Predicting Supernovae, The Truth About Binary Stars, Creating a Pet Black Hole | Q&A 234

Could we know what's going on inside a star just by measuring its neutrinos? Could we make our own mini black hole and feed it? And are alien civilizations making stars disappear from the sky? All this and more in this week's question show. It's time for the question show, your questions, my answers. As always, wherever you are across my channel, the question pops into your brain. Just write it down, I'll gather them up and I will answer them here. Just a reminder, I record the show every Monday at 5pm pacific time. So if you want to be a part of the live conversation, ask your questions, see follow up questions from other people have a big conversation. Definitely join us every Monday at 5pm for the live stream here on my channel. Now before I get into this week's questions, I just want to thank everybody who just hammered me with questions on the most recent space bites episode I asked you for questions. You delivered there were some beautiful questions, hundreds. And so I'm trying to think about what to do with them. But just like, thank you so much for stepping up and give me a lot of really interesting things to think about. I've got like 30 browser windows in front of me open right now with all kinds of research that I've been doing. So it's been awesome. All right, let's get into the questions. Nicholas mode 6906. Since you want more questions, Fraser, how about this one? In stars more than eight solar masses, the sort that will end in a type two core collapse supernova. Is there a way to tell at which stage of core burning they are at say, silicon burning versus carbon burning by the neutrino flux or some other measurement? Wouldn't that be amazing that you could just point your giant neutrino telescope at any star that you wanted and instantly get a sense of the stage of that star's life because of the kinds of neutrinos that are coming from that star, their energy levels, that would be great. But of course, you know, you don't have a giant neutrino telescope, you point at a target, you have a one kilometer cube of ice in Antarctica that is able to detect neutrinos passing through it. And mostly the neutrinos that are passing through say ice cube are the neutrinos coming from the sun you like you getting very, very few neutrinos that are coming from other sources. So I want to sort of talk about like, theoretically, and then also talk practically, theoretically, yes, that the amount of fusion that's going on inside the star will relate to the amount of neutrinos that are coming from it. And it's kind of surprising because, like the stage and the type of fusion that's going on in the star produces different amounts of neutrinos. So you wouldn't think like you think like, oh, there's, they're moving up the table of elements, the elements are getting, you know, there's more pressure, more gravity, but actually different versions. So if you're doing say, hydrogen to helium versus helium to beryllium versus, you know, carbon, neon, as you move up the chain, different methods of fusion release different amounts of neutrinos. And so one sort of weird example is just like, there's two main kinds of fusion that go on in stars, there's the proton proton kind, which is what mainly is happening in the sun. And then there's the carbon nitrogen oxygen cycle. And in fact, the proton proton produces a lot more neutrinos than the carbon nitrogen cycle. But like, if you could just like, place ice cube right next to any star that you wanted and just gather an enormous amount of data, you would be able to understand more about the internal processes that are going on in star and we're really still at the beginning stages and just understanding our own sun. Now, practically, it would be essentially impossible with the kind of technology that we have today. So like with ice cube and other neutrino observatories, we can detect neutrinos coming from the sun. And just three years ago, astronomers were finally able to detect the neutrinos coming from this carbon nitrogen oxygen cycle, they call it the CNO cycle, and it's only a fraction of the fusion that's going on inside the sun. And but astronomers were able to actually detect the neutrinos coming from that specific process. And so if you know, one kind of fusion process, another kind of fusion process, you could detect the neutrino flux coming from different kinds of elements being fused together, you could work it out. But we're not able to detect more than just occasional random neutrinos coming from the universe. Astronomers were able to detect the neutrinos coming from the supernova 1987 a, but the level of neutrinos like the amount and the energies involved are just off the charts. So it's a great goal, right, that you could build a neutrino detector that is 1000s of cubic kilometers across that you're able to really fine tune and start to detect the neutrinos coming from various stars and start to work out what's going on inside them detect supernovas, they go off, get advanced notice when stars are about to go supernova, that would be great. So the other way that you could theoretically do it, and not through necessarily neutrinos is by the way the star is behaving, how it is pulsating, how it is sort of growing and shrinking as different elements are being fused in the corner, actually, there's a paper that came out earlier this year, where astronomers were thinking that actually Betelgeuse, because it was brightening and dimming in the way that it was, they're calculated that had moved up to the carbon burning stage of the end of life of a star. And if that's the case, then that would mean that Betelgeuse is 10s to 100s of years away from detonating as a supernova. But that's just like a hypothesis. And not a lot of people came aboard and a lot of people have questioned it. And more data is necessary. But like, wouldn't that be amazing if we got this final confirmation that yes, indeed, Betelgeuse is just in the end stage of his life, you almost mark it on your calendar when it's going to detonate, but I wouldn't definitely wouldn't put that on my calendar. So anytime between now and the next million years or so still, all right, you've probably noticed the Star Trek planet name that's appeared above my shoulder, this is a way for you to vote on the questions that you thought were the best. And this week, we had a tie between how rogue planets can have liquid water on their surface and if there would be any alternate communication other than radio. So congratulations to Benoit Heinz 5357 and Terence Abol 5024. If you want to vote for the question that you thought was the best, we're going to put the planet name up with each one of the questions that are asked and answered. And then just down in the comments down below, just write in the name of the question that you like the best and we will tally them up. And we will celebrate the winner next week. Cosmos web, how common are red dwarf binary stars? Have you ever heard it said that most of the stars in the universe are actually in multi star systems? That's wrong. It's not true. It's a myth. And it was created back in the day when astronomers could mostly observe brighter stars like our sun. And yeah, stars like our sun are mainly in multiple star systems, binary star systems, triple star systems, quadruple star systems, even seven star systems. But red dwarfs are mostly singletons, they prefer to be by themselves. And so when you add up all the stars in the universe, the majority are red dwarfs. And the majority of red dwarfs are singletons. And so effectively, most stars are single. But you can have all kinds of variations, you could absolutely have red dwarf stars in binary star systems, you can have red dwarfs in a binary star system with another brighter star, bigger star, you know, every combination is possible. And astronomers know of many examples of stars where, you know, think about Alpha Centauri, you've got two stars that are kind of like the sun that are in a binary relationship. And then you've got Proxima Centauri, which is a red dwarf star, which is in a trinary system with those other two stars. And so that happens all the time. HP 3.14. Could we manufacture a micro singularity and keep it alive by feeding it matter like somewhere out in the Kuiper Belt? There's always my answer, right? Theoretically, yes, practically, no. So so like, what is a singularity singularity is a black hole? How do you get a black hole, you detonate a star, and the star produces a black hole in the middle of 10 times the mass of the sun more. And that is not us manufacturing, you know, if we were to go and gather up all the material create this giant star exploded, then we would get a black hole. But I don't think that's what you're going for. You're probably thinking, could we do it in something like the Large Hadron Collider? And this was one of the possibilities, this is sort of like one of the theoretical capabilities of the Large Hadron Collider, is that you could collide particles with such force and energies involved, compacted into such a small area that you would get a singularity form, you get a tiny little black hole. And then according to the theories from Stephen Hawking, you would have Hawking radiation and that black hole would evaporate. And it would evaporate very quickly, like it would evaporate within 10 to the minus 83 to 88 seconds. So you know, point 0000 80 times. That's very short amount of time. So it's such a short amount of time, that'd be really hard to detect the radiation. And so we still have not detected Hawking radiation coming from singularities generated in the Large Hadron Collider, maybe because they're not being formed, like almost certainly because they're not being formed. But maybe just because it's so brief that we're not able to detect it. But if you were able to make a dramatically bigger particle collider, like imagine you built a particle collider that went around the entire solar system, like at the orbit of the Earth, and you crashed particles together with much higher energies, maybe you could generate more massive black holes that would last longer, because the more mass in the black hole, the longer to last before the Hawking radiation makes it evaporate again. And so then the other question is, could you then you know, if you've got a black hole that you're crashing all these particles together, and you are forming this black hole, and then you are feeding more and more material in and you're trying to mash all of this energy into this really tight space, you could theoretically grow a black hole. And over time, have it be whatever mass is important to you. And in the beginning, you'd need to do with the particle accelerator. And then later on, you could, you know, once it was going, you could start to feed it regular matter. I mean, keep in mind that anything that is less than the mass of, like a mountain is going to evaporate in a very short period of time, like within a couple of minutes. So you've got to work quick. Now, your idea of putting this out in like the Kuiper Belt is a good idea. Because if you manufactured a black hole here on Earth, it would be pulled into the center of the Earth by the gravity. And so you would, you'd make your black hole, and then it would fall into the Earth. And then it would be gone, that would evaporate. But even if it didn't evaporate, like it would take trillions of years before it accumulated like a kilogram of mass. So don't worry about us manufacturing black holes and then eating up the Earth from inside like, it would take a long time. But the idea of doing it out in the Kuiper Belt is great, because then you could balance the gravity. And so you would make sure that this black hole is formed, and maybe your whole particle accelerator is turning as the black hole is inside this particle accelerator, it's always staying there. And then you're feeding it and make it bigger and bigger. And after a while, it's kind of like starting a fire. And then once you've got to a certain point, you start feeding it material, and you get to whatever size you want. And then you sort of back away. And it is like you're balancing the Hawking radiation that's coming off of it with the amount of matter that you're feeding into it. And you've got your own pet black hole, graph 200. If an alien civilization wanted to harvest a star and extract everything useful from it, how might they do it? Could that make stars disappear like that one did recently? Right? So this is a continuation on from the previous question. If an alien civilization wanted to harvest a star, what would be the best way to go about it? And so let's kind of go through some of these ideas, like right now, we are harvesting our star with solar panels, when you put solar panels out, you're collecting the energy that's falling from the sun onto your solar panels, you're turning into electricity would have been lost as radiation into the universe, but we're extracting and then we're releasing heat from this process, it is very inefficient, right? You're having to burn, you know, oil tankers worth of hydrogen at the core of the star every second, and we're able to get a little bit of electricity out of it. That's not great, we can do better. And so like, what could you do if you wanted to get more energy off of your star, you could tear your star apart and start using hydrogen fusion. To run your fusion reactors, you just keep extracting hydrogen off the stars different ways to go about it, you could like, surround the star in a magnetic field, you could try to sort of rotate it so that material starts to come off of it. And then you'd siphon that away and put it into fusion reactors and then, you know, go with that. And that will be more efficient than what the sun does. But that is not very efficient. But you can imagine that disappearing a star over time. And so maybe some advanced civilization takes a regular star and dismantles it. Like for example, if you replace the sun with 13 red dwarfs, now, the sun would last for trillions of years in 13 red dwarf form, as opposed to just a few billion years before the sun runs out of fuel in its core and turns into a white dwarf. So that would be more efficient. And that would look like a star was disappearing because you would be pulling away all of its hydrogen siphoning it off into smaller red dwarf stars, they'd be too dim for us to see and they would seem to disappear. But if you want to have a more efficient use of a star, you want to feed a star to a black hole. And if you do that, then you're going to get this accretion disk around the black hole. And that accretion disk is the sort of matter that's piling up, and you're going to be able to extract about 6% sort of like follow equals MC squared, right? You could extract about 6% of the energy equivalent from the mass that you're feeding into this black hole as it's blasting out of the out of the accretion disk. And that doesn't sound like a lot only 6% of the energy available energy and that matters you're feeding into the black hole, the black hole gets to keep 94% of the energy that's not fair. But that is about 50 times more efficient than fusion power. So like fusion power is would be amazing if we could accomplish it, but it kind of sucks compared to what would happen if you had a pet black hole. But that's not the most efficient way that you can extract energy from a black hole. The more the most efficient way is something called the Penrose process where you are feeding material directly into a black hole spinning black hole. And some of the matter goes into the black hole and some of the matter gets thrown out at incredibly high velocities. And then you sort of catch that matter as it comes back out. And you're able to get about 30% of the mass energy equivalent. And so you can imagine some futuristic civilization is taking stars, tearing them apart into little pieces, feeding those pieces into black holes, and getting the most efficient use of energy and it would totally look like a star disappearing, but very slowly like it would take millennia for this process to happen. And so, you know, do I think that's a reasonable answer for why we saw that star disappear? No, no, we, you know, I like the failed supernova idea, stellar merger sounds good. But no, not that advanced civilization is dismantling their stars. But like, if you wanted a way to know that there was an alien civilization out there, up in the sky, and watch stars winking out one by one in a roughly circular region, that'll tell you something weird is going on out there. And that, you know, we might be in the future of whatever that expanding sphere of stellar reorganization is. SMEDS pets could dark matter be matter that isn't illuminated similar outer solar system objects. In the most recent space bites episode talked about all of those rogue planets were found in the Orion Nebula. And I got a ton of questions from people asking, Oh, could rogue planets account for dark matter? And the answer is no. And I'll get to that in a second. So you know, right now astronomers think that 10% of the universe is the regular matter that we could see and then 90% of it is dark matter, some kind of invisible thing that only interacts with regular matter through gravity. And in fact, for the regular matter, astronomers only could only account for half of the regular matter. They knew there was a total amount of regular matter. But when you added up all of the stars and all of the galaxies and all of the gas clouds and all the planets and everything they could see, it only counted for about half of the normal matter that they could find. And so then they slowly and carefully were able to find the rest of that matter and really only in the last couple of years, did they finally cross that finish line and say, okay, we think we know where all of the normal matter is. And that last big chunk was in large clouds of gas that are in between galaxies. And the way they found that was by watching how a quasars light so like some super actively feeding supermassive black hole is passing through intergalactic space. And they by watching the light, they were able to see how much of its light was being absorbed by material through its journey. And based on that, they were able to calculate how much gas and dust there is in this space in between galaxies. And from there, they were able to account for the missing mass. And so I say that because I feel like that gives you sort of a clue to the direction that we're going here, which is that sort of what makes dark matter different from regular matter is that it doesn't interact with regular matter in any way. And it also doesn't interact with itself only through gravity. And so if dark matter was regular matter, then we would see it because it would be 10 times as much as the regular matter. And so you would see its illumination, you would, it would be colliding and heating up, it would be gathering together into stars and galaxies and all kinds of things. And so like any explanation that you have for dark matter, that is somehow regular matter has to behave like regular matter, and we can see regular matter. And so it has to be something else or Mond, you know, additional ways that gravity works that we don't understand. So you know, the viable candidates for that are some kind of particle that is massive, but has a very low cross section. So it's like, imagine like a neutrino is a is a perfect example, it's right neutrinos have mass, but neutrinos have almost no cross section. So a neutrino can go through almost a light year of lead on average, and not interact at all. And so that is a low cross section, like if you had a whole bunch of neutrinos, and you fire them at each other, they're not going to crash into each other, just going to pass right through. But if you have a whole bunch of hydrogen atoms, fire them at each other, they're going to bunch up and form a big cloud and eventually form stars and things like that. And so whatever dark matter is, it's kind of like neutrinos. But it's not neutrinos, because neutrinos move fast, and whatever dark matter is, it has to move slowly. And so like this search for dark matter, astronomers have sort of constrained the properties for what it must be, if it's a particle, it has to move slowly, it has to be cold compared to neutrinos, it has to have a very small cross section so that it can't interact with itself and it can interact with regular matter. It doesn't release any kind of electromagnetic radiation, but it does interact with regular matter through gravity. What it is, we don't know, but it has those characteristics. Archer, as someone with a very strong but very unsatisfying career in computer science, how can it become more directly involved in supporting scientists side outreach, occupationally, like your crew? So I mean, there is an enormous demand for people who are skilled in computer science, programming, databases, that kind of thing in the astronomy field. And you know, if you have that kind of ability, I would reach out to scientists who are perhaps having to go through enormous databases gather together material, help them write the Python help them write the database queries, help them look through archives to pull the kind of information that they're looking for. And I mean, there's no real simple way to do this, you you have to sort of think about a kind of project that you want to get involved in, go to a place like archive, look at the kinds of papers that are doing that kind of work, maybe they're working with the James Webb Space Telescope data, or maybe looking through Hubble data, maybe looking through asteroid data, from the dark energy survey camera, upcoming Vera Rubin is just going to be so much data that people are gonna have to be able to look through and reach out to some researchers and say, I'm a computer programmer, can I help you, you know, with some of your data analysis, and you may get a bunch of people ignoring you, and then you may get some people who are interested, and they'll get back to you. And eventually, you might find somebody to collaborate with. And you can help them out. Obviously, there are jobs for computer programmers at NASA, there's jobs for computer programmers at all of the major observatories around the world, like there's plenty of work for a computer programmer, and you can move from your existing career into one that you are more interested in. You know, my favorite example of this is is Kevin Gill, who is one of these citizen scientists who is always working on Juno images, he's I've interviewed him here on the channel before. And he used to be a computer programmer working for a software company. And he loved space, and went into NASA data and came up with really cool simulations and visualizations and said, like, let me take these images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. And let me bring them into Maya and let me 3d animate what it might look like to do a flyover. And eventually got a job at NASA he's at works for the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, but he's, he's helping process data from one of the Earth observation satellites, but he's still producing images of Juno and other stuff. So it's kind of like the open source movement, right, that you kind of get out of it, what you put into it. And so if you're able to see a need, participate in a project, build a name for yourself, make connections, make friends, make everybody's lives better, eventually, the value that you bring to the table just has to be rewarded, and people will will sort of task you to help out. So you're, you're perfect, you're perfectly positioned to play a part in this if you want to. Now, if you want to support the work that we do at Universe Today, consider joining our Patreon club, this support lets us do a minimum of ads and no sponsorship messages and patrons get no ads on the universe today.com website for life. You also get extra parts of the live stream that aren't in this edited version. And you can sign up for a special patron only podcast feed and get all of our overtime segments, as well as other special behind the scenes episodes, including our monthly patron only question show. Thanks to everyone who already subscribed and welcome to the recent newcomers, Donald Myra, Brian Nicholson, Joel Williamson, Jonas Devoist, Sharon tender, Cheryl, Dale Cochran, Chris R. Mish, Louis Stamper, and Clarence Rowe. Join the club at patreon.com slash universe today. Rudy Marquez, how likely is it that panspermia has occurred, but from Earth to another world and with a similar composition and atmosphere to Earth, that world parallels us and would they invent the bidet? I hope they invent the bidet, but these are great. So could Earth be the source of panspermia to other worlds? Theoretically, yeah. So this idea of panspermia is that you have like some planet that has life on it and gets hit by an asteroid and the asteroid hits so hard that it throws chunks of rock out into space, those chunks of rocks have microbes inside of them, and they're able to hide inside the rock and then the rock makes the journey through the solar system lands on another world and is able to pass through the atmosphere and land softly enough that the microbes just can move on to their new destination. And every stage of that is plausible that you could throw chunks of rock into space gently enough from an asteroid impact that life might survive, that you could handle the journey in space for some period of time and life could stay inside the rocks and be protected from radiation and just be in hibernation until it arrives at its destination and that rocks can pass through the Earth's atmosphere of the right size and not airburst and explode. And so you could get life moving from from world to world. Like if we find life on Mars, you know, like right away, you're going to want to do some kind of DNA analysis to find out are we related if we are related, when is our common ancestor. But generally, this process can happen to go from lower mass worlds to higher mass worlds. So you know, we have examples of lunar meteorites here on Earth, we have examples of meteorites from Vesta, we have meteorites from Mars, but we don't have any Jupiter meteorites. And I don't even think we have any Venus meteorites, maybe there's one. But you're probably not going to find a lot of Earth meteorites on Mars, because it's much harder for a giant planet or a larger planet to have rock blasted off of it. It's much easier to throw rock into orbit from Mars than it is from Earth. And so generally, you're going to go from the smaller worlds to the more massive worlds. There was this proposal put together by Abby Loeb and team who said, well, like every 100,000 years or so a comet will pass so close to the Earth, that it flies right through the upper atmosphere of the Earth before heading off into space. And it's going to get sort of smeared with bacteria that's in the air as it passes through the atmosphere. And like, can you imagine, like, on Earth, you know, 100,000 years, like, this has happened while humans have been around, maybe even while there's been civilization that you'd be like watching this comet pass directly through the atmosphere of the Earth before skipping off and going out into space. And so you can imagine that this comet has picked up all this bacteria now it's moving through the atmosphere, and then it flies off into space and bacteria is able to stay protected underneath the comet goes out into the outer Oort cloud. And because of that flyby with Earth, it now has an escape velocity to leave the solar system. And now it's going to move to some other star system. And so if it's happening every 100,000 years, this will have happened 1000s of times I'm trying to think, right, do the math in my head, over the course of the amount of time that life has been around on Earth. And if this is happening on every single star system, with every single atmosphere, I mean, we know that there are 1000s of extra solar objects passing through the solar system right now, that we might be in a shooting gallery of comets polluted with life forms from star system to star system. And so, like, if we found life on another star system, I would search for the comet ancestor. And I wouldn't be surprised if we're related that life has been making its way around. So are we the source of life in the universe? It's highly unlikely it's big universe, we're just one planet that if life is all connected, we're just one, you know, someone had to be first, but it's almost certainly not us. David Baker, will New Horizons be able to put to rest one way or the other the possibility that a planet x exists in the Kuiper Belt? No, no. New Horizons is just one spacecraft, and it's got a telescope on board that is good for looking at Pluto when it did the flyby and good for analyzing Eric Hoth when it did a flyby of that. And it's been helpful for measuring how bright the universe itself is, but it's not a great telescope compared to what we have here on Earth. And New Horizons is stuck on the trajectory that it's going to be on with, you know, maybe some tiny course correction changes that it can make. And it's really important to sort of wrap your mind around how far away objects in the Kuiper Belt really are. I mean, they are hundreds of 1000s of kilometers away from each other, like you saw like you're passing through a jumbly asteroid belt, which even those are still really far away from each other. You're going to be like having to go way out of your way. I mean, this is the challenge is like, can we find another object that is anywhere in New Horizons cone of like upcoming trajectory that it could reach with the propellant that it has on board. And that's going to be tricky, like there's gonna happen, you're gonna have to turn the world's telescopes, the new giant telescopes like Vera Rubin on the problem, hopefully it will turn up an object before New Horizons leaves the Kuiper Belt around 2029. And like, what if it's on the other side of the solar system, right? What if it's an astronomical unit away from it? So like, you would have to be incredibly lucky for planet nine to happen to be in the same region as New Horizons. But it would be a fraction of 1% chance of it being possible. Red Coat, what are the odds that we are wrong about our observation data for stars rendering all exoplanet estimates incorrect, I hear that we base data based on comparing them to possible faulty estimates of the sun. exoplanets are discovered in a few ways. But the two main ways are the transit method and the radial velocity method. And so the transit method is where you watch the brightness of the star. And then you watch as the star dims as a planet passes in front of it. And then based on how much the star dims, that tells you how much of the light of the star was blocked. And then that tells you the size tells you how long it takes for the planet to go around the star. And that has nothing to do with the sun. Like it really is just about you looking at the brightness of the star, very, you know, astronomers have ways to measure the brightness of stars with incredible precision. That's what's required. And then they watch as the brightness changes on some periodic basis. So what do you know, every 14 days, the star dims a little bit in a very characteristic way. Like there are lots of variable stars that that sort of pulsate at very regular amounts of time. But when a planet is passing in front of the star, it's a very precise sort of light curve that happens. And so that's just like that has nothing to do with the sun. Like maybe, you know, we saw Venus and we saw Mercury pass in front of the sun. And that gave us some sort of baseline ways to measure how the brightness of a star changes as a planet passes in front. And then the other method is called the radial velocity method. And that's where astronomers measure the speed of the star, whether it's moving away from us or towards us, depending on sort of the radial velocity that's coming from it. So, you know, we know, on average, the radial velocity of any star that we want to observe, we can tell whether stars are moving towards us or whether stars are moving away from us. But some stars, they're sort of moving towards us, but sometimes they move a little less quickly towards us. And other times they move a little more quickly towards us. And that's because they've got some giant planets orbiting around them, it's yanking them back and forth. And we're able to measure that change in velocity as the planet is passing in between us and the star and star comes sort of a little quicker, and then it moves a little away from us. moving towards us entirely, but the the change in its velocity. And again, that's incredibly precise, you know, you're able to measure the, the redshift change of the light coming from the star. And that's done using spectroscopy, which is a very well established science like, like all of astronomy depends on spectroscopy, where you take the light of a star, you blow it up into this rainbow, you see all of the absorption lines in that star, and that tells you what that star is made of. And then you can watch as those lines kind of shift back and forth as the redshift of that star is changing. And from the radial velocity method that gives you the mass of the planet. And so once you've done the radial velocity method and the transit method, you're then you then get everything you need to know about that planet, you know, its mass, you know, its size, you know, its orbit. And when you know a planet's mass and size that tells you its density, and that gives you a chance to figure out what that planet is made out of. But there are more methods that are coming online that are going to be able to provide even more certainty about these planets, you got the astrometry method, where you've got Gaia, that is watching how a planet will sort of pull a star with its gravity into this tiny little circle in the sky, you can actually measure that from the planet, you've got the direct imaging method, where now astronomers have seen directly about 20 planets. And so you can watch as that planet like just like you see a picture, you see the light from the planet as it is moving around the star. And again, that tells you how long it takes the planet to go around the star, like what is its year. And so, no, I don't think that there are any like faulty estimates of the way the sun works and have any real influence on the way exoplanets work. It's very established science at this point. Xvera, has anyone proposed the idea that UFOs are not from outer space, but instead from a dimension that we cannot detect? Yes, that feels to me like that is what a lot of people who are proposing that UFOs are something more than unidentified. A lot of them are saying that they come from other dimensions and things like that. But like whenever someone makes a claim, right, like this is a good example of a claim, someone says UFOs are objects coming from other dimensions, then you have to say, how do you know? And if their answer is not an enormous amount of data and evidence that shows you how these things are coming from other dimensions, then you don't have to take it very seriously, right? Like the whole, it's right there in the name, unidentified flying object. You can't go, well, there's this thing and I don't know what it is, but I know it's coming from another dimension. Well, how do you know, where's the evidence? And so always, we just need to be in this place. And so the problem that we have right now is that there just isn't evidence that there are interesting conversations that are being had. People have eyewitness testimony that they have seen things in the sky, but there is no evidence that we can then look at it and go, you're right, or you're wrong, or anything. So like, the conversation can't even begin yet. And until the evidence shows up, whether, you know, if the government has got radar data that they're holding on to that they can't release for state secret reasons, or whatever, whether there is actually better evidence out there that just no one's got their hands on until people can look at it and study it. I always love the channel from Mick West, who is like he looks at data, publicly available data that he can get his hands on. So whenever someone makes a claim, and then they have a justification based on that claim, like, you know, I saw this thing in the sky, and here's what I think it was and take a look at the picture, he is able to look at their evidence and try and figure out what it is. And so if there is evidence, then you can almost always identify it and identify it as something that isn't aliens or people coming from other dimensions. So this whole situation with UFOs, it just suffers from a lack of evidence. Like I think emotionally, people get excited about it, because they love what the possibilities might be. Wouldn't it be amazing if there were aliens visiting Earth, or that there was other dimensions and people were visiting us from other dimensions like that sci fi Christmas right there. You know, people will tell man, people tell me they're like, Oh, you can't handle the truth phrase, you're not ready. I'm so ready. I can't wait. And I was thinking about this, like if you asked 100 astronomers, you know, they get to choose one thing or the other, would you like to know with absolute certainty that no alien spaceship has ever visited Earth? Or would you like to know with absolute certainty that alien spaceships have visited Earth? Which one would you prefer? And if you ask most astronomers, they would say, I'm guessing they would want to know that aliens have visited Earth, like that would be their preference. Because it is an enormous scientific question. How did they get here? What technology they use? What's their culture like? What speak language? Why are they here? Why are they willing to make this journey to come to the solar system to visit us? Why haven't they made contact with us? What skills and knowledge have they gained that we don't have? It's like archaeologists discover ancient civilizations. And so you've got these sort of whispers from the past, and you're able to see how humans lived in a time in our past. But to meet a peer or an advanced civilization that has so much to teach us, also a little scary, but still, would be incredible. And so, like, we just need evidence, please, Jared Edwards. When we look through Jane's web, we are magnified with our sight. So how are we looking back in time? When you look at Mars with your eyeballs, you know that the light from Mars has taken somewhere between four and 20 minutes to reach your eyes. That's just like, that's how far away Mars is. And that's how long the photons have taken to go from Mars to your eyes. So if you then look through a telescope at Mars, and your friend was right beside you, and maybe an asteroid smashed into Mars, and they like, whoa, Mars got a little brighter. And you're looking through your telescope at exactly the same time. And you're like, yeah, I see that it was an asteroid strike on Mars, because you were seeing the same events happen on Mars, whether you're looking through the telescope, or whether you are just looking with your eyes. And if the Hubble Space Telescope is watching Mars at the same time, and you know, they're on the phone call with you. And they're like, we saw it too. You're still just seeing the same events happen. So it's the same thing, just because you were seeing things with more magnification and clarity across billions of light years of space doesn't change the amount of time that those photons were released by the thing that you're looking at. Cliff cords. I had an astronomer friend of mine say that the twilight sky is mostly still stars with a few moving satellites and airplanes, soon it will be mostly moving satellites. True or false? False. Now, there are a lot of satellites in the sky right now. I mean, Starlink alone accounts for 1000s of 1000s of satellites, their plan is to get up to something like 40,000 30,000 satellites. Not to mention Amazon just launched their satellite constellation, not to mention the Chinese are planning multiple satellite constellations, the Russians are planning to do this, the Europeans are planning to do this, like, there are going to be hundreds of 1000s of satellites in space in the coming decades. But the good news is that for most people, most of the time, you can't see them. Like the brightness of a Starlink satellite now is about magnitude seven, between seven and eight. And like the faintest your eyeballs can see is about six. So you can't see a Starlink with the unaided eye. And satellites are only visible when they're in sunlight. And so for most parts of the world, when you look up in space, the sky above you, and the satellites as they move through, they're in the shadow of the earth. And so and have you ever seen this, like you watch a satellite move across the sky, and then suddenly it just disappears. And that's because it moved from being sunlit into shade, we see the satellites at night, because they're still up in sunlight, while we're down in shade, but it depends on like where you are on the earth. But your friend is right that the satellites sort of in the twilight are one of the trickiest points because much more of the satellites are going to be illuminated in twilight and sort of just before sunrise, then at the dark of night, like astronomical midnight, most of the satellites are going to be in in shadow as well. And so you're not going to be able to see them. And so like the horizon is the worst place to look anyway, you never want to point your towards the horizon, you're going to have the most atmospheric distortion, it's a really bad place to observe. But there are a class of objects, a class of very dangerous near earth asteroids, that the only time that you can see them is right after sunset or right before sunrise. Because they're, you know, orbiting within the orbit of Earth, they're coming at us from the sun. And you can't see them unless you are able to look early on, you know, really close after when the sun goes down, because they are close to the sky to the sun. Now there are some telescopes observatories that are going to be deeply affected by the satellite constellations. And the best example, of course, is my favorite, Vera Rubin, I mean, we know because Vera Rubin is in the Southern Hemisphere, it is going to be able to see larger chunks of the sky, and very likely going to be picking up large numbers of starlings passing through or different satellite constellations passing through its images, every time like there could be a satellite in every image that it takes or multiple satellites in every image that it takes. And most of those will be harmless. But every now and then that satellite is going to go right through the galaxy that you're hoping to observe. So there are like a couple of examples, like if you're a pilot, pilots apparently are seeing starlinks down near the horizon just before sunrise, or just after sunset. And in fact, they thought these were UFOs, but now they're actually starlinks. So there are very sort of remote times when you will actually be able to see them. But there is like one really troubling satellite that's been launched. That's the Blue Walker three. And this is a potential satellite that will turn your cell phone into a satellite phone, it will be able to communicate with with radio to your cell phone. And it is like the eighth brightest star in the sky. It's incredibly bright. And so if more of those satellites were launched, then absolutely it would, you would look up into the sky and you would just see this grid of satellites around the earth all the time. But fortunately, the current crop of satellites are very dim. They're a big problem for astronomers, but they're not a problem for you. So I can't imagine a time when you would walk outside, and you would look up and mostly what you would see would be satellites like there would be the occasional satellites, but the rest of them are just too dim for you to be able to see. And if you have a problem with seeing satellites, like light pollution has stolen the sky. All of the city lights that are in cities pointing up have made it so that a third of humanity can no longer see the Milky Way. And this has nothing to do with satellites, it just has to do with people wasting their light throwing their photons up into the sky. And so like, that is really important that we fight back against that. And so if you are like in any, if at some point, you hear about satellites in space, and they're like blocking our view, and you're like, Oh, I'm so mad, like, be mad. You have my permission, but also channel that anger into helping get rid of light pollution, because it is causing problems for wildlife for not being able to see space. And it's a it's a big problem. So International Dark Sky Association, check out their website, find out how you get involved, both tracking the brightness of and the amount of light pollution that's going on, as well as learn ways that you at both your home level can mitigate light pollution as well as get involved and active to help your cities reduce the amount of light pollution that they're throwing out into space. And maybe we can have this time you imagine being in New York City and going outside and like seeing the Milky Way when that'd be amazing. That's theoretically possible if we just treat the night sky more carefully. All right, those are all the questions that we had this week. Thank everyone who asked questions in the comments as well as who showed up for the live show. Now I'm going to talk a little bit more about how you can see the dark sky, see the Milky Way for yourself if you haven't already. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons, David Richards, Mark Anstis, Joel Yancey, Antonio Lofi Lara, Dustin Cable, Just Paul Davis, Vlad Shipplin, Jay Dennis, David Gilton, Ed Modso, George, Jeremy Madden, Jordan Young, Tim Whelan, Dave Verhoeff, Andrew Gross, and Josh Schultz who support us at the Master of the Universe level, and all of our other supporters on Patreon. I mentioned earlier that only about a third of humanity can actually see the Milky Way. And like, if you're one of those people, you should try to see the Milky Way. Depending on where you live, it can be very challenging. I know that if you are in Western Europe, there's a ton of light pollution, you're gonna have to go very far. But if you live on the eastern seaboard of the United States, it's pretty bad there too. But there is a great website that I like to use to be able to find locations. It's called the Dark Site Finder. And what it does is they take a Google Map that has the light pollution mapped on top of it. And you can move the map around, you can zoom in, you can find your exact location, and then you can find out how far away you would have to go and in what direction to be able to get rid of all of the light pollution. And you don't have to go to a place with pristine dark skies. When you look at the Dark Site Finder, green is fine. That's, you know, I live in a place where it's green. And I can see the Milky Way from my backyard. Blue is better. And obviously, gray and eventually nothing is the best. But if you live somewhere that has like red or orange or yellow, look around for the closest place that has one of those other colors, green or blue, and figure out how long it's going to take you to drive there. It's often going to be some kind of park or National Forest or something like that. And in many cases, it's not that far away. Like yes, you might have to get in a car and drive for two hours with your friends to go to a place. Like in the middle of summer and you want to go see the Perseid meteor shower or you want to go and take a telescope or set something up or make an event of it. Spend more time with your friends under the sky and appreciate what the Milky Way looks like what the stars look like. This is what we evolved to live in. And don't lose, don't lose that connection to the night sky. All right, we'll see you next week.