radiation

From the First Nuclei to First Light

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When we talk about the first 30 minutes of time, we describe the universe expanding and cooling. As the universe cooled, the nuclear reactions that produced the first atomic nuclei slowed and stopped.

But it was only relatively cool.

The universe still held a temperature on the order of 1 billion kelvins–and that, by the way, converts to roughly 999,999,727°C, or 1,800,000,000ºF.

Ridiculous temperatures like those mean that the gases of the early universe must have been totally ionized. That is, electrons were not bound to atomic nuclei, and no atoms existed.

So how did we get to the universe we know today–a universe full of stars and galaxies?

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The Universe’s First Moments

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Imagine a time before galaxies existed, before the first stars had been born, before the most basic building blocks of matter–atoms–had formed.

This was mere moments after the Big Bang.

No one understands how matter and energy behave under the extreme conditions of the Big Bang itself. We can’t tell the story of the universe from exactly zero. But we can rewind the clock all the way back to the universe’s first one-millionth of a second.

So, what was the universe like back then?

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What Goes On Inside a Star?

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Our sun is undoubtedly the star we know the best. It’s only 93 million miles away—which might seem far, but isn’t that large a distance when you realize that the nearest neighboring star is a whole 4.3 light-years away.

As in, it takes light—yeah, that same stuff that hits the ground from your flashlight in a split second—a whole 4.3 years to get here.

We’re pretty familiar with our star’s interior. We know it produces most of its energy in its core, a relatively small but very hot region at its center. We also know that energy then radiates outward until it hits the convective layer.

There, the energy gets stuck in circulation for a bit until it finally manages to leave the sun’s surface.

But…how normal is that? Is it the same for all stars, or just the sun?

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From Cold Cloud to Hot Protostar

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Paradoxically, stars begin in the galaxy’s coolest places: the dense giant molecular clouds (or GMCs).

This is not quite the paradox it seems, as in the beginning, stars require little else but gravity to form. And that’s really quite lucky, because one thing they do need is regions of high density, and high density is unlikely to occur where temperatures are high.

And so stars begin in perhaps the most surprising of ways: as a high-density bundle of very cool gases within an equally cool interstellar cloud.

But they do heat up eventually. How?

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What is a Nebula Made of?

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What you see here is the Trifid Nebula, a vast cloud of gas and dust in space.

In my last post, we explored why it looks the way it does. We discovered that the pink hues of emission nebulae are caused when extremely hot nearby stars “excite” the gas of the nebula itself to emit its own light, which our eyes perceive as pink.

The haze of blue to the right, on the other hand, is the result of light from hot young stars nearby getting scattered among the nebula’s dust particles. It looks blue for the same reason the sky looks blue. We call nebulae like this reflection nebulae.

And the black wisps of dark nebulae are hardly as ominous as they look; they’re simply ordinary clouds of gas and dust, ordinary nebulae, that we can only see because they’re silhouetted by brighter objects in the background.

But nebulae, for all their different names, are actually a heck of a lot more similar than you might think.

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What Makes a Star Blue?

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Albireo is the distinctive double star in the head of the constellation Cygnus. You can find it yourself if you look for the Summer Triangle amid the dusty trail of the Milky Way across the night sky.

The brighter, orange star of Albireo is a K3-class bright giant. That means it’s just a few thousand Kelvins (Celsius degrees plus 273) cooler than the sun. But it’s also larger—70 times the sun’s radius—and that makes it brighter than you would expect.

The blue star, on the other hand, is a B8-class dwarf. It has only about 3.5 times the sun’s radius, although it’s hotter by about 7422 Kelvins.

Neither star in Albireo is particularly unusual. There are doubtless millions, even billions, of other stars similar to each one. But Albireo certainly offers us the most striking contrast. Bright blue and red stars don’t often appear so close together.

But what exactly gives these stars their distinctive colors?

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The Starlight We Can’t See

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Find yourself a dark, unpolluted night sky on a clear night free of clouds, and you are very likely to look up into the heavens and see a sight quite like this. It’s what we see of the Milky Way, our galaxy.

When I’m at an astronomy event with a sky like the one above, I find it absolutely incredible. Do you notice how the stars don’t all look the same?

A couple are startlingly bright, there are numerous stars that are somewhat dimmer, and if you look really hard, you notice that even the dark night background is sprinkled with stars so faint they can barely be seen.

But what if I told you that you’re not even seeing the half of it?

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The Solar Neutrino

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Ever heard of a neutrino?

Well, I guess now you have. But what exactly is a neutrino?

Don’t worry, they’re not harmful. They’re passing through you this very second and you’ll never notice them, not in your whole life. They’ll never hurt you because they just don’t interact with matter—including you—in the way you’d expect.

I’ll bet now you’re wondering where they even come from.

Well, as the diagram illustrates, they come from the sun. They’re kind of a side-effect of the nuclear reaction that powers the sun, and they radiate out from the sun in droves. But that’s not even the coolest bit.

We know how many neutrinos should come from the sun if our theories about its power generation are right. So if we can count them, we can prove those theories correct.

That’s when we encounter a bit of a problem. We can’t actually detect neutrinos.

So how the heck do we count them?

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The Balmer Thermometer

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How hot would you say this star is? Take a wild guess.

Well…sorry, but I’m going to stop you for a moment just to make sure we’re all using Kelvins. The Kelvin scale is like the Celsius scale, except water freezes at 273 K instead of 0℃. 0 K is absolute zero, which is purely theoretical and doesn’t exist.

Now can you guess this star’s temperature?

I’ll give you another hint. This is a real photograph, so it’s impossible for this star to be any star other than our sun. How hot do you think our sun is?

Okay…I’ll tell you. It’s about 5800 K, which—for those of you unfamiliar with Kelvins—is about 5527℃. Kinda crazy, huh?

Next question. How do we know this? I mean, it’s not like we stuck a thermometer in the sun’s surface and actually measured it, right?

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Stars and Radiation

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Stars are hot.

Really hot. Hot enough to have energy to spare for their planets. If our star wasn’t hot, we couldn’t live on Earth. And our star isn’t even particularly hot for a star. It’s a middle-aged star of low mass, so it’s relatively cool compared to other stars.

You might also notice that stars aren’t all the same color. There are redder stars and bluer stars and more whitish stars.

We know stars are hot. They’re also bright. And they’re different colors. But how does that all translate to radiation—and how can we see it?

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