Cosmic Queries – Starquakes with Conny Aerts

What is a starquake? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Matt Kirshen explore asteroseismology, the sun, and what’s happening on the insides of stars with astrophysicist Conny Aerts.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. This one is titled "Starquakes." I've got as a co-host here Matt Kirshen. Matt, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 0:26Matt Kirshen?

  Thank you so much for having me. It's nice to be back.

• 0:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so you solicited questions about like stars and starquakes from...

• 0:33Matt Kirshen?

  I'm very excited about this topic and so are the listeners. There's been a lot of, a lot of your Patreon patrons have responded to this one and we're gonna try and get through as many of these as possible, but uh...

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I don't know a damn thing about...

• 0:44Matt Kirshen?

  I can't promise all of them, but I will try.

• 0:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know a damn thing about starquakes, so...

• 0:49Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, I know, I'm excited. I live in California where earthquakes are a problem, so I know how to deal with those. But I don't, if you're involved in a starquake, is getting under a table still enough? Or how do we deal with it?

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we're gonna find out for sure. So our guest with the expertise we need is Connie Arts. I think I pronounced that right, Connie. Welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Hi, glad to be here.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Now, you're in from Belgium and the Netherlands. You have a dual appointment. One as the professor of astrophysics at, let me get this straight, in Luvin, Belgium. And it's KU, that's Catholique Universit, it's like Catholic University in Luvin? Is that correct?

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, KU Luvin, just don't worry about it.

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  KU Luvin.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Luvin is a small college town in Belgium, so that's where I'm from.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. And in the Netherlands, you're a professor of astroseismology at Radbouw University in the Netherlands. And so the fact that that's even a title to hold, astroseismology, says how far we've come in just the specification within the broader field of astrophysics. And I think this is just delightful. And your expertise is stellar astrophysics, stellar structure and evolution. These are two favorites of mine professionally. But I never really thought about seismology in anything other than Earth. And so, what, first tell us, what is astroseismology?

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Well, it's the study of the seismology of stars. Now, as you say.

• 2:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're gonna have to do better than that.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, I know, give me a chance, right? Give me a chance. So, we all know earthquakes, that the earth has a whole crust, you know. Uh, it's not pleasant to have earthquakes, but it's fantastic to have starquakes. Now, stars are hot gaseous spheres, and they also move up and down. And we can use these starquakes to learn what's inside the star. It's the only way to know how to look inside a star. And that's just like, like seismologists of the earth, you know, they, they are the only happy people. When the art, uh, the earth is quaking, let's say, why? Because the earthquakes create waves, they travel into this, the, the planet, they bounce back at the iron core,

• 3:17Speaker 02

  and seismographs detect it, and then we can do all sorts of fun physics uh, and chemistry of our planet, and we do the same, but then for stars.

• 3:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Matt, I think Connie just said that while cities are burning and everyone is dying, geologists are delighted that they have earthquake.

• 3:36Matt Kirshen?

  Absolutely, yeah, I'm hiding under a table while my pets are going crazy, and, uh, and seismologists are like, the data, what beautiful data we're getting right now.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The data.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, but I'm confused though, because when I think of an earthquake, I have a very simple, uh, understanding of it, that you have a rigid crust that is under pressure and under tension, and then it spontaneously gives way. And then you get an abrupt shift, and that's an earthquake. But when I think of stars, they're fluids, they're gaseous fluids. So, what could possibly be quaking if you don't have anything solid to build up the tension that then gets released?

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's a bit different, because the, the starquakes are happening all the time, because it's, it's a gas. And so you have motions, right? Up and down motions, but also more complex, uh, motions. And if you, if you, if you. You know, press a gas and then release it, it creates sound waves. That's a bit like music in a theater hall. So for me, stars are three dimensional musical halls, concert halls, right?

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  And so, uh, the nice thing is that starquakes are always there. Luckily for us humans, the earthquakes die out quickly, right?

• 4:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're rare relative, I mean, they're rare in the sense of the ones that do serious damage are rare. But as I understand it, there are actually earthquakes of even very small magnitude almost all the time. I think that's correct.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's correct, because anybody in nature vibrates, yeah? And so, yeah, stars do that all the time and they do it permanently, which for us astrophysicists is great because we can measure the up and down motion. Why? Because it gives changes in the, in the temperature of the star. And so the, the brightness of the star changes as a function of time. And then we have our seismographs that measure these changes as a function of time.

• 5:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your seismographs are also, I, I, you, you implied there that they're sensitive to those boundaries where temperature changes.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 5:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because your sound would get reflected or your, your pressure wave, which we're calling sound, would, would get reflected or bent in a different way. And you, you use that to model the total interior structure of the star. Is that correct?

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's correct, but yeah, like, um, we cannot hear these sound waves with our ears. So we see the brightness variations because the sound is only propagating there where there is gas. And between us and the star, you know, there's nothing, it's empty, right? So we can't literally hear the, the frequencies of the waves, but we see the up and down motion. And so that is actually connected. The frequency of these sound waves created by these up and down motions is connected to the physics and also the chemical composition of the star in its interior. So we can't literally dive into the stellar concert hall. But we can measure the frequencies from a distance, let's say.

• 6:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But but if you could, you would hear all of these.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's fantastic. Sometimes I give lectures for musical artists and then they are all totally fascinated about this, about these sounds like, you know.

• 7:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me test this on Matt. So Matt, NASA is going to plan a mission to send astronauts to the sun to listen to these sounds, but it's dangerous, obviously. So they're going to go at night.

• 7:11Matt Kirshen?

  Right.

• 7:14Matt Kirshen?

  You'd you'd need your earplugs as well. I, you know, I don't allow concerts sometimes. I don't take any chances now. I'm getting old and my hearing's going. That, by the way, I know I know we haven't got into the questions yet, but that actually is one of our questions from Lucas, from listener Lucas, was actually about whether you can make that the heartbeat of stars into music.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:33Matt Kirshen?

  And so you're saying, yes, that you can absolutely do that.

• 7:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my goodness. So has have people done? So you so you have a a portfolio of frequencies going on at different times and different locations. And so you get a clever musician to sort of take all of that bass material and figure out a way to listen to it. That'd be interesting.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So we we actually just shift the, I mean, each star has its own symphony, right? Depending on how big it is, how how much mass it has, how old it is, it has its own symphony. But then we shift that global symphony into the audible range of humans. That's that's called somification. It's a whole field by itself. And actually, it allows blind people to be astronomers. I find that I'm a very, for me, inclusion is very important. So in this way, we can reach people who can't see, but they can hear the stars. But we have to help them a little bit by shifting to the audible range. Yeah.

• 8:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have finally achieved the goals of the ancients by celebrating the music of the spheres.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. That's true.

• 8:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, man. Okay. So that so that question already got asked, Matt. So that was who asked that?

• 8:44Matt Kirshen?

  That was that was Lucas from New West who asked that question.

• 8:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And where is what is New West? What is that?

• 8:49Matt Kirshen?

  I I don't know. It just says New West. I'm not sure exactly. But Lucas also proceeds it by saying, I have a geek kind of question, which I don't think you need to proceed any questions to start off with.

• 8:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, this is a geek safe space here, everybody. You don't have to preface it, but New West, I mean, I live in New York and you know, there's

• 9:08Matt Kirshen?

  Formerly New Amsterdam.

• 9:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just south of New England. I've never heard of New West. I don't know what that is. Maybe that's California after it breaks away from the San Andreas Fault.

• 9:18Matt Kirshen?

  Just floating off, just floating off into the Pacific.

• 9:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So why don't we get some more questions here? This is great. Now that we have some foundation for what

• 9:26Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, we've got some awesome ones. Some of them have already, some of them we've already kind of answered, and I'm sure that'll happen as we go along, but I'll try and get as many ones in. So James Smith from Indianapolis says, what is the largest recorded quake not found here on Earth? And also, do all planets have plates that shift like Earth? A couple of people have asked that question as well, whether all other planets have plates.

• 9:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting. So let's start there first. You know, we know Earth is geologically active because there's like volcanoes and plate tectonics. So where else in the solar system might do that before we get back to the sun?

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Oh, well, you know, all planets will have quakes. I mean, any, any body in nature quakes. I was banging, I was about to bang the table here, but I will not do that. But the table would also have, you know, quakes. So they then bow quickly depending on whether you have a gaseous planet or a crust like planet like Earth. So Jupiter, Saturn, all the big gaseous planets in our solar system, they also have quakes.

• 10:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait a minute, Connie, you're saying every sound anywhere is a quake to you?

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's true. You do.

• 10:34Matt Kirshen?

  So a guitar is, what we're doing right now is kind of causing the tiniest of tiniest quakes by making sound.

• 10:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're quaking through Earth's atmosphere.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Of course, you're, you're creating sound waves. So.

• 10:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my God.

• 10:45Matt Kirshen?

  Listener Woody also asked, by the way, on this same topic, what, what different, would the ice giants experience quakes? I guess you've said the answer is yes. And what possible differences would there be between Earth, water, ice, frozen methane and nitrogen quakes?

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so the, the

• 10:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. That's a bit, wait, just a quick thing. So we've got ice in Uranus Neptune, the ice giants, and we've got sort of gases in Jupiter Saturn. We've got Earth's crust here. And so presumably

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've, Connie, you've got some portfolio of who makes what kind of sound under what conditions so that you can decode what you hear, is that correct?

• 11:28Speaker 02

  That's correct. And so the frequency of the sound waves of all these heavenly bodies is really determined by the density of the object, right? And so stars are gases and their density is very different from the density here on Earth.

• 11:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very low, yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Or in Jupiter, yeah? So by measuring the frequencies of the quakes, we know quite directly how big the object is and what its density is. And if you know these two, then you know the mass. So that's the basic tools, right?

• 12:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said that on the sun, you you measure the quakes because some parts of the sun get brighter relative to others because they're hotter. How do you do that with just a planet sitting out there in space?

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, we need to send some space mission there to come closer and to be able to see this. And so for stars, we also, I mean, this is a booming research field in astrophysics. Why? Because we recently had the luck of being able to measure the brightness variations with satellites. Yeah, we don't have a sasmo graph that we can put there, literally, like for the Earth, but we sent instruments that that measure these tiny variations in the gas, you know?

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I'm an old world astrophysicist. So when you say we make these measurements by going there, that's cheating.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  That's cheating, yeah, yeah. We can't go there.

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's tabletop science at that level.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you get to go there.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you're saying it's the same kind of features in a gaseous planet. Some parts will be a little warmer or cooler than others on the surface. And that'll tell you, that'll give you seismic information about what's going on inside.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, as soon as the density changes, for whatever reason, density changes give pressure waves and these are sound waves, right?

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 13:30Matt Kirshen?

  And so the follow up part from from James, what's the largest recorded quake not found on Earth?

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Oh, we have the slowest quake in a star. Like, it can take several, several months in period. Well, for the sun, it's five minutes, by the way. For those who don't know, the solar quakes go up and down, create sound wave with periods of about a few minutes, five minutes at their strongest. So for a very big blue supergiant star, it takes months before the quake went up and down.

• 14:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just to be clear, the normal frequencies we listen to are hundreds and thousands of cycles per second. And that's what our eardrum and brain will record. And you're saying these are cycles every five minutes?

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Yes, and that's even fast.

• 14:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or even every month. So that's why you have to shift it back to our audio range.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, we would never even know what was happening.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  That's right. These are slow waves to human standards.

• 14:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. You'd vaporize first. But while you were vaporized, you would not know you were in the middle of a starquake.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 14:41Matt Kirshen?

  That's wild for me. So incredibly slow, but presumably hugely energetic.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Yes, that's true. Yeah, so the energy of each wave can be quite tremendous. But that also depends on the type of waves that you're dealing with.

• 14:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Wow. All right, well, let's take a quick break. And we're to come back to more starquakes. Something was like, what?

• 15:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But to Connie, everything's a quake. So we'll get more into that in this episode of StarTalk Cosmic Queries when we return.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  I'm Joel Cherico, and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 15:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Cosmic Queries. We're talking about star quakes. And my co-host, Matt Kirshen. Matt, where can I find you on the internet?

• 16:00Matt Kirshen?

  Well, you can find my podcast, Probably Science. I start with the Neil episode. That's always a nice place to start.

• 16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was a guest once on your Probably Science. I just thought by now it would have been called Certainly Science. I just, I thought it was evolutionary, but apparently not.

• 16:16Matt Kirshen?

  The longer we do the show, the more probably it gets. It's gonna descend through possibly to, ah, science.

• 16:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To probably not.

• 16:26Matt Kirshen?

  And then I'm on Twitter, @mattkershen, and technically on Instagram, but I'm very rarely there.

• 16:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Kirshen, K-A-R-S-H-E-N. And we have as our in-house expert right now on star quakes, professor of astroseismology in the Netherlands. But right now, Connie Arz, I think I pronounced that right, is visiting New York City at a place called the Flatiron Institute, which is in the Flatiron section of Manhattan. And very cool science is happening there. All manner of science. It started with sort of math and astrophysics, but it's spilling into biology and computer science, where very deep problems

• 17:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that need high-performance computing and clever people to solve them are invited to then gather their talents and try to solve the secrets of the universe. And Connie Arz is on sabbatical this year. So Connie, we're delighted to have you as part of this podcast.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Very grateful to be here. Thank you.

• 17:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So we've got some more questions. But before we do that, I just want to be clear that most people's understanding of the word quake is, I think, built in is that it's abrupt and short-lived. That's kind of built into our life experience with a quake. And, but we're now hearing about quakes on completely different timescales. Should you have invented another word to describe a quake that? Moves on the scale of days or months rather than seconds or minutes?

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Sure, and I use the term star quakes for popular lectures, but actually in in our professional life, we we speak of stellar oscillations. So they're global oscillations, they're smooth, they're properly behaved. So for stars, it's a bit less abrupt than for earthquakes, let's say.

• 18:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay. So if on Earth they were Earth oscillations, then Matt, you maybe you wouldn't have to hide under a desk or in the the structural beams of the house.

• 18:43Matt Kirshen?

  I would just ride it out.

• 18:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just ride it out, surf it out.

• 18:46Matt Kirshen?

  Keep the knees perplexed, keep keep your course stable, that's all you need.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  But you would get seasick all the time, you know, because they would always be there, you know.

• 18:55Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, lies on the horizon, that's the secret, always look out the window, don't try and look at a fixed object inside.

• 19:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Take me surfing one day out in Los Angeles and teach me.

• 19:04Matt Kirshen?

  Oh, I I'm a terrible surfer, but.

• 19:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Matt, what do we else do we have for Connie?

• 19:08Matt Kirshen?

  We've got some great questions. By the way, I just side note, I I love when we have topics like this, when it's something that is close to Neil's wheelhouse, but just outside it, when it's when it's like in your field of astrophysics, but something that you've never really encountered, they're my favorite episodes, because.

• 19:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you like looking how much of an idiot I am, that's what you're saying.

• 19:24Matt Kirshen?

  I love it when you, yeah, when you're just just at the edge of Neil's knowledge, it's my favorite, it's it's it's the best.

• 19:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I those are my favorite episodes where I learn stuff, so.

• 19:34Matt Kirshen?

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 19:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is good.

• 19:37Matt Kirshen?

  So I'm going to combine these two questions, I like to do this, because because.

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to hear their names anyway.

• 19:42Matt Kirshen?

  Absolutely, Dylan and from NAU in Flagstaff and Alejandro Reynoso from Monterey have both asked about what we can actually learn from the oscillation of stars. Dylan says, can we predict its age and or understand the core? And also, do all stars oscillate or just dying stars, supermassive stars, main sequence stars? And then Alejandro says, what have you learned from analyzing star quakes that you couldn't learn with other methods? So basically, they're both asking, what specifically is it that we can learn from these quakes?

• 20:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to tighten that question and say, what are you learning that we didn't otherwise?

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Figure out through other means.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Okay, if there's one word that I have to ask to that question, it is rotation of stars. That's more than one word, but internal rotation of stars, you know, and why is that? Let me give the analogy with music again. So we have sound waves that are happening inside a star, but the the gas in the star is rotating around. Right? And what do you get when you put a musician in a theater play? And you make the podium rotate just for the fun of it as a surprise to the musician?

• 20:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get pissed off musicians, that's what you get.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Exactly, I like that experiment, actually, you can really do that. But the symphony is destroyed, that's what the audience would say. Now, for me, as an astrophysicologist, the frequencies of the waves get shifted, right?

• 21:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Doppler shift.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, they get shifted because of the extra motion you to the rotation. And we can measure that. And we're not measuring that at the surface of the star, but in the inside the star where the the starquake has its strongest energy. Right? And so what we have come to realize is that the theory of how stars evolve, relying on how they rotate in their interior, it is quite off. It's it's not very good. And that's not surprising, right? Because we could only measure before we had starquakes, we could only measure the rotation of the star at its external layer. Like for the sun, you see the you see the tiny little dark spots of the sun rotating around if you're patient.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  Every twenty six days, you see them back in your line of sight. But so the sun rotates with a period of about twenty six days. But that's just the outer layers. It doesn't say at all how it rotates in its interior. So if you have no information, what can you do? Well, you think, well, it won't be that different.

• 22:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just assume it's the same, right?

• 22:16Speaker 02

  You assume it's the same.

• 22:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everything else rotates as an as a kind of a unified object. Why would I even think some lower level would rotate at a different rate?

• 22:26Speaker 02

  Well, the stars have many more surprises than us.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Astrophysicists have imagination.

• 22:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What a smack, oh, Matt, did you hear, Matt? Did I just hear this woman correctly here?

• 22:41Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, I stand by it, I'm I'm on team star on this one.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  And.

• 22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a smackdown right there, okay?

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Yes, I always say the stars are right, the theory is wrong if they, if it doesn't match with each other, right?

• 22:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  Thanks to the frequency shifts of these waves, we can now measure how stars rotate around. And why is that important? Well, if they rotate faster or slower, then their material gets mixed in a different way. Yeah, uh, that's also something you can imagine if you take the analogy with coffee drinkers, you know? If you, if you like coffee with milk, you pour milk into your coffee and you don't wait until, you know, until everything is mixed because then the coffee is cold and it doesn't taste well anymore. No, you take a spoon and you rotate your coffee. In my terminology, that is saying you bring angular momentum to the coffee cup. And what, why do you do that?

• 23:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what everyone says when they're having coffee at Starbucks.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  That's what everybody does without saying it. And that's because everybody prefers well-mixed coffee with milk.

• 23:48Matt Kirshen?

  I'm, I'm assuming at the Flatiron Institute that it, that just the coffee station there has angular momentum implements.

• 23:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How much angular momentum would you like on your coffee this morning?

• 23:59Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, just. Do you want, do you want a metal angular momentum implement or one of the wooden straight ones?

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, we could do an, an experiment of how people do that, huh? But, you know, the diversity of human beings, uh, taking their spoons will be, uh, large. And in stars, there's a whole range of internal rotation frequencies that we have measured. In, we have about 2,000 stars now for which this has been measured by many groups in the world with astrosatmosologists. And so the life of the stars is really going, uh, slower if I look at the measurements.

• 24:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean our estimates for their life expectancy need to be updated to have them live longer than we originally thought? Is that what you're saying?

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, particularly for the big massive stars.

• 24:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that because they're mixing more material into their core? Giving them a little more lease on life?

• 24:54Speaker 02

  And they they get more material into their inner part and in the inner part of a star is actually a a nuclear reactor for me, because the the the simplest constituent, which is hydrogen, is turned into helium by nuclear fusion. And stars are masterpieces in that. But if you bring more hydrogen into that area where it's hot and dense enough, then the star can live longer. And so the rotation affects how much nuclear fuel you bring inside its its interior, actually.

• 25:28Matt Kirshen?

  That was about to be the opposite of what I would have guessed because I I was wondering whether the sort of the stirring effect would have sped up the fusion reaction by kind of, you know, you can increase the speed of a chemical reaction. I know that's different from a nuclear reaction by by stirring the chemicals together or by increasing the energy in there. But you're saying it's the opposite because it's bringing more fuel in from the outside.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so once the nuclear burning is ongoing, the nuclear fusion in stars is stable. The stars are are can do that very well. We humans can't do that here.

• 26:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, everything I know about the nuclear furnace says that it's pretty small relative to the size of the star itself. Do your waves give you enough information about tiny areas like a like the nuclear core?

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, tiny, it's 10% of the mass that they typically takes part in the nuclear fusion. So it's still 10%.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of the mass, even if it's physically small, it's got it's got a lot of mass going on.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, because the density is very high. And so if you if you change that 10% to, say, 12%. That sounds like, you know, it's only 2%, you know, but that's a lot of fuel, eh?

• 26:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  That you bring into your nuclear reactor and so then...

• 26:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and increase the life by at least 20%, perhaps, or you think maybe?

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it can really change the lifetime of the star, so that's, that's, uh, so...

• 26:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Matt, if you were in the center of a star, you'd be dense too. I just wanted to tell you that.

• 26:51Matt Kirshen?

  Oh, thanks.

• 26:54Matt Kirshen?

  It's one of the nicest things anyone's ever said to me.

• 26:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got more questions, Matt, bring them on.

• 26:59Matt Kirshen?

  We do. Aziz from Saudi Arabia says, "I wonder if it's possible for a star to have a starquake so strong caused by, for example, nuclear fission or fusion happening or abnormally fast, or caused by any other reason to lose mass?" I thought I'd ask that one because we're already talking about fusion.

• 27:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, in the formation of stars in the galaxy, you can get shock waves across a gas cloud that's otherwise minding its own business, and it can trigger gravitational collapse and other interesting features. So I'd love that question, Connie. So are starquakes just the product of what's going on? Or are they a participant in causing what's going on?

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you can have all sorts of reasons why stars have these oscillations, right? And they can indeed be caused by the, by the fierce turbulence in the, in the core of a very massive star. Because it's, you know, it's, we call that convection, turbulent motions, and they create waves also. Because again, they, they make the gas, you know, compress and expand. But there are also other reasons why stars can have starquakes. Think of the Earth-Moon system and tides. Well, half of the stars, or even more if you go to higher masses, they live together with two. And then they have tidal forces.

• 28:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Binary star system, just like in that scene in Star Wars, where Luke comes out, is it the, the sand planet, and he sees a double sunset? That's the only accurate science in the entire series.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  That's, that's okay, that's okay, you know, yeah.

• 28:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what happens there? So you have a gravitational tidal dance?

• 28:38Speaker 02

  And they, that's right, they, they rotate around each other and they pull, they give a tidal pull, right? And so you could also say that, you know, for me, tidal forces are actually forced oscillation. You know, I, I say everybody oscillates. In nature, so um when the stars are close enough together, the tidal oscillations, as I call them, uh are very strong, can be very strong. So that's another reason why stars can have uh.

• 29:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these are like a tidal bulge.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 29:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the direction of the of the object responsible for it.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, see, in my older years, I I have a tidal bulge as well. In my section. I'm I'm watching for that, just to see what I can do about it.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, you wanna prevent it, but we like it when it started.

• 29:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Matt, give me some more.

• 29:31Matt Kirshen?

  Quentin from Switzerland says, and I don't know what I don't know what Quentin's referring to. So hopefully, one of you two can fill me in. Says, do you need more data to exactly figure out what happened with Betelgeuse recently? Is it pronounced Betelgeuse?

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Betelgeuse, yes.

• 29:45Matt Kirshen?

  It is pronounced Betelgeuse, like the film, but spelled differently. It seems pretty unlikely that we will witness a similar event in the near future. So what is it? What did happen?

• 29:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I I gotta lead off with this, and then we'll get the actual answer from Connie.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 29:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I heard, but Betelgeuse is one of the brightest stars in the night sky. It's a important star in one of the most dominant constellations of all eighty eight. Dominant in size and and appearance is Orion. Orion is visible in both the northern and southern hemispheres because it straddles the equator on the sky. And so there's this star, Betelgeuse, one of the biggest, baddest red giants in the known universe. And someone told me, do you realize Betelgeuse is getting dimmer? I said, no. What, what, what? And I looked up and I went, huh. It was because my whole life, Betelgeuse was a certain brightness relative to other stars in the constellation.

• 30:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I cannot communicate to you my loss of breath in the moment I looked up and I say, what is happening? Is this, you know, is this? Is the seventh seal broken? Is there some, is this something biblical? So, Conny, I want you to know.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I, I, I nearly freaked out.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 31:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what happened to Betelgeuse a year ago? When it just got mysteriously dim? Like, it was, it went to less than half its normal brightness? And that had never been observed, ever? In any time anybody's been looking at the star? So, we're gonna blame you for this, Conny. What, what happened?

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Well, Betelgeuse is behaving normally at the star. It's, you know, it's a supergiant, right? It's a very big star. And so these stars are nearing the end of their life. And so they're, they're puffing up their material and they're blowing it away, so to speak. Right? And so when material gets lost from the star, well, then for us, it, the star is obscured because it's in between the supergiant and us. There's material that is being expelled. Now, for me, as an astrosatmosologist, that's a bit annoying, that behavior. Because Betelgeuse has star quakes, but all that material that's being expelled makes it hard to still measure them.

• 32:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's blocking your view.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  It's blocking the view. And that's also the reason why, for us, it's difficult to do astrosatmosology from ground-based telescopes. You know, the stars are up there, they, people say they twinkle, right? But that twinkling that you see with your eyes, that's not the star. That's actually the starlight that is being perturbed by the earth atmosphere. Right? And so it's a bit similar, but then, then the twinkling of Betelgeuse is caused by the material it has expelled. But it does have also oscillations. And these oscillations can tell us how old it is and how big it is, et cetera.

• 32:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, is Betelgeuse ready to blow? Because we think that's a supernova category star. Is it?

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That people, I, I said, oh my gosh, that something, something bad is gonna happen.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  It's gonna happen. It's, it's not bad. No, it's not bad. Because it will explode eventually, but that can take still some while, so. You know, you don't wanna go and look every day because you may need to have some patience like.

• 33:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Connie, we're trained to think that if something blows up, it's bad. Okay, I'm sorry.

• 33:09Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, but these guys are like, it's exciting. This is more data. This is.

• 33:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's more data. Okay, all right. This is like the, the, this is like the rocket launchers who, the rocket blows up on the launch pad. You say, oh, are you upset by that failure? No, that was an experiment rich in data.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Well, but I'm saying it's good because it enriches the galaxy with metals, with carbon, with oxygen, with iron, and, you know, we need that as human beings. So.

• 33:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, just, just to be clear, Matt, astrophysicists are, uh, we are very lazy with regard to the periodic table of elements. And so any element that's not hydrogen or helium, we call it a metal. But this freaks out chemists. We're self-aware of this bad vernacular. But the point is ninety-eight percent of the universe is hydrogen and helium. And so, and the rest is just other stuff. So we just, we just.

• 34:10Matt Kirshen?

  Experimental error. It's just.

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So we just call them metals. And I'm, I'm just covering Connie's ass right here.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When she said the, the metals such as carbon. Right. No, she's being fully astrophysical in, in, uh, in, in the referencing. So, but, but Connie, you speak of this, um, this, this blockage of ejected gas, like, of course it would do that. Yet it hasn't done it in the thousands of years we've been observing the night sky and mapping its brightness relative to other stars. So do you have an account for why it's doing it now and it's not doing it regularly?

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Oh, but you see, we astrophysicists have to be very patient because the time scales, when, for stars to do this kind of stuff, you know, that's like hundreds of thousands of years, you know, and.

• 35:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you're saying if we see it only once in a few thousand years, that could be a regular interval?

• 35:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. All right. She got out of that one, Matt, I think.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  It's just annoying that we, human beings, only live for like 100 years.

• 35:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At most, yeah.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  If we are lucky.

• 35:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we're very lucky.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  In an astronomical time scale, that's instantaneous.

• 35:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Instantaneous.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we gotta take our last break, and when we come back, more astroseismology with a professor of astroseismology, Connie Arts, on StarTalk Cosmic Queries.

• 35:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back for the third and final segment of StarTalk Cosmic Queries, the Astroseismology Edition, with our expert, a professor of astroseismology, Connie Arts, and she's on sabbatical now at the Flatiron Institute in New York City, which has gathered all manner of computational scientists in multiple fields, where they not only compare notes with each other in their own field, but across disciplines, perhaps there's some cross-pollination that can lead to discoveries that wouldn't otherwise happen. And Connie, you are based in the Netherlands and in Belgium. You have two different appointments.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, of course, there's strong overlap in what they are, but this is very cool that we have you here. We're borrowing you from Europe, and great to have you here in my hometown, New York City. So Matt, we have a few minutes for a few more questions. Let's see how many more we can slip in. And these questions are from our Patreon members, still, correct?

• 36:53Matt Kirshen?

  They are, yeah. So Kevin the Sommelier asks, "Does astroseismology coincide with the data we can get from the James Webb Space Telescope? Are we able to see those quakes in infrared?"

• 37:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, I like that.

• 37:07Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, and also then gives a wine recommendation.

• 37:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, because I told him I would not allow him to ask another question. If he's going to bill himself as a sommelier, there's gotta be a recommendation.

• 37:18Matt Kirshen?

  So he recommends specifically for our Belgian guest, says, "With Moulfreet, Kevin recommends a bottle of Muscadet Surly La Grange." So there we go. Thank you, Kevin, for that.

• 37:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that sounds like a dessert wine, all right. Let the world know. We've got the recommendation. So I love that question, Connie. I didn't even think to think about this because I'm I love stellar evolution, but I'm primarily a galaxies guy and a large scale structure guy, which which the James Webb telescope is exquisitely tuned to observe the early universe. And it would never occur to me to imagine if it could be of use to you in thinking about star quakes. So what how does how is your field put your sort of hooks into the data of that telescope?

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Well, the James Webb is fantastic, but I would not spend its time on star quakes. And so let me explain why, you know, James Webb can pierce very deep into the early universe in the infrared. What I need as a seismologist is really long term measurements. And that's why we love the Kepler mission of NASA and now the test mission and the future Plato mission, because they're staring at stars for years without interruption. And so you don't want to spend James Webb on that because it has, as you say, so much other fantastic extragalactic science to do. So I

• 38:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  don't want to hook on James Webb, right?

• 38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, at all times in in our field, Matt, we're always judging whether you need one particular telescope for that task versus another telescope that might be either more available or less a cutting edge, because you want the cutting edge telescope for the cutting edge science that's going to break open whole new fields typically. So, yeah, that's a very important point that you're mentioning there, Connie. And but I want to also ask, that's part of the great computational challenge, because if you have a lot of quakes of all different frequencies. Short measurements cannot distinguish one from the other, correct?

• 39:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need a very long baseline so that you can tease out of the data frequencies that are represented enough to know that they're real. Did I characterize that accurately?

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's very well described. And in practice, you know, the, the precision of the frequency goes as one over the total time base of the measurements. Yeah. So if Kepler measures four years, well, that's one over four years in, in, in frequency resolution, as we call it, capacity to unravel these, these starquake frequencies. So we, we, we need, we need to be very, astrophysicologists are very patient people.

• 40:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is if you, uh, so I like that. So if you measure something for four years, you can't really say much about frequencies that occur on two-year time scales.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 40:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You would have only had one or two cycles in there.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's not enough to even know if they're real.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 40:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you need enough cycles in your baseline of data to be able to say, yeah, that's real. Yes, it's repeating and it's reliable.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. And so that's why we need these long time series and we can only do the work once we achieve that. So we need dedicated space missions to achieve that. And James Webb is just not one of them.

• 40:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got it.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Again.

• 40:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Please, uh, leave James Webb to the people who need it. And I'm not one of them, all right?

• 41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's very magnanimous of you, yes. So, so just to up, update people. So Kepler was a telescope that looked in one part of the sky, looking for, um, for Earth-like planets around sun-like stars, studying them for a long period of time. TESS, what's that? That's an acronym for what? I forgot. Transiting?

• 41:24Speaker 02

  Exoplanet.

• 41:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exoplanet Survey.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  Satellite.

• 41:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Satellite, thank you.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So TESS will see the entire sky, but not quite to the depth in space that Kepler did. And so now, what is Plato gonna do? And is that also an acronym?

• 41:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, Plato stands for planetary transits and oscillations of stars. And Plato is actually gonna, from construction, combines the best of both worlds of the Kepler mission and the TESS mission, in the sense that we need long-term observations, but we also need the whole, not the whole sky, but a very, very big part of it, to have copies of the Earth in our line of sight that rotate around copies of the Sun. It takes a year for us to revolve. And so Plato has that building. It's actually, it's 24 telescopes on one big platform.

• 42:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh. Okay, I didn't know that about it.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's a multi-telescope instrument that is being built by the European Space Agency right now. I tend to call it my third child, because I've been...

• 42:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're deep involved in the design and objectives of it. Congratulations for that.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's exciting. I wanna see the data before I retire, yeah.

• 42:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kepler was a famous German mathematician who coincided with Galileo, actually, in time, and we all heard of Plato, but I don't know any TESS. So TESS is an acronym, but not an acronym of a famous scientist of the past.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly, yeah.

• 42:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they don't always work out, the way you need to...

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, just as long as the machinery works for us, TESS.

• 43:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't care what the hell you call it?

• 43:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so Matt, keep it going. What do you have?

• 43:09Matt Kirshen?

  I am gonna, to try and get through as many of these questions as possible, I am gonna try and combine four different...

• 43:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's test Connie and see if she can do a lightning round.

• 43:16Matt Kirshen?

  Here we are, we're combining four questions. They said it couldn't be done, but four different questioners between, because a lot of people have asked about the effect of sunspots on star quakes and how they affect Earth. So Charles Maco asks how they affect star quakes. Trevor Mills says, how close would a nearby star have to be for a star quake to be considered dangerous for Earth? And then Sarah Rosen says, how big of a CME would it take for the Sun's gravity to be negatively affected? And Gina Martin says, why didn't the one... The starquake back in 2004 wiped us out. I've read that it released more energy than our own sun would admit in 150,000 years.

• 43:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so let me tighten all those up. So Connie, clearly there are quakes going on all the time. And I presume that a CME, a coronal mass ejection, is itself detectable as some kind of quake activity. So, and of course, sunspots are measures of the activity of the sun. So, but you haven't mentioned solar flares or coronal mass ejections or sunspots yet. Not much in this conversation. So what role do they play in all of this?

• 44:25Speaker 02

  Oh, well, the role they play is they disturb the periodic oscillations of the sun. But it's not bad for us. Why not? Because a coronal mass ejection or star spots that rotate around, you know, they do not give the same signal in the periodicity of the quakes. I'm quaking my microphone right now. So, you know, a coronal mass ejection is an abrupt event. It's more like an earthquake, you could say. It happens and it disappears, right? But it doesn't disturb us finding the five-minute oscillations of the sun, which are always there.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, they get disturbed abruptly, but then they continue and they continue and they continue all the time. So for us, you know, we can unravel the signal of star spots of mass ejections, even for stars other than the sun, from the always smooth periodic oscillation.

• 45:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how about the dangers that they might pose if you do have a coronal mass ejection that happens to head towards us?

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the earth is protected by a magnetic field that protects us from all these high energetic particles falling in on our planet. And other stars are too far away. So, I mean, it's only a matter of the solar quakes. They are not dangerous for us. The coronal mass ejections, they disturb our electronics every once in a while, right? But, you know, that's not a periodic oscillation that I would call solar quakes.

• 46:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I forgot that you enjoy events like that, even if they mess with our computers.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  That's how we, that's how we started.

• 46:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I forgot that. I learned that earlier in this podcast.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's true.

• 46:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that almost counts as a lightning round, Mac, because she answered three questions in one reply.

• 46:21Matt Kirshen?

  Yes, she did.

• 46:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's see if we can get a few more in before we call it a day here.

• 46:26Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, James Allen from Brisbane in Australia says, "Could a starquake large enough theoretically cause a star to tear apart? And would descend a high radiation blast like a supernova? What could we learn such things from our own star?"

• 46:39Speaker 02

  A starquake would not rip apart a star because it's really a smooth, nice periodic variability. You know, the biggest starquakes in terms of expansion and contraction, let's say, can make the star become bigger and smaller by about 10% in its radius, let's say. But not make it explode. That's another phenomenon.

• 47:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Again, that's people thinking that a quake is a spontaneous bad thing.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  No, it's a fantastic smooth thing.

• 47:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's fantastic smooth thing.

• 47:11Matt Kirshen?

  Well, on that same note, Connor Home from Squim, Washington, says, "Is it possible to predict where and when a starquake will occur? And if so, what's the largest predicted starquake? And how much bigger is it compared to the largest recorded one?"

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Well, starquakes happen all the time. I keep repeating that, so...

• 47:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me ask you differently then. What variety of your oscillations carries the most energy?

• 47:34Speaker 02

  Well, the simplest starquakes are radial oscillations, you know? Up and down and up and down. So everything is...

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Expanding and contracting while keeping spherical symmetry. So that's about the, you know, the largest energetic it can get. And that's for me, just a simple oscillation because it's.

• 48:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's what gives us variable stars, I guess, right?

• 48:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Cephalies, Oortoli, Ray.

• 48:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, it's half a star. I mean, some huge fraction of stars in the night sky are variable, presumably for this reason. And I heard when I was in graduate school, Connie, that if you looked at every star close enough with sharp enough data, they're all variable.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Of course they are. Everything oscillates, of course.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we just have to draw some arbitrary line of what we categor- what we catalog as a variable star relative to other stars. But really, to you, everybody's got action.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  Well, we're measuring the action up to parts per million.

• 48:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there it is.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  Right?

• 48:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got it.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  Parts per million.

• 48:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got it. All right. Matt, let's get one more- slip one more in before we got to call.

• 48:51Matt Kirshen?

  All right. Margaret Defoe from Milwaukee says, why didn't our solar system go binary? And what is the smallest and largest a star can get? So we're on more general questions about stars, I think.

• 49:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, let's do it. Hold aside the largest and smallest. That's a whole other astrophysics question. But Connie, what do you say about why the sun is alone when so many stars in the night sky are binary in multiple systems?

• 49:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, if you look at the star with the mass of the sun, then half of them are in binary. So that means that half of them are alone. So it's a toss. It's an equal toss, right? Yeah, so that's not so exceptional. But if you, if you go to stars.

• 49:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not the answer we were looking for. We wanted you to say, we might have had a double and then it blew up. We want a more sci-fi answer.

• 49:38Matt Kirshen?

  We lost, it was originally a twin. We lost one of them. It ate the other one in the womb.

• 49:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It ate the other one.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  I don't think so. I don't think so. But that happens frequently when you go to higher masses, huh? If your star is born with 10 to 100 times more mass than the sun was born with, well, then about 80% of the stars are multiple, double stars. Yeah, so for the sun, I think it's just a logical consequence of there only being half of them that live their life together, right?

• 50:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  Luckily for us, it wouldn't have been so nice here if it would have had been living next to a star that has exploded already.

• 50:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, it has issues, but that's definitely a yet to be written sci-fi drama, I think, sci-fi action film. Whatever happened to the sun's twin? You got it. Well, Connie, it's been a delight to have you on StarTalk. And like I said, my city, my town is your town, so I'm a native of New York City. You're visiting for the sabbatical. Maybe we can get you up to the museum and give you a tour and possibly extract, extort a seminar from you for our National Physics Group.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I love this city, so I'm very grateful that you're hosting me.

• 50:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. Matt, always good to have you, man.

• 50:58Matt Kirshen?

  It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me, and this has been great. I've loved hearing about this stuff.

• 51:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got to land this plane. So thanks for joining us on this episode of StarTalk Cosmic Queries: Starquakes. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.