Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. Wow, hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: This is Alison I don't know, the science editor at
Speaker 1: the how stuff works dot com, And this is Robert Lamb,
Speaker 1: science writer at how stuff works dot com. Today we're
Speaker 1: going to do the first podcast in a recurring series
Speaker 1: that will look at how different celestial bodies get their start,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna begin with stars. Yeah. Do you know
Speaker 1: what a supergroup is, Alison? Tell me what a supergroup is, Robert,
Speaker 1: But something like you two. No, no, no, okay, you
Speaker 1: two is a group that you know, these guys came together,
Speaker 1: you know, started small, and they became this, you know,
Speaker 1: this awesome musical act. Right, Um, I don't know. I'm
Speaker 1: talking about like established you know names, and they're they're
Speaker 1: just pulled together by their own you know, awesomeness and
Speaker 1: they form a supergroup. You know. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: a like a voltron of music. Like a couple of
Speaker 1: classic amples are like the Traveling Willbury's the eighties. This
Speaker 1: is Bob Dylan, George Harris and Tom Petty, Jeff Lynn
Speaker 1: of Electric Light Orchestra, Roy Orbison all come together and
Speaker 1: really don't make anything memorable, but that they still they
Speaker 1: come together in an awesome group, right the Highwaymen, that
Speaker 1: was Wayalen Jennings, Johnny Cash, Chris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson. You know,
Speaker 1: they come together just drawn together by and just become
Speaker 1: something in theory awesome, you know, not like like Wu
Speaker 1: Tang clan would not be an example because like those
Speaker 1: guys all started off together as Wu Tang and then
Speaker 1: they became awesome, and then you know, went off into
Speaker 1: their own thing and then came back. But now these
Speaker 1: are these are people are just drawn together and they
Speaker 1: become a supergroup. So that's what I keep thinking of
Speaker 1: when I was reading all about star formation and really
Speaker 1: the formation of a lot of things in our in
Speaker 1: our universe due to a process called accretion. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: let's take it from the top, Shelley. In the process
Speaker 1: of star birth. Yeah, like most things in our thirteen
Speaker 1: points seventy five billion year old universe, stars begin as
Speaker 1: just particles or began as particles just floating around in
Speaker 1: these vast clouds of dust and gas um and these
Speaker 1: clouds which we know as nebula. Uh, they don't do
Speaker 1: a lot of anything for while they're cold, they're monotonous.
Speaker 1: Nothing's happening, right, just little particles out there, you know,
Speaker 1: like a little bitty you know, nobody's on the music scene,
Speaker 1: just out there in space. Just play in the clubs
Speaker 1: open for a big break. Yeah. Then what happens then?
Speaker 1: Like some sleepy backwater town and a biker movie. I
Speaker 1: think classic movie Wild One. That would be the film analogy.
Speaker 1: And by the way, I don't think you've seen Wild One?
Speaker 1: Have you film Star? No? No, I have not seen
Speaker 1: seen that. Yeah, I do like ribbing that in because
Speaker 1: you've seen pretty much every movie. What do you think
Speaker 1: of that movie? And I have not seen any movies
Speaker 1: including Wild One. Uh. But but the idea is pretty simple.
Speaker 1: It's like sleepytown and the name comes the biker, right, everything,
Speaker 1: everything gets all crazy when this newcomer speeds through. In
Speaker 1: the case of a star, that disturbance might take the
Speaker 1: farm of a streaking comment or the shockwave from a
Speaker 1: distant superdova, rather than say Marlon Brando riding on a
Speaker 1: Triumph Thunderbird and playing the leader of a motorcycle gang.
Speaker 1: Have you seen it Triumph Thunderbird? We have a picture
Speaker 1: of one on our side it's pretty it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: A thunderbird, you mean the classic like native American bird
Speaker 1: that No, no, I mean like a cycle, like a
Speaker 1: bike that all vehicles look the same to me. So
Speaker 1: what happens next? Alright? So alright, so yeah, everything gets
Speaker 1: stirred up by our you know, cosmic biker gang that
Speaker 1: rolls through the town, through town. So all those particles
Speaker 1: starts spinning around, right, and when you have all those
Speaker 1: particles moving, suddenly you have collisions. Collisions occur. Now, this
Speaker 1: is where creation begins because clumps. Yeah, you start getting
Speaker 1: clumps and a clump of particles, just even a small
Speaker 1: clump of particles um ends up having a gravitational pull
Speaker 1: on other clumps. So they start, you know, clumping together
Speaker 1: in fluence. And and this is actual the actual term.
Speaker 1: Astrophysicists used the term clumps. So we're not it's highly scientistic.
Speaker 1: We're not domine it on anymore than it I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a clump. It's kind of like that game. I
Speaker 1: have to mention this. Have you ever played Katamari Domacy? No, no, no,
Speaker 1: what's up. It's a it's a video game that was
Speaker 1: for PS two sixty. Number of these games all right,
Speaker 1: So the idea is, you can't see me, but I'm
Speaker 1: rolling my ass. That's a silly question to ask, but
Speaker 1: it's a it's a Japanese video game and it it
Speaker 1: involves the Prince of the Universe accidentally destroys the stars.
Speaker 1: So he charges this young prince with creating new stars.
Speaker 1: And you're the prince and you're very smallest, tiny little guy,
Speaker 1: and you have this little ball and you roll it
Speaker 1: around and as you roll it around, it starts other
Speaker 1: objects starts sticking to it. And it starts off small,
Speaker 1: so it's like paper clips stick to it, you know,
Speaker 1: thumb tacks. And then the ball stars getting bigger and
Speaker 1: it just rolls, you know, rolls up to your rolling
Speaker 1: up say, mice, um erasers, m chairs, tables. Eventually you're
Speaker 1: rolling up like whole houses. And if it gets big enough,
Speaker 1: the King of the Universe is this big mustachio guy
Speaker 1: with a fancy hat, takes it and turns it into
Speaker 1: a star. And really that that's the process. It's one
Speaker 1: of the silliest games I've ever played. And it's a blast.
Speaker 1: But that's basically accretion, right, So it's more matter falls
Speaker 1: into the clump. It's center is gonna grow denser, and
Speaker 1: it's gonna and it's gonna grow hotter. Over the course
Speaker 1: of a million years, the clump grows into a small
Speaker 1: dense body and it's called a proto star. And this
Speaker 1: protot star continues to draw and even more gas, and
Speaker 1: it gets even hotter. Yeah, and eventually our protostar gets
Speaker 1: hot enough. And we're talking seven million degrees kelvin um.
Speaker 1: And remember that the sign signs use kelvin scale when
Speaker 1: they're talking about very high temperatures, very low temperatures. Zero
Speaker 1: kelvin is absolute zero. That you know, nothing can really
Speaker 1: touch a theoretical temperature if you will, I will um.
Speaker 1: So it gets hot enough, the hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen
Speaker 1: atoms begin to fuse, producing helium in an outflow of energy.
Speaker 1: All right, bang nuclear fusion. How he, the outward push
Speaker 1: of its fusion energy is still weaker than the inward
Speaker 1: pull of gravity. So you have this tug of war
Speaker 1: going on with the opposing forces in the young star's life.
Speaker 1: You made the point that it's kind of like a
Speaker 1: struggling business that's still costs more to operate than it makes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's still is still pulling in more than it can
Speaker 1: push out, so it hasn't stabilized yet into a mature
Speaker 1: adult star. But material continues to flow into the protostar,
Speaker 1: providing increased mass and heat. And then, finally, after millions
Speaker 1: of years, uh, some of these struggling stars reach the
Speaker 1: tipping point. Sort of fireworks gone on. Yeah, if if enough,
Speaker 1: if they reach enough mass, which is roughly point one
Speaker 1: solar masses, And a reminder, one solar mass equals our sun.
Speaker 1: You know, it's the closest star we have, so that's
Speaker 1: our our measuring stick for everything else. Um, some point
Speaker 1: one solar mass is obviously going to be smaller than that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: reaches that point, it and it will collapse into the
Speaker 1: protostar and it produces this thing called a bipolar flow,
Speaker 1: and that just means two massive gas jets erupting from
Speaker 1: opposite sides of the protostar and it just just blast
Speaker 1: the remaining gas and dust clear away from the fiery
Speaker 1: surface of the star and bang. Just like that, the
Speaker 1: young star stabilizes and like a business, it finally becomes lucrative.
Speaker 1: It reaches the point where its output exceeds its intake.
Speaker 1: The Howard pressure from hydrogen fusion now counteracts gravity is
Speaker 1: in a red pull. It's a main s you can
Speaker 1: star and it will remain so until it burns through
Speaker 1: all its fuel, which brings us to our next question. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the lifespan of the stars. Got back to the business thing.
Speaker 1: You know, some businesses are run very well um, and
Speaker 1: some businesses, uh are run very poorly. UM. So it
Speaker 1: it's similar with the stars. It depends on the mass
Speaker 1: A star. The size of our Sun takes roughly fifty
Speaker 1: million years to reach main sequence and maintains that level
Speaker 1: for approximately ten billion years UM. Astronomers classify the Sun
Speaker 1: is a G type main sequence star. The G indicates
Speaker 1: the Sun's temperature and color. Right, Astronomers have to have
Speaker 1: some way to classify all the stars in the sky,
Speaker 1: so they invented Oh, be a fine girl, kiss me.
Speaker 1: Have you heard this? This is cool. It's anemonic device,
Speaker 1: and the first letter in each word of the pnemonic
Speaker 1: device corresponds to one of the spectral classes. So for
Speaker 1: the oh and O star is going to be the
Speaker 1: hottest with temperatures between thirty thousand and sixty THO Kelevins
Speaker 1: and an O star is blue. Yeah, that reminds me
Speaker 1: the thing with the rainbows and the lebricn what's the
Speaker 1: name of what's that lucky charms? No, no, no, he
Speaker 1: talking about it's like like some words, some nonsense cool word.
Speaker 1: It stands for all the different hues the Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: nothing like that. I highly disagree. Um. So, after you
Speaker 1: have your O star, then you have less odd B stars,
Speaker 1: which have tempts between ten thousand and thirty thousand calevns,
Speaker 1: and these are gonna be blue white. Then you have
Speaker 1: your A stars. I won't tell you the temperatures here
Speaker 1: because you're gonna forget him. This is a podcast. After all.
Speaker 1: These A stars are why you have F stars. And
Speaker 1: then you have GES stars. These are yellow like our sun.
Speaker 1: And by the way, if you guys don't know it,
Speaker 1: there is a podcast out on how the sun works
Speaker 1: that Josh and checked it, so if you want a
Speaker 1: little bit more background on the sun, that might be
Speaker 1: a good one to listen to. After your stars, you
Speaker 1: have K stars. These are gonna be yellow orange. And lastly,
Speaker 1: all the way at the bottom of the list are
Speaker 1: M stars, which are red and are less than thirty Kelvin's.
Speaker 1: But you don't have to remember all that, Just remember, oh,
Speaker 1: be a fine girl and kiss me. You can also
Speaker 1: group stars depending on whether or not they have a
Speaker 1: maine so a binary star, for example, or whether they
Speaker 1: occur in clusters or otherwise, or maybe you're more interested
Speaker 1: in measuring luminosity, radius, movement, mass or more. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, the larger, brighter stars are going to burn
Speaker 1: out faster. Um wolf rayet stars boast masses at least
Speaker 1: twenty times that of our science. That's twenty solar masses
Speaker 1: and burn four point five times. It's hot. Uh, they
Speaker 1: go super supernova within a million years of reaching the
Speaker 1: main sequence. It's more like Starlet, you know, rises up
Speaker 1: fast on the Hollywood scene, makes a big splash and
Speaker 1: band nobody's heard of him in five years exactly, flash
Speaker 1: in the pan. That about wraps it up for starbirth.
Speaker 1: You know that sounds a lot like starburst if you
Speaker 1: say it fast. By the way, did you know that
Speaker 1: starboard we're first called opal fruits. Yeah, they're when they
Speaker 1: were first invented in the UK nineteen but when they
Speaker 1: came to the US, the Americans changed the name to
Speaker 1: star wars. I had to wonder if this had something
Speaker 1: to do with the space race. Maybe, so I searched
Speaker 1: the Google and I could not find anything. I wonder
Speaker 1: Opal where? How Opal fruits taste? I know I want
Speaker 1: to have one. I don't know. I think you should
Speaker 1: go downstairs after we finished recording and get some Star
Speaker 1: Wars and give me one. Please. You know what I'm
Speaker 1: excited about. What are you excited about, Robert Um. I'm
Speaker 1: excited about our Twitter and our Facebook. Tweeting is pretty fun.
Speaker 1: What's our handle? Our handle on Twitter is lab stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you can become a fan of us on Facebook two. Yeah,
Speaker 1: where we're just stuff in the science lab. You can
Speaker 1: just searches. You don't even have to put you in
Speaker 1: around the starch and just start showing up. Yeah. We
Speaker 1: got a brand spanking news stuff from the Science Lab
Speaker 1: page on Facebook. Yeah, and yeah we're gonna we're keeping
Speaker 1: that updated with you know stuff, We've written stuff, we
Speaker 1: are writing stuff. We're thinking about writing queries for people
Speaker 1: with genetics expertise, all sorts of good stuff. And about
Speaker 1: a spy iter that eats tonails. What was that? Yeah?
Speaker 1: That was pretty crazy, spider. So I think that's about it.
Speaker 1: You want to do some listener mail, Yeah, I've got
Speaker 1: some pretty cool listenermail here. Well, recently we did that
Speaker 1: whole podcast about venom and things we can do with
Speaker 1: venom such as turn it into medicine or or drink
Speaker 1: it or drink it. Yeah, so this one here comes
Speaker 1: from Paul in London. He says, Hi, Allison and Robert,
Speaker 1: my name is Paul, and I live in London, England.
Speaker 1: I just can you go back to you with a
Speaker 1: British accent feast? I don't know. Was that be tasteful?
Speaker 1: Maybe not? Okay, forget that. I thought you do a
Speaker 1: pretty good British accent too. Okay, but sorry, I don't
Speaker 1: I can do it. Just understand that there's no um,
Speaker 1: you know, I wish I had a British accent. So
Speaker 1: it's it's really more sad than it is distasteful. Um.
Speaker 1: Hi Allison and Robert, my name is Paul. You know
Speaker 1: I live in London, England. I've just listened to your
Speaker 1: Virtues of Venom podcast and I thought I would email
Speaker 1: you to let you know about my personal experiences with
Speaker 1: snake wine. While traveling in Vietnam, I was convinced by
Speaker 1: an older Vietnamese baki to consume a shot or three
Speaker 1: of snake wine He said that it would make me
Speaker 1: quote a strong man while he made a fish showing
Speaker 1: how it would work as an half a daisy act.
Speaker 1: I'll be honest, I'm not sure about the review you
Speaker 1: read read out in the podcast. It didn't taste like
Speaker 1: jin sing. I just remember it burning. I believe that
Speaker 1: there's also snake blood and snake bile wine, but thankfully
Speaker 1: I have not experienced either of these. Keep up the
Speaker 1: great work, Paul. Yeah, so I'm I that wasn't It
Speaker 1: was awesome to hear about even more snake than him
Speaker 1: related beverages out there. And uh yeah, I mean and
Speaker 1: and if anybody else, Yeah, send me more reviews because
Speaker 1: I need to do a little research before actually order
Speaker 1: a bottle. What else are you holding? Then you're in there?
Speaker 1: Oh let's see, I've got one from Jeffrey and I
Speaker 1: don't know where Jeffrey's froms like, just gonna use my
Speaker 1: own accent. Hey, guys, just finished listen in to the
Speaker 1: podcast on venom, and Robert mentioned the idea of venom
Speaker 1: and energy drinks. I remember a couple of years ago
Speaker 1: reading that reading this wasp in Korea whose venom is
Speaker 1: used in energy drinks or at least a component of
Speaker 1: the venom and it's raw state. The venom dissolves flesh,
Speaker 1: and people that get swarmed who don't die are pretty
Speaker 1: much disfigured for life. If I wasn't on my phone,
Speaker 1: i'd send you a link, but I had to mention it.
Speaker 1: Keep up a good work, Jeffrey sent from my iPhone. So, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's awesome. I looked it up a little um
Speaker 1: and um and yeah. Apparently apparently these energy drinks are
Speaker 1: at least pretending to be made from some sort of
Speaker 1: like crazy wasp juice, so it's pretty interesting. Cool. Well,
Speaker 1: thanks for writing, as we always love hearing from you,
Speaker 1: and as always, if you want to send us an
Speaker 1: email about stars or anything else scientifics and it's an
Speaker 1: email at science stuff at how strix dot com. For
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics, is it
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works,
Speaker 1: check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com home page