WEBVTT - CLASSIC: A Cosmic Murder Mystery: The Star That Simply Vanished 0:00:00.120 --> 0:00:05.080 Fellow conspiracy realist. We are returning with a classic episode 0:00:05.160 --> 0:00:12.280 that speaks to our exploration of Nibiru, occurring quite recently. 0:00:13.160 --> 0:00:18.320 Back in twenty twenty, we learned that a star vanished, 0:00:18.720 --> 0:00:21.120 a cosmic murder mystery. 0:00:21.160 --> 0:00:22.840 That's weird, right, that's not supposed to happen. 0:00:23.239 --> 0:00:24.760 It's not really supposed to happen. 0:00:25.280 --> 0:00:28.440 Sometimes stars explode, but they don't vanish. 0:00:28.840 --> 0:00:32.360 They just break into like smaller bits, yeah, or they 0:00:32.479 --> 0:00:35.519 have like a spinoff band or a solo project. 0:00:35.560 --> 0:00:37.560 Yeah, turn into a black hole. 0:00:37.440 --> 0:00:41.960 Right yeah, yeah, or a white dwarf or something. 0:00:42.280 --> 0:00:42.519 You know. 0:00:42.640 --> 0:00:47.680 The star collapses, but it always leaves forensic evidence. As 0:00:47.720 --> 0:00:52.360 we discovered, there was this investigation that turned into kind 0:00:52.400 --> 0:00:54.640 of a murder mystery out there in space. 0:00:54.960 --> 0:00:55.400 That's right. 0:00:55.440 --> 0:00:58.960 Recently, an enterprising group of astronomers, an astrophysicists found themselves 0:00:59.040 --> 0:01:03.520 transformed into space detectives to help solve this cosmic murder 0:01:03.560 --> 0:01:04.600 mystery in question. 0:01:04.640 --> 0:01:06.880 So let's join this conversation already in progress with. 0:01:06.880 --> 0:01:12.480 Us from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History 0:01:12.600 --> 0:01:16.280 is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now 0:01:17.000 --> 0:01:19.080 or learn this stuff. They don't want you to know. 0:01:20.000 --> 0:01:27.520 A production of iHeartRadio. 0:01:32.200 --> 0:01:33.240 Welcome back to the show. 0:01:33.319 --> 0:01:35.160 My name is Matt, my name is Noah. 0:01:35.360 --> 0:01:37.800 They call me Ben. We are joined, as always with 0:01:37.840 --> 0:01:42.240 our super producer Paul. Mission control decands, most importantly, you 0:01:42.360 --> 0:01:45.840 are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff 0:01:45.920 --> 0:01:50.640 they don't want you to know. Today, we are investigating 0:01:50.760 --> 0:01:54.640 a mystery, and spoiler alert, it is not one that 0:01:54.680 --> 0:01:58.760 we are going to solve in today's episode. What are 0:01:58.760 --> 0:02:02.680 we talking about? Well, let's let's take a somewhat secuitous 0:02:02.760 --> 0:02:08.200 route here. Let's start comparatively local and consider the Sun. 0:02:08.680 --> 0:02:11.880 You know it, you might love it, You've definitely heard 0:02:11.880 --> 0:02:15.080 of it. It's the closest star to uh. I almost 0:02:15.080 --> 0:02:17.160 said the US, But it's the closest star to Earth 0:02:17.240 --> 0:02:20.920 and the US. Uh. It's wildly popular. It's one of 0:02:20.919 --> 0:02:24.760 the few fads that humanity can largely agree is a 0:02:24.800 --> 0:02:28.840 good thing and should be kept around. But the Sun 0:02:28.960 --> 0:02:31.959 is far from the only star in the universe. 0:02:32.280 --> 0:02:34.239 Really quickly, Ben, you know who doesn't like the sun? 0:02:35.240 --> 0:02:36.880 Me Beavis and butt Head. 0:02:37.280 --> 0:02:40.040 Oh remember that part in the movie where they're like, 0:02:40.120 --> 0:02:41.400 the sun sucks. 0:02:42.160 --> 0:02:47.240 That's all I got? Sorry, please carry I think exactly. 0:02:47.400 --> 0:02:52.760 Dehydration, Yes, my skin also is not a big fan, 0:02:54.200 --> 0:02:57.240 but it is also the life giver of you know, 0:02:57.680 --> 0:02:58.680 it is the light bringer. 0:02:58.880 --> 0:03:00.480 If you will u there we go. 0:03:01.000 --> 0:03:04.040 So so, if you're you know, standing on Earth and 0:03:04.080 --> 0:03:06.200 you look out, you see our sun. That's definitely the 0:03:06.200 --> 0:03:09.040 most prominent star out there. But if you continue to look, 0:03:09.080 --> 0:03:11.079 even with the naked eye, if you're far enough away 0:03:11.080 --> 0:03:14.520 from a city, you can see that these things are everywhere. 0:03:15.120 --> 0:03:17.840 And then you imagine just that there are billions of 0:03:17.880 --> 0:03:22.800 galaxies out there in the vast nothingness. It's not really nothingness. 0:03:22.800 --> 0:03:25.639 It's the everything news. It's something news at the very least. 0:03:26.720 --> 0:03:29.120 But within each of those billions of galaxies there are 0:03:29.200 --> 0:03:30.239 stars right. 0:03:30.600 --> 0:03:34.519 Or space as a hoax? Oh right, maybe maybe I 0:03:34.560 --> 0:03:37.320 don't know. Well, here are the facts. Let's talk about stars. 0:03:38.240 --> 0:03:42.880 Okay, so cool. If you look in one very specific 0:03:43.080 --> 0:03:46.760 direction out there into the cosmos, and then you travel 0:03:47.160 --> 0:03:51.760 let's say, seventy five million light years away from the Earth, 0:03:52.200 --> 0:03:55.880 you will find yourself in the Kinman dwarf galaxy. It's 0:03:55.880 --> 0:03:59.880 also known as PHL two ninety three B or f 0:04:00.080 --> 0:04:03.880 PHIL two ninety three B. There is a massive star 0:04:04.240 --> 0:04:09.200 inside this little dwarf galaxy and fairly little dwarf galaxy 0:04:09.880 --> 0:04:13.760 that is inside the constellation of Aquarius. If you're looking 0:04:13.800 --> 0:04:16.760 out there and looking at constellations. 0:04:16.120 --> 0:04:19.960 Yes, this object in question is known as a luminous 0:04:20.120 --> 0:04:26.599 blue variable star or LBV, and part of me wants 0:04:26.640 --> 0:04:30.279 to just pronounce that, but it doesn't roll off the 0:04:30.279 --> 0:04:31.400 tongue the way Phil does. 0:04:32.040 --> 0:04:34.000 Matt, you win with that one, sir. 0:04:34.480 --> 0:04:36.279 But it's about two and a half million times brighter 0:04:36.320 --> 0:04:38.719 than the Sun. At least at one point in time, 0:04:38.839 --> 0:04:42.640 it was so Ben, what's the skinny? What happened with 0:04:42.760 --> 0:04:46.279 this like big brother to the Sun that is now 0:04:46.400 --> 0:04:47.360 no longer that thing? 0:04:48.440 --> 0:04:51.520 Yes, as stude listeners, you may notice that we have 0:04:51.600 --> 0:04:57.440 started speaking in past tense about this star. Here here's 0:04:57.480 --> 0:05:02.400 what happened. This star is already relatively well studied in 0:05:02.440 --> 0:05:07.560 the modern day. Astrophysicists, astronomers and so on had investigated 0:05:07.560 --> 0:05:09.640 it for the better part of a decade from about 0:05:09.680 --> 0:05:14.000 two thousand and one to twenty eleven. There's nothing unusual 0:05:14.040 --> 0:05:18.600 about that. That is the routine research that scientists will do. 0:05:19.360 --> 0:05:24.919 This star, however, was different in that it was nearing 0:05:25.120 --> 0:05:30.400 the end of its stellar life. It's right, stars, just 0:05:30.640 --> 0:05:35.520 like people or living things do have a finite span 0:05:35.680 --> 0:05:39.440 of time in their existence, and this star was in 0:05:39.640 --> 0:05:43.120 its older days. It was elderly. It was an elderly 0:05:43.160 --> 0:05:46.240 star for lack of a better word. And it was 0:05:46.279 --> 0:05:52.640 also subject to these weird, unpredictable variations and brightness. So, Noel, 0:05:52.720 --> 0:05:56.679 you had said this LBV was about two point five 0:05:56.839 --> 0:06:00.520 million times brighter than the Sun. It was, but it 0:06:00.640 --> 0:06:05.640 wasn't consistently at that brightness, and this was pretty baffling. 0:06:06.480 --> 0:06:11.480 Stars like this are candidly pretty rare, but they are 0:06:11.520 --> 0:06:14.760 not unknown. So again, still, this star was not unique 0:06:14.839 --> 0:06:19.160 yet a handful of these have been discovered already. However, 0:06:19.240 --> 0:06:24.839 when people saw these fluctuations in brightness, some enterprising astrophysicists 0:06:25.440 --> 0:06:30.600 also recognized that as an enormous opportunity for possibly groundbreaking research, 0:06:30.920 --> 0:06:34.120 and so they said, out of the multitude of stars 0:06:34.200 --> 0:06:36.800 in the sky, we want to turn the telescopes back 0:06:36.839 --> 0:06:39.279 to this one and see if there's anything else we 0:06:39.320 --> 0:06:39.760 can learn. 0:06:40.279 --> 0:06:46.000 Yes, a doctoral astrophysicist student at Trinity Dublin College did 0:06:46.160 --> 0:06:48.400 just that. A gentleman by the name of Andrew Allen 0:06:48.839 --> 0:06:52.520 was very interested in the star. So back in twenty nineteen, 0:06:52.920 --> 0:06:57.800 he and his fellow star enthusiasts, professional star enthusias decided 0:06:57.800 --> 0:07:01.400 to use something delightfully named the European Southern Observatory is 0:07:01.560 --> 0:07:04.960 very large telescope, love it just to tell it like 0:07:05.000 --> 0:07:07.200 it is, And they wanted to use this device to 0:07:07.440 --> 0:07:12.080 get a closer look at this star as it started 0:07:12.200 --> 0:07:16.200 kind of approaching its twilight years, the end of its 0:07:16.280 --> 0:07:17.040 stellar life. 0:07:17.240 --> 0:07:18.880 And that's what potentially. 0:07:19.240 --> 0:07:24.000 Really offer some incredible research material, right Yeah. 0:07:24.280 --> 0:07:27.040 And it's not as though they were going in, you know, 0:07:27.160 --> 0:07:29.800 completely blind about what may may happen. They had a 0:07:29.800 --> 0:07:32.200 pretty rough idea of what's going to happen to this star, 0:07:32.640 --> 0:07:37.080 because stars do a couple of general different things. But 0:07:37.200 --> 0:07:40.280 usually when a star, you know that's this much larger 0:07:40.320 --> 0:07:44.880 and brighter than the sun, begins to really end, truly end, 0:07:45.240 --> 0:07:49.200 it's going to explode in some kind, in some form 0:07:49.280 --> 0:07:51.760 or fashion. And there are several different types of these 0:07:51.840 --> 0:07:54.360 explosions that we're going to talk about here. But it 0:07:54.360 --> 0:07:57.360 would it would explode, and we would notice because we 0:07:57.400 --> 0:08:00.960 would see it. Even though it's seventy five light years 0:08:01.000 --> 0:08:04.120 away and it takes that light that long to reach us, 0:08:04.280 --> 0:08:06.120 we would still be able to observe it. 0:08:07.080 --> 0:08:13.040 Yeah, Yeah, and so we know that stars of this 0:08:13.280 --> 0:08:18.880 size tend to have violent deaths. And also, you know, 0:08:18.960 --> 0:08:23.960 I know I'm leaning into the comparisons here, and I 0:08:24.080 --> 0:08:29.280 maybe anthropomorphizing a bit, but you'll see why these comparisons 0:08:29.280 --> 0:08:33.320 are apt. So stars have Stars of this nature tend 0:08:33.320 --> 0:08:36.920 to have violent deaths. Here's what happens. They run out 0:08:36.920 --> 0:08:40.440 of hydrogen to fuse, right, and then the weight of 0:08:40.520 --> 0:08:44.520 the stars starts squeezing on its core. It gets hotter 0:08:44.720 --> 0:08:47.960 and hotter and denser and denser, and then the star, 0:08:49.640 --> 0:08:54.480 almost as if it is struggling to prevent itself from dying, 0:08:54.880 --> 0:08:58.720 it begins to fuse heavier elements than usual and sort 0:08:58.760 --> 0:09:03.320 of a ay, a last ditch effort to keep from collapsing. 0:09:03.400 --> 0:09:06.880 So from carbon to silicon to iron, each of these 0:09:06.920 --> 0:09:12.000 steps generates heat and pressure, but it's never quite enough, 0:09:12.520 --> 0:09:15.960 and the fusion of these heavier elements they don't give 0:09:15.960 --> 0:09:20.560 the star more energy, so boom, the core collapses, and 0:09:20.840 --> 0:09:25.720 the resulting shock wave of protons and neutrons colliding will 0:09:25.880 --> 0:09:31.280 rip the star apart. The outer layers are thrown out 0:09:31.679 --> 0:09:36.040 into the ink, out into space, and it becomes a supernova, 0:09:36.880 --> 0:09:42.760 and for very brief time, comparatively, the star is enormously bright. 0:09:43.240 --> 0:09:48.720 This massive amount of chaos and pandemonium makes for a 0:09:49.000 --> 0:09:53.640 beautiful display. Actually it's weird that for us it's an 0:09:53.679 --> 0:09:58.040 amazing firework, but you know, it's tremendously damaging to the 0:09:58.040 --> 0:09:59.319 galaxies in which it occurs. 0:10:00.080 --> 0:10:01.800 And it's one of those things where if you are 0:10:01.920 --> 0:10:08.360 observing even the region around a star that is going 0:10:08.480 --> 0:10:11.079 into super and ova or beginning to supernova, or has 0:10:11.200 --> 0:10:14.520 recently gone into that process, you'd be able to see 0:10:14.520 --> 0:10:19.640 it because it's not just you know, if you think 0:10:19.679 --> 0:10:21.760 about our sun, it's not just kind of that ball 0:10:21.840 --> 0:10:27.520 of gases that's burning, right. It's now if you imagine, 0:10:27.640 --> 0:10:30.839 you've seen it before depicted in movies and science fiction 0:10:31.160 --> 0:10:35.400 television probably, but it is now kind of coloring the 0:10:37.320 --> 0:10:41.280 space around it, the darkness around it. Right, it looks 0:10:41.320 --> 0:10:45.320 like a splotch now more than kind of a spherical thing, 0:10:46.800 --> 0:10:49.400 because it's all those gases that Ben was talking about, 0:10:49.440 --> 0:10:52.960 the radiation, it all just kind of looks to have 0:10:53.120 --> 0:10:56.920 spilled out into the space around it for quite a while. 0:10:57.360 --> 0:11:00.200 It doesn't just explode and then it's done, right, It 0:11:00.200 --> 0:11:02.160 doesn't last for a few seconds the way it does 0:11:02.200 --> 0:11:04.760 in maybe a Star Wars or you know, something like that, 0:11:05.000 --> 0:11:08.200 it's there and you're observing it again over the course 0:11:08.240 --> 0:11:09.559 of several years. 0:11:09.880 --> 0:11:10.120 Man. 0:11:10.559 --> 0:11:15.439 Yeah, so after the blast, this dense core that's left 0:11:15.520 --> 0:11:20.760 behind from stellar material might collapse into a black hole 0:11:21.240 --> 0:11:24.239 or a neutron star. And those are two of space's 0:11:24.280 --> 0:11:28.040 most head scratching kind of mysteries that we really don't 0:11:28.040 --> 0:11:30.360 know what happens when you get sucked into one of these, 0:11:30.600 --> 0:11:32.800 or at least not as much as we would like. 0:11:33.320 --> 0:11:37.440 But that's not what happened to LBV. When Andrew Allen 0:11:37.800 --> 0:11:42.400 searched for this LBV, he stumbled across a bit of 0:11:42.440 --> 0:11:45.679 a galactic mystery, sort of like a victim in some 0:11:45.760 --> 0:11:48.120 kind of cosmic noir detective story. 0:11:48.400 --> 0:11:49.400 I love this Ben. 0:11:50.160 --> 0:11:53.160 The star just just you know, like they like Kaiser 0:11:53.200 --> 0:11:57.400 SoSE like that it was gone. And in order to 0:11:57.480 --> 0:12:01.080 investigate this mystery and kind of follow the clues, the 0:12:01.120 --> 0:12:05.160 researchers had to look back at previous observations and snapshots 0:12:05.360 --> 0:12:07.200 of the star taken in two thousand and two. In 0:12:07.240 --> 0:12:10.640 two thousand and nine, and they discovered something very interesting, 0:12:10.960 --> 0:12:12.960 which was that the star I had been undergoing a 0:12:13.120 --> 0:12:16.080 very strong one of those outburst periods that Matt was 0:12:16.080 --> 0:12:20.040 talking about during that time, getting rid of throwing off 0:12:20.720 --> 0:12:24.120 enormous amounts of that stellar material at a much much 0:12:24.200 --> 0:12:25.760 faster rate than normal. 0:12:26.040 --> 0:12:27.480 I would just like to point out that is not 0:12:27.640 --> 0:12:32.840 a supernova they're talking about there, Like, it's not an explosion. 0:12:33.000 --> 0:12:37.360 It's it's ejecting material the way maybe you've seen the 0:12:38.080 --> 0:12:41.280 Sun with a coronal mass ejection or some of the 0:12:41.320 --> 0:12:45.040 filaments that just will escape from the surface of the 0:12:45.080 --> 0:12:47.200 Sun and head out into space. 0:12:47.559 --> 0:12:48.800 It's a space tantrum. 0:12:49.400 --> 0:12:53.360 Yes, yeah, star tantrum. It's yeah, that's essentially what we're 0:12:53.360 --> 0:12:55.440 talking about here, but at a much higher rate. 0:12:55.840 --> 0:12:59.920 That's a very good point, Matt. And so what happened next, Well. 0:12:59.800 --> 0:13:06.080 The researchers know that this kind of star variable LBV 0:13:06.280 --> 0:13:11.760 like this can experience these space tantrums as they age, 0:13:12.559 --> 0:13:15.760 and that can cause them to glow more brightly. But 0:13:16.120 --> 0:13:19.640 what they found was that the outburst they could prove 0:13:19.800 --> 0:13:24.000 and trace ended some time after twenty eleven, right when 0:13:24.080 --> 0:13:29.040 routine observation the star halted, and that meant that they 0:13:29.120 --> 0:13:33.000 needed some they needed to do some space detective work, 0:13:33.240 --> 0:13:37.640 because sometime between twenty eleven and twenty nineteen, this star 0:13:38.240 --> 0:13:45.360 simply vanished. So what happened? That's our question today, and 0:13:45.400 --> 0:13:48.680 we'll attempt to find some answers. Afterword from our sponsor. 0:13:55.679 --> 0:14:01.080 Here's where it gets crazy, Okay, juries out what happens. 0:14:03.320 --> 0:14:05.920 Well, that's kind of the point of this episode, guys. 0:14:07.480 --> 0:14:13.239 We don't know exactly what happened, and scientists, even brilliant 0:14:14.880 --> 0:14:18.920 younger people who are you know, getting PhDs in astrophysics, 0:14:18.960 --> 0:14:21.600 who are observing the thing directly, are trying to figure 0:14:21.600 --> 0:14:26.040 out exactly what happened. But the cool thing that occurs 0:14:26.200 --> 0:14:30.360 when you know, strange things go down is that there 0:14:30.400 --> 0:14:34.920 are a bunch of explanations, proposed hypotheses, theories about what 0:14:35.160 --> 0:14:38.560 perhaps occurred here. And what we're going to do from 0:14:38.600 --> 0:14:41.880 here on out is just explore some of the things 0:14:41.920 --> 0:14:45.320 that may have happened with this star. And some, of course, 0:14:45.720 --> 0:14:48.560 are a little more out there than others. Some are 0:14:48.600 --> 0:14:52.360 a little more mundane, little boring. But it's okay because 0:14:53.000 --> 0:14:55.760 it could be any of these because guess what's coming 0:14:55.840 --> 0:14:56.840 up in a second Ben. 0:14:57.160 --> 0:14:59.440 Oh yeah, strap In, I have a clear bias on 0:14:59.480 --> 0:15:01.600 this one, guy. I have the one that I very 0:15:01.680 --> 0:15:06.200 much want to be true. We're gonna get to aliens 0:15:06.200 --> 0:15:10.320 in a second, but right now it's already spooky and 0:15:10.360 --> 0:15:15.000 disquieting enough to note that stars do a lot of things. 0:15:15.760 --> 0:15:21.200 They don't just disappear, that doesn't happen. They leave a trace. 0:15:21.560 --> 0:15:23.760 Like you said, No, there will be a black hole, right, 0:15:23.800 --> 0:15:27.240 there will be there will be some sort of detritus. 0:15:27.560 --> 0:15:30.720 But this one seems to have just vanished. So if 0:15:30.760 --> 0:15:33.800 we look at the possibilities, I suggest we start with 0:15:33.880 --> 0:15:36.240 the mundane, or as you said, Matt, maybe the more 0:15:36.240 --> 0:15:42.760 boring aka plausible stuff. First, we have to remember to 0:15:42.800 --> 0:15:44.680 a point I think one of us made earlier, that 0:15:44.720 --> 0:15:49.600 we're looking at something from a long, long, long way away. 0:15:50.160 --> 0:15:53.560 There's a lot of space in between us and this star, 0:15:53.760 --> 0:15:56.280 so much space that there's a lot of time in 0:15:56.360 --> 0:15:59.920 between us and this star. And in that space, that 0:16:00.080 --> 0:16:05.000 geographic space between us and this star, there are plenty 0:16:05.000 --> 0:16:06.440 of things that get in the way. 0:16:06.880 --> 0:16:08.720 To preface this, I want to point out something that 0:16:08.720 --> 0:16:11.280 Matt mentioned off air, that you know, in that there's 0:16:11.320 --> 0:16:14.720 that gap between the observation periods twenty eleven and twenty nineteen. 0:16:15.240 --> 0:16:17.640 There anything could have and all bets are off anything 0:16:17.640 --> 0:16:19.200 could have happened in that time, So just keep that 0:16:19.240 --> 0:16:23.040 in mind. But one pretty simple and a little bit 0:16:23.120 --> 0:16:26.680 mundane explanation could be that the star dimmed considerably after 0:16:26.720 --> 0:16:31.560 its outburst and was then further obscured by a thick 0:16:32.120 --> 0:16:36.640 kind of cluster of cosmic dust. If that's the case, 0:16:36.960 --> 0:16:40.720 then the star could reappear in future observations, because again, 0:16:41.080 --> 0:16:44.280 these are these clouds, this kind of veil could drift 0:16:44.360 --> 0:16:47.480 through space, and that's a lot of time for something 0:16:47.520 --> 0:16:49.440 like that. You know, things move very slowly in space, 0:16:49.440 --> 0:16:51.840 at least far away when you're observing it. That absolutely 0:16:51.880 --> 0:16:54.480 would be a scenario where the star didn't actually go anywhere, 0:16:54.800 --> 0:16:56.520 it just wasn't observable at the time. 0:16:57.080 --> 0:16:59.720 Just what I would say here that this one feels 0:16:59.720 --> 0:17:02.480 a little odd to me is just how bright the 0:17:03.160 --> 0:17:05.680 star was in question here the LBV, because you know 0:17:05.760 --> 0:17:07.119 we mentioned at the top it was two and a 0:17:07.160 --> 0:17:09.320 half million times brighter than the sun. 0:17:09.680 --> 0:17:13.360 Yeah. Right, that's some robust cosmic dust right there, you know. 0:17:13.400 --> 0:17:18.960 Well it is for sure, It's just we don't know 0:17:19.000 --> 0:17:22.359 how far away, you know, where that veil would be 0:17:22.440 --> 0:17:26.840 located in between the two points right on that on 0:17:26.880 --> 0:17:27.960 that line. 0:17:28.600 --> 0:17:30.560 I mean, would that be sort of like an asteroid 0:17:30.600 --> 0:17:33.960 belt or something like like a cluster of like closely 0:17:34.040 --> 0:17:38.600 knit together material that would potentially obscure something from view. 0:17:38.840 --> 0:17:41.760 This is what I find hilarious about this. This is 0:17:41.880 --> 0:17:46.919 classic human This This theory is basically that it is 0:17:47.000 --> 0:17:51.160 saying that seventy five million light years is a lot 0:17:51.160 --> 0:17:53.640 of space and that there could be something in front 0:17:53.640 --> 0:17:56.800 of the telescope. We're dressing it up to sound fancy 0:17:57.320 --> 0:17:59.879 and we're going to talk about some weirder stuff. But this, 0:18:00.000 --> 0:18:04.840 this is like one hunder a possibility and feels like 0:18:04.920 --> 0:18:09.000 the exact kind of delightful hyjiinks our species gets itself into. 0:18:09.240 --> 0:18:12.199 It's like the cosmic equivalent of accidentally having your thumb 0:18:12.480 --> 0:18:15.119 slightly over the corner of the camera on your phone 0:18:15.119 --> 0:18:17.600 when you're taking a selfie. 0:18:17.800 --> 0:18:20.679 You know, if your thumb was let's say, forty million 0:18:20.760 --> 0:18:25.440 light years away of a galaxy exactly exactly. 0:18:25.600 --> 0:18:27.639 So we let's get into what we you know, what 0:18:27.680 --> 0:18:30.400 we like to talk about here, the weirder and more 0:18:30.520 --> 0:18:31.720 exciting explanation. 0:18:32.440 --> 0:18:34.359 Then I think I leave this to you, my friend. 0:18:34.960 --> 0:18:39.040 Oh oh, this is this is on the way to weird. 0:18:39.280 --> 0:18:41.720 I won't say this is We're not full weird yet 0:18:41.760 --> 0:18:46.080 on this one. But what if the star never really 0:18:46.119 --> 0:18:50.080 recovered from its space tantrums, what it was bleeding out 0:18:50.119 --> 0:18:55.240 all that material? What if it just somehow collapsed into 0:18:55.280 --> 0:18:58.800 a black hole, not with a bang, but with a whimper. 0:18:59.000 --> 0:19:01.879 What if no super nova occurred? In short, like, what 0:19:02.880 --> 0:19:06.840 if there wasn't an explosion like that for us to see, 0:19:07.240 --> 0:19:12.399 it just sort of became a black hole. This is 0:19:13.240 --> 0:19:15.680 pretty crazy. This would be a rare event, and if 0:19:15.680 --> 0:19:19.560 it did happen, then the star would have made an 0:19:20.320 --> 0:19:23.919 enormous black hole. It would have a mass that was 0:19:24.520 --> 0:19:27.800 eighty five to one hundred and twenty times the mass 0:19:27.800 --> 0:19:31.320 of Earth's Sun, and we have no idea how that 0:19:31.320 --> 0:19:34.680 would have happened. That's like, that's at the stage of 0:19:34.920 --> 0:19:39.119 you know, spitballing in speculation, where someone says, maybe this 0:19:39.200 --> 0:19:41.359 could have happened, and then someone says, well, how do 0:19:41.400 --> 0:19:43.439 you think it would have occurred? And everybody has to 0:19:43.480 --> 0:19:47.200 kind of throw up their hands and shrug because that 0:19:47.240 --> 0:19:49.879 doesn't make sense. It violates what we understand about the 0:19:49.960 --> 0:19:51.000 rules of physics. 0:19:51.320 --> 0:19:53.880 Well, you know what they really would have to do, Ben, 0:19:54.320 --> 0:19:57.119 and it's something that would be completely beyond maya understanding 0:19:57.640 --> 0:20:02.560 is throw up a bunch of FIS equations that there's 0:20:02.680 --> 0:20:05.440 no way I could ever understand. But I've read some 0:20:06.040 --> 0:20:08.560 papers on this. We've all read some scientific papers on 0:20:08.600 --> 0:20:11.639 this now at this point and trying to wrap my 0:20:11.760 --> 0:20:16.440 head at least around the math that goes into calculating 0:20:16.840 --> 0:20:19.680 how it could become a black hole like that. People 0:20:19.720 --> 0:20:22.160 are doing it and they're checking it out and they're 0:20:22.240 --> 0:20:26.280 checking you know, their maths. But I certainly couldn't explain 0:20:26.320 --> 0:20:29.359 it to you on this podcast. But like you said, rare, 0:20:29.480 --> 0:20:30.360 but could have happened. 0:20:30.640 --> 0:20:35.520 Yeah, could have. There's another possibility that comes to us 0:20:36.080 --> 0:20:39.879 through some research, some pretty recent research at Cornell University. 0:20:39.960 --> 0:20:43.000 Right, is this a step up in the weird spectrum? 0:20:43.480 --> 0:20:46.520 This one, This is a weird one where it feels 0:20:46.560 --> 0:20:52.600 more plausible and a little less. I don't know. This 0:20:52.640 --> 0:20:55.360 one rides the line between mundane and strange. So let's 0:20:55.440 --> 0:20:56.199 let's just get into it. 0:20:56.240 --> 0:20:59.320 I'm good with that. Yeah. They It was a project. 0:21:00.720 --> 0:21:04.960 Through an article submission to our xiv dot org that 0:21:05.119 --> 0:21:09.359 is a mouthful r xivy dot org, which is like 0:21:09.400 --> 0:21:14.119 a database, and that's through Cornell University. In February twenty 0:21:14.200 --> 0:21:19.760 twenty they weighed in on different potential outcomes that we 0:21:19.960 --> 0:21:22.359 just mentioned so far, and they added this one as 0:21:22.400 --> 0:21:27.000 another possibility, positing what if the light that these astronomers 0:21:27.000 --> 0:21:29.960 were observing all that time and observing that it had 0:21:30.000 --> 0:21:34.400 dimmed so significantly wasn't actually from an lbvstar but from 0:21:34.400 --> 0:21:40.720 the explosion of an lbvstar, from you know, a supernova lbvstar. 0:21:41.000 --> 0:21:44.200 The scientists show that a type two end supernova could 0:21:44.240 --> 0:21:48.080 account for some of these previous misinterpretations of that light 0:21:48.520 --> 0:21:50.680 that would you know, in theory, have been coming from 0:21:50.680 --> 0:21:52.879 an active star rather than an explosion. 0:21:53.880 --> 0:21:57.120 Your user error, then, is a good way to sum 0:21:57.200 --> 0:21:59.960 up that argument. It's not that the results were wrong 0:22:00.560 --> 0:22:04.440 or necessarily mysterious at that point, it's that our interpretation 0:22:05.119 --> 0:22:09.560 of those of that data was incorrect. And these scientists, 0:22:10.480 --> 0:22:13.439 you know, they make a pretty good case for this theory. 0:22:13.840 --> 0:22:14.119 Yeah. 0:22:14.400 --> 0:22:17.280 And if you know, you may think to yourself, what, no, man, 0:22:17.359 --> 0:22:21.879 there's no way brilliant people could mistake a star just 0:22:21.960 --> 0:22:27.960 being there physically somewhere and an explosion. Well, maybe think again. Here, 0:22:28.040 --> 0:22:30.040 I'm going to reading a couple quotes here from this 0:22:30.280 --> 0:22:33.040 article that was published. It says it is possible the 0:22:33.440 --> 0:22:38.359 sn supernova two end like event occurred sometime between September 0:22:38.440 --> 0:22:42.119 nineteen ninety five and September nineteen ninety eight, when no 0:22:42.200 --> 0:22:47.399 photometry is available, so no actual pictures of this star 0:22:47.520 --> 0:22:50.920 and of the light being emanated from that area. Going 0:22:50.920 --> 0:22:54.240 back to the quote, in some cases supernova light curves 0:22:54.359 --> 0:22:59.440 exhibit bumps several years after the explosion. Now that would 0:22:59.440 --> 0:23:02.240 account for or you know, early on Ben was talking 0:23:02.320 --> 0:23:06.080 about how this star or wherever this light was coming from, 0:23:06.119 --> 0:23:08.760 it was very bright at times and then seemed to 0:23:08.760 --> 0:23:10.919 dim of it and then be very bright, even brighter, 0:23:10.960 --> 0:23:13.800 and then a little more dim And that's what they're 0:23:13.840 --> 0:23:17.679 describing here as these bumps in output of light. And 0:23:17.720 --> 0:23:21.560 here's another quote here. The most plausible explanations for the 0:23:21.600 --> 0:23:25.720 recent dissipation of the broad emission after an unusually persistent 0:23:25.800 --> 0:23:30.120 phase are an LBV outburst followed by a slow weekly 0:23:30.280 --> 0:23:34.560 variable phase or a very long lived s N two 0:23:34.760 --> 0:23:39.800 end event that's a supernova event, so again exactly what 0:23:39.800 --> 0:23:43.600 we described before. The most plausible things are that it 0:23:43.800 --> 0:23:46.880 just had that weird outburst, that space tantrum we talked about, 0:23:46.960 --> 0:23:50.800 then just dimmed very significantly after that, or it was 0:23:51.000 --> 0:23:55.920 a long lived supernova that we've just been observing as 0:23:55.960 --> 0:23:59.120 though it were a star, and they say the latter 0:23:59.359 --> 0:24:03.359 is more like given the lack of short timescale variability 0:24:04.080 --> 0:24:08.720 and the slowly fading light curve. Oh the language of scientists. 0:24:08.760 --> 0:24:09.160 Everyone. 0:24:09.359 --> 0:24:11.679 Yeah, you did a really good job of unpacking that, Matt, though, 0:24:11.680 --> 0:24:14.960 I applaud you. And now I think we're to Ben's 0:24:15.320 --> 0:24:20.600 favorite part of today's episode, when we get legitimately into 0:24:20.640 --> 0:24:22.080 the weirdest sphere here. 0:24:22.600 --> 0:24:26.040 Oh, I yeah, I'm excited about this one. Guys. I 0:24:26.119 --> 0:24:29.800 think it's I think it's gonna be our I think 0:24:29.800 --> 0:24:33.240 we'll be unanimous in deciding this is our favorite part, 0:24:33.560 --> 0:24:36.200 this is our favorite possible explanation. But let's hold the 0:24:36.280 --> 0:24:39.680 tension just a bit longer. We'll pause for a word 0:24:39.680 --> 0:24:50.000 from our sponsor, and we'll be right back. Noel, Matt 0:24:51.000 --> 0:24:57.320 fellow conspiracy realist. Let's dream big. What if this mysterious 0:24:57.359 --> 0:25:00.960 star was never destroyed at all? What if reports of 0:25:01.000 --> 0:25:05.560