Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbomb here with another classic episode from our archives.
Speaker 1: This one first aired back in January of twenty nineteen
Speaker 1: after some fascinating research came out concerning the future of
Speaker 1: our Sun and other stars. It turns out they'll eventually crystallize.
Speaker 1: Hey Brainstuff, Lauren voelbomb here. Our Sun may look like
Speaker 1: an eternal miasma of incandescent plasma, but one day it
Speaker 1: will die. This may sound like a bummer, especially for
Speaker 1: anything that's living on Earth in a few billion years,
Speaker 1: but there is a bright side to the solar doom.
Speaker 1: According to research published in the journal Nature, this very month,
Speaker 1: our dead star will leave behind a shimmering legacy. It'll
Speaker 1: turn into a massive crystal. Before we start talking about
Speaker 1: supersized stellar crystals, we first need to understand how stars
Speaker 1: like our Sun live and die. The Sun is fueled
Speaker 1: by nuclear fusion. Its massive gravity crushes hydrogen atoms together
Speaker 1: in its core to create helium, and the vast quantities
Speaker 1: of energy released by these fusion processes push outward, maintaining
Speaker 1: a happy equilibrium so long as there's plenty of hydrogen
Speaker 1: fuel feeding this process, the core remains about the same
Speaker 1: size and temperature around fifteen million kelvin, producing energy that
Speaker 1: radiates throughout the Solar system, ultimately nurturing the evolution of
Speaker 1: life on a certain habitable planet. This hydrogen burning phase
Speaker 1: of a star's life will last for ninety percent of
Speaker 1: the lifetime of our Sun. The period of stellar life
Speaker 1: is known as the main sequence. We're currently about four
Speaker 1: point five billion years into our Sun's main sequence days,
Speaker 1: or approximately halfway through its life. So what happens when
Speaker 1: that hydrogen is all used up? Things start to get
Speaker 1: a little wild, to put it mildly. Without the outward
Speaker 1: pressure of the energy created by fusing hydrogen, the Sun's
Speaker 1: gravity overwhelms the core, crushing it into a smaller space
Speaker 1: and boosting its temperature tenfold. That's okay, though, the heavier
Speaker 1: helium nuclei will begin to fuse together, creating the outward
Speaker 1: pressure once again to maintain equilibrium. It's predicted that this
Speaker 1: will start happening in about five billion years, marked with
Speaker 1: a sudden outrush of energy known as a helium flash.
Speaker 2: As the helium fuses, carbon and oxygen are formed, and
Speaker 2: the temperature of the core rises yet again. Soon after,
Speaker 2: even heavier elements also begin to fuse, and the Sun
Speaker 2: on the whole will start looking a bit worse for
Speaker 2: the wear. It will begin to swell, blasting into planetary
Speaker 2: space with savage solar winds that will begin to strip
Speaker 2: away its upper layers. Though our Sun isn't massive enough
Speaker 2: to explode as a supernova, it will turn into a
Speaker 2: red giant star, possibly expanding beyond the orbit of Earth.
Speaker 2: Our planet will be toast. After the death of our star,
Speaker 2: it will leave behind wispy remains of solar plasma, creating
Speaker 2: a beautiful planetary nebula enriched with newly formed heavy elements.
Speaker 1: Will go on to create the next.
Speaker 2: Generation of stars and planets, and in its core will
Speaker 2: be a hot stellar remnant known as a white dwarf,
Speaker 2: a tiny, dense star shimmering brightly, a testament to the
Speaker 2: Sun that used to be in its place. White dwarfs
Speaker 2: can sustain themselves for billions of years before fizzing out
Speaker 2: and dimming forever. But this isn't the end of the story.
Speaker 2: Using observations by the European Gay Emission, which is currently
Speaker 2: making precision measurements of stars throughout our galaxy, Researchers at
Speaker 2: the University of Warwick in the UK have stumbled on
Speaker 2: a white dwarf's secret that has remained hidden until now.
Speaker 2: Soon after forming, white dwarfs are extremely hot, radiating the
Speaker 2: intense energy that was once held in the core of
Speaker 2: the main sequence star that came before them. Over billions
Speaker 2: of years. After forming, white dwarfs slowly cool and at
Speaker 2: a certain point, the oxygen and carbon they contain will
Speaker 2: go through a phase transition akin to liquid water freezing
Speaker 2: and turning into solid ice, only at much more extreme
Speaker 2: temperatures and pressures, and they'll solidify to form a huge crystal.
Speaker 2: Pierre Emmanuel Tremblay, from the University of Warwick's Department of
Speaker 2: Physics and leader of the study, said in a press release.
Speaker 2: All white dwarfs will crystallize at some point in their evolution,
Speaker 2: although more massive white dwarfs go through the process sooner.
Speaker 2: This means that billions of white dwarfs in our galaxy
Speaker 2: have already completed the process and are essentially crystal spheres
Speaker 2: in the sky. The sum itself will become a crystal
Speaker 2: white dwarf in about ten billion years. Tremblay's team analyzed
Speaker 2: the Gaya observations to measure the luminosities and colors of
Speaker 2: fifteen thousand white dwarfs within three hundred light years of Earth.
Speaker 2: What they found was an excess in the population of
Speaker 2: stars of specific colors and brightness. They realized that this
Speaker 2: group of stars represented a similar phase instellar evolution, where
Speaker 2: the conditions are right for this phase transition to occur,
Speaker 2: causing a delay in cooling, thus slowing down the aging process.
Speaker 2: The researcherch found that some of these stars had extended
Speaker 2: their lifespan by up to two billion year. Trembly said
Speaker 2: in the statement, this is the first direct evidence that
Speaker 2: white dwarfs crystallize or transition from liquid to solid. It
Speaker 2: was predicted fifty years ago that we should observe a
Speaker 2: pile up in the number of white dwarfs in certain
Speaker 2: luminosities and colors due to crystallization, and only now has
Speaker 2: this been observed. Crystallized white dwarfs aren't just a stellar curiosity.
Speaker 2: Their quantum makeup is unlike anything we can recreate in
Speaker 2: the laboratory. As the white star material crystallizes, its material
Speaker 2: becomes ordered on a quantum level, nuclei aligning themselves in
Speaker 2: a complex lattice with a metallic oxygen core and an
Speaker 2: outer layer enriched with carbon. So it turns out that
Speaker 2: after stars like our sun die, their stories aren't over All.
Speaker 2: White dwarfs will go through this crystallization process, littering the
Speaker 2: galaxy with massive diamond like stellar remnants. Today's episode is
Speaker 2: based on the article After the Sun does, It'll become
Speaker 2: a stellar crystal on HowStuffWorks.
Speaker 1: Dot Com, written by Ian O'Neil. Brain Stuff this production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio in partnership with how Stuffworks dot Com and
Speaker 1: it's produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows