Science
Spirograph Nebula: A Century of Stellar Change
In this episode of Bedtime Astronomy, we explore the Spirograph Nebula (IC418), a stunning example of stellar evolution that reveals dramatic changes over just 130 years. Join us as we delve into the ...
Spirograph Nebula: A Century of Stellar Change
Science •
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Interactive Transcript
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Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy.
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Explore the wonders of the cosmos with our soothing Bedtime Astronomy podcast.
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Each episode offers a gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
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unwinding after a long day.
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Let's travel through the mysteries of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful slumber under
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the night sky.
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Okay, let's unpack this.
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We often frame the universe as, you know, this enormous, immutable backdrop.
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Something so ancient and vast that it seems entirely static over the span of a human lifetime.
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We look up, and the stars.
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They're pretty much where they were for our great grandparents, right?
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Right.
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That's the common perception, fixed, unchanging.
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But today, we're diving into the study of a single object that, well, violently defies
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that expectation.
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An object whose changes are so rapid, they can actually be measured, tracked, observed
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over just 130 years.
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And it's those dramatic, visible shifts, these objects evolving within our, our observational
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record that really forces to challenge those underlying assumptions.
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We think of stellar evolution in millions, billions of years.
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Yeah.
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We have a real-time lab relatively speaking showing change over a single century.
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Exactly.
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We are looking at the stunning planetary nebula known officially as IC418.
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But you probably know it better by its nickname, the Spirograph Nebula.
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Ah, yes, the Spirograph, it's a great name.
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Name for those complex, intricate, looping structures, the Hubble Space Telescope captured
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so beautifully, it really does look like something made with that old geometric toy.
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And that nickname's important, I think.
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It grounds the science in something, well, familiar and beautiful.
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It emphasizes this isn't just some distant fuzzy smudge, it's dynamic.
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Caught right in the act of its final transformation.
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Tosmic change on a time scale we can actually grasp.
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Precisely.
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So our mission today is built around this fascinating study, published in astrophysical
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journal letters.
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The team accomplished something pretty remarkable.
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They stitched together this almost unbroken, 130-year lineage of observations for IC418.
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A huge undertaking.
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They did this to track the stars' death-throws, and specifically to figure out what it's,
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well, astonishingly rapid evolution means for a really fundamental question.
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Which is?
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How the ingredients for life, particularly carbon, get distributed throughout the galaxy.
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Ah, the big one, cosmic chemistry.
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So it's like a detective story starting way back in the 19th century.
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Ending with some pretty profound implications for how we understand astrophysics today.
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Exactly.
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Okay, so let's start with the basics.
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The object itself, IC418, where do we find it?
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Right.
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You need to look towards the Southern constellation lepus.
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That's Latin for the hair.
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It's situated about 2,000 light years away from us.
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2,000 light years.
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So relatively close in galactic terms, but still a long way off.
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Oh, absolutely.
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And physically, it spans roughly 0.2 light years across.
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Which sounds small, maybe, but that's...
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Well, it's about 12 trillion miles, give or take.
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So not insignificant.
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Okay, yeah, definitely not small.
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But from Earth, its apparent size is quite compact.
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It shines at about magnitude plus nine.
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Meaning you'd need a telescope.
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Oh, yes.
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Definitely not naked eye.
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And it appears about 18 arc seconds across in the sky.
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I think roughly the size of Jupiter through a decent backyard telescope
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when it's looking particularly large.
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Got it.
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Now we have to pause in the name planetary nebula.
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It's famously confusing, right?
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Because they have absolutely nothing to do with planets.
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Nothing at all.
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It's one of those historical quirks.
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The name stuck from when astronomers like William Hershel first saw them.
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Through their early, less powerful telescopes,
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these objects look like round, ghostly disks,
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kind of like the faint appearance of Uranus or Neptune.
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The known planets at the time.
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Exactly.
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They didn't have the resolution to see the structure,
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just these fuzzy planet-like shapes.
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So the name stuck, planetary nebula.
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But they're actually the spectacular final breaths of a star, aren't they?
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That's right.
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It happens when a star similar to our sun runs out of fuel,
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expands hugely into a red giant and then pus off as outer layers.
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Creating that glowing shell, we see.
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Mm-hmm.
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And for us, the real hook, the reason we have this 130-year timeline,
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is the human story behind its discovery.
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This is where William E. Muneflaming comes in.
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Yes.
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The discovery back on March 26, 1891,
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belonged squarely to her.
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She was a true pioneer of, well, modern data-driven astronomy.
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She was Scottish American, working at the Harvard College Observatory,
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HCO, part of that massive Draper catalog survey.
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And you really have to picture her work, right?
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She wasn't at a telescope eyepiece.
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No, not usually.
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She was in a room meticulously, painstakingly,
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examining thousands upon thousands of photographic glass plates.
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Huge, heavy things.
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Like the world's first large-scale scientific data analyst, essentially.
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You could definitely say that.
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Grooling work.
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Those plates required expert interpretation.
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Her role in that of the other women known as the Harvard Computers
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was crucial.
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They classified stars based on their spectra,
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the patterns in their light, and spotted anything unusual,
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like a nebula.
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And she was incredibly prolific.
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The notes mentioned she discovered 59 nebulae
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just during her work on that one survey.
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59.
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Imagine.
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IC-48 was just one entry in a huge body of work.
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She was instrumental in shifting astronomy from just describing things,
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to systematically classifying them,
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based on physics derived from light.
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Her observation in 1891 is the absolute starting point
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for this whole study we're discussing.
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It's the anchor.
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Without her and the rigorous record keeping it Harvard,
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we wouldn't have this baseline.
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We couldn't track this evolution.
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And just a quick historical note.
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Although it was later catalogued as IC-48ean
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and sometimes misattributed,
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the initial credit belongs to Fleming.
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1891.
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Yeah.
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That's our starting gun.
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Absolutely key.
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Okay, this is where it gets really interesting, I think.
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We move from historical discovery to, like,
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modern scientific detective work.
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You've got this object observed in the 1890s.
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How on earth do researchers today track its physical evolution?
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How do they bridge 130 years of completely different technology?
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Yeah, that's the challenge.
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Going from someone literally describing what they saw.
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Right.
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To photographic plates, to modern digital cameras.
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Like the Hubble Space Telescope.
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It's what we might call forensic astronomy.
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Forensic astronomy, I like that.
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And IC-48ean had a unique advantage.
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It has this almost unbroken chain of spectroscopic measurements.
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Spectroscopy breaking down the light.
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Exactly.
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Breaking light into its component wavelengths like a rainbow
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to figure out temperature speed, chemical makeup.
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That technique was just getting started in the 1890s.
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And IC-48ean was an early target.
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So they were pulling data from completely different areas.
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Visual observations, glass plates, film, digital CCDs.
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Mm-hmm.
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Three distinct technological phases.
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And the trick is making sure the data from all these sources,
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well, speaks the same language, can be reliably compared.
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How do you even use data from say 1893?
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You mentioned William Campbell observed a spectrum then.
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How is a visual description useful?
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It sounds imprecise, doesn't it?
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Uh-oh.
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But the key is that earliest drymas, even without digital tools,
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were incredibly meticulous note takers.
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Dr. Albert Zaestra, one of the researchers on this recent study,
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pointed out that Campbell's observation was described well enough.
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Well enough for what, though?
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Well enough to establish a baseline.
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He described the visible emission lines.
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Crucially, their brightness relative to other known lines,
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like hydrogen.
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That relative brightness gives you a starting point,
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even if it's not a precise number like we get today.
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So it's the relative information that matters.
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That's amazing.
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Trusting those 140-year-old notes.
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It's a testament to their standards.
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They knew they were recording something important.
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But the jump to photographic plates must have been a huge challenge,
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correcting for the technology itself.
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That's where the forensic part really kicks in.
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You have to account for technological bias.
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An old glass plate doesn't record light, literally.
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The brightness depends entirely on the chemical emotion
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used on that specific plate.
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Ah, okay.
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So different plates from different times might be more sensitive to blue light
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or less sensitive to red.
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Precisely.
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And a researcher today needs to know that specific sensitivity profile
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to figure out the star's actual energy output
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at different wavelengths back then.
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So they have to mathematically reconstruct.
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What?
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The chemical properties of old photo-emulsions.
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Essentially, yes.
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They model the sensitivity curves of those historical chemicals.
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They look at old lab notes,
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logbooks at atmospheric conditions,
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even the type of silver halide used.
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It's about converting a recorded density on the plate
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back into a physically meaningful foot-on count.
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That is incredibly detailed work.
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Your part-history and part-chemist, part astrophysicist.
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It takes a team with diverse skills, definitely.
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But it's crucial to make sure the 1893 data is genuinely comparable
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to Hubble data from, say, 2018.
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The whole study hangs on getting that right.
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And they focused on specific emission lines,
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you said.
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Hydrogen in this doubly ionized oxygen, OII.
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Yes, those were key, especially the OII lines
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in the blue green part of the spectrum.
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And that connects back perfectly
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to another historical quirk, the nebulae and mystery.
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Ah, right.
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The element that never was.
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Exactly.
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Back in the late 19th, early 20th century,
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astronomers kept seeing these really bright, distinct
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emission lines in nebulae spectra.
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Lines they couldn't match to any element known on Earth.
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So naturally, they assumed.
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They must be a new element.
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They even gave it a name.
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Nebulae.
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It was a big puzzle.
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Why couldn't they recreate it in the lab?
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Until physics caught up.
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Right.
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It wasn't until the 1920s,
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with advances in atomic physics that Iroboa
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and figured it out,
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wasn't a new element at all.
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It was just familiar elements acting weirdly.
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Exactly.
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Common stuff like oxygen and nitrogen.
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But under the incredibly extreme conditions inside
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a nebula specifically, ultra low density and intense radiation,
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these atoms can emit light in ways
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through forbidden transitions that are basically impossible
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to achieve in a dense Earth atmosphere.
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So the light they called nebulae
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and was actually just ionized oxygen behaving strangely
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because of the nebula's environment.
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Precisely.
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And the way those oxygen atoms emit that specific light,
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the former nebulae signature,
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turns out to be extremely sensitive
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to the temperature and density of the nebula gas.
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Oh, so tracking those specific lines over 130 years,
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lets them track how the physical conditions inside the nebula
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have changed.
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That's the key.
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They started out chasing a fictional element
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and ended up using that very same light signature
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to measure one of the fastest stellar temperature changes
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ever recorded.
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Incredible.
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The science evolving alongside the observation.
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Okay, let's get to the core discovery.
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The numbers that really made the astronomical community sit up
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and take notice.
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But first, maybe just quickly remind us
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what's actually happening when a star like this dies?
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What are the death throws?
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Right, it's a dramatic,
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but in a way beautiful process.
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It starts when a star, roughly like our sun,
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exhausts the hydrogen fuel in its core.
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Gravity causes the core to contract and heat up
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while the outer layers swell enormously.
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It becomes a red giant.
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Sometimes swallowing its inner planets.
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Potentially, yes.
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Then over a relatively short period,
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afternomically speaking,
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it sheds those bloated outer layers into space.
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That expelled gas and dust forms the expanding,
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glowing shell of the planetary nebula,
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like IC418.
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And what's left behind in the center?
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The incredibly dense, hot core of the former star.
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It collapses down into what we call a white dwarf.
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Think of it as a stellar ember,
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compressed to about the size of Earth,
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but still containing maybe 60% of the star's original mass.
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In IC418's case,
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it's about 0.6 times the sun's mass.
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Just glowing incredibly hot from left over heat.
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Exactly.
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And this whole process,
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this is the fate awaiting our own sun and solar system
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in about 5 billion years.
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Right.
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So IC418 is showing us our future in a way.
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In a very real way.
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Now, normally, the changes in the star's temperature,
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especially during these later stages,
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happen over incredibly long time scales.
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Millenia, millions of years.
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We usually consider them constant over human history.
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Pretty much.
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Except here,
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this study gave us the first continuous century-plus look
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at this specific white dwarf formation phase.
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And the numbers are startling.
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Oh, okay. What did they find?
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They determined that the central star,
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that white dwarf,
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has increased its surface temperature by a whopping 3000 degrees Celsius
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since Williamina Fleming first recorded it back in 1891.
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3000 degrees Celsius in 130 years.
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Yes.
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That breaks down to a heating rate of roughly
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1000 degrees Celsius every four years.
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Wow.
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So in a single human generation,
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that star gets substantially hotter.
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You could theoretically measure the change
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within a working astronomer's career.
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You absolutely could.
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We are literally watching this dying star
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heat up dramatically, almost in real time.
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That puts astronomical change on a human scale,
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like almost nothing else.
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The source material compared it to our sun's formation.
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It did. Our sun during its own formation phase
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when it was settling down saw a similar temperature increase,
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maybe a few thousand degrees.
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But that took something like 10 million years.
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10 million years.
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I see 418, did it in 130?
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It's deep time accelerated.
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This rapid heating happens as the star sheds
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its final-itre layers,
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like throwing off a blanket,
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exposing the incredibly hot,
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contracting core underneath.
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As that core shrinks under gravity,
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its surface area gets smaller,
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but the energy gets concentrated.
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So the surface temperature just skyrockets.
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Okay, that makes sense.
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Rapid heating as the core is revealed.
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But here comes the paradox, right?
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This is what messes with the models.
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This is the kicker.
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While that heating is incredibly fast in human terms,
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the study found that this rate,
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this 1000 degrees every 40 years,
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is actually slower than current theoretical models
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predict first or like this.
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Wait, it's heating up super fast,
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but our best physics says it should be heating up even faster.
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That's the puzzle.
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If you take the known properties of IC418,
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it's mass, the nebulas expansion rate,
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and plug them into our standard computer models
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of stellar evolution.
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Yeah.
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Those models predicts an even more rapid temperature increase
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than what we've observed over these 130 years.
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So the star is putting on the brake somehow
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compared to the theory?
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Or perhaps the theory has the accelerator pushed down too hard.
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It suggests there's something we don't fully understand.
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Maybe some process is slowing the final collapse,
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or moderating the thermal output.
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Could it be some residual low-level nuclear
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burning deeper inside than we expect?
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Or maybe the way the very last bits of mass are rejected
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affects the surface temperature profile differently?
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So this slight discrepancy in speed,
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it points to a gap in our understanding of the physics
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right at the very end of a star's life.
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A potentially significant gap.
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If we don't quite grasp the thermodynamics, the heat flow.
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Then we probably don't fully grasp the chemistry either.
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Right, so let's pivot to that so what question.
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Why does a 3000 degree temperature difference
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or a slight mismatch in heating speed
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in a nebula 2000 light years away actually matter to us?
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Because it connects directly to where the building blocks
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of life come from.
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Carbon.
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Carbon exactly.
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This finding is crucial because these dying,
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intermediate mass stars are the primary factories
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for creating and distributing elements heavier
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than helium back into space.
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And the analysis confirms, I see 418 is explicitly
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a carbon-rich nebula.
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Meaning the star itself cooked up a lot of carbon inside.
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Synthesized vast amounts of it through nuclear fusion.
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And then through processes we call dredge up,
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mix that carbon up to its surface layers
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before puffing them off to form the nebula.
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And that ejected material, that beautiful
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spiral graph shell we see full of carbon.
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Well, eventually disperse and mix with the interstellar gas and dust.
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It becomes the raw material for the next generation of stars,
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planets.
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And potentially life.
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Absolutely.
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A huge fraction of the carbon in the universe.
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The carbon that forms the basis of all organic chemistry.
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The carbon in you and me originated in stars that went through
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exactly this phase.
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So tracing the carbon atoms in my hand back,
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many came from a star like I see 418's progenitor.
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That's the cosmic cycle.
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So when I see 418 challenges are models of how these stars evolve
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and die, it directly challenges our understanding of how the
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ingredients essential for our existence were made and spread through the galaxy.
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And the problem isn't just the heating speed, right?
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There is another major conflict with the models related to the stars mass.
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Yes, this might be the most profound part.
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The study used observations of the nebula and the white dwarf
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to calculate the original mass of the star
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before it started shedding its layers.
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The progenitor mass, what did they find?
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They determined it was about 1.4 times the mass of our sun.
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So a bit heftier than the sun, but not dramatically so.
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OK, 1.4 solar masses and empirical measurement
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based on the current system.
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Right.
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Now here's the clash.
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Our standard stellar evolution models generally
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predict that a star needs to be significantly more massive
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to produce the amount of carbon enrichment we see in I see 418.
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How much more massive?
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Often in the range of, say, 2.5 to 3 times the mass of the sun.
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The model suggested you needed that much more initial gravitational squeeze,
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that much more fuel to drive the nuclear reactions
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and the dredge-up processes efficiently enough to create such a carbon-rich outflow.
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Hold on.
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So the actual star they measured was substantially smaller than the model
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said was necessary, yet it somehow produced all that carbon.
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Exactly.
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It seems this 1.4 solar mass star was far more efficient at manufacturing
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and injecting carbon than our standard models allowed for.
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How could that happen?
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Does it change how we think about the dredge-up process?
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It certainly suggests we need to revisit it.
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The third dredge-up is this complex process
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where convection currents deep inside the star bring freshly synthesized elements
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like carbon up to the surface layers.
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If a star of only 1.4 solar masses can do this so effectively,
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then either the minimum mass required for a fission dredge-up is lower than we thought,
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or the process itself is more efficient in stars of this size
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than the models currently simulate.
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Either way, it means our fundamental understanding needs adjusting.
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It's a major revision.
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If the threshold for being a significant carbon source is lower,
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well, think about it.
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There are many more stars born with around 1.4 solar masses than with 2.5 or 3 solar masses.
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So it could dramatically increase the number of stars contributing to the galaxy's carbon budget?
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Precisely.
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It potentially means the universe has been seated with the building blocks of life much more widely
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by a larger population of stars than we previously calculated.
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Wow.
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That's a huge implication stemming from observing one nebula carefully.
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It's a classic case of a single well-studied object potentially breaking a widely accepted model.
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It really highlights the power of that long-term observational approach.
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Tying it all together.
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Absolutely.
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This mass discrepancy, this carbon puzzle,
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it only really comes into sharp focus when you combine the modern measurements
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with that full 130-year history.
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Without tracking its evolution, seeing that rapid,
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but not that rapid-heating, confirming its stage of life,
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we wouldn't have the context to confidently challenge the mass models.
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Which brings us back full circle to the value of those old archives, those dusty glass plates.
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They're not just history, they're irreplaceable scientific data.
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They capture dynamics over time scales that no single modern mission, no matter how advanced, can replicate.
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You simply can't tell Hubble to wait 130 years.
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We're relying on the meticulous work of astronomers from generations ago to refine 21st century astrophysics.
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It's a powerful reminder. Sometimes the most cutting-edge science comes from combining the newest tools with the oldest records.
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The source mentioned another great example, finding hints of planets around Vennman and Star.
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Yes, in 2016.
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A potential planetary system, or at least debris,
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spotted entirely on a photographic plate taken way back in 1917.
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It's added in an archive for nearly a century.
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Just waiting for someone to look at it with modern questions and techniques?
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It proves these archives are potential gold mines. When you devalue them, preserve them, digitize them.
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The 130-year story of IC418 is exhibit A for why that's so critical.
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Okay, let's quickly recap the key takeaways from this incredible story of the Sparograph Nebula IC418.
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First, it's one of those super rare objects in the sky that actually visibly changes over a human lifetime.
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It shatters that idea of a static universe.
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Definitely. Second, by piecing together 130 years of data from handwritten notes and glass plates right up to Hubble,
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science has tracked its central star heating up by a massive 3000-degree Celsius.
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That's achieving in just over a century what our son took maybe 10 million years to do during his formation.
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Right. And third, that heating rate, combined with the stars measured original mass of only 1.4 solar masses,
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there is a real wrench into our standard models.
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The stars heating slower than predicted, and it produced way more carbon than models thought possible for a star that size.
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Suggesting we need to rethink how efficiently stars make carbon and spread it through the galaxy the very stuff we're made of.
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It connects this distant nebula directly to our own origins, forcing a revision of fundamental cosmic chemistry.
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So if 130-year-old glass plates and careful notes squibble down in the 1890s are still generating groundbreaking science today,
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science that makes us rethink the origins of carbon, the basis of life itself, it really makes you wonder, doesn't it?
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It absolutely does.
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What else might be hiding right now, undiscovered in dusty archives and old notebooks around the world?
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What breakthroughs are just waiting for the right person to connect those historical dots with modern analysis?
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What revolutionary science are we sitting on maybe unknowingly right at this very moment?