Magnetars

All right. Try two this time with audio. Uh so uh yes. Um Tim, that was a fair comment over on the YouTube chat. That was a riveting start to the chaos. Um, it is currently 8 am on the West Coast. Mornings are hard. Um, I'm not sure what's going on. Uh, Fraser needs uh 10 minutes. I figured I would just pop on and answer questions and things like that since I was already set up. Um, so I am live. I am a live. It has been a weird two weeks. Last week was one hell of an emotional roller coaster. I went from uh have I was at a writing retreat uh working on writing fiction. Um because that's something I have a dream of doing with my life. Um and you can't actually make dreams come true unless you work on them. So [snorts] I was working on it and while writing a fiction story about a asteroid and inclusion course with Earth because we need more of that in our lives. Um I got word that I finally have an asteroid named after me which I mean that sounds like a really obnoxious way to say it. I hear what just came out of my mouth. But the truth is like so many of my friends have had asteroids named after them for so many decades. And I can't tell you how many times I've been at the dinner table while people got into a pissing match over who had the lowest asteroid number. Um so on Monday I panicked a friend cuz I was like, "Oh my god, that was wild. " I was writing a story about an asteroid hitting the Earth when I got the news and she was like, "Oh my god, this timeline. " I'm like, "No, no, no. I'm actually writing fiction right now. " [snorts] Um, so I panicked a friend. I had a really good Monday. Tuesday was a Tuesday. They're never great. They're never terrible. Um, and then on Wednesday, [gasps and sighs] I was sitting on a sofa writing longhand on my iPad like a 12-year-old, except iPads have handwriting recognition, so it totally works. And I I heard muttering and I was like snuffly and I had a headache and I thought it was all allergies cuz I have terrible allergies, but [snorts] no. Um the event I was at, despite the fact that we all had to test for COVID before we arrived, someone had shown up with COVID. We don't know who. It could have been me. anybody that picked it up while flying. And um six of us were put into quarantine. We had our own reading group that way. Um totally unintentional. Um and so I got to go through how do you get Paxid while you're traveling and uh neither CV CVS or Walgreens was still stocking Paxid and it was just a week and finally got home quarantined until I was throwing

negative I like masked the [ __ ] out of myself while traveling and I was on Paxid and it had been 5 days before I traveled so like I hit all the criter IA marks. Um, but yeah, I'm finally home. I'm still snuffly. I still think it's allergies. Um, and yeah, so the meteor is named Pamela Gay and not Star Strider, and that's okay. Um, so yeah. So that's been my past week. Um, this is my first time down in the studio since um, a week ago, two weeks ago, Friday. [snorts] Um, two weeks ago today. And, um, yeah, I need to water plants. The plants are sad. But, it's been a weird week in space science. Um, Star Strider, n denominator. I completely agree. would be an amazing name for an asteroid. But um this way if it does hit the earth, I can always say no, no, it's actually named after the coroner in New York. Um there is someone who shares the exact name I have in New York who just retired from being a coroner. Um getting her Google alerts was never fun. Anyways, um it's been a wild week in um space science. We've seen a massive change to how the Aremis missions are planned. Uh we saw another failure of the Japanese uh KOS missions. We saw um really cool science coming down from all of our telescopes, including the news that makes me super sad that Y 2024 or 2024 YR I forgot its number already. I'm a bad human. Um is not going to strike the moon. It's going to miss the moon by a matter of like 45 minutes. Um, I was really hoping the moon would take one for science and we could watch that. Um, yeah. Uh, Broken Symmetry asking on Twitch, "Does it have a number too? Because shortened Meteor PG-13 would be good for most ages. " It sadly uh does not have that number. Um, hold on. It's on my blue sky. Uh I need to memorize it because I know people are going to ask. Not there yet. I'm gonna actually leave it for the audience to Google. Um I'm going to let Fraser in and then I will be right back with Fraser. So hold on.

We are live. I tell you — it's alive. — All right. Our audio levels look level. — Do they? Are you sure? Sure. Someone's not going to say — I mean, all I can tell you is how they look. They sound fine to me, but my ears are lying liars, which is why I do not edit audio ever. — Yeah. — Um, — the lying liar is the lie. — Yeah. Ian is like actually good. Thank you, — finally. Um, — oh man. — Oh. So, what do you think about Star Trek Academy? — I still need to watch it. — Oh, you haven't watched it? Okay. — No. I've heard so many good things, seen so many good things. Um, but I was trapped in a small room until very recently and Okay. — Um, so yeah. — Well, then I will hold off giving my perspective of the show. — All right. — Until after you've watched it. All right. — And then we will come together and we will discuss it because it is — Yeah. I have thoughts. Okay. — Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but One Piece starts in a week from now. — Okay, the live action One Piece. — Okay, that's what I needed to know. The other one has like 3,000 episodes and I'm not sure that's hyperbole or not. — No, it's merely 1100. Come on. More episodes of One Piece than there are episodes of Astronomy Cast. — Um, yeah, it's pretty crazy. Uh, so that's coming next week. I am pretty excited about that. Um, whoa. I'm a dragonfly. Okay. — Yeah. No, no. I screwed up. I went to drag the wrong window. Um, yeah. — Yeah. Did you get a chance to see the eclipse at all? Was it? — So, we had the most fascinating counterprogramming here. — So, everyone was billing uh the eclipse as the blood moon and yada yada creepy creepy. And I wake up taking a dog to the face as thunder and lightning roared and flashed and um [snorts] — yeah, there is something poetic about having a massive Midwestern thunderstorm during a blood moon. I deeply appreciate the planning of mother nature that went into providing me that experience. I wish I hadn't taken the dog to the face. — Right. Yeah, we uh I tried I had my telescopes rolling, — ready to set up uh you know, ready to record broadcast. It was I was showing it, but there was like light cloud and the clouds just got worse and worse. And the about 20 minutes and I'm like, "Nope, this isn't going to happen. " And it and I was right. It was rain all night. So no, we had no eclipse here. — Aiv I combined both first and last names. Aviva Yamani uh who is our project director for 365 days of astronomy. She does a lot of stuff in Indonesia um not in English language and um she got the most amazing photo from Bang with her sea star. — Wow. — Um and it was a mix of clouds and eclipse that just looked like a painting from a haunted house movie. — Yeah. like the like what you want ideally for the best composition is you want some clouds in the sky, you want something that kind of makes it like a if you have a cloud partly in front of the like that's incredible, right? — But then a few clouds can turn into more clouds and so you really don't want any clouds. — They bring friends. — They Yeah, it is more entertaining if you have no clouds. You get to enjoy the whole thing. So yeah, it was uh — Anyway, um I'm mad. I'm a little angry, not going to lie, cuz I because I was like I was ready to go. I had this really cool setup where I could sit on my couch, — controlling the telescope, uh changing the exposure at the different times as we switched out. We I had a little interface that showed the time and the phases where it was showing it was making its way through the phases. — Uh it was all good to go. And then yeah, I learned a lot of valuable lessons just about how to kind of — how to composite. Yeah, — for the internet and it's sort of a totally different — cuz essentially the interface that I was using to control the telescope was nothing like the interface that was being displayed — through OBS. It was putting out little bits of browser pieces, — okay, — that were transparent. And so it was then building up the layers

in little browser bits that then OBS was able to composite together and display the nice picture of the eclipse as well as the as all of the information. And so I learned a ton about like okay now this is the way I do this right but unfortunately I wasn't able to and it's rained non-stop since. So the second I have clear skies I'm back out cranking on it again and I'll figure it out. So, your telescope is Wi-Fi based. Do you have a repeater that allows you to get good signal with it far enough away from the house to not get the — big long extension I have a big long network cable? No, I'm not messing around. Yeah. Uh, so I have a I have a big long extension cable and I have a big long — um — uh network cable and so the two connect up to the telescope and so I put it out — far enough away that it can see 365 but it loses about 15 degrees in all direction just cuz of trees and stuff. — You don't want those 15° anyways cuz the atmosphere is a mess. — Yeah. They're the worst. And so everything is sorted by what's as directly overhead as possible. And so I can muck around in — in all of the constellations that are up high. So yeah, this is the it's it's very cool. — Um it's kind of amazing. So I'm really looking forward to being able to actually do the live stream. I just need the weather to change. But — um or you know move the whole telescope down to Texas, right? — I mean that is all that is what the cool kids are doing. I've heard — that is exactly what the cool kids are doing. Yeah. Totally. All right. Well, let's do our jobs. — Okay. I uh am pressing record on the audio. I lost the video. There it is. I am pressing record on the video. All things. Oh, you're said I accidentally made you far shorter than you should be. Let me fix that. — I'm more here now. — I Yeah, mistakes were made. Okay. I'm still sitting taller than you, but I can fix that. There — we go. — Okay. Can I speak? — Yeah. Yeah. — Okay. — Astronomy Cast episode 785, Magnetars. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I'm Fraser Kane. I'm the publisher of Universe Today. With me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmoquest. Hey Pamela, how you doing? I am doing well. I I've had the weirdest two weeks and I caught COVID for the first time. — Oh no. How are you feeling? — I I'm still snuffly and I'm not convinced it isn't allergies cuz I've been snuffly for a month and I haven't had CO for you test positive for CO. That's you know you could be like not experiencing much of the disease and — you also enjoying allergies. So, — right. I think that is indeed what happened. And uh yeah, there were six of us at a little tiny event that everyone tested before they arrived, but the current version of CO has a two-day incubation period. So, yeah, on Wednesday, um having all gotten together on Sunday, six of us tested. — Yeah. So, it was — it was a thing. So, thank you everyone for your patience, for your well wishes, for putting up with my fever dreams posted to the internet. Um, but I have a question for you. — Okay, — it is spring. Have you had the first bear sighting of spring yet? — No. Uh, I don't even have that in my calendar. I have a calendar of all of the key events that have happened and we're kind of marching through first Robins, uh, the what we call the frog chorus where the frogs just go berserk at night. Um, first uh thrush, first crocus. Uh, but I haven't written down first bear, but we're but they're soon. They typically show up around, you know, within the next month or so. So, I'll let you know when I see first bear. — Okay, that sounds awesome. We have hit the owls are definitely wanting to get it on season and it sounds like the owls sound like monkeys this time. Which kind of owl do you guys have around you? — We have bard owls. — You have bard owls. Yeah. — Uh yeah, that is a So we have them as well, but they're invasive here. Although I mean like how do you say like a bird that flies around is invasive, right? Birds just go where they want to go. — So um but yeah, we have b owls. And so my I think I've mentioned this in the past. My way of finding bard owls is you just listen for the robins going berserk. — Oh — yeah. Uh, so if you hear like a whole bunch of robins just losing their minds, it's and they're usually clustered around a bard owl and so you can just go into the forest, listen for robins. — Uh, you guys have robbins there too, right? American. — We do, but like they stick to the ground. That's their domain.

— Well, they'll Yeah. So, they'll be So, if you go into the forest, you just listen and if you hear a whole bunch of robins really angry angrily — chirping — Uhhuh. They've got an owl in locked in on an owl and harassing it. Yeah. All right. Let's try this. — Let's move on. Magnetars are a special type of neutron star with physics that defy comprehension. Magnetic fields so powerful they could strip you apart at an atomic level. But where do they come from? So many mysteries to uncover about magnetars. And we'll talk about it a second, but it's time for a break. And we're back. All right. So, what is a magnetar? uh the uh they're angry little monster neutron stars, — right? — These are sometimes pulsars, not always. They are definitely neutron stars, so they're about 20 miles across, about 30 km across, size of Manhattan Island. Um, they have some of the most powerful magnetic fields kicking around and they — I have this number in my head actually. — Go for it. — Well, it's 10 the^ 15 g. — Okay. I do not store that number. Thank you. — So the Earth is I think about three Gaus. — Yeah. — So that's ludicrous, right? The thing about them that lives rentree in my brain is in December 2004, a magnetar on the other side of the core of our Milky Way from us. So basically half a galaxy away got the neat idea to rearrange its magnetic field and it released such high power gamma rays that it saturated telescopes pointed in completely different directions orbiting telescopes. That's crazy. — Yeah. And these things have slowly we're understanding are responsible for soft gamay repeaters. They may be responsible for uh ultraast radio bursts. Uh they just do lots of things and they're violent about it. — Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. So then you say that they are neutron stars and so you know like we know that you get neutron stars from the death of a massive star. It — runs out of fuel, — implodes. the material, the infalling material builds up at the core, you get this neutron star. — Yeah. — And then when the when they are first formed, they are rapidly spinning because they have the combined angular velocity momentum of the — original material of the original star. And so they are spinning, they are pulsating, putting out these radio waves. This is — they're not pulsating. Just to clarify language because so pulsating stars are actually like changing in radius. I love these buggers. Uh no, these have a misalignment between magnet ic field and uh rotational axis. And as the pole of the magnetic field whips around, it gives off a jet that we see as a burst of radio signal. — Right. — Continue. Sorry. [snorts] — Yeah. No, no. And that is a pulsar. — Yeah. And that as a pulsar ages, it is bleeding off uh its rotational energy through gravitational waves. It slows down and eventually it stops being a pulsar and just switches to being a regular old neutron star. And — so this is the normal behavior of the neutron star. You start off as a pulsar, you end up with a neutron star. [snorts] And the normal formation mechanism also needs to be addressed because as far as we're concerned, — your run-of-the-mill everyday neutron star — comes into existence when a massive star, so something 9 to 10 solar masses or larger um fail when it's a main sequence star fails to lose enough mass in its old age. And so instead of collapsing politely down into being a white dwarf, it undergoes some sort of a supernova explosion. And what's left behind is a core of neutrons that have so much mass that the gravitational push on the object causes electrons and protons to go can't separate any longer and they merge into neutrons. So that is how neutron stars should form. — Right. And so then that is the norm that is the normal variety and that is not what we're talking about today. We are talking about magnetars which are different. So — yeah and weird and weird. So I guess like how would you sort of just describe physically a magnetar from as a

comparison to a neutron star? How do we sort of think about that? — Well so they are both neutron stars. The — No, I know. But like why do they have a name, right? Why are they different? — So pulsars are sometimes rotating as much as a thousand times a second. Uh magnetars are looking more like one to two times a second. There are pulsars that are magnetars. Um but they have this massive magnetic field that pulsars don't normally have. And it's looking like maybe one in 30 uh pulsars, neutron stars have a magnetar phase in their life. And so the question becomes is it one in 30 massive stars going supernova that end up forming a magnetar due to some sort of conservation of magneto hydrodnamics and magnetic flux. So that as an object that already had a magnetic field that was massive collapses down something occurs. Is this just a weird thing that some stars have for other physical reasons? I the understanding of how you get this magnetic field is that in the formation of the neutron star, there is a chaotic layer that rearranges itself which is why we get these amazing star quakes that is responsible for the dynamo inside the mag the magnetar. Um but then so I mean the thing is pulsars we normally find in young stellar populations. We find them in star forming ra regions. the discs of uh spiral galaxies. They go where massive stars are still in the process of dying. — But then magnetars are like no mm- I'm going to be over here with the old guys. And um so that raises the question and this was magnified just to use the word magnetic as much as possible in inappropriate ways um by the discovery of a weirdo magnetar with the license plate SG0501 plus 4516. So that's a soft gamay repeater. It is on its way through the disk of our own Milky Way. We know we have magnetars. They blast us occasionally. Um but it can't be traced back to a supernova remnant. And so the thinking is that maybe there are binary systems where a white dwarf is somehow able to gain mass from its companion. — Wow. in a way that somehow there's a whole lot of the word somehow involved in magnetar science — that somehow [snorts] causes it to transition from being a white dwarf with electrons and protons just barely holding each other apart with electron degeneracy pressure to in a massive release of gamma rays but without a supernova um transition into being a neutron star. So, we're still figuring out how. And as science likes to keep showing us, our idea that there's going to be one pathway doesn't necessarily have to be true. So, it could be both pathways are possible. — All right, we're going to talk about this some more, but it's time for another break. — And we're back. So, you mentioned one possible way that magnetars come into existence, that a white dwarf is somehow upgraded into a magnetar. There is another one, I actually recently did an interview with scientists about this, — that it's thought that maybe you can have either merging white dwarfs or merging neutron stars — and you get a kilanova. — Yeah. But the total mass of the object is still not heavy enough to turn into a black hole. That's — and so you've mashed together the rotation and the momentum of these two, you know, city-sized monsters and you end up with something that is ferocious. And they did a scan of a believed kilanova event using radio telescopes trying to detect the presence of a magnetar there and they failed. So — so in that case it doesn't look like it formed a magnetar but they're tricky. It's a very tricky observation to make and so that is another way but I mean we've heard as many theories on magnetar formation as there are scientists — and it's a transiatory thing. So

— it's not only that not every neutron star is a magnetar. It's also that only during a temporary and we don't know is this measured in hundreds of thousands or millions of years only for a temporary period of time. Is this what's going on in these stars? Eventually they um discombobulate themselves. uh they go from being having these chaotic layers, this high power magnetic field to relaxing that magnetic field and no longer being a magnetar, just being a normal neutron star. And so that fact that it's transitory makes it even harder to figure out. — And that point you made about they're hard to detect, I can't stress that one enough. Unless they're being a soft gamma ray repeater, um, we're stuck looking for things like zeon line splitting and wild polarization and other things like that are indicating magnetic fields and those are hard detections to make. — Yeah, that idea of polarization I think is a great way to kind of look at it. That — that when magnetic field interact with dust and things around it, they can align the particles. the particles emit radiation. The radiation is polarized. And so you can use a very powerful radio telescope uh to scan a region and detect this polarized emissions coming from this location that was caused by a magnetic field. The more aligned the particles are, the stronger the magnetic field is that's working in that vicinity. — But you have to have the particles. Exactly. Yeah. So you need a certain kind of characteristics to show up for you to be able to make those kinds of observations. That soft gammaray repeater, can you give me why do they call it a soft gammaray repeater? — So soft about it. — We gam astronomers should not be allowed to name things. Okay. So — yeah, I believe we have set this as maybe our top rule for astronomy — cast. So someone asked me to name something last week. I was like no, I'm an astronomer. No. — Um, so, so hard and soft get used in gamma rays and X-rays to refer to where they are in the spectrum, but also occasionally for how loud they are. Again, we should not be allowed to name things. In this case, it's referring to where they are in the gamay spectrum, which admittedly just keeps going forever. It's sort of like radio goes all the way to the long, gamma short. Um, but soft means they're closer to X-ray. Right. Okay. All right. So, they're so they're right on the edge between X-ray and gammaray. Yeah. Right. — Okay. All right. We're going to talk about this some more, but it's time for another break. And we're back. So then, you know, we and we speculated on a couple of ways that magnetars form. Do we have any sense of what the future of magnetars look like? I mean, is this a this is believed to be a temporary phase in the life of a neutron star? So, so and they're already rotating fairly slowly. — Yeah. — So, what do we think the future holds for magnetars? — They become boring lumps of neutrons that are slowly cooling away as um I mean neutron stars and white dwarfs, they're dead. And that means that when they form, they are ultraviolet emitting super hot cores of stars. And over time, as they radiate away that energy, they're going to get redder and redder. And we actually have lots of observations showing that white dwarf cooling curve. They're going to go through phase transitions as their crystallization. And these are essentially crystals of of particles. Um, they're going to go through phase changes as they release energy as they go into more and more relaxed states. And that's the cool thing about magnetars that we don't see with white dwarfs is they start out with a certain amount of chaos in their structure just cuz they collapse down. It's a violent process. And that misalignment of chunks, uh, that's a higher energy state. — And over time, they literally rearrange themselves to be lower and lower energy states. They give off these gamma rays and they're cooling and normalizing themselves into just being a chunk of neutrons that are someday going to do like everything else in the universe and deteriorate and become a nothing. But

for now, they're just going to become a cool lump of neutrons gravitationally held together and getting redder and redder over time. — Right. this idea of essentially star quakes. — Yeah. — Is just so cool. Um [snorts] that you know when you think about this you know people talk about a neutron star is a blob of neutrons but the reality is that it actually has layers. — Yeah. — Like onions and ogres right. Yeah. — That it can then as it cools down it can rearrange itself. You get these earthquakes. — You just said onions and ogres. — Yes. Yeah. They have layers. — Okay. — Trek. Yes. — Have you not seen Trek? — I forgot that line entirely until you reminded me. — They have layers. — I haven't seen it since 2001. I am sorry. — No, it's fine. — 2002, I guess. Whenever it came out. — You should have just let it roll past you. Just, you know, one a tiny part of the audience got my reference and like, "Nice one, Fraser. " And you just had to ruin it for me. — I did. I'm sorry. — Yeah. Just edit that out, right? I don't want anyone to hear it. No. Um, so yeah, this idea that they have these quakes that they will rearrange themselves. You get and there's a just a great instrument on board the International Space Station that the nicer instrument that is studying neutron stars and detecting these flashes as neutron stars are rearranging themselves and — sending out short little blasts. And so it shows that these things are more active than I think we had described. You know, you call them a piece of degenerate matter. They're just they're dead. They're dead and dying. Yeah. — And yet, in fact, they're not completely dead. — The reference — um they're just mostly dead, which means they're partly alive. Okay. Um — Where's your white horse? Um — All right. Um, all right. So, we have these dead stars with their chaotic interiors and their massive magnetic fields. And when they undergo these star quakes, these magnetic field reconnection events, it's all part of a hole that gives off these uh gamma rays that vary in intensity. Uh, as I said, back in 2004, one attempted to take out a whole bunch of space telescopes because it could. Um, and we've seen multiple of these over the decades from our own galaxies. Believe there's order of tens of these probably scattered about our Milky Way. We do see — tens, — tens. There's not that many. But it's also estimated there could be and should be millions of neutron stars out there that were magnetars at some point earlier in their life. — Cuz there's a billion — Uhhuh. — neutron stars in the Milky Way. — Yeah. And like I said, it's a super short period of their lives that they go through this. It's sort of like if you think about some short term in human life, you don't see it very often. So like that period in time when a child can crawl but not stand, you don't see that very often because it's such a short period. But even that compared to the length of life of a neutron star is extremely long. Um, so yeah, we're seeing the awkward early days of a neutron star. So the period of time when the zombie uh is still learning to eat brains, I guess, — right? But uh I mean the fact that we see so few of them — Yeah. tells us that either it's a very rare sequence of events that causes them some kind of specific unique configuration of a star and a binary companion or two colliding white dwarfs — you know something that is very bizarre or as you say it is a very short phase — both this is so rare it's probably both — a rare event plus — a short phase that come together to make these things have such a bizar bizarre and short life. Um, and yet they have an oversized impact on their environment for the time that they're there. And the piece that I always like to talk about is this idea that they would tear you apart an atomic level. So why are why are magnetars going to tear you apart at an atomic level? So, so if you get within roughly 600 miles or uh 900 kilometers, they the magnetic field goes, "Oh, water

molecules are polarized and uh they just tear you apart atom by atom. " — Um Yeah. That's a thing. — You will decoher. — Yeah. And I mean you were already having problems because their gravitational field is just that big, — right? You're experiencing the tidal forces, you're experiencing the radiation. I mean it you've already had a bad day. — Yeah. So ultraviolet light, it's hot. Uh gamma rays if they're in the process of rearranging themselves. That's not an everyday occurrence. But that powerful magnetic field in combination with the powerful gravity when you get that close and it's the fact that you're taking like 1. 42 solar masses of material and crunching it down to the size of Manhattan Island Greater London. Um and you can get really close to that and because you can get so close you experience much larger tidal forces. — Yeah, we talk about that. You know, if you could grab a piece of neutron star and lift it away from the neutron star, even like a teaspoon would weigh whatever you know the — many elephants like a mountain, right? — But also would explode. — So don't do it. Uh very cool. Uh they're awesome objects and uh and and like a genuine mystery and we don't know right now — really what causes them, what begins this phase of their lives, what ends it and this is a big chunk of research for a lot of astronomers to get to the bottom of this. So very cool. Thanks Pamela. — Thank you Fraser. And thank you so much to everyone out on Patreon. Um reading your names this month, there are so many. I am so grateful. And I think I mispronounced a third of them, but we're going to go with this. We're going to try this. Thank you. This week, we would like to thank, and this is where Rich — inserts the hot mess that was me trying to say names this month. — Yeah. All right. Well, thanks everyone and we will see you all next week. — Bye-bye. And then they saved. — [snorts] — Something occurred while we were streaming that has never happened. My Mac Minis's fan came on — and it was just like, "Oh, the latest updates, the latest updates are requiring my Mac to work hard. I do not like this. " — No, that's unacceptable. — Yeah, that makes noise. — Drop box. — No. So, did you see the Mac releases at all this week? they were kind of hard to ignore. Um, — yes, — the So, I absolutely love my iPad Pro. Uh, being able to just sit and write longhand when I want to. — The iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil understands cursive. It brings my old person energy joy. — Nice. Um, and the iPad Pro just had a new version I am not going to buy with an M chip that just came out, which is like the same chip that's in my Mac Mini, but it doesn't do all the stuff I want to do, so I'm not going to buy it. — No, that's good. That's Resist. — Yeah, but they also came out with a new laptop that I'm also not going to buy. — Good resist. — That came out with a um iPhone chip in it. And the fact that we're seeing that the chipset needed to do what our phones do is capable of driving low-end laptops and the things you can accomplish with a high-end tablet now require a uh high-end chip is just kind of like — weird. — This is the Star Trek future. — Yeah. Yeah. They the so I forget what they called the Neo. Yeah. They come in yellow. — Yeah. But they're like 600 bucks US, which is like that's it. — they have now got the whole market top to bottom and [snorts] man. Okay. So like I need to disclaim this. — I hate using Apple products. Right. I hate them. — You didn't use — I always have. Okay. — Always have. Yeah. I hate — you more willing to in the past. — I Well, hear me out. No, I hate them. I hate the interface. I hate the sandbox environment, the the inability to uh to customize your experience. I hate that they won't let you do things that should be just paint patently obvious. Like, I just I hate hate it. I hate the And I like I hate the computers and I hate the phones more. Like, I really hate the phones.

Hate them. Okay, — I you are crazy to not only live in the Mac ecosystem right now, — right? I have a MacBook Pro as my main daily driver computer. I'm running this on a Mac Mini — uh is my streaming machine. I have another Mac Mini that is sort of a server for all of our software applications. And then I begrudgingly have adopted an iPhone from my wife after my Pixel was moved on to my son and and it is just like the battery life on these things is insane. The power of these things is incredible, right? just and the and the performance for the price is like in the olden days you would use a Windows laptop and it would slow down and it would run into problems and it would get blown. It would just it would be a it would be miserable. — You never experienced that with the new the max the silicon max like just — it's crazy and it I hate it because nobody can come up with something that can do as well as they can and so they're just running away with the market. I live really in Unix. I live like I'm most of the time I'm in the command line working with cloud code and just doing stuff like that website. — OSX is a species of Linux. — Yeah, it's a beautiful implementation of Linux and so it there's really, you know, trying to set up a Linux environment on a Windows PC is madness. You just go with Linux, right? you just run the Linux machine, — but then you run into all kinds of problems and you're having to use — well, if you want to run a Linux machine, then you've got to run a like an old Windows PC, right? You can run an Intel chip or an AMD chip and it just is it sucks. — So, yeah. Like if someone can come up with an ARMbased solution that runs Linux at the level at the price compariveness as Mac, but no one can cuz they've just got scale. So, yeah. So, we uh I mean these new machines, yeah, they're I mean I'm on I'm running an M3, so I don't need to upgrade for a while. We're probably going to upgrade one of our editing machines this runaround just to — because we're spending a lot of time doing um like a lot of video production. So, we're going to get one of those — for the editor. But apart from that, yeah, it's uh — yeah, they're just running out of and these Neil like it absolutely if you want a computer, get one of the Neo. Like there's no downside for you making that your daily driver. The thing's made of aluminum. It's going to be fast. It's got a pretty good screen. It's got tons of power for what you need. It's the way. Yeah. And one of the things that our modern world is making me appreciate is the availab availability of the M series chips that have CPU and GPUs mounted on the same chip is causing them to still be here when everything else has massive shortages. — Yeah. They've avoided the RAM crisis. — By building baking all together, right? They avoided the GPU crisis. It's like I am so ticked off that like Valve is having issues coming out with their next generation of hardware because there's just not RAM available. So many companies are going to end up going out of business because they can't release their cool new hyped thing because they can't get hardware. — Yeah. Um — Yeah. Like the Steam Machine, we should have known the price on the Steam Machine by now, right? We don't because we've been able to pre-order like we could — able to pre-order. Yeah, we can't. Yeah. And now you can't get Steam Decks. — I know. — They're out of stock, too. So, yeah. This is madness. I don't like it. — My husband was eyeing my Steam Deck last night. He's like, "What do you have over there? " And cuz — they're — He doesn't have a Steam Deck. — No. So, so what ends up happening is my husband has a hobby of collecting hobbies and most of the time he will decide there's this one video game he really wants to play and so he buys the game console and he plays that game and then he sets it aside and like I'll give it eight weeks and then I steal it when he's not looking. — Right. — This is this they just drift away into the night. Yeah. Um, but the Steam Deck he had no interest in for whatever reason. He doesn't play Steam games, I guess. — And yeah, I don't question, but so the one system I had to buy on my own was the Steam Deck. Everything else I just steal from my husband, — right? — Um, yeah, — but you never need anything else, right? The Steam Deck runs your game library. I do still play the Switch sometimes because I have a few games that I've paid for on it that I haven't paid for in Steam. But yeah, it's and I don't

think all the Mario games or Animal Crossing — No, none of those are going to [clears throat] be on Steam, but you're going to pay $70 for your cartridge for it to run on your So just like play a different game is my — um Right. So, I play uh what just came out? Oh, Slay the Spire 2 just came out. — Yeah, I saw that. I haven't played it yet. — Yeah. So, I picked that up and I'm sort of halfway through one round of Slay the Spire. But then today in about 3 hours, Path of Exiles New League opens up and then that's going to be my life. So, — excellent. — Yeah, not enough time. — I have actually been playing with Legos in the real world lately. I've talked about this a few episodes. — Explain this real world to me. I know. It's something you have to dust, which I really am not a fan of. This is why I like Minecraft more than actual Legos. — I never even thought about that. — Yeah. You have to dust your Lego. — Yeah. And like if I learned that using a brush a blush brush is the best way to go because everything else like you'll be knocking leaves off your trees and stuff. — Right. So, you just have like a set. You buy like some cheap set of brushes and then you can just get in there and brush them off. You're like a an [snorts] archaeologist for your own Lego. — It's that is the one thing I hate about actual Legos. But yeah, Minecraft uh however, you don't run out of blocks that stops you and causes you to go do something else. The thing about Lego is my addictive personality is like, [ __ ] there's no more Legos in this box. I guess I have to go do something else. — Yeah. — Um — uh Francisco Athens said, "Don't ever pick up Vintage Story. We'll never see you again. " Oh, it's on my wish list. — Raja has tried Kitten Space Agency. I haven't tried it yet. — I've heard really good things about it. It's on my list of things to try. I — I am so behind on things. — Yeah. Like you haven't read things, you haven't watched things. Yeah. No, you're just making your Lego. But that's fine. Like how can we I mean is this the modern anxiety is that we feel like we have to reach parody with everybody else about — the about the things that we collect and enjoy and read and watch and so on. Right? — I don't I want to say that the long tale to how we currently consume things allows people more diversity — and for me — Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. Oh, I was gonna say that we are so aligned, you and me, right? We are aligned almost perfectly and yet we have totally different, right? Like, you know, if I listed off the video games that I like, you'd be like, "Yeah, I'd play all those. " And if you off the books that you read, I'd be like, "Yeah, I read all those that we like. " Yeah. And yet here we are unable to find common ground and we are we are, you know, overlapping uh vin diagrams. So, I think just the ability for us to connect as a species at a uh at a meme level is gone. My kid sends me memes and I was like, I don't get it. — I don't understand. — Right. — The kids memes are not okay. — Explain the kids are okay. Their memes are not okay. — Yeah. Just Yeah. Explain the meme to me cuz I don't get it. Right. — Oh, boy. It's a reference to the back rooms which is like okay — and we're also biased by the people around us. So for instance I have a much wider amount of content that I enjoy than a couple of my friends. And so if I'm spending Friday night over at one of my friends who has a narrower set of things they're willing to watch, I'm going to end up watching a whole lot more anime than I would otherwise. — Um. — Right. Right. — And so spouses, wives, friends, — all of these things influence what we're actually consuming. And I've also been highly motivated by there is so much stuff that in the real world I need to get done. So much gardening, so much cleaning of the house. — Yes. Yeah. And that means bike riding, so much podcast, — so much telescoping. Yeah. It's — Yeah. I am overwhelmed. I am. And I am running. I am more efficient now than I've ever been in my life. Like just [snorts] learning my Chinese and exercising, you know, weightlifting and bike riding and hiking and working on projects around the property and staying on top of all of my media. The thing that's gone to the wayside is scrolling on social media. Uh that kind of stuff. So, I feel pretty good about my mix, — but even that I'm running out of

like play, right? That I'm running out of margin that I'm going to have to go like, "That's it. I'm done. I'm maximally interacting with my friends and my family. I am out there in nature as much as I can. I am staying on top of the things on my business. I'm filling my brain with the best possible content that's ever existed. I am eating very well. Uh, and yet I feel anxious all the time because, you know, it's a lot of work. — Yes. — To do all this stuff, right? So, yeah. — And I don't know about you, but I [snorts] read a lot of science press releases that have nothing to do with astronomy and space science because there's so much cool stuff going on in the world. And like I had a rabbit hole the other day about chimpanzees liking to play with crystals. And in this world where there is so much cool stuff being done — there the rate at which we are expanding our understanding is amazing and — I — yeah I' I've had to shut off those feeds for myself — because it's exactly what you're talking about. You're like oh did you see there's a new study that shows that mice you know, make these sounds when they do this and those that or uh oh, it turns out that that geologists have discovered, you know, this interesting kind of crystal that is forms, you know, and I'll just rabbit hole like crazy. — And yeah, I've got so I've actually unsubscribed now from — from pretty much everything that is a — distraction. Uh but you have to replace it with high quality aggregation. — Right. That's the trick is that you remove you replace the drift net with uh with some friend who's out there fishing for you and so you can so for example like pol like you could right now in politics you could just you can spend your whole day [sighs] up refreshing YouTube and watching what's going on. No, pick one podcast where the people have a perspective that you really appreciate. — Maybe they update once a week. you'll stay on top of the whole system and you don't have to grind, right? And so for me, like I really like the plates, the slate political podcast. — Oh, yeah. Gap. Yeah. I've listened to that since day one pretty much. — And they cover it's more US focused, but right now, you know, the US affects us all. Uh, and then the other one that I really like is The Rest His Politics, which is two British guys, and they cover things from a much more international angle. Um, but I and I skip a bunch of their podcasts, but like just in general, take these things that are, you know, that are causing this anxiety and boil it down to a, you know, some source that, you know, is not an echo chamber. — Yeah. — Francisco. Uh, that is going to challenge your tribe's perspectives. And that's why I like the rest of his politics. One guy is conservative, the other guy is liberal. Yeah. And together they are good balance to each other but also sane. — Are you following Wired at all? — No. — So I like so many people I've been like, "All right, so where do I go to get good news nowadays? " And it turns out Wired of all places has been doing a ton of really good investigative journalism. Yeah, they had been. I don't know if they had kept it up. — They have and because technology is at the root of so much of what's going on in the world, like finding out that uh Open AI had said no to military use of their algorithms and then the Pentagon was testing it using uh Microsoft's interface. Anyways, just like that's a technology issue going into how politics is playing out in the world. Um, seeing how anthropics uh training data was old and led to a school being destroyed. That's a technology issue — that killed like a lot of people and so Wired is keeping up with all of this while also telling me the stuff I was interested in learning anyways about new headsets. — I would say, you know, if I had to So my aggregator for all things technology is RS Technica at this point. That's kind of my favorite. — Um — I'm seeing biases in there that I'm not liking and no easy way to filter out who I am and I'm not getting content from. So Wired lets me pick who I'm following with a much more fine grain. — Yeah. Like I loved Wired so much like 30

years ago, right? — Same. And then I like unsubscribed for two decades and now I'm subscribing to them and not WPO cuz — darkness did kill democracy. — Yeah. Well, here we are. We've reached the end of our episode. We're about to both spin out into uh into dark places. So why don't we uh wrap things here? Uh, so we've got something special uh on my channel that we're going to be releasing this weekend. — Okay. Tell me more. — It's Well, I I'm going to keep it a bit of a secret. — That's all right. Tell us when. — I don't know, but it's going to be this weekend. — So let me see. — All right. — Uh, it is enormous. — Okay. And the reason I don't know when is because resolving the copyright the bogus copyright claims is inexraable. — Yeah. — So we had one person claim one group claim 5 hours. — Oh no. — In this video of content which is just like it's absolutely [ __ ] And so now I'm going to have to fight it in a sort of very specific way. But the fact that I have to claim a video should tell you that something very weird and big is coming. So — yeah, stay tuned for that. And then on yesterday I interviewed Lee Fineberg who is the um uh he's the architect of the Habitable Worlds Observatory. He was one of the main people on James Webb, worked on Hubble, — uh has retired from NASA and is now the mission architect for the large interropherometer for exoplanets. — Oh, that's cool. — So, so he has had his hands in every major space telescope and the next generation ones. And we talked for like an hour and a half, just a mindbending interview. And we'll be releasing that probably Monday. And you know, it's my interview of the year. So if you are excited about the future of the habitable worlds observatory large interform exoplanets you want to hear uh you know a few like little nuggets that for example uh — web has mountains of propellant remaining. — Yes. Yeah. — They they're halfway through — so much propellant. — Yeah. the original mission was for 5 years then they but they wanted to do 10 years and he said I you know I think it's going to be the electronics that go bad before we run our propellant on this spacecraft so cool — you know we are looking at decades of productivity out of web which was great uh one more a couple more dings but they're reorienting the telescope to minimize the dings has gone beautifully So, uh, the optics are ahead of quality. — That's also cool. — Yeah. Yeah. So, so we I did a journalism and so you'll get uh updated information about what's happening with the telescopes you care about and you will learn more about the future of the big observatories than you're going to hear from any other source. So, uh yeah, I think you'll love it. — Yeah. It's it's a wild time. We were planning to come out this week over at EVSN with a special episode on rockets uh that would be going out to Patreon uh folks this weekend. Um except we've had to throw out our script so many times that currently the one sentence we have is we don't know what's going on in space science. Um just because every time we turn around what we had just finished writing up has been invalidated by either Congress or NASA. — Right. Um yeah, so International Space Station's going to last two days long, two years longer. The they're funding commercial uh contracts for space stations that they want to build a base on the moon and move away from the lunar gateway — entire the EU segment for SLS is being gotten rid of, but not — looking for a new upper stage. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's a it's a mess, but it feels like it's a mess that's moving in the direction of a little bit of sanity. So I — So I don't — I'm okay to watch this play out a little bit more. — It feels to me a little bit too much like when Constellation bit the dust of Was anyone happy with Constellation? Not really. No. — Was anyone thinking constellation was going to be money saving? Hell no. Was anyone thinking constellation was the best path to return to the moon? No. But it was a path — and SLS was an improvement. And I think we have all the same opinions of SLS that we had for constellation except it's less of a quagmire is actually technologically feasible. And one of the things that has happened is we've hit the point in product development where it costs less money to finish what we're currently doing than start over yet again. — Yeah, that sounds like the sunk cost fallacy talking.

— Oh my goodness. I so there was actually like people have done the modeling of the finances where — um there's certain break points that it makes sense to kill SLS after this and before this and they're ignoring those break points like there's a really good break point after Artemis. I think it's either five or seven when the architecture changes. — Yeah. — Um so yeah I don't know. Um — we could do this all day. We got to wrap it up. I got to go. — I'm sorry. Yeah. I'm doing. So, there's an interview live on CosmQuest at 2 p. m. Eastern. Tune in for that. We're talking science with Trisha App and how NASA is looking to innovate what they're doing. So, um — thanks everybody. — All right. — We'll see you next time. — Bye. Um Ah, okay. Too many buttons. What's happening? I lost the window I need to click. Um I'm going to reid EJ over on that. Uh hitting stop there. All right.