Low-Mass Mania with Emily Rice

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Neil deGrasse Tyson
Every day, our world gets a little more connected, but a little further apart. But then there are moments that remind us to be more human. Thank you for calling Amica insurance. Hey, uh, I was just in an accident. Don't worry.

Emily Rice
We'll get you taken care of. At Amica, we understand that looking out for each other isn't new or groundbreaking. It's human. Amika empathy is our best policy. Coming up on Startalk cosmic queries.

Chuck Nice
My friend and colleague Emily Rice is going to tell us all about the latest in brown dwarfs and exoplanets. Oh, yeah. That all comes to you from right here in my office at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History.

Welcome to Startalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. Star talk begins right now. This is Star cosmic queries edition. Got Chuck. Nice with me, Chuck.

How you doing, man? Hey, what's happening here? All right. You know, there's a part of the universe that is a little foreign to me because most of my research back when I was, like, active with it was galaxies, large scale structure, big bang, all right? And you come down, you get.

Get closer and closer and closer. There's a whole world there, right? Literal and figurative world. Okay? People think about planets and stars being born around which you would find planets, right?

And we got one of the world's experts right here in the house. Oh, and here she goes. Emily Rice. Emily, friend and colleague. How you doing?

Emily Rice
I'm very excited to be here again. Welcome back. Thank you. Yeah, to start talking and just let the record show that whatever I'm wearing, that's cosmic. And people say, oh, that's cool, that's cosmic.

Chuck Nice
I just want you to know that. I will come in with something cooler. When I'm with my people. It's just camouflage. Cause everybody else has got something now.

Emily Rice
It is. And you are like, leader of the pack there. Aren't you involved in some haberdashery or something? Haberdashery? What?

Chuck Nice
Clothing. A little bit of this, a little. Bit of jewelry line. Yeah. Or do you still have the jewelry line?

Emily Rice
It's a super long story, but, yeah, we. So it started as a phenomenological. Like, we noticed people, you know, you were one of the originals, but other people were doing it, too. I mean, I'm an og. I think you might be to be.

Chuck Nice
Loud in my attire, okay. But a bunch of people were doing it. And so we started a blog. Originally, summer ash and I. Summer was at Columbia at the time, and we were doing our outreach stuff and wearing our stuff, like our galaxy leggings and our NASA swag and stuff like that.

Emily Rice
We were like, we should. This is so cool. Cause some of the stuff we noticed was real, you know, real hubble images and stuff like that. And so we started a blog that was. We meant to, like, share it with the public.

Like, oh, you bought this thing? What is it? Where did it come from? You know, astronomically. How was it?

Chuck Nice
Add some science. Add the science to it. What I didn't expect is for the rest of the astronomers to be so into it that, like, we presented it at a research conference, but there's always room at the research conferences for outreach and education and things like that. And the number one question we got at our poster at the research conference was, where do I buy this stuff? Like, run the other aspects.

Emily Rice
The genesis can make stuff with my science. And at the time, we were just finding things that were out there, you know, people's etsy shops and small designers. Like, it was kind of everywhere. You were an aggregator at the time? Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Curator, you know, cosmological Joan Rivers. Oh, who are you wearing? What galaxy is that? Totally. And it's now become a shop.

Emily Rice
So, long story short, we became an online shop. So we create our own stuff as well. It's called star torialist, startorialist, sartorialist. You see what she did there? Exactly.

Chuck Nice
Okay, well, cool. That's online. We can find it online. Yeah. Star Taurealist.

Emily Rice
So I really thought it would be a fad that would just kind of happen and fade away, like, not be popular anymore, which is kind of fine, but it hasn't. It's continued to grow. We've added our own stuff. So I say that we're the dark energy of the fashion universe. Look at that for astronomy.

Chuck Nice
All right. Dark energy is a power of expansion. Exactly. It accelerates expansion of the universe. In other words, you're unaware of why you are successful.

Emily Rice
Absolutely. Fully. It's not fully understood. It will be. We just need maybe.

Chuck Nice
We don't know. We don't know. So your expertise is newborn stars, exoplanets brown dwarfs. Yeah. And I have an issue, first of all.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Uh oh. So when I think of a star, it's self luminous and it's burning bright, even though burning to us means something different than to a chemist. Fusing bright. Yeah, fusing bright. But that doesn't have the alliteration, and it's not as cool.

Chuck Nice
So stars will burn bright. Even if they're burning dimly, they still sort of are luminous in the infrared or somewhere. Okay. At no time am I thinking I'm looking at a brown object. So why did these objects, which in the Netherland between planets and stars?

Emily Rice
Yes. Cause I don't call planets brown, all right? Because they're gonna reflect light and they're gonna have whatever colors they have. I don't call stars. Where do you get the color brown from?

The color brown apparently came from Jill Tarter, who you've had on your show before. Yes. Jill's a friend of startalk. Yeah. Active with SETI.

Chuck Nice
Jill Tarter. Yeah. I watched her interview on Startalk once, and she told the story of her early career. It was actually in her PhD thesis where she did some research on these objects that were previously called black dwarfs. And so it started in the sixties.

Oh. So we had to take it away from the black. That makes perfect sense. That's what you say. Couldn't just let it be a black dwarf.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
No, we can't have that. Sure. A hole can be black, no problem. Yes, exactly. You know, we have white holes, too.

Emily Rice
Apparently. That's on paper, but not in a real thing. Okay. Anyway, sorry. So the.

Yeah, they were black dwarfs originally. Cause the idea was that was purely theoretical, was what happens when the stars don't have enough mass pushing down from the outside to get a high enough temperature at the inside to fuse. Hydrogen and helium is a steady source of power. This is what the sun does every. Day of its life.

This is how the sun creates energy. It's a stable source of energy of pressure pushing outwards against gravity. And the idea is that these things that started to form like stars but wouldn't have enough mass would kind of still continue to exist. But what would they look like? What would their structure be?

How would they radiate things like that? That was first described by a theoretical physicist in the 1960s. SS Kumar was his name. And then Jill Tarter, I think it was in 1975, in her thesis, kind of proposed the term brown dwarfs and that kind of stuff. So she originally studied these objects.

It's still at that point theoretical. And, of course, to Chuck's point, black holes were gaining very serious attention around that time. Yeah. So I think early seventies, it was. A cover story of the New York Times magazine, black holes with new research.

Chuck Nice
So it took the word. I think you're right. Yeah. Yeah. But then they realized, like, okay, they're not fully, you know, they're not fully unexplained.

Emily Rice
Like, they are reasonably well explained by, like, kind of normal physics. And so they moved away from black and just called them brown. Jill Tarter on your show said, oh, you know, so I started out doing this, and then I wanted to do research that mattered. Wow. Talking about her shift into SETI, which I'm like, I can't argue with that too much, but it's.

Chuck Nice
But it is a little bit of a dance. A little bit of a dance. But it's an amazing. So she coined the phrase in 1975, and they still weren't known to exist. Like, they weren't actually discovered until the 1990s.

Emily Rice
Even then, it kind of took a while. Just context here. Right. And I hate thinking this way, but it just jumps into my head. You realize you just described something that happened 50 years ago.

Yeah. More than. We had a conference, actually, 50 years after, to celebrate the original paper. It was 19, 63, 64. So that's already ten years ago.

Chuck Nice
Had it been 1975 and we had this conversation, you'd be talking about 1925 as 50 years earlier. Wow. That's what I'm saying. Oh, God, this. Just to put that where.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yes. In the proper context. In the proper context. You know, you guys old? That was not what I was trying to learn.

Who asked you to comment? It is amazing how far we've got and how quickly. Like, I do feel like the. You know, it's not typical. Like, this is the first time in our civilization, possibly, that these, like, cutting edge research results are disseminated to the public so quickly.

Yeah. Like, that's actually something that I love doing at startorialists. Like, there was the press release of the new polarized image of the black hole in the center of the sagay star, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. And it came out, and I showed it to my students that day in class and described it to them. That's amazing.

Emily Rice
Yeah. And, you know, I can put it on a t shirt for you and sell it in star Taurielist. The three of us sound a little bit like we're on a porch. I remember we're youngins today. I remember we had to teletype each other and let them know about the discoveries that we made teletype.

Chuck Nice
We had to send a telegram. Dots and dashes is how we had to tell people about our great, significant discoveries. Who just started. It feels a little bit like that. So before we go on to our q and a here, let me give you a full, dutiful introduction.

You're a research associate here in our department of astrophysics of the American Museum of Natural History, and you even have a desk, so we get to count you as a resident research associate. So continued welcome. Taking up space up here to those ranks. You're also associate professor of astrophysics at the McCauley Honors College in CUNY. The city University of New York.

Emily Rice
Yeah. And you're in the faculty PhD program at the CUNY grad center. So you're all in there. It's kind of all over the place. Yeah.

Chuck Nice
And we see some students of yours. They come through here. It's very communal. So I bring my classes. Thanks for helping me as much as I can.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yes. Didn't I talk to your class one time? Yes, twice. Twice, yeah. Thanks for bringing by.

Chuck Nice
Delighted. Just call me. And you're a founding member of BDNYC, and all those letters are like in Subway. Subway, I was gonna say. Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
And what line is that? We are very proud. Oh, there's a whole story. There's just no why. There's no why.

Emily Rice
There was no y. So we made up. The y is kind of. We made it red and white in the center. There's no y train, but it's kind of the inversion of the WNYC logo a little bit.

But we had a joke going for a little while because. So these brown dwarfs, you know, we have the stars that have the letters that go with them, and there's a whole story about that. Right. Obafgkm was. That was kind of set into order about 100 years ago by the Harvard college computers or the Harvard Observatory women who were working as computers there.

Annie, Tom Cannon took that letters, and they were originally done by the strength of the hydrogen absorption line. But then they were realizing that actually, it's a little bit different. It needs to be. If we order it by temperature, we change up the letters. And so that's why it's not alphabetical anymore.

But when we started to discover. So rather than reletter them. Oh, yeah, they kept letters. They kept them and just rearranged, confusing. People for the century to fall.

You call it confusion. I call it job security. Pretty. And there was a bunch. Apparently there was a bunch of different systems that they were, and a lot of controversy about it at the time.

But since the brown dwarfs were discovered, so the M dwarfs are the coolest and the faintest stars. But for the brown dwarfs, we had introduced new letters for the spectral type. And there are full papers going through the Alphabet to say, which letter should we use, basically. And so the next ones were L and t, that were kind of proposed about the same time. That is, like, forever messed up my understanding of the Alphabet, because it goes ML in stars.

But then the next one, we realized, okay, there might be things fainter than these t dwarfs, cooler than these faint, or cooler than the t dwarfs. They're gonna have different spectral characteristics and things like that. They proposed that there would be y dwarfs. And so this was even in my, like, scientific career in the last 20 years or so. And so for a little while, we had a joke with the bDNYC logo where there was no y dwarfs yet discovered, and there was also no y train that we would have to explain to people from outside of New York City.

Then the wide dwarfs were actually discovered with the wide field survey, infrared explorer, this NASA mission in the infrared. And so now the joke has been. Become far too long to be actually interested anymore. But we're very proud of our BDNYC logo with the subway things on there. And I feel like we've.

Chuck Nice
It's a local community of people of, like, interest, professional interest. Yeah. The three of us started at myself, Kelly Cruz, who's faculty at Hunter College in CUNY, and Jackie Faherty, who's senior scientist and educator here at AMNH. Yeah. And it was, man, we.

Emily Rice
Over ten years ago now, something like twelve, maybe 14 years ago, we founded BDNYC. It was one of the first groups that was, like, led by a bunch of women, you know, like, it was still rare back then for kind of the three of us to be working together, leading papers together. We were counting how many papers could we find with only female authors. For example, we published one with just the three of us, we couldn't find another one that had any more. There were not solo that were more than three authors, but only women.

Chuck Nice
That sounds like that fact hole test on movies. Yeah, the BDnYC test or something like that. It sounds like black people in Utah. If you see three in one street, there's something. You're no longer in Utah.

Emily Rice
It's getting better now. I feel like you were teleported in that instant, as with somebody parallel dimension or something. So, again, one last thing before we cross over. How does your interest in brown dwarfs take you to an interest in exoplanets. Oh, they're very, very similar.

So the interesting thing is that the difference in between brown dwarfs and stars is actually relatively straightforward. Relatively. It's the nuclear physics on the inside. Like, it's whether they have enough mass to create the high enough temperature at the core to fuse hydrogen, the helium. Like, that's a big difference.

Kind of evolutionarily. It's a clean line, too. Yeah, it's a very. Like, they either turn on so they. Ignited or they didn't.

Yeah. Okay. But for the lower mass things, it's not as clear. And originally, we had a kind of. We wanted to have a similar definition.

And so there was this. This lower mass demarcation that was 13 Jupiter masses instead of between the stars and the brown dwarfs. It's about 75 Jupiter masses. And that was again derived in the 1960s for the 13 Jupiter masses. We wanted to make this nice, clean break between the brown dwarfs and the planets.

And so 13 Jupiter masses is the mass. Just to be clear, what you're doing, you've turned Jupiter into its own measurement. Into its own measurement. Oh, yeah. We always.

Oh, yeah. Or with the masses. I don't know how common an exercise that is in the rest of society. Okay. In New York City, I don't know.

Yeah, it's one block, but it's one example, avenue block versus one, you know, street block or something like that. That's. Whatever, Miles. But, yeah, we do this in astronomy all the time. This is the great, like, astronomers, you know, we say astrophysicist.

If we want people to be impressed or something like that, we'll take anything and call it one or, like, set it relative to one another to make the math easier. Like, we'll do anything to make the math easier. Oh, my goodness. Just 1. How far away is from the.

Chuck Nice
Is ten of us, right? Or five of us, right? Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Emily Rice
So there's 13 Jupiter masses. Above that, there would be some nuclear fusion going on. So more massive than that, you might fuse a little bit of hydrogen, a little bit of lithium, because that's easier to fuse. Deuterium, which is heavy hydrogen is also easier to fuse. And so that easier means it will fuse at lower temperatures.

And so above 13 Jupiter masses, there might be a little bit of fusion going on. And then below 13 Jupiter masses, they figured out there's no fusion going to happen ever. But the thing is that this demarcation doesn't actually make a huge difference in the long term for these things, not in terms of the structure, not in terms of the evolution. So how does it get you interested in an exoplanet? Yeah.

So what ends up happening is that the brown dwarfs are actually really similar to the massive exoplanets. And some of these massive exoplanets are things that we found more easily than we found the Earth like exoplanets. So the size of your party grew. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 510 times the mass of Jupiter.

We found those exoplanets around other stars even more easily. So you find yourself at the same conferences as these other. Yeah, we used to have kind of, we call them cool stars conferences. And first the brown dwarf people went to the cool stars conferences, but then when the exoplanets got big enough, now there's a ton of different exoplanet conferences that the brown dwarf people go to. We kind of go to both, too.

Chuck Nice
Yeah. And we bring our karaoke along, but it's kind of like. And it's also where collaborations are born. Yeah. Especially undervalue.

Emily Rice
And then the planetary science people who have studied the planets in the solar system for so long are like, what are you guys doing? Because so much of it, you know, needs, like Jupiter, we know in a lot more detail, but there's still a lot of open questions. Saturn, we know in a lot more diesel, even Earth atmosphere stuff. Brown dwarf people can learn in order to study these things. Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
All right.

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Chuck Nice
Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie, because we listen to startalk every night and support startalk on Patreon. This is star talk with Neil degrasse Tyson.

Let's jump right in. Okay, we got questions. Let's do it. And they are all from our Patreon people. And they are all for you specifically.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
All right, so this is from Laura Fortier. Says, greetings from Arizona. Hello, doctors Rice and Tyson. Lord. Nice.

I have heard that brown dwarfs and hot Jupiter. Yeah. Are similar. In what ways do they differ and how are they made when they are clearly separated from a solar system? I heard somewhere that we don't really know how low density stars are even created.

Have we learned more? Yeah. People doing their homework before they. Yeah, they really are. So the hot Jupiters are one of these things that, like, we found around other stars that we haven't found in our solar system.

Emily Rice
And they. The hot Jupiter is a nice one because it is what it sounds like. It's a Jupiter sized planet. Jupiter mass planet. All the other planets are super sexy hot planets.

Chuck Nice
Right. Oh, hot Jupiter in the house. Okay, go ahead. Close to its star so that it's irradiated by the star. So it's not hot on its own.

Emily Rice
That's the thing. It's not hot on its own. Yeah. So that's a little circumstantial. Yeah.

And so that's the interesting thing is that these hot jupiters end up being similar to mass and maybe a similar temperature to a brown dwarf, but for a different reason. For a different reason. Yeah, look at that. Like, whether the radiation is coming from the outside of the inside. And so there's similarities, but there's also differences.

Yeah. So those are one kind of. Thanks for clarifying that. And what's the other part of that question? Um, she said, I heard somewhere we don't really know how low density stars are created.

Yeah. So did they mean low mass stars? What, low density? Yeah, they can be kind of the same. The interesting thing is that because of the.

The physics going on at the very, very cores, these things kind of plateau and size. And so they do get lower and lower density. Okay. Because the mass decreases while the physical size stays the same. And so they do get lower and lower density.

But we talk about them more in terms of their mass. Um, yeah, we don't fully know, like, how many of the low mass ones are out there. That's just, like, counting them. We don't fully know that. We don't really know how they formed or how low the mass can go when it forms like a star does.

Chuck Nice
Why did we invite you to this, Eugenia? We all know. Security. Yeah. So, wait, so let's get to brass tacks.

I have a gas cloud out there. There's so many beautiful images of gas clouds from Hubble, especially beautiful ones. So. And we see stars being born. Why weren't those stars born a billion years ago?

Why are they being born now? What happened in that gas cloud ever, at any time, to make a star? Oh, it depends on what the. How does it know to make a high mass star or a low mass star? Yeah, I mean, the universe does.

Emily Rice
Does that, like. We don't necessarily, you know, we. Why'd she get away with that answer? I was about to say she actually gave you your. Your answer, but much more succinct, which is the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
That's true. Yeah. That's kind of figuring out and seeing if there's a law. So there does seem to be a law. We should allow that in the PhD defense, the thesis defense.

Right. So, excuse me. Why do you get this? The unit universe just does that. I feel like that is, like, as soon as you can say, like, confidently, I have no idea, or I don't know, or I don't think we can know, like, that's when you're an actual scientist.

Chuck Nice
Yeah. Yeah. Very good. There's a lot of pressure to. To know the answer.

Very important philosophical point. The confidence and the uncertainty, like, makes the scientists, because everybody else is trying. To give an answer. I was going to say. And that is the difference between, like, I hate to bring it up.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
But science and religion, and you said, somebody beat us in. You. Yeah, I be science and religion, but, yeah. Oh, is that religion? I didn't mean to conflate those two, but.

But no, it's the truth. Like, you know, religion has an answer for everything. Basically. They have an answer. Even when one answer contradicts the other.

Answer, it doesn't make difference. I gave you an answer. You know, that's. Yeah, that's very cool. Or I should say, maybe it's like my parents, which were.

Because I said so. Yeah, exactly. That's the ultimate answer. That's the ultimate answer because I said so. That's very cool.

All right, well, this is great. That was great. That was really informative. Thank you very much, Laura. And say her last name one more time.

Fortier. Fortier. Which is not my forte, to pronounce. Fortier. Okay.

This is Jason Dorikson. And Jason says, what is the largest dwarf star ever discovered? Oh, look at that. He's going for the jumbo shrimp angle. He's going for the jumbo shrimp angle.

What is the largest dwarf star that we have actually seen? That's a good question. I don't think I can answer that very concretely. And the reason why is because there's more weirdness here that I haven't even really touched upon, which is the fact that when the stars are formed, they. Then they kind of form and they start to fuse their hydrogen and helium, and they kind of.

Emily Rice
Once they turn on, they stay that way for a while, they get stable. Right, right. And so they have the same temperature, the same luminosity, the same mass for a long time. That's the other thing, is same mass. Except for the little bit they're losing when they convert it into energy.

Oh, yeah. But it's a tiny. Even for the small stars, it's a tiny bit of mass. Tiny fraction. Yeah, a tiny fraction of mass.

Even for the big stars, the mass doesn't change a huge amount with the nuclear fusion. But the big stars have shorter lifetimes, and the small stars have longer lifetimes. So the low mass ones, the low. Mass ones, we think they can last. And I can't believe we can throw around this number but for, like, a trillion years.

Chuck Nice
Yeah. Yeah. They're not. You could throw it around. Cause nobody understands what it is.

Emily Rice
Yeah. And probably nobody's gonna be around to. Prove me wrong way longer than the universe has been alive to this day. Wow. Right?

Look at that. But the tricky thing is, so that star becomes stable and kind of doesn't stay. But the brown dwarfs will kind of gradually cool and fade over time. Okay. Like, they have this kind of residual heat left over from forming, but then they just kind of cool and fade.

And so, as astronomers look, just looking at them, we can't really tell whether we have a young, low mass brown dwarf that's just formed or an old, high mass brown dwarf that's been cooling. Off for a while because they last for so long. You can't really tell they look the same. The regular. The stars last for a long, long time, but the brown dwarfs cool off.

Yeah. And so we have this. We call it the age mass degeneracy. So we don't know if we have a young, low mass thing that's just hot because it's still young or an old high mass thing that's hot because it's a little bit higher mass. But it's been around for a long time.

A long time off with time. We have to get her explained. Degeneracy. Degeneracy. Yeah, it's like where you.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Degeneracy. You can't tell. It's a lecherous brown dwarf. I know. Degeneres.

It has a gambling problem. The brown dwarfs of today. Oh, God. It's just not what they used to be. I'm never gonna be able to explain my research again.

Emily Rice
It's so funny. We get so used to using these terms. Right? So degeneracy is a. It's a mathematical.

It's a physical term. Physical, mathematical.

There's a couple different kinds. Even. So, our degeneracy, the age mass degeneracy is that you don't know one without constraining the other. So it's ambiguity is the colloquial. Like, that's.

Chuck Nice
The two things look alike, but we can't. They can be very different from each other and just happen to look alike in that moment. Right. And you can't distinguish one from the other without another determination. Another measurement measure.

Emily Rice
Yeah. We have to be able to measure the mass somehow, or we need to. Be able to another data point to break the degeneracy. And there's another degeneracy. Degeneracy is like, the cores of the objects are partially degenerate, we say.

And that's like a quantum mechanical thing where the actual electrons in the atoms get so close together that they fill up the quantum states, and that provides pressure against the mass pushing. Can't keep squeezing down. Wow. Yeah. That's called degeneracy pressure.

Chuck Nice
So I've forgotten we have degeneracy used in two complete. Yeah, they are too different. I never thought about that before, either. Yeah. Such a weird.

Emily Rice
We speak our own language sometimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so this high mass. So it's really hard to tell, actually, exactly how high mass something is. Like, normally we have the 75 Jupiter mass cut off, right?

But we also don't know. You know, is it young or is it old or something like that? Which will factor into whether or not it is or it isn't, which factors into whether it's the largest brown dwarf we've ever seen. Yeah, I gotcha. Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Wow. You put all the. Damn. That's rough. It's weird.

Chuck Nice
Science is hard. It's rough, man. Science is hard. Yeah. You'll just look through a telescope.

Here's the answer to that question. You find new problems as soon as you dig a little bit deeper. So, Jason, the answer to your question is, we don't know. We don't know, man. Sorry.

Emily Rice
How many is that? I think that's. I don't know. You're up to, like, five here. All right.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
That's pretty cool, though. I love it. But who is it that says, the only thing I know is that I know nothing? What's that quote? All I know is that I don't know nothing.

Emily Rice
That's Operation Ivy. But I think before that, I'm thinking ancient Greece. Socrates, Socrates, and Operation Ivy. So it'd be Socrates, actually. Socrates, Johnson, so crates it was.

Chuck Nice
If I know anything at all, it's that I know nothing. I know nothing. I'm paraphrasing. So, yeah. All right.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
This is nobble gobble, and nobble gobble says, salutations, doctors and lord. My name is Caleb. Noah gettin. Okay. Noah gettin noetken.

There you go. My name is Caleb Nowetkin, and. Oh, thanks, Caleb. He says, good luck with that one. Son of a gun.

I can't believe you. Then he says, this is Caleb from Wichita Cole. People got. People are people. I get no respect.

Emily Rice
So, you're just letting the cat mash on the keyboard that Chuck is gonna have fun with this? Oh, yeah. Tell me about it. He says, since brown dwarfs are sort of an intermediate object between a planet and a star, I was wondering if there was a common trend between mass composition and magnetic field strips. Oh, gosh.

Magnetic fields. Look at that. This is one of those things where, if you wanna trip up an astronomer, or you ask them about dust, or you ask them about magnetic fields. And it's nice because it applies, really, across any kind of research, we try to ignore it because those things complicate things hugely. So, yeah, these things do have magnetic fields, but we actually don't know how the magnetic fields are generated on these stars.

We think we know how magnetic fields are generated on the sun. Cause there's this cool thing called the tachoclein, and it's like the. You know, these moving charges are going to generate the magnetic field, and we think that's where it comes from on the sun. And that tachycline is a border between a radiative zone and a convective zone. So there's energy transport is happening in different ways.

But for brown dwarfs, what we think we understand of the structure, and this is all from modeling things and understanding how energy transport is supposed to happen, we think at some point, they become fully convective. So this is kind of cool. It's like the convection is this big bulk motion of material that happens when you, like, boil water and stuff like that. So it's relatively familiar. It's like an internal churning.

Yeah, it's an internal churning, but instead of the churning only going down part of the way inside the stars, which it does for the higher mass stars, it goes all the way down. So the two of those together, you have a radiative effect, which is the outward pushing of the star, and then you have the internal churning, and the two of them together, like the earth's core rolling around inside of us, makes a magnetic field. Is that. Well, we don't know for the boundary. That's the thing, is that.

Because I'm trying to figure it out. All I know is that what to seven idol knows, so. And the. We also think the magnet fields are going to be different across the different types. So why did you call it a.

Chuck Nice
Something klein? A tacho klein. And not just a dynamo? Or is a dynamo. The broader term.

Emily Rice
Dynamo is the broader term that generates the magnetic fields. Yeah, I'm messing up my solar physics. Hopefully not. I could be. Somebody can get their $0.05 back, their $5 back.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
So what is the difference between that and a star? Because we know that's what had happened. Like, in our own sun. Yeah, in our own sun, we've kind of got these bigger motions in the brown dwarfs. We don't know fully where there isn't this separation between the inner layers.

Emily Rice
And so we don't know where the brown dwarf, where the magnetic field comes from, but there is a magnetic field on the low mass stars. And on the brown dwarfs, we see. A royal spots is good evidence on the brown dwarfs. Yeah. On the sun, spots always come in pairs.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Right. And one is plus and one minus. Oh, I did not know that. Yes. It's a cool fact.

Emily Rice
There's a bright spot that goes along with the dark spot. Yeah. I think the bright spot is harder to see usually that, yeah, that is. The first I've ever heard of that. And the solar wind that we're.

Chuck Nice
Here's something else I heard which is consistent with what you just said. Back in my day, you would accuse someone of, after presenting their research and they say the bigger is the effect of a magnetic field in what they describe. The less they know about the subject, the less they can explain. They put in more magnetic, magnetic fields, which accounts for everything that they don't otherwise know. Magnetic fields are challenging.

Emily Rice
They're very hard to understand. Wow. That's really. Well, astrophysically in a lab. We got it.

Chuck Nice
Yeah. We're talking magnets. It's no big deal. Yeah. Wow.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Well, Caleb, that was a great question, man. Three. I don't know. It doesn't make it every, here's. I was counting seven, but it was only three.

Good. All right. But this is what I'm loving about the I don't knows. Every time we don't know something I learned something, like something else comes out of it that I've never heard before. That's the third time that we've had it.

I don't know. But every single time there's something really cool that we find out in place of. I don't know. It's also a measure that the field is very much embedded in its own frontier. Right.

Chuck Nice
When you're on a frontier, every step you take is into the unknown. Yeah.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Neil deGrasse Tyson
Okay, this is Atticus Thompson. Atticus says hello. Doctor Tyson, Doctor Rice, is this a. Letter from the Civil War? We need that voice.

My dearest Doctor Tyson and Doctor Rice, today was an especially difficult day. John. Atticus, is anybody named Atticus today? Yeah, they're all in Brooklyn. Oh, is that right?

Emily Rice
100%. They're all at the playgrounds in Brooklyn right now, I guarantee you, so. Right. Wow. But that's Atticus from Atticus Finch.

Quite possibly, yeah. Okay, I would think. But anyway, he says, my name is Atticus, and I am nine years old. He's nine. He says, I live in sunny Daisy, Tennessee.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
I want to know, if two brown dwarfs collided, do they become a larger brown dwarf, or would they just become a low mass star? Ooh. That is a very good question. Nine years. Okay, so, Atticus, first of all, you ain't fooling nobody.

I don't care if you're nine or not. I know your father helped you with this question. You're not fooling anybody, Atticus. I'm Atticus, and I'm nine years old. I would like to know.

Chuck Nice
Wait, dude, when I was nine, I could've asked that. You could've asked that? Okay. Oh, yeah.

My interest in the universe was birth when I turned nine years old. Okay, all right, well, Atticus, I take it back. No, I don't. No, no. You want to get Adam, ask him if he paid the $5.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yeah, but if he's asking questions like that, he might have a job. I'm just saying. Okay, so what happens when stars collide? Yeah, it's gonna depend on their mass. Really?

Emily Rice
Yeah, it's not outside the realm of possibility. If you have, like. That's just a multiplication or an addition problem, really. If the two brown dwarves come together and have more than that 75 mass Jupiter mass Jupiter theory. Yeah.

It could ignite hydrogen fusion. Right. So the whole star will reorganize. Right. Quite possible.

It's something that we haven't. We don't, like, expect it to happen a lot. I don't. It wouldn't be an object with two separate cores. We don't think.

Chuck Nice
Because gravity and gravity. Yeah. They would. Friction would bring it together. If they get closer together, they would get, like, torn apart a little bit.

Emily Rice
And so it would probably, like, if. They did and then coalesce again. Yeah. This happens for, like, the higher mass stars because we see that, you know, black hole mergers are what triggered the gravitational waves. We have, you know, stellar mergers.

Like, it's. It creates more energy. And so we. We have more evidence of it for the high mass stars. Um, so we don't really think about it too much for the low mass stars because I think we don't have a lot of super close binaries like, there.

There's not going to be a huge amount of energy loss. Like, you're going to need some kind of energy loss to get them to get closer and closer. Somebody has to eat the energy of. Their orbit, orbital energy, if they're gonna come together. Otherwise, that's why we don't just collide into the sun right now.

It's a very slow process for any kind of orbital change like that. But if it did happen, and blue stragglers are similar. Yeah. That's all these weird stars. You know about the blue strike?

Neil deGrasse Tyson
No, tell me. Yeah. Yeah. So you look at a cluster of stars all born together. So they all should be evolving together as we understand stellar evolution.

Chuck Nice
And then there's some stars that are, like, hotter and bluer than anybody else is and was a big. In my day, it was a big mystery until someone said, maybe these are two stars that have merged. Merged. And when you merge, you get to re energize your core with stretched material so that you will have a prolonged life expectancy and you'll come out a little hotter than you're otherwise supposed to be. They're the late bloomers of the stubborn nursery.

Well, they got an injection of new, of new. Had a growth spurt over the summer. Look at me. Yeah. So they stand out from all the rest of the stars, blue stragglers.

Because everyone else has evolved together. Because they all were born together. They were born together. And this one got an extra infusion. High mass ones, especially are bluer to begin with and shouldn't live as long.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Right, right. And so these are standouts. So I never thought about the brown dwarf. You can ignite a brown dwarf that otherwise would have had to live its life. Yeah, in theory.

Emily Rice
I think in practice, I don't think we see it a lot. We do see, you know. You know, with. Maybe they're not. Things are binaries.

Yeah. Maybe they just turn into these stars. Could be. Maybe they're just a star you're ignoring over on the side. And it used to be too brown.

Yeah. Would we see evidence of it? It's hard very well be hidden in plain sight. Look at that. Like.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yeah, like a youtuber that actually crossed over to regular entertainment. What? Okay, anyway, sorry, that's all the broadcast. Atticus. That was Atticus.

Chuck Nice
Atticus. Thank you. Attic. Atticus. Atticus Thompson.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
That was a great question. And, you know, he's building something in. His basement, something I don't want anything to know about, but I'm sure the US government does. The power grid dims every once a week as he turns on his experiment. All right.

Okay, here we go. This is Jimmy Golightly. This is Holly's brother. Says hi. This is James in Charlotte.

How does the light wait for those. Who were not alive in 1964? Oh, it's still on the movie channel, is it? Okay. Turner movie classics.

It's a great movie. Yeah. So that was what's her face. Breakfast at Tiffany. Breakfast at Tiffany.

Chuck Nice
Audrey Hepburn. Audrey Hepburn. She was. Holly go lightly. Holly go lightly based on the novel by Truman Capote.

Emily Rice
Truman Capote. Oh. Ah. You didn't know that? I did not know.

Chuck Nice
You learn something every day here, let me tell you. That's why I come here, okay? Cause I'm stupid.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
All right. This is. He says, hey, James and Charlotte here. How does the lifespan of a low mass star compare to the lifespan of other stars, such as our sun? Yeah.

So these. The brown dwarfs are gonna be around forever. That's what makes us super useful. Yeah. The sun is gonna stably fuse hydrogen for about 10 billion years, and we're about halfway through that.

Emily Rice
So if you want something to worry about, like, the sun is about halfway through its lifetime, but the brown dwarfs, like we said, are going to last basically forever. For, like, our practical definition of forever, which we use it in kind of a neat way, which is we call it galactic archaeology, because some of the low mass stars that we can see now might have been around already. Sense very early on, the high mass stars are going to have come and gone. But the low mass stars are going to be around. And one of the interesting things is.

Chuck Nice
That you can make a low mass star today. Yes. And it's be a low mass star. But some of the pool of low mass stars could have been born first. Right at the very beginning.

Right. And there's still a lot you might. Ask, how can we tell the difference? How are you going to know the difference? Or is it degenerate?

Emily Rice
Yeah, we can. This way we can tell the difference. And the answer lies in those high mass stars, because the high mass stars that have been fusing and then exploding have been creating heavier elements. And so the older a low mass star is, the longer ago it was formed, the fewer heavy elements it's going to have. And so the more recently formed low mass stars are going to have more of the heavy elements that were created in the subsequent generations of high mass stars, which is kind of cool if.

Chuck Nice
You think spectra and look at those elements. Yeah, you get the spectra, you look at the elements. And we have a special name for the low. We call it low metallicity because we call this composition. How many heavy elements are in it?

Emily Rice
We call that metallicity. The low metallicity stars are called sub dwarfs. Oh. Because they're under the main sequence of stars on this HR diagram. Okay.

Yeah, it's a little bit weird, but. And they also tend to be blue in color. Sub dwarfs. That's super cool, man. They are fun to study because they.

Chuck Nice
Reveal themselves as their own population. Yeah. Subclinical metallicity. Got it. Got it.

Okay. Wow. Okay. All right. This is Matt Curtis.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Matt says, hello, Doc. Doc Lord. Matt here. And Chuck is pronounced Matt. Matt.

Boy, these people are just in case. These people are brutal today, man. They are brutal coming here for. He says, coming from South Carolina here. Given that our space telescope technology is improving and we keep discovering more and more exoplanets, what will it take to directly capture an image of one of them?

Deducing their existence through transit or gravity? Wobble is great, but what improvements would be required to show an image to the public directly? You want to see, like, oceans. And so it depends. He wants a travel boat, if you want to.

Emily Rice
So I like to call because we do have images of exoplanets. This is an amazing thing. Direct images of exoplanets. How many pixels? Yeah, a handful.

And how many planets? It's like also ten planets, maybe, or something like that. But one of them has stood the test of time. So this is also kind of back in my day of exoplanets, back in 2008, two directly imaged exoplanets were announced. One was in around the star fomal hall, which famously had a disc, and it was a little, like, bright thing in the disk.

And then the star. And that star is a southern hemisphere. Yeah, it's a pretty bright star, though. It's got a name, like a star with a relatively normal name is the star that you can see in the night sky. And then the other one was HR 8799.

With a number like that, you can't see it in the night sky, but it had three planets detected around it. And both of these, one was done with a Hubble space telescope, one was done with a ground based telescope. But there are amazing discoveries. Yeah, it's a handful of pixels, and it's really fuzzy images. It's like, meh.

But the fomohaut one actually seems to have been a spurious discovery. Like, it's just a clump in the disk that kind of didn't move the way it was expected to move and has since gone away. The HR 8799 system, they found another planet even closer in. So there's four planets in the system, and you can, over the time, put the images together and watch the planets orbit. Oh, wow.

It's beautiful. And so somebody, Jason Wang, I believe his name is, has made gifs that every once in a while go around social media of like a little animation of the images where we can watch planets orbit around a star other than the sun, which I think is just amazingly. It's crazy. I love it. Yeah, we haven't found that many more.

Chuck Nice
Years to go around it's host star. You need data over that entire time to really get the good. And these are. The HR 8799 system is like a souped up solar system. It's a bigger star than the sun.

Emily Rice
The planets are bigger. They're like five to ten times the mass of Jupiter, and they're all further out than our. So it's bigger and brighter, but similar. That's cool, man. Time for one more question.

Chuck Nice
One more. All right. Okay, so since we're on exoplanets, let's do Paula Patsova, who says hello. Doctor Rice. Doctor Tyson Lord.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Nice. Paula here from Slovakia. What is the potential of habitability of orbiting planets around a brown dwarf or low mass stars? Good one. Yeah.

Emily Rice
Especially the low mass star, like the brown dwarfs. Maybe they're kind of the extension of the low mass stars. But the low mass star is like, they might actually be better targets for finding Earth. I don't want to say Earth like, but I'll say Earth size planets at the very least, because for these indirect methods that were mentioned earlier, the indirect methods, it's easier to see small planets relative to small stars. It's easier to see planets close into the stars.

And so both of those mean that if you look around a small star, it's easier to find earth size planets and kind of earth temperature planets. Okay. So they're. Because those are going to be closer into the star because it's a cooler star. So it's like a smaller fire.

Chuck Nice
If you're going to have an earth temperature and it's way dimmer or way less luminous than our sun, you gotta be way closer in to get that same temperature. Yeah. To get that same equilibrium temperature. But then it's easier to find that planet with these indirect methods that we use most of the time. And so now these small stars have been, like, really intriguing targets for searching for exoplanets.

Emily Rice
So the Trappist one system is a very famous system that was discovered a handful of years ago with seven earth sized planets in orbit around that star. And, like, something like three or four of them. Trappist is the name of the star. Yeah, this one. Well, weirdly enough, the star was known before.

TrAppist is actually the acronym for an acronym survey. Oh, okay, okay, okay. The catalog transiting. But it's a Belgium. The group includes a Belgium observatory.

And so it's. They call it a backronym sometimes where they think of the clever term that they want, and then they make up the acronym to go with it. Go with it. Backronym. I love it.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a fun portmanteau. So this Trappist one system is super great because a solid three or four of those planets could be in the habitable zone. So the habitable zone is where it's the right temperature for liquid water.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Goldilocks zone. Yeah, yeah. Goldilocks zone. But you still. It doesn't tell you anything about the atmosphere, which you would also need to have liquid water on the surface.

Emily Rice
And so there's still a lot of unknowns, a lot of what ifs for those. But the low mass stars are really exciting targets for Earth size exoplanets, at least. Wow. Cool. Exciting.

Chuck Nice
All right. Yeah, that's great. Well, Emily, thank you. You don't come on here often enough. We gotta bring.

Emily Rice
I'm around. We're just reaching out. I'm right upstairs. Yeah. Walking by.

Chuck Nice
Call me.

Well, thank you for bringing back your expertise on this.

This zone of ignorance. That existed for so long that finally people are jumping in, getting their hands dirty. We've always kind of wondered, right? But now we know for sure, which is amazing. Very cool.

Emily Rice
A lot of the things. All right, all right. Good stuff. All right. Well, let me take us out with some reflections on this moment in my field, astrophysics.

Chuck Nice
Many of us confront people who ask the very sensible question, why are we spending money on anything you're doing when we have all these problems here on Earth? And, okay, before we did all of this, did you not have those problems on Earth? I think you had them long before any of us spent a dime of tax money or any other money trying to understand the universe. What we do know is what we discover expands our view not only of the world, but of our place within it. And when I was growing up, there were planets and there were stars, and no one really thought much about, well, how do you get between one and the other in the universe?

What does the universe say about that? And then we learned there's an entire field that we didn't even know would exist or could exist and now does exist that specializes in the transition between what you are as a planet and what you would become as a star.

This is more about our world, our universe, our home. And it could be that this will help us discover life on a planet around a star sometime in our future.

Whether or not that specifically puts food on your table, I'll ask you a little differently. I'll say, how much is the universe worth to you?

And that's a cosmic perspective. Neil degrasse Tyson here for startalk. Cosmic fairies, as always, keep looking up.

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Low-Mass Mania with Emily Rice

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1: Introduction to Brown Dwarfs

2: Fashion Meets Astronomy

3: Educational Outreach and Public Engagement

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