Are The First Stars Really Still Out There?

okay

look

up

when you peer at the heavens on a clear

moonless night you can see the stars of

our galaxy strewn across the black

we cannot help but seek recognizable

outlines by tracing our finger from one

star to the next like searching for

shapes in clouds

we see ourselves in the groups of stars

assigning them names and meaning to our

eyes the individual Stars making up

these constellations seem uniform

remarkable only when forming part of a

larger group

but with a powerful enough telescope the

truth reveals itself and we can finally

reshape the sky according to science not

symbolism

so let us take a tour of the Stars

in order of their Rarity

we begin with the failed Stars Brown

dwarfs below eight percent of the mass

of the Sun these are protostars without

the gravitational clout to spark Fusion

in their cores the Galaxy is littered

with these failures one for every

successful star

stars in the prime of their Stellar

lives make up 90 of the several hundred

billion in the Milky Way our sun is one

part of the yellow dwarf category in

which only about seven percent of stars

fall a relative Rarity far more numerous

are the cooler and smaller red dwarfs

that make up a much larger 75 percent as

we look for stars with larger masses the

search becomes more difficult thanks to

their volatility and short lifespan

white supergiants like cannipus the

second brightest star in the sky despite

its great distance from us comprised

less than one percent of the start in

our galaxy and more extreme hypergiants

like the largest known star Stevenson

218 are even harder to find their size

resulting in strong Stellar winds where

Stellar material the mass of Jupiter is

blown away in single events almost

evaporating the star as fast as it grows

While most stars are enjoying their best

life there are tens of billions in the

final stages of their Stellar Revolution

smaller Stars such as the sun will

eventually puff out into red giants a

fleeting midpoint on the way to a white

dwarf these dense and compact Stellar

remnants comprise about five percent of

stars in the present day though

eventually 97 percent of the Milky Ways

Stellar population will shrivel into

these gently fading spheres

neutron stars and black holes are exotic

high density phenomena making up 0.5

percent and point zero zero zero five

percent of our Galaxy's population

respectively and the result of

supernovae by the largest Stars while

spinning neutron stars pulsars have been

observed in their thousands since the

1960s we've only observed 31 of their

most extreme form

natash

this type of neutron star has a magnetic

field a thousand trillion times stronger

than that of the earth and star Quakes

on their surface produce powerful bursts

of gamma rays these star Quakes are also

much stronger than our equivalent

reaching up to 23 on the Richter scale

but even that is still not the rarest

form of star scientists predict could be

out there

in its early days the universe was

filled with hypergiants but they were

much different to those we see now the

first lights that kindled in the cosmos

were vast hungry and short-lived living

and dying in a cosmic blink of an eye

known as population 3 stars they were

the ancestors of us all and they may

still linger out there in the black

the rarest stars in the universe

how much time do you have a plank time

is the shortest possible moment of time

an average human life is about 4 to the

power of 52 of these single moments long

more than the amount of atoms inside the

entire Earth and on average your career

makes up 80 000 hours of that total

roughly 20 percent and so is a huge

opportunity to make a positive

difference in the world eighty thousand

hours has sponsored this video and they

are a non-profit that helps people find

a fulfilling career that also does good

and everything they provide is free

forever based on 10 years of research

with academics from Oxford University

their aim is to help you find a job that

makes a positive difference in the world

helps solve the biggest problems facing

humanity and also gives you job

satisfaction a lot of career advice

focuses on a few well-known paths that

people think have a high social impact

like being a doctor teacher or charity

worker but it turns out these aren't

your only options to be forced for good

and they probably aren't your best

options either everything 80 000 hours

publishes is based on careful

consideration of the best evidence they

can find on the topic their in-depth

research-led career guide has also just

been updated for 2023 and if you join

the newsletter now you'll get a free

copy sent directly to your inbox

so to get started on planning a career

that works on one of the world's most

pressing problems sign up now at eighty

thousand hours dot org forward slash

universe thanks to 80 000 hours for

supporting education on YouTube

[Music]

in Japanese mythology the god of

creation gives birth to many deities but

three a particularly Divine tsukuyomi

the moon God susano the god of Storms

and seas and Amaterasu the goddess of

the Sun the highest deity of all

in the most famous Legend involving the

sun goddess susano threw a holy horse

into a loom flaying it alive and killing

a nearby weaving Maiden Amaterasu was so

upset that she fled and hid in a cave

blocking the entrance

Sun disappeared from the sky and a

permanent night fell on Japan this

eternal night only ended when the other

gods and goddesses staged a ritual

outside the cave laughing so loudly that

Amaterasu could not help but come out to

see what was going on the deities sealed

the cave shut as she emerged and Japan

once again became the Land of the Rising

Sun

[Music]

the sun is essential to all life on

Earth its calm and predictability

nurtures plants animals and humans alike

surrounding them with light and warmth

it is no wonder then that right from

where the earliest civilizations formed

the sun has often been portrayed as a

benevolent God want to be feared perhaps

but only because of its possible

disappearance

now of course we understand that stars

are physical entities still full of

wonder but explainable using modern

science

for the longest time we were reliant on

only our own eyes until Galileo ground

his artificial lenses and magnified the

skies with his telescope

the haze of the Milky Way resolved into

millions of stars and even some

individual Stars revealed themselves to

be binary systems hundreds of years

passed and we cataloged the positions of

these stars with increasing accuracy and

with the Advent of spectroscopy we could

even begin to identify barcodes

individual to each star the gaps in

which revealed which heavy elements were

present in that Stellar atmosphere

we could identify what these distant

Suns

were really made of

but that was not all

[Music]

chemical elements comprise a nucleus

surrounded by electrons these electrons

naturally rest in the ground state but

can be excited up into different energy

levels by the absorption of a photon

with an energy equal to a particular

energy gap