Pod Insights Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe What's the densest thing in the Universe that's not a black hole? About this episode Daniel and Kelly dive into the hearts of blue giants, massive planets, and neutron stars to reveal a surprising limit on cosmic density.
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Transcript 9,935 words · 18 speakers
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0:00 Daniel Whiteson? This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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1:44 Daniel Whiteson? Gravity is a monster. Not the kind of monster that jumps out and slashes you. It's the kind that shuffles slowly, never racing but always getting closer. It's patient, happy to wait billions of years until everyone else has had their turn. But it never, ever, ever gives up.
2:04 Daniel Whiteson? It's always there, ready to tear you to shreds or crush you into a speck. And in the end, it's gravity that dominates our cosmic destiny. We rely on quantum forces like the structural integrity of the earth, or the radiation pressure from fusion that keeps the sun from collapsing. They keep gravity at bay for now. But inevitably, they will fail us, and gravity will overcome each of our defenses, making white dwarves and neutron stars, and eventually victorious in creating black holes, gravity's ultimate trophies. But where exactly is the quantum limit? How close can one get to the black hole threshold without collapsing? What is the last line of quantum defense against the plodding, unavoidable onslaught
2:49 Daniel Whiteson? of the gravitational monster? We'll dig into all of that on today's episode. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinarily crushing universe.
3:12 Kelly Weinersmith? Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I study parasites and space, and today we're going to learn that physicists love noodles.
3:29 Kelly Weinersmith? Where do you go from there, Daniel?
3:32 Daniel Whiteson? I got nothing.
3:37 Daniel Whiteson? Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I do worship at the arm of his noodley appendage.
3:42 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, man, that is a throwback. I feel like the pasta farians were a big deal when I was an undergrad and master's student.
3:51 Daniel Whiteson? Ramen, brother, ramen.
3:52 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, my gosh, I never heard that. Okay. All right, so let's go way back. So I'm wondering what, uh, what young physicist Daniel was like. What is the first science project you did? And I'm thinking like, science fair is when you were a kid.
4:09 Daniel Whiteson? Ooh, that's a great question. And I think it's kind of revealing, but not very romantic, actually. Um, young physicist Daniel had no idea what physics was actually like and was doing it because number one, I seemed to be good at it. And number two, people told me it was hard. And I was like, I don't really understand how the world works. And I'm kind of confused and socially awkward, but this is something I'm good at that people seem to like. So I'll just do that for a while. And honestly, my sincere interest in physics wasn't really kindled until pretty late in undergrad, when I found particle physics. And I realized, oh, my gosh, physics can actually be fun. Research can be something that like touches a passion deep inside you. I was going through the motions for a long,
4:51 Daniel Whiteson? long time, including my first ever science project, which was an experiment to measure how much light mirrors absorb. So we took a little laser beam and we bounced it back and forth between some mirrors. Then we had a sensor at the end and it measured the intensity of the light after a bunch of bounces and before and did it as a function of the number of bounces. And so from that you can extract the fraction of the light that's absorbed by every bounce in the mirror.
5:18 Kelly Weinersmith? Whoa, cool. What year was that?
5:20 Daniel Whiteson? It was pretty cool. I think I was in middle school and, you know, didn't take any fancy math or any fancy equipment. But I remember the judge being like, did your dad do this experiment?
5:31 Kelly Weinersmith? Aww.
5:31 Daniel Whiteson? I was like, what, which part do I need him for? Like the dividing, the counting? It's just like a pen, laser and a couple of mirrors. But I had a lot of fun. I thought it was really cool because I didn't realize until then that mirrors don't perfectly reflect. They do absorb some light.
5:47 Kelly Weinersmith? So, so your hypothesis was that you were going to get the exact same value from the laser as you got after it bounced?
5:53 Daniel Whiteson? I was curious if it was measurable. I thought maybe I was going to get something where it was like 99.999999%. But it turns out to be mirrors are quite absorbent. I mean, you can't use them to like wipe up your kitchen or anything, but they do, they do drink some light. Uh, how about you, Kelly? What was your first ever piece of science data?
6:09 Kelly Weinersmith? Yeah. So, uh, I- Kelly did not look like a promising scientist in sixth grade for the first science fair. I put the project off until the last second and it was like a couple days beforehand and I was into like conservation and protecting the environment, but I didn't really know how to do science. And so I pretty much like took a tiny little fishbowl and I stole some motor oil from the garage and I like dumped it in and I was like, that doesn't look good. Oil spills are bad.
6:46 Daniel Whiteson? What was the hypothesis? Is oil icky? Answer, yes.
6:50 Kelly Weinersmith? Uh, yeah, I don't actually think I had a hypothesis. I was just like, gross. That's not good. And I remember getting a pretty, uh, negative review from my teacher, who was, you know, who probably pointed out that there was no hypothesis being tested here. Kelly just dumped some oil and water and brought that to school. And, uh, so, so anyway, I, uh, I appeared pretty dense as a sixth grader and today we're going to be talking about dense things.
7:16 Daniel Whiteson? Ooh, wow. What a crushing transition. Nice job.
7:20 Kelly Weinersmith? Thank you. Thank you. I planned ahead.
7:24 Daniel Whiteson? Well, the crushing power of gravity is fascinating and one of the enduring mysteries of physics. How does it work? How do we interface it with quantum mechanics? Is Einstein's theory real? Or is it just some weird emergent approximation of something else that's happening deep down? And the best way to get the answers to those questions are the places where gravity and quantum mechanics connect, where gravity is so extreme, it can actually overcome quantum forces. So that means thinking about black holes and how they form and how basically the whole universe inevitably is going to collapse into a black hole. And that means you and everything you love.
7:57 Kelly Weinersmith? Ah, existential dread, my old friend.
8:02 Kelly Weinersmith? That, that friend tends to visit more when Daniels are out.
8:07 Daniel Whiteson? But you know, it's existential dread with a light sprinkling of dad jokes and mom jokes.
8:11 Kelly Weinersmith? Yay, and knowledge.
8:15 Daniel Whiteson? And something that's always fascinated me about this question is that we can resist gravity sort of temporarily. We're like a weightlifter, holding some crushing weight above our heads, but our knees are shaking and our thighs are vibrating. And eventually, you know, you're gonna drop that weight. But you can for a while. What's really fascinating to me about holding off gravity is that we have this series of defenses, these places where chemistry and quantum mechanics pushes back. But I've always wondered, what is the last line of defense? What is the densest thing that can exist in our universe that hasn't quite yet given up the ghost to gravity?
8:50 Kelly Weinersmith? And when it gives up, it becomes a black hole, right?
8:53 Daniel Whiteson? Mm hmm.
8:53 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay, I've learned something.
8:54 Daniel Whiteson? That's surrender. Becoming a black hole is surrender.
8:57 Kelly Weinersmith? All right. Well, that is a fantastic question. I honestly don't know the answer, but let's see if our extraordinaries know the answer.
9:04 Daniel Whiteson? Thanks very much to everybody who participates. And if you would like to join this elite crew of speculators, please write to us through questions at danielandkelly.org. So think about it for a minute yourself. What do you think is the densest thing that can exist in the universe that's not a black hole?
9:20 Speaker 05 Outside of black holes, I always thought that neutron stars were the densest things in the universe. But I guess we could also say the core of a neutron star would be the densest thing. Of course, given your asking, it's probably neither of those.
9:34 Speaker 06 Densest thing that's not a black hole, that would be neutron star.
9:40 Speaker 07 It should be a neutron star. I know those are the densest objects in the universe, which are not black holes.
9:49 Speaker 08 It's either a neutron star, a movie by David Lynch, or this chocolate cake I'm about to eat.
9:57 Speaker 09 I like science, so I know a few things. And I can easily say confidently that the densest thing, not a black hole, would be a neutron star.
10:07 Speaker 10 Is the densest thing that's not a black hole, a neutron star? Like a sun that died and didn't become a black hole because it was too small, so it became a neutron star? Maybe a neutron star spinning like at 99.999% speed of light for some reason, just because it seems like it gives a little more get up and go?
10:25 Kelly Weinersmith? Well, Daniel, it sounds like the answer is neutron star. Shortest episode yet. Thanks for, thanks for playing, everyone.
10:34 Daniel Whiteson? And this is why science is not democratic. You just vote on stuff and move on. But it's cool that everybody's heard about neutron stars and they know that neutron stars are dense. But spoiler alert, neutron stars are not the theoretically most dense objects in the universe.
10:51 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay, wait, and so, so just to clarify, you said theoretically. So at the end of the day, we're going to be talking about what we think might be the most dense thing next to black holes. But we're not totally sure. Is that right?
11:02 Daniel Whiteson? Stick around for the end and you'll find out.
11:04 Kelly Weinersmith? Ooh, I'm here for it. Let's do this. Alright, so you, before we started going to the listener responses, you were talking about how, you know, like a person holding up a weight. And I guess I really, when I did CrossFit for a while, I really loved weightlifting. I totally miss it. But anyway, so like a person trying to hold up a heavy weight, they're, you know, shaking and quaking and, and, and they're pushing back against the weight before they collapse. What is the equivalent for a star? Why doesn't it just collapse?
11:33 Daniel Whiteson? I love that in this analogy, Kelly is all of quantum forces, holding back gravity. What's the heaviest thing you were ever able to lift, Kelly?
11:42 Kelly Weinersmith? I don't remember what my PR was, is that I think that stood for personal record. I just know that I really liked taking heavy stuff from the ground and then putting it over my head. I thought that was great.
11:53 Daniel Whiteson? Well, there is something very satisfying about that because you're overcoming gravity. And stars, when they collapse, they collapse due to gravity. But before we dig into that, let's just remind ourselves the basics of gravity and why black holes are inevitable. Gravity is one of the fundamental forces, but it's different from the other fundamental forces. It's not a quantum force. We don't have a quantum explanation for it. And it's also different because it's super duper weak. So if you compare these things equivalently, like look at the forces between two protons. Gravity is like 10 to the 30 times weaker than any of the other fundamental forces. And so you might think, well, gravity should be relevant, right? It's like, if you're balancing your checkbook and one expense is like 10 to the 30 times smaller than the others,
12:38 Daniel Whiteson? you can basically ignore it and still get the answer right to the penny, right? But the thing about gravity. Is that it's inevitable because it cannot be cancelled out. Gravity is only an attractive force. Masses only get pulled together. There is no repulsive gravity. I mean, there is expansion in the universe, which we don't quite understand entirely. But the force of gravity and over short distances can only attract things, which means that it can't be neutralized. For example, particles feel very strong electromagnetic forces, but then those are rapidly neutralized when they form neutral atoms. And hydrogen doesn't feel electromagnetic forces anymore. So bath clouds of hydrogen only feel gravity. Gravity is inevitable because it cannot be neutralized because it's only attractive.
13:22 Kelly Weinersmith? All right, so let's see if I've absorbed all of that. So you said that gravity is only attractive, but you also mentioned that the universe is expanding and we don't really know why. That does seem to be overcoming gravity. So does that mean as we understand it right now, gravity is only attractive? Or does the expansion of the universe just suggest that like, we understand gravity, but something different is happening that's overcoming gravity? Because it's such a wimp.
13:48 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, we don't really understand the expansion of the universe, especially its accelerating expansion. And that can overcome gravity, but only over very, very large distances, like between galactic superclusters where gravity gets weak because the distances are large. Over smaller distances, like the cluster of our galaxy, gravity overwhelms dark energy or the expansion of the universe and holds things together. That's why even though the universe is expanding, you're not flying apart or our solar system is not flying apart or our galaxy is not flying apart. So while it's inevitable for things to collapse into a black hole, it's not going to be one huge, single universe black hole. It's like every little neighborhood where gravity dominates is going to pull everything together into a black hole eventually.
14:29 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay, and then just to remind me where we are with gravity. We haven't found like gravity fields or anything. We don't really kind of understand what's happening with gravity, but we can very clearly measure it and we know that it's like a definite thing.
14:41 Daniel Whiteson? We have an excellent classical theory of gravity that ignores quantum mechanics, but makes perfect predictions everywhere we can test it. So it's an excellent theory, but we think it's probably wrong.
14:51 Kelly Weinersmith? All right, well, at least it's helpful. Okay.
14:54 Daniel Whiteson? But because gravity can't be canceled out the way like electromagnetism can, you can't make an object which is neutral in gravity. Eventually, even though it's weak, it's the only thing left on the playground. So like, that's why the structure of the solar system is mostly due to gravity. The structure of the galaxies is mostly due to gravity. It's the weakest force, but everything else gets canceled out because they're so powerful and because they have like positive and negative charges. Equivalently, gravity basically only has positive charges. And so things only attract. And so it's the only thing left over. It can't be neutralized, which is why gravity, though it's super weak, shapes the cosmos.
15:32 Kelly Weinersmith? That's interesting. I hadn't thought of gravity as being the like winning force because everything else canceled out. I thought of gravity as being the winning force because there's just so much mass.
15:42 Daniel Whiteson? Well, it's not hard to overcome gravity. Like you can overcome gravity with your legs, right? You hold up those enormous Kelly PR weights and the whole earth is pulling on them and you're overcoming them with your like admittedly impressive muscles. But you know, you're small compared to the earth, yet you're still able to overcome its gravity. And so that's an example of like quantum forces of your muscles, et cetera, resisting gravity. And you can do that temporarily, but you can't hold that weight up forever. And eventually, if you add enough mass, gravity can overcome any quantum force. It can pull stuff together and eventually collapse into a black hole. And that's sort of the destiny of everything in the universe. But we can hold it off temporarily, like our sun is not yet collapsing into a black hole.
16:25 Kelly Weinersmith? And what is the sun's equivalent of my massive bulging rippling muscles? What is, what is keeping things from collapsing?
16:34 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, it's an amazing story because the beginning of the life of a star is gravitational. You have these vast clouds of hydrogen and dust and grains from previous stars, et cetera. And a little bit of gravitational over density somewhere in that cold cloud has to be like 10 to 20 Kelvin will start a collapse. It will create a region of higher density, therefore higher gravity. It'll pull stuff which makes higher density, which means higher gravity. And you get this runaway effect where you get a huge accumulation. You start from very, very low density cloud. Into a very high density object, a protostar. And what stops the collapse is quantum mechanics is fusion. You get such a high density at the core of this star that the temperature goes up because of all the pressure from the outer layers.
17:18 Daniel Whiteson? And when you have high temperature and high pressure and you have protons, they start to fuse and that emits light. It releases energy and that energy comes out as photons. We call this radiation pressure. So fusion ignites when the star gets big enough to get hot enough. And that balances the star. So you have this initial rush in due to gravity. And then fusion stands up and says, hold on a second. I'm going to burn for a little bit here. And for millions or billions of years, the star is incredibly in balance. Where the radiation pressure sort of cancels out the force of gravity. And the star is able to hang out there and just like emit light for billions of years.
17:57 Kelly Weinersmith? And is it like amazing that they balance out? Or does it make sense that they balance out? Because the amount of fusion happening is like proportional to the extent that it's getting squeezed.
18:08 Daniel Whiteson? It's sort of amazing to me that it balances out and that it can balance for so long that the balance is stable for billions of years. I can imagine lots of other settings on the universe knobs where stars are very, very brief. Right? And in our universe, the length of star burns depends on its size. So for example, if you get a really, really big star, like early universe, we think we had collapses of matter like 200 times the mass of the sun. Well, the bigger the star, the more massive it is, the more gravitational pressure you have, the higher the temperature at the core. And fusion is very sensitive to temperature. So as the temperature goes up, the rate of fusion increases dramatically. So counterintuitively, a bigger star doesn't last longer because it has more fuel.
18:51 Daniel Whiteson? It lasts much shorter because it burns that fuel at a much higher temperature and it burns through it much more quickly. So super huge stars only last a few million years. Whereas tiny stars can last for like many, many billions of years. Longer than the age of the universe, we think.
19:07 Kelly Weinersmith? Wow.
19:07 Daniel Whiteson? Our star is slightly on the bigger end. We think its life cycle is going to be about 10 billion years. But red dwarfs can last for Much, much longer. Small cold stars just above that fusion threshold can be in balance for billions and billions and billions of years.
19:22 Kelly Weinersmith? Amazing.
19:23 Daniel Whiteson? It's incredible.
19:23 Kelly Weinersmith? We've had conversations where I've learned that mass is more complicated than I thought it was when you talk to a physicist. Does density require some similar unpacking? Or does density for a physicist pretty much mean what we sort of imagine it to mean?
19:37 Daniel Whiteson? You mean how we like sneakily redefine density to mean something else and not mention it and keep using the same word?
19:43 Kelly Weinersmith? That's right.
19:44 Daniel Whiteson? We would never do that, except we do it all the time.
19:46 Kelly Weinersmith? Yes, you would. Yes, you would.
19:49 Daniel Whiteson? Yes, and we're going to do that with the word pasta later on.
19:51 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, man.
19:52 Daniel Whiteson? Though density means the same thing. It's mass over volume. But again, counterintuitively, the densities of stars is sort of surprising. Like, the smaller stars, red dwarfs, are actually much denser than the bigger stars. So to calibrate, water is 1,000 kilograms per cubic meter. That's the density. That's its density. And the earth is like five times that. It's like 5,000 kilograms per cubic meter. A red dwarf is like 50 to 200 times that density.
20:21 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, wow.
20:21 Daniel Whiteson? It's much, much denser than the earth or water at the core. And you might expect that it's the opposite, right? That smaller stars are less dense because they're not as hot and there's not as much pressure at the core. But the bigger stars that burn hotter, they're creating a lot more radiation pressure, so they puff the star out. So the sun, for example, has a density of like 1,000 to 2,000 kilograms per cubic meter. That's like about the density of water.
20:46 Kelly Weinersmith? I could float on the sun. I mean, I'd die, but I could float a little.
20:51 Daniel Whiteson? We are not doctors. We do not recommend that you take a swan dive into the sun. But in principle, yes, it isn't the density that would kill you.
20:59 Kelly Weinersmith? That's right. Something else would.
21:01 Daniel Whiteson? But it's weird to think about the density of the sun being density of water. But as you go to bigger stars, hotter stars like blue giants, they have a density less than water, like 200 to 500 kilograms per cubic meters. That's like the density of our atmosphere.
21:17 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay, so bigger stars are less dense.
21:22 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah.
21:23 Kelly Weinersmith? Is that because if a big star was more dense, it would squish down? Yeah, why couldn't you have? I think I'm still not quite following why you couldn't have a really big dense star. What absolutely prohibits that from happening?
21:37 Daniel Whiteson? If you have a really big dense star, then it's going to have an incredibly high temperature and fusion is going to be super intense and it's going to blow that star out.
21:46 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay.
21:46 Daniel Whiteson? And so gravitationally, nothing prevents you from having a big dense star. But the quantum mechanics of that star are going to push back. And that's what happens. You can't have a star that's stable, that's that big and that dense.
21:59 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay, got it. Totally makes sense. It's stuck in my head now, for now.
22:02 Daniel Whiteson? So that's about as dense as we can get with actively burning stars because of the fusion, right? Here's quantum mechanics pushing back on gravity, but that requires having fusion at the core. And sometimes you get objects of form that can't fuse. And so you might wonder, hmm, could they be even denser than stars?
22:19 Kelly Weinersmith? And that question would keep me up at night, but fortunately you are going to have an answer after the break.
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24:53 Kelly Weinersmith? All right, Daniel. So fusion is the rippling muscles of the universe pushing back against gravity. But what happens when you don't have fusion?
25:04 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, we talked about the collapse of stars. And you have these huge molecular clouds that collapse. But you get lots of different collapses, right? You get a cloud doesn't collapse just into one star, has lots of different stars of different masses. And sometimes you get stars whose mass is too small to raise the internal temperature to the level of fusion, right? So like below a red dwarf is something we call a brown dwarf, something that has less than 80 times the mass of Jupiter, doesn't reach the internal temperature to begin fusion. And this is also true of like Jupiter itself or Earth, right? Earth is a big blob of stuff. It's hot at the core. It's not hot enough to fuse. And that's why planets can get denser than stars.
25:47 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, and so does that have a bit to do with what the insides are made of? And like whether it's good fusion material or not? Or is it all just about like how crushed it gets and how hot that makes things?
26:00 Daniel Whiteson? All of those things. What comes into play is what it's made out of and also its structural integrity, right? So we don't have fusion to protect the planet from collapsing into a black hole. But the earth is not collapsing into a black hole right now, as far as we know. Why is that, right? Well, what's saving the earth is chemistry, actually. So thank you to chemistry.
26:20 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, man, it's a dark day for you and me.
26:24 Daniel Whiteson? I mean, we don't have to understand it, but we can be grateful for it. But, you know, all of those atoms in the inside of the earth are resisting being collapsed by gravity. They have these forces between them, the van der Waals forces and the electric repulsion, and they form bonds. And those things are still more powerful than gravity. But, yeah, the density of the planets depends on what they're made out of. And again, the density is sort of counterintuitive. You'd be hard pressed to guess, for example. Kelly, what do you think is the densest planet in the solar system?
26:51 Kelly Weinersmith? Jupiter.
26:55 Daniel Whiteson? You sound so confident.
26:58 Kelly Weinersmith? Well, yeah, well, you know, you just told me that the big suns are the least dense. And so now I'm wondering if something similar is happening with the planets, but I think probably not. So I'm gonna say Jupiter.
27:08 Daniel Whiteson? Wow, you double counterintuitive yourself.
27:10 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, man, wait, so Venus, Venus is like, has a lot of lead? Maybe it's Venus.
27:16 Daniel Whiteson? Well, both directions are actually wrong. You might think, I'm gonna go for the biggest mass, like Jupiter. But Jupiter has created a huge amount of gas, right? It's a massive planet because it gobbled a lot of gas. And in the early formation of the solar system, it's out beyond the snow line. And so it can accumulate not just rock and metal, but also ice. And so we don't have a perfect theory for how these giant planets form. But one of the leading theories is that they start from like a gravitational over density, like a mini version of a solar collapse. And then they grab the rest of the gas in the outer solar system. But because there's a lot of hydrogen there, it's not actually that dense. So then you'd think, well, what about in the inner solar system? Inner solar system. All the water is vaporized and all the gas is either gobbled by the sun
28:01 Daniel Whiteson? or blown out by the sun's early radiation. And so you're left with things like iron and rock. And like, that's mostly what the earth is made out of, right? Iron and rock and all sorts of crazy, heavy, dense stuff like that. And mercury actually has the highest percentage of these heavy elements. Like 85% of the interior of mercury is a metallic core compared to just 55% for earth. Mercury has like a very, very thin mantle.
28:26 Kelly Weinersmith? I think the lesson here is never go with Kelly's intuition.
28:31 Daniel Whiteson? But mercury is also not the densest planet in the solar system, right? The densest planet in the solar system is actually earth, because you have a balance here. In order to get density, you need gravity to make it dense. And so mercury, though it has a lot of metal in it, doesn't have enough mass to compress the core to get to the same density that earth has. And so you can take mercury, for example, and add to it, add more stuff to it. And its radius grows, but also the pressure grows, so it gets more collapsed. And so it becomes denser and denser. And there's actually sort of a maximum size to a rocky planet, which is about the radius of 10,000 kilometers, not much bigger than earth. If you took earth and you like added a whole bunch more stuff to it, it wouldn't actually get much bigger. It would just get denser.
29:16 Kelly Weinersmith? Why?
29:17 Daniel Whiteson? Because of gravity, right? It would just keep compressing it because the stuff inside the earth does get compressed. It still resists gravity. It's not yet collapsing to a black hole. Eventually that would happen if you added enough mass. But as you keep adding mass to the earth, for example, it gets denser and denser and denser. And so in the solar system, the earth is sort of at the extreme of all of these balancing factors.
29:38 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, man, it's nice that for once earth is special in some way, you know? Wait, once we got decentered from the universe, you know, that was a little bit of a bummer, but this is making me feel good.
29:48 Daniel Whiteson? So Jupiter's density is just above that of water. Mercury is like 5.4 times that and earth just hops out mercury at 5.5. Venus is close to 5.2, but earth is definitely king of the solar system in terms of density. Yay, we are the densest.
30:07 Kelly Weinersmith? Hey, man, I'll take what I can get.
30:10 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, wait, does that mean we've quit? Like, we're not pushing back as much anymore? Does this, is this, no, never mind. Don't think too hard about it. It's not a sign of failure. It's a sign of success.
30:19 Daniel Whiteson? Exactly. But planets are also not the densest things in the solar system. So stars, which are actively fusing, they have a lot of radiation pressure. Keeps them from getting very dense. Planets, you can make them denser than stars, but if you make them too dense, they start to fuse.
30:34 Kelly Weinersmith? And then, once we fuse, we start pushing back out again and density goes down again.
30:37 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, exactly.
30:38 Kelly Weinersmith? I've been listening.
30:39 Daniel Whiteson? Exactly. But you could also play another game and say, well, I'm just gonna wait for fusion to run out. Right? What happens when fusion burns itself out? We've been talking about how stars have a certain lifetime. And eventually, fusion runs out because it relies on fuel and certain conditions.
30:55 Kelly Weinersmith? And I'm gonna guess, this is where our brilliant listeners come in. And is the next stage a neutron star?
31:01 Daniel Whiteson? Not yet.
31:02 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, man.
31:03 Daniel Whiteson? Almost, right? We're not quite there yet. But think about the life cycle of our star. What's gonna happen? Well, we have a fairly low mass star. It's gonna burn and burn and burn. And it's burning mostly hydrogen and it's accumulating helium at its core. But it's not hot enough to burn that helium. So that helium is just sort of like ash. It gets in the way of fusion. And so, as the core builds up helium, the fusion gets pushed to the outside. So we have fusion instead of at the core. Now you have it in the middle and then in the outer layers. And so, the star blows up to become a red giant as the fusion starts happening in its core. And this is why people say, the star is gonna absorb the Earth because the radius of our sun is gonna get enormous as the helium core heats up.
31:45 Daniel Whiteson? But eventually, for a brief moment, the star will go across that threshold, be able to burn helium for like, literally, a minute.
31:52 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, wow.
31:52 Daniel Whiteson? And there'll be a helium flash where the helium fuses. And that'll blow out the star and you'll be left with a nebula, like, you know, the outer edges of the star blown out. And at the core will be a remnant, which, for our star, is a white dwarf. And a white dwarf is just that core of unburnable stuff, leftover stuff from fusion, where the star was not massive enough to fuse it. So it's just sort of like unfusible fuel left over, but very hot and very dense. And that's a white dwarf.
32:21 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh my God. Okay. So I imagine that that one minute period that you were talking about where the helium is burning is going to differ depending on like what kind of star you're talking about. So but still, I imagine there's a very narrow amount of time during which you could catch this happening. But that sounds amazing. Have we caught this like on any of our telescopes?
32:41 Daniel Whiteson? No, because unfortunately, it's mostly internal. The helium flash is absorbed by the star. And we've looked for these things on other stars, but we've never actually seen them. Because again, it's mostly internal and absorbed. People are trying to study it by doing astro seismology, looking at like periodic changes in a star's brightness to see if maybe something is happening internally, or looking for other kinds of indirect evidence. But we've never directly seen a helium flash. So currently, it's still theoretical.
33:09 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay, but it's definitely awesome.
33:11 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, it's definitely awesome. And so what's left over in the white dwarf depends on how big the star was. The bigger the star, the hotter the core, the more elements you can fuse. And the biggest star can fuse all the way up to iron. Smaller stars like ours can only form things like carbon and oxygen. But that's what the white dwarf is going to be made out of. And these things are incredibly dense. They can have a mass of up to the mass of our sun. Our sun won't leave a white dwarf the mass of the sun, because some of the mass is blown out. But bigger stars up to like eight times the mass of our sun can leave a white dwarf. And the core there is like the mass of our sun.
33:48 Kelly Weinersmith? Wow.
33:48 Daniel Whiteson? And the radius is very small. It's only like 10,000 kilometers. And so these things are incredibly dense. Density of like 10 to the 10 kilograms per cubic meters. Earlier, we were talking about like thousands of kilograms per cubic meters. This is like 10 billion kilograms per cubic meters. Really incredibly dense.
34:09 Kelly Weinersmith? Holy cow. Okay. And the reason, even though it's so dense, it's not fusing because it's already burned up all of its fusion fuel. So fusion can't happen anymore.
34:16 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, exactly. It's not dense enough to have any more fusion. But if something comes along and leaks a little bit of mass to the white dwarf, so it can compress further and overcome the quantum forces, then does suddenly trigger fusion in the whole star and blow the thing up as a type 1a supernova. That's how type 1a supernovas are formed.
34:33 Kelly Weinersmith? What? That's awesome. Oh, I kind of wish I could see this stuff. I mean, I'd be dead. I know. But wow.
34:41 Daniel Whiteson? Well, we can see them across the galaxy, which is why they're so powerful for telling us about the expansion of the universe. But the reason that their white dwarf is stable, like you might ask, what's keeping this thing from collapsing into a black hole anyway? And it's not like the structural integrity of iron or carbon, the way the earth is, and it's not fusion, the way a star is, it's something else called electron degeneracy pressure. Instead of thinking about this object as made of individual atoms, think about it like a metal. What happens in a metal is the electrons all sort of flow around and you have like electron energy levels across the metal, like conduction band, valence band, all that kind of stuff. Well, what's happening here is that the electrons, because they're fermions, they're the kind of particle where you can't have two of them in the same
35:24 Daniel Whiteson? state, they can't collapse to low energy levels because those are occupied. And so the electrons are forced to stay in higher energy levels because they can't go down to those occupied levels. And that means they have higher energy, which means they're flying around, bouncing against stuff. And that's where electron degeneracy pressure comes from. People often write and ask me like, what is the polyexclusion principle? What force is acting on it? It's not one of the quantum forces, it's not electricity, magnetism, it's not the weak force, not the strong force. What force are we talking about here? It's not any individual force. It's this quantum rule that prevents electrons from going to lower energy. So they have a higher energy, so they bounce off the stuff and apply pressure.
36:04 Kelly Weinersmith? Huh. Okay. And that's what keeps the white dwarf, white dwarf-y.
36:09 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, exactly. That's the thing that prevents gravity from collapsing into a black hole. Those electrons do not want to go down into that lower energy. So they keep having high energy and they push back. In the same way that radiation pressure keeps a star from collapsing, electron degeneracy pressure keeps a white dwarf from collapsing.
36:26 Kelly Weinersmith? All right. So I'm on the edge of my seat now because I know that at some point we have to get to neutron stars. And I'm guessing we're going to get there through white dwarfs. And so maybe something goes wrong with electron degeneracy pressure. But let's go ahead and take a break and find out when we get back.
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38:38 Kelly Weinersmith? All right, Daniel, at the beginning of this episode, the extraordinaries pointed out that neutron stars are very dense. And we've explained how you get to white dwarfs and how electron degeneracy pressure keeps the white dwarf from collapsing even further into a black hole. How do we get to neutron stars?
38:55 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, so to get to neutron stars, you have to overcome this electron degeneracy pressure, which means either adding more mass to a white dwarf or just having more mass in the star initially. This leads to a type 2 supernova, when that last moment of fusion in our star would have been a helium flash, but in a bigger star, that's a supernova and it blows out the outer edges much more dramatically. And instead of getting a white dwarf at the core, you get a neutron star. And what happens here is that you've overcome the electron degeneracy pressure just by having more mass. And you've squeezed those electrons into the protons and made neutrons. This is inverse beta decay. Beta decay is when a neutron decays into an electron and a proton.
39:37 Daniel Whiteson? This is like you squeeze electron back into the proton and you form a neutron. And so that's what a neutron star is, when you've like said, screw you electrons, I'm pushing you into those states.
39:47 Kelly Weinersmith? Holy cow.
39:48 Daniel Whiteson? Eat it.
39:49 Kelly Weinersmith? All right, that's intense. And so are there any electrons or protons left? Are they're all smooshed into neutrons? There's probably an equal number of them.
39:56 Daniel Whiteson? Neutron star is mostly made of neutrons. There are going to be some protons in there as well and a few electrons, especially at the edge, we don't know exactly what's happening. And then at the core, we really don't understand. But these things are incredibly dense. They're still like 1 to 3 times the mass of the sun, but their radius is only 10 to 15 kilometers.
40:16 Kelly Weinersmith? Wow.
40:17 Daniel Whiteson? The white dwarf's radius was like 10,000 kilometers. This thing has a radius of 10 kilometers.
40:22 Kelly Weinersmith? What?
40:22 Daniel Whiteson? It's like the size of Los Angeles, right? And its density is 10 to the 17 kilograms per cubic meters. So like 10 million times the density of the white dwarf.
40:34 Kelly Weinersmith? Wow, okay. But still somehow, that's not enough to become a black hole.
40:38 Daniel Whiteson? That's still not enough to become a black hole because at the core, quantum mechanics is still pushing back. And these neutrons are neutral electromagnetically, but they still have The strong force. And when you get at the core, even the neutrons themselves start to merge. And you don't just get individual neutrons to get pushed into something called like a quark gluon plasma, or these other hypothetical states of matter, for example, nuclear pasta.
41:03 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, I've been waiting all episode for us to get to the nuclear pasta. Okay, tell me about the noki phase. How do you pronounce that?
41:14 Daniel Whiteson? So if you have a few protons left over, and you do the calculations of what happens when you compress neutrons really, really far, you get these weird blobs. So this is called the noki phase. We have these semi spherical blobs. And this is just what like emerges from the calculations. You like run your simulations and you get these blobs. But sometimes instead, you get the spaghetti phase, where you get like long rods of neutrons form. Or they have a phase where there's like sheets of neutrons. They're called the lasagna phase.
41:42 Kelly Weinersmith? Because of course.
41:45 Daniel Whiteson? Or another phase, they call the anti spaghetti phase, where you roll those sheets up back into rods.
41:50 Kelly Weinersmith? I feel like they're losing the plot there.
41:55 Daniel Whiteson? So we don't know if this is what's actually happening inside the neutron star. But here, remember neutrons are also fermions. So the poly exclusion principle applies to them as well. So even though they're neutral, they resist collapse because they don't want to be in the same state either. And so that's quantum mechanics, like last ditch effort to avoid being turned into a black hole. But if you take a neutron star, and you add more mass to it, or equivalently, if you started with a much bigger star, more than 40 times the mass of our sun, then when you have that supernova, and then the collapse, you don't get a neutron star, you get a black hole.
42:29 Kelly Weinersmith? And I'm just trying to imagine, like, add more mass to it might mean that like dust from nearby gets sucked in, or like a comet that's passing by gets sucked in, and that adds a lot more mass? Is that how you get the mass?
42:41 Daniel Whiteson? Maybe, but that's probably not going to be enough. I think more typically, you'll have a binary star system, and it'll absorb one of its neighbors. And so you see the systems where like, one of them is a white dwarf or a neutron star, and the other one is a still burning puffy star, and its partner is like slurping on it. You see there's like tendrils of gas.
42:59 Kelly Weinersmith? Space cannibalism.
43:00 Daniel Whiteson? Exactly. Yay.
43:02 Kelly Weinersmith? We got there.
43:06 Daniel Whiteson? But the question of this episode is, can you go beyond a neutron star? Is there something denser than neutron star, which can still resist the force of gravity?
43:14 Kelly Weinersmith? And what's the answer, Daniel?
43:17 Daniel Whiteson? So we're trapped between a neutron star and a black hole. So let's put some numbers on it to make it concrete. And counterintuitively, also, the density of black holes is confusing. As black holes get more massive, their radius goes up. And so they're also not super dense. For example, a black hole the size of our solar system has the density of about water. But smaller black holes have a smaller radius. They're incredibly dense. So let's imagine our neutron star scenario. We have a mass of like two times the mass of the sun, a radius of 10 kilometers. That's a density of like 10 to the 18 kilograms per meters cubed. If you collapsed it to a black hole, would require squishing that 10 kilometer radius star down to about six kilometers.
43:59 Daniel Whiteson? And that would make a density of five times the neutron star. So we're wondering if there's a place between the density of that neutron star and the five times density of a black hole where something can survive and not collapse gravitationally.
44:12 Kelly Weinersmith? So just to make sure that I'm understanding. So you said that some black holes could have the density of water. And we talked earlier about how our sun has the density of water. So does that mean that there are blue giants out there that are denser than some black holes?
44:27 Daniel Whiteson? There are blue giants out there that are denser than some black holes, absolutely. Because a black hole that's super big is not very dense. And here we're defining density as the mass of the thing divided by the event horizon. We don't know inside the black hole how that mass is distributed. If there's a singularity of infinite density, if it's smoothly distributed, if there's weird quantum stuff happening, if it's black hole squid pasta, we have no idea. But we're just sort of assigning the average of density of the black hole.
44:52 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay, all right. So we've got a range of densities and we're trying to figure out if there's anything between a neutron star and the least dense black hole.
45:02 Daniel Whiteson? Well, between a neutron star and the black hole it would eventually collapse into, which would be quite dense.
45:07 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay.
45:07 Daniel Whiteson? And I chose a neutron star because the black hole it would collapse into would be quite small, six kilometers and very, very dense. And so we're wondering if there's a possibility in between. And so there's an Australian physicist, Hans Buchdahl, who thought about this stuff several decades ago. And he came up with this really clever calculation and he proved this limit. That said, that nothing can be smaller than 12% larger than the radius of a black hole. So if you have a certain mass, you can calculate what the black hole radius would be. For our case, for two times the mass of the sun, our neutron star with a radius 10 kilometers, the black hole radius is 6 kilometers. And he says that nothing can survive less than 7 kilometers without collapsing into a black hole. But then in principle, it is possible.
45:52 Daniel Whiteson? So he was thinking about it in terms of the radius of a black hole, which is the Schwarzschild radius. And for that given mass, he said that nothing can be smaller than a radius of 9/8ths of the Schwarzschild radius. So like 12% bigger than the Schwarzschild radius. If you get smaller than that, then you have to collapse into a black hole. But theoretically, it's possible to have an object that's like 9/8ths the radius of the Schwarzschild radius, which would not yet be a black hole.
46:19 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay, but like, my hat is smaller than that. And so by like, by nothing, do you mean no celestial bodies?
46:28 Daniel Whiteson? Well, your hat has a tiny mass. And so the Schwarzschild radius for your hat is very, very small. And Buettl is saying that your hat in principle could resist becoming a black hole by staying at 9/8ths of the Schwarzschild radius of your hat.
46:43 Kelly Weinersmith? Oh, okay. All right.
46:44 Daniel Whiteson? And so in the case of our neutron star, its Schwarzschild radius is 6 kilometers and its Buettl radius is about 7 kilometers. So Buettl did this cool calculation. And the way he got this number is he said, well, let me make some assumptions. Let me assume that pressure in the object is finite and that density increases monotonically from the inside to the outside. So you have this sort of simplified object. It's a perfect fluid with isotopic pressure. And in a Newtonian world, where gravity is just like a force between two objects, there is no limit here on the density of an object. But in general relativity, pressure contributes to gravity. So as something gets denser, it has more pressure pushing out,
47:27 Daniel Whiteson? actually gravitates also, increases the gravitational pull on the object. And so Buettl discovered this limit where the pressure essentially becomes infinite. So you can't have an object smaller than 9/8ths of their Schwarzschild radius without that pressure blowing up and becoming infinite. And therefore, that thing would have to collapse into a black hole. It couldn't survive under those conditions.
47:50 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay, so. Bechdel did these calculations.
47:53 Daniel Whiteson? Mm hmm.
47:54 Kelly Weinersmith? And I'm guessing the implication here is that he found that there is an intermediate density that could exist between a black hole and a neutron star.
48:05 Daniel Whiteson? Exactly.
48:06 Kelly Weinersmith? But have we ever seen that?
48:08 Daniel Whiteson? We have not ever seen that, and this remains theoretical. It's fascinating to understand that there is a limit to the density, that there is a maximum possible density you can achieve before you get to a black hole. Neutron stars do not achieve that density. And in order to achieve that density, you'd need some kind of force which is capable of resisting gravity more powerfully than neutron degeneracy pressure. We don't know what that is, but in theory, if it did exist in the universe, it could create what they call a Bookdahl star. This object with a radius of nine eighths, the Schwarzschild radius. Not yet a black hole, but something with a surface that you could actually like land on, that Kelly could swim in or, you know, stand on the surface of and try to lift her weights.
48:52 Daniel Whiteson? But you know, we've seen black holes in the universe, but we're not 100% sure they actually are black holes. Like, we see objects out there in the universe that are smaller and denser than neutron stars can be. And so people say, oh, well, therefore they must be black holes. And we see them gravitating and we see things getting close to them so we can measure their radius. But our measurements are not precise enough to actually tell us whether these things are black holes or Bookdahl stars. Because we can't see the event horizon directly. We've observed the accretion disk, we've seen the indirect effects, but that's a very small difference between a Bookdahl star and a black hole. So in principle, some of the black holes we've seen could actually be Bookdahl stars.
49:36 Kelly Weinersmith? Okay, so what do we need to know to differentiate between those?
49:39 Daniel Whiteson? We need a more precise measurement of the radius of these things. So for example, the black hole at the center of our galaxy, we don't know precisely what its event horizon radius is. We've seen stuff go near it and get sucked in, we've seen stuff go near it and not get sucked in that lets us measure it, but it's not precise enough to distinguish between a black hole or a Bookdahl star. What we really need is direct evidence of event horizon. See something fall in and redshift and act the way you would expect something falling into a black hole to behave.
50:08 Kelly Weinersmith? I volunteer Zach.
50:11 Daniel Whiteson? That's so nice of you, really, just for the sake of science. Or the other direction you could go is you could think hypothetically about what these objects might be, what is capable of creating an object at that density or maintaining that density and resisting a black hole's collapse. And there are some ideas out there, fuzzballs, or quark stars, or weird hypothetical objects. We have earlier episodes about them if you want to learn more about them. And some of those have specific predictions that you could look for that differ from just like, hey, this is a very dense object, that like, short lifetimes, or other weird predictions. So you could try to make predictions for what a theoretical object like this would look like that's different from a black hole, and then look for those signatures.
50:55 Kelly Weinersmith? Wow, okay, so where we are is we've definitely seen neutron stars. We suspect there's this intermediate thing, and maybe we've even been looking at the intermediate thing, these being the Bechdel stars. Every time I say it, I say it a little different, that's fine.
51:09 Daniel Whiteson? He passed away 10 years ago, so you don't have to worry about it.
51:11 Kelly Weinersmith? All right, he's not going to call me on it, that's good. But so, we might have already seen that kind of star and black holes, and maybe one day we'll be able to tell which is which, but at the moment, we can't.
51:21 Daniel Whiteson? Yeah, that's right. We don't have direct evidence for the existence of black holes, which leaves the door open to wondering exactly what are these objects? Because the argument for black holes is essentially, there's nothing else we can think of that's this massive and this small, but that doesn't mean it's not out there.
51:37 Kelly Weinersmith? Amazing. All right, so time to get into science, kids, because there's a lot of problems left to solve.
51:43 Daniel Whiteson? So the listeners were mostly right, that the densest thing that's not a black hole that we have observed and have confirmation of is a neutron star. But in principle, there could be something denser in our universe.
51:54 Kelly Weinersmith? Way to go, extraordinaries.
52:02 Kelly Weinersmith? Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.
52:07 Daniel Whiteson? We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.
52:13 Kelly Weinersmith? We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.
52:20 Daniel Whiteson? We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected] .
52:26 Kelly Weinersmith? Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.
52:36 Daniel Whiteson? Don't be shy, write to us.
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Previous Listener Questions #25 Next Perimenopause Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated