Chapter 1: What questions do Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice tackle in this episode?
Look, this was a grab bag, and everybody keeps asking about black holes. It is. They got black hole on the brain. And none of them have pronounceable names. Well, Chuck mangled names the way black holes mangle matter. Very nice. On StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Chuck, nice baby. How you doing? Hey, what's happening? All right. To grab bags, you stick your hand in the bag. You don't know what you're going to get. You just pull it out. And it's random. Right. Exactly.
And, you know, if it's a turd, it's your fault, people. Turd. If we pull out a turd, it's your fault. This is all you. All right, this is Joshua from Portland, Oregon. He says, hey, Dr. Tyson, Lord and I, I'm Joshua from Portland, Oregon. I love the movie Sunshine, but the main plot- I haven't seen Sunshine. I haven't seen it either.
He says, the main plot of reviving our sun by sending all of Earth's nuclear material to the sun seemed more than far-fetched and even a quite bit cheesy. Putting all the cheesy aspects of the movie aside, the movie did address what it would be like getting near our sun. My question is, if you've seen the movie, did the movie Sunshine get anything right when approaching close to the sun?
Scientifically speaking, of course. And if not, in your opinion, what would be the funnest or weirdest thing to know about being extremely close to our sun?
So, a couple things. So, first... I haven't seen the movie. All right. But based on what has just been told, I have comments. Okay. Our nukes are, well, we have fission nukes. Right. Which we call A-bombs. Right. The sun has never been in the business of nuclear fission. It's fusion. Fusion. It takes light elements into heavy elements. Right. We do that, but we still don't know how to control it.
Right. So we have uncontrolled nuclear fusion, otherwise known as A-bombs. Hydrogen bomb? Bomb, yes. Bomb.
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Chapter 2: How plausible is the concept of reviving our Sun with nuclear materials?
Bomb. We're good at making uncontrolled nuclear fusion. Right. And the day we harness that and we get fusion reactors, that would be very inexpensive fuel. It will be the...
The beginning of a new era.
A new era. Yes, it would. Because all of our energy problems will be solved. Basically, that's correct. Yes. That's correct. So now you want to send our measly nukes into the sun and believe that's going to make a difference? Yeah. Okay. Just for context. Yeah. Have you ever seen spots on the sun?
No.
I mean, in pictures, yeah. Yes, you know what we call those? Sunspots. Sunspots. I ask easy questions here. All right. A sunspot is typically slightly larger than Earth. Okay, well.
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Chapter 3: What are the scientific implications of getting close to our Sun?
So the sun has blemishes bigger than our planet. Our planet. Yeah, that's crazy. And you want to think that our nukes don't have anything to do with the sun? Right.
Yeah, why not throw spitballs at it? Just as effective. Just as effective. Get a straw and, yeah, just as effective.
Or if I could do a Chuck voice, it would be. You'd fire the nuke into the sun and say, mm, this is delicious. Exactly.
Yeah, wow. Plus, isn't that different? I mean, you can't start fusion from an explosion, right? No, the explosion is the fusion.
That's what I'm saying. Oh, but you want to, can you trigger it? Yeah, I'm saying, because the idea would be to. No, you can't trigger it because the outer layers of the sun are not hot enough to sustain it. Right, okay. But at the center of your bomb it was. Right. Just like at the center of the sun. Exactly.
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Chapter 4: How does sending nuclear material to the Sun relate to fusion and fission?
Yeah, because the fusion is happening at the center of the sun. And not in the outer edges. And not in the outer edges. Okay, so here's how you prolong the life of the sun. And I got to see the movie to see why they were doing it. If the sun was running out of fuel or whatever.
It's an easy way to do this. Let me guess. Now, and I'm, this is me guessing, so shut up. All right. I'm going to say, since the sun takes hydrogen and fuses it so that it ends up with like this four proton that creates helium, right?
Four nucleons. Four nucleons. So it's two protons, two neutrons.
Two protons, two nucleons. So the four nucleons that creates helium, what you want to do is either send the sun more helium Or send it more hydrogen. Why send it more helium? Well, because the next step after the helium is, that's where it keeps going from there. Yeah, but the sun won't.
The sun won't. Only the high mass stars are going to take it. Oh, get out.
The sun pretty much stops. So the sun stops. Yeah.
Oh, so I need to send the hydrogen then. Oh, yes. I should just send more hydrogen. Yes. Okay. Okay, now, where is it hot enough to fuse hydrogen into helium? In the center of the sun.
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Chapter 5: What happens to objects near a black hole?
In the center, okay. So I got to get to the center of the sun. So if you run out of hydrogen in the center of the sun, where is there more hydrogen?
If I run out of hydrogen in the center of the sun. Yes. Oh, maybe I can pull it in from just outside the center of the sun. Thank you. Right. From everywhere else.
Everywhere else in the sun. Just pull it back in. Okay. Yeah. So there's what's called convection. Convection. Right. Okay, if you can drive a convection deep inside the sun, bring fresh hydrogen down into the core, pull out the helium, then... You'll jumpstart the fusion.
You can jumpstart the fusion, and the sun, when it dies, it only used, I forgot the number, a few percent of its total hydrogen available. Oh. The sun could live for trillions of years if you can't be found a way. If you can't find a way to recycle it. You don't have to find hydrogen from somewhere else. No, just. It's sitting there in the sun itself. Wow.
Just get away to get it like a conveyor belt. Right. Send it down into the core.
And now all you have to do is do that without burning up before you get there.
Okay, so now, how do you get close to the sun?
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Chapter 6: How does the concept of time dilation relate to black holes?
Well, first you give it a call. You're like, hey, how you doing? You need a shield. Right. Because what temperature is it in space? Because right now you have a thermometer. It's reading the temperature of what? Whatever the room temperature is. You mean here on Earth? Specifically. If I have a thermometer here and it says 72 degrees.
It's 72 degrees at that thermometer. What is 72 degrees? The temperature of the atmosphere. I don't know. The air. Yeah, the atmosphere. Okay, you said it's the temperature of the room. Right, no. It is the temperature of the air around the thermometer.
In that spot. Right. It's the air. Okay. All right. Right there. Okay. Because it may not be 72 degrees over there. Now, if I come over here. And I'm near that lamp. Oh, it's going to be a little warmer. Because that's an old-fashioned bulb. Yeah, exactly. Okay? Yeah. It's going to be a little warmer because that's heating the air over there. Right. Okay.
You go by the window, it's going to be a little cooler. A little cooler. Okay. Over there. Right. If you're in space.
There is no air. Right. So what the hell temperature are you measuring? You gotta measure the temperature of the nothingness of space. Correct.
And space is not entirely nothing.
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Chapter 7: Can we travel faster than light using warp drives?
Right. There is radiative energy moving through space. Correct, right. Photons. Right. So it's got a little bit of a temperature. And so it'll get a temperature if the thermometer is facing the sun. Right, because that's a radiative heat coming from the sun. Correct. And it's not the air, it's just photons hitting.
Now the other side of the thermometer, if you had two thermometers that split, so one is facing that way, one is facing this way, that's facing deep space. And it's just like, it's cold.
Why is it so cold?
Man, I'm burning up over here. Depending on your distance from the sun, that'll be the intensity of the rays. It'll be hundreds of degrees on the other side. And as you get closer to the sun, the radiative flux is the official term. It gets higher and higher and higher. That temperature will continue to go up. Right.
As long as you're shielded and you're looking out on the other side, that temperature is going to stay the temperature of deep space, which is like the microwave background hitting it, which is there at all times, or some nearby stars if they happen to be there. So temperature is a funny thing. Did we do an explainer on temperature? We did. I thought we did. We did.
We did an explainer on temperature. Yeah, okay. And you put it on your lipstick?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Give yourself a lip. You can't do StarTalk with cracked lips.
I don't want the people talking about me. You know, right now, if I had ashy lips, there's some black people out there like, what is wrong with his lips? And I believe his brother on TV with ashy lips. His mother didn't. Who raised you?
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of living in a multiverse with expanding bubble universes?
Who's the comedian? That's his line. Who raised you? Who raised you? He was one of the comedians. So if you want to get close to the sun. In the shield. Well, but the shield will be too cold for you, and the other side will be too hot. So what you really want to do is make a rotisserie.
Yes.
Oh, I'm cooking evenly. Tell you right now, if you wanna... Somebody baste me. Baste me, please.
Get the butter.
So you get pretty close if you're on a rotisserie. You're on a rotisserie. All right. But there's a point where you'll just burn. Right. And there's a point where that shield... wait a minute, this photon's hitting that shield. Right. Maybe it's very reflective, so it's not absorbing any, but it's not perfectly reflective.
Some are going to get absorbed, and that shield temperature is going to begin to rise. And eventually it will radiate infrared back to the other side of the thermometer. And burn you alive. So, yeah, and then you reach a point where it is so hot, everything vaporizes. Right. Do you know what has the highest temperature? Melting point? Iron? No. I thought, what is it? No, no, no.
What has the highest melting point? You never guess. I'll never guess. Carbon. What? Ain't that something?
Wait a minute, but in the- Have you ever tried to melt a diamond? Oh, well, the- Yeah, put that on your stove and see what happens. Exactly. Carbon. Wow. It's the highest melting point. Look at that. It's like 5,000 degrees. Insanely high. Insanely high. So generally, if you're going to go near the sun, you want carbon. We need a diamond ship. And it'd have to be piloted by a hip-hop star.
Or Elizabeth Taylor, or somebody like that. Or Carol Channing, yes. Ice. There you go. So I have to go see the movie now. Thanks for that prompting. And maybe I can add more to that commentary. But otherwise, yeah, it'll vaporize you. No matter what.
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