Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: Imagine you're standing outside on a perfectly clear night.
Speaker 3: Oh that sounds nice, right.
Speaker 2: You're far away from the city, no street lights, no
Speaker 2: light pollution at all. You were just staring up at
Speaker 2: a completely dark, quiet patch of the night sky, just
Speaker 2: you and the universe exactly. The stars are fixed. Everything
Speaker 2: seems peaceful, serene, ancient. But then suddenly, right in the
Speaker 2: middle of that black void, there's this brilliant, blindingly powerful
Speaker 2: double flash of energy out of nowhere, out of nowhere,
Speaker 2: It's up that patch of space with unimaginable violence, and then,
Speaker 2: almost as quickly as it appeared, it just vanishes, complete silence. Again.
Speaker 4: Here's the crazy part, though. If you were standing there,
Speaker 4: relying entirely on your own human eyes, you wouldn't have
Speaker 4: seen a single thing, nothing at all, not a blip
Speaker 4: the sky would have remained completely unchanged because well, human
Speaker 4: vision is locked into this ridiculously narrow band of the
Speaker 4: electromagnetic spectrum. We just see visible.
Speaker 2: Light, right the colors of the rainbow.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, But the universe, I mean, it doesn't limit
Speaker 4: its violence to the colors of the rainbow.
Speaker 2: Which is terrifying honestly, but fascinating at the same time,
Speaker 2: because this flash absolutely happened. It was completely invisible to
Speaker 2: the naked eye, but it happened, and it left the
Speaker 2: smartest astronomers on Earth completely scratching their heads.
Speaker 4: Oh, totally baffles.
Speaker 2: We're talking about an event that occurred recently on March fifth,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four, and to really figure out what happened
Speaker 2: out there in the dark, we've got to look at
Speaker 2: the initial alert logs, the multi wavelength follow up data
Speaker 2: from all over the planet, and well the theoretical astrophysics
Speaker 2: trying to piece this whole puzzle together.
Speaker 3: It's a massive puzzle, it really is, and it.
Speaker 2: All starts with a highly sensitive piece of orbital technology
Speaker 2: called the Einstein Probe.
Speaker 4: The Einstein Probe is just it's an incredible feat of engineering.
Speaker 4: It's a space telescope launched with a very specific and
Speaker 4: frankly very difficult mission, which of what basically to tirelessly
Speaker 4: stare into the cosmic abyss and just wait for something
Speaker 4: to explode. But like we said, it doesn't look for
Speaker 4: visible light. It's equipped with these wide field X ray optics.
Speaker 2: They call them lobster eye optics, right, yeah.
Speaker 4: It's super cool. It mimics the way a crustacean's eye
Speaker 4: can take in light from a massive field of view
Speaker 4: all at once. So it just scans the cosmos for
Speaker 4: these sudden, totally unpredictable, high energy.
Speaker 3: X ray flashes.
Speaker 2: And it has to be in space because our atmosphere
Speaker 2: actually protects us from X rays. If the Einstein probe
Speaker 2: was sitting on a mountain on Earth, it wouldn't see anything.
Speaker 4: That is a crucial point. The Earth's atmosphere is incredibly thick.
Speaker 4: It acts like a lead shield against high energy radiation
Speaker 4: like X rays and gamma rays.
Speaker 2: Which is great for us.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah. If our atmosphere didn't absorb those wavelengths, life
Speaker 4: on Earth would be sterilized. Period. So to observe the
Speaker 4: high energy universe, we literally have to put our robotic
Speaker 4: eyes above the atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Makes sense. So on this day in March, this orbital
Speaker 2: telescope is just doing its job, watching the dark, and
Speaker 2: it catches something entirely.
Speaker 4: New, a completely novel event.
Speaker 2: Right, and it gets cataloged with the incredibly poetic name
Speaker 2: of EP two four zero three zero five.
Speaker 4: A ah, yes, the romance of astronomy.
Speaker 2: I know they love their naming conventions. Yeah, but essentially
Speaker 2: that just stands for Einstein probe, the year twenty twenty four,
Speaker 2: the month of March, the fifth day, and the first
Speaker 2: event of the day.
Speaker 4: It's pure functional data management. But you know, the name
Speaker 4: isn't really the point.
Speaker 2: No, The core mystery here is that this specific flash
Speaker 2: of X rays completely defies existing classification. It doesn't fit
Speaker 2: into any known.
Speaker 3: Box, not a single one.
Speaker 2: If we're playing cosmic detective, it's sort of like it's
Speaker 2: like finding an animal in the woods that has the
Speaker 2: feathers of a bird, the scales of a fish, and
Speaker 2: the bark of a dog.
Speaker 4: That's a great way to put it. The physical mechanics
Speaker 4: of what we're looking at just don't align with the
Speaker 4: categories we've spent centuries building.
Speaker 2: And astrophysics relies on those categories completely.
Speaker 4: The universe is usually quite good at fitting into our
Speaker 4: established models. We know the exact signature of a dying star.
Speaker 4: We know the signature of a supermassive black hole feeding
Speaker 4: on a cloud of gas.
Speaker 2: So when something doesn't fit, when.
Speaker 4: A transient event entirely refuses to fit into those boxes,
Speaker 4: it forces a reckoning. It means our understanding of the
Speaker 4: fundamental mechanics of extreme stellar death is incomplete.
Speaker 2: To understand why this event is forcing that reckoning, we
Speaker 2: need to look really really closely at the precise timeline
Speaker 2: of the flash, because it wasn't just a random burst
Speaker 2: of static.
Speaker 4: No, it had a highly specific and frankly very weird heartbeat.
Speaker 2: Right the Einstein probe witnessed a brief X ray flare,
Speaker 2: a massive spike of energy, and then this is the
Speaker 2: wild part. The energy dropped to nothing, dead quiet, yeah,
Speaker 2: for about two hundred seconds, and then boom, a second
Speaker 2: brief X ray flare hit right after it.
Speaker 4: In the realm of transient astronomy, which focuses entirely on
Speaker 4: things that change rapidly in the sky, a two hundred
Speaker 4: second pause is deeply anomalous.
Speaker 2: It feels anomalous just logically. I mean, when I picture
Speaker 2: a cosmic explosion. I picture a singular catastrophic release of energy.
Speaker 2: A star blows up, it expands.
Speaker 4: Outwards, a one and done kind of deal.
Speaker 2: Exactly. A star doesn't blow up, pause for three and
Speaker 2: a half minutes to catch its brapp and then blow
Speaker 2: up a second time. It makes me think of an
Speaker 2: engine stalling.
Speaker 3: An engine stalling, Yeah, like an.
Speaker 2: Old car engine that vapor locks, It sputters, goes completely
Speaker 2: silent while the fuel line clears, and then aggressively fires
Speaker 2: one last time. Does the universe actually build engines that
Speaker 2: can stall?
Speaker 4: You know that analogy of a stalling engine is actually
Speaker 4: incredibly close to the underlying physics we're talking about here. Really,
Speaker 4: oh absolutely. If we look at standard cosmic explosions, like
Speaker 4: a supernova, that is a continuous outward expansion of energy
Speaker 4: and matter, it rises in brightness, it peaks, and it
Speaker 4: fades over weeks.
Speaker 2: Right, a single structural failure, but.
Speaker 4: A double flare separated by a hard pause. That implies
Speaker 4: a central engine that is actively managing a flow of fuel.
Speaker 2: So we aren't looking at a bomb going off. We're
Speaker 2: looking at a machine processing material.
Speaker 4: Exactly. The machine in this context is almost certainly a
Speaker 4: black hole, or maybe a highly magnetized neutron star, and
Speaker 4: the fuel is an accretion disk.
Speaker 2: An accretion disc, that's the swirling vortex of superheated gas
Speaker 2: spiraling down into the gravitational Well.
Speaker 3: We got it.
Speaker 4: Black holes do not function like cosmic vacuum cleaners. They're
Speaker 4: more like a massive traffic jam.
Speaker 2: A traffic jam.
Speaker 4: Yeah, material is trying to fall in, but it's spinning
Speaker 4: so fast that centrifugal force fights against gravity, so it literally.
Speaker 2: Has to wait its turned across the event horizon.
Speaker 4: Yes, the gas rubs against itself, creating immense friction and
Speaker 4: heating up to millions of degrees, which, by the way,
Speaker 4: is what produces the X rayce.
Speaker 2: Okay, so that's the flare. But where does the pause
Speaker 2: come in.
Speaker 4: Well, accretion disks are highly unstable. They're governed by super
Speaker 4: complex magnetic fields. If those magnetic fields get tangled up,
Speaker 4: or if a massive clump of matter temporarily blocks the
Speaker 4: inner flow, the engine can effectively choke. Wow, the flow
Speaker 4: of fuel into the black hole stops, the X ray
Speaker 4: emission shuts off, and that is your two hundred second.
Speaker 2: Pause, and then it clears.
Speaker 4: Yep, the magnetic tension snaps, the blockage clears, a new
Speaker 4: clump of matter falls in, and the engine aggressively reignites,
Speaker 4: producing that second flare.
Speaker 2: So a black hole basically choked on its dinner, had
Speaker 2: a three minute coughing fit, and then took a second bite.
Speaker 4: That is a very visceral, but very accurate way to
Speaker 4: describe it.
Speaker 2: But here is the massive logistical problem with studying an
Speaker 2: event like this. You don't get a calendar invite. Never
Speaker 2: we know years in advance exactly when a solar eclipse
Speaker 2: is going to happen, down to the millisecond, but a
Speaker 2: transient X ray flash. By the time the Einstein probe's
Speaker 2: alarm bells start ringing down here on Earth, the event
Speaker 2: is completely over.
Speaker 4: That is the fundamental hair pulling frustration of transient astronomy.
Speaker 4: You are entirely at the mercy of the universe's unpredictability.
Speaker 3: It's all reacting, completely reactive.
Speaker 4: These sudden flashes are the ultimate fleeting evidence. By the
Speaker 4: time the orbital telescope registers the photons, processes the data,
Speaker 4: and beams an alert down to ground control, the primary
Speaker 4: signal the X rays generated by that immediate violence, is
Speaker 4: already dissipating into the void.
Speaker 2: Which means catching the initial flash is really only step
Speaker 2: one of the investigation. The actual science, the real detective work,
Speaker 2: happens in the frantic, highly coordinated scramble immediately after the flash.
Speaker 4: Right, how do you study an explosion when the fire
Speaker 4: is already dying out?
Speaker 2: Exactly? You have to mobilize every available observatory on Earth
Speaker 2: and in space as fast as humanly possible before the
Speaker 2: ashes blow away. That introduces the necessity of what astronomers
Speaker 2: call a massive multi wavelength follow up campaign.
Speaker 4: This is where the story turns into an international scavenger hunt.
Speaker 2: Once the Einstein probe sounded the alarm on EP two
Speaker 2: forty three oh five, A, researchers rapidly pointed multiple different
Speaker 2: telescopes located all over the globe and in orbit at
Speaker 2: those exact coordinates in the sky.
Speaker 4: And they didn't just look for more X rays. They
Speaker 4: gather data across entirely different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Speaker 4: We're talking X rays, infrared, optical, and radio.
Speaker 2: This is critical for anyone trying to understand the modern astronomy.
Speaker 2: We aren't just looking through glass lenses trying to magnify
Speaker 2: visible light anymore, not at all.
Speaker 4: The universe communicates across an entire spectrum. If you only
Speaker 4: look at the visible light, you're only reading one single
Speaker 4: paragraph of a massive encyclopedia.
Speaker 2: For anyone listening who might not be a physicist. I
Speaker 2: want to make sure the concept of wavelengths really lands
Speaker 2: because it is the absolute key to unraveling everything that follows.
Speaker 4: It's the most important concept here.
Speaker 2: Think of it like a car crash. I'm standing on
Speaker 2: the sidewalk and I witness two cars collide. My eyes,
Speaker 2: which are basically biological optical sensors, see the dented metal,
Speaker 2: the shattered glass, the red paint of the car. That
Speaker 2: is optical data, right. But if I pull out a
Speaker 2: thermal infrared camera, I don't see the red paint anymore. Instead,
Speaker 2: I see the intense glowing heat radiating off the engine
Speaker 2: blocks and the friction burning on the tires.
Speaker 4: It's the exact same event, but a totally different set
Speaker 4: of physical data exactly.
Speaker 2: So what about the extremes? What do X rays and
Speaker 2: radio waves tell us?
Speaker 4: If we push that analogy further into the extreme ends
Speaker 4: of the spectrum, the X rays would represent the actual
Speaker 4: acoustic shock wave of the collision.
Speaker 2: Like the loud crunch.
Speaker 4: Yes, the violent immediate sound of metal crushing. X rays
Speaker 4: represent the highest energy, the most violent immediate consequence of
Speaker 4: the event. They tell us about materials being superheated to
Speaker 4: millions of degrees and the immediate vicinity of a massive
Speaker 4: gravitational engine.
Speaker 2: So X rays equal idiot extreme violence the sound of
Speaker 2: the crash. So what do radio waves tell us? Because
Speaker 2: we always hear about radio telescopes.
Speaker 4: Radio waves sit at the complete opposite end of the
Speaker 4: spectrum from X rays. They are low energy with very
Speaker 4: long wavelengths. In your car crash analogy, the radio waves
Speaker 4: would be the long black skid marks left on the asphalt.
Speaker 4: I like that, or maybe the sound of the police
Speaker 4: sirens echoing through the neighborhood hours later. They are the
Speaker 4: long term aftermath.
Speaker 2: But how does an explosion in a vacuum produce radio waves?
Speaker 2: There's no air for sound or anything.
Speaker 4: It happens through a process called synchrotron.
Speaker 3: Radiation sychotron radiation.
Speaker 4: Right when a massive explosion happens, it rarely just puffs
Speaker 4: out in a perfect sphere. Often it blasts highly concentrated
Speaker 4: plumes of material relativistic jets out into space at nearly
Speaker 4: the speed of light.
Speaker 2: That could cosmic fire hose.
Speaker 4: Exactly, As those jets slam into the interstellar gas and
Speaker 4: dust that was quietly floating around the star's neighborhood, it
Speaker 4: creates a massive shockwave. That shockwave operates like a cosmic
Speaker 4: particle accelerator, so.
Speaker 2: It's riving up whatever's already out there.
Speaker 4: It catches electrons, traps them in magnetic fields, and whips
Speaker 4: them around at tremendous speeds. As those electrons spiral around
Speaker 4: the magnetic field lines, they bleed off energy in the
Speaker 4: form of a steady, glowing hum of radio emission.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 4: And because that shockwave takes a long time to plow
Speaker 4: through the surrounding gas, that radio hum can last for weeks, months,
Speaker 4: or even years after the initial X ray flash has
Speaker 4: died out.
Speaker 2: Okay, So, armed with that understanding of the spectrum, let's
Speaker 2: look at the actual clues the astronomers gathered in the
Speaker 2: days following the double flash of our mystery event, because
Speaker 2: the timeline of how these different wavelengths faded is bizarre.
Speaker 4: Truly bizarre.
Speaker 2: First, the X rays, the data shows they vanished rapidly
Speaker 2: over a matter of days. That tracks with our engine analogy, right.
Speaker 2: The engine turned on, burned its fuel, and shut down.
Speaker 4: Permanently, exactly a rapid X ray DEK points strongly to
Speaker 4: a highly energetic but very short lived initial burst. The
Speaker 4: immediate violence was.
Speaker 2: Fast, but then they looked at the radio emissions and
Speaker 2: those lingered. They faded much much more slowly, dragging on
Speaker 2: over several.
Speaker 4: Weeks, which is the definitive smoking gun for an evolving jet.
Speaker 4: That tells us that whatever exploded didn't just flash. It
Speaker 4: fired a concentrated beam of matter out into space, and
Speaker 4: we were watching the slow motion aftermath of that beam
Speaker 4: plowing through the cosmic neighborhood.
Speaker 3: The skid mark the skid marks exactly Here is where.
Speaker 2: It gets really interesting, though. The telescopes also spotted a faint,
Speaker 2: fading near infrared source at the exact same location, so
Speaker 2: there's some heat, some glowing embers left behind. But incredibly,
Speaker 2: and this is the part that makes this specific event
Speaker 2: so notorious, there was zero detection at optical wavelengths, nothing.
Speaker 4: No visible light whatsoever.
Speaker 2: Which is astonishing. Usually when you have an event powerful
Speaker 2: enough to blast out high energy X rays and carve
Speaker 2: a massive radio emitting jet through interstellar space. You expect
Speaker 2: a brilliant flash of visible light.
Speaker 4: Oh, without a doubt. A standard supernova, for example, can
Speaker 4: outshine its entire host galaxy, and optical light to have
Speaker 4: an event this violently energetic be completely optically dark adds
Speaker 4: a profound layer of stealth to the phenomenon.
Speaker 2: But how do you hide an explosion that big from
Speaker 2: regular telescopes? I imagine space is empty, but clearly something
Speaker 2: was blocking the view.
Speaker 4: It forces us to analyze the environment where this explosion
Speaker 4: took place. Optical light is actually quite fragile compared to
Speaker 4: X rays or radio waves. Fragile, yeah, it gets easily blocked, scattered,
Speaker 4: and absorbed by cosmic dust. We call this process dust extinction. O.
Speaker 4: Think of trying to shine a standard flashlight through an
Speaker 4: incredibly thick, dense fog. The visible light just diffuses, scatters
Speaker 4: off the water droplets, and vanishes after a few feet.
Speaker 2: But X rays in radio waves don't care about the.
Speaker 4: Fog exactly, and X ray can punch right through that
Speaker 4: fog as if it isn't there, and radio waves, being
Speaker 4: so long, just roll right over the far particles.
Speaker 2: So the complete lack of optical light strongly suggests that
Speaker 2: this explosion happened in an incredibly dirty, dusty, chaotic region
Speaker 2: of space. The visible light was simply swallowed by the
Speaker 2: soot of its own environment before it ever reached Earth.
Speaker 4: That's the only logical explanation for the missing optical data.
Speaker 2: So to summarize the crime scene for you listening, we
Speaker 2: have a physical engine that filed, stalled for three minutes,
Speaker 2: and fired again. It generated intense X rays that died
Speaker 2: in a matter of days. It fired a jet that
Speaker 2: produced synchrotron radio waves for weeks. It left a tiny
Speaker 2: thermal signature of heat, and it was completely cloaked in dust,
Speaker 2: making it invisible to the naked eye. That is our
Speaker 2: exact set of physical clues.
Speaker 4: That is the complete profile of our culprit.
Speaker 2: Which means we are now ready for the ultimate game
Speaker 2: of cosmic elimination. To figure out what this new thing
Speaker 2: actually is, scientists couldn't just invent a new theory. They
Speaker 2: first had to meticulously prove what it.
Speaker 4: Isn't, and astrophysics has a massive lineup of usual suspects
Speaker 4: to go through.
Speaker 2: Let's walk through that exhausting list, because is watching this
Speaker 2: single event systematically dismantle every single existing theory of stellar
Speaker 2: death is kind of thrilling. Let's bring in suspects number
Speaker 2: one in two title disruption events and X ray binaries.
Speaker 4: All right, let's define the physics of those, because they're
Speaker 4: some of the most violent events in the universe. A
Speaker 4: tidal disruption event, or TDE happens when a star wanders
Speaker 4: just a little too close to a supermassive.
Speaker 3: Black hole, which is a bad day for the star.
Speaker 4: A very bad day. Every black hole has something called
Speaker 4: a roche limit. When a star crosses that invisible boundary,
Speaker 4: the gravity of the black hole becomes so intense that
Speaker 4: it pulls exponentially harder on the nearer side of the
Speaker 4: star than the far side.
Speaker 2: Oh, I've heard this. The title forces just rip the
Speaker 2: structural integrity the start to pieces violently.
Speaker 4: It stretches the star out, shredding it into a long
Speaker 4: stream of superheated gas, a process cheerfully known by astrophysicists
Speaker 4: as spagetification.
Speaker 2: Spaghetification. It sounds fun until you realize it's a star
Speaker 2: being ripped into a noodle.
Speaker 4: Right, And as that shredded star material wraps around the
Speaker 4: black hole and collides with itself, it circularizes into an
Speaker 4: accretion disc. It heats up immensely through viscous friction and
Speaker 4: releases massive amounts of X rays, and it often launches
Speaker 4: a jet from its poles.
Speaker 2: Okay, so a TDE fits the description perfectly. It's an
Speaker 2: X ray transiit with a jet. What about an X
Speaker 2: ray binary?
Speaker 4: And X ray binary is essentially a localized stellar relationship
Speaker 4: gone very wrong.
Speaker 2: A toxic relationship.
Speaker 4: Oh, incredibly toxic. You have a compact object like a
Speaker 4: stellar mass black hole or a highly dense neutron star,
Speaker 4: orbiting very closely with the normal living star. The gravity
Speaker 4: of the compact object slowly siphons gas off its companion star.
Speaker 2: It's just stealing its material, yep.
Speaker 4: It pulls the outer layers of the living star across
Speaker 4: the gravitational equilibrium point between them, building up that swirling
Speaker 4: accretion disc. Periodically, that disc reaches a thermal tipping point,
Speaker 4: becomes suddenly unstable, and dumps a massive amount of matter
Speaker 4: onto the compact object.
Speaker 2: All at once, resulting in a flash, a.
Speaker 4: Brilliant, violent outburst of X rays.
Speaker 2: So both of those suspects sound incredibly violent. Both produce
Speaker 2: X rays, Both involve things being torn apart and eaten
Speaker 2: by black holes or neutron stars, which completely fits our
Speaker 2: engine theory. So why did the astronomers look at the
Speaker 2: data for EP two forty three H five A and
Speaker 2: completely throw them out.
Speaker 4: It comes entirely down to the mechanical clock. The timescale
Speaker 4: of a physics is completely wrong.
Speaker 3: Too slow, way too slow.
Speaker 4: When a supermassive black hole shreds a star in a
Speaker 4: tidal disruption event, it's a messy, prolonged process. The viscous
Speaker 4: timescale basically the time it takes for that glowing, superheated
Speaker 4: disc of stellar spaghetti to actually drain into the black
Speaker 4: hole and cool down takes months, sometimes even years. The
Speaker 4: X ray emission drags on and on.
Speaker 2: And our events X rays faded completely in a few
Speaker 2: days exactly.
Speaker 4: The physics of a TDE do not allow an accretion
Speaker 4: disc of that size to drain and go dark in
Speaker 4: a matter of days. It was way too fast, and
Speaker 4: the exact same thermodynamic problem applies to standard X ray binaries.
Speaker 4: Accretion disc outbursts typically lasts for several months as the
Speaker 4: instability works its way through the disc.
Speaker 2: Well, wait, I was reading about this, and there is
Speaker 2: a loophole right. The astronomers did consider a very rare,
Speaker 2: short lived subclass called fast X ray transience. There are
Speaker 2: some X ray binaries out there that can flare up
Speaker 2: and fade within a few weeks. Could this just be
Speaker 2: a really fast binary system.
Speaker 4: It's an excellent point, and the resesearchers absolutely explored that loophole.
Speaker 4: But science relies on the totality of the physical evidence.
Speaker 4: While a fast X ray binary might explain the relatively
Speaker 4: quick fade of the X rays, they categorically fail to
Speaker 4: explain the other half of the spectrum, the radio waves exactly.
Speaker 4: Fast X ray binaries simply do not produce the strong,
Speaker 4: lingering synchrotron radio emissions that were seen in this event.
Speaker 4: They do not have the sustained magnetic power to launch
Speaker 4: the kind of relativistic jet needed to plow through intercellar
Speaker 4: gas and create a weeks long radio afterglowd So you can't.
Speaker 2: Just pick and choose which data to belief because the
Speaker 2: radio jet exists. Suspects one and two are physically impossible
Speaker 2: spot on. Okay, cross some moss, but getification is out.
Speaker 2: Let's move to suspect number three. Thermonuclear bursts. Just the
Speaker 2: name alone sounds like a perfect fit for a blinding,
Speaker 2: invisible explosion.
Speaker 4: A thermonuclear burst is a truly mind bending phenomenon. We're
Speaker 4: talking about literal nuclear explosions that occur on the actual
Speaker 4: solid surface of a neutron star.
Speaker 2: For anyone who hasn't spent time thinking about neutron stars,
Speaker 2: we really need to pause and establish just how alien
Speaker 2: the physics of these objects are, because if you don't
Speaker 2: grasp the density, you can't grasp the explosion.
Speaker 4: That's true, a neutron star is the collapsed dead core
Speaker 4: of a massive star that went supernova. They are incredibly small,
Speaker 4: usually only about twenty kilometers across, maybe the size of
Speaker 4: a city.
Speaker 3: Like Manhattan, Okay city sized.
Speaker 4: But within that tiny city sized sphere, they contain the
Speaker 4: mass of one or two entire suns.
Speaker 2: So if you took a single teaspoon of neutron star material,
Speaker 2: how much would it weigh on Earth?
Speaker 4: Roughly a billion tons.
Speaker 2: A billion tons in a tea spoon.
Speaker 4: The density is incomprehensible. The gravity on the surface is
Speaker 4: so unimaginably strong that it completely overwhelms the electron degeneracy
Speaker 4: pressure that normally keeps atoms apart. It crushes the electrons
Speaker 4: into the protons, creating a solid sphere of neutrons.
Speaker 3: Okay, so that's the surface. Where does the burst come from.
Speaker 4: Well, if a neutron star happens to be pulling a slow,
Speaker 4: steady trickle of gas, mostly hydrogen and helium, off a
Speaker 4: companion star, that gas piles up on the neutron.
Speaker 3: Star's surface, it just sits there.
Speaker 4: It sits there, and it gets crushed. Because the gravity
Speaker 4: is so intense, The pressure and temperature at the bottom
Speaker 4: of that pile of gas eventually becomes so extreme that
Speaker 4: it triggers what we call pick non nuclear reactions. It
Speaker 4: triggers runaway nuclear fusion, like.
Speaker 2: A massive hydrogen bomb, covering the entire surface.
Speaker 4: Of a star, exactly, a hydrogen bomb the size of
Speaker 4: a city, detonating all at once. It burns through the
Speaker 4: accumulated fuel and a matter of seconds to minutes, producing
Speaker 4: a massive sudden spike in thermal X rays.
Speaker 2: Okay, that sounds like a remarkably good fit. It's an engine.
Speaker 2: It's violent that produces X rays. It's sudden. Let me
Speaker 2: guess that timing is wrong again.
Speaker 4: Actually, the timing of a thermonuclear burst isn't a terrible
Speaker 4: fit for the initial flashes. The problem here lies in thermodynamics.
Speaker 2: Thermodynamics, it's like the heat.
Speaker 4: Right Astronomers can analyze the specific spectrum of the X
Speaker 4: ray light to determine the exact temperature of the emitting material,
Speaker 4: treating it as a black body radiator. While a thermonuclear
Speaker 4: burst is incredibly hot, the measured X ray temperature of
Speaker 4: EP two forty three zero five A was actually fundamentally
Speaker 4: too low to match the signature of runaway nuclear fusion
Speaker 4: on a neutron star surface.
Speaker 2: Wait, it was too cold to be a nuclear bomb.
Speaker 2: I didn't see that coming.
Speaker 4: It was the wrong kind of heat entirely. And beyond
Speaker 4: the temperature flaw, we run right back into the radio
Speaker 4: wave problem.
Speaker 2: The skid mark strike again, always.
Speaker 4: The skid marks. Thermonuclear bursts are surface events. They flash
Speaker 4: brilliantly across the crust of the star, but they do
Speaker 4: launch massive, highly collimated, relativistic jets of material out into
Speaker 4: deep space from.
Speaker 3: Their poles, So no jet, no radio waste exactly.
Speaker 4: Therefore, the lingering synchrotron radio signal that lasted for weeks
Speaker 4: makes absolutely no physical sense in the context of a
Speaker 4: surface explosion. Suspec Number three is ruled out.
Speaker 2: The universe is incredibly picky. Okay, suspects four and five.
Speaker 2: We're running out of options in the catalog here magnetar,
Speaker 2: giant flares, and stellar flares. Let's tackle magnetars first.
Speaker 4: Oh, magnetars. A magnetar is a highly specific, very rare
Speaker 4: type of neutron star where the internal physics have generated
Speaker 4: a magnetic field that is so absurdly powerful it breaks
Speaker 4: our standard models of physics.
Speaker 2: How powerful are we talk?
Speaker 4: We're talking magnetic fields a thousand times stronger than a
Speaker 4: regular neutron star, and trillions of times stronger than the
Speaker 4: Earth's magnetic field.
Speaker 2: I read once that if a magnetar was located halfway
Speaker 2: between the Earth and the Moon, its magnetic field would
Speaker 2: be strong enough to wipe the magnetic strip data of
Speaker 2: every single credit card on our planet.
Speaker 4: That is entirely accurate. The magnetic fields are so stressed
Speaker 4: and twisted by the star's rapid rotation a dynamo mechanism,
Speaker 4: that they exert immense physical pressure on the solid crust
Speaker 4: of the neutron star.
Speaker 2: The magnetic field pushes against the solid crust.
Speaker 4: Yes, and occasionally the actual crust fractures under the strain.
Speaker 4: This is literally called a.
Speaker 2: Stark wake, a starquake. That's amazing.
Speaker 4: And when the crust snaps, the incredibly tense magnetic field
Speaker 4: lines violently snap and reconnect, releasing a catastrophic burst of
Speaker 4: energy in the form of alphin waves and high energy radiation.
Speaker 4: This is a giant flare.
Speaker 2: Okay, a snapping crust and reconnecting magnetic fields. That has
Speaker 2: to be it. That perfectly explains the mechanical start and
Speaker 2: stop the double flash. The crust snaps, pauses, and snaps again.
Speaker 2: Why isn't it a magnetar.
Speaker 4: It is purely a timing issue, but in the opposite direction.
Speaker 4: This time. When a magnetar giant flare goes off, the
Speaker 4: release of energy is virtually instantaneous. They rise to peak
Speaker 4: brightness and then fail to almost nothing in a fraction
Speaker 4: of a single second.
Speaker 2: A fraction of a second.
Speaker 4: The physics of magnetic reconnections simply happened too fast.
Speaker 2: But our initial flares lasted for several minutes, and there
Speaker 2: was a two hundred second pause between them.
Speaker 4: Exactly two hundred seconds is an absolute eternity for a magnetar.
Speaker 4: A magnetar giant flare operates on a timescale that is hundreds,
Speaker 4: if not thousands of times too fast to explain.
Speaker 3: Our transient, so it's not a match.
Speaker 4: It's like comparing the sharp, instantaneous crack of a whip
Speaker 4: to the slow rolling rumble of an earthquake. They are
Speaker 4: fundamentally different physical mechanisms.
Speaker 2: Okay, so magnetars are out, what about stellar flares? Like
Speaker 2: normal main sequence stars just throwing a tantrum? Our own
Speaker 2: Sun has solar flares all the time that mess with
Speaker 2: our satellites, right, Could this just be a really, really
Speaker 2: big version of that happening on a distant star.
Speaker 4: It's a very logical place to look. Stars are massive
Speaker 4: balls of churning plasma, and their magnetic fields get tangled
Speaker 4: and snap in the atmosphere all the time, releasing energy
Speaker 4: through magnetic reconnection. Right, And indeed, we see massive stellar
Speaker 4: flares from other active stars that produce significant X ray spikes,
Speaker 4: But we run right back into the exact same physical
Speaker 4: wall we've hit with almost every other suspect.
Speaker 2: The radio skid marks.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the jet precisely, a stellar flare does not fire
Speaker 4: an artillery shell of matter into deep space at relativistic speeds.
Speaker 4: A flare is a surface eruption. It doesn't have the
Speaker 4: gravitational engine required to collimate matter into a jet that
Speaker 4: takes weeks to plow through interstellar gas. It completely rules
Speaker 4: out a simple stellar origin.
Speaker 2: If you're listening to this and keeping track, watching this
Speaker 2: rigorous process unfold really highlights how methodical astrophysics is. It
Speaker 2: feels like a cosmic Goldilocks problem.
Speaker 4: It's exactly what it is.
Speaker 2: Every known violent event in the universe is either too hot,
Speaker 2: too cold, too fast, too slow, or completely lacking the
Speaker 2: physical mechanism to produce an aftermath jet. It is incredible
Speaker 2: how precisely scientists can read the thermodynamic and the decay
Speaker 2: curves and say no, the physics simply do not allow
Speaker 2: for this.
Speaker 4: It is a testament to how far observational astronomy has advanced.
Speaker 4: We aren't just looking at pretty pictures of the sky.
Speaker 4: We are reverse engineering the exact thermodynamic mechanics of the
Speaker 4: universe using nothing but a few photons of light captured
Speaker 4: by a telescoot mirror.
Speaker 2: So, with all the usual suspect totally cleared from the room,
Speaker 2: with the tidal black hole shredding the binary discs the
Speaker 2: neutron nuclear bombs and the magnetic starquakes all tossed out
Speaker 2: the window. Scientists are left staring at one remaining phenomenon.
Speaker 4: The last one's standing, and this.
Speaker 2: Phenomenon checked almost all the physical boxes.
Speaker 4: Almost This brings us to the most devastatingly powerful explosions
Speaker 4: known to science since the Big Bang itself. We are
Speaker 4: talking about gamma ray bursts or GRBs.
Speaker 2: Let's formally introduce the prime suspect for a listener who
Speaker 2: might only know gamma rays as the fictional radiation that
Speaker 2: turned Bruce Banner into the Hulk. What exactly is a
Speaker 2: gamma ray burst? In a purely mechanical cosmic sense, the.
Speaker 4: Mory burst is the ultimate death scream of a massive star,
Speaker 4: or the catastrophic merger of two incredibly dense neutron stars.
Speaker 4: Let's focus on the massive star scenario, often called the collapser.
Speaker 2: Model Lapster model.
Speaker 4: Okay, when a star that is dozens of times more
Speaker 4: massive than our Sun finally runs out of nuclear fuel
Speaker 4: in its core, the outward pressure of nuclear fusion abruptly.
Speaker 3: Stops, so gravity takes over instantly.
Speaker 4: Suddenly there is nothing holding up the crushing inward weight
Speaker 4: of the star's own outer layers. The core collapses in
Speaker 4: on itself in a fraction of a second, instantly forming
Speaker 4: a newborn black hole deep inside the star.
Speaker 2: So the star is basically pregnant with a black hole
Speaker 2: that is about to eat it from the inside out.
Speaker 4: That is a gruesome, but accurate way to put it.
Speaker 4: As the rest of the star's massive envelope is collapsing inward,
Speaker 4: that newborn black hole begins to aggressively gorge on the
Speaker 4: infalling material that it chokes well. The gravitational and magnetic
Speaker 4: physics becomes so extreme that instead of swallowing everything cleanly,
Speaker 4: the black hole violently ejects a fraction of that in
Speaker 4: falling matter outward. It channels this material into two tightly focused,
Speaker 4: incredibly narrow jets that blast out from the north and
Speaker 4: south poles of the dying star at ninety nine point
Speaker 4: nine to nine percent the speed of light.
Speaker 2: So the jet actually has to punch a hole straight
Speaker 2: through the collapsing body of its own star.
Speaker 4: It acts like a cosmic drill. It drills right through
Speaker 4: the stellar envelope and erupts into open space. Within these
Speaker 4: relativistic jets, internal shockwaves where faster moving material catches up
Speaker 4: and collides with slower moving material generate a blinding flash
Speaker 4: of high energy radiation.
Speaker 3: That is your gamma ray burst exactly.
Speaker 4: They are so luminous that a single GRB lasting only
Speaker 4: a few seconds can briefly outshine the entire observable universe.
Speaker 2: Outshine the entire observable universe. Yeah, that is a scale
Speaker 2: of violence that the human brain isn't really built to comprehend.
Speaker 2: So how did the physical properties of our weird little
Speaker 2: double flash line up with the theoretical models of these
Speaker 2: ultimate cosmic explosions.
Speaker 4: Lined up eerily well, almost perfectly.
Speaker 2: Let's look at the specific matching fingerprints. First. That strange
Speaker 2: two hundred second pause, the stalling engine double flash we
Speaker 2: talked about earlier.
Speaker 4: In the world of GRBs. That is actually a known,
Speaker 4: physically documented feature. It's literally referred to in the astrophysics
Speaker 4: literature as a double burst.
Speaker 2: Wait, really, so the newborn black hole engine can stall?
Speaker 4: Yes, the central engine that newborn black hole feeding inside
Speaker 4: the collapsing star can experience a severe hiccup. The accretion
Speaker 4: disk feeding it might become temporarily disrupted by chaotic magnetic
Speaker 4: fields or irregular densities in the infalling star.
Speaker 2: Matter, so the food supply gets interrupted.
Speaker 4: Right, This disruption can literally shut off the jet production
Speaker 4: for a few minutes, causing a dark pause. Then a
Speaker 4: fresh massive clump of matter falls into the black hole.
Speaker 4: The accretion disc stabilizes and it reignites the jet, causing
Speaker 4: a second burst. It is a rare phenomenon, but it
Speaker 4: is a known GRB behavior.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the mechanical heartbeat perfectly matches a struggling black
Speaker 2: hole engine. What about the rest of the evidence. The
Speaker 2: X rays fading in.
Speaker 4: Days a perfect match. The way the X ray brightness spiked, peaked,
Speaker 4: and then dropped off incredibly rapidly perfectly mimics the typical
Speaker 4: decay curve or light curve of a gamma ray burst.
Speaker 4: Once the internal shocks of the initial explosion are over
Speaker 4: and the jet breaks.
Speaker 2: Free, and the lingering radio waves the skid marks that
Speaker 2: ruled out literally everything else on our list.
Speaker 4: That is the most satisfying correlation of all we talked
Speaker 4: about how those radio waves come from a jet plowing
Speaker 4: into interstellar space and accelerating electrons. Well, a gamma ray
Speaker 4: burst is defined by its ultrafast, ultra powerful jet.
Speaker 2: Oh, I see where this is going.
Speaker 4: As the external shockwave of that jet slams into the
Speaker 4: surrounding interstellar gas over weeks and months, it produces exactly
Speaker 4: the kind of slow fading synchrotron radio afterglow that the
Speaker 4: Einstein Probe follow up telescopes observed. Wow, the double burst heartbeat,
Speaker 4: the X ray light curve, the long term radio afterglow,
Speaker 4: it all points beautifully, flawlessly to a GRB.
Speaker 2: I can only imagine how deeply satisfying that moment in
Speaker 2: the scientific process must be for the researchers. You spend
Speaker 2: days ruling out everything else. You are staring at a
Speaker 2: massive mystery, and then finally you overlay the data on
Speaker 2: a gamma ray burst model and you find an exact match.
Speaker 2: In the physics. It has to feel like a massive victory.
Speaker 4: It really does. It is the exact moment where chaotic
Speaker 4: data suddenly snaps into a beautiful, predictable order. Science relies
Speaker 4: heavily on pattern recognition and physical modeling. When you perfectly
Speaker 4: match the curve of the fading light, the exact timing
Speaker 4: of the engine decay, and the long term presence of
Speaker 4: the radio shockwave, you feel like you finally have a
Speaker 4: solid grasp on the physical reality of what happened billions
Speaker 4: of light years away.
Speaker 2: Well, I hate to be the one that interrupt the celebration,
Speaker 2: I really do. But as we synthesize all this data,
Speaker 2: there is one massive, glaring physical paradox with calling this
Speaker 2: event a gamma ray.
Speaker 4: Burst, the defining characteristic.
Speaker 2: Itself exactly where on Earth are the gamma rays? Absolutely
Speaker 2: zero z ro gamma rays were detected by any observatory
Speaker 2: during this entire event. None, not a single photon of
Speaker 2: gamma radiation hit a detector.
Speaker 4: Which forces astrophysicists into a very uncomfortable corner.
Speaker 2: It honestly baffles me. How can you confidently publish a
Speaker 2: paper saying you found a gamma ray burst if there
Speaker 2: are no gamma rays. That is like me calling you
Speaker 2: up and saying I am standing in a torrential rainstorm,
Speaker 2: but conferring that not a single drop of water is
Speaker 2: actually hitting the ground.
Speaker 3: It's a tough sell.
Speaker 2: It completely defies the fundamental definition of the event. It
Speaker 2: makes zero logical sense.
Speaker 4: It sounds exactly like a paradox, and it is because
Speaker 4: of this missing, definitive proof the scientific community has been
Speaker 4: forced to coin a highly specific and frankly somewhat contradictory
Speaker 4: classification for this exact type of event.
Speaker 2: What do they call it?
Speaker 4: They officially refer to it as a gamma ray dark
Speaker 4: GRB like event.
Speaker 2: A gamma ray dark GRB like event. That is the
Speaker 2: scientific equivalent of shrugging your shoulders while using very big,
Speaker 2: very expensive words.
Speaker 4: It is a profounded mission of scientific caution. It acknowledges
Speaker 4: that while the mechanical behavior of the engine completely matches
Speaker 4: a GRB, the final high energy output does not match
Speaker 4: your expectations.
Speaker 2: So it's not a dead end.
Speaker 4: No, This paradox is actually where the most fascinating cutting
Speaker 4: edge astrophysics begins. If the physical engine of a gamma
Speaker 4: ray burst is running, if the core collapsed, if the
Speaker 4: black hole formed, if the jet launched, and if the
Speaker 4: subsequent X rays and radio waves are ringing out into space,
Speaker 4: but the primary gamma ray signal is missing, that implies
Speaker 4: that something physical, something mechanical, is hiding the main event
Speaker 4: from us.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the blast definitely happened, but the universe somehow
Speaker 2: put a blindfold on us. How does that happen physically?
Speaker 2: What are the mechanisms that explain where the gamma rays went.
Speaker 4: Astrophysicists have proposed three main theoretical models to explain the
Speaker 4: missing gamma rays, and each one tells us something profound
Speaker 4: about the chaotic, messy environments where these massive stars die.
Speaker 4: Let's break them down mechanically. Theory number one is the
Speaker 4: off axis to off axis.
Speaker 2: Okay, so earlier you mentioned that a GRB isn't a
Speaker 2: spherical explosion that expands equally in all directions. It's a
Speaker 2: tightly focused beam like a laser or a lighthouse, firing
Speaker 2: from the poles.
Speaker 4: Exactly because the material in that jet is moving at
Speaker 4: virtually the speed of light, extreme relativistic physics come into play.
Speaker 4: There is a phenomenon called relativistic.
Speaker 3: Beaming relativistic beaming.
Speaker 4: Because the jet is moving so fast, the Lorentz factor
Speaker 4: dictates that the vast majority of the light emitted by
Speaker 4: the particles in the jet gets heavily beamed forward, concentrated
Speaker 4: in a narrow cone pointing in exactly the direction the
Speaker 4: jet is traveling. If that incredibly narrow, highly concentrated beam
Speaker 4: happens to be pointing directly at Earth, we see a
Speaker 4: blindingly bright gannery burst.
Speaker 2: But what if it's not pointing at us. Let's go
Speaker 2: back to an earth bound analogy. If someone points a
Speaker 2: high powered, blinding, tactical flashlight directly into your eyes in
Speaker 2: a dark room, all you see is intense blinding white light.
Speaker 2: That's your direct on axis gamma ray burst. But if
Speaker 2: they turn that flashlight ninety degrees pointing it to your left,
Speaker 2: you don't get blinded at all. You don't see the
Speaker 2: beam directly.
Speaker 3: You just see the.
Speaker 2: Ambient glow of the light scattering off the dust in
Speaker 2: the air.
Speaker 4: That is precisely how an off axis jet operates. If
Speaker 4: the relativistic jet of this collapsing star was pointing away
Speaker 4: from Earth, even just by a few degrees off our
Speaker 4: line of sight, the relativistic beaming effect means we would
Speaker 4: completely miss the narrow, blinding beam of high energy gamma rays.
Speaker 2: But the jet still exists.
Speaker 4: It still exists, It still slams into the surrounding interstellar
Speaker 4: gas and creates an expanding external shockwave. As that shockwave
Speaker 4: slows down and expands laterally in all directions, it creates
Speaker 4: the ambient glow, the broader X rays, and the slow
Speaker 4: fading radio waves.
Speaker 2: We completely missed the primary high speed bullet, but we
Speaker 2: caught the expanding ripple in the air.
Speaker 4: That's a perfect way to visualize it.
Speaker 2: I love that it feels like a very elegant solution.
Speaker 2: It doesn't require us to invent any weird new physics
Speaker 2: or rewrite the textbooks. It just requires a slightly bad
Speaker 2: viewing angle from Earth. So what is theory number two?
Speaker 4: Theory number two is significantly more violent and messy. It
Speaker 4: relies heavily on the physical structure of the dying star itself.
Speaker 4: It is called the choked jet model.
Speaker 2: A choked jet that pains a very vivid, suffocating picture.
Speaker 4: Remember the internal sequence of events we discussed. The core collapses,
Speaker 4: the black hole forms in the center, and it tries
Speaker 4: to punch a relativistic jet of energy straight outward through
Speaker 4: the outer layers of the dying star.
Speaker 2: Right the cosmic droll.
Speaker 4: But stars are not uniform. What if the progenitor star
Speaker 4: is a massive wolf rate star with an incredibly dense,
Speaker 4: thick outer envelope of gas. What if the physical density
Speaker 4: of the star is simply too much for the jet
Speaker 4: to penetrate.
Speaker 2: The jet literally gets stuck inside the star.
Speaker 4: Exactly the explosion occurs. The massive release of gravitational energy
Speaker 4: happens deep inside the core and the jet la launch,
Speaker 4: but as it drills outward, it encounters too much resistance.
Speaker 4: The jet of energy simply fails to fully punch through
Speaker 4: and break out of the dense surrounding material of the
Speaker 4: stellar envelope.
Speaker 2: It just stalls out.
Speaker 4: It rams into the star's massive outer layers, dumps all
Speaker 4: of its incredible kinetic energy into that gas, and effectively
Speaker 4: smothers itself. The jet stalls, it chokes.
Speaker 2: So it's like lighting a powerful firecracker inside a solid
Speaker 2: bowling ball. The explosion absolutely happens. The chemical energy is released,
Speaker 2: but it never breaches the surface. It just violently vibrates
Speaker 2: and heats up the ball from the inside.
Speaker 4: That is a fantastic mechanical analogy. Because the jet never
Speaker 4: breaks free into open space, the internal shocks that normally
Speaker 4: produce those high energy relativistic gamma rays are never allowed
Speaker 4: to form in the open The gamma rays are trapped
Speaker 4: and absorbed.
Speaker 2: The energy has to go somewhere, right.
Speaker 4: Yes, the immense heat and pressure from that failed choked
Speaker 4: jet still managed to superheat the outer layers of the
Speaker 4: star creating a massive cocoon of energy. When that cocoon
Speaker 4: finally bulges and breaches the surface, it releases a massive
Speaker 4: slower belch of thermal X rays, and as the outer
Speaker 4: layers of the star slowly expand and eventually collide with
Speaker 4: interstellar gas, you still get a radio afterglow.
Speaker 2: Wow. So an entire massive explosion happened. The black hole
Speaker 2: fired its ultimate weapon, and the star essentially swallowed it.
Speaker 1: Hoole.
Speaker 2: The star contained its own destruction just long enough to
Speaker 2: hide the gamma rays.
Speaker 4: It's a terrifying thought that physically it works.
Speaker 2: That is incredible. That brings us to theory number three,
Speaker 2: which sounds like the absolute messiest option of all the
Speaker 2: theoretical models, the dirty fireball.
Speaker 4: The dirty fireball theory is a fascinating variation where the
Speaker 4: jet does actually manage to break out of the star.
Speaker 4: It doesn't choke, It successfully punches through the envelope.
Speaker 2: Okay, so it gets that.
Speaker 4: But instead of beating a clean, pure beam of highly
Speaker 4: accelerated plasma, the jet is overwhelmingly contaminated.
Speaker 2: Contaminated by what space is a vacuum.
Speaker 4: Contaminated by the dying star itself. This is a concept
Speaker 4: known in astrophysics as baryon loading. As the jet was
Speaker 4: violently drilling its way out from the core, it scraped
Speaker 4: against the sides of the star. It picked up too
Speaker 4: much extra cosmic material, too many heavy baryons, specifically protons
Speaker 4: and neutrons, from the dying stars envelope, like.
Speaker 2: A snowplow picking up too much snow.
Speaker 4: Exactly, it got physically weighed down by the mass of
Speaker 4: its own host. It was loaded with too much dirt.
Speaker 2: So the engine works perfectly. It broke free into space,
Speaker 2: but it was just hauling way too much physical garbage
Speaker 2: to run efficiently. Mass is the enemy of.
Speaker 4: Speed, precisely to produce high energy gamma rays, the particles
Speaker 4: within the jet need to be traveling incredibly close to
Speaker 4: the speed of light highly relativistic speeds, so that when
Speaker 4: they collide in internal shock waves they generate extreme high
Speaker 4: energy photons.
Speaker 2: So they can't because they're too heavy.
Speaker 4: Right, If the jet is heavily burdened with all this heavy,
Speaker 4: dirty baryonic matter, the physics of momentum dictate that it
Speaker 4: simply cannot accelerate to those ultra relativistic speeds. The extra
Speaker 4: mass acts like a massive anchor.
Speaker 2: So what do we see.
Speaker 4: The jet still blasts out into space, It still produces
Speaker 4: a massive external shock wave that generates the X rays
Speaker 4: and the weeks of radio waves, but the excess dirt
Speaker 4: dampens the internal speed, effectively swallowing its own capacity to
Speaker 4: produce a clean gamma ray output. The cosmic fire is burning,
Speaker 4: but it's completely choked with heavy soot.
Speaker 2: An off axis jet missing us by a few degrees,
Speaker 2: a jet suffocating inside the dense envelop of its own star,
Speaker 2: or a dirty fireball weighed down by the heavy debris
Speaker 2: of its own creation. It is genuinely fascinating how these
Speaker 2: three highly mechanical theories completely reshape how we as humans
Speaker 2: think about space.
Speaker 4: It really changes the perspective we.
Speaker 2: Are so used to seeing these beautiful, clean, sterile images
Speaker 2: from the James Weber Hubble telescopes, the perfect mathematical spiral galaxies,
Speaker 2: the pristine glowing nebulas. But these theories tell us that
Speaker 2: on a mechanical physical level, the universe is incredibly chaotic, messy,
Speaker 2: and fundamentally inefficient.
Speaker 4: It's far from perfect.
Speaker 2: Explosions don't happen in a sterile vacuum. They have to
Speaker 2: fight through thick gas, heavy dust, and the crushing gravity
Speaker 2: of their own environments.
Speaker 4: It is an incredibly turbulent, almost violent environment. And realizing
Speaker 4: this is a paradigm shift for astrophysicists, we are beginning
Speaker 4: to understand that the clean, perfectly brilliant gamma ray bursts
Speaker 4: we've been observing and classifying for decades might actually be
Speaker 4: the extreme exception rather than the rule.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, really.
Speaker 4: Yeah, They might just be the lucky ones, the rare
Speaker 4: events that managed to fire perfectly straight down the barrel
Speaker 4: without hitting any dense substructions or scraping off too much
Speaker 4: buryonic dirt.
Speaker 2: Which means there could be millions of dirty, choked or
Speaker 2: off axis explosions happening all the time that we just
Speaker 2: entirely miss because they don't produce the blinding gamma ray
Speaker 2: flash we traditionally.
Speaker 4: Look for exactly. And that profound realization brings us back
Speaker 4: to the ultimate, somewhat conservative conclusion that the researchers had
Speaker 4: to arrive at when formally classifying.
Speaker 2: The event, right because without the definitive gamma ray, no
Speaker 2: matter how perfectly the X ray curve or the radio
Speaker 2: skid marks match the models, they can't put a stamp
Speaker 2: of one hundred percent certainty on it. The scientific method
Speaker 2: demands proof. So what is the final official classification they
Speaker 2: settled on in the literature.
Speaker 4: Because they cannot firmly establish a pure GRB origin with
Speaker 4: the current multi wavelength of data, they simply can't prove
Speaker 4: definitively which of those three theories is the correct physical mechanism,
Speaker 4: or if it's something else entirely new that we haven't
Speaker 4: theorized yet. They classify it very broadly, based only on
Speaker 4: the observable facts, which are They call it an extragalactic
Speaker 4: fast X ray transient.
Speaker 2: Extragalactic meaning the physics confirm it happened far outside our
Speaker 2: own Milky Way galaxy, deep in the Cosmos. Fast because
Speaker 2: the engine stalled and faded in a matter of days.
Speaker 2: X ray transient because that high energy burst was the
Speaker 2: primary physical signal we caught. It is a very literal,
Speaker 2: very cautious name.
Speaker 4: It is the absolute essence of scientific caution. You state
Speaker 4: exactly what the physical data proves, and absolutely nothing more.
Speaker 4: But the broader implications of this highly cautious classification are staggering.
Speaker 4: Oh so it proves definitively that faint, quirky heavily obscured
Speaker 4: events like this are incredibly easy to miss. If you
Speaker 4: think about the sheer volumetric scale of space out there,
Speaker 4: it is overwhelming. These subtle gamma ray dark flashes, these
Speaker 4: choked and dirty explosions, are constantly being drowned out and
Speaker 4: overshattered by the brighter, more obvious, clean cosmic explosions.
Speaker 2: It's like trying to listen to someone whisper a complex
Speaker 2: secret to you while you are standing in the middle
Speaker 2: of a heavy metal concert. If you aren't paying exact, undivided,
Speaker 2: highly calibrated attention to that specific frequency, you are never
Speaker 2: ever going to hear it. The noise of the universe
Speaker 2: drowns it out.
Speaker 4: And this is exactly where we have to focus on
Speaker 4: the absolutely vital role of observational technology and modern discovery.
Speaker 4: This entire physical mystery, this entire peeling back of the
Speaker 4: curtain on the messy, dirty universe, is entirely reliant on
Speaker 4: the physical tools we build.
Speaker 3: And launch into orbit, like the Einstein probe.
Speaker 4: Yes without highly sensitive specialized instruments like the Einstein Probe,
Speaker 4: specifically waiting in the dark, staring, unblinking through lobster eye
Speaker 4: optics looking for these faint X ray whispers. We would
Speaker 4: never have even known this event happened. It would have
Speaker 4: vanished into the void forever.
Speaker 2: And even if the probe had seen the initial flash,
Speaker 2: if humanity hadn't built the infrastructure to instantly trigger a massive,
Speaker 2: immediate multi wavelength follow up from other optical and radio
Speaker 2: telescopes across the planet, we wouldn't have any of the
Speaker 2: physical clues.
Speaker 4: We'd be blind.
Speaker 2: We wouldn't know about the lingering synchrotron radio waves. We
Speaker 2: wouldn't know about the dust extinction blocking the optical light.
Speaker 2: We wouldn't be able to calculate thermodynamics to rule out
Speaker 2: a neutron star explosion. We would just have a single,
Speaker 2: meaningless blip on a computer screen and zero context to
Speaker 2: understand it.
Speaker 4: The synergy between space based wide field monitors and ground
Speaker 4: based rapid response telescopes is the only physical wave to
Speaker 4: catch these fleeting transient events. EP two four zero three
Speaker 4: oh five A proves beyond a shadow of a doubt
Speaker 4: that there is an entire vast spectrum of quiet violence
Speaker 4: happening in the universe. We're only just now finally building
Speaker 4: the mechanical eyes sensitive enough to see the hidden machinery
Speaker 4: of the cosmos.
Speaker 2: So we've gone from a completely mysterious invisible double flash
Speaker 2: on a random Tuesday in March through a massive international
Speaker 2: telescope scramble. We've interrogated the physics of black holes, We've
Speaker 2: dismantled the thermodynamics of neutron star bombs, and we've completely
Speaker 2: thrown out the mechanics of magnetic starquakes.
Speaker 4: We covered a lot of ground, we really.
Speaker 2: Did, and we've landed on a massive physical paradox. A
Speaker 2: star destroying explosion weighed down by its own debris, or
Speaker 2: an incredibly violent beam of relativistic light that just happened
Speaker 2: to miss Earth by a few degrees, a dirty fireball
Speaker 2: burning in the dark.
Speaker 4: It is a truly remarkable journey from a single point
Speaker 4: of X ray data to a profound realization about the complex, obscured,
Speaker 4: and messy nature of cosmic deaths. It serves as a
Speaker 4: reminder that every single time we look at the universe
Speaker 4: with a slightly different technological lens, whether it's X ray, infrared,
Speaker 4: or radio, it reveals a completely new layer of physical
Speaker 4: complexity that our previous models simply hadn't anticipated.
Speaker 2: And that leaves us with a pretty wild, slightly unsettling,
Speaker 2: lingering question to mull Over, if an incredibly advanced, dedicated,
Speaker 2: state of the arts based telescope like the Einstein Probe
Speaker 2: just barely managed to catch this faint, anomalous, dust obscure
Speaker 2: double flash, what else is flashing in the dark right now?
Speaker 4: It's a great question.
Speaker 2: How many entirely new, unclassified classes of violent cosmic phenomena
Speaker 2: are playing out in the space between the stars at
Speaker 2: this exact moment, just waiting for us to invent the
Speaker 2: right kind of eyes to see them.
Speaker 3: The universe isn't just full of things we don't understand.
Speaker 2: It is absolutely overflowing with complex physical mechanics we haven't
Speaker 2: even noticed yet. And the next time you were standing
Speaker 2: outside staring up at that quiet, dark night sky, just
Speaker 2: remember you are completely blind to the soviolent, invisible violence
Speaker 2: happening right above your head,