Birthday balloons falling
limply to the ground.
Satellites, medical scanners
and TVs fading to black.
And twinkling stars in the night sky
disappearing one by one.
All in just five seconds without helium.
Helium isn’t only just your party
balloon filler-upper.
It’s the second most abundant element
in the Universe.
And the second lightest too,
behind only hydrogen.
Helium can be found on both
planets and moons,
but most of all, stars.
After all, it was discovered
in 1868 by astronomers
who observed a yellow light
in the Sun’s corona during a solar eclipse.
That’s how it got its name
from the Greek god Helios.
And even though this gas
isn’t something you need
for your biological functions,
it’s an important part of your everyday life.
"I really should't be doing this."
It’s used in the lasers of barcode readers,
medical machinery
like MRI scanners
and scientific research equipment
like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
And it also
helps prevent stars from exploding.
So would five seconds without helium
lead to the biggest interstellar
fireworks show of all time?
The moment that helium disappears
from the Universe,
you’d barely notice anything.
Our atmosphere contains
almost no helium.
So you’d keep on
breathing without any issues.
But hopefully
you weren’t in the middle of an MRI scan
when all this goes down.
These use a ton of energy
and have superconducting magnets
that need to be kept cold.
Very cold.
Without the -269 °C (-452 °F) chill
of liquid helium running through the wires,
the magnets would overheat.
If you were in the machine
at this moment,
you could get some serious burns.
Scientists working with
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider
would immediately run
into a similar issue.
Except they’d
suddenly lose 120 tons of liquid helium.
And now they’d
have increasingly hot magnets
steering the machine’s particle beams.
And, of course,
the worst thing that would happen
is the rapid deflation of every
birthday balloon on the planet.
That would make for a lot
of very sad kids.
Ok, maybe this wouldn't be the worst.
Because none of these problems
would compare to
what would start happening
around the rest of the Universe
once all the helium disappeared.
In the core of our Sun,
helium is produced
by the nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms.
And not just a little bit either.
The Sun produces 700 million tons
of helium every second.
This nuclear fusion process exerts
an enormous amount of outward pressure.
And without being contained somehow,
this would explode.
Just like a hydrogen bomb.
Good thing there's inward pressure formed
by the Sun's massive gravitational pull.
This attraction of the gas mantle
surrounding the core provides
enough of a balance
to keep things from blowing up.
But if all the helium vanished
a large amount of the Sun’s mass
would be gone.
And with that,
it would have less gravitational pull.
This would upset that precious balance.
So now our Sun would be on
the verge of exploding.
And you could count on that
being bad news for you
and everyone else back on Earth.
Now with any luck, this wouldn’t happen.
The five seconds would be up
and our Sun would maintain its pressure
as all of its helium
is once again
restored to its rightful place.
Yeah, sure,
MRIs and the Large Hadron Collider
could be out of service for a while,
but at least you could spend
the rest of your life
counting your lucky stars.
Although,
make sure you keep an eye open
for which stars those are.
Looking up,
you could see a permanently darker
night sky.
Some stars didn't fare as well as our own.
And as their light travels
you could see
evidence of their explosions
for many years to come.
Now, you’d also be fortunate
that it was helium
that disappeared from the Universe
for five seconds.
At least it wasn’t
something a bit more essential to you.
Like oxygen.
But that’s a story for another WHAT IF.