take us through it. And it seems as though maybe it is something to take us through. So I'm excited to learn what this is about.

0:03:12 Bryan: Happy to hear it.

0:03:24 Bryan: Yeah, yeah.

0:03:49 Bryan: So, the article in question, the title is NASA Confirms That Cosmic Object Is So Bright That It Defies Laws of Physics. Subtitle, It's Definitely Not an Optical Illusion. And this is on the website Futurism, which I don't read regularly myself. Do you read it regularly, Thomas?

0:04:10 Thomas: I've seen it from time to time. And it was exactly in that Schrodinger's bullshit area. I was, like, ah, it didn't look obviously stupid, but it also could easily be. Like I would believe it if it was. So let's take that measurement and collapse the wave here.

0:04:15 Bryan: Yeah. Okay, let's talk about kind of the game of telephone that's going on in getting this to us. So, first, some scientists, they do work. They think, "Oh, this work is really good. We should get press office involved." They contact their local press office. They get in touch with journalists. Maybe they set up a meeting. So what I'm imagining happening is the journalist who wrote this talked with the scientists. They explained to him what was happening. He wrote up an article based on his understanding, submitted it to the website. Then an editor for the website reads the article and decides on a title for it based on his understanding of the article and what's going to be most clickbaity. And then we read just the title and go onto our favorite social media site and read the comments on it if we want to understand more.

0:04:59 Thomas: Yeah.

0:05:17 Thomas: So you're describing science.

0:05:19 Bryan: Yes, that's how science is done

0:05:20 Thomas: That's all how science works. Isn't that how Einstein did it with relativity? It wasn't that exact thing?

0:05:21 Bryan: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, he read the comics on Reddit. I figured it out from there. Of those steps with most of them having less and less understanding there's a lot of room for error, even if everyone's trying to act in good faith, the mistakes are going to be made. And so looking at this, reading you the title, there's the one obvious red flag of it defies laws of physics. So Whenever you hear that, it is almost certainly a red flag. It's not as bad as in health when somebody says something can cause cancer, but it's one of those red flags to look out for because it's so click-baity that they have to throw it in if there's any way to justify it.

0:05:38 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:06:06 Thomas: Well, and how often, I mean, I don't, I'm not asking for like an exact number, but like how often in, in the modern era of this kind of journalism has something like defied the laws of physics and it turned out like, oh yeah, it's correct. We got to change the laws OF physics. Is that like, you know, one, three times, zero times.

0:06:24 Bryan: Yeah, I'm trying to think of the last time there's been a legitimate change to the laws of physics, And it would be probably decades ago when the development of, well, no, more recent than that, it was the development of quantum mechanics and theories around that, because there were definitely findings there, including some experimental, which defied what were previously thought of to be laws of physics. There were some experiments, so the mid-1900s, I'd have to look up. But basically, yeah, since then, I wouldn't say we've, yeah. It's been decades. So,

0:06:35 Thomas: Yeah. 1910. Yeah.

0:06:50 Thomas: Right. Yeah, it'd been a while. Is laws of physics, they're pretty authoritarian. They don't like being defied. They're not. I mean, occasionally they're like, all right, this one, you can have this one. Well, we'll let you defy us. But no, not really. It just turns out we were wrong about what they were.

0:07:06 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Basically it. If they're saying it defies laws of physics, what it really means is we were wrong about what the laws were.

0:07:21 Thomas: Right. But that's still obviously very significant and would be amazingly interesting and groundbreaking if true. So

0:07:25 Bryan: Yeah. The title of this article, I'm thinking back to, remember our first recording on Star Wars The Last Jedi. I brought up the quote from Luke Skywalker, every word of what you just said was wrong. On this title is about a nine out of 10. So if I were to cross out every wrong or misleading word in the subtitle and title and subtitle, all I'm left with is cosmic object.

0:07:45 Thomas: Oh, really? I was like, NASA confirms object bright.

0:07:59 Bryan: Oh, I'm not even giving you NASA confirms or bright. I'm just saying cosmic object.

0:08:00 Thomas: Oh dang. All right. Well, then you could always, I mean, it's free to just add in comma laws of physics. You doesn't

0:08:11 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. So let's go into what actually happened. So the article itself isn't so bad. Of what's going on is well described by the author. This stage of the game, this is somebody who it, tried their best to say what was going on, and I think at one point made a mistake. Yeah, Yeah, overall, it's good. So I'm placing most of the blame here on the editor. Think what's going to be best, I'll just give you a brief run through of everything wrong with the title, and then we can go into what the actual science is.

0:08:54 Thomas: All right, I'll read the title. You just stop me as soon as something's wrong, okay, and then you can explain. Okay, so I'm gonna read it. Ready, "NASA

0:08:59 Bryan: Okay, stop. Stop. So I looked at the original paper. It has 21 co-authors, which, usually a good sign. Got a lot of people working on it. So the original newspaper on that note, probably pretty well -reviewed. Do you want to guess how many of them worked at a NASA institute?

0:09:00 Thomas: Oh, yeah. How many of them are NASA? This doesn't just list NASA as one of the authors? Uh, I guess none, apparently, if you're stopping me this early.

0:09:21 Bryan: No. Oh, one. One. There actually was one, but not the lead author. So, you know, that's less than 5%. I don't think we can say NASA made this discovery. Now, the way NASA was involved is they produced the telescope that this was made with. But if you think about it kind of an equivalent case, like let's say I have an Apple iPhone. I take a bunch of pictures with it, analyze those pictures and come up with a result. You don't say Apple found that.

0:09:23 Thomas: Oh, yeah.

0:09:35 Thomas: Good point.

0:09:54 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, Steve Jobs confirms. Wow, I thought he was dead. Holy moly. I

0:09:58 Bryan: Now, it is a one-off telescope made to do this, so they do get a lot of credit for designing it, but complicating it is that this wasn't actually what they were planning to use the observations for. They were doing a lot of other science with it. And what the people who worked on this paper did is they looked at the publicly available archive from what this device had already taken images of. Say I images, but they're not quite images. But anyways, they looked to the publicly available archive, downloaded it, and then did extra science to it. So

0:10:35 Thomas: Wrong with that, though. But you're just saying that means it's not NASA. Gotcha.

0:10:36 Bryan: Yeah, no, Yeah, I wouldn't credit NASA. If I were rewriting that word in the title, I would say an international team of researchers, because that's true, and it sounds great.

0:10:42 Thomas: Sure. There you go. Right, right, we're good, so how about I'll sub that in and we'll move on. Okay, so we're fixing it. International team of researchers confirms that No, already didn't even get another word in

0:10:57 Bryan: Stop. Yeah... this isn't a full confirmation. This is the most plausible alternative they bring up in the paper. They look at about four different interpretations and find one that they argue is the best, but they think there's more. I wouldn't call it a confirmation, but it's compelling evidence.

0:11:22 Thomas: Yeah, they're listing kind of, here are the interpretations that work with what we're seeing and So I assume this, this team of definitely not NASA, uh, isn't saying like, yeah, this is 100% what it is. They're just kind of putting it out there or

0:11:27 Bryan: Yeah. Yes.

0:11:38 Bryan: Yeah, definitely. They come their conclusion, and they list out like four different possibilities, they run through each one, just describe the arguments for and against each of them, and they land on this one conclusion which they argue, okay, this one seems to have the most compelling evidence for it, and to the others which have strong evidence against, and

0:12:00 Thomas: Right. That sounds more like what scientists do. I guys have probably been burned a few times about like, yeah, there's it. And then, you know, some peer review happens and you're like, oh, uh sorry, I messed that up.

0:12:03 Bryan: Yeah, yeah. Yeah Just reminds me of that time it came out in the news a few years back that neutrinos were going faster than the speed of light

0:12:18 Thomas: I was going to bring that up, actually. That was what I was trying to think of when I asked you that when's the last time the laws of physics were defied. And I remember that. And my memory was like it was people were kind of thinking maybe something could have been going on there. But yeah.

0:12:18 Bryan: Yeah yeah Yes. Because If that were true, it would defy the laws of physics, and so, yeah, that's something you could put in headlines, that some scientists think laws of physics may be defied, and, uh, they were confused about it because they couldn't figure out what was going on. It turned out to be very simple, that one of the clocks wasn't calibrated properly.

0:12:51 Thomas: Oh, man. Too bad. Always something like that. But it was interesting. I remember, you know, that was at least, you wasn't instantly obvious, right? I mean, people were like, oh, what's going on here?

0:12:53 Bryan: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they did a lot of internal research on it and couldn't figure it out and only brought it to public attention after they'd run out of ideas and said. Which is, you know, kind of how they should act. You know, if you think something defies the laws of physics, first of all, you're probably wrong. You should try your best to figure out what's going on first, and then you get other input. And it's really only after the whole community has had a chance to look at it and say, yeah, this seems to be real, do you say, okay, laws of physics defied, we're going to need to rethink them.

0:13:09 Thomas: Right, which Yeah, you have a big red stamp that says defied that you put on the paper. No, but, know, maybe it's me listening to too much Be Reasonable, but I think it's maybe important to pause there and note that that is what happens when this happens. It's not like, it's lot of people think that what happens in these cases when the laws of the physics might be wrong or defied is a bunch of scientists, you, Brian, you guys get in a room, you're probably there, you're in on it, and they're like, guys, we can't, we can't let this happen, we need to cover this up, there's no way we can let anyone know that we were wrong about something massive, conspiracy, are we all in, yes, we're all 100 of us, we're all in, nobody's going to talk, massive conspiracy, but really what happens is they're, they're like, oh, is this, do we, we can't figure out, something's probably wrong here, but like, we can figure out what it is, and then a bunch of scientists get together, and the global community is like, ah, we found it, it's the fucking clock.

0:13:37 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah,

0:14:26 Thomas: That's what happens, right?

0:14:26 Bryan: Yep. Exactly. Oh, and we should probably note, Be Reasonable, that is, a podcast. So you started listening to that, did you? Yep. Yeah. There

0:14:32 Thomas: Yeah, Michael Marshall, yeah, yeah, because I realized it was one of those ones that I always meant to listen to, but I somehow, like, it on my player, or like, you know, I got a new phone and didn't have it, just forgot, and I was like, Oh, shit, and so I've been binging it. It's, it is a lot of fun. Okay. So let oh, I'm going to have to start writing this down. Cause I'm sure by the end of this, this headline is going to be massively different. So team of researchers, I think was the first one, right?

0:14:42 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah.

0:14:55 Thomas: Team of researchers.

0:14:54 Bryan: So instead of confirms, I would say maybe argues that or proposes that.

0:14:59 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Proposes. Oh, I like proposes. Team of researches proposes that, do we get the, to keep that in there?

0:15:01 Bryan: Yeah. I'll give you that. I'll get you that

0:15:07 Thomas: Okay. All right. We're keeping that. Good job. Proposers that cosmic object. Ooh, is so, So this

0:15:14 Bryan: So good so far. Oh, we're getting a bit iffy. We're going to have to discuss what the definition of is is, but we Can do that later. Yeah.

0:15:22 Thomas: Is you. You at the dinner party are like, you know, like as I'm saying is so you're like, come on, Thomas, not a little. Don't go down this is so bright.

0:15:28 Bryan: Yeah. Stop. Yeah. Okay, so thing is, this thing is very bright, that's not under question.

0:15:35 Thomas: Oh, How bright is it?

0:15:43 Bryan: It's so bright that they knew how bright it was long before this study came out. So, Yeah. So how bright is it isn't news, so they're not confirming how bright it is, it's just like, yeah, everybody knows it's bright, don't look directly at it. Okay. Okay.

0:15:48 Thomas: Right, right, right.

0:15:59 Thomas: Yeah, that isn't really now I think about it. That seems, you Know, you're you're the you're the astronomer, you're the scientist, but seems like something you wouldn't need to look to be like, wait, we, we think this thing's really fucking bright, but let's like, look at it a little harder. That is pretty apparent, right? To, to,

0:16:17 Bryan: The brightness is the one of the easiest things to measure. The only difficulty with it is that you don't know how far away something is. And, you know, obviously, the closer something is to you, the brighter it's going to appear. And there is a bit of difficulty there. So we have two different terms for this. There's apparent luminosity, which is, you know, from us sitting on Earth, how bright does it look when we look up at it? So where, where, like, the sun has the brightest apparent luminosity, then the moon, yeah, yeah.

0:16:24 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay, yeah. Yeah, we measure that by having Trump getting on that balcony and he just looks at it without any eye protection.

0:16:50 Bryan: And then absolute is from a fixed distance, so like a distance of 10 parsecs away, how bright is it? Or if we were to calculate it out from 10 parsects, you don't have to do exactly 10, but as long as you all agree on what it is, you can get a common comparison.

0:17:06 Thomas: Yeah. As long as you do the Kessel run in less than it, it's fine. Um, why I should give it credit. So it could be, you're not really like, you know, how bright something is, but I would imagine then I'm not saying this is what's happening here, but if you were to maybe have a change in your conception of how close something was, I guess that would change your absolute right?

0:17:27 Bryan: That's correct. That isn't what happened here, but that could be the case.

0:17:28 Thomas: Okay. Right. Yeah, I was just saying. It could be,

0:17:32 Bryan: I can imagine a case, that thing we thought was kind of faint and very close is actually very far away and very bright.

0:17:33 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, so that's hypothetically possible, but that's not what happened here.

0:17:42 Bryan: No.

0:17:43 Thomas: I was trying to give him some credit. Darn.

0:17:43 Bryan: Okay. So what they actually found here is they're not changing the measurement of the brightness, but basically how much mass inflow or how much it's accreting mass, which goes into this supposed law of physics that it's violating. And it turns out it's actually ridiculously much. They found that this is taking in, oh, about one and a half times the mass of the Earth every day. So in.

0:18:10 Thomas: You say taking in or spitting out? Taking in. Okay.

0:18:14 Bryan: Yeah. So basically you've got a neutron star, which we'll talk a bit later about what exactly that is, surrounded by a ton of stuff out in the universe and orbiting around all of this junk. And about every day it's adding one and half times the mass of the earth to itself, which

0:18:34 Thomas: So it's sucking in. It's a big garbage disposal out there. That's cool.

0:18:37 Bryan: Yeah. So we'll talk more about that later.

0:18:40 Thomas: All right.

0:18:40 Bryan: But we've still got the rest of the title to get through.

0:18:43 Thomas: Yeah. But that that's a shame because I mean, that's pretty interesting. So I art. Imagine Is that something that they're not really arguing? They're just saying, or is that part of the thing that is in the model is how much it's taking in?

0:18:43 Bryan: Yeah. Oh, it is okay So the new thing here is, um, calculated how much mass it's accreting. So the scientific term when something is adding mass slowly over time is is accretion. So we say the rate of mass accretion, or you can just say the mass it's sucking in. That's good enough.

0:19:05 Thomas: Right. Sure. Okay, so that headline would have been cool though if it was like you know, it's confirms it's sucking in a whole bunch of crap, just just hoovering up everything. All right, so should we go on with the headline? Okay. So we got "Team of Researchers Argues That Cosmic Object," so we're giving it that. Is, um, now how do we change this if it's not about the brightness, you know, how are we going to modify that?

0:19:14 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:19:31 Bryan: Say, is sucking in such a ridiculously high amount of mass?

0:19:36 Thomas: Okay. Well, what you said, sucking in such a ridiculous eye of mouse, that it defy. I knew you weren't going to give me that one.

0:19:37 Bryan: Yeah. That, no, no. No, no stop. Yeah it it breaks a limit. I wouldn't say it defies a limit, but you can maybe leave the word defy in, but definitely not laws of physics. So there is a limit that it breaks. This one's called the Eddington limit. What this limit says says is that if you imagine, so imagine you have this big garbage dump in space. It's a star out yeah.

0:19:54 Thomas: Right. Okay, it's called earth. Am I right?

0:20:15 Bryan: So you've got this garbage dump, it's accreting mass from every direction around it. And what they're proposing here is that this mass comes down, collides with this object, and it collides so much that it lets out a burst of light through one of various mechanisms. So, whenever the mass hits it, it lets out a burst of light. So you've got mass being sucked in and light being shot out.

0:20:39 Thomas: Is it literally like converting mass to light, like E equals MC squared style, or is it just some like side effect of it eating, just being like yummy and then it like shines brighter?

0:20:49 Bryan: Well, it's more complicated than that. It isn't directly converting mass to light. Most of the mass stays in the form of mass, but because it's going down to a lower gravitational potential, it builds up speed as it's falling down, and then that speed energy gets converted into light through one of a few different mechanisms.

0:21:11 Thomas: Wow, that's so cool.

0:21:13 Bryan: Yeah, so basically you can think that this is slamming into it so hard it creates an explosion of light, and this is happening frequently enough that it is shining pretty much continuously out, it's like a ridiculous light show. Now the reason we get the Eddington limit is we've got these two things crossing paths. They're paths, the mask going in and the light coming out. And the mass coming in could be touched by this light. And so theoretically, you could think, well, if you take the amount of mass going in, keep that a constant, but find some magic way to crank up the dial on the luminosity of it, make it brighter and brighter. At some point, the light is going to shine so much on the mass coming in that since light has some momentum, it's not much, but it is some, there will be some limit at which point the object is shining so brightly it prevents any more mass from coming into it, yeah.

0:22:14 Thomas: Wow. And Just to clarify, because I mean, I, the first thing I think a, a you on Earth with normal, uh, intuitions would think is, oh, it's just getting getting burned up by all that light. But it's, you're saying it's not that, it's like, literally the light is stopping, like momentum wise, stopping. That is like so hard to even think about. Like it's so far away from like daily experience. Like if you shine a flashlight and I'm like, Oh, I can't move.

0:22:30 Bryan: Yeah. Okay. Here's some daily experience I can give to you. Like imagine you're playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and you've got

0:22:46 Thomas: Oh, well, I, sorry. I got to stop you. Like in the same way you're fixing this headline, um, being able to actually have time to play that that defies the laws of physics. So, sorry.

0:22:47 Bryan: Oh, Okay. Okay. So I, I won't, uh, spoil the physics of that game, okay.

0:22:59 Thomas: Don't spoil, but hypothetically in a world where I wasn't working 400 hours a day, you're saying, okay, okay. I gotcha.

0:23:05 Bryan: So Yeah. It's like imagine you're falling to the ground and you're throwing bombs below you. Whenever one of those bombs blows up, it pushes you back up. And the bomb could also push up other bombs you're throwing, and eventually it'll reach such a concentration of bombs that the bombs blowing up slow down the bombs that are trying to fall down. So you do reach some kind of saturation point.

0:23:05 Thomas: Right.

0:23:30 Thomas: Even then though, I still think of that as what, like a shock wave or something. Like it's still weird to think of that being the actual light, like literally the light itself, but that's so cool.

0:23:35 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, has such little momentum that we usually don't think about it, but it is there.

0:23:46 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, Yeah. Okay. So there, so that's the Eddington limit is like, there's a limit of how much, and is it with this exact kind of, you star going on or is this happen in more context than this?

0:23:49 Bryan: Yeah.

0:23:58 Bryan: For any object, really, would show this limit. But typically, we don't hit this because, as I said, light doesn't have much momentum to it, so it doesn't slow things down much. But we have found a number of objects that appear to violate this limit, so what I would call a law of physics. It is just, if you do this calculation based on these assumptions, you get this balancing point.

0:24:25 Bryan: But the problem is it's based on a lot of assumptions.

0:24:00 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, right. So it's not something physicists or whatever would have encoded in their massive law book.

0:24:33 Bryan: No.

0:24:33 Thomas: Like they wouldn't have passed this through like scientific science Congress and been like, yeah, sign this law of physics. It's like, no, we're thinking this is how it works. You know, is this the kind of thing that, you know, there's papers probably back and forth about it. And, you Know, it's not how settled was this before any of these observations? Do you think?

0:24:36 Bryan: Yeah.

0:24:53 Bryan: Were actually a surprising number of objects that were found that seemed to exceed this limit. And well, basically no scientist was ever calling this a law of physics. Like if you imagine the laws of physics are building the the foundation, you'll have your foundational laws and then some laws built on top of that, which we're so sure of the foundation and we're sure of how we connect that the laws on top that are basically immutable as well. And then each level you get up, you're adding more and more assumptions. And this limit here would be on like the 27th floor. It's very high up.

0:25:03 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Yeah, this is like that, that antenna that that they put up there to get a little more, you know, like height in the stats on the Wikipedia, like, no, it's actually this tall. Cause we got this big ass, you antenna on there.

0:25:37 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is where we're stretching out to see how far we can take our laws and see if it works. It's tentative. And it turns out this one didn't work because we're finding all of these counterexamples.

0:25:56 Thomas: Gotcha. So would we say, okay, so instead of defies, maybe let's say, uh, giving it a lot of, uh Cause it's from what you're saying, it sounds like this is something then we already have a lot of these counterexamples, right? So is it like further evidence that this limit is probably not quite, you know, established?

0:26:01 Bryan: So I would say it'S breaking a previously theorized limit for luminosity.

0:26:13 Bryan: Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah. And I think what's going on is that what's new here is they think there's a different mechanism here. It breaks it for a different reason than some of these other counterexamples. Let's go back to the limit. If you're imagining this happening, all of the junk falling down and light shooting up, this is happening in three -dimensional space.

0:26:40 Bryan: It's not like a one -dimensional problem where you have one doorway where things can get in and things can go out. You've got a huge number of angles. So the easiest way to think about getting around this limit is, okay, what if the mass comes in one way and the light goes out another? The hold it up.

0:26:19 Thomas: Oh, okay. Mm -hmm. Yeah.

0:26:59 Thomas: Yeah, okay, so it sounds like there could be a lot of variation just depending on the actual, like, physical characteristics of what's happening. Like,

0:27:07 Bryan: And so that's one of the assumptions going into to the calculation of the limit. It basically assumes that both the mass inflow and the luminosity are what we call isotropic, which means the same at any angle.

0:27:21 Thomas: We're assuming spherical cows. That basically, Like... exact and And it's like, oh, it turns out cow's not exactly spherical, possibly.

0:27:23 Bryan: Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So if the system isn't isotropic, if it isn't a spherical cow, then one mechanism which seems pretty physically plausible, actually, is that all the mass flowing in comes in in a certain ring around it, it gets into an orbit, and that orbit decays over time as, you know, things bump into each other, lose energy, fall in a bit, and keep falling in. And then, due to like the magnetic field of the object, that beams all of the light out of like the north and south poles of it, so the two lanes don't cross. That's a pretty plausible explanation for how you could break the limit. So that's what a lot of people thought was happening, saying, okay, we see all of these exceptions, but those are probably just cases of the lanes not crossing.

0:28:16 Thomas: Okay, they cross the streams.

0:28:18 Bryan: And this one they're thinking, no, no. I think they actually are crossing the streams here. And that's weird.

0:28:18 Thomas: Got it, okay. Interesting, so there's definitely something interesting happening here, it's just, boy, that's not at all what the headline at all should say, um. Shoot, do we need to add more to the headline, or do, what, what is it in its finished form here. Team of researchers.

0:28:27 Bryan: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I what I've written down. Down. "International group of researchers proposes that cosmic object has such ridiculously high rate of mass accretion that it might actually be breaking a previously theorized limit for luminosity." And you can tell that I am not going to get hired as a headline writer. That is way too wordy.

0:28:40 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. You're going to have to add something like seven ways to please your man after it, just because you're not, you know, just to get the click beta. So it's definitely not an optical illusion. Is that just fucking throw away? Or is there any way, what does that refer to?

0:28:59 Bryan: Yeah. Oh, so that's a misinterpretation. So what I talked about, like all the light going out the north and south, we would call that geometrical beaming if we were talking about it. And I think somehow that got misinterpreted as it might just be that we're looking directly into one of the poles of it. Like the difference between someone's shining a laser directly into your eyes versus shining it off to the side. It's going to look a lot brighter if they shine into your ears. But that's not an optical illusion. That's not what an optical illusion is.

0:29:28 Thomas: Yeah.

0:29:40 Thomas: Right. Well, also, wouldn't I mean, we're fucking we're moving all over the place over here on Earth. Like, wouldn'T that be could be shining?

0:29:48 Bryan: Well, these things are pretty big beams.

0:29:50 Thomas: Oh, OK. So it's like it's big enough that the whole time we're looking at it, we'RE still directly. Wow. OK. So the beam just covers our whole.

0:29:51 Bryan: Yeah. We're still more or less in the path of it, our

0:30:00 Thomas: Yeah. Like our whole solar system, essentially. Right.

0:30:03 Bryan: Whole solar system. Yeah.

0:30:04 Thomas: Wow. That is a big beam.

0:30:04 Bryan: Yeah. It's a pretty wide beam.

0:30:06 Thomas: OK. Well, I corrected. I didn't know they made beams that wide. So we've, um, I would think it defies the laws of physics call this headline fixed. This is just a different, this headline is now different.

0:30:06 Bryan: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes. It is Yeah.

0:30:21 Thomas: So are you going to, um. Take us through a little more detail on this? Cause this sounds really fascinating though.

0:30:25 Bryan: Yeah. What actually is going on is very fascinating. So, you know, I read the article on it, and the first read-through of the article, of mine, the article seemed pretty sensible. So it immediately struck me, okay, this is a problem with the headline, not the article. Then I went to the paper. I came up with a couple of problems with the article, but it's not enough to be critical. The author of this is doing this in good faith, and it's nothing to really be critical of there. The editor I have issues with, but not the author.

0:30:55 Thomas: Hmm. Gotcha. Yeah.

0:31:03 Bryan: So I went back to the actual paper and read through it. And I think now would be a good time to talk to the listeners about how to read a scientific paper. You know, what order to read things in. So in this case, this paper is free for anyone to view. You can follow the links in the article. I'm sure you'll give a link to the article in the show notes. And it links to the paper here. So you often look at where was this published, or has it been published, often you'll be linked pre-prints, that is just somebody who's done work but it hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, in this case it has been published, it's been published in the Astrophysical Journal, which you may not have heard of, you can search up the journal, look at what its impact factor is to get an idea of how well-respected it is. But I'm just going to cut to chase. This is a fine, well-respected

0:31:03 Thomas: Ooh, love it.

0:31:58 Thomas: Okay.

0:31:58 Bryan: Journal. No red flags there.

0:31:59 Thomas: Yeah, I was going to say I, um Um, all of that I learned from the conceptual penis hoax, all, all that. So I was just about to ask you, Oh, what's the impact factor? Is it, you know, yeah, it's all from that.

0:32:07 Bryan: Yeah, yeah, of this guarantees that it's right, but we're looking for red flags, more or less. So next, when you're reading it, you look at the title of the article and decide if it's interesting to you. Is this worth reading? So original paper is titled Orbital Decay in M82 X-2, which I swear is not the name of Elon Musk's child.

0:32:12 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Right.

0:32:34 Thomas: It could be, it might be both.

0:32:36 Bryan: Yeah, okay, okay. Yeah, it could be. People who aren't in the science, that might not strike your interest, but they wrote an article about it. So we're going to decide we're interested. Next, usually look over the authors first. You're looking for red flags, the biggest red flag is if it's a sole author, particularly in something like astrophysics, where it takes a lot of people working together to Analyze data. Now, it is possible for a sole person to download legacy from an archive and do what's called legacy science on it all on their own. But it's pretty uncommon for them to not confer with anybody else.

0:32:56 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Hmm.

0:33:16 Bryan: And if it is just one person, it's a bit of a red flag you'll want to watch. Here we've got 21 co-authors that that is common, sized team, a lot of people. And, you know, each of these people has to sign off that they agree with what's in this paper. So that is, if anything, a green flag. It means it's probably pretty well vetted.

0:33:36 Thomas: Right. Yeah. So hold on. Just to clarify, science is not done by one really crotchety old white man who everyone can't stand, but he's so genius that they have to keep working with him. And then he just goes, I've got it. And they're like, what? What have you got? And then, he doesn't explain it because then that would be too easy. He's got to be like, it's so simple.

0:33:57 Thomas: Yeah, and then he writes a bunch of stuff on the blackboard, a bunch equations, and the confused students are like, ah, I don't know. What does he talk? It's so, and then he just leaves the room. That's not how science is done.

0:33:37 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, he just tells them, yeah, do your own research.

0:34:09 Thomas: Okay. Darn.

0:34:10 Bryan: There some cases where you'll have something written by an individual person in theoretical science, but often that won't be experimentally verified. And the ones you want to look at are the verifications because you can come up with the models upon models upon models of how the universe might work, but you need to test how it does work. And that these days, at least, it takes a lot of people working together. There's very few experiments left that can be done by a single person. Yeah.

0:34:24 Thomas: Right.

0:34:39 Thomas: Bad, but also, yeah, that's inevitable. Makes sense.

0:34:41 Bryan: Yeah. All the low-hanging fruit has been picked off. People have done all the easy experiments. And now we have to do the hard ones. Yeah, part of reading a paper is the abstract. This is basically the authors of the paper wrote a summary of it for you. So this is how they boil down their results. And the abstract is only a paragraph long, so I'm just going to read it out. M82X2 is the first pulsating ultraluminous X-ray source discovered. The luminosity of these extreme pulsars, if isotropic, implies an extreme mass transfer rate.

An alternative is to assume a much lower mass transfer date, but with an apparent luminosity boosted by geometrical beaming. Only an independent measurement of the mass transfer rate can help discriminate between these two scenarios.

In this paper, we followed the orbit of the neutron star for seven years, measure the decay of the orbit, uh, they give a bit of numbers here to estimate it, I won't read that out, and argue that this orbital decay is driven by extreme mass transfer of more than 150 times the mass transfer limit set by the Eddington luminosity, yeah, so it's more than, um, times what you would expect

0:34:45 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. Well,

0:35:49 Bryan: To be possible from

0:35:49 Thomas: Shoot, there's your clickbait headline. Come on. I mean, that is, s a lot. I just assumed this was going to be like, yeah, you know, 110% of it or

0:35:50 Bryan: Yeah yeah it's not like we got like 10 % over, no, this is 150 times as much. Yeah, there

0:35:57 Thomas: Yeah yeah exactly no oh shit, that's okay put that in your headline, damn it, that's really I'm interested, yeah.

0:36:04 Bryan: We go, yeah, the abstract, if this is true, the mass available to the accreter is more than enough to justify its luminosity with no need for beaming. This also strongly favors models where the accretor is a highly magnetized neutron star. So, there you have it. That's their summary of it. And yeah, Yeah, if you're not into astrophysics, a lot of those words probably went over your head. But often, if You're Not Into It, the abstract will give you at least an idea of what they're trying to get across.

0:36:34 Thomas: Abstract is also known as, often the only part I can read, because it's only part that's not behind a paywall. Oh,

0:36:41 Bryan: Yeah, are they getting better about that. There's been a push in recent years that any science that relied upon public funding to get done should be available for the public.

0:36:50 Thomas: Yeah. That's a great point.

0:36:51 Bryan: Public. Yeah, and so a lot of countries are instituting laws for that. And so this article here is publicly available. I'm reading it off of my home computer right now, not at the Institute, so anyone can click through, read the whole thing. Astrophysics has been a bit ahead of the curve on that in a few ways. There's been a habit of putting at least preprints up to be publicly available for quite a long time. But it's nice that it's getting enshrined into law in most places now so that the public can see what they paid for with their tax dollars.

0:36:51 Thomas: Oh. Cool, yeah.

0:37:26 Thomas: No kidding, and I would, I mean, I don't know how this works, but I, you know, many of these papers are above me and I, you know, wouldn't be able to follow along, but I'm often, I'm like, oh, I want to check this out. And I wish there was like one thing I could pay for. Like, even if it was still paid, if there was one fucking, I don't know, Amazon of scientific papers where it's like, yeah, okay, I'll pay some money to whatever. It's a business expense for me. I want to read these things. But isn't it like every single goddamn different journal you would have to like subscribe to to be able to read a lot of these things? Yeah.

0:37:58 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. A lot of the journals are held by the same brand, El Salvié, I think it is, however you pronounce that, owns a lot of journals. It's a huge monopoly, and they charge extortionate prices, uh, to read it. Like, if you want to read one article you'd have to pay like 50 bucks or something, it's insane, and they don't want their profits to go away just because the government is mandating, uh, all of this is open to the public. So now they've just shifted to charging those extortion rate rates to the people who want to publish. So now we're shifting things around that we have to find somewhere in our departmental budget a way to pay for all of the papers we want to publish.

0:38:12 Thomas: Exactly Even from a capitalistic hellscape of view, though, there's got to be some market of me's that would nowhere in a million years pay anything like fifty dollars an article for every article or subscribe to journals for hundreds of dollars, whatever, but would pay, like, I would pay something to be able to read a lot of these. And that's business, that, you maybe they would lose out because I would, share I it too much or pirate it to people. But like, I dunno, I would pay something to be able to read all these things. And the other thing is also, if this at all went to the scientists or to any good part of the process, I wouldn't mind paying, but like ,I imagine it doesn't.

0:38:52 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah we get nothing.

0:39:15 Thomas: Oh, that's stupid.

0:39:16 Bryan: Absolutely zero goes back to the authors of that. It all goes to the profits of El Salvié and some amount to the editors it employs and then their expenses. And that's it. The scientists working on it get zero.

0:39:20 Thomas: Damn.

0:39:35 Thomas: Too bad. Too bad. All All right. Well, that aside,

0:39:40 Bryan: So reading the article, you've read through the abstract and you still want to know more. So at this point, where you look depends a bit on what you want to note. But the three next most important places to look are the introduction, the conclusion, and any pictures. Pictures are often where they try to get across the point the best. It's kind of a self -fulfilling prophecy. They know that people are only going to look at the pictures, so they put the best information. They try to find a way to shoehorn it into a picture, and then people know the best information is going to be in the pictures, so they keep only looking at the pictures.

0:40:12 Thomas: And that's Yeah, yeah.

0:40:18 Bryan: This has only a handful of figures, actually. When you're trying to read through, you search for what they call the money plot, which is this one paper sums up the finding of this. So figure 1 is a bunch of probability diagrams of fitting a bunch of parameters. Okay, there's a bit of information there, but if you read the caption the first word is example. Okay that's just an example. It's not summarizing thing. Scroll down. Figure 2. Okay this one's a lot simpler.

You see kind of a scatter plot with a line fit to it on the left and more probability probability distributions on the right. But the left looks promising. That's nice and simple, like they're trying to boil things down. You go to the figure. Left, orbital decay in M82X2, measured through the delay of the T-sk. Well, we don't know what T-sk is because we skipped forward to the figures. We'll have to look back through the paper if we want to figure that out.

The T-sk parameter. Oh, parentheses, time of passage through the ascending node. Oh. Oh, so the author's predicted, you know, you're going to skip to the figure, aren't you? Okay, we're goingto redefine that for

0:41:29 Thomas: You might be losing me in the audience a little. Is that intentional? Are you trying to illustrate?

0:41:31 Bryan: You. Yeah, yeah, is at the stage where they're writing for scientists. They don't expect the public to get this deep. Will stop at the abstract. But I'm giving you an idea of how a scientist reads this.

0:41:37 Thomas: Yeah yeah, of course. Yeah we rely on someone to write a really terrible clickbait headline for us to get our science input. How I accrete science? Yeah.

0:41:49 Bryan: Exactly. Yeah. And find I'm seeing here is, you know, everything I've read so far tells me the key focus of this paper is not, as the headline says, how bright this object is, but it's how much mass inflow there is. And the way they're measuring that inflow is in basically the orbital decay, as they call And orbital decay actually means the orbit is getting faster and faster, because as things get closer together, gravity is stronger and can cause it to go in tighter circles. So this is why the planet Mercury orbits the sun faster than Jupiter does, because Mercury's in closer. So orbital decay means that something is losing energy, coming in closer to the neutron star that's at the center of this. And so putting the pieces together of what they've said in the abstract, they went out and what they actually measured was the orbital decay. That is, they tracked this over a long period of time and figured, okay, how much is the orbit decaying?

Plugged it into a bunch of equations and said, Okay, if it's decaying that much, then this is the amount of mass that's going into it over time. And, whoa, that is a ridiculous amount of Mass. That's one Earth every day. That's more than 150 times the Eddington limit. This is wild.

0:42:04 Thomas: Right. Right. Yeah.

0:43:18 Thomas: Okay, so at first I, you were talking about the um, of the orbit of the, of the junk that's going in the garbage disposal, but no, it's because this thing is building up mass, that's what makes its orbit around something else? Wait.

0:43:32 Bryan: No, no, this is orbits the junk and the junk orbits it. Now,

0:43:36 Thomas: It's like a binary system. Pluto.

0:43:38 Bryan: It's like Pluto and its moon, Charon, is the best way to think about it. That Pluto and Charon.

0:43:45 Thomas: Has a moon named Karen? Did, did Pluto's Moon was the one that called us and told it, hey, this guy's not a planet? I don't want to be a total Karen, but okay, Pluto's Moon Called The

0:43:48 Bryan: C-H-A-R-O-N. Yeah, it's not spelled like that, but it is pronounced like that.

0:43:59 Thomas: Called The manager of the solar system. And it was like, this fucking guy's not a planet over here. Okay. Cannot that. All right.

0:44:07 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, spelled C-H-A-R-O-N. But you might have heard that the orbit a point inside Pluto. It orbits a point slightly outside of Pluto, and Pluto also orbits that point, because gravity, two things attract each other. When you have two things of comparable mass to each other, each orbits the other one. So here, the pile of junk orbits the neutron star, and the neutron star orbits the pile of junk, which from what we've seen here isn't set up symmetrically around the star, but is probably off to one side. Like at some point in the past, there was a pile of junk out there. The neutron star was going by the neighborhood, saw a nice yummy pile of junk and decided to have a snack and never left.

0:44:15 Thomas: Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Okay. And is that part of the reason why Pluto was not a plant? Is like, hey, look, its own moon isn't even fucking, it doesn't even have the gravitas to have its own moon orbiting it?

0:45:05 Bryan: Yeah, that actually is, I think that went into the definition that it hasn't cleared its own orbit because the moon is so significant relative to it.

0:45:08 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I still think it was Karen calling the manager of the solar system. Okay. So, makes more sense. That why I was kind of confused about which things orbit we were talking about, because we're kind of talking about both things, really, right? Oh,

0:45:17 Bryan: Well, we can't rule that out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they orbit with the same time period. So they may be different distances out from the center of mass of the system, but they'll both take the same amount of time to go around it overall. So you can measure the time period. So, the neutron star is what's bright. It's the thing we can actually see. And so, if you look at it for a while and measure where the light from it is coming in from, and look at other things as well, like the redshift of the light will differ at different parts of the orbit. Like, when it's coming towards us, the light will be a bit blue shifted, and when it is going away it will be redshifted.

0:45:39 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, all All right. Love that. Is that Doppler or no?

0:46:07 Bryan: Um, Basically, yes, it's the same reason as the Doppler effect, the exact same math goes into that, with a bit of relativity corrections, but Yeah, it's a Doppler shift, um, you can use that to figure out when it's going around, and the device that was used to measure it, it turned out that they had a ton of measurements of these, this, over the course of like seven years, and a lot of those measurements were taken over a decent period of time themselves. They were basically videos instead of images. So you've got a lot of data you can use to piece together how it was orbiting at any given time and how that orbit evolved over time.

0:46:09 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, of course. Always.

0:46:47 Thomas: And it's changing fast enough for seven years to be like a significant...

0:46:50 Bryan: And Yeah, it is. Most things in astrophysics are pretty slow. But once you get into supernovae, neutron stars, and black holes, you do see some pretty quick things. Like, a supernova takes about a couple of weeks to happen. Like a super nova were to go off in our galaxy, which hasn't happened for hundreds of years, but there are historical records of, you'll see a new star in the sky for like two weeks and then it's gone.

0:46:52 Thomas: Oh, wow. Wow.

0:47:18 Thomas: Yeah. I want that to happen so badly. That is so cool.

0:47:21 Bryan: Yeah, it would be so cool.

0:47:22 Thomas: I've read about that. I'm like, come on, man. Just give us one.

0:47:26 Bryan: That's the the type of thing you can only hope to live through it. But

0:47:29 Thomas: Yeah, and we'll have to talk about that another time because I'm pretty sure based on where it is, like, that could look incredible, right? Like, couldn't it blow up, like to be as big as almost, you know, as big as the moon or something relative in our night sky? I think I read that once, but it could be a bullshit.

0:47:36 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Depending on the luck, it could be, it Could be just a new star. It could be very beautiful. Or it could be the end of life on Earth.

0:47:48 Thomas: Oh yeah. Okay. That's so maybe, maybe I shouldn't root for this too hard. Although it depends. We'll see how the next election goes.

0:47:52 Bryan: Yeah, yeah yeah. Let's wait and see. But anyways a lot of this stuff is quick neutron stars in particular have some very fast things happening. Like the The neutron stars themselves spin, in addition to the fact that they can orbit something else. And they can spin. And what's interesting is that often neutron stars, we talked about they have geometrical beaming of the light. This is very common. But that direction isn't necessarily going to be perfectly aligned with the axis it spins around. Just like on Earth, there are technically like three different north poles of Earth.

0:48:17 Thomas: Yeah, hmm.

0:48:29 Bryan: There's the traditional North Pole that it rotates around, and there's a couple different definitions of magnetic North Poles. One's an average, one's the point it comes out of the ground vertically. And I think the magnetic North Pole is off in Canada somewhere, last I checked. And so those are misaligned, and so as Earth rotates around, the line going up from the magnetic pole rotates around and points at different things. Now imagine, instead of Earth, this is a neutron star. So what's going out of the magnetic pole is a gigantic beam of light. So it's far off away, sometimes that beam might be pointing at us, but then it rotates away, way, and it appears dimmer. It's off at an angle, but then it quickly rotates back and we see it again. And this results in what was traditionally called a pulsar.

0:48:29 Thomas: Yeah yeah.

0:49:21 Thomas: Pulsar. Yeah I

0:49:22 Bryan: So if you ever hear pulsar, it's a neutron star that is rotating in such a way that it spins around the beam of light, it shoots out and pulses very, very quickly.

0:49:33 Thomas: Cool. I should have asked this from the beginning, what something a neutron star specifically and why that sounds like that's the only kind of star that can be a pulsar, or is that wrong, based

0:49:43 Bryan: It is. And the trick is a neutron star isn't really a star. It's something that's traditionally called a star, but it doesn't do what we think of that stars do. So a neutron star is a nuclear fission engine in space where atoms are, sorry, fused, no, stars are fusion, sorry. And stars are not those. So they fuse together atoms. Different types of stars will fuse different types of atoms. Like yellow stars is mostly fusing hydrogen into helium. Giants fuse helium into other higher elements up to around carbon or so, I think. I'd have to look that up. And then supernovae, for the brief time they happen, sorry to be clear, type 2 supernova, there are two types, it doesn't really matter, type

0:49:56 Thomas: Stars are just like us That's not What a star Is, yeah Nice

0:50:39 Bryan: Two supernova are fusing all the way up to basically everything on the periodic table we see at the various stages of it. So stars are fusion engines, and neutron stars are not fusion engines. They sit there. So to get to what a neutron star is, we really have to go kind of past the supernova stage. So Essentially, what happens is, as a star fuses up all of the material it has, it will start to collapse in on itself. So this is kind of like the Eddington limit. It holds itself out by the heat and light it produces, and that keeps it from getting too hot, because once everything collapses under gravity, they gain energy by collapsing together. But once it runs out of fuel, it starts to collapse again.

So when a yellow star collapses again, I should say main sequence is the technical term, but we can think of it as a yellow star, once it collapses again, it's able to ignite helium fusion, then it goes into red giant, it runs out of helium, collapses once more, and at this point, if it's massive enough, it can supernova of all of the other things fusing into a ton of different stuff, which causes a massive explosion.

Since this is so energetic, so rapid, and it blasts off the outer layers of the star, and inside it, it causes an interior explosion, pushing the core denser and denser. And point, we kind of get a bit of a-your-own-adventure as to what happens next, depending on the mass of the star. If it's very not massive, we'll get what's called a white dwarf. This is basically all of the matter that's been left over just piles up.

You have atoms of a lot of stuff that's just laying there, and it's hot. Because it's hot, it glows. It gives off light. This is what they call a white dwarf, and it is theorized that eventually, over billions and billions of years, it will cool down so much that it no longer gives off any light and become a black dwarf. We don't believe any of these exists because it would take more time than the universe

0:51:02 Thomas: Nice. Hmm. Ah,

0:53:00 Bryan: Has been around.

0:53:00 Thomas: Gotcha.

0:53:01 Bryan: But yeah, the future, there will be black dwarfs, but not right now. So the other alternative, if it's a bit more massive than that, what happens is that the force of gravity on the remaining clump of matter is so strong that the atoms can't hold themselves apart. There's this one law of quantum mechanics called the Fermi exclusion principle, which basically says that two fermions, which is a specific type of matter, which atoms and electrons are, can't be in the same place as each other. There's a limit to that. And the limit is effectively hit for electrons when, let's say, if the remaining white dwarf is more than one and a half times the mass of our sun, it'll reach this limit and the Fermi exclusion force won't be enough to keep it propped up and the atoms will essentially collapse together.

0:54:00 Thomas: Wow.

0:54:00 Bryan: So, yeah, essentially you're crushing atoms together. The electrons that orbit the protons and neutrons get collapsed into the core. The electrons and protons merge together to become neutrons and neutrinos. So you get a burst of neutrinos coming out and a burst of light coming out. This would typically happen around the same time as the supernova, so it just goes to fuel it more. And so all you're left with is a bunch of neutrons. And so when you just have a clump of neutrons, that's what we call a neutron star, even though it isn't really a star, because it's not doing fusion. It's just the historical name since you be seen to be bright like a star and was often thought to be a star because of all the interesting things that happen around it.

0:54:48 Thomas: The question was, what's a neutron star? And you just delivered like an amazing TED Talk, like rapid fire without stopping. That was impressive. I won't pretend I followed all of that, but it's interesting. Why is it a star? Okay, so it's not a star because it's not doing fusion, but what does it, I guess, look like to us? Like if there's one of these nearby by that we could, maybe there is, I don't know, but like with a naked eye, does it just look to me like, oh yeah, that's a star or what's actually happening there? Is it still giving off all kinds of light?

0:54:50 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah.

0:55:15 Bryan: So the ways neutron stars give off light aren't really from what they're doing themselves. So when a normal star gives off light, that's the energy created from fusion. When a white dwarf does, that it's shedding its remaining heat. For a neutron star, it really only gives off light because of what it's doing with the environment. So you've still got something there. And, you used to be a star around it.

There's a supernova remnant around it, so there's a lot of junk out in space where it was left, and it may by chance collide with other junk in space in the future. And as this junk falls down, that junk is going to pick up energy. And then once it picks up energy, there's a lot of ways that translates to light. One of these is kind of a basic electromagnetism rule that whenever a charged particle accelerates, it gives off light.

This is like you have the surface of water and you jiggle the surface, you cause waves in it. So if you have a charged particle, you jiggled the charged particles, you caused waves of light. So as things accelerate towards the neutron star, they give off light. And since the neutron start is so dense, it creates a very deep gravitational well, so things can accelerate a ton before they actually hit

0:56:19 Thomas: Huh? Wow.

0:56:34 Bryan: It. So they end up giving off a lot of light, uh,

0:56:37 Thomas: And that's enough to make it look like a star? That's crazy. Had no idea. There's just this whole different kind of star out there doing a different thing, but still giving off enough light for, you know, me to think it's a start. Crazy.

0:56:39 Bryan: Yeah.

0:56:49 Bryan: There's a lot of weird things going on with neutron stars. They are some of the craziest things in the universe. They're basically neutron stars, basically exist at the point of the universe where you've taken things to the most extreme you can get before everything breaks down and you get a black hole. So they're just at the the edge of craziness, where we see all the craziness that is possible before it swallows itself up.

0:57:16 Thomas: I guess my last question on that would be, is the junk pile because of that explosion? Or you said, um, this particular one we're looking at in this article, do we know, or does it matter if it's like it's its own junk pile that it's then reabsorbing or is it a different

0:57:30 Bryan: So in this case, it seems to be a different junk pile. If it's reabsorbing its own one, the one that came out of it is going to be distributed pretty evenly in all directions. So It's not likely to orbit it very much. But if it comes across something else that it starts pulling in, it's like you can imagine if our sun were to go supernova and blow things off, and then later Jupiter started falling into it and it started eating what used to be a gas giant around it. Something like that could have happened. Taking in something else. That's why we see the significant orbit to it. Think what's most important here to understanding why the laws of physics are getting really strange is the magnetic field of the neutron star. And this is one of the points where we don't fully understand why neutron stars have magnetic fields as strong as they do, but they are ridiculously, insanely strong. Like, at the low end, a neutron star will have a magnetic field a hundred million times that of Earth's magnetic field.

0:57:41 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. Hmm. Okay Uh, Oh, a hundred million. This is where I, I, for whatever reason in science, magnetic fields were where I was, where I was just like, I just don't get it, man. I don't know what it is. Like, what, why does that happen? What does it mean? Is it just like all the forks in that galaxy are going to just go and then it's all like an actual magnet, or is it not an actual magnetic? It's something else. What is a magnetic field?

0:59:02 Bryan: And Okay.

0:59:02 Thomas: I don't know. Do we have time to answer that?

0:59:04 Bryan: I could answer it if you want. It's crazy. Short answer, magnetic field is the second order effect effect that you get when you combine an electric field with special relativity. It's weird.

0:59:16 Thomas: For our purposes today, what is that magnetic field doing that's, we need to worry about? What's that, that causing? Is

0:59:22 Bryan: Magnetic field will change the way charged particles move through it. So if you have a static magnetic field and send a charged particle through it, it will start to spin around in a spiral through it. Charged particles like to orbit around magnetic field lines. So way we see this on Earth is that very often near the North and South Pole you'll get a bunch of charged particles coming into the atmosphere. They see these magnetic field lines going up and so they rotate roughly around these lines, stay there for a while, and then, as I said before, accelerating charged particles emit light. So we see these dancing lights near the north and South Pole, that we call the northern, southern lights, or aurora. And so this very thing happens with neutron stars as well. They have ridiculously strong magnetic fields, and so when charged particles come by, they start rotating ridiculously fast around, should say orbiting, I keep saying rotating but they orbit around it, and then they, um, charges, you get light. You get a ton of light from these huge magnetic fields.

1:00:02 Thomas: Ah, that's Right. If we're talking a hundred million times out of earth, I guess we're getting a hundred billion times the Aurora Borealis or whatever.

1:00:31 Bryan: Yeah. And remember, that's at the low end. The pi end is one quadrillion times, so that's a hundred million times ten thousand. It gets ridiculous.

1:00:43 Thomas: Holy shit. Now, is that something, is That contribute to the brightness of the thing or cause like, if I think of the Northern lights, I visible from only specific places, right? Or is it, okay.

1:00:54 Bryan: Yeah? You basically have to be close enough to the north or south to it, because otherwise the body of the earth will get in the way.

1:01:02 Thomas: That might be stupid. Sorry. But I was thinking of it. Is it like a rainbow where it's like a certain angle or is it like, Could you see it if you were above it? Like if you were somehow in space?

1:01:09 Bryan: Yeah. You can see them from above, so a rainbow is an optical illusion that doesn't really come from a specific place, but the, um, uh, come from specific places and these places are near the, the poles, as that's where the field lines are the strongest, and they can rotate kind of in place. In And now you go to a neutron star, you enhance the field lights and you get lights like these, yeah.

1:01:12 Thomas: Okay. Okay, cool.

1:01:21 Thomas: Gotcha. Okay.

1:01:34 Thomas: So if we're talking a, a hundred, good, meaningless number I didn't understand, and you can yeah Does that mean we can see their Northern Lights from here almost? Is it that crazy? Is that that's all we see oh, okay, that's one, gotcha.

1:01:38 Bryan: One quadrillion, a one followed by 12 zeros. Oh that is what we see? That's the light we see from it, or at least one component there Other ways light can be produced.

1:01:52 Thomas: Gotcha.

1:01:53 Bryan: This is just one example. It can also be produced by things slamming into the neutron star. Once they finally hit ground, they have to let that energy out somehow, and there are a lot of ways that can happen. But in one way or another, it gets turned into light and emitted out. And in this paper, the is actually what they think is happening, is that there is so much mass being sucked into this neutron star that the impact of this mass hitting the star keeps shooting out light that reaches this insane luminosity we see.

1:01:53 Thomas: Okay, wow.

1:02:28 Thomas: Crazy, so

1:02:29 Bryan: Yeah, how are we getting around the Eddington limit, because what they've seen shown in this paper is that it looks like the mass inflow and light coming out isn't due to geometrical beaming. If it were the Northern Light stuff, you can maybe expect, yeah, that's going to be clustered around the poles, but mass slamming into it, I don't know, that's gonna go out in every direction. So how is it that mass is going in faster than it should be able to? The light it's creating should blow the mass back and slow it down so that it never gets as bright as it is. So here they come across this puzzle. They've shown that the mass inflow is too much. It, it doesn't seem to make sense. So this is where the really interesting physics, yeah, all of this stuff up till now, that was the boring physics. Now we're going to talk about the interesting physics, yeah.

1:02:32 Thomas: Okay cool uh

1:03:23 Bryan: So the interestingysics is, again, this magnetic field. And so, as I mentioned, magnetic fields change the way charged particles move. And think back to what an atom is. You've got charged protons and neutrons at the center. They're heavy, they don't move very much. Then you've got a light electron out kind of in orbit ish around it. It's quantum mechanics, it's not a true orbit, but it is moving around it, and then this magnetic field enters the picture.

So if you imagine you had something orbiting, but now, oh, it wants to spiral around this magnetic field. What happens is the, the path that the electron takes changes from being just like a simple orbit. We're imagining this is how it is, this isn't how it actually is, it's more like a probability cloud, but we don't need to get into it. It changes from a simple orbital to a very long, stretched out cylinder of places the electron can be.

So it's like if an atom is a beach ball, the surface of the beach ball is where the, the electron might be, it gets transformed into a gigantic, long, thin straw. So this field causes crazy things to happen. Atoms stop behaving like atoms, they're so stretched out. And so what they think here is because these atoms are so stretched out, out, they're no longer capturing light as well as they used to be able to.

1:04:56 Thomas: Sorry, the atoms aren't capturing light like like light is not just refracting or some other weird thing?

1:04:58 Bryan: So, usually what happens when light hits an atom is that it gets absorbed by the electron in orbit around the atom. That electron gets bumped up to a higher energy level. And then eventually later, it falls back down. And when it fallsback down later, it emits another burst of light. So the atom briefly captures the energy and then lets it go in a different direction.

1:05:23 Thomas: Is That just what, like, reflection is, or okay what is this like, in, in daily object terms, what do we, just when light hits, it's anything, or, oh, okay.

1:05:27 Bryan: Reflection is more complicated than that. Yeah, this is absorption. This is like a white surface. That is, all the light gets absorbed and then later back out in a random direction. So you see the total amount of light that hits a pure white surface. You just don't see the specific directionality of it because it all gets scrambled.

1:05:52 Thomas: Gotcha. Okay.

1:05:53 Bryan: These atoms, you can think of them as just like a white wall closing in on it, but all of a sudden the magnetic field enters the picture and the individual atoms go from a sphere to a long thin cylinder. So because they're like this, for quantum mechanic reasons that we are not getting into on a podcast, they get a lot less good at capturing light.

1:06:15 Bryan: And the magnetic egg field is so ridiculously strong, the atoms get ridiculously less good at capturing light.

1:06:14 Thomas: Okay, okay, so let's picture we've got a big white t -shirt outside of this planet, and all the atoms do this cylinder -y thing, and so instead of seeing like, oh the white t -shirt, and it's kind of, you know, bright or whatever, but we can't see like, it's not like there's a focused like reflection beam off of it, but now what do we see? Now it's like not absorbing at all right,

1:06:22 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, now, the this t -shirt has been stretched out into a single thread wrapping around the planet, so if you were to try to, you know, like, blow up against a t - shirt with air, there's a lot of surface area to capture, but when it's been stretched out into a thread, it it isn't supported as well. And so a lot more air can get by without slowing down the mass nearly as much.

1:07:04 Thomas: And and so that's why this thing could be brighter than we think it should be, or

1:07:09 Bryan: That's basically how it is. Because remember, the Eddington limit is a balance of mass inflow and luminosity. There's a certain point at which the mass coming in is fueling just enough luminosity that the luminosity won't slow down the mass anymore. And if he tried to put in more mass, it would increase the luminosity, blow the mass back, and slow it right back down to that equilibrium point. But if you introduce this ridiculous magnetic field that neutron stars have, you can think of it like pieces of paper are floating down, the air is blowing back to hold them up, but this magnetic field turns all the paper sideways, and so the air slips right

1:07:18 Thomas: Yeah, okay, yeah, interesting. Okay. And so whereas previously you might have been just calculating, like, wow, look, if you look at all the mass of the papers, you like this amount, and that should do, but if they're all aligned a certain way. Okay, interesting.

1:07:55 Bryan: By them. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's what's going on here, um, authors believe, so

1:08:11 Thomas: A question. In thinking of that analogy, and I know analogies aren't perfect, is the thing that's happening that the papers aren't getting blown back as much by the light, or is it that we can see the light better than we would think, and so we're measuring that it's brighter than it should be because the light is going through the pieces of paper in a way that we didn't expect?

1:08:32 Bryan: It's that the papers aren't getting blown back as much. There, is a little bit of the latter happening, but the primary is, um, that the light just isn't catching, um, The air isn't catching the paper, or the light isn't getting caught by the atoms. Yeah, this brings us back to the paper here. So what the paper actually said, if you go back to what the abstract said, their key finding was just about the mass inflow rate.

1:09:00 Bryan: And they just mentioned one sentence at the end, which says, this also strongly favors models where the accreter is a highly magnetized neutron star. So, what it turns out is, unlike what this paper didn't come up with this idea themselves. This idea was proposed, least, back in 2015, so it wasn't a new idea. It's just that this paper sets out the evidence to show that it looks like that is the best idea, and that might actually be correct for what's going on here.

1:08:35 Thomas: Okay. Okay, okay. Okay,

1:09:35 Bryan: Are. Yeah. Yeah.

1:09:36 Thomas: And when you say that's what's going on here, was it with just this one specific object, or was it just in the theory, like in the framework?

1:09:44 Bryan: With at least this one object, possibly others, there are a lot of other objects that look very bright. And this, you, neutron stars seem to have ridiculous magnetic fields. So it's quite likely this is going on with others as well. I think kind of the end result of this is showing that the Eddington luminosity isn't really a good guide for the maximum luminosity see an object can have, because the magnetic fields complicate it so much that it, we're going 150 times over it. It's not a good limit.

1:09:48 Thomas: Okay yeah yeah yeah exactly it's not even a good guideline at at that point. Wow.

1:10:21 Bryan: It'd be like saying the speed limit at 70 miles per hour and everybody's going a thousand. That's not the limit.

1:10:28 Thomas: That to the original headline of NASA confirms that object is so bright that it defies the laws of physics. Yeah, no, that's not good. That's a bad headline. That is not even within the boundaries of like, okay, you are click baiting it up. That was just wrong on every level. But really fascinating to learn about what's, what is actually going on there. So cool stuff.

1:10:33 Bryan: No, yeah, yes, oh, yeah, neutron stars are just fascinating, yes.

1:10:49 Thomas: Sure there's many more, uh, topics that'll be spawned just from that one conversation. Hey, anyone wants to find more from you, where should they go before assuming, you know, in between your appearances on this show, of course, and

1:10:59 Bryan: Yeah, So what I decided to do, inspired by my appearance on this show, is to spin off into a YouTube channel where I talk about, uh, astrophysics and video games as I play through them. So I started off with some Portal, talking about how Portal can teach us about theoretical physics, and I've also done the Outer Wilds and some Tears of the Kingdom as well. So you can find that if you search for my name, Brian Gillis, that's b-r-y-a-n-g-i-l-l-i-s on YouTube, or Astrophysicist Plays Portal, or Astrophysicist Plays Outer Wilds, any of those will get you to my videos. You have a look and enjoy.

1:11:35 Thomas: The link of course in the show notes, I'll put the link in the show. Uh, that's so cool. I'm glad you're doing that. I

1:11:38 Bryan: Oh, thank you. Be warned, if you go to the Portal video, there will be spoilers for when Thomas and I do a Portal episode.

1:11:46 Thomas: I'm sure there's plenty of astrophysics and theoretical physics to go around, though. That's so cool. Congrats on that. I can't wait to see it and I can't wait to share it with people. Brian Gillis thanks so much again for coming on and explaining that to us that was really fascinating and check out Brian's channel click

1:11:50 Bryan: Yeah. Thank you. Right, thank you very much, Thomas.