Aren't neutron stars another form of a stellar corpse? If we've seen planets around neutron stars, which are created in a far more violent death throe than what a white dwarf's original star would have gone through, then why would there be any doubt that a planet would eventually be found around one? Don't get me wrong, the discovery is cool, but its doesn't seem to be that big of a deal.
That is the first agreed upon discovery where they were confident in what they had discovered partly because the exoplanets we detected before didn’t fall within our expectations of possible planet sizes and mass.
@@waverod9275- Seems to me like they formed afterwards, those planets around pulsars. Planets are created because of the existence of nearby stars, yes? And they cannot be formed independently. Planets also die because of stars, or more specifically, because of the death of stars.
I absolutely love that any time a science communicator talks about the sun turning into a red giant, they remind us it's going to happen in 5 billion years, and not to panic. I suppose there's always someone who's learning it for the first time!
I'm a very visual learner, and I love all the charts, illustrations and, especially! images, and etc. you include with your videos. I sometimes go back and look at them many, many times because I find them fascinating!! Thank you for your always interesting and excellent content, Dr. Becky!
I have my doubts about Becky. In here Tides video she is using Newton's discounted gravitational attraction instead of the proven Laws of Motion from Newton and Kepler. Apparently she is not aware of Galileo theorizing that the tides are a result of the Earth's motion in space. Nor is she aware of Kepler's contribution showing that the Earth's acceleration factor is the greatest on its closest pass around the sun which is what causes the annual high tide. You would think that an self proclaimed astrophysicist would understand that the earth is orbiting the sun created in one line of acceleration whilst rotating on its axis creating another line of acceleration. The net affect is that the ocean is accelerated first in a clockwise direction as it orbits the sun and then counterclockwise creating the back and forth tidal motion. Even if there wasn't a moon orbiting the planet, the result would be the same. Can't wait for the day when another earth like planet is discovered with no moon orbiting it. How are the flat earthers calling themselves relativists going to spin that? They are already being confronted with planets larger than the host star. That throws a monkey wrench in their models based on mass rather than acceleration. Physicists are supposed to look at the observation from ALL frames of reference. Not just one.
It's probably been said before but I really like the idea of displaying every paper main author''s photo along with the abstract. Sometimes we tend to forget that scientists are human beings like us. 🙂
The problem with the true color Neptune is that it looks identical to Uranus, which can be scary. 😂 Sorry about the Uranus joke, but they do look almost identical. Plus, this isn't the first time Neptune has had its color corrected. It was done in 2017. It didn't take then either.
Good evening Dr۔ Becky۔ Thank you for this mid week dose of curiosity۔ As always، thanks for making difficult ideas، concepts and scientific knowledge، easy for us to understand۔ Can't thank you enough۔
The white dwarf is actually hotter than the star was while in the main sequence. The infrared emission that JWST detects from the planet is not reflected light from the white dwarf, but the thermal emission from the (still warm) planet. The same happens in our solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune emite much more in the infrared than they receive from the Sun.
Yes, and more importantly its luminosity is a tiny fraction of a main sequence star so the size of the planets are calculated from how much they have cooled by their estimated age and is not from any reflection.
For one of the white dwarfs, WD2105-82, it is probably a bit cooler than when it was a main sequence star. The white dwarf has been cooling for almost 1billion years and is now a smidge below 10,000K. But according to the paper, it would have been a 2.5 Solar mass main sequence star in the past, and so would have had a temperature a bit over 10,000K. The other white dwarf, while having cooled to under 9000K, probably descended from a star only a bit heavier than the Sun, so that one is still hotter than its former main sequence star.
Thanks for the clarification, I have not read the paper. My main point is that the amount of infrared light from the white dwarf that is reflected by the planet is negligible compared to the thermal emission arising from the internal heat source of the planet. That is regardless of the temperature of the WD. Actually, an old (and therefore colder and fainter) WD makes a bit less challenging to see the planet on top of the glare of the WD.
Dr. Kipping just got awarded JWST time this year specifically to search for exomoons. However, his candidate planet orbits a main sequence star. Maybe if that search is successful and exomoon study gets more popular, it will eventually lead to searches around white dwarfs too.
An interesting presentation, thanks, I enjoyed it. As a professional software engineer though I have to confess I pursed my lips a little as you went into the sponsor promotion segment at the end. It's great of course for anyone to learn anything, and certainly the mental skills and disciplines gained through learning to code will never be wasted. My concern is rather to manage expectations. Coding is a bit like chess: easy to learn, hard to master. I've been doing it for over fifty years, and I am still learning and improving. There's also a strong Dunning-Kruger tendency to coding, in that many devotees feel that being able to bodge together a bit of Python means they have essentially conquered this business; any protests to the contrary by what-would-they-know, so-called professionals - sheesh, why do I need to initialize my variables? Add an 'else' block? - count as mere fussbudgetry that can be safely discounted. In this connection I can't resist mentioning that a significant fraction or my present day job is cleaning up god-awful code written by astronomers. ;)
Dr. Smethurst, thank you for your excellent continued efforts to explain significant astronomical news. Your RUclips channel is one of my favorites. I was shocked when I read about you being stalked. I’m relieved that the stalker has been caught.
Does a white dwarf star have the same mass as the original star? If no, then I assume it’s much less massive since so much mass was ejected to leave the white dwarf. Wouldn’t the lower mass cause some change in the orbits of the remaining planets? Could some planets escape from the system altogether? Is that where rogue planets might come from?
How much mass is there at the center of a hurricane? Why would a solar system or even a galaxy be ruled by different laws of physics. Are there different laws of physics for 3 dimensional objects like rotating spheres and one dimensional objects like rotating disks?
@BillMitchell-lm8dg now extend that to the solar system and to the galaxy. There is no "gravitational pull'. The earth is gaining mass from the sun, causing it to slow down, which 'lifts' the moon into a higher orbit rather than the moon being 'pulled' in closer due to 'gravity.'
Just wanted to point out a correction here: Becky shows the image of Fomalhaut B, 'Dagon', as the first directly imaged exoplanet from Hubble. Dagon actually isn't thought to be a planet anymore, but some kind of dust cloud - in more recent images, it seems to have disintergrated.
So sorry to hear about your stalker. As 80 year old retired Chem.Eng. I love your broadcast which keeps my mind active. You make astrophysics fun and understandable. Thank you
5:32 Just adding that Fomalhaut b was later found out to be an expanding gas cloud and not an actual exoplanet... but the method was still proven to be effective.
5:37 what is that ring structure you can see around Formalhaut? Asteroid belt? probably too bright for that; some kind of disk around the star (of a shattered planet?)
Something between an asteroid belt and Saturn’s rings. Basically a huge ring of dust and rocks. It’s a young star system still in the process of formation.
Dr.Becky i just finished to listen to you amazing audio Book! Thanks a lot to share your knlowledge it was a great!!!!. I have a question about 1 point that you explained that was extremly interesting but that i cannot find a lot of information.... the rotational Drag Force that the BH is exercising to the matter in the surrondings, it cannot be used also to explain the increased rotation speed of stars in a galaxy?
I know that the difference would be a small fraction of a percentage, but I'm curious. When we give the distance between two bodies, like the Sun and the Earth, are we talking center to center or "surface" to surface?
Becky, please help me to understand: Why is it possible at all to catch an exo planet in front of its star? This will require to be somhow in the plane of rotation or very close to it. With earth around sun for example, observed from any other star, there would be no chance to see it ever moving in front of the sun.
As the red giant's outer layers "fizzle away" will the star's mass change enough to affect its planets orbits? Will they move closer to the star, or farther away?
I've not looked at my daily compendium of ArXiv papers for a few weeks - life etc - but there's nothing to stop you doing a similar search for papers including "Trappist" as often as you like.
How strongly would the outer planets be gravitationally bound to the white dwarf? Is there a significant difference between the mass of a white dwarf vs a red giant?
Actually, white dwarfs are extremely hot, some 100000K, which means that it emits a lot more in visible than in infrared - and most of emissions is somewhere in x rays. The problem is that they are extremely compact, so total energy output is low. Planets will absorb all that energy and re-emit in infrared.
My understanding is that when a sun-like star goes into the red giant, then white dwarf phases, a lot of the outer layers will get cast off (i.e. the inaccurately named 'planetary nebula'). When that happens, how much mass is thrown off, and would that impact the orbits of the gas/ice giants? i.e. if the sun cast off a significant enough portion of its mass, wouldn't the gas/ice giant orbits be changed in some way, potentially becoming unstable and ending up getting cast out of the remaining gravitational influence of the sun? Or is the mass loss to a planetary nebula not sufficient enough to change the orbits that substantially?
So when the sun dies, it loses a great deal of it's mass raising the question, will the further out planets still orbit the sun or will they become rogue planets? Because less mass means less gravity.
It only loses about 45%, so those planets just take on larger orbits and are not lost to space all else equal. Of course the additional gas they blow through also slows them down which depends on quite a few factors.
We can only take educated predictions. Ultimately, when the time comes, any number of things can happen. And we will never know for sure anyway. Now I'm sad 😢
That’s the virial theorem. 2T = -U, so total energy is T + U = -T < 0…bound state And U is prop to M, so if M is halved, then the energy is T + U/2 = 0, unbound. Ofc it’s independent of radius, since there is no inherent length scale in the two body point particle problem. Classically, in quantum, the Compton wavelength of the light particle sets a length scale, which is why the Bohr radius is the electron Compton wavelength divided by the fine structure constant.
Thank you for another, as always, great video. I wonder if the planets orbits of the sun (or similar star in other star systems) are affected when the sun first becomes a red giant and then a white dwarf? Will the sun e.g. loose mass and thus the gravity change?
Mass loss is an almost universal thing for old SOLITARY stars. Things get a lot more complex for multiple stars (about half of all stars). Of course, the stable orbits around (or between) two mutually orbiting stars are also far more complex than those around a single star.
I heard that the exoplanet was a rogue planet which started revolving around fomalhault star for a short period of time but now it's just on it's cosmic journey again as a rogue planet in the cold vacuum of space
Oh wow…I didn’t know that! But YEAH…I see that the Spitzer data-plus a reanalysis of the original HST data-indicates that the light from *Fomalhaut b* is scattered sunlight off a dust cloud, instead of “planet thermal emission.” A 2020 paper by Gáspár & collaborators says that it’s, “a dispersing cloud of dust, produced by a massive collision between two planetesimals.”
i was just considering how the swelling of the sun would affect the temperature and diameter of Jupiter. i asked Pi, and it said that even though the Sun would be cooler, overall energy output would be greater, leading to a potential temperature increase of Jupiter by several hundred degrees Celsius, and that an increase by 500 degrees would result in an increase of the diameter of the planet by maybe 40% depending on actual atmospheric composition and their combined thermodynamic properties. idk if those estimates are anywhere near accurate, but i find the principle intriguing.
What I'd be curious to know is if the planets that survive the Red Giant stage of their stars change at all. Do their orbits change due to the decrease in the star's mass as it sheds its envelope? Do they drift further away or closer because of the drag from said envelope? Does their chemical composition or mass change as they interact with that envelope?
This is an excellent science fiction prompt. The remnants of human civilization living on the moons of the outer planets after the sun becomes a white dwarf.
I can imagine it now. _The human emigrants from Earth must learn to coexist with the combative fish beings under Enceladus’ subsurface ocean in order to survive!_ I’d watch that movie.
At the other end of the planetary evolution time scale, what do you think the chances are that we'd get some pictures of TCha from JWST once they gone through the planetary formation data?
So if a star sheds a large amount of it’s mass wouldn’t that affect the amount of gravitational influence it had on any planets orbiting it? Would less mass in the star result in a planet moving farther out, or even leaving orbit entirely?
As the mass of the star has burned off, doesn't that change the gravitational pull of the star? Wouldn't that destabilize the orbits of those more-distant planets?
My ignorance is showing. Would the gravitational force be stronger or weaker when the sun is in the red giant stage. How would that affect the position of the gas giants?
These directly imaged planets' luminescence would be vastly different depending on which "phase" they are in, i.e. if they are closer to us (so we see their darker backside) than their star or if they are farther away (showing their illuminated side). Similarly it's hard to determine how far from the star they are if you don't know the orientation and inclination of their orbits and where in their orbit they are. I don't know how they are able to discern any of this from just one image. Perhaps I should read the papers...
What happens to the orbits of the surviving planets? Are they affected in a meaningful way, by the expected loss of solar mass during the formation of the nebula? I would suppose a certain amount of the ejected mass, would be swept up by the outer planets too, but not anywhere near the amount that has been ejected.
Dr. Becky, with a sun going to a red giant phase and 'blowing off' a good deal of its mass, does that not reduce its gravitational pull and leave the orbital speed of planets along with their unchanged mass changing their orbits drastically? I'm imagining them 'flying off into space', but would it merely mean their orbital distance would just increase? 🤔
I like to point out that what ultimately happens to Earth seems less a matter of stellar evolution & more a question of who'll be running this solar system & how good they are at planetary engineering.
I think it's worth pointing out that "survive" could mean different things to different people. I'm sure most people watching this channel will know you mean "will it still exist" But the conditions will likely be very different - if it had life before it very likely won't do afterwards. (The reverse is also possible I guess - it could become habitable after the death of the host star, but this would likely require an orbit change - could the dying star cause it's planets orbits to shift inwards?)
Amazing discovery! What would theoretically happen to the gas giants once the gravity and energy of the star diminish? Less so will they wander off…but more related internally, atmospherically, etc?
It's a Hammer House of Horrors statement. "The solar system will be plunged into complete darkness." Yes Skywalker, then my plans will be complete! Thanks Dr Becky, it made me laugh, but it was thoroughly informative.😊
My question is after a star explodes and turns into a white dwarf, wouldn't their mass be dramatically reduced? If so, wouldn't that also change the orbits of any remaining planets? Especially if inner planets are destroyed, there would be less mass and in turn, less gravity pulling on them.
Not an explosion, more a slow expansion and ejection of mass over 10's of thousands of years (forming a very cool looking 'planetary nebula'). The planets will move further out in their orbits since about half of the Sun's mass will be ejected into space.
What explosion? Our G2V Sun will not produce a supernova. It simply does not have enough mass. Only spectral types O and B dwarfs will produce SN when they run out of fusion fuel.
During the evolution from red giant to white dwarf, do we know anything about the mass of the star? Does it lose substance and does that have consequences for the orbits of surviving planets?
If some type of star goes out in a so-called symmetric collapse, "just disappearing" (seeming so, in brightness), none of its planets will be severely affected, just calming down. Anton Petrov told in about 2'22 that about 200 Stars had dissapeared that were on maps. I read about an object found at the size of (asteroid) Ceres orbiting a tiny star more then 500 lightyears away, before JWST was doing similar, that is just hard to grasp or fathom, but amazing. But a rather boggling query would be where the sun's twin called Nemesis went, since most star systems are consisting of two similar stars, and i'm convinced that the absence of Nemesis attracts asteroids and comets stuff (like in the late heavy bombardment) to refill the mass gap for stabilisation feeding or stuffing Jupiter, "hey Jupiter, you'll be a star some day", making the solar system having more meen ("moons") until then. Not just as science friction. Decades ago, the "USA" seduced us away from self-healing abilities with nasty sticking products, and nowadays they're intensivating zombi research, but i guess i'm getting a slap on this last interpretation of mine. Flaws should be self-chosen?
What happens to the orbit of the exo planets after the star becomes a white dwarf. Presumably a lot of mass had been lost from the transition from a star to a white dwarf so the pull of the star changes - yes?
does the suns gravity pull change when it dies? an how would that effect the solar system thats left? or is the solar system too big for it to have any effect??
6:55 There are caves in earth right now that are darker than Neptune will be orbiting around the Suns corpse. It's never completely dark under a stary sky. And it will take a while until the sky is no longer lit by at least some stars.
2 questions: 1) What pourcentage of his mass the sun will lose when it'll be a white dwarf? Because if he loses a lot a mass, orbits of Jupiter/Saturne will change anyway no? Maybe some gas giants will be ejected or they can crash in the sun or between them. 2) With red dwarfs, planets orbit very close to their star. Can they survive the red giant phase? Or we are looking for this kind of planets only orbiting dead orange/yellow dwarfs? I guess for bigger stars finishing in supernovae, all planets should be destroyed or ejected too.
1.) The sun is expected to lose a bit less than half of its mass, planets should move outwards but not be ejected, there's less gravity not an active push away. 2.) Red dwarfs don't undergo the red giant phase, they become 'blue dwarfs' then stop fusing and cool. They do not have the mass to fuse helium. As a note the first exoplanets discovered orbited a neutron star, so planets can survive even supernovae (Or forma afterwards.)
Once the sun gets rid of the outer layers and leaves the core, the gravitational pull should be much smaller. Wouldn't then seeing these planets in the saturn orbit mean that the inner planets moved outwards rather than the outer planets remaining in place?
I wonder if hollow Saturn from the exploding rosie is correct and that's why it ate Chrysalis like a can of Goya. Like HeyZeus wearing the golden fleece as a disguise from the fates. Rings around the rosie~☆ Missing golden moons, Chrysos, deserved better.
I would assume that since the white dwarf is now much lighter (less massive) and the gas giants are still massive, their gravitational influence could be seen and measured by the white dwarfs "wobble?"
I was assuming the same as well. Once a red giant “farts out” (Dr. Becky prefers “belches”) its outer gaseous layers-and therefore a bit of its mass-and becomes a CSPN (white dwarf), it makes sense that the gravitational influence of its planets would be slightly more detectable. In the case of our own solar system, I just hope Sol makes a beautiful, colorful planetary nebula (Dr. B left out _that_ part) prior to the surviving planets being plunged into (visible spectrum) darkness, lol!
so - if those gas giants will survive the red-giant phase of the sun - the question for me, would be: will their orbits survive? with the sun losing mass, and those giants probably gaining some of it - and solar wind pressure decreasing, i would expect orbits changing / destabilizing
Fun fact: first exoplanets discovered were orbiting a neutron star. They were detected because of the impact they had on the pulsars timing.
Yeah the first named exoplanet is called Poltergeist. Which is just plain awesome and thematically appropriate.
Aren't neutron stars another form of a stellar corpse? If we've seen planets around neutron stars, which are created in a far more violent death throe than what a white dwarf's original star would have gone through, then why would there be any doubt that a planet would eventually be found around one? Don't get me wrong, the discovery is cool, but its doesn't seem to be that big of a deal.
@@souledgar for the pulsar planets, it's not clear that they predate the supernova that formed the pulsar. It may be that they formed afterward.
That is the first agreed upon discovery where they were confident in what they had discovered partly because the exoplanets we detected before didn’t fall within our expectations of possible planet sizes and mass.
@@waverod9275- Seems to me like they formed afterwards, those planets around pulsars.
Planets are created because of the existence of nearby stars, yes? And they cannot be formed independently.
Planets also die because of stars, or more specifically, because of the death of stars.
I absolutely love that any time a science communicator talks about the sun turning into a red giant, they remind us it's going to happen in 5 billion years, and not to panic. I suppose there's always someone who's learning it for the first time!
It still seems like awfully short notice. What if I have plans that day? They'll be ruined!
Damn! I was going to wash my hair that day!
@@mikehipperson that's auspicious timing, sun will dry them for you
Earth will be torched long before 5 billion years. I believe I heard somewhere in the 300 to 500 million year area 🔥
Better check if my insurance covers loss caused by Expanding Red Giants
I'm a very visual learner, and I love all the charts, illustrations and, especially! images, and etc. you include with your videos. I sometimes go back and look at them many, many times because I find them fascinating!! Thank you for your always interesting and excellent content, Dr. Becky!
5.5k views in 45 minutes. I'm glad there's that many people interested in astronomy!
There ARE that many people.
@@AndrewBlacker-t1d Yea there are that many, indicated also by the about a million of subscribers that many astrophysics channels have.
It's so easy to just pre-like the video before it even starts with this channel. It's Dr. Becky. I *know* I'm going to like the video.
I have my doubts about Becky. In here Tides video she is using Newton's discounted gravitational attraction instead of the proven Laws of Motion from Newton and Kepler.
Apparently she is not aware of Galileo theorizing that the tides are a result of the Earth's motion in space. Nor is she aware of Kepler's contribution showing that the Earth's acceleration factor is the greatest on its closest pass around the sun which is what causes the annual high tide.
You would think that an self proclaimed astrophysicist would understand that the earth is orbiting the sun created in one line of acceleration whilst rotating on its axis creating another line of acceleration. The net affect is that the ocean is accelerated first in a clockwise direction as it orbits the sun and then counterclockwise creating the back and forth tidal motion.
Even if there wasn't a moon orbiting the planet, the result would be the same.
Can't wait for the day when another earth like planet is discovered with no moon orbiting it. How are the flat earthers calling themselves relativists going to spin that? They are already being confronted with planets larger than the host star. That throws a monkey wrench in their models based on mass rather than acceleration.
Physicists are supposed to look at the observation from ALL frames of reference. Not just one.
It's probably been said before but I really like the idea of displaying every paper main author''s photo along with the abstract. Sometimes we tend to forget that scientists are human beings like us. 🙂
Have you seen the publication fees for each photograph?
Scientists are humans? Okay I'll take it under consideration, but by no means are lawyers human...
I am glad you put that “finally published” remark into the bloopers. I was thinking about how much I resemble that remark.
I like that we are still using the "false color" Neptune :)
Haha I noticed that on reviewing the edit, and thought about changing it - but I moved house this week, so forgive me for having no energy left haha
you mean the SUPERIOR color Neptune 😤
@@Avendesora The one I see in my telescope is the blue-green , but probably atmospheric aberration.
The problem with the true color Neptune is that it looks identical to Uranus, which can be scary. 😂 Sorry about the Uranus joke, but they do look almost identical. Plus, this isn't the first time Neptune has had its color corrected. It was done in 2017. It didn't take then either.
@@scottdorfler2551 I believe it was Voyager 2 that first discovered the _dark rings around Uranus!_ lol
My favourite White Dwarf is *40 Eri B,* the second brightest white dwarf.
*I like to call it WD-40*
BAH-DUMP-CHEE! [rim shot]
How long have you been waiting to post that pun in Dr. Becky’s comments? lol!
That was slick.
Handy when your knowledge of stars is a bit rusty
@@ahcapella I've been waiting to post it since about 3 seconds after I saw Becky's video title.
“Good science is never late. Nor is it early; it arrives precisely when it is ready” -Magneto
Good evening Dr۔ Becky۔
Thank you for this mid week dose of curiosity۔
As always، thanks for making difficult ideas، concepts and scientific knowledge، easy for us to understand۔ Can't thank you enough۔
Where will the April solar eclipse be visible in North America۔ Any information۔
The white dwarf is actually hotter than the star was while in the main sequence. The infrared emission that JWST detects from the planet is not reflected light from the white dwarf, but the thermal emission from the (still warm) planet. The same happens in our solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune emite much more in the infrared than they receive from the Sun.
Yes, and more importantly its luminosity is a tiny fraction of a main sequence star so the size of the planets are calculated from how much they have cooled by their estimated age and is not from any reflection.
Yeah, I was womdering about this!
Yeah, i was about to ask how white dwarfs are brighter in the infrared, if that was the case they would be red, not white
For one of the white dwarfs, WD2105-82, it is probably a bit cooler than when it was a main sequence star. The white dwarf has been cooling for almost 1billion years and is now a smidge below 10,000K. But according to the paper, it would have been a 2.5 Solar mass main sequence star in the past, and so would have had a temperature a bit over 10,000K. The other white dwarf, while having cooled to under 9000K, probably descended from a star only a bit heavier than the Sun, so that one is still hotter than its former main sequence star.
Thanks for the clarification, I have not read the paper. My main point is that the amount of infrared light from the white dwarf that is reflected by the planet is negligible compared to the thermal emission arising from the internal heat source of the planet. That is regardless of the temperature of the WD. Actually, an old (and therefore colder and fainter) WD makes a bit less challenging to see the planet on top of the glare of the WD.
I know we're not there yet, but I hope we get to the point that we can detect moons around such remainder gas giants.
Dr. Kipping just got awarded JWST time this year specifically to search for exomoons. However, his candidate planet orbits a main sequence star. Maybe if that search is successful and exomoon study gets more popular, it will eventually lead to searches around white dwarfs too.
really enjoyed this one. keep mooooving on to the next!
Sidebar: I just love the word "orbit."
I really appreciate your content.
An interesting presentation, thanks, I enjoyed it. As a professional software engineer though I have to confess I pursed my lips a little as you went into the sponsor promotion segment at the end. It's great of course for anyone to learn anything, and certainly the mental skills and disciplines gained through learning to code will never be wasted. My concern is rather to manage expectations. Coding is a bit like chess: easy to learn, hard to master. I've been doing it for over fifty years, and I am still learning and improving. There's also a strong Dunning-Kruger tendency to coding, in that many devotees feel that being able to bodge together a bit of Python means they have essentially conquered this business; any protests to the contrary by what-would-they-know, so-called professionals - sheesh, why do I need to initialize my variables? Add an 'else' block? - count as mere fussbudgetry that can be safely discounted. In this connection I can't resist mentioning that a significant fraction or my present day job is cleaning up god-awful code written by astronomers. ;)
Excellent and fun, as always!
Loving that shirt! Just ordered mine. Thanks doc!
The exagon shaped starlight is so cool, even if I know it's just an artifact from jwst
Good simulations! Watching after a few years and the topics are quite interesting
Like your enthusiasm.
Awesome vid again, Dr Becky. I wish you had been my physics teacher.
I always enjoy your vids. 🙂
Great stuff. Thanks Dr Becky
Your enthusiasm is so much fun…..
Dr. Smethurst, thank you for your excellent continued efforts to explain significant astronomical news. Your RUclips channel is one of my favorites. I was shocked when I read about you being stalked. I’m relieved that the stalker has been caught.
Does a white dwarf star have the same mass as the original star? If no, then I assume it’s much less massive since so much mass was ejected to leave the white dwarf. Wouldn’t the lower mass cause some change in the orbits of the remaining planets? Could some planets escape from the system altogether? Is that where rogue planets might come from?
How much mass is there at the center of a hurricane? Why would a solar system or even a galaxy be ruled by different laws of physics.
Are there different laws of physics for 3 dimensional objects like rotating spheres and one dimensional objects like rotating disks?
@@stewiesaidthat The surrounding atmosphere keeps the hurricane circular, not any gravitational attraction of the hurrican'es "eye".
@BillMitchell-lm8dg now extend that to the solar system and to the galaxy. There is no "gravitational pull'. The earth is gaining mass from the sun, causing it to slow down, which 'lifts' the moon into a higher orbit rather than the moon being 'pulled' in closer due to 'gravity.'
@@stewiesaidthat🦆🦆
Just wanted to point out a correction here:
Becky shows the image of Fomalhaut B, 'Dagon', as the first directly imaged exoplanet from Hubble. Dagon actually isn't thought to be a planet anymore, but some kind of dust cloud - in more recent images, it seems to have disintergrated.
Brilliant video. Thank you.
So sorry to hear about your stalker. As 80 year old retired Chem.Eng. I love your broadcast which keeps my mind active. You make astrophysics fun and understandable. Thank you
That's pretty exciting.
5:32 Just adding that Fomalhaut b was later found out to be an expanding gas cloud and not an actual exoplanet... but the method was still proven to be effective.
5:37 what is that ring structure you can see around Formalhaut? Asteroid belt? probably too bright for that; some kind of disk around the star (of a shattered planet?)
Something between an asteroid belt and Saturn’s rings. Basically a huge ring of dust and rocks. It’s a young star system still in the process of formation.
4:06
There are cardinal directions in space? North, South.. etc?
Thank you, keep working.
nice. this has been theorized for a long time.
Cheers from the Pacific West Coast of Canada.
This is so incredible JWST is a dream come true 😍
Dr.Becky i just finished to listen to you amazing audio Book! Thanks a lot to share your knlowledge it was a great!!!!. I have a question about 1 point that you explained that was extremly interesting but that i cannot find a lot of information.... the rotational Drag Force that the BH is exercising to the matter in the surrondings, it cannot be used also to explain the increased rotation speed of stars in a galaxy?
DR BECKY, can you speak on the april 8 total solar eclipse plz? would love to hear you present it
Brilliant stuff!
Thanks, dr. Becky! 😊
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
How would the mass loss of the star affect the orbits of any surviving planets?
In general, they'll become more elliptical.
b i g
Very informative Doctor! Question, what would the impact be on the outer planets moons? Like Io, Titan…..?
I know that the difference would be a small fraction of a percentage, but I'm curious. When we give the distance between two bodies, like the Sun and the Earth, are we talking center to center or "surface" to surface?
Pretty and brilliant. I love your videos Dr Becky.
This is so cool, thanks!
@DrBecky >>> Great video...👍
Becky, please help me to understand:
Why is it possible at all to catch an exo planet in front of its star?
This will require to be somhow in the plane of rotation or very close to it.
With earth around sun for example, observed from any other star, there would be no chance to see it ever moving in front of the sun.
"The time you think it's going to take you, triple it" I relate heavily to this
Thanks @drbecky. I just signed up to Brilliant through your link. Loving the Thinking in Code course 🙂
1:08 You don't need to worry because the increasing solar output is expected to boil off all the oceans roughly 1 billion years from now.
As the red giant's outer layers "fizzle away" will the star's mass change enough to affect its planets orbits? Will they move closer to the star, or farther away?
Yes, a significant fraction of the Sun's mass will be lost, and yes, the planets' orbits will change. They will become more elliptical.
The "helium flash" actually generates the energy that blows off the outer layers of red giants like our Sun.
Favorite videos that pop up in my subscriptions. Do you know if there are any updates on the Trappist-1 system?
No atmospheres detected yet on the first couple of planets. Not looking good
@@vicenzor3625 so nothing on like I think it’s d, e, and f that are supposed to be more in the habitable zone
@@vicenzor3625the red dwarf might have underwent a flare star phase and microwaved the system
I've not looked at my daily compendium of ArXiv papers for a few weeks - life etc - but there's nothing to stop you doing a similar search for papers including "Trappist" as often as you like.
How strongly would the outer planets be gravitationally bound to the white dwarf? Is there a significant difference between the mass of a white dwarf vs a red giant?
Actually, white dwarfs are extremely hot, some 100000K, which means that it emits a lot more in visible than in infrared - and most of emissions is somewhere in x rays. The problem is that they are extremely compact, so total energy output is low. Planets will absorb all that energy and re-emit in infrared.
My understanding is that when a sun-like star goes into the red giant, then white dwarf phases, a lot of the outer layers will get cast off (i.e. the inaccurately named 'planetary nebula'). When that happens, how much mass is thrown off, and would that impact the orbits of the gas/ice giants? i.e. if the sun cast off a significant enough portion of its mass, wouldn't the gas/ice giant orbits be changed in some way, potentially becoming unstable and ending up getting cast out of the remaining gravitational influence of the sun? Or is the mass loss to a planetary nebula not sufficient enough to change the orbits that substantially?
So when the sun dies, it loses a great deal of it's mass raising the question, will the further out planets still orbit the sun or will they become rogue planets? Because less mass means less gravity.
It only loses about 45%, so those planets just take on larger orbits and are not lost to space all else equal. Of course the additional gas they blow through also slows them down which depends on quite a few factors.
You mean do they go virial?
We can only take educated predictions. Ultimately, when the time comes, any number of things can happen. And we will never know for sure anyway. Now I'm sad 😢
That’s the virial theorem.
2T = -U,
so total energy is T + U = -T < 0…bound state
And U is prop to M, so if M is halved, then the energy is
T + U/2 = 0, unbound.
Ofc it’s independent of radius, since there is no inherent length scale in the two body point particle problem.
Classically, in quantum, the Compton wavelength of the light particle sets a length scale, which is why the Bohr radius is the electron Compton wavelength divided by the fine structure constant.
She answers your question directly @6:30 Dr. Becky often already knows your question before you do. 💫
A 10 minute video? Shortest one yet, but understand how busy y'all must be.
As always, outstanding and fascinating. Thank you!
I did move house this past week 🙃
@@DrBecky wait... You moved an entire house?! 🤯
JK...
If y'all are doing drywall, the Vancouver carpenter is a great channel.
Honestly, it's easier for me to watch shorter videos.
Um, 'y'all' is plural, and Dr. Becky is singular; there is only one of her.
@@michaelsommers2356Never forget the amazing editors 👍
Thank you for another, as always, great video.
I wonder if the planets orbits of the sun (or similar star in other star systems) are affected when the sun first becomes a red giant and then a white dwarf? Will the sun e.g. loose mass and thus the gravity change?
Mass loss is an almost universal thing for old SOLITARY stars. Things get a lot more complex for multiple stars (about half of all stars). Of course, the stable orbits around (or between) two mutually orbiting stars are also far more complex than those around a single star.
It's actually been found that the object orbiting Fomalhaut was a dust cloud and not a planet.
I heard that the exoplanet was a rogue planet which started revolving around fomalhault star for a short period of time but now it's just on it's cosmic journey again as a rogue planet in the cold vacuum of space
Oh wow…I didn’t know that! But YEAH…I see that the Spitzer data-plus a reanalysis of the original HST data-indicates that the light from *Fomalhaut b* is scattered sunlight off a dust cloud, instead of “planet thermal emission.” A 2020 paper by Gáspár & collaborators says that it’s, “a dispersing cloud of dust, produced by a massive collision between two planetesimals.”
As long as the star has mass, what difference does it nake if it is dead or alive?
I somehow missed this video! Presented this news at an astronomy club meeting haha! 🌌
i was just considering how the swelling of the sun would affect the temperature and diameter of Jupiter. i asked Pi, and it said that even though the Sun would be cooler, overall energy output would be greater, leading to a potential temperature increase of Jupiter by several hundred degrees Celsius, and that an increase by 500 degrees would result in an increase of the diameter of the planet by maybe 40% depending on actual atmospheric composition and their combined thermodynamic properties. idk if those estimates are anywhere near accurate, but i find the principle intriguing.
What I'd be curious to know is if the planets that survive the Red Giant stage of their stars change at all. Do their orbits change due to the decrease in the star's mass as it sheds its envelope? Do they drift further away or closer because of the drag from said envelope? Does their chemical composition or mass change as they interact with that envelope?
This is an excellent science fiction prompt. The remnants of human civilization living on the moons of the outer planets after the sun becomes a white dwarf.
I can imagine it now. _The human emigrants from Earth must learn to coexist with the combative fish beings under Enceladus’ subsurface ocean in order to survive!_
I’d watch that movie.
At the other end of the planetary evolution time scale, what do you think the chances are that we'd get some pictures of TCha from JWST once they gone through the planetary formation data?
Thank you ma'am 🙏🙏🙏🌾🌾🌾
So if a star sheds a large amount of it’s mass wouldn’t that affect the amount of gravitational influence it had on any planets orbiting it? Would less mass in the star result in a planet moving farther out, or even leaving orbit entirely?
As the mass of the star has burned off, doesn't that change the gravitational pull of the star? Wouldn't that destabilize the orbits of those more-distant planets?
They will tend to move outwards, but it is unknown if this will especially destabilize them rather than just make them more loosely held.
A necklace with moon phases? How cute for an astrophysicist :DD
My ignorance is showing. Would the gravitational force be stronger or weaker when the sun is in the red giant stage. How would that affect the position of the gas giants?
Weaker, as the star loses mass. This will cause planetary orbits to become larger over time.
These directly imaged planets' luminescence would be vastly different depending on which "phase" they are in, i.e. if they are closer to us (so we see their darker backside) than their star or if they are farther away (showing their illuminated side). Similarly it's hard to determine how far from the star they are if you don't know the orientation and inclination of their orbits and where in their orbit they are. I don't know how they are able to discern any of this from just one image.
Perhaps I should read the papers...
What happens to the orbits of the surviving planets? Are they affected in a meaningful way, by the expected loss of solar mass during the formation of the nebula? I would suppose a certain amount of the ejected mass, would be swept up by the outer planets too, but not anywhere near the amount that has been ejected.
Dr. Becky, with a sun going to a red giant phase and 'blowing off' a good deal of its mass, does that not reduce its gravitational pull and leave the orbital speed of planets along with their unchanged mass changing their orbits drastically? I'm imagining them 'flying off into space', but would it merely mean their orbital distance would just increase? 🤔
There something weird with the sound, ie, it's shrill and piercing even at 25% volume.
I like to point out that what ultimately happens to Earth seems less a matter of stellar evolution & more a question of who'll be running this solar system & how good they are at planetary engineering.
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You're one in a million!!! Aloha's stay safe 🤙🙏🖖👽💯
I think it's worth pointing out that "survive" could mean different things to different people. I'm sure most people watching this channel will know you mean "will it still exist"
But the conditions will likely be very different - if it had life before it very likely won't do afterwards. (The reverse is also possible I guess - it could become habitable after the death of the host star, but this would likely require an orbit change - could the dying star cause it's planets orbits to shift inwards?)
The dying star will lose about half its mass, so the orbits of the planets will move outwards as there is less attraction.
@@DeepeningTheListening yeah, that's pretty much what I thought, they may get pushed out but unlikely to fall in
Amazing discovery! What would theoretically happen to the gas giants once the gravity and energy of the star diminish? Less so will they wander off…but more related internally, atmospherically, etc?
They will move out further, maybe lose some of their atmosphere from strong solar winds and cool down faster.
What book is that in the background?
A Brief History of Black Holes, I think.
How would we know if the planets had survived the white dwarf process? Or did they drift into orbit after it was already "dwarfed"?
What happens to the orbits of those remaining planets?
It's a Hammer House of Horrors statement.
"The solar system will be plunged into complete darkness."
Yes Skywalker, then my plans will be complete!
Thanks Dr Becky, it made me laugh, but it was thoroughly informative.😊
Miss your shows Dr. When next show?
My question is after a star explodes and turns into a white dwarf, wouldn't their mass be dramatically reduced? If so, wouldn't that also change the orbits of any remaining planets? Especially if inner planets are destroyed, there would be less mass and in turn, less gravity pulling on them.
I would expect that the change in mass due to the explosion would completely alter the orbits causing the plants to fly off
Good question. Or would the planets just move their orbits out a bit?
Not an explosion, more a slow expansion and ejection of mass over 10's of thousands of years (forming a very cool looking 'planetary nebula'). The planets will move further out in their orbits since about half of the Sun's mass will be ejected into space.
What explosion? Our G2V Sun will not produce a supernova. It simply does not have enough mass. Only spectral types O and B dwarfs will produce SN when they run out of fusion fuel.
During the evolution from red giant to white dwarf, do we know anything about the mass of the star? Does it lose substance and does that have consequences for the orbits of surviving planets?
Stars can lose up to half their mass while turning into a red giant and then a white dwarf. Yes, the orbits will be affected.
If some type of star goes out in a so-called symmetric collapse, "just disappearing" (seeming so, in brightness), none of its planets will be severely affected, just calming down. Anton Petrov told in about 2'22 that about 200 Stars had dissapeared that were on maps.
I read about an object found at the size of (asteroid) Ceres orbiting a tiny star more then 500 lightyears away, before JWST was doing similar, that is just hard to grasp or fathom, but amazing.
But a rather boggling query would be where the sun's twin called Nemesis went, since most star systems are consisting of two similar stars, and i'm convinced that the absence of Nemesis attracts asteroids and comets stuff (like in the late heavy bombardment) to refill the mass gap for stabilisation feeding or stuffing Jupiter, "hey Jupiter, you'll be a star some day", making the solar system having more meen ("moons") until then. Not just as science friction. Decades ago, the "USA" seduced us away from self-healing abilities with nasty sticking products, and nowadays they're intensivating zombi research, but i guess i'm getting a slap on this last interpretation of mine. Flaws should be self-chosen?
What happens to the orbit of the exo planets after the star becomes a white dwarf. Presumably a lot of mass had been lost from the transition from a star to a white dwarf so the pull of the star changes - yes?
does the suns gravity pull change when it dies? an how would that effect the solar system thats left? or is the solar system too big for it to have any effect??
It will lose about half of its mass, blown into space, and the surviving outer planets will orbit slightly further away.
The sun's gravity will nearly halve, causing planetary orbits to become much wider. The suns gravity binds the entire solar system.
@@garethdean6382 wondering if it be enough to create rouge planets.....?
@@Naptime48 We already have a 'rouge' planet. It's called Mars!
@@mikehipperson badum tsssss (flippin auto correct!)
Doesn't reflectivity vary from planet to planet?
6:55 There are caves in earth right now that are darker than Neptune will be orbiting around the Suns corpse.
It's never completely dark under a stary sky.
And it will take a while until the sky is no longer lit by at least some stars.
2 questions:
1) What pourcentage of his mass the sun will lose when it'll be a white dwarf? Because if he loses a lot a mass, orbits of Jupiter/Saturne will change anyway no? Maybe some gas giants will be ejected or they can crash in the sun or between them.
2) With red dwarfs, planets orbit very close to their star. Can they survive the red giant phase? Or we are looking for this kind of planets only orbiting dead orange/yellow dwarfs? I guess for bigger stars finishing in supernovae, all planets should be destroyed or ejected too.
1.) The sun is expected to lose a bit less than half of its mass, planets should move outwards but not be ejected, there's less gravity not an active push away.
2.) Red dwarfs don't undergo the red giant phase, they become 'blue dwarfs' then stop fusing and cool. They do not have the mass to fuse helium.
As a note the first exoplanets discovered orbited a neutron star, so planets can survive even supernovae (Or forma afterwards.)
@@garethdean6382 How do we know that this planet was not captured by the neutron star? (After supernova)
What the thinking about the gas planets moon/ satellites surviving?
Once the sun gets rid of the outer layers and leaves the core, the gravitational pull should be much smaller. Wouldn't then seeing these planets in the saturn orbit mean that the inner planets moved outwards rather than the outer planets remaining in place?
I wonder if hollow Saturn from the exploding rosie is correct and that's why it ate Chrysalis like a can of Goya.
Like HeyZeus wearing the golden fleece as a disguise from the fates.
Rings around the rosie~☆
Missing golden moons, Chrysos, deserved better.
I would assume that since the white dwarf is now much lighter (less massive) and the gas giants are still massive, their gravitational influence could be seen and measured by the white dwarfs "wobble?"
Was thinking the same. :)
I was assuming the same as well. Once a red giant “farts out” (Dr. Becky prefers “belches”) its outer gaseous layers-and therefore a bit of its mass-and becomes a CSPN (white dwarf), it makes sense that the gravitational influence of its planets would be slightly more detectable.
In the case of our own solar system, I just hope Sol makes a beautiful, colorful planetary nebula (Dr. B left out _that_ part) prior to the surviving planets being plunged into (visible spectrum) darkness, lol!
so - if those gas giants will survive the red-giant phase of the sun - the question for me, would be:
will their orbits survive?
with the sun losing mass, and those giants probably gaining some of it - and solar wind pressure decreasing, i would expect orbits changing / destabilizing
For some reason I read that title as Death star from Star wars and was really confused.