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: Okay, let's unpack this. We often frame the universe as
Speaker 2: you know, this enormous, immutable backdrop, something so ancient and
Speaker 2: vast that it seems entirely static over the span of
Speaker 2: a human lifetime. We look up and the stars they're
Speaker 2: pretty much where they were for our great grandparents, right.
Speaker 3: Right, that's the common perception, fixed, unchanging.
Speaker 2: But today we're diving into the study of a single
Speaker 2: object that well violently defies that expectation, an object whose
Speaker 2: changes are so rapid they can actually be measured, tracked,
Speaker 2: observed over just a hie hundred and thirty years.
Speaker 3: And it's those dramatic visible shifts, these objects evolving within
Speaker 3: our are observational record that really force us to challenge
Speaker 3: those underlying assumptions we think of stellar evolution in millions
Speaker 3: billions of years. Now here we have a real time lab,
Speaker 3: relatively speaking, showing change over.
Speaker 2: A single century exactly. We are looking at the stunning
Speaker 2: planetary nebula, known officially as IC four eighteen, but you
Speaker 2: probably know it better by its nickname, the spirograph nebula.
Speaker 3: Ah. Yes, the spirograph. It's a great name.
Speaker 2: Name for those complex, intricate looping structures. The Hubble space
Speaker 2: telescope captured so beautifully. It really does look like something
Speaker 2: made with that old geometric toy.
Speaker 3: And that nickname is important. I think it grounds the
Speaker 3: science and something well familiar and beautiful. It emphasizes this
Speaker 3: isn't just some distant, fuzzy smudge. It's dynamic caught right
Speaker 3: in the act of its final transformation.
Speaker 2: Cosmic change on a timescale we can actually grasp precisely.
Speaker 2: So our mission today is built around this fascinating study
Speaker 2: publish in Astrophysical Journal Letters. The team accomplished something pretty remarkable.
Speaker 2: They stitch together this almost unbroken one hundred and thirty
Speaker 2: year lineage of observations for Icy.
Speaker 3: Four eighteen, a huge undertaking.
Speaker 2: They did this to track the star's death rows, and
Speaker 2: specifically to figure out what it's well, astonishingly rapid evolution
Speaker 2: means for a really fundamental question, which is how the
Speaker 2: ingredients for life, particularly carbon, get distributed throughout the galaxy.
Speaker 3: Ah, the big one, cosmic chemistry. So it's like a
Speaker 3: detective story starting way back in the nineteenth century and.
Speaker 2: Ending with some pretty profound implications for how we understand
Speaker 2: astrophysics today.
Speaker 3: Exactly.
Speaker 2: Okay, so let's start with the basics. The object itself
Speaker 2: IC four eighteen. Where do we find it?
Speaker 3: Right? You need to look towards the southern constellation Lepis.
Speaker 3: That's Latin for the hair. It's situated about two thousand
Speaker 3: light years away from US.
Speaker 2: Two thousand light years, so relatively close in galactic terms,
Speaker 2: but still a long way off.
Speaker 3: Oh absolutely. And physically it spans roughly zero point two
Speaker 3: light years across.
Speaker 2: Which sounds small maybe, but.
Speaker 3: That's well, it's about twelve trillion miles give or take,
Speaker 3: so not insignificant.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, definitely not small, but from.
Speaker 3: Earth its apparent size is quite compact. It shines at
Speaker 3: about magnitude plus nine.
Speaker 2: I mean you'd need a telescope.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, definitely not naked eye, and it appears about
Speaker 3: eighteen arc seconds across in the sky, think roughly the
Speaker 3: size of Jupiter through a decent backyard telescope when it's
Speaker 3: looking particularly large.
Speaker 2: Got it. Now we have to pause in the name
Speaker 2: planetary nebula. It's famously confusing, right, because they have absolutely
Speaker 2: nothing to do with planets.
Speaker 3: Nothing at all. To one of those historical quirks, the
Speaker 3: name stuck from when astronomers like William Herschel first saw
Speaker 3: them through their early, less powerful telescopes. These objects look
Speaker 3: like round, ghostly discs, kind of like the faint appearance
Speaker 3: of Urinus or Neptune.
Speaker 2: The known planets at the time.
Speaker 3: Exactly. They didn't have the resolution to see the structure,
Speaker 3: just these fuzzy planet like shapes, So the name stuck
Speaker 3: planetary nebula.
Speaker 2: But they're actually the uh, spectacular final breaths of a star,
Speaker 2: aren't they.
Speaker 3: That's right. It happens when a star similar to our Sun,
Speaker 3: runs out of fuel, expands hugely into a red giant,
Speaker 3: and then puffs off as outer.
Speaker 2: Layers, creating that glowing shell we see.
Speaker 3: And for us, the real hook and the reason we
Speaker 3: have this one hundred and thirty year timeline is the
Speaker 3: human story behind its discovery.
Speaker 2: This is where Williamina Fleming comes in.
Speaker 3: Yes, the discovery back on March twenty six, eighteen ninety
Speaker 3: one belongs squarely to her. She was a true pioneer
Speaker 3: of well modern data driven astronomy.
Speaker 2: She was a Scottish American working at the Harvard College
Speaker 2: Observatory HCO, part of that massive Draper catalog survey. And
Speaker 2: you really have to picture her work right. She wasn't
Speaker 2: at a telescope eyepiece.
Speaker 3: No, not usually. She was in a room meticulously painstakingly
Speaker 3: examining thousands upon thousands of photographic glass plates, huge heavy things.
Speaker 2: Like the world's first large scale scientific data analyst.
Speaker 3: Essentially, you could definitely say that grueling work. Those plates
Speaker 3: required expert interpretation. Her role and that of the other
Speaker 3: women known as the Harvard Computers was crucial. They classified
Speaker 3: stars based on their spectra, the patterns in their light,
Speaker 3: and spotted anything unusual like a nebula.
Speaker 2: And she was incredibly prolific. The notes mentioned she discovered
Speaker 2: fifty nine nebulae just during her work on that one survey.
Speaker 3: Fifty nine imagine IC four eighteen was just one entry
Speaker 3: in a huge body of work. She was instrumental in
Speaker 3: shifting astronomy from just describing things to systematically classifying them
Speaker 3: based on physics derived from light.
Speaker 2: Her observation in eighteen ninety one is the absolute starting
Speaker 2: point for this whole study we're discussing the anchor.
Speaker 3: Without her and the rigorous record keeping at Harvard, we
Speaker 3: wouldn't have this baseline. We couldn't track this evolution.
Speaker 2: And just a quick historical note, although it was later
Speaker 2: cataloged as IC four eighteen and sometimes misattributed, the initial
Speaker 2: credit belongs to Fleming eighteen ninety one. That's our starting gun.
Speaker 3: Absolutely key.
Speaker 2: Okay, this is where it gets really interesting. I think
Speaker 2: we move from historical discovery to like modern scientific detective work.
Speaker 2: You've got this object observed in the eighteen nineties. How
Speaker 2: on earth do researchers today track its physical evolution? How
Speaker 2: do they bridge one hundred and thirty years of completely
Speaker 2: different technology.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the challenge, going from someone literally describing what they.
Speaker 2: Saw right to photographic plates to modern digital cameras.
Speaker 3: Like the Hubble Space telescope. It's what we might call
Speaker 3: forensic astronomy.
Speaker 2: Forensic astronomy.
Speaker 3: I like that, and IC four eighteen had a unique advantage.
Speaker 3: It has this almost unbroken chain of spectroscopic measurements.
Speaker 2: Spectroscopy breaking down the light.
Speaker 3: Exactly, breaking light into its component wavelengths like a rainbow
Speaker 3: to figure out temperature, speed, chemical makeup. That technique was
Speaker 3: just getting started in the eighteen nineties, and ICE four
Speaker 3: eighteen was an early target.
Speaker 2: So they were pulling data from completely different eras visual observations,
Speaker 2: glass plates, film, digital CCDs.
Speaker 3: Three distinct technology phases. And the trick is making sure
Speaker 3: that data from all these sources well speaks the same
Speaker 3: language can be reliably compared.
Speaker 2: How do you even use data from say, eighteen ninety three?
Speaker 2: You mentioned William Campbell observed a spectrum, then how is
Speaker 2: a visual description useful?
Speaker 3: It sounds imprecise, doesn't it, Hugh? But the key is
Speaker 3: that earliest drimers, even without digital tools, were incredibly meticulous
Speaker 3: note takers. Doctor Albert Zealstra, one of the researchers on
Speaker 3: this recent study, pointed out that Campbell's observation was described.
Speaker 2: Well enough, well enough for what though.
Speaker 3: Well enough to establish a baseline. He described the visible
Speaker 3: emission lines crucially their brightness relative to other known lines
Speaker 3: like hydrogen. That relative brightness gives you a starting point
Speaker 3: even if it's not a precise number like we get today.
Speaker 2: So it's the relative information that matters. That's amazing trusting
Speaker 2: those one hundred and forty year old notes.
Speaker 3: It's a testament to their standards. They knew they were
Speaker 3: recording something important.
Speaker 2: But the jump to photographic plates must have been a
Speaker 2: huge challenge correcting for the technology itself.
Speaker 3: That's where the forensic part really kicks in. You have
Speaker 3: to account for technological bias. An old glass plate doesn't
Speaker 3: record light linearly. The brightness depends entirely on the chemical
Speaker 3: emulsion used on that specific plate.
Speaker 2: Ah okay, so different plates from different times might be
Speaker 2: more sensitive to blue light or less sensitive to.
Speaker 3: Red precisely, and a researcher today needs to know that
Speaker 3: specific sensitivity profile to figure out the star's actual energy
Speaker 3: output at different wavelengths back then.
Speaker 2: So they have to mathematically reconstruct what the chemical properties
Speaker 2: of old photo emulsions.
Speaker 3: Essentially, yes, they model the sensitivity curves of those historical chemicals.
Speaker 3: They look at old lab notes, log books about atmosphere conditions,
Speaker 3: even the type of silver halide used. It's about converting
Speaker 3: a recorded density on the plate back into a physically
Speaker 3: meaningful footon count.
Speaker 2: That is incredibly detailed work. You're part historian, part chemist,
Speaker 2: part astrophysicist.
Speaker 3: It takes a team with diverse skills, definitely, but it's
Speaker 3: crucial to make sure the eighteen ninety three data is
Speaker 3: genuinely comparable to Hubble data from say twenty eighteen. The
Speaker 3: whole study hangs on getting that right.
Speaker 2: And they focused on specific emission lines. You said hydrogen
Speaker 2: and this doubly ionized oxygen OII.
Speaker 3: Yes, those were key, especially the OII lines in the
Speaker 3: blue green part of the spectrum, and that can expect
Speaker 3: perfectly to another historical quirk, the nebulium mystery.
Speaker 2: Ah right, the element that never was exactly.
Speaker 3: Back in the late nineteenth early twentieth century, astronomers kept
Speaker 3: seeing these really bright, distinct emission lines in nebulae spectra.
Speaker 3: Lines they couldn't match to any element known on.
Speaker 2: Earth, so naturally they assumed.
Speaker 3: It must be a new element. They even gave it
Speaker 3: a name, nebulium. It was a big puzzle, why couldn't
Speaker 3: they recreate it in the.
Speaker 2: Lab until physics caught up right.
Speaker 3: It wasn't until the nineteen twenties, with advances in atomic
Speaker 3: physics that Ira Bowen figured it out. It wasn't a
Speaker 3: new element at all.
Speaker 2: It was just familiar elements acting weirdly.
Speaker 3: Exactly common stuff like oxygen and nitrogen. But what are
Speaker 3: the incredibly extreme conditions inside a nebula? Specifically ultraload density
Speaker 3: and intense radiation. These atoms can emit light in ways
Speaker 3: through forbidden transitions that are basically impossible to achieve in
Speaker 3: a dense Earth atmosphere.
Speaker 2: So the light they called nebulium was actually just ionized
Speaker 2: oxygen behaving strangely because of the nebula's.
Speaker 3: Environment precisely and the way those oxygen atoms emit that
Speaker 3: specific light. The former nebulium signature turns out to be
Speaker 3: extremely sensitive to the temperature and density of the nebula gas.
Speaker 2: Oh so tracking those specific lines over one hundred and
Speaker 2: thirty years lets them track how the physical conditions inside
Speaker 2: the nebula have changed.
Speaker 3: That's the key. They started out chasing a fictional element
Speaker 3: and ended up using that very same light signature to
Speaker 3: measure one of the fastest stellar temperature changes ever recorded.
Speaker 2: Incredible, the science evolving alongside the observation. Okay, let's get
Speaker 2: to the core discovery, the numbers that really made the
Speaker 2: astronomical community sit up and take notice. But first, maybe
Speaker 2: just quickly remind us what's our actually happening when a
Speaker 2: star like this dies? What are the death throws?
Speaker 3: Right? It's a dramatic, but in a way beautiful process.
Speaker 3: It starts when a star roughly like our Sun, exhausts
Speaker 3: the hydrogen fuel in its core. Gravity causes the core
Speaker 3: to contract and heat up while the outer layers swell enormously.
Speaker 3: It becomes a red.
Speaker 2: Giant, sometimes swallowing its inner planets potentially yes.
Speaker 3: Then, over a relatively short period aftronomically speaking, it sheds
Speaker 3: those bloated outer layers into space. That expelled gas and
Speaker 3: dust forms the expanding glowing shell, the planetary nebula like
Speaker 3: IC four.
Speaker 2: Eighteen, and what's left behind in the center.
Speaker 3: The incredibly dense hot core of the former star. It
Speaker 3: collapses down into what we call a white dwarf. Think
Speaker 3: of it as a stellar ember, compressed to about the
Speaker 3: size of Earth, but still containing maybe sixty percent of
Speaker 3: the star's original mass. In IC four eighteen's case, it's
Speaker 3: about zero point six times the Sun's.
Speaker 2: Mass, just glowing incredibly hot from left over heat exactly.
Speaker 3: And this whole process, this is the fate awaiting our
Speaker 3: own Sun and the Solar system in about five billion years.
Speaker 2: Right, So IC four eighteen is showing us our future
Speaker 2: in a.
Speaker 3: Way, in a very real way. Now, normally, the changes
Speaker 3: in the star's temperature, especially during these later stages, happen
Speaker 3: over incredibly long time scales millennia, millions of years.
Speaker 2: We usually consider them constant over human history.
Speaker 3: Pretty much, except here. This study gave us the first
Speaker 3: continuous century plus. Look at this specific whitewarf formation phase
Speaker 3: and the numbers are startling.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, what did they find?
Speaker 3: They determined that the central star, that white dwarf, has
Speaker 3: increased its surface temperature by wapping three thousand degrees celsius
Speaker 3: since Williamina Fleming first recorded it back in eighteen ninety one.
Speaker 2: Three thousand degrees celsius in one hundred and thirty years.
Speaker 3: Yes, that breaks down to a heating rate of roughly
Speaker 3: one thousand degrees celsius every forty years.
Speaker 2: Wow, So in a single human generation that star gets
Speaker 2: substantially hotter. You could theoretically measure the change within a
Speaker 2: working astronomer's career.
Speaker 3: You absolutely could literally watching this dying star heat up
Speaker 3: dramatically almost in real.
Speaker 2: Time's that puts astronomical change on a human scale like
Speaker 2: almost nothing else. The source material compared it to our
Speaker 2: Sun's formation, Right it did.
Speaker 3: Our Sun during its own formation phase when it was
Speaker 3: settling down, saw a similar temperature increase, maybe a few
Speaker 3: thousand degrees, but that took something like ten million years.
Speaker 2: Ten million years. IC four eighteen did it in one
Speaker 2: hundred and thirty.
Speaker 3: It's deep time accelerated. This rapid heating happens as the
Speaker 3: star sheds its final eiter layers, like throwing off a
Speaker 3: blanket exposing the incredibly hot contracting core underneath. As that
Speaker 3: core shrinks under gravity, its surface area gets smaller, but
Speaker 3: the energy gets concentrated, so the surface temperature just skyrockets.
Speaker 2: Okay, that makes sense, rapid heating as the core is revealed.
Speaker 2: But here comes the paradox. Right, this is what messes
Speaker 2: with the models.
Speaker 3: This is the kicker. While that heating is incredibly fast
Speaker 3: in human terms, the study found that this rate, this
Speaker 3: one thousand degrees every forty years, is actually slower than
Speaker 3: current theoretical models predict for a star like this.
Speaker 2: Wait, it's heating up super fast, But our best physics
Speaker 2: says it should be heating up even faster.
Speaker 3: That's the puzzle. If you take the known properties of
Speaker 3: IC four eighteen it's mass, the negula's expansion rate, and
Speaker 3: plug them into our standard computer models of stellar evolution,
Speaker 3: those models predicts an even more rapid temperature increase than
Speaker 3: what we've observed over these one hundred and thirty years.
Speaker 2: So the star is putting on the brake somehow compared
Speaker 2: to the theory.
Speaker 3: Or perhaps the theory has the accelerator pushed down too hard.
Speaker 3: It suggests there's something we don't fully understand. Maybe some
Speaker 3: process is slowing the final collapse or moderating the thermal output.
Speaker 3: Could it be some residual, low level nuclear burning deeper
Speaker 3: inside than we expect, Or maybe the way the very
Speaker 3: last bits of mass are rejected affects the surface temperature
Speaker 3: profile differently.
Speaker 2: So the slight discrepancy in speed it points to a
Speaker 2: gap in our understanding of the physics right at the
Speaker 2: very end of a star's.
Speaker 3: Life, a potentially significant gap. If we don't white grasp
Speaker 3: the thermodynamics the heat.
Speaker 2: Flow, then we probably don't fully grasp the chemistry either.
Speaker 3: Right, So let's pivot to that. So what question? Why
Speaker 3: does a three thousand degree temperature difference or a slight
Speaker 3: mismatch in heating speed in a nebula two thousand light
Speaker 3: years away actually matter.
Speaker 2: To us because it connects directly to where the building
Speaker 2: blocks of life come from, carbon carbon exactly. This finding
Speaker 2: is crucial because these dying intermediate mass stars are the
Speaker 2: primary factories for creating and distributing elements heavier than helium
Speaker 2: back into space, and the analysis confirms IC four eighteen
Speaker 2: is explicitly a carbon rich nebula, meaning.
Speaker 3: The star itself cooked up a lot of carbon.
Speaker 2: Inside, synthesize vast amounts of it through nuclear fusion, and
Speaker 2: then through processes we call dredge up, mix that carbon
Speaker 2: up to its surface layers before puffing them off to
Speaker 2: form the nebula.
Speaker 3: And that ejected material, that beautiful spirograph shell we see
Speaker 3: full of carbon.
Speaker 2: Will eventually disperse and mix with the interstellar gas and dust.
Speaker 2: It becomes the raw material for the next generation of stars, planets,
Speaker 2: and potentially life.
Speaker 3: Absolutely a huge fraction of the carbon in the universe,
Speaker 3: the carbon that forms the basis of all organic chemistry,
Speaker 3: the carbon in you and me, originated in stars that
Speaker 3: went through exactly this phase.
Speaker 2: So tracing the carbon atoms in my handback many came
Speaker 2: from a star like IC four eighteen's progenitor.
Speaker 3: That's the cosmic cycle. So when IC four eighteen challenges
Speaker 3: our models of how these stars evolve and die, it
Speaker 3: directly challenges our understanding of how the ingredients essential for
Speaker 3: our existence were made and spread through the galaxy.
Speaker 2: And the problem isn't just the heating speed. Right There
Speaker 2: was another major conflict with the models related to the
Speaker 2: stars mass.
Speaker 3: Yes, this might be the most profound part. The study
Speaker 3: used observations of the Nebula and the white Dwarf to
Speaker 3: calculate the original mass of the star before it started
Speaker 3: shedding its.
Speaker 2: Layers, the progenitor mass. What did they find?
Speaker 3: They determined it was about one point four times the
Speaker 3: mass of our Sun, so a bit heftier than the Sun,
Speaker 3: but not dramatically So.
Speaker 2: Okay, one point four solar masses an empirical measurement based
Speaker 2: on the current system.
Speaker 3: Right. Now, here's the clash. Our standard stellar evolution models
Speaker 3: generally predict that a star needs to be significantly more
Speaker 3: massive to produce the amount of carbon enrichment we see
Speaker 3: in IC four eighteen.
Speaker 2: How much more massive, often in the.
Speaker 3: Range of say two point five to three times the
Speaker 3: mass of the Sun. The models suggested you needed that
Speaker 3: much more initial gravitational squeeze, that much more fuel to
Speaker 3: drive the nuclear reactions and the dredge up processes efficiently
Speaker 3: enough to create such a carbon rich outflow.
Speaker 2: Hold on, So the actual star they measured was substantially
Speaker 2: smaller than the model said was necessary, yet it somehow
Speaker 2: produced all that carbon exactly.
Speaker 3: It seems this one point four solar mass star was
Speaker 3: far more efficient at manufacturing and dejecting carbon than our
Speaker 3: standard models allowed for.
Speaker 2: How could that happen? Does it change how we think
Speaker 2: about that dredge up process?
Speaker 3: It certainly suggests we need to revisit it. The third
Speaker 3: dredge up is this complex process where convection currents deep
Speaker 3: inside the star bring freshly synthesized elements like carbon up
Speaker 3: to the surface layers. If a star of only one
Speaker 3: point four solar masses can do this so effectively, then
Speaker 3: either the minimum mass required for efficient dredge up is
Speaker 3: lower than we thought, or the process itself is more
Speaker 3: efficient in stars of this size than the models currently simulate.
Speaker 2: Either way, it means our fundamental understanding needs adjusting.
Speaker 3: It's a major revision. If the threshold for being a
Speaker 3: significant carbon source is lower, we'll think about it. There
Speaker 3: are many more stars born with around one point four
Speaker 3: solar masses than with two point five or three solar masses.
Speaker 2: So it could dramatically increase the number of stars contributing
Speaker 2: to the galaxy's carbon budget previsely.
Speaker 3: It potentially means the universe has been seated with the
Speaker 3: building blocks of life much more widely by a larger
Speaker 3: population of stars than we previously calculated.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's a huge implication stemming from observing one nebula carefully.
Speaker 3: It's a classic case of a single well studied object
Speaker 3: potentially breaking a widely accepted model, and it really highlights
Speaker 3: the power of that long term observational.
Speaker 2: Approach tying it all together.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, this mass discrepancy, this carbon puzzle, it only really
Speaker 3: comes into sharp focus when you combine the modern measurements
Speaker 3: with that full one hundred and thirty year history. Without
Speaker 3: tracking its evolution, seeing that rapid but not that rapid heating,
Speaker 3: confirming its stage of life, we wouldn't have the context
Speaker 3: to confidently challenge the mass models.
Speaker 2: Which brings us back full circle to the value of
Speaker 2: those old archives, those dusty glass plates.
Speaker 3: They're not just history, they're irreplaceable scientific data. They capture
Speaker 3: dynamics over time scales that no single modern mission, no
Speaker 3: matter how advanced, can replicate. You simply can't tell Hubble
Speaker 3: to wait one hundred and thirty years.
Speaker 2: We're relying on the meticulous work of astronomers from generations
Speaker 2: ago to refine twenty first century astrophysics.
Speaker 3: It's a powerful reminder sometimes the most cutting edge science
Speaker 3: comes from combining the newest tools with the oldest records.
Speaker 2: The source mentioned another great example finding hints of planets
Speaker 2: around ven Mann and Star Yes.
Speaker 3: In twenty sixteen planetary system or at least debris spotted
Speaker 3: entirely on a photographic plate taken way back in nineteen seventeen.
Speaker 3: It's sad in an archive for nearly a.
Speaker 2: Century, just waiting for someone to look at it with
Speaker 2: modern questions and techniques.
Speaker 3: It proves these archives are potential gold mines when you
Speaker 3: devalue them, preserve them, digitize them. The one hundred and
Speaker 3: thirty year story of IC four eighteen is exhibit A
Speaker 3: for why that's so critical.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's quickly recap the key takeaways from this incredible
Speaker 2: story of the asparrograph Nebula ic four eighteen. First, it's
Speaker 2: one of those super rare objects in the sky that
Speaker 2: actually visibly changes over a human lifetime. It shatters that
Speaker 2: idea of a static universe definitely.
Speaker 3: Second, by piecing together one hundred and thirty years of
Speaker 3: data from handwritten notes and glass plates right up to Hubble,
Speaker 3: science has tracked its central star heating up by a
Speaker 3: massive three thousand degrees celsius. That's achieving in just over
Speaker 3: a century what our Sun took maybe ten million years
Speaker 3: to do during its formation.
Speaker 2: And Third, that heating rate, combined with the star's measured
Speaker 2: original mass of only one point for solar masses, throws
Speaker 2: a real wrench into our standard models.
Speaker 3: The star's heating slower than predicted, and it produced way
Speaker 3: more carbon than models thought possible for a star that.
Speaker 2: Size, suggesting we need to rethink how efficiently stars make
Speaker 2: carbon and spread it through the galaxy the very stuff
Speaker 2: we're made of.
Speaker 3: It connects this distant nebula directly to our own origins,
Speaker 3: forcing a revision of fundamental cosmic chemistry.
Speaker 2: So if one hundred and thirty year old glass plates
Speaker 2: and careful notes squibbled down in the eighteen nineties are
Speaker 2: still generating groundbreaking science today, Science that makes us rethink
Speaker 2: the origins of carbon, the basis of life itself. It
Speaker 2: really makes you wonder, doesn't it.
Speaker 3: It absolutely does.
Speaker 2: What else might be hiding right now, undiscovered in dusty
Speaker 2: archives and old notebooks around the world. What breakthroughs are
Speaker 2: just waiting for the right person to connect those historical
Speaker 2: dots with modern analysis.
Speaker 3: What revolutionary science are we sitting on, maybe unknowingly right
Speaker 3: at this very moment. USA