okay looks like we're doing neutron stars my friends neutron stars are one of the most
extreme and violent things in the universe giant atomic nuclei only a few kilometers in diameter
but as massive as stars and they owe their existence to the death of something Majestic
tons of hot plasma are being pulled inwards by gravity and squeeze material together with
so much force that nuclei fuse hydrogen fuses into helium this releases energy which pushes
Against Gravity and tries to escape as long as this balance exists stars are pretty stable
eventually the hydrogen will be exhausted medium stars like our sun go through a giant phase
where they burn helium into carbon and oxygen before they eventually turn into white dwarfs
but in Stars we've done Red Dwarf video white dwarf video coming
protect you from going to computers thanks to things called post Quantum algorithms that are
inside this baby this is made with open source software uh and you can go read on the internet in
the description and if you want to use it for free you can so get you can go use the alpha for free
right now this is the beta version so it looks a little bit different this version beta comes out
this week and you'll get a free month currently it's only available on Windows by the way
um but you know the Mac version we're developing starting from the end of this week anyway
50 times the mass of our sun things get interesting when the helium is exhausted
for a moment the balance of pressure and radiation tips and gravity wins squeezing
the star tighter than before the core Burns hotter and faster while the outer layers of
the Stars swell by hundreds of times fusing heavier and heavier elements carbon Burns to
Neon in centuries neon to oxygen in a year oxygen to Silicon in months and silicon to iron in a day
death iron is nuclear Ash it has no energy to give and cannot be fused nuclear Ash that's a
cool way of putting it yeah you can't use iron it basically actually takes energy
um so what happens then is the core of the Star as soon as you run out of the
other stuff it just the core collapses right and that results in a very interesting thing
the fusion suddenly stops and the balance ends without the outward pressure from Fusion the core
is crushed by the enormous weight of the star above it what happens Now is awesome and scary
particles like electrons and protons really don't want to be near each other but the pressure well
you just got to think about this right because at the center you had a nuclear fusion reaction
pushing out right there's lots of energy but you had this huge amount of mass you got gravity
pushing inwards so what happens when the core suddenly stops pushing out and collapses right
it stops producing energy essentially well it collapses right because you have gravity trying
to crush it the whole time like you said it's a delicate balance between you know gravity trying
to squish it as well as Fusion so uh yeah picture of the collapsing star is so great that electrons
and protons fuse into neutrons which then get squeezed together as tightly as in atomic nuclei
an iron ball the size of the Earth is squeezed into a ball of pure nuclear matter the size of
a city it actually is like somewhat becomes like a giant atom in a way because yeah the neutrons are
pushed so close together that they're like kind of almost touching right and it's like a neutron
star is just kind of like a bowl of neutrons but not just the core the whole star implodes gravity
pulling the outer layers in at 25 the speed of light this implosion bounces off the iron core
producing a shock wave that explodes outwards and catapults the rest of the star into space
this is what we call a supernova explosion and it will outshine entire galaxies
what remains of the star is now a neutron star its mass is around not always so a supernova
can also result in black holes you might know um you know if the star is large enough uh you know
that collapse of the core right can result in the you know more layers collapsing uh and that
you basically you know squishes stuff Beyond its Schwartz child radius and at that point reality
like space time just is like nope not doing that anymore mate I'm out of here and then there's a
hole in the universe in a sense because you know things start to go you know like inwards and we
think there could be a singularity in there black holes are way more mysterious we don't
really understand them we understand like kind of the outside and what's happening around them kind
of still lots of mysteries uh but yeah anyway I forgot to mention as well because remember
I said you know the outside sort of collapses in and then you might be like well he just showed a
supernova expand it that's because there's like a brief collapse and then it goes bang right it goes
like in and then out and there's also multiple events that actually happen it's not as simple
as this right like there's like flashes that get a lot let off at certain points there's all kinds
of things that actually go that happen if you go into astrophysics and look at this there's a lot
right it's not this simple but this is kind of just you know talking about the main fun things
and a million times the mass of the Earth but compressed to an object about 25 kilometers wide
it's so dense that the mass of all living humans would fit into one cubic centimeter of
neutron star matter that done through that guys that would be mean it's roughly a billion but
um yeah I I also always like to say uh like a little teaspoon of uh neutron star
apparently weighs as much as Mount Everest I mean if you make the calculation you can
verify that but that's what everyone says at least in tons face the size of a sugar cube
put another way that's Mount Everest in a cup of coffee there you go
from the outside a neutron star is unbelievably extreme its gravity is the strongest outside black
holes and if it were any denser it would that's the he's saying the strongest of like known Stars
there's lots we don't know out there right and there's lots of theoretical stars that could exist
that we don't know about and he's actually uh you might have heard of a magnetar which actually you
know the fit the magnetic field around those things is actually more intense but a magnetar
is literally just a pulsar right just with a really strong magnetic field we can talk about
magnetize soon we actually have realized recently that might be what frbs are fast radio bursts very
mysterious things we thought might have been aliens but it's never aliens unfortunately
become one light is bent around it meaning you can see the front and parts of the bag
their surfaces reach a million degrees celsius compared to a measly 6000 degrees for our sun
okay let's look inside a neutron star although these giant atomic nuclei are stars in many
ways they're also like planets with solid crusts over a liquid core the crust is extremely hard
the outermost layers are made of iron left over from the Supernova squeezed together in a crystal
lattice with a sea of electrons flowing through them going deeper gravity squeezes nuclei closer
together we find fewer and fewer protons as most merge to neutrons until we reach the base of the
crust here nuclei are squeezed together so hard that they start to touch protons and neutrons
rearrange making longest or sheets enormous nuclei with millions of protons and neutrons shaped like
spaghetti and lasagna which physicists call nucleopaster nuclear pasta is so dense that it
may be the strongest material in the universe basically Unbreakable lumps of pasta inside a
neutron star can even make mountains at most a few centimeters high but many times as massive as the
Himalayas eventually beneath the pasta we reach the core we're not really sure what the properties
of matter are when they're squeezed this hard protons and neutrons might deserve so we talk
about this in other videos but you might ask how the hell do we know this well it has a lot to do
with computer simulations right you know you put these in computer simulations and you know they
seem to look like what they do in reality and then we make predictions from the computer simulations
reality matches the simulations and we go okay maybe you know we're onto something here but not
just that way you know theoretically as well we do calculations dissolve into an ocean of quarks
a so-called Quark gluon plasma some of those quarks might turn into strange quarks making a
sort of strange matter with properties so extreme that we made a whole video about it we've watched
that one maybe they just stay protons and neutrons no one knows for sure and that's why we do science
that's all pretty heavy stuff literally so let's go back out into space when neutron stars so there
might be phases Beyond even a neutron star but it doesn't look like it from what we can see uh you
know there could be Quark Stars strange Stars uh and then some other weird things as well so
anyway first collapse they begin to spin very very fast like a ballerina pulling her arms in
neutron stars are Celestial ballerinas spinning many times per second
this creates pulses because their magnetic field creates a beam of radio waves which passes
every time they spin okay that's not a perfect explanation right so uh have you heard of a pulsar
right if you're confused what the hell so pulsar and neutron star the same thing okay we call them
a pulsar when so so like you said there are these Jets and they actually come at the poles right
just like that so that you know if we imagine the you know neutron star Pulsar Jets coming out
perpendicular at the poles and when those poles are pointing at us uh you know so as he mentioned
they rotate rapidly right so as they spin these these poles the Jets of stuff that's coming out
at these poles at you know Nellie's speed of light they get spun around because the the Stars
spinning and if you spin it in a certain way it it actually goes like this so we can look this up
um and so those whip around and sometimes they you know hit Earth right and that's
when what we call a pulsar when it like you know when it whips and hits us and
these things are really really really uh they happen very regularly like we could use these
things as things that are nearly as precise as atomic clocks for measuring time for instance
um and we actually might be able to use these for GPS devices for like Interstellar GPS so
that's not how we currently do it but I think this is probably the future of GPS
these radio pulsars are the best known type of neutron star about 2 000 are known of in
the Milky Way these magnetic fields are the strongest in the universe a quadrillion times
stronger than Earth's after they're born they're called magnuses until they calm down a little
but the absolute best kind of neutron stars are friends with other neutron stars by radiating
away energy as gravitational waves Ripples and space time their orbits can Decay and they can
crash into and hit each other in a killing over explosion that spews out a lot of their guards
when they do the conditions become so extreme that for a moment heavy nuclei are made again it's not
Fusion putting nuclei together this time but heavy neutron-rich matter falling apart and reassembling
only very recently we've learned that this is probably the origin of most of the heavy elements
in the universe like gold uranium and platinum and dozens more so they're now two Neutron starts
the next time you get like a gold ring or a gold anything just remember that might probably came
from a colliding neutron stars that's not cool I don't know what is let's collapse and become a
black hole dying yet again not only do stars have to die to create elements they have to die twice
over millions of years these atoms will mix back into the Galaxy but some of them end up in a cloud
which gravity pulls together to form stars and planets repeating the cycle a solar system is
one example and the remains of those neutron stars that came before us are all around us
our entire technological modern world was built out of the elements neutron stars made in eons
past sending these atoms on a 13 billion year journey to come together and make us and our world
and that's pretty cool until that is pretty cool I agree go get kersey's ark's calendar
because they're they're Legends and I think that's that video so that was fun