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: So I want you to just imagine for a second,
Speaker 2: standing outside on a perfectly clear, incredibly dark night. You know,
Speaker 2: you are looking up at the sky, tracing those familiar constellations,
Speaker 2: maybe even spotting a galaxy like Andromeda as this faint,
Speaker 2: fuzzy smudge against the black right.
Speaker 3: Just a quiet night under the stars exactly.
Speaker 2: But now I want you to imagine that within one
Speaker 2: of those distant, quiet galaxies, a star dies. And this
Speaker 2: isn't your standard stellar death. I want you to picture
Speaker 2: a detonation so inconceivably bright that it outshines almost supernovae
Speaker 2: by a factor of ten, maybe even one.
Speaker 3: Hundred, oh easily one hundred in some cases.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, And it is so luminous that for a
Speaker 2: brief window in cosmic time, it completely dominates the night
Speaker 2: sky of its host galaxy literally outshining billions of other
Speaker 2: mature stars combined.
Speaker 3: It's honestly a scale of energy release that operates at
Speaker 3: the absolute edge of physical laws. I mean, when we
Speaker 3: discuss these specific events, we're looking at something that fundamentally
Speaker 3: rewrites the thermodynamics and really the geometry of its surrounding neighborhood.
Speaker 2: It's just mind bending. And today our mission is to
Speaker 2: solve a sixteen year old cosmic cold case. We are
Speaker 2: going to witness the birth of a terrifyingly powerful stellar
Speaker 2: engine called a magnetar and discover how a century old
Speaker 2: theory by Albert Einstein provided the ultimate key to understanding
Speaker 2: a billion light year distant explosion.
Speaker 3: It really is one of the most baffling mysteries of
Speaker 3: the twenty first century.
Speaker 2: It really is. Okay, let's unpack this, because since they
Speaker 2: were first identified in the early two thousands, these ultra
Speaker 2: bright explosions, what astronomers call superluminous supernovae, have been a
Speaker 2: massive thorn in the side of stellar physicists.
Speaker 3: A huge thorn. They completely defied the standard energy budget.
Speaker 2: Right. The core anomaly is basically this, why do these
Speaker 2: specific explosions stay so intensely bright for so long, well
Speaker 2: after the star's nuclear fuel is gone, and that initial
Speaker 2: kinetic stock wave has just dissipated exactly.
Speaker 3: The established mechanics of core collapse simply could not account
Speaker 3: for the sheer duration and the intensity of that lingering light.
Speaker 3: I mean, it was as if someone had pulled the
Speaker 3: plug on a massive city grid, but instead of the
Speaker 3: lights fading out, the entire infrastructure just kept glowing at
Speaker 3: maximum intensity.
Speaker 2: For months, which makes no sense. So to really grasp
Speaker 2: why superlimited supernovae broke the energy models in the early
Speaker 2: two thousands, we have to look closely at the math
Speaker 2: of a stellar explosion. I think most of you listening
Speaker 2: are already familiar with the baseline physics.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: A massive star hits the iron limit, fusion stops, gravity winds,
Speaker 2: the core collapses into a neutron star or black coal,
Speaker 2: and the rebound shockwave blasts the outer layers into space.
Speaker 3: That is the standard mechanism, yes, right, And.
Speaker 2: We know that the lingering glow of a normal supernova
Speaker 2: is primarily powered by the radioactive decay of heavy elements
Speaker 2: synthesized in that blast, specifically nickel fifty six decaying into
Speaker 2: cobalt fifty six and then into iron fifty six.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we can calculate exactly how much light a
Speaker 3: given mass of nickel fifty six will produce as it decays.
Speaker 3: It's very well understood.
Speaker 2: Because it's just radioactive half life right.
Speaker 3: Precisely, A typical core collapse supernova might forge, say a
Speaker 3: fraction of a solar mass of nickel fifty six, which
Speaker 3: gives you a very predictable light curve. The light rises
Speaker 3: as the ejecta expands and becomes transparent enough for the
Speaker 3: trapped radiation to escape.
Speaker 2: It hits a peak, and then it fades with smoothly.
Speaker 3: Right, it follows a very smooth, mathematically precise exponential decline
Speaker 3: dictated by the half life of those isotopes.
Speaker 2: But wait, if we see a super luminous supernova that
Speaker 2: is ten times brighter, couldn't the simple explanation just be
Speaker 2: that while the star was exceptionally massive and therefore it
Speaker 2: just forged ten times as much nickel fifty six during
Speaker 2: the explosion. Like, why did astrophysicists immediately assume there was
Speaker 2: a mystery to solve.
Speaker 3: It comes down to the fundamental limits of nuclear synthesis
Speaker 3: to power the like curves we were seeing in these
Speaker 3: superlomitous events, especially the hydrogen pore ones and as Type
Speaker 3: I superlumined supernovae, you would need to synthesize an absurd
Speaker 3: amount of nickel fifty six.
Speaker 2: How absurd are we talking?
Speaker 3: In some cases the calculation showed you would need five,
Speaker 3: maybe even ten solar masses of pure radioactive nickel.
Speaker 2: Wait, really, let me stop you there, because the sheer
Speaker 2: physics of that seems impossible. You're saying the math required
Speaker 2: the star to produce more nickel than the entire mass
Speaker 2: of the core that collapsed in the first place.
Speaker 3: That is the exact core of the issue. Yeah, a
Speaker 3: collapsing star simply cannot convert that much of its mass
Speaker 3: into nickel fifty six. The thermodynamics don't.
Speaker 2: Allow for it, right, It would just blow itself apart exactly.
Speaker 3: The core would become unstable, and pair instability might rip
Speaker 3: the star apart entirely in a different kind of explosion,
Speaker 3: but it wouldn't leave the remnants we were observing. So
Speaker 3: you have a light curve peaking at ten to the
Speaker 3: forty four ergs per second, staying there for one hundred days,
Speaker 3: and the radioactive decay model completely fails. To provide that.
Speaker 2: Energy because you cannot get something from nothing, No, you can't.
Speaker 3: The initial shockwave is gone, the radioactive decay is entirely insufficient. Therefore,
Speaker 3: something else must be pumping extra energy into the expanding
Speaker 3: debris field.
Speaker 2: I was trying to visualize the mechanics of this, and
Speaker 2: I want you, the listener, to picture the setup. If
Speaker 2: the fuel is gone, how is the fire still burning.
Speaker 2: Imagine you have a heavy duty flashlight. You switch it on,
Speaker 2: it's blindingly bright. Then you take the battery pack completely out,
Speaker 2: but instead of the light going dark, the bulb suddenly
Speaker 2: shines ten times brighter and stays that way for months.
Speaker 3: That is a great analogy.
Speaker 2: You would immediately realize there has to be a hidden
Speaker 2: power source somewhere in the circuitry that you just can't see.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: There has to be a secondary battery.
Speaker 3: And that is exactly where the astrophysics community landed. They
Speaker 3: deduced that the initial collapse and explosion could not be
Speaker 3: the end of the stellar death process. The only viable
Speaker 3: explanation for a superluminous supernova was the existence of a
Speaker 3: hidden engine. A hidden engine, Yeah, something active buried deep
Speaker 3: within the expanding cloud of stellar debris continuously injecting vast
Speaker 3: amounts of kinetic or electromagnetic energy into the wreckage.
Speaker 2: But finding that engine is a logistical nightmare, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: the debris field of a supernova isn't just a wisp
Speaker 2: of smoke. You are looking at several solar masses of
Speaker 2: plasma and heavy elements expanding outward at ten thousand kilometers
Speaker 2: per second. It is optically thick. It is completely opaque.
Speaker 3: It is much denser than any material we interact with
Speaker 3: on a daily basis. The photons generated at the center,
Speaker 3: they take weeks just to scatter their way out through
Speaker 3: the expanding.
Speaker 2: Ejecta like bouncing around inside a pinmall machine.
Speaker 3: Exactly a process governed by radiative diffusion. So whatever this
Speaker 3: hidden engine was, it was entirely obscured from our telescopes.
Speaker 3: We could measure the effect of the engine that sustained
Speaker 3: unnatural luminosity, but we couldn't peer through the glowing plasma
Speaker 3: curtain to see the machinery actually operating at the center.
Speaker 2: So it's basically a locked room mystery. But the room
Speaker 2: is a billion light years across, filled with superheated plasma
Speaker 2: and exploding.
Speaker 3: A very chaotic locked room. Right.
Speaker 2: So to figure out what this hidden engine actually was,
Speaker 2: we have to rewind the timeline to a bold theoretical
Speaker 2: prediction made back in twenty ten.
Speaker 3: Yes, in twenty ten, Dan Cosson, a theoretical atrophysicist at
Speaker 3: UC Berkeley, along with Lars Bilsten, put forward a very
Speaker 3: specific hydrodynamic model. And this concept was actually being developed
Speaker 3: independently and concurrently by Stanford Woosley at UC Santa Cruz.
Speaker 2: Right, great minds thinking alike exactly.
Speaker 3: They looked at the energy deficit of these superluminous supernobe
Speaker 3: and hypothesized that the core of the star hadn't just
Speaker 3: collapsed into a standard quiet neutron star. They proposed that
Speaker 3: the core colapse had birthed something far more extreme, which
Speaker 3: is a magnetar.
Speaker 2: A magnetar. Okay, we know that when a massive star's
Speaker 2: core collapses, if it doesn't cross the Tumann Oppenheimer Wolcoff
Speaker 2: mass limit to become a black hole, it becomes a
Speaker 2: neutron star, basically a sphere of degenerate neutron matter. But Kayson,
Speaker 2: Bilston and Woosley, we're talking about a very specific, rare
Speaker 2: subclass of neutron star. Let's break down the anatomy of
Speaker 2: this monster, because the physical parameters required by their twenty
Speaker 2: ten model are just staggering.
Speaker 3: They really are. So to understand the extreme nature of
Speaker 3: a magnetar, you first have to look at the baseline
Speaker 3: of a standard neutron star. When that iron core collapses,
Speaker 3: gravity is so intense that it overcomes electron degeneracy pressure.
Speaker 3: It literally crushes electrons and protons together to form neutrons.
Speaker 2: Just mashing them into a pace.
Speaker 3: Pretty much an entire stellar core. Roughly the mass of
Speaker 3: our Sun gets compressed into a sphere with a radius
Speaker 3: of only about ten to twelve kilometers.
Speaker 2: So ten miles across. I want you to really picture
Speaker 2: that density. You could fit it inside the city limits
Speaker 2: of most major metropolitan areas, but it contains the mass
Speaker 2: of an entire sun. Like a single sugar cube sized
Speaker 2: chunk of this material would weigh hundreds of billions of
Speaker 2: tons on Earth.
Speaker 3: The density is analogous to the nucleus of an atom,
Speaker 3: just scaled up to the size of a city. Now,
Speaker 3: because of the conservation of angular momentum, you know the
Speaker 3: classic figure skater pulling their arms into spin faster that
Speaker 3: incredibly dense fhere is going to be.
Speaker 2: Rotating right speeds up as it shrinks exactly.
Speaker 3: Most newborn neutron stars spin quite fast, maybe a few
Speaker 3: dozen times a second, and they possess strong magnetic fields.
Speaker 3: We observe those as.
Speaker 2: Pulsars, But a magnetar takes those parameters and dials them
Speaker 2: up to an almost incomprehensible degree. How does a standard
Speaker 2: neutron star become a magnetar during that initial collapse.
Speaker 3: It requires a perfect storm of initial conditions. The progenitor
Speaker 3: star likely needs to have a rapidly rotating core and
Speaker 3: a pre existing magnetic field. During the split second of
Speaker 3: the core collapse, you have incredibly violent convection currents churning
Speaker 3: inside the proto neutron star.
Speaker 2: It's boiling inside.
Speaker 3: Right, boiling violently, and if the rotation is fast enough,
Speaker 3: those convective currents combined with the rotation to create a
Speaker 3: runaway dynamo effect. This dynamo amplifies the magnetic field exponentially
Speaker 3: before the star even has a chance to fully cool
Speaker 3: and settle.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: So instead of standard pulsar with a magnetic field of
Speaker 3: say ten to the twelve gaals, which is already billions
Speaker 3: of times stronger than the Earth, you get a magnetar.
Speaker 3: A magnetar's magnetic field operates in the range of ten
Speaker 3: to fourteen to the ten of the fifteen gas that
Speaker 3: it is one hundred to one thousand times stronger than
Speaker 3: a typical pulsar.
Speaker 2: I just I don't think the human brain is wired
Speaker 2: to intuitively understand a magnetic field of ten to the
Speaker 2: fifteen gus. If you are somehow able to survive the
Speaker 2: radiation and approach within one thousand miles of a magnetar,
Speaker 2: what does a magnetic field of that magnitude physically due
Speaker 2: to ordinary matter To a person?
Speaker 3: It entirely overrides the electromagnetic forces that hold matter together.
Speaker 3: A field that strong physically warps the electron orbitals of atoms.
Speaker 3: Instead of spherical electron clouds, the magnetic field stretches the
Speaker 3: atoms into long, thin, needle like cylinders beetles.
Speaker 2: That sounds horrifying.
Speaker 3: It would completely dissolve the molecular bonds of your body.
Speaker 3: The chemistry that makes life or even solid objects possible,
Speaker 3: just ceases to function. The magnetic field becomes a dominant
Speaker 3: physical force, rivaling gravity and the strong nuclear force in
Speaker 3: the immediate vicinity of the crust.
Speaker 2: Okay, so Casson's twenty ten model places this ten mile
Speaker 2: wide ball of ultra dense matterwarping neutrons at the center
Speaker 2: of the supernova. But a strong magnetic field alone doesn't
Speaker 2: generate light right to power the supernova. This magnetar has
Speaker 2: to be moving. How fast did their math require this
Speaker 2: object to spin? To account for the energy deficit we
Speaker 2: talked about earlier.
Speaker 3: To match the luminosity of the brightest supernova, the twenty
Speaker 3: ten models required the newborn magnetar to be spinning at
Speaker 3: near breakup velocity. We're talking about rotational period of one
Speaker 3: to five millisecond milliseconds. Yes, that means this city size
Speaker 3: object is completing a full rotation roughly one thousand times
Speaker 3: every single second.
Speaker 2: Let's just push on that for a second. An object
Speaker 2: with the mass of a sun spinning one thousand times
Speaker 2: a second the equator is moving at a significant fraction
Speaker 2: of the speed of light. The centrifugal forces trying to
Speaker 2: rip the star apart must be fighting a titanic war
Speaker 2: against its own gravity.
Speaker 3: And gravity only barely wins. But it's exactly that tension
Speaker 3: that immense reservoir of rotational kinetic energy that serves as
Speaker 3: the hidden engine.
Speaker 2: Ah see, here's.
Speaker 3: How the mechanism actually powers the supernova. You have this
Speaker 3: newly formed magnetar at the exact center of the expanding
Speaker 3: debris field is spinning one thousand times a second. As
Speaker 3: it rotates, that ten to the fifteen gaals magnetic field
Speaker 3: whips around with it.
Speaker 2: So you have a magnetic field tearing through the immediate
Speaker 2: surrounding space at relativistic speeds.
Speaker 3: Yes, it a rotating magnetic field generates an intense electric field.
Speaker 3: This extracts charged particles from the surface of the neutron
Speaker 3: star and accelerates them to near the speed of light,
Speaker 3: creating this massive outflow of energy called a pulsar wind.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: And this highly energized wind of particles in radiation just
Speaker 3: slams violently into the inner wall of the expanding supernova ejecta.
Speaker 2: So instead of the debris fiel just expanding outward and
Speaker 2: cooling adaabatically into the dark, it is constantly being superheated
Speaker 2: from the inside by this relativistic particle wind.
Speaker 3: That is the precise mechanism. The continuous injection of energy
Speaker 3: from the magnetar's wind heats the surrounding plasma. This process,
Speaker 3: known as magnetic dipole radiation, converts the rotational spin energy
Speaker 3: of the neutron star into thermal energy in the ejecta.
Speaker 3: This is what keeps the plasma glowing white hot entirely,
Speaker 3: solving that energy deficit problem incredible. The magnetar basically acts
Speaker 3: as an unseen dynamo, slowly spinning down over weeks and months,
Speaker 3: transferring its rotational energy into the light we see.
Speaker 2: But wait, I have a question about the timeline here.
Speaker 2: If you have a magnetic field that is one hundred
Speaker 2: to one thousand times stronger than a normal pulse or
Speaker 2: the magnetic breaking effect must be immense. Doesn't that intense
Speaker 2: field act like a massive friction break, causing the magnetar
Speaker 2: to spin down and lose its energy almost immediately. How
Speaker 2: does it sustain the glow for hundreds of days.
Speaker 3: That is a fantastic point, and it's exactly why the
Speaker 3: math works so perfectly for a superluminous supernovae. You are right,
Speaker 3: magnetic breaking is severe. A normal pulsar might spin for
Speaker 3: millions of years, but a magnetar, because its field is
Speaker 3: so strong, sheds its rotational energy very quickly. The spin
Speaker 3: down time scale for a magnetar with a millisecond period
Speaker 3: and a ten to the fourteen gus field is on
Speaker 3: the order of weeks to months.
Speaker 2: Oh and riaks. Two months is exactly the duration of
Speaker 2: a superluminous supernova light curve.
Speaker 3: Yes, the rate at which the magnetar hits the brakes
Speaker 3: and dumps its energy perfectly matches the time scale required
Speaker 3: to keep the supernova bright. If it's spun down in seconds,
Speaker 3: you just get a brief gamma ray burst. If it's
Speaker 3: spun down over centuries, the energy injection will be too
Speaker 3: slow to outshine an normal supernova. The magnetar hits the
Speaker 3: absolute physical sweet.
Speaker 2: Spot is just a breathtakingly elegant theory.
Speaker 3: What's fascinating here is how Dan Kasm viewed his own model.
Speaker 3: He noted that for years this magnetar engine concept felt
Speaker 3: almost like a theorist.
Speaker 2: Magic trick, because they were essentially inventing an invisible machine
Speaker 2: just to balance their equations.
Speaker 3: To a degree. Yes, it was mathematically robust, but observationally frustrating.
Speaker 3: Theorists were essentially saying, we have this giant, unexplained luminosity
Speaker 3: we will solve it by hiding a phenomenally powerful, totally
Speaker 3: unobservable engine behind the thickest layers of stellar debris in
Speaker 3: the universe. Very convenient, right, the highly natural explanation. But
Speaker 3: because the ejecta is so optically thick thanks to Thompson's
Speaker 3: scattering of photons off free electrons in the plasma, yeah,
Speaker 3: there was no direct way to look inside and verify
Speaker 3: the engine's existence.
Speaker 2: So they were staring at the glowing curtain, mathematically proving
Speaker 2: that a wizard must be pulling the levers behind it,
Speaker 2: but on it able to actually open the curtain exactly.
Speaker 2: And in astrophysics, a beautiful mathematical model is just a
Speaker 2: theory until the universe gives you proof. They had to
Speaker 2: wait sixteen years for that proof. The theory was published
Speaker 2: in twenty ten, and the definitive proof finally arrived in
Speaker 2: December twenty twenty four. It did, but when it did,
Speaker 2: it didn't just give us a blurry glimpse of the engine.
Speaker 2: It laid bare the exact mechanical workings of the magic trick.
Speaker 3: It really did, and the data came from a very specific,
Speaker 3: highly unusual stellar explosion designated SN twenty twenty four A five.
Speaker 2: Let's look at the observational logistics of SN twenty twenty
Speaker 2: four A five. Because the scale is staggering, this event
Speaker 2: wasn't happening in our galactic neighborhood. The host galaxy for
Speaker 2: this supernova is located approximately one billion light years from Earth.
Speaker 3: To put that immense distance into context, the photons we
Speaker 3: analyzed from SN twenty twenty four to five began their
Speaker 3: journey across the universe a billion years ago, long before
Speaker 3: the first multicellular organisms even evolved in Earth's oceans. This
Speaker 3: massive star exhausted its fuel and collapsed.
Speaker 2: That is just on inspiring to think about.
Speaker 3: Is that light traveled through the expanding vacuum of intergalactic
Speaker 3: space completely undisturbed until it finally struck the mirrors of
Speaker 3: our telescopes in late twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Four, and astronomers were uniquely prepared to catch it thanks
Speaker 2: to the Los Cumber's Observatory. For those who aren't familiar,
Speaker 2: Lost Cumber's isn't just a single telescope on a mountain.
Speaker 2: It is a globally distributed, interconnected network of robotic telescopes.
Speaker 2: They have twenty seven instruments placed strategically across different longitudes
Speaker 2: and hemispheres.
Speaker 3: The geographic distribution is the key to their success. Historically,
Speaker 3: if you wanted to monitor a supernova, you were limited
Speaker 3: by the Earth's rotation. The sun comes up, your observation
Speaker 3: window closes and you have.
Speaker 2: To wait for nightfall, and in that twelve hour gap,
Speaker 2: crucial data could be lost.
Speaker 3: Exactly Furthermore, you are at the mercy of local weather.
Speaker 3: If it rains for a week, you miss a massive
Speaker 3: chunk of a light curve.
Speaker 2: But with Las Cumbres, the sun never rises on their network.
Speaker 3: Precisely as don aro Wich is a telescope in Hawaii,
Speaker 3: the system automatically hands off the observation to a telescope
Speaker 3: in Australia, and then to South Africa and then to Chile.
Speaker 3: It provides continuous, unbroken surveillance of a target. They can
Speaker 3: stare at a single point in the sky relentlessly, and
Speaker 3: for SN twenty twenty four or five, they attracted continuously
Speaker 3: for more than two hundred days.
Speaker 2: That continuous cadence is what cracked the case, because when
Speaker 2: you map out the brightness over time creating that light curve,
Speaker 2: you need high resolution data to spot anomalies.
Speaker 3: R you need to see every little dip and spike.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And for the first month and a half SN
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four have looked like a fairly standard, though
Speaker 2: extremely bright, superluminous supernova. It surged in brightness, hit its
Speaker 2: peak luminosity, and started its long slow decline. But then
Speaker 2: about fifty days after peak brightness, the data did something bizarre.
Speaker 3: Graduate student Joseph Ferra, operating out of UC Santa Barbara
Speaker 3: and the Lost Coomber's Observatory, along with senior astronomer Andy Howell.
Speaker 3: They were analyzing the photometric data and they noticed that
Speaker 3: the fading like curve wasn't smooth. The exponential decay was
Speaker 3: being interrupted.
Speaker 2: It wasn't just a gentle slope downward.
Speaker 3: No, it wasn't. Instead of steadily fading the luminosity, the
Speaker 3: explosion suddenly spiked, reached a mini peak, and then fell
Speaker 3: back down. And then a few weeks later it spiked again, peaked,
Speaker 3: and fell. It repeated this pattern, creating highly distinct, measurable
Speaker 3: bumps in the light curve.
Speaker 2: Okay, I want to push on the data quality here.
Speaker 2: When you are looking at a signal from a billion
Speaker 2: light years away, the signal to noise ratio has to
Speaker 2: be challenging. How did they know these bumps weren't just
Speaker 2: instrumental errors or atmospheric interference or just you know, noise
Speaker 2: in the CCD cameras.
Speaker 3: The last cumbers pipeline is incredibly rigorous about characterizing noise.
Speaker 3: Because they have multiple telescopes observing the same event, they
Speaker 3: can cross correlate. Oh that makes sense, right If a
Speaker 3: telescope in Chili sees a bump, but a telescope in
Speaker 3: Australia observing at the same time, doesn't you know it's
Speaker 3: a local artifact. But these bumps were consistent across the
Speaker 3: entire network. They were statistically robust, high sigma deviations from
Speaker 3: the expected decay curve. The supernova was physically flashing.
Speaker 2: Brighter, and looking at the data, they didn't just record
Speaker 2: one or two flashes. They recorded four distinct bumps in
Speaker 2: the light curve over a period of several weeks. Now,
Speaker 2: the absolute key to unlocking this mystery lies in the
Speaker 2: timing of those four bumps. I want you to visualize
Speaker 2: the spacing time interval between the first bump and the
Speaker 2: second bump was a certain number of days, but the
Speaker 2: time between the second and third bump was noticeably shorter, Yes,
Speaker 2: and the time between the third and fourth bump was shorter. Still,
Speaker 2: the intervals between the brightness spikes were progressively decreasing.
Speaker 3: The frequency of the fluctuations was accelerating.
Speaker 2: Joseph Farah used a brilliant analogy to describe this accelerating frequency.
Speaker 2: He compared the pattern to the rising pitch of a
Speaker 2: bird's chirp. If you imagine a bird calling tweet tweet,
Speaker 2: the notes get closer together and higher in pitch at
Speaker 2: the end.
Speaker 3: It's a very evocative way to put it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that exact accelerating rhythm was embedded in the photonic
Speaker 2: data from a billion light years away. But let's look
Speaker 2: at the historical context here, because seeing bumps on a
Speaker 2: light curve isn't entirely unprecedented, is it. We have observed
Speaker 2: supernova with jagged light curves.
Speaker 3: Before we have it is relatively rare, but astronomers have
Speaker 3: documented supernova that show one or two spikes in brightness
Speaker 3: as they fade. However, the astrophysics community had a very
Speaker 3: well established standard hydrodynamic explanation for those events.
Speaker 2: They attributed it to circumstellar interaction. Right the shockwave hitting
Speaker 2: pre existing gas, yes.
Speaker 3: Exactly, dyeing massive stars are highly unstable in the millennia
Speaker 3: leading up to their death. They experience violent mass loss episodes,
Speaker 3: essentially ejecting massive shells of gas and dust that form
Speaker 3: a thick, complex nebula around the star. When the star
Speaker 3: finally undergoes core collapse, the supernova ejecta expands outward at
Speaker 3: a significant fraction of the speed of light, and eventually
Speaker 3: it slams into those pre existing shells of circumstellar material.
Speaker 2: Ah like a high speed snowplow crashing into a dense bank.
Speaker 3: That's a great way to picture it. When the fast
Speaker 3: moving injecta hits the slow moving gas shell, a massive
Speaker 3: forward and reverse shockwaves is generated. The kinetic energy of
Speaker 3: that collision is violently converted into thermal energy and X rays,
Speaker 3: which get reprocessed into optical light. Got it. That collision
Speaker 3: registers as a distinct bump on the light curve. So historically,
Speaker 3: when astronomer saw a bump, the default assumption was simply
Speaker 3: the supernova debris just plowed into a dense pocket of gas.
Speaker 2: But wait, Previous supernovae have shown one or two light
Speaker 2: bumps from shockwaves hitting surrounding gas. So why is four
Speaker 2: bumps such a paradigm shifting deal? Like, if a star
Speaker 2: can burp out one shell of gas, why couldn't burp
Speaker 2: out four shells of gas space perfectly so the shockwave
Speaker 2: hits them one after another.
Speaker 3: When you look closely at the fluid dynamics, the circumcellar
Speaker 3: interaction model completely breaks down for this specific light curve. First,
Speaker 3: as you noted, the shells would have to be perfectly
Speaker 3: spaced to create an accelerating rhythm, which is highly improbable
Speaker 3: in nature.
Speaker 2: Right, isn't usually that neat exactly?
Speaker 3: But more importantly, the physics of the collision itself precludes
Speaker 3: this kind of signal. When the ejecta hits the first
Speaker 3: shell of gas, it doesn't just pass through cleanly. The
Speaker 3: collision creates severe Raley tailor instabilities. The boundary layer becomes
Speaker 3: incredibly turbulent and chaotic.
Speaker 2: So the expanding shockwave gets shredded and smeared out.
Speaker 3: Yes, by the time the ejecta passes through the first
Speaker 3: shell and hits a hypothetical second or third shell, the
Speaker 3: shocksrunt is no longer a sharp, distinct wall. It is
Speaker 3: a messy, turbulent transition zone. You wouldn't get sharp, distinct
Speaker 3: individual flashes of light. The collisions would blend together into
Speaker 3: a broad, messy plateau of sustained brightness.
Speaker 2: The structural integrity of the shockwave is gone.
Speaker 3: Yes, the sheer number of bumps, their sharp profile, and
Speaker 3: most crucially, that very specific accelerating chirp rhythm entirely ruled
Speaker 3: out random collisions with surrounding gas clouds. Random fluid dynamics
Speaker 3: do not produce highly structure mathematically accelerating rhythmic flashes.
Speaker 2: Wow. Okay.
Speaker 3: When Fair and Howell analyze this data, they realized the
Speaker 3: universe was signaling something deeply mechanical, something rotating, geometric and structured,
Speaker 3: was operating at the core of the debris field.
Speaker 2: The hidden engine was finally revealing itself. But you know,
Speaker 2: realizing it was an engine and understanding how it worked
Speaker 2: are two very different things. To decode the specific accelerating
Speaker 2: trip of s N twenty twenty four to five, Fara's
Speaker 2: team had to abandon classical Newtonian physics entirely did. They
Speaker 2: realized that standard gravity and hydrodynamics couldn't explain the rhythm.
Speaker 2: They had to utilize Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.
Speaker 3: This is where the physics gets truly profound. To understand
Speaker 3: the mechanism, we have to look at the immediate aftermath
Speaker 3: of the magnetar's birth. The star's cores collapse, the magnetars
Speaker 3: spinning seriously, and the outer layers of the star have
Speaker 3: been blasted outward. Right, But the explosion isn't perfectly efficient.
Speaker 3: Gravity is still an overwhelmingly dominant force in the immediate
Speaker 3: vicinity of the newborn neutron star. So a small fraction
Speaker 3: of the innermost stellar material doesn't reach escape velocity. It
Speaker 3: gets caught in the magnetar's gravitational well and begins to
Speaker 3: fall back inward.
Speaker 2: Oh, this is the fallback accretion phase. But the material
Speaker 2: doesn't just drop straight down onto the surface right, Because
Speaker 2: the star was rotating before it died. The exploding material
Speaker 2: still carries angular momentum.
Speaker 3: Right, conservation of angular momentum dictates that the infalling material
Speaker 3: must swirl as it falls back toward the magnetar. Centrifugal
Speaker 3: forces cause it to flatten out into a superheated, extremely
Speaker 3: dense ring of plasma orbiting the equator of the neutron star.
Speaker 2: An accretion disc.
Speaker 3: Yes, this is an accretion disk. So the architecture of
Speaker 3: our engine is a central hyper spinning magnetar surrounded by
Speaker 3: a flat disc of glowing, swirling plasma.
Speaker 2: But the critical geometric detail here is the alignment. The
Speaker 2: accretion disc is not perfectly aligned with the magnetar's equator.
Speaker 3: Is it. It is highly unlikely to be aligned or collapse.
Speaker 3: Supernovae are inherently chaotic asymmetric events. The neutrino heating that
Speaker 3: drives the explosion is turbulent. Often the neutron star itself
Speaker 3: receives a massive kick velocity during birth due to these asymmetries,
Speaker 3: completely skewing its rotational axis.
Speaker 2: So it's slightly off kilter right.
Speaker 3: Therefore, the angular momentum vector of the fallback material will
Speaker 3: almost certainly differ from the spin axis of the newborn magnetar.
Speaker 3: The accretion disc forms it a tilt. It is misaligned
Speaker 3: relative to the magnetar.
Speaker 2: I want to make sure I'm visualizing this correctly. You
Speaker 2: have the magnetar spinning on its vertical axis straight up
Speaker 2: and down like a top, but the accretion disk of
Speaker 2: superheated plasma circling it is tilted at a sharp angle
Speaker 2: like a hula hoop that has been tipped partially over.
Speaker 3: That is the exact geometry. Now, if we lived in
Speaker 3: a purely Newtonian universe, classical physics says that tilted disc
Speaker 3: would simply maintell its orbit. The gravity of the central
Speaker 3: mass would hold it in place, and it would just
Speaker 3: spin at an angle indefinitely.
Speaker 2: Just happily spinning along right.
Speaker 3: Magnetar does not exist in a classical Newtonian framework. It
Speaker 3: is an object of extreme mass and density spinning at
Speaker 3: a significant fraction to the speed of light. And this
Speaker 3: is where einstein General relativity takes.
Speaker 2: Over, because Einstein proved that space is not just an
Speaker 2: empty coordinate system. It is a physical fabric. It has geometry.
Speaker 2: The stress energy tensor tells us that mass bends the
Speaker 2: fabric of space time, creating what we perceive as gravity.
Speaker 3: Mass tells space time how to curve, and curve space
Speaker 3: time tells mass how to move. That is the foundational
Speaker 3: concept of general relativity classic Einstein exactly. But Einstein's equations
Speaker 3: reveal a secondary, even more bizarre effect. If a massive
Speaker 3: object is strictly stationary, it just creates a static dimple
Speaker 3: in space time. But if that massive object is rotating,
Speaker 3: it doesn't just bend the fabric, It physically drags the
Speaker 3: fabric of space time along with it as it turns.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: This phenomenon is known as lends during procession, or more
Speaker 3: commonly frame.
Speaker 2: Dragging frame dragging. It is a concept that just challenges
Speaker 2: our basic intuition of reality. The best way I've found
Speaker 2: to conceptualize this, and I want you to picture this
Speaker 2: at home. Imagine a large jar filled with incredibly thick honey.
Speaker 2: If you take a spoon, push it right into the
Speaker 2: center of the honey and just hold it still, the
Speaker 2: honey wraps around the spoon but remains stationary.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a static dimple.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that represents a static mass bending space. But if
Speaker 2: you take that sooon and start spinning it incredibly fast,
Speaker 2: you don't just rotate the spoon. The friction grabs the
Speaker 2: honey itself, and the honey gets dragged into a swirling,
Speaker 2: twisting bortex around the spoon.
Speaker 3: That is a phenomenal analogy for frame dragging. In this
Speaker 3: astrophysical scenario, the spinning spoon is the newborn magnetar and
Speaker 3: the thick honey is the fundamental metric of space and time. Itself.
Speaker 3: The magnetar is spinning so furiously and contains so much
Speaker 3: concentrated mass that it is literally twisting the geometry of
Speaker 3: the universe around it in a cosmic fortex.
Speaker 2: So, the local space time around the magnetar is physically swirling.
Speaker 2: But how does dragging space time create a flashing light like?
Speaker 2: How does that vortex explain the four distinct bumps we
Speaker 2: saw in the last cumbers data.
Speaker 3: We have to bring the tilted decretion disc back into
Speaker 3: the picture. For that, that tipped over hula hoop of
Speaker 3: plasma is physically embedded inside that swirling vortex of space time.
Speaker 3: As the fabric of space is violently dragged around the
Speaker 3: magna car, it exerts a profound gravitational torque on the
Speaker 3: misaligned disc.
Speaker 2: Oh because the space itself is moving, Yes, the.
Speaker 3: Disc has no choice but to follow the curvature of
Speaker 3: the space it occupies. The twisting space time violently yanks
Speaker 3: on the disc, causing the entire structure.
Speaker 2: To wabble wobble in the same way as spinning top
Speaker 2: behaves as it starts to lose momentum. You know, the
Speaker 2: way the axis of the top starts tracing a slow circle.
Speaker 3: In the air exactly. In orbital mechanics, that wobble. It's
Speaker 3: called nodal precession. The entire tilted disc is processing around
Speaker 3: the magnetar's spin axis. Now think about the optical layout
Speaker 3: of this system. At the center, you have a bound
Speaker 3: layer where the disc meets the magnetar, which is generating
Speaker 3: immense amounts of high energy radiation X rays and extreme
Speaker 3: ultraviolet light super bright, yes, intensely bright. And surrounding that
Speaker 3: brilliant center, you have the thick, opaque, tilted disc of
Speaker 3: plasma which is now wobbling in a circle due to
Speaker 3: frame dragging.
Speaker 2: Oh I see it. The wobbling disc acts like a
Speaker 2: giant physical shutter.
Speaker 3: Precisely, it creates a cosmic lighthouse effect. As the tilted
Speaker 3: disc wobbles, its geometric orientation relative to our line of
Speaker 3: sight on Earth is constantly shifting. During one phase of
Speaker 3: the wobble, the thickest part of the tilted disc rotates
Speaker 3: into our line of sight, physically blocking the intensely bright
Speaker 3: central emission region. The supernova appears slightly dimmer to our
Speaker 3: telescopes because the core is.
Speaker 2: Obscured, but the space time vortex continues to drag the disk,
Speaker 2: forcing the wobble to continue, and.
Speaker 3: Half a processional cycle later, the disc tips out of
Speaker 3: the way, Our line of sight to the brilliant superheated
Speaker 3: central region is clear, and a massive pulse of radiation
Speaker 3: escapes toward Earth. Additionally, the broad phase of the tilted
Speaker 3: disc can act like a mirror, catching the intense radiation
Speaker 3: from the magnetar and reflecting a massive pulse of light outward.
Speaker 2: So it's unblocking it and reflecting it.
Speaker 3: Yes, And regardless of whether it's unobscuring the core or
Speaker 3: reflecting light, the observational result is identical. A sudden, massive
Speaker 3: spike in luminosity.
Speaker 2: A bump in the light curve. One full wobble of
Speaker 2: the accretion disc produces one distinct pulse of light. It's
Speaker 2: a lighthouse, driven not by a mechanical motor, but by
Speaker 2: the physical warping of space time itself. That beautifully explains
Speaker 2: the flashing. It explains why the bumps exist, But we
Speaker 2: still have to address the chirp. The time between the
Speaker 2: bumps was shrinking, the frequency of the flashing was accelerating.
Speaker 2: How does the lens thiring wobble explain the acceleration?
Speaker 3: It explains it perfectly when you consider the thermodynamics of
Speaker 3: the disk. An accretion disc is not a static ring.
Speaker 3: The plasma within the disk is subject to magneto rotational instabilities.
Speaker 3: In extreme friction, as the gas particles rub against each other,
Speaker 3: they generate heat and radiate energy.
Speaker 2: Away, loosing energy.
Speaker 3: Exactly by shedding this orbital energy, the material loses angular
Speaker 3: momentum and slowly spirals inward, falling closer and closer to
Speaker 3: the surface of the spinning magnetar.
Speaker 2: And if we go back to our honey analogy, what
Speaker 2: happens as you move closer to the spinning spoon.
Speaker 3: The vortex becomes exponentially stronger. The frame dragging effect, the
Speaker 3: twisting of the space time metric is inversely proportional to
Speaker 3: the cube of the radius. It gets significantly more violent
Speaker 3: the closer you get to the surface of the neutron star.
Speaker 3: So as the accretion disk loses energy, shrinks and spirals inward,
Speaker 3: it moves into regions of space time that are being
Speaker 3: dragged much more rapidly.
Speaker 2: Which means the gravitational torque on the disc increases dramatically.
Speaker 3: Yes, stronger dragging produces greater torque, which forces the disc
Speaker 3: to precess or wobble faster. As the disc spirals inward
Speaker 3: over a period of weeks, its processional wobble continuously speeds up.
Speaker 3: A faster wabble means that disc is acting as a shuther,
Speaker 3: more rapidly blocking and reeling the central light at an
Speaker 3: accelerating pace.
Speaker 2: Faster wabble equals faster flashing. The time interval between the
Speaker 2: light pulses naturally gets shorter and shorter.
Speaker 3: That is the origin of the chirp. The viscous inward
Speaker 3: spiral of a tilted disc inside a frame dragging vortex
Speaker 3: perfectly dictates the accelerating rhythm seeing the lost Komber's data.
Speaker 3: If we connect this to the bigger picture, the profound
Speaker 3: achievement here is that Ferre's team didn't just propose this
Speaker 3: as a neat qualitative idea. They took the exact field
Speaker 3: equations of general relativity, calculated the theoretical processional rate of
Speaker 3: an inspiring disc around a rapidly rotating mass, and plotted
Speaker 3: that mathematical curve over the observational data from s N
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four or five.
Speaker 2: Let me guess it fit the.
Speaker 3: Relativistic model map perfectly onto the four bumps.
Speaker 2: The math of Einstein's spacetime dragging exactly matched the real
Speaker 2: world flashes arriving from a billion light years away down
Speaker 2: to the statistical noise limit.
Speaker 3: It was an impeccable fit. Yeah, and its significance cannot
Speaker 3: be overstated. This is the very first time in the
Speaker 3: history of astronomy that general relativity has been strictly observationly
Speaker 3: required to explain the mechanics of a supernova.
Speaker 2: Like Curry, really the first time.
Speaker 3: Yes, we use relativity constantly for black hole mergers, for
Speaker 3: gravitational ways, for cosmological expansion, but supernovae have historically been
Speaker 3: the domain of Newtonian physics, hydrodynamics, and nuclear physics. This
Speaker 3: event unequivocally demonstrated that you cannot understand the death of
Speaker 3: this specific star without evoking the severe relativistic warping of
Speaker 3: space time at its core.
Speaker 2: The elegance of that is just breathtaking. But I want
Speaker 2: to push back again because the scientific method demands skepticism.
Speaker 2: Right when you claim to have found a relativistic spacetime
Speaker 2: vortex powering a supernova, you don't just publish and call
Speaker 2: it a day. You have to actively try to break
Speaker 2: your own model, you have to search for a simpler,
Speaker 2: less exotic explanation. How aggressively did the research team test
Speaker 2: alternative physical models before concluding that Einstein was the only answer.
Speaker 3: Oh, they attack their own data relentlessly. Ockham's razor dictates
Speaker 3: that you must exhaust all classical explanations before invoking general relativity.
Speaker 3: The team spend months throwing every alternative torque mechanism they
Speaker 3: could think of at the data to see if anything
Speaker 3: else could produce that specific wobble.
Speaker 2: What other forces could conceivably cause an accretion disk to process.
Speaker 3: They initially looked at purely Newtonian effects. For example, the
Speaker 3: central neutron star was slightly a blate, meaning squashed at
Speaker 3: the poles due to its rapid rotation, its classical gravity
Speaker 3: would be asymmetrical. Could that equatorial bulge exert a classical
Speaker 3: gravitational torque and cause the disc to wobble?
Speaker 2: That seems like a very reasonable, non relativistic hypothesis.
Speaker 3: It is entirely reasonable, But when they ran the calculations,
Speaker 3: classical Newtonian procession scales differently with the radius of the
Speaker 3: disc compared to relativistic procession. The maths showed that while
Speaker 3: the Newtonian bulge would cause a wobble, it would not
Speaker 3: produce the specific accelerating rate of the chirp. They observed
Speaker 3: it couldn't match the timing ah, so the rhythm was
Speaker 3: wrong exactly. Then they moved to electromagnetic forces. We know
Speaker 3: the magnetar possesses a ten to the fourteen gas magnetic field.
Speaker 3: Could the magnetic field itself physically grab the ionized plasma
Speaker 3: disc and twist it forcing it to process?
Speaker 2: Given how strong that field is, it seems highly probable
Speaker 2: that magnetic torque could push a plasma disc around.
Speaker 3: Magnetic torque is a powerful force, and it absolutely interacts
Speaker 3: with the disc. But again, the physics of magnetic torque
Speaker 3: has a different mathematical dependency on the distance from the star.
Speaker 3: A wabble driven purely by the magnetic field produced a
Speaker 3: rhythm that simply did not fit the light curve. No
Speaker 3: matter how they adjusted the variables for classical gravity, magnetic
Speaker 3: torqu or even exotic gas collision models, the resulting simulated
Speaker 3: light curves failed to reproduce the precise timing of those
Speaker 3: four accelerating bumps.
Speaker 2: The alternative puzzle pieces just refuse to fit the laws.
Speaker 3: Yes, only one mechanism fit the data only. Einstein's lens
Speaker 3: thirring procession driven by a rapidly spinning ultra dense central mass,
Speaker 3: matched the timing of the chirp.
Speaker 2: Perfectly, which leads to a thrilling conclusion. If general relativity
Speaker 2: is the only mathematical framework that reproduces the observation, then
Speaker 2: the physical parameters required by that relativistic model must be real.
Speaker 2: By measuring the exact timing of the wobble, the team
Speaker 2: essentially reverse engineered Einstein's equations to calculate the precise physical
Speaker 2: statistics of the unseen object at the center of the debris.
Speaker 2: What were the exact numbers they extracted from the space
Speaker 2: time drag.
Speaker 3: The derived parameters were astonishing. By quantifying exactly how fast
Speaker 3: the local space time was being dragged to produce the
Speaker 3: observed chirp, they calculated that the newly born neutron star
Speaker 3: at the center of s N twenty twenty four to
Speaker 3: five is spinning with a period of precisely four point
Speaker 3: two millisecond.
Speaker 2: Wait four point two milliseconds. Let me do the math
Speaker 2: on that. That means this object is completing a full
Speaker 2: three hundred and sixty degree rotation roughly two hundred and
Speaker 2: thirty eight times every single second.
Speaker 3: Correct a sphere ten miles wide containing the mass of
Speaker 3: a sun rotating two two hundred and thirty eight times
Speaker 3: a second. But the calculations for the magnetic field derived
Speaker 3: from the spin downright required to power the overall luminosity
Speaker 3: were even more extreme. The processional math and energy budget
Speaker 3: require the central object to possess a magnetic field roughly
Speaker 3: three hundred trillion times stronger than Earth's.
Speaker 2: Three hundred trillion. Let's just sit with the magnitude of
Speaker 2: that number. Earth's magnetic field is robust enough to deflect
Speaker 2: the solar wind, to protect our atmosphere from being stripped
Speaker 2: away into space, to align compass needles all over the globe.
Speaker 2: And you take that planetary force, multiply it by three hundred.
Speaker 3: Trillion, it's almost unimaginable.
Speaker 2: It really is. The sheer violent electromagnetic energy required to
Speaker 2: sustain a field that strong. It's a physical extreme that
Speaker 2: almost defies description.
Speaker 3: And crucially, both of those derived numbers, the four point
Speaker 3: two millisecond spin period and the three times ten to
Speaker 3: the fourteen gas magnetic field, are the absolute defining theoretical
Speaker 3: characteristics of a magnetar.
Speaker 2: Here's where it gets really interesting when you symplicize the
Speaker 2: entire picture. The sustained super luminous energy output that defies
Speaker 2: Nickel fifty six to K, the accelerating rhythmic bumps in
Speaker 2: the light curve, the rigorous mathematical necessity of relativistic frame dragging,
Speaker 2: and the final calculated parameters of the central object. It
Speaker 2: all points to one inescapable conclusion. Alex Philippenko and Andy Howell,
Speaker 2: the senior astronomers overseeing the project, stated definitively that this
Speaker 2: observation is the smoking gun.
Speaker 3: It is the definitive proof the field has been waiting for.
Speaker 3: It ties the observational data directly to the theoretical framework. The
Speaker 3: twenty ten model proposed by Kazin, Bilsden and Woosley was correct.
Speaker 3: The hidden engine is no longer hidden.
Speaker 2: The magic trick is revealed exactly.
Speaker 3: The relativistic chirp in the supernova signal was the physical
Speaker 3: equivalent of pulling back the plasma curtain and revealing the
Speaker 3: exact machinery the magic trick. Josephera's analytical work demonstrated beyond
Speaker 3: a shadow of a doubt that a magnetar was birthed
Speaker 3: in the core of this superlumited supernova and that its
Speaker 3: furious spin in immense magnetic field are exactly what kept
Speaker 3: the explosion glowing.
Speaker 2: It's just a triumphant moment for theoretical physics. You derive
Speaker 2: a model on a chalkboard, you wait sixteen years, and
Speaker 2: the universe eventually provides the exact receipts. But as with
Speaker 2: all great paradigm shifts and science, answering one massive question
Speaker 2: immediately opens the door to a dozen new complications. We
Speaker 2: have definitively solved the mystery of the central engine for
Speaker 2: s N twenty twenty four A five, but we have
Speaker 2: to look at the broader landscape of transient astronomy. Does
Speaker 2: the single smoking gun mean the case is permanently closed.
Speaker 2: Does a newborn magnetar explain every single superluminous supernova we've
Speaker 2: ever cataloged.
Speaker 3: No, and the researchers involved are very careful to delineate
Speaker 3: that the universe is incredibly diverse, and astrophysical phenomena often
Speaker 3: exhibit what we call degeneracy, meaning multiple different physical mechanisms
Speaker 3: can produce a similar observational.
Speaker 2: Result, so it could be different engines for different stars.
Speaker 3: Precisely, the magnetar model is now proven reality for SN
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four A five, and it likely accounts for
Speaker 3: a significant majority of Type I hydrogen poor superluminous events,
Speaker 3: but it does not universally explain all of them. There
Speaker 3: are alternative engines that must be applied to different subclasses
Speaker 3: of supernovae.
Speaker 2: What other invisible mechanisms could be generating that much energy?
Speaker 3: We discussed circumstellar interaction earlier, the supernova shockwave crashing into
Speaker 3: pre existing shells of gas. While we mathematically prove that
Speaker 3: the couldn't explain the four accelerating bumps in this specific event,
Speaker 3: there's a whole class of type two superluminous supernovae which
Speaker 3: are rich in hydrogen, where the sustained brightness is almost
Speaker 3: certainly powered by that exact mechanism.
Speaker 2: Ah okay.
Speaker 3: In those cases, the progenitor star was likely a luminous
Speaker 3: blue variable that shed massive amounts of material before dying.
Speaker 3: The engine isn't a spinning magnetic core. It's the continuous
Speaker 3: kinetic friction of the debris field plowing into an incredibly dense,
Speaker 3: extended nebula.
Speaker 2: So kinetic shockwaves are still a valid engine for certain
Speaker 2: types of explosions. Are there any other theoretical engines that
Speaker 2: utilize a central compact object, but perhaps not a magnetar.
Speaker 3: Yes. Dan Kaysen, the theorist who helped pioneer the magnetar model,
Speaker 3: has heavily researched another fascinating and perhaps even more violent possibility,
Speaker 3: known as the collapser model.
Speaker 2: The collapsor model right, what if.
Speaker 3: The progenitor star is so exceptionally massive that when its
Speaker 3: iron core collapses, the crush of gravity completely overpowers the
Speaker 3: neutron degeneracy pressure. The core doesn't stop in a neutron star,
Speaker 3: it collapses directly into a black hole.
Speaker 2: A newborn black hole operating at the exact center of
Speaker 2: the supernova.
Speaker 3: Exactly in the collapser scenario. You also have massive amounts
Speaker 3: of stellar material falling back inward. That material forms a
Speaker 3: dense accretion disc swirling around the newly formed black hole.
Speaker 3: The friction in that disc generates immense heat, and the
Speaker 3: magnetic fields within the disc can launch relativistic jets of
Speaker 3: energy outward, piercing through the star and powering a superluminous
Speaker 3: explosion and crucially, a spinning black hole also drags spacetime.
Speaker 2: Oh so a tilted accretion disc around a black hole
Speaker 2: hole would also undergo lens third precession.
Speaker 3: Yes, it would also wobble, and it could theoretically produce
Speaker 3: similar rhythmic bumps in a light curve. However, because a
Speaker 3: black hole is more massive than a neutron star, the
Speaker 3: processional mathematics would be different. The timing of the chirp
Speaker 3: would have a different signature.
Speaker 2: So the engine could be a spinning magnetar or it
Speaker 2: could be a baby black hole voraciously consuming its own
Speaker 2: stellar debris, and the only way to tell them apart
Speaker 2: is to analyze the precise rhythm of the wobble.
Speaker 3: That is exactly where the field is heading. The landscape
Speaker 3: of astrophysics has fundamentally shifted because of this single observation.
Speaker 3: Prior to SN twenty twenty four five, there was a
Speaker 3: heavy reliance on circumstellar gas collisions to explain many of
Speaker 3: these ultrobraate transients. But as Filipenko noted, this discovery proves
Speaker 3: that central engines account for a much larger fraction of
Speaker 3: these events than previously accepted. That makes sense, Yeah, The
Speaker 3: magnetar model has graduated from an elegant hypothesis to a
Speaker 3: confirmed operational mechanism.
Speaker 2: And it feels like we are stack ending on the
Speaker 2: precipice of a massive explosion in data. If you know
Speaker 2: exactly what to look for, if you know that you
Speaker 2: need to listen for a relativistic chirp to identify an engine,
Speaker 2: you can start tuning your algorithms to find it. And
Speaker 2: the timing for this realization is perfect because the astronomical
Speaker 2: community is about to bring some incredible new observational tools online.
Speaker 2: I'm thinking specifically of the Veric Reuben Observatory.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. The Veric Ruben Observatory is poised to fundamentally revolutionize
Speaker 3: time domain astronomy. Currently under construction in Chile, it is
Speaker 3: designed to conduct the Legacy Survey of Space and Time,
Speaker 3: which is an unprecedented decade long optical survey. It features
Speaker 3: an eight point four meters mirror and a three two
Speaker 3: hundred megapixel camera, giving it an immense field of.
Speaker 2: View two hundred megapixels. That's absurd.
Speaker 3: It is it will be able to photograph the entire
Speaker 3: visible southern sky every few nights.
Speaker 2: Which means it isn't just taking deep space portraits. It
Speaker 2: is essentially filming a high resolution movie of the cosmos.
Speaker 2: It is going to catch everything that flashes, moves, or
Speaker 2: changes brightness.
Speaker 3: The data volume will be staggering. The sheer number of
Speaker 3: transient events, things that appear and disappear, like supernovae, tidal
Speaker 3: disruption events, and killinova that the Ruben Observatory will detect
Speaker 3: will require entirely new machine learning pipelines to process. I
Speaker 3: can imagine right now humanity discovers a few thousand supernova
Speaker 3: a year. The Ruben Observatory is expected to flag millions
Speaker 3: of transients every.
Speaker 2: Single year millions, and buried in those massive data sets
Speaker 2: will undoubtedly be hundreds, perhaps thousands of super luminous supernovae.
Speaker 2: And because Reuben will be imaging the sky so frequently,
Speaker 2: we won't just get partial snapshots. We will have incredibly detailed,
Speaker 2: high resolution, continuous light curves for a vast population of them.
Speaker 3: That is the crucial point. Joseph anticipates that once the
Speaker 3: Ruben Observatory is operational, astronomers are going to discover many,
Speaker 3: many more of these chirping supernovae. We are going to
Speaker 3: transition from studying single rare events to performing population.
Speaker 2: Statistics, which changes everything entirely.
Speaker 3: We will be able to categorize them, measure their spin rates,
Speaker 3: calculate their magnetic fields, and definitively distinguish the magnetar engines
Speaker 3: from the black hole collaps or engines based purely on
Speaker 3: the nuanced mathematics of their spacetime wobbles. We are opening
Speaker 3: up a whole new sub field of observational astrophysics. We
Speaker 3: are moving from simply documenting the glow of stellar explosions
Speaker 3: to actively reverse engineering the relativistic engines hidden inside them.
Speaker 2: It is staggering to look back at the arc of
Speaker 2: this scientific journey. Just to summarize the sheer scale of
Speaker 2: what we've discussed today, we started with a persistent sixteen
Speaker 2: year anomaly where the thermodynamic math of dying stars refused
Speaker 2: to balance. We explored how theoretical physicists essentially invented an
Speaker 2: invisible magic trick, a spinning magnetic dynamo to balance the equations.
Speaker 3: The trick that turned out to be real.
Speaker 2: Right. We then cast our gaze across one billion light
Speaker 2: years of intergalactic space, utilizing a global network of robotic
Speaker 2: telescopes to track a single explosion for two hundred days
Speaker 2: only to find a light curve that chirped, and to
Speaker 2: finally decode that chirp, we had to rely on Albert
Speaker 2: Einstein's profound century old realization that a spinning city sized,
Speaker 2: ultra dense core can physically grab the fabric of space
Speaker 2: and time and drag it into a wobbling cosmic lighthouse.
Speaker 3: It is a profound testament to both the power of
Speaker 3: human curiosity and the rigorous, predictive power of the scientific method.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I think the most poignant and humbling takeaway
Speaker 3: comes directly from Joseph Fara, the researcher who first recognized
Speaker 3: the significance of the chirp. What did he say when
Speaker 3: reflecting on the implications of this discovery. He said, it's
Speaker 3: the universe telling us, out loud and in our face
Speaker 3: that we don't fully understand it yet, and challenging us
Speaker 3: to explain it.
Speaker 2: Oh. I love that perspective, the universe throwing down a gauntlet.
Speaker 2: It's a constant reminder that no matter how sophisticated our
Speaker 2: models become, the cosmos is always capable of surprising us.
Speaker 2: It is always ready to reveal engines and relativistic mechan
Speaker 2: that are far more complex, beautiful, and violent than our
Speaker 2: initial theories imagine.
Speaker 3: It forces humility upon the field, but it also drives
Speaker 3: relentless progress. Every time we solve one of these macroscopic mysteries,
Speaker 3: we peel back a layer of reality, only to find deeper,
Speaker 3: more intricate physics operating.
Speaker 2: Underneath layers within layers.
Speaker 3: Exactly the fact of the space time dragging predicted by
Speaker 3: Einstein on a talkboard in nineteen eighteen, is strictly required
Speaker 3: to understand the rhythmic flashing of a dying star a
Speaker 3: billion light years away in twenty twenty four. It demonstrates
Speaker 3: that the underlying rules of the universe are profoundly and
Speaker 3: beautifully interconnected.
Speaker 2: So what does this all mean for you? The next
Speaker 2: time you step outside on a clear, dark night. I
Speaker 2: want you to look up at the stars, but don't
Speaker 2: just focus on the points of light, look at the
Speaker 2: vast dark patches of space between them, and consider this
Speaker 2: final thought. If these hidden magnetars are spinning two hundred
Speaker 2: times a second and violently dragging the geometry of space time,
Speaker 2: they aren't just emitting light. They are likely generating intense
Speaker 2: rips and gravity itself.
Speaker 3: Oh, gravitational waves, Yes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, The next generation of gravitational wave detectors might not
Speaker 2: just see the afterglow of these explosions. We might actually
Speaker 2: be able to feel the fabric of the universe vibrate
Speaker 2: as that infant star takes its first furious spin in
Speaker 2: the dark.
Speaker 3: A fascinating prospect to consider
Speaker 2: Just waiting for us to finally learn how to listen