The Extreme Universe with Tim Paglione

Summary

StarTalk Radio: "The Extreme Universe with Tim Paglione"

Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Guest: Dr. Tim Paglione, Professor at City University of New York and astrophysicist
Co-Host: Chuck Nice
Release Date: February 11, 2025

---

1. Introduction to Extreme Energy Phenomena

Neil deGrasse Tyson welcomes Dr. Tim Paglione to discuss extreme objects and high-energy phenomena in the universe. The conversation initiates with an engaging exchange about muons generated by cosmic rays striking the Earth's atmosphere.

Notable Quote:
Tim Paglione [00:00]: "Those muons will stream down to the surface. A thousand just went through your body."
Chuck Nice [00:08]: "Wow."

---

2. Gamma Rays and Cosmic Rays

Dr. Paglione elaborates on gamma rays, the most energetic form of light, and their origins. He explains that gamma rays result from highly energetic processes such as supernova explosions or massive shockwaves that accelerate particles to near-light speeds.

Notable Quotes:
Tim Paglione [03:11]: "Gamma rays seem to just come from their own places."
Neil deGrasse Tyson [03:29]: "So tell me about what makes gamma rays in the universe."

---

3. Particle Interactions and Muons

The discussion delves into how cosmic rays interact with protons in the interstellar medium, producing secondary particles like pions and muons. Despite their short lifespans, muons reach the Earth's surface due to relativistic time dilation—a testament to Einstein's theories.

Notable Quotes:
Neil deGrasse Tyson [10:35]: "It should have decayed before."
Tim Paglione [10:34]: "In fact, the time it takes a muon to reach the surface of the Earth from space, they shouldn't make it."
Chuck Nice [11:02]: "That's amazing. So they actually don't know any better."

---

4. The Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope

Dr. Paglione introduces the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope, highlighting its advancements over its predecessor, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. The Fermi telescope's ability to pinpoint the direction of gamma rays with higher precision has significantly enhanced our understanding of gamma ray sources.

Notable Quotes:
Tim Paglione [17:10]: "It's the Fermi gamma ray Space Telescope."
Neil deGrasse Tyson [19:08]: "Cause I think there's whole generations of detectors where they just detect something."

---

5. Research on Undetected Pulsars

Using the Fermi telescope, Dr. Paglione discusses his research on pulsars—dense, rapidly spinning neutron stars. While thousands of pulsars are detected via radio waves, only a fraction emit detectable gamma rays. His work involves stacking signals from undetected pulsars to enhance signal-to-noise ratios and confirm their gamma ray emissions.

Notable Quotes:
Tim Paglione [20:30]: "We're trying to figure out what their stack population."
Neil deGrasse Tyson [21:27]: "We're trying to reduce the background."

---

6. Pulsars: The Densest Objects

The conversation shifts to pulsars, emphasizing their extreme density and rapid rotation. Pulsars possess surface gravities millions of times stronger than Earth's, and their powerful magnetic fields accelerate particles to near-light speeds, making them significant gamma ray sources.

Notable Quotes:
Tim Paglione [23:05]: "A pulsar is the densest kind of object in the universe that we can measure."
Chuck Nice [24:04]: "That's wild."

---

7. Impact on Galaxy Dynamics and Star Formation

Dr. Paglione explores how cosmic rays from pulsars and supernovae penetrate molecular clouds, serving as a crucial heat and ionization source. This interaction influences star formation rates and the overall dynamics of galaxies, highlighting the role of feedback mechanisms in regulating galactic evolution.

Notable Quotes:
Tim Paglione [29:40]: "Cosmic rays... provide a source of heat."
Neil deGrasse Tyson [30:35]: "They tend to be really subject to the overall dynamics of the galaxy."

---

8. Gamma Ray Bursts and Early Universe Supernovae

The discussion covers gamma ray bursts (GRBs), which are intense, short-lived explosions resulting from the collapse of massive stars into black holes. Dr. Paglione explains that GRBs emit vast amounts of energy in seconds, making them observable across the universe and providing insights into stellar evolution in the early cosmos.

Notable Quotes:
Tim Paglione [27:21]: "Gamma ray bursts are during a stellar explosion."
Chuck Nice [25:00]: "That's better to burn out than it is to fade away."

---

9. Cosmic Chemistry in Molecular Clouds

Addressing the role of molecular clouds in star formation, Dr. Paglione notes that while these clouds facilitate the birth of new stars, the diffuse nature of the gas results in slow chemical interactions. Cosmic rays help maintain the temperature and ionization levels necessary for star formation despite the slow gas-phase chemistry.

Notable Quotes:
Tim Paglione [35:35]: "The chemistry's there, but it's slow."
Chuck Nice [35:24]: "Knowing what he's talking about."

---

10. Stellar Populations and Solar Origins

The conversation touches on stellar populations, clarifying that our Sun is a second-generation (Population I) star, enriched with heavier elements from earlier generations of stars. This enrichment underscores the cyclical nature of star formation and the recycling of stellar debris in the interstellar medium.

Notable Quotes:
Tim Paglione [40:19]: "The sun is definitely a second generation star."
Chuck Nice [40:33]: "Population I, II, III."

---

11. Massive Stars vs. Sun-like Stars

Dr. Paglione contrasts massive stars with Sun-like stars, revealing that massive stars undergo rapid life cycles due to intense thermonuclear fusion. They burn hot and bright, synthesizing heavier elements up to iron before exploding as supernovae, whereas smaller stars have longer, more stable lifespans.

Notable Quotes:
Tim Paglione [43:30]: "No, it's also in how they're born and how they live."
Chuck Nice [46:31]: "That's Highlander."

---

12. Cosmic Perspective and Technological Advancement

In a reflective closing, Neil deGrasse Tyson emphasizes the importance of technological advancements in astrophysics. He highlights how new instruments and telescopes enable scientists to probe previously inaccessible regions of the universe, driving significant growth and discovery in the field.

Notable Quotes:
Neil deGrasse Tyson [47:32]: "It’s about brilliant technologies that could take us not only where we've never been, but on occasion, where we've never even dreamt of."

---

Conclusion

The episode wraps up with acknowledgments and a final reflection on the interplay between scientific inquiry and technological innovation. Dr. Paglione's insights into high-energy astrophysics illuminate the dynamic and interconnected nature of cosmic phenomena, reaffirming the perpetual quest to understand the universe's most extreme environments.

Notable Quote:
Neil deGrasse Tyson [49:09]: "Thanks for making the trip... All right, this has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries, the Extreme Energy edition. Until next time, keep looking up."

---

This episode of StarTalk Radio offers a profound exploration of the universe's most energetic phenomena, bridging complex scientific concepts with accessible dialogue. Dr. Tim Paglione's expertise, coupled with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice's engaging hosting, provides listeners with a comprehensive understanding of gamma rays, cosmic rays, pulsars, and the intricate mechanisms driving star formation and galactic evolution.

Transcript

[Tim Paglione]

That particle shower, these extensive air showers, they'll come flying in and those muons will stream down to the surface. A thousand just went through your body.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Tim Paglione]

Another. Another thousand.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Another thousand.

[Tim Paglione]

But the interesting thing is their lifetime is so short that they shouldn't make it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. We've got a cosmic queries lined up for you. And that means I got Chuck Nice in the house.

[Chuck Nice]

That's right. What's up, Neil?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right.

[Chuck Nice]

Good. Feeling good.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Good. You know, I'm mining my colleagues once again.

[Chuck Nice]

Sounds illegal.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Tim Paglione. Tim, how you doing, man?

[Tim Paglione]

All right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Welcome to StarTalk. Your first time.

[Tim Paglione]

Thanks. Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Have we known each other how long?

[Tim Paglione]

Probably like 20 years, man.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Welcome. Thank you. To the show. A fellow astrophysicist. You're a professor at the City University of New York.

[Chuck Nice]

Nice.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

At the graduate college. Excellent. And at York College, one of the campuses of the CUNY system. And we have Astrocom here. And what is Astrocom short for?

[Tim Paglione]

So, full name's Astrocom nyc. And the com in Astrocom is community. So it's all about building community.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. And you'd mentor students within that community.

[Tim Paglione]

Yep. It's been 74.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

74 students.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. We've been going for a dozen years now.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Because it's not good enough just to be a scientist if you just, you know, live on an island.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You got to pass the torch at some point. Let's share the torch.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. That's a good island. Where scientists are actually bringing up other scientists.

[Tim Paglione]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They don't vote you off. Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

They don't vote you off the island.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They bring you into the island.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. Unless you say you believe in astrology. Then they're like, you got to get out.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No. A good educator will then show them why that's in error.

[Chuck Nice]

But let's be honest. Let's just be honest here.

[Tim Paglione]

Then you vote them up.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So one of the reasons why we have you here is you've done a lot of thinking and a lot of observing and a lot of publishing about extreme objects in the universe. And people love them. Some extreme things.

[Chuck Nice]

Everybody loves extremes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We love it.

[Chuck Nice]

So you go big or you go home.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. Yeah.

[Tim Paglione]

Super fun. That's the stuff.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. So as we ascend the electromagnetic spectrum in energy and we go red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. I left that.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, you skipped it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, I skipped Indigo. Because indigo doesn't belong there. That's Isaac Newton being mystically fascinated by.

[Chuck Nice]

You broke up Bel Biv devoe.

[Tim Paglione]

I don't think that was G Biv.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Not Bel Biv. Devo. Roy G Biv. Right, so violet and then ultraviolet, which can give you skin cancer, and then X rays, which will give you organ cancer. And now gamma rays. Yeah, that turned you into the Hulk.

[Tim Paglione]

They go right through you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So tell me about what makes gamma rays in the universe. Because we know stars make regular light and we also know black holes in their vicinity, they can heat up the gases and they'll radiate ultraviolet and X rays. But gamma rays seem to just come from their own places.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, it's the most energetic light that there is. So you need a really super energetic process. So you have to blow something up or have a huge shock run through an area to accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Shock means something very specific in astrophysics. So tell us about that. Because otherwise, shock. What does shock mean anywhere? Oh, dear. That's not what we mean.

[Chuck Nice]

That black hole did.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Dude, you were shocked by the shock. Yes, so.

[Tim Paglione]

So, I mean, simply put, in a certain area, there's a speed of sound, and if you go beyond that, that's a shock.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You make a shock.

[Chuck Nice]

Make a shock.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Just go beyond it. Like so you need a process that will overtake something as fast as the speed of sound in that medium.

[Tim Paglione]

That's right. So like an explosion, if a star explodes as a supernova, it'll send a shockwave out through the interstellar medium, and that'll bunch up all the gas into high density. It'll bunch up all the magnetic field.

[Chuck Nice]

So let me ask you this. When you look at.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Wasn't he in the middle of explaining something?

[Tim Paglione]

No, it's cool.

[Chuck Nice]

That was. Okay, so in the medium itself, all right, air is the medium through which the shock wave of sound travels. Right.

[Tim Paglione]

Sound that we.

[Chuck Nice]

The sound that we.

[Tim Paglione]

That we're doing right now here on Earth.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Here on Earth.

[Chuck Nice]

So in space, if it's a vacuum, what exactly is the shock traveling on?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Good question.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, there's always a little bit of something going on out there.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, yeah.

[Tim Paglione]

And so anytime there's any kind of discontinuity, we would also describe as a shock. And the things that I'm most interested, that'll create gamma rays, these high energy particles called cosmic rays, they're accelerated by these bunched up, shocked up magnetic fields.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, there you go.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Shocked up. That's a statement.

[Tim Paglione]

That is a made up phrase.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Shocked Up. Just like you jacked. I'm shocked.

[Tim Paglione]

I'm shocked.

[Chuck Nice]

Up, baby.

[Tim Paglione]

Exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

Tell you right now.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, so in that one sentence you mentioned gamma rays and cosmic rays and shock waves. Right. All of this, and this is high energy phenomenon is where you're coming from here. So what's your best way to create high energy phenomenon? I know we can do it in laboratory. In the accelerators.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So does our understanding of the accelerator. In the accelerator help us? In what? In your job?

[Tim Paglione]

Actually, it really does. So once we had the Large Hadron.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Collider going in Switzerland. The cern. Cern, yeah.

[Tim Paglione]

So from the rates of, you know, the, the bajillions of collisions that they're doing there, we were able to figure out basically the interaction rate of protons at those high energies. And that made actually my models of those proton proton collisions in the interstellar medium a little more accurate, which was kind of nice. But we work at way higher energies than we.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I mean, the universe.

[Tim Paglione]

The universe, yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We take credit for the universe.

[Tim Paglione]

That is the super mega royal we.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

My stars, my. Yeah, it's the royal we, if there ever was one.

[Tim Paglione]

Exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And so you're accelerating protons to much higher energies than even the most powerful accelerators on Earth.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, that's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, and now they're fast moving. Can a single proton make a shockwave? No. Right. What goes on there? No, you need a wave of them. I mean, a bunch of them.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, yeah, you need a bunch of them. But as long as they find another proton out there, like an ambient proton, which is just a hydrogen atom.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Ambien proton.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, These are the sleepy ones, the ones not looking ambient. Ambient. Okay.

[Tim Paglione]

So if there's just an interstellar cloud out there, it's just hydrogen minding its own business, just hanging out. Gets whacked by one of these high energy protons that'll create a bunch of other particles. It's a nuclear reaction. And just like you get at the particle accelerators and all these things come out, these pions come out, some are positively charged, some are negative.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So they call all those daughter products. Sure, but never sun products. I was wondering.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, daughters very rarely disappoint. Sons often do.

[Tim Paglione]

I wonder if it was Marie Curie that did that.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, that makes sense.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Interesting.

[Chuck Nice]

So cool. If it was, it would be.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, it's data to that point in time, right?

[Tim Paglione]

Oh, for sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Cuz that's when we see the first.

[Chuck Nice]

Person to see the X rays.

[Tim Paglione]

That's where the alpha, beta and gamma rays were first. Named.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Tim Paglione]

When we didn't know what they were. That's just the first three letters of the Greek Alphabet.

[Chuck Nice]

Makes sense.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So they were just some source of energy moving out of your experiment into somewhere else. So when alpha rays became. What. What did we discover those to be?

[Tim Paglione]

Those are helium nuclei.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. That's kind of weird, but all right. The nucleus of a helium atom. Alpha rays. Okay. We just call them rays. Cause we didn't know because we couldn't distinguish the energy of a wave from the energy of a particle.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Those. Idiot.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Tim Paglione]

Alpha beta turned out to be electrons.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Just electrons.

[Chuck Nice]

Just electrons.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We go from the helium nucleus to electron. See, that ain't right.

[Chuck Nice]

That's alpha beta wild.

[Tim Paglione]

They had a really interesting result, though, because they had a whole bunch of different energies of electrons of beta rays would come out. And that led Enrico Fermi to say there must be something else carrying this extra energy. And that turned out to be some little tiny massless particle with no charge, which is a neutrino. Neutrino.

[Chuck Nice]

Neutrino. It was little, right? It was a little one.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The eno.

[Chuck Nice]

That ENO makes it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Makes it little. And neutral is neutral.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So there was. The energy budget was not resolved.

[Tim Paglione]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's in there.

[Tim Paglione]

There was always some leftover.

[Chuck Nice]

So. Yeah. Okay. So is that the residual. The neutrino itself.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. So that's a. That's it. That's a.

[Chuck Nice]

That's the prediction. Badass.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. If you say we're missing energy, therefore there's a particle with no charge that carried it away. That we didn't detect.

[Chuck Nice]

That's.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's like making shit up.

[Tim Paglione]

Totally.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Just to fill in the blank.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

And it turned out to be exactly the case.

[Tim Paglione]

Oh, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

For sure. Wow. That's very cool, man.

[Tim Paglione]

It is.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, so now tell me, the proton hits what to then make a shower of other particles. Another proton.

[Tim Paglione]

Another proton. Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. And so it busted open the proton. And when I. My classical knowledge of nuclear physics ends with the quarks that are inside.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But I guess you can pair up quarks and make particles that are not protons but are lighter than protons.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. Yeah. So. Well, pair them up.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes, I guess. I don't know.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. So I mean, from this reaction from the proton. Proton interaction, you end up primarily. You get muons, you'll get some pions. Primarily, pions are the ones that interest me the most. There's positive ones, negative ones, and neutral ones. The neutral ones with no charge, they immediately decay into Two gamma rays, which is usually what we see.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So there's a whole chart of what's going on there that you need to be fluent in. Otherwise you don't know what the hell is going on.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, kinda.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, remind us about muons. Cause I'm fascinated. That they exist at all.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. Cause they're very short lived. And so this is one of these interesting.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Can you quantify that? Short lived.

[Tim Paglione]

Can I quantify that?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I mean, short lived. A few seconds, A few microseconds.

[Tim Paglione]

Way smaller, way faster.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Even shorter than that.

[Tim Paglione]

Okay. In fact, the time it takes a muon to reach the surface of the Earth from space, from the atmosphere, where they're created by these cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere, they shouldn't live to get to the surface. Traveling at almost the speed of light. They shouldn't make it. And yet they do. And this was one.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It should have decayed before.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, I was gonna say.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Tim Paglione]

But the trick is that they're traveling so fast that their clock's at a different speed than ours.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, that's amazing.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Ain't that stuff? So you have muons in your exotic places in the universe. But I hear that we also detect muons here on Earth.

[Tim Paglione]

Oh yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So what's going on there?

[Tim Paglione]

So you'll get one of these energetic cosmic rays will come in and hit something in our atmosphere.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So it's the same phenomenon.

[Tim Paglione]

Exactly the same. Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But that's happening to us.

[Tim Paglione]

The Earth's atmosphere is a bright, bright gamma ray background, in fact. So that particle shower, these extensive air.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Showers, because it busted open the proton.

[Tim Paglione]

They'Ll come flying in and those muons will stream down to the surface. A thousand just went through your body.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Tim Paglione]

Another, another thousand.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Another thousand.

[Tim Paglione]

But the interesting thing is their lifetime is so short that they shouldn't make it. That trip from the top of the atmosphere down to here, they should decay before.

[Chuck Nice]

They should decay before they heat.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Long before they hit the Earth. Before they hit the Earth.

[Chuck Nice]

Then why do they make it?

[Tim Paglione]

Well, because they're traveling so fast that their clock is running at a different speed than ours.

[Chuck Nice]

That's amazing. So they actually don't know any better.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So Einstein was right. So it's rel time dilation right here on Earth. It's a.

[Chuck Nice]

You gotta love science, people.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You just gotta love it.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, can't argue with it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It blows a gasket every now and then. You gotta love, you gotta recover from that.

[Chuck Nice]

So phenomenal.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And muons, they behave like electrons, right?

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Except they're electric ones. Too. Well, they're different.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Thank you, Professor Paglio.

[Tim Paglione]

They're fundamentally different. I mean, they've got mass, they're not a fundamental particle like an electron, things like that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But they're analogous to an electron. And why?

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. Well, there are muons with negative charges. Electrons have negative charges. But if you leave a muon alone, it'll decay, and you can get an electron from that. So in a way you could think that an electron's kind of hiding inside a muon.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, that's weird.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. All right. So these energetic phenomena, I think because we're colleagues and I hear the most energetic things I know of are supernovae and then there's hypernovae. Okay, what are those things? Hypernovae.

[Tim Paglione]

That would just be a big ass explosion. I don't really know. I mean, there are supernovae that are just extremely energetic. They're hard to explain.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's the badass supernova.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, yeah, you're right near the edge there.

[Chuck Nice]

Is there a quantifiable magnitude of nova, supernova, hypernova, like, that we would be able to understand as a regular person?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Like, you're not a regular person. Let's get that.

[Chuck Nice]

Like. Yeah, you know what I mean?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Like we have a hierarchy of words. And how do they correspond to hierarchies of energy? What you're trying to say.

[Chuck Nice]

That's what I'm trying to say. Like, how would you explain, like. Okay, so a nova is like 10 nuclear bombs or 5 hydrogen bombs or whatever, just so that we could like.

[Tim Paglione]

Like, I wish I had that number. But I think it's more of those bombs than I could. I could put more than we could ever even imagine.

[Chuck Nice]

More bombs you can imagine.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, I mean, you get 10 to the 53ergs from what we call a type 2 supernova explosion. So that's a massive star that'll explode and end up as a black hole.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Tim Paglione]

And that's like a factor of 10 to the 20 more than a Nova. Just a little.

[Chuck Nice]

10 to the 20 more.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's a huge difference in that explosion, correct me if I'm wrong, it's emitting more energy than all the stars in the galaxy in which it explodes.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, that's something.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I mean, that's right. If the sun is 10 to 33 ergs per second, and it's 10 to the 53 total ergs.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So that's 10 to the 20th more ergs.

[Tim Paglione]

The one that I've heard is if you add up all the energy that the sun will ever Emit in its total lifetime. That's like a supernova.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's a supernova.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. Gotcha.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Tim Paglione]

Is huge.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. That's almost the same way to.

[Chuck Nice]

All at once.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All at once.

[Chuck Nice]

You're looking at 10 billion, 15 billion years.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Of radiation all at once.

[Tim Paglione]

Yep.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And that's what. So they're visible across the universe.

[Chuck Nice]

I'm Kais from Bangladesh and I support Startalk on Patreon. This is Startalk with Neil Degrasse Tyson.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So how far away are your objects? Are they all in our own galaxy?

[Tim Paglione]

Everything that I've been studying lately has been in our own galaxy. But I've also studied other galaxies, but nearby ones mostly. But now I've just started getting into galaxy clusters, but still nearby clusters, but they're getting kind of far away. Now.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Let's just take a moment as we record this in the year 2024. Yes. That 100 years ago, Hubble, the man, not the telescope, discovered that we're not alone as a galaxy in the universe.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Tim Paglione]

Ended the great debate.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, he didn't do the debate.

[Tim Paglione]

No, he ended it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Ended it.

[Chuck Nice]

He ended the great debate.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. The great debate was are the spiral nebulae just local phenomena in our own galaxy or they whole other.

[Chuck Nice]

Whole other galaxies.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Whole other galaxies out there like ours.

[Tim Paglione]

Island universe.

[Chuck Nice]

Now we know there's a whole trillion of them out there.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

That's amazing.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They got out of control.

[Chuck Nice]

Look at that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So you mentioned Emiko Fermi just a moment ago as the.

[Tim Paglione]

The neutrinos.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The. Was he the namer of the neutrino? He must be Italian. Yeah, neutrino.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly how he said it too. I believe I have a discovery. It's called a neutrino.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's Chuck speaking Italian, by the way.

[Chuck Nice]

That's. Yeah, that's every American who's not Italian speaking Italian.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And if there were girl neutrinos, they'd be neutrinos, right? Wouldn't they?

[Chuck Nice]

That's very cool.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Now I'm interested.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So we tend to name telescopes after scientists or other people relevant to our field. And I read recently about the Fermi telescope and I don't know anything about it. Could you catch me up on it?

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. So it's a gamma ray. It's the Fermi gamma ray. Space telescope.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Space telescope.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. You got to be in space because gamma rays will interact with the Earth's atmosphere, so.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And give you muons.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, yeah. And pyons and the whole gamut. Yeah, Good stuff. So it's in space.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Is this the first gamma ray telescope? Space telescope?

[Tim Paglione]

It is not. So its predecessor was the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I knew that. Okay.

[Tim Paglione]

It's the size of a bus. It was a really big one.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because it's a bus that fits inside the space shuttle.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So just. Yeah, so it's not that it just fit in. It's designed to just fit in.

[Tim Paglione]

Oh, for sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's your size. Just make it fit.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, that's your whole payload.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's the whole.

[Chuck Nice]

That's the whole payload right there at the time.

[Tim Paglione]

And it may still hold the record. It was the heaviest thing that the shuttle ever launched.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Really?

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Tim Paglione]

But you need a heavy detector like that to stop the gamma rays, you know, to detect them. It's in essence, the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope is a particle detector.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But it could also know what direction it's coming from.

[Tim Paglione]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tim Paglione]

So it detects when a photon comes in, and it's one photon at a time.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Gamma ray photon.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Tim Paglione]

So when the photon comes in where it came from as best as it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Can, you're counting one photon at a time.

[Tim Paglione]

One at a time.

[Chuck Nice]

That's insane.

[Tim Paglione]

They're rare. This is the highest energy stuff. You need something special to create it. And so, yeah, they're pretty rare, man.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They're just dishing them out just here. One for you, man.

[Chuck Nice]

One for you.

[Tim Paglione]

One for you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And when we got a photon. Guys looking over here, let me toss one to those aliens.

[Chuck Nice]

That's pretty wild, man.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I mean, when you talk to solar astronomers. Oh, gosh, you can't even have a conversation.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because they have like countless photons coming from the sun, even us.

[Tim Paglione]

Just from anything from a star, you get countless photons, you know, so these, these. It's. They're precious. One photon at a time.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so what will it do that the Compton Observatory couldn't do?

[Tim Paglione]

Fermi was a great improvement on that. Localization, like figuring out what the direction was so it could pinpoint the direction of the gamma ray. Much better. That was really important.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Cause I think there's whole generations of detectors where they just detect something.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And there was no information as to where it came from. It just detected. Right.

[Tim Paglione]

And it was even worse with Compton because you would really like to say, oh, we detected a gamma ray from this crazy source, but you couldn't quite pinpoint did it really come from that crazy source or not?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Your uncertainty circle was huge.

[Tim Paglione]

Exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Okay, so now you're doing a little.

[Tim Paglione]

Better Oh, a lot better. Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, to a fraction of a degree. It still sounds pretty sloppy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So observer that you are, space telescopes have high value to you being above the atmosphere.

[Tim Paglione]

Oh, yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Detecting your one particle a year or whatever, your one photon.

[Tim Paglione]

Luckily it's more than that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, I'm happy to hear. How many total gamma ray photons have you touched in your life?

[Tim Paglione]

Oh, that's been plenty.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Plenty. Okay.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. Like I was saying before, anytime one of those cosmic ray protons hits an ambient proton and the galaxy is full of those gas clouds, they light up.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, gotcha.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. So it's actually, it's a strong background.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's a strong background.

[Tim Paglione]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right. So you use the Fermi telescope in what way?

[Tim Paglione]

I've lately been studying, well, things that you can't detect, oddly enough. So there's all these different gamma ray.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You're detecting it with gamma rays. You think you can't detect with a regular telescope?

[Tim Paglione]

No, no. You can. There are bright sources of gamma rays like pulsars and star forming galaxies and things like that. But you know, if you look at all the pulsars that are out there, there's about 5,000 or so that have been detected in the radio and many of them are detected as gamma ray sources as well. But only a couple of hundred, about 300. So what are the other 4,000 or so doing? We suspected that they would also be good sources of gamma rays. And so we were looking at all the gamma rays.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Just a weaker source.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Tim Paglione]

So we were looking at all the undetected pulsars and gamma rays and stacking that signal together to see if as a population they actually are gamma ray sources and trying to, you know, figure out what their stack population.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You are improving the signal to noise of your data.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, exactly. It's the signal compared to the noise. We're trying to reduce the background.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So every time you stack, the noise slowly cancels itself because it's not additive. Right. The ups and the downs cancel ideal. You have a signal, however low, if it's really there, every next time you're going to boost it, it's amplified, it's amplified. And every next time you're going to tamp down the noise.

[Tim Paglione]

In real practice, with a particle detector like this, the background just always adds up too.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It does. Oh man.

[Tim Paglione]

But you do get persistent additional signal from your source population. So we stack them both.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You have to beat it. You have to beat it.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, we stack them both.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Tim Paglione]

Stack the background, compare it to our targets, and then we Get a signal above the background.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. And so in the inventory of objects or phenomena that are in these catalogs that emerge from the stacked data, is it something other than a pulsar or a supernova or. Well, are you discovering new kinds of objects?

[Tim Paglione]

Maybe because pulsars at very low gamma ray luminosities, some people say they shouldn't do that. And we're discovering that we're seeing them, that these low spin down, they're called low spin down pulsars, are actually potential sources of gamma ray emission. So there's just a lot that we don't know about the gamma ray production of pulsars. It comes out in a wacky area of their magnetosphere.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So does it feel good when someone.

[Chuck Nice]

Says, can you just. Just for the sake of the people who may not know. Because I know for others.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

For the other people, like, what is a pulsar and why is it so important when you talk about spin?

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. So a pulsar is the densest kind of object in the universe that we can measure. It's all the. It's all the superlatives like that, Right? It is the densest. We're talking something a couple of times the mass of the sun, but the size of queens.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Tim Paglione]

So super compact.

[Chuck Nice]

That's wild.

[Tim Paglione]

Can't go any more compact, or you get a black hole.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Queens, a borough of New York City.

[Chuck Nice]

So it's a.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

For international.

[Chuck Nice]

It's a black hole that you can actually observe, or right before a black hole that you can absolutely observe.

[Tim Paglione]

Exactly, yeah. So super dense. Because of that, it has an incredibly high surface gravity. Right. So like 100 trillion times the surface gravity that's keeping us in our seats right now. So if you weighed a pound right, right here, you'd weigh a hundred trillion pounds on the surface of a neutron star.

[Chuck Nice]

You'd be flat as a flapjack.

[Tim Paglione]

Exactly.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. You'd be a grease spot spot.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's all. Not even flapjack, not even a tortilla.

[Chuck Nice]

Spot.

[Tim Paglione]

But then they pulse, right? This pulsing is that they're spinning around really super crazy fast. Also, some of the fastest spinning things, they spin spin faster than a blender.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Tim Paglione]

Double the mass of the sun. The size of queens.

[Chuck Nice]

The size of queens spinning faster than a blender.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, it's pretty nuts.

[Chuck Nice]

That's wild.

[Tim Paglione]

Spinning so fast they could almost fly to pieces. I mean, it's that fast. Because of that fast spin and that high compression, they have these powerful, powerful magnetic fields, like trillion times higher than the magnet that's on Your fridge. And that generates these intense electrical fields that'll accelerate particles just like the particles at the particle accelerators here on Particle Accelerator.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, the universe as a particle accelerator.

[Chuck Nice]

Look at that.

[Tim Paglione]

And even though the surface gravity is so high, any particles that are near the surface, and these are just electrons and stuff like that, they will be, instead of falling to the surface despite that high gravity, they get shot off at almost the speed of light because of the intense electric magnetic fields.

[Chuck Nice]

Look at that.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So that means we understand gamma ray bursts, Is that what you're saying?

[Tim Paglione]

That's a stretch. Yeah. All right, so a gamma ray burst is a different thing. So this is. This is during a stellar explosion, like a supernova, something happens as the core of that star collapses.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And anytime a scientist says something happens.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We're gapping ignorant. There's a whole ignorant valley there.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. There's a whole world inside the whole world.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Tim Paglione]

Well, people are modeling it and getting pretty good at it. There's a student in our group, a master's student who's been doing these gamma ray burst explosions, but Master's degree. Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Not just a Master of the Universe or master class, which would be kind of cool, though. Master's degree student.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes. That'd be the degree they should give you as an astrophysicist. You are now a Master of the Universe.

[Tim Paglione]

That I am in favor of. That's pretty awesome.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'll change that for sure. Well, let's look at our cosmic queries and see what came in. Chuck, you have them all?

[Chuck Nice]

I have them right here.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You got them all. Bring it on.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. Well, let's start with Haywood from Atlanta, Georgia.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Says Heywood's asked before, I think Heywood.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. He says. Hello, Neil, Tim, Chuck. Just wondering, do gamma ray bursts start slowly and build over time or are they instantaneous? And by that I think he means not the actual explosion, but the lead up to. Because there's no such thing as a slow moving burst.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. It wouldn't. You wouldn't call it a burst.

[Chuck Nice]

You wouldn't call it a burst at that point. So leading up to the actual expulsion of what we just talked about, what's that process? Do we have an idea of what that process is?

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. So it's the collapse of a massive star down to a black hole, presumably. But then instead of just like this spherical explosion that you might picture, it's actually you get a jet, couple of jets of explosive material, basically that blast out of the star. And they tend to be. Those jets tend to be pointed Right at us. And that gives you a lot of that high energy emission once it breaks out of the star. But it's seconds. It's seconds. It's a pretty, really rapid rise and then there's a slight fade, but it's still seconds, maybe tens of seconds. And those are so called long gamma ray bursts. There are shorter ones that are much, much quicker.

[Chuck Nice]

Tens of seconds. And that's the longest.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Wait, wait, so how do you know it's that short? Has anyone witnessed that?

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, yeah. We see the light curves of their explosion and then the.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So somebody's looking at it before it explodes.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And then they see it while it's exploding in those tens of seconds. Even though the sky is vast and we're not enough astronomers in the world to look at every star at all times. But you had people looking at the right star at the right time.

[Tim Paglione]

Well, not just people. The Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope has an instrument that's looking at the whole sky all the time.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, there you go. Okay, so it wasn't a pointed observations, it was a broad.

[Tim Paglione]

It's part of a survey.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Survey. Okay.

[Tim Paglione]

Exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, give me more, Chuck.

[Chuck Nice]

Let's keep moving. Let's go with Warma or Rama who says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Professor Padillon and Lord Nice Andrew here from Cork in Ireland. And then he says, I suppose it's in Gaelic. A thousand welcome. A hundred thousand welcomes. And I'm not going to try to pronounce that. Sorry, buddy. He goes. My question for you today is can you explain how the properties of the largest molecular clouds in galaxies influence star formation rates and the overall dynamics of galaxies? Okay, that's a great question. Yeah, that's a really great question.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. This is where I started before doing the gamma rays was studying these star formation and giant molecular.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Was your PhD on that?

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, wow.

[Chuck Nice]

Cool.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. In fact, there's not, not a word of gamma rays went into my PhD thesis. But the one paper I did as a grad student on it was one of my most highly cited papers.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Nice.

[Tim Paglione]

Kind of funny. And now I, all I do is gamma ray. I was waiting for Fermi to get launched. Yeah, the star formation happens in these giant molecular clouds and so that's, that's where all the action is. So yeah, the properties of the molecular clouds definitely determines how it all plays out.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow. And do the, any of these other phenomena, like, I don't know, the collision of black holes or these pulsar ejections and all of these particles that are excited and then jetted across the universe, do they ever perturb these other, you know, like, clouds and things to cause something that we can observe or.

[Tim Paglione]

You know, it's interesting when you're talking about black holes and this and that, I was. I'm rolling in my head, I'm like, no, no, no, no. But the cosmic rays that we've been talking about, they can penetrate into the molecular clouds deeper than anything else and provide a source of heat. And what we've noticed is that molecular clouds are a little hotter than one might predict. They should be really cool. And so there seems to have always been an additional source of ionization, source of heating, and cosmic rays are that source.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Tim Paglione]

And this is one of the things that keeps me going in cosmic ray astrophysics is seeing what the contribution of cosmic rays are to galaxy evolution and molecular cloud evolution, star formation.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So molecular clouds can be huge. That means they have a lot of gravity. Does that enough gravity to influence other clouds, or are they just into its own thing?

[Chuck Nice]

Interesting.

[Tim Paglione]

I mean, they can merge and do other stuff, but they tend to be really subject to the overall dynamics of the galaxy. So they'll follow the. The gravitational potential of. Of the galaxy.

[Chuck Nice]

All right, this is Ilya. Ilya says hello. Dr. Tyson, Professor Pelion, and anyone else who might be there. Thanks.

[Tim Paglione]

Your title is Lord.

[Chuck Nice]

This is true. Yes. Here's a question from beautiful Portland, Oregon. From the limited knowledge, Gamma is the highest photon energy we have encountered in the universe, but we have also produced photons with much higher levels in particle accelerators here on Earth. Does the equipment you use in your studies have the capacity to detect and differentiate such particles? But the truth is, have we really.

[Tim Paglione]

No. You can't compete with the cosmos, man. No, they totally have us beat.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So the cosmos is a they in that sense. I'm just sure how you're personifying the universe.

[Tim Paglione]

The LHC is able to bang together protons at, I think it's like 14 tera electron volts, which is just a whole crapload of electron volts. It's very high energy, but we've got. There are sources out there that work a thousand times higher.

[Chuck Nice]

Thousand times higher.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Tim Paglione]

We're getting cosmic rays, and there are gamma rays that we're seeing from sources that we truly don't understand how they can be that energetic.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Isn't that our best evidence that the Large Hadron Collider would not create many black holes that would eat Earth when they turned on the switch?

[Tim Paglione]

Oh, that's an interesting question.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Because the energetics of the collider though high pale compared to the actual collisions happening in our actual atmosphere.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And so you can't worry that that's going to turn us into a black hole when you have higher energy reactions.

[Chuck Nice]

That are happening right above us, right above. All the time.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All the time.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

That makes sense.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. I think the record is 20 TeV for the highest energy photon detected on the Earth. It might, might be higher now, but that requires a process or a particle that's even more energetic. And so they're out there. They're out there and we can't touch that.

[Chuck Nice]

Can't touch it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Can't touch.

[Chuck Nice]

So this is Kayla Bord Badu. She says salutations from Lafayette, Louisiana. Kyla here, curious about gamma ray telescopes. How exactly do they work? Are they used to investigate and why do we never hear about them?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I know. How come? Because you don't make pretty pictures.

[Tim Paglione]

I don't know.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's gotta be it. People like pictures.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, that's true.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You say I had three photons today does not make a headline.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh yeah.

[Tim Paglione]

The pictures are kind of grainy, I'll admit that. But you know, we usually Tim.

[Chuck Nice]

That's why there's Photoshop.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. Or artist's impression, you know, it's a particle detector. So the particle comes in, it goes through these layers of tungsten basically, and it'll create a particle antiparticle pair. And that pair travels through the tracker, the so called tracker. And that lets us know where the, where it came from. And then it lands in this silicon calorimeter, which is just an energy measure. And that's the way it works.

[Chuck Nice]

All right, so that's super cool, man.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So tell us about a calorimeter.

[Tim Paglione]

So the, the particle eventually ends up in this, this calorimeter and that's, that's just overall measuring the total energy.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay. Like a collection.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. So you know, we, like I said we get three things.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's root is calorie. Yeah, yeah. Calorie is energy. Calorimeter. Yeah, Calorie.

[Chuck Nice]

So it's heat.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Or energy.

[Chuck Nice]

Energy.

[Tim Paglione]

Energy, Right.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, exactly. Which can manifest, can manifest heat, but it's energy. Excellent.

[Tim Paglione]

Technically, heat is exchanged energy.

[Chuck Nice]

Gotcha.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Cool. All right. You see how specific these scientists are, people? You see what a pain in the ass this is.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But it facilitates efficient communication.

[Chuck Nice]

That I cannot disagree with.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's what I'm saying.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. All right, here we go. This is Christopher Stowe, who says hi, Chris in Pennsylvania.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Here.

[Chuck Nice]

My question is about the chemistry that occurs in these huge clouds. Is There. Complex chemistry occurring in the nebula? Or is the material too diffused for this to happen?

[Tim Paglione]

This guy knows what he's talking about. Yeah, that's really insightful because the dude.

[Chuck Nice]

Knows what he's talking about.

[Tim Paglione]

Here it is diffuse, extremely diffuse. You might. In a dense molecular cloud, you might have a thousand particles in a cubic centimeter, so the size of a dye, you know, so that's not much. So they don't interact a lot.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

A die. You mean a dice. Dice.

[Tim Paglione]

One die.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

One die.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Tim Paglione]

So, yeah, the chemistry's there, but it's slow. Gas phase chemistry is just really slow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's slow because of the separation among. The frequency of interaction is so slow. The experimenting is not sensibly happening on a sensible time scale.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, you can't make a compound out of two atoms if they don't meet up, you know, so it's just. Yeah, it's just slow. It happens. And you can get complex molecules, but it's. It's slow. And molecular clouds don't live that long. Oh, yeah, millions of years. They're a little transient. So now, I'm sorry, that was an astronomical time scale there.

[Chuck Nice]

That's.

[Tim Paglione]

That's fast.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. Okay, There you go.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But don't live. So what happens to them?

[Tim Paglione]

Well, they could collapse to form stars, or they could dissipate or be disrupted. They're all very turbulent. So they could just fly to pieces.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, okay. All right. This is Saja Minkinon. Saja Minkinen. Who says hello?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm guessing it's not that.

[Chuck Nice]

I mean, how about this?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm just guessing.

[Chuck Nice]

Saya Minkanen. Okay, how about that? Hello. From the distant snowy lands of Finland. My name is Saya Minkinen, pronounced Saya. Oh. Guess who got it right. Okay, for once, had it wrong the first time until you said maybe not the last name. Sorry, I can't help you there, Chuck. Okay, you jackass. All right, here you go. Saya, here's my question. If there are regions in the galaxy where stars are born and die very quickly, could these starbursts in some way be considered the vital functions of galaxies themselves? In other words, do they act as the breathing or the pulse of galaxies, shaping their life cycle and their evolution?

[Tim Paglione]

Boy, you sound like you've been working with Neil for. Yeah, that's a great question. And it's kind of the thing that got me into the galaxy cluster Project of the galaxy. Yeah, because galaxies form from infalling gas and things like that, but then there's also this process of Feedback, because you get supernova explosions and things like that or stellar winds. And when it's all happening in one burst like that, you can get these giant super bubbles or galactic scale winds that are coming out of galaxies and then receding their neighborhood and even turning off the star formation. So it's all regulated by these feedback mechanisms.

[Chuck Nice]

That's wild.

[Tim Paglione]

They also generate cosmic rays, which can carry away a bunch of the energy as well. It's another thing I've been looking at.

[Chuck Nice]

Very, very cool. Great question, Saya. Way to go. I'll forgive you for making fun of me. All right, this is Michael Kemp who says, greeting Dr. Tyson Lord. Nice. Dr. Pagioni. Paglioni. Paglione. Sorry.

[Tim Paglione]

Rhymes with telephone, I think.

[Chuck Nice]

Michael Kemp here from soggy Oregon coast range in the southwest of Eugene, James Webb space telescope has imaged tons of supernova from the early universe. Are these early supernovae different from the ones occurring in our universe today? It. Thanks a lot. What would make them change?

[Tim Paglione]

Well, it's a great question. It's actually a big problem. What we assume is that they're the same as supernova that we know and love, the ones that we're really familiar with that are nearby. And we're kind of hoping that they probably are the same so that we understand what they're like right now. What he's referring to, though, there's been dozens of new transients discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope.

[Chuck Nice]

So things that just explain transients.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, things that just blinked on and then went away.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, get out.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, that don't repeat.

[Tim Paglione]

Transient. Like an explosion.

[Chuck Nice]

Wild.

[Tim Paglione]

Mm.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, that's. But that's crazy, though.

[Tim Paglione]

So we presumed they're supernova, but we're actually still. I think they're still studying what the heck they are.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Tim Paglione]

This is really new stuff. I mean, this guy's up on.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, he's up on the stuff. Way to go, Michael Kemp. Look at that. You impressed the doctor here. Okay. All right. This is Gavin Bamber who says hello from North Vancouver. Please visit us. Okay. Thanks for the invitation.

[Tim Paglione]

Absolutely.

[Chuck Nice]

Expecting my plane ticket. Was our sun a star that was formed from the debris of a massive star? If so. Or not, how many dying stars does it take to form a new star? Interesting.

[Tim Paglione]

So, yeah, we're definitely a second generation. We. The sun is definitely a second generation star. What we call a population one star. Even though it's second generation. Two came first. I don't know astronomers, but pop two came first.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Pop one came second.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Deal with it.

[Chuck Nice]

That's Weird.

[Tim Paglione]

There's pop three now also, which were the first.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, yeah, that's in ridiculous.

[Tim Paglione]

Anyway. Well, the sun is definitely a pop one star, so it has heavier elements in it, like magnesium and whatnot, you know, and these things come from exploding stars and other. Other, you know, evolved stellar things. So, yeah, for sure. We're from the debris of a lot of different stars then. So all. All that, you know, when a star explodes or throws off its outer layers when it's a giant or things like that, you know, that all goes back in. In the interstellar medium, eventually forms another giant molecular cloud.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Tim Paglione]

And then forms. The next generation of stars, falls in.

[Chuck Nice]

And so, yeah, forms a star. That's pretty wild.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Next gen. Next gen. Gen X. Let's start naming them. Yeah, population wanted to. That's not catchy.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, it really is. Just start. All right, this is Alyssa Feldhouse. Alyssa Feldhouse. Who says Alyssa from Rocket city, Huntsville here. Dr. Pavlione. Can we trace the features in younger galaxies directly to these early starburst galaxies? And might they be considered progenitors of the galaxies we observe today? And why. Why, pray tell, is my favorite candy named after them? Thanks. Keeping me up. Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Starburst.

[Chuck Nice]

Starburst, right there. You have some on your desk.

[Tim Paglione]

Oh, very nice.

[Chuck Nice]

Look at that.

[Tim Paglione]

I mean, the answer to her question, in short, is.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, this is when, you know, you're in a real astrophysicist office, when you see some starbursts sitting around. Anyway. Yeah, you want one? There you go.

[Tim Paglione]

I think that's just a cool name. I. I'm not in the marketing. Marketing firm for these guys, but, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, just went for it. Yeah.

[Tim Paglione]

In astronomy, Neil wrote about this a long time ago.

[Chuck Nice]

You know, we.

[Tim Paglione]

We use simplistic naming. We're not super fancy with the names. If there's a burst of star formation in a galaxy, we call it a starburst galaxy. You know, get right to the point. But, yeah, I mean, the earliest galaxies were forming a lot of stars. They were smaller, obviously, and really messed up. And, yeah, we try to make those connections, but the star formation rate earlier in the universe was a lot higher than it is today. So, you know, things were. We're definitely interested in trying to tie all those together.

[Chuck Nice]

Cool.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Time for one more question, Chuck.

[Chuck Nice]

All right, let's go to our buddy, Alejandro Reynoso.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

He's from Hackensack, New Jersey.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, okay.

[Tim Paglione]

He's not the big king.

[Chuck Nice]

Alejandro Reynoso from Monterrey, Mexico. Hello. Or should I say hola?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

There's that on there?

[Chuck Nice]

No, no, he says this. My question is how massive stars, how do they behave different from our sun? Is the only difference in how they die?

[Tim Paglione]

No, it's also in how they're born and how they live. So it's everything.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, my God.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. Massive stars do everything just fast.

[Chuck Nice]

So let's talk about how they're born, because that's pretty doggone interesting.

[Tim Paglione]

Well, it's the same way the sun or a low mass star is born. It's a collapse of a molecular cloud.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. The.

[Tim Paglione]

But the massive star just does it faster because of the mass.

[Chuck Nice]

Because of all the mass.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, Gravity. So it just all happens faster.

[Chuck Nice]

All right? So now I'm this big, giant, fat super star, and I'm just burning away, baby. What am I doing differently than the kind of star that we have? And then what am I doing differently than, like a brown dwarf. Like a little boring ass brown dwarf star?

[Tim Paglione]

It's the burning away, baby that you were talking about. It's the burning. Yeah, it's all in the burning. So the sun at the core.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But just to be clear, we don't use the word burn the same way the chemist does.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. You wouldn't.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The chemist. Burn is a chemical reaction.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Usually involving oxygen.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Where it's exothermic and releases. We say burn.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But we don't mean burn.

[Chuck Nice]

What you really mean is what? Well, we're reacting.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We mean thermonuclear fusion. Yes. So it's loose tongue. It's just loose tongue. We're all guilty of that. So I slip that in there. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

So here you are, you're doing your thermonuclear fusion.

[Tim Paglione]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And I'm talking about hydrogen burning.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. That's hydrogen burning.

[Tim Paglione]

So that's what the sun is.

[Chuck Nice]

The sun, yeah.

[Tim Paglione]

Burning hydrogen and creating helium.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. So it's helium. Helium. So what's. What's the biggest fat guy doing?

[Tim Paglione]

So they have enough mass to compress the core to higher temperatures so that they can burn helium into carbon.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh.

[Tim Paglione]

Or even better, burn carbon into oxygen.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh.

[Tim Paglione]

Or even better, the next one and the next one and the next one until you get up to iron.

[Chuck Nice]

So they're just making all these elements.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

As they burn.

[Tim Paglione]

Yep.

[Chuck Nice]

Whoa.

[Tim Paglione]

Nucleosynthesis.

[Chuck Nice]

Nucleosynthesis. So that is not just a part of the dying process before they become explode.

[Tim Paglione]

That's the living process.

[Chuck Nice]

The living process.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Interesting.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. And that each one of those is a very energetic process. So they burn fast. And so even Though, you know, they have more mass and so you would think, oh, with more fuel in the tank, you'd last longer. No, they burn it up really, really fast.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Way faster.

[Tim Paglione]

They're super luminous. I mean, they could be thousands of times more luminous than the sun. And so they're shining. They're giving off energy that much faster.

[Chuck Nice]

Now, does the size compensate for the longevity or do they just burn out quicker?

[Tim Paglione]

They burn out quicker. Oh, they might only last 10 million years. Oh, yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Instead of a trillion, right? Yes.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah. So this is why when star formation's happening, massive star formation, it's instantaneous. If you see a massive. There are no old massive stars.

[Chuck Nice]

Look at that.

[Tim Paglione]

There just aren't.

[Chuck Nice]

It's better to burn out than it is to fade away.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What's that from? That's.

[Chuck Nice]

That's. That's Highlander.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No. Yes. There's another one.

[Tim Paglione]

Really?

[Chuck Nice]

That's Highlander.

[Tim Paglione]

That has two catchphrases. It's not. There can be only one.

[Chuck Nice]

That. That is the number one catchphrase. But the anti hero in the movie, that's his line. It's better to burn out than it is to fade away.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

My favorite song that has that. It's better to burn than to fade away. Ms. Neil Young.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, Neil Young.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Hey, hey.

[Tim Paglione]

My favorite Highlander line is actually. It hurts, doesn't it? He stabs him in the neck.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

That's your favorite?

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah, because it's kind of cruel because he knows he won't die.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Just stabbed him. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Hurts, doesn't it? Wow. So big, giant stars, they live fast and die young. Absolutely awesome.

[Tim Paglione]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Even though they have more fuel.

[Chuck Nice]

Even though they have more fuel.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They're like gas guzzling land yachts of the 1960s and 70s.

[Chuck Nice]

I like to think of more.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They have bigger gas tanks, but they would not go as far right as the smaller gas tank. They got better gas mileage.

[Chuck Nice]

That's right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Same analysis.

[Chuck Nice]

Very cool.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Let me see if I can reflect on our conversation.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

With a cosmic perspective.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What has always fascinated me with science in general, but astrophysics in particular, is that there are things you know and love and see that. You have telescopes and detectors and you hypothesize what's there and you get more better data and you figure it out. Then you realize you're still only limited by the power of your tools. And you actually wait until a bigger telescope comes along, a better telescope comes along, a more powerful particle accelerator comes along that could reach into zones of the universe that were previously unknown. And so for me, it's not just about how clever are you with what we already know. It's you got to bring in the engineers at some point to build the thing, to be able to even see where you had never imagined was even possible. And that's where the significant growth in a field comes from. Not only from brilliant people thinking about stuff we already know about. It comes from brilliant technologies that could take us not only where we've never been, on occasion, where we've never even dreamt of. And that's a cosmic perspective. Tim, thanks for coming.

[Tim Paglione]

Hey, thank you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Thanks for making the trip from upstairs here at the Rose center for Earth and Space, Hayden Planetarium, American Museum of Natural History. That's your visitor's office, right? Because you're based at York College. That's right, yeah. So thanks for coming.

[Tim Paglione]

Absolutely.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Chuck, always good to see you, man.

[Chuck Nice]

Always a pleasure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, this has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries, the Extreme Energy edition. Until next time, keep looking up.