A closer look at the novel celestial events thrilling scientists this month

It's been an exciting time for astronomers, astrophysicists, and other scientists who specialize in the goings-on and the far reaches of space. Since the beginning of the month, observations of some never-before-seen celestial events have been reported in science journals. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien is here to explain all. Miles, thanks for joining us. The first one is a star swallowing up a planet that was orbiting around it. As you talk about it, we're going to show some animation from Caltech depicting it. Well, John, I don't want to ruin your weekend, but this is, in fact, a preview of what lies ahead for our little planet Earth.

A team of researchers at Palomar Observatory outside San Diego were using a wide-field camera called the Zoiki Transient Facility, which looks at a big swath of the night sky looking for things like comets and asteroids. Astronomer Kishile Day at MIT was going through data from 2020. There's so much data that they have a backlog. And he noticed a star about 12,000 light-years away that grew 100 times brighter over the course of a week. He thought maybe that was a binary star, which he studies quite a bit, two stars, which kind of interact with each other, and there are brightness changes as the gravity pushes and pulls. But the problem was the total amount of energy that was released by this event was way less than it would be if it was two stars. And so that meant, by virtue of that, that it was probably a black hole swallowing up a planet.

But it's not just any planet 10 times bigger than Jupiter. And I guess the flash that he saw, I guess it amounts to a cosmic belt, John. You say this is going to happen to Earth. Does this happen to all planets? Do they eventually sort of go into their suns? Not all of them. Like, the outer planets in our solar system are likely to be spared. And we're kind of on the bubble. We know Venus and Mercury, they're goners eventually.

There's some scientific debate as to what will happen to us. But basically, the star gets bigger and bigger as it gets older, like we all do, I suppose, and gets hotter and eventually gobbles up the near planets. So I'm sorry to give that piece of news to everybody here this weekend, but we have some time to plan. You've given us a lot of lead time. The next thing I want to ask you about is the largest space explosion ever detected. This one is very far away, eight billion light years away. So that means what we're seeing in these images or animations or data is about six billion years after the creation of the universe, the Big Bang.

This explosion lasted about three years. So what was it? No one's really sure. The current thinking is that maybe the black hole in this case, much more powerful than ours, swallowed up a huge gas cloud, and in so doing created this multi-year explosion. So again, the universe is a rough place, John. Tough neighborhood. There's also a neutron star that is behaving in a way that scientists didn't think a star could behave. And first of all, start out by telling us what a neutron star is.

It's like a dead star. Didn't quite make it to black hole status, but a neutron star is a very, very dense object. There are limits to how bright they can become. It's called the Eddington limit, little bit of physics here, but basically it's a push and pull between the light photons and gravity. And the physicists would tell you that, given the size of any particular object, there's a limit to how bright it can be. But this one, turns out, is 100 to 500 times brighter beyond this so-called Eddington limit. And they think what's happening here is that the magnetic field at this particular neutron star is actually warping the atoms and allowing that star to hold together longer than it would otherwise.

So that's a little bit mind-bending and actually literally atom bending, but there you have it. This is all mind-bending to me. The closest instance of a black hole tearing apart a star remind us or describe what a black hole is and will place some animation from NASA. Yeah, these are huge gravity wells that are at the center of most galaxies. This is one of the center of ours. This one, they say close in astronomical terms. It's 137 million light years away from Earth.

And we know about these tidal disruption events, which create this thing, my favorite astronomical term, spaghettification. It pull things in so rapidly that they stretch out spaghetti style. And this is the closest one we've seen. But as you look at this animation that NASA made for us, this is all a reminder of, number one, how far science has taken us to even understand all of this and the fact that we know this all exists. We have the Web Space Telescope giving us great imagery. We have the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile coming online soon. All kinds of instruments which are going to take us even farther and further back in time.

And, you know, to me, John, it's a reminder that we are pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things. And yet we've gotten pretty smart at figuring some big things out. So as we face our problems here on Earth, we do have the capability of understanding big things. And maybe that's something we can take in our daily lives to help us understand how we solve smaller problems right here on Earth. That's my philosophical note for the weekend. We appreciate it, Miles. This has been fascinating.

Our very own master of the universe, Miles O'Brien. Thank you very much. John, it's a pleasure.

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