JWST discovers exoplanets orbiting DEAD STARS
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- čas přidán 17. 05. 2024
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When stars like the Sun die do their planets survive? In 5 billion years the Sun will swell into a red giant star, swallowing up the Earth, and maybe even Mars. But what about Jupiter and the rest of the gas giant planets? This month new research has been published, claiming to have found two exoplanets in orbit around two dead white dwarf stars with JWST. These planets are similar in mass to Jupiter, and orbit their stars at a distance similar to Saturn and Neptune in the Solar System.
Mullally et al. (2024; two exoplanets directly imaged around white dwarf stars) - arxiv.org/pdf/2401.13153.pdf
JWST proposal 1911 - www.stsci.edu/jwst/phase2-pub...
My previous video on the history of exoplanet studies - • The discovery of the f...
JWST’s first exoplanet discovery - • JWST has discovered it...
JWST’s claim of a biomarker of life in an exoplanet atmosphere - • Did JWST find a MARKER...
00:00 - Introduction
01:30 - Why we need JWST to do this
03:01 - How do you search for exoplanets?
04:06 - The two newly discovered planets
05:59 - Masses and orbits of the two planets
06:13 - What does this mean for the Solar System?
07:01 - AD Interactive learning with Brilliant
08:39 - Bloopers
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
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👩🏽💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
drbecky.uk.com
rebeccasmethurst.co.uk - Věda a technologie
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.
None of which matters because you weren't paying attention. The End.
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
5.5k views in 45 minutes. I'm glad there's that many people interested in astronomy!
There ARE that many people.
@@user-dh6bj2me5p Yea there are that many, indicated also by the about a million of subscribers that many astrophysics channels have.
“Good science is never late. Nor is it early; it arrives precisely when it is ready” -Magneto
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.
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!
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 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
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.
I am glad you put that “finally published” remark into the bloopers. I was thinking about how much I resemble that remark.
Sidebar: I just love the word "orbit."
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۔
really enjoyed this one. keep mooooving on to the next!
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.
The exagon shaped starlight is so cool, even if I know it's just an artifact from jwst
Loving that shirt! Just ordered mine. Thanks doc!
Excellent and fun, as always!
I always enjoy your vids. 🙂
Great stuff. Thanks Dr Becky
I really appreciate your content.
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
Brilliant video. Thank you.
Good simulations! Watching after a few years and the topics are quite interesting
Like your enthusiasm.
Thank you, keep working.
Your enthusiasm is so much fun…..
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. ;)
This is so cool, thanks!
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?
Very informative Doctor! Question, what would the impact be on the outer planets moons? Like Io, Titan…..?
Awesome vid again, Dr Becky. I wish you had been my physics teacher.
Brilliant stuff!
Thanks, dr. Becky! 😊
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Dr. Smethurst, thank you for your excellent continued efforts to explain significant astronomical news. Your CZcams 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.
nice. this has been theorized for a long time.
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.
That's pretty exciting.
'Now on to those bloopers' as if fans don't love seeing this brilliant astrophysicist make mistakes in the most adorable ways.
DR BECKY, can you speak on the april 8 total solar eclipse plz? would love to hear you present it
Pretty and brilliant. I love your videos Dr Becky.
Thank you ma'am 🙏🙏🙏🌾🌾🌾
You should do a video on "fringe theories" of black holes.
"The time you think it's going to take you, triple it" I relate heavily to this
Your move is going well. Getting the home telescope setup I hope?
A necklace with moon phases? How cute for an astrophysicist :DD
Cheers from the Pacific West Coast of Canada.
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.
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 👍
This is so incredible JWST is a dream come true 😍
@DrBecky >>> Great video...👍
Thanks @drbecky. I just signed up to Brilliant through your link. Loving the Thinking in Code course 🙂
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.
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.😊
4:06
There are cardinal directions in space? North, South.. etc?
I somehow missed this video! Presented this news at an astronomy club meeting haha! 🌌
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.
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.
You're one in a million!!! Aloha's stay safe 🤙🙏🖖👽💯
Imagine being so important that getting photo bombed by a whole galaxy is considered a bad thing. 🤯
Rubble orbits rubble, nice!
I come for the science & stay for the bloopers! :D
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?)
The Doc says, “…and it’s big,” and all I could hear in my head was, “Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.”
"Anything you plan will cost more and take longer."
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. 💫
you made me think about gravity at the center of the planet for some reason and when i went and looked that up, i was even more baffled than when i started. this place is mind blowingly weird. thanks for the laughs at the end:}
Nothing is weird.
How you interpret it can be weird.
They just can't let go...🤔💥
Miss your shows Dr. When next show?
Write a sci-fi series about humanity surviving the sundeath and coming back to orbit and harness the white dwarf, becoming (or rebuilding) a Kardashev1 civilization
Dark lass. Nice
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 really appreciate your channel, fun and still very heady...off topic, but the CC follows your British accent - Hubble was Hobble, and exo planet said XA planet once 😂🙌
What the thinking about the gas planets moon/ satellites surviving?
"We do these things not because they are easy, but because we THOUGHT they were easy" - the programmer's philosophy.
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?
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.
Doesn't reflectivity vary from planet to planet?
Yes.
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.
Mullally mutates to Mulaney at around 6:11🤔
Ah, the Scotty method: always triple the time you think it'll take, that way when you get it done in less time, you look like a miracle worker! 🤣
This is nuts
That is very positive news for our possible future selves that shows we could survive the death of the sun, gives us plenty time to develope the technologies required to get to and survive on 'bodies' within our solar system.
Looking at the 'transitting method of exo-planets passing stars I was thinking are our telescopes powerful enough to differentiate between a transitting "planet/body" and sun spots or are their dimming of the light emitted by them "incosequential"? ... Just curious (not something I've seen mentioned but also maybe something we aren't looking for or unable to detect yet, same could be said for CME's or flares) lol
For some reason I read that title as Death star from Star wars and was really confused.
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?
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
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?
first of all ty, second of all you look beautiful today Dr Becky!
Phew, for a moment got worried because I understood 5 million years...
What happens to the orbits of those remaining planets?
Thanks for this.
I would appreciate it if you'd make a video about the JWST "discovery" about "We Finally Know What Turned The Lights on at The Dawn of Time" (sciencealert)/"Most of the photons that reionized the Universe came from dwarf galaxies" (nature) - as your videos make better sense of the findings and what it means for our understanding of the "beginning of time".
With the technology available magnetars and exoplanets orbiting white dwarf stars should have been seen by now ✌️❤️🇬🇧
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 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.
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?
There something weird with the sound, ie, it's shrill and piercing even at 25% volume.
when the sun reaches it's red giant stage , will the conditions on other planets in our solar system possible improve? I thinking about the moon Europa
Is dr Becky the creator of the channels History of the Universe and History of the Earth?
Wonderful video! What are the theories/chances of the fate of the earth when the sun goes red giant? Is the earth swallowed? Does the sun push the earth into a further out orbit? Presumably not idea conditions for humans and other life, but perhaps there would still be an earth...
Earth may find itself inside the Sun. Assuming it does not, its orbit will be more elliptical. By the time that happens, life on Earth will already have been extinguished for a long time.
It's still quite likely the Earth will be swallowed, though its orbit will increase in width over time. There will be a 'race' to outpace the expanding sun, and at present is seems likely Earth will lose.
and now i have "Dead Souls" by NIN stuck in my head.