Are You REALLY Made Of Stars?

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Hello, welcome to The Rest of Science with me, Hannah Fry. And I am Michael Stevens. Question for you, Michael. What are we made of? We're all made of stars. Yeah. Or are we? As you can tell by my sarcastic tone, I'm not a big fan of that phrase. It gets spoken a lot, but today I want us to really answer the question, what are we made of?

You don't like the explanation that we're forged in the heart of dying into galactic cosmic collisions. Oh, it's so inspiring. Oh my gosh. Speed out by supernovae explosions. I mean, obviously we are. We were. Okay, but wait, when you say obviously, why so obviously? Well, because we're made of matter and that matter wasn't created

By our mothers in the womb. Ex nihilo. Okay, from nothing. It was already there and it was rearranged into us. And before we were here, it was something else. Because the atoms come from elsewhere. The atoms came from elsewhere. And then you ask, well, where do the atoms come from? And they formed...

early in the universe, and then heavier and heavier nuclei, like more and more elements were formed by stars, smashing them together in their cores, and then dying and exploding, and all of their guts coalescing into new stars and planets and peoples. So we're made of stars, mostly. I guess the point is that it's very rare that new atoms get made on Earth.

Would it have like a little atom factory where it's like, how many carbons do you want? How many oxygen do you want? These atoms only exist because of these high energy explosions that happened in intergalactic collisions. It depends what you mean by made. Go on.

OK, so there are a lot of radioactive isotopes of very common things like potassium and carbon that are always like converting and decaying into things. I don't think I'm not counting decay. I'm not counting. OK, I want I want. What's the opposite of decay? Re-up K. DK. Re-K. Just K. K. You can decay. Can you just K? I only want K. Yeah. I mean, I can't go to the store and say, oh, I need carbon. I'm looking to, you know, grow. Build a baby.

Yeah, it's like if you want carbon, go eat a potato. But that potato got the carbon from the soil, which got it from a star that died billions of years ago.

So hang on, this all sounds completely legitimate to me. It does. And that's why I say mostly we are made of stars. Yeah. I like to say that we are made by stars. Go on. First of all, the very lightest elements, hydrogen. Okay. There's a lot of hydrogen in our bodies. Sure. It's part of H2O. See episode one. See episode one. Yeah. As the universe cooled, protons...

could start to hold on to electrons and, oh, you've got hydrogen. So a lot of the hydrogen in your body wasn't made by a star. It was just made in the very early days, even before stars existed. Feels a bit pedantic, but go on. How is that pedantic? There's an enormous amount of hydrogen in your body. Excuse me, actually. You were made before stars. Now, OK, to be fair, that hydrogen was probably in a star before it was in you. Sure. It wasn't made.

Well, OK, so you are you're made. Yeah. All right. Fine. That one that one I'll give you. OK, deal. You're made of that of stars there. My knockdown point is boron and beryllium. Go on. Hydrogen to helium to lithium. But then. In nucleosynthesis, the process inside stars that forms new elements, you leapfrog all the way from number three, lithium, to number six, carbon. And four and five, beryllium and boron.

are not made in stars. Well, where are they made then? They are made by Cosmic Ray Spallation. I beg your pardon. So... This is where I get the whole, we're not made of stars, we're made by stars, because cosmic rays often come from stars.

We're not entirely sure everything that they might come from, but they are extremely high energy particles. They're not rays of like, you know, a laser or something. They're little cannonballs. And they're flying through space, often from stars that supernovaed many, many years ago. When these hit other atoms, they can cause that atom to explode. They can cause things like neutrons to fly around. And then those things fall into other atoms. And that is how beryllium and boron get made.

So hold on. Not in a star, but around a star or potentially really far away from a star. By a star. So right, right at the beginning, we said, what are you made of? Stardust. And you disagreed. And to prove that you're not a pedant... We've gone all the way around the houses and come back to you saying, it's not, we're not made of stars, we're made by stars. But we're made by stars of stuff. You're absolutely right, Michael, not pedantic at all.

Hang on. Right. How much boron and brilliant is there in the human body, though? I've known this my entire life. So your body contains about 35 micrograms of beryllium. Okay. And every day you drink about... between 0.2 and 0.6 milligrams of boron in your drinking water. Now, earlier I told you that boron had no... You're really adding to this pedantic thing here. Like, okay, you have to say by stars, but because 0.35 micrograms...

of beryllium is in your body. We said, what are you made of? Not what is most of you made of. I just think, here's the deal. I'm not being pedantic so much as I love... that I get to have this conversation every time someone says, oh, we're made of stars. I can be like, well, boron and beryllium are technically in your body and they're made by cosmic rays spallations. All right. I do that all the time. And.

This is why we love you, Michael. You know, if you support me, eat some kidney beans, eat some avocado and kidney beans and wash it down with prune juice. Those are our highest dietary sources of boron and beryllium. Just chew on a boron rod. That's what my dad always used to tell me. But guys, let's talk about the things that make us, not just what they make us out of. Cosmic rays.

Because actually, cosmic rays, there is a whole fascinating journey that we're going to take you on in this episode about cosmic rays that bring us to life itself. But also, a cosmic ray helped a Super Mario speedrunner achieve the impossible. I guess we should start off talking about what cosmic rays are. I mean, you describe them as star puke, which I think is, I mean, frankly, that's all we need, isn't it?

It's more than puke. It's better than puke. It's more violent than puke. It's the entrails of a star in many cases. I mean, because here's the thing. Okay, space is sort of, it feels like...

It's lots of blackness, but actually space is extremely violent. There are, you know, dying stars that explode into supernovae. There are sort of stars that are tearing themselves apart in these explosions that are so big that they can outshine actual galaxies. I mean, you also have like... black holes smashing into one another you've got like actual galaxies smashing into each other it's all sorts of stuff that's throwing debris all over the place across space and that debris

are the cosmic rays. Exactly. A cosmic ray is not an immaterial flash of light like a ray from a laser gun in a movie. It's just really, really high energy, fast moving particles like protons and helium nuclei and stuff. Yeah, because a lot of the stuff, the debris that's throwing around is going to be planet sized or moon sized or, you know, just like big rocks. But tons of it.

tons of it, a lot, a lot, a lot of it is the size of single atoms or single, you know, atomic particles, basically. That's right. And these things are not just like rare. They... are flooding the universe. I mean, how many times am I being hit by a cosmic ray every day? Even now, okay? In this moment. A lot. So the calculations are that every square metre at sea level, well, sort of at sea level-ish here, gets 10,000... of these space bullets.

Every second. Every second, right? It's an enormous, enormous number. I mean, it's sort of like, imagine that the earth is kind of sitting in a bar during a sort of Western-style shootout, right? There's the stuff. flying everywhere and we are actually protected from a lot of it because of our atmosphere, because of the magnetic field that the Earth creates. It kind of protects us from a lot of this stuff. But still, it's this constant barrage of the stuff. And we don't feel it at all.

No. Mostly they pass right through us, I'm sure. Well, OK, so it depends, right? These protons are like heading straight towards Earth. And of course, there's a lot of atmosphere between us and sort of outer space. You know, just by chance, at some point, this proton... is going to smash into a particle that gets directly in its way.

And at that moment, they don't just bounce off each other, right? You can't just think of them as sort of like normal bullets, okay? You end up with this fireworks display of loads of different types of subatomic particles. So you get quarks, you get gluons, and then they go on to sort of combine and then...

split into all these other particles you get mesons you get muons you get neutrinos you get photons a little flash of light you get hadrons and loads of these just decay away almost instantly apart from muons, which is sort of like, it's kind of like a heavy electron. And those survive just long enough to hit down at sea level, to come down to Earth.

But they shouldn't. But they shouldn't. Yeah. They shouldn't. They decay so quickly that even at the speeds they travel, they shouldn't reach the surface of the Earth. And yet we detect them. They're being created as shrapnel from cosmic ray collisions in the atmosphere. And we...

detect them down here on the surface. And yet that became some of the earliest evidence that Einstein was right, that the faster you go, the slower time passes for you. These particles were decaying exactly when they should. It's just that. Time was running so slowly for them compared to our time that their brief lives allowed them to travel all the way to Earth's surface.

Exactly. So these things, they decay extremely quickly. They last for 2.2 microseconds, right? I mean, less than a blink of an eye. But even if they were travelling at the speed of light, 2.2 microseconds only lets them travel about 660 metres.

Really not far at all. And yet the atmosphere is like 15,000 metres thick, 15 kilometres up in the sky. So if classical physics were right, you would never find any muons down at the ground from cosmic rays. And yet, exactly as you say, you find, you measure them. and there are thousands per square metre. Wow. So we...

live constantly in a shower of cosmic rays and the residue of cosmic ray spallation. That stuff's called spall, which is what you basically call shrapnel when it's not a weapon. It's just stuff that flies out, some of which are these time-traveling particles. or time dilating particles. You can see them there, can't you? You can make like cloud chambers to detect them. Yep, yep.

Didn't you make one of those when you were a kid? I did. My mother somehow allowed me to get a bubble chamber from this catalog. And it came with the chamber, but it also came with a needle tipped with radioactive lead. And she made me keep that in the garage. I don't know how she approved all of this. Sorry, your mother, who didn't let you say crap or damn. Until I was in my 30s. Allowed you to get a radioactive lead needle. First of all.

I still can't say damn. OK, sorry. I am allowed to now say crap and piss. Piss seems a lot worse than damn, I got to tell you. But anyway. I don't think she fully understood what it was. And then when it came in this special test tube with radioactive warnings all over it, she was like, oh. And then I told her, oh, so I also need you to take me to the store to get some dry ice. And...

the highest proof alcohol you can buy. Because hold on, we should explain what these things are. You basically get, I mean, imagine sort of an unused aquarium that you might house a fish in, right? Sort of that kind of thing. And then you create a... layer of alcohol vapor you sort of really really chill it using dry ice to create this this layer of a super critical layer that's just ready to condense it just needs the littlest provocation and it can get that from

cosmic rays. A little muon. A little muon flies through and then you see a trail. Like a contrail almost. A contrail from an airplane basically. You see that and it's this quick streak of slightly wider A very thin, like a spider silk. And that is radiation from above. Hold on, what was this radioactive needle for? Oh, well, you needed a source of radiation because background radiation is not enough.

to get cool results in the bubble chamber. It was a very simple one. But you could stick this needle through a little hole in the chamber and then you would see it looks like wisps of hair constantly coming off of the needle. It was lead. It was a lead isotope that was radioactive. Where is it now? I don't know. Just out there giving someone else kind of stuff. I should ask her what happened to it because it sat in the garage, but she sold that house years ago.

So it could still be in that garage. Maybe we should go and check in on the people. Maybe she ate it. I'll give her a call after we record. But yeah, if she suddenly gets extra senses, can like climb buildings. She can thank me.

shoot spider webs out of her arms, you know. That's how you detect muons, right? Using cloud chambers. You can also do it where you get great big tanks of water and look for little flashes of UV light. You can also do this on the atmosphere where you kind of have loads and loads of mirrors and... and just wait for that head-on collision of a cosmic ray and some sort of particle in the atmosphere.

And when you do that, based on the intensity of the light, you can tell how much energy that space bullet had, right? That sort of piece of shrapnel had. And loads of them, most of them have low energy, right? Sort of 10 to 80% the speed of light. Well, you know, the slow guys.

Yeah, so slow. Not really bothering. And solar flares and big ejections from the sun, they'll spit out these sort of protons. I mean, they make life quite interesting for astronauts, to be fair. In what way? Oh, because if you are orbiting...

Yeah, if you're like in the International Space Station, so you're outside of the protective layer of Earth, these cosmic rays are coming in and not hitting other particles before they decay and reach you. Astronauts, when they're on the ISS, report seeing flashes of light.

the cosmic ray interacts with the neurons in their brain and make them think they're seeing things that are not there or tasting things that are not there. No kidding. Like flashes of metallic taste. Just like this sort of interruption. Oh yeah, so that...

That would be a concern for long distance space travelers. If you want to go all the way to Mars, you're really leaving the protection of Earth and you're going to be hit by cosmic rays directly a lot. But these are just these are the low energy ones that we're talking about. now and then you get a medium energy one 99.9% speed of light right that those are coming from supernova they're coming from pulsars that kind of thing but then in 1991 in Utah

They had all of these mirrors in the sky, pointing in the sky, doing this big experiment, looking for cosmic rays, trying to catch this very faint flash of ultraviolet light that happens when they slam into the atmosphere. And they found one. They recorded one. that was travelling as 99... 99.9999. I mean, I can carry on going. It's 21 nines, right? 21.9% the speed of light. 99.9999. 21 of them, 5% the speed of light. Are you describing the oh my God part? I am describing, this is.

what it became known as it wasn't going the speed of light but to put it in perspective at the speed it was traveling if it entered a race with a beam of light after a quarter million years

the light would only be one centimeter ahead of it. What? It's basically moving at light speed. And it hit Earth and we detected it. And we called it the Oh My God particle. Most of them aren't that fast. No, but I mean, this one, the amount of energy that this had to get a particle to be traveling at that sort of a speed. This one, it basically had the same energy as a baseball traveling at 100 kilometers.

per hour right but it was in a single particle in a single single particle subatomic particle and this is it no one still has any idea what kind of violent collision would produce That kind of space shrapnel. I mean, it's a real, genuine mystery. And it's not the only one. They've seen other particles with similar amounts of energy. Do they know?

The general region the Oh My God particle came from in the sky? I don't think they do, not from a single particle. You can only really, you can tell when there's a lot that come from a particular direction. But also remember, I mean, these things might be traveling close to the speed of light. But they've probably been traveling for billions of years. In our time. In their time, no time's passed almost. But in our time, it's billions of years.

you know quite often these things are they're sort of like the ghostly remnants of ancient ancient star collisions older than the sun, you know, and these bullets like passing through you all the time. Imagine being that particle you formed in the early days of the universe and then you traveled and you watched in very fast motion.

the universe age and you traveled a long distance and eventually you wound up on the one planet that could detect you and talk about you on a podcast. What a life. What a life. What a life. I know more about the third most powerful cosmic ray detected, the Amaterasu particle. This one was detected just in 2021. It had the energy of a brick being dropped from your waist.

onto the ground in a single part in a single particle. But what's cool is that we tracked where it came from and it came from the local void. Which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a nearby area. Well, nearby. It's far out from our galaxy and all the galaxies around us where there's just nothing. There's nothing there.

And yet it's pitching these cannonballs at us or one cannonball. We don't know where it came from. It could be just a property of space itself is the creation of these particles. that's incredible yeah because also i mean think about how small earth is this thing could be there could be something going on in the deep void that we don't know about this

spewing out all of these in all sorts of different directions. And we just so happened to have been looking in the right place at one moment where one just so happened to be passing. I'm sure even... more powerful particles have hit Earth. But we're not always looking. We've only been talking about particles that scientists have detected with experiments watching for them. But I think that...

We've also been affected by massive cosmic ray, high energy particles doing really interesting things when we weren't even expecting them. For example, in 2016, there was this woman named Mary Moe. Great name, by the way. She was on a flight to Amsterdam and she had a pacemaker. And suddenly in the middle of the flight, her heart just starts.

beating like crazy. Like she can see it beating and the rhythm is all off. They do this whole emergency ambulance pickup when they land. At the hospital, they determined that the pacemaker had entered. It's backup processing mode where it has like a default rate and impulse strength. It was not what was prescribed for her. Why did that happen? The leading explanation is that a single bit.

in the computer of that pacemaker was flipped. The memory and the language of a computer is stored in these electrically charged bits. And a charged particle that results from a cosmic ray collision in our atmosphere can... can interfere with these bits and flip them. They can only be one of two things, on or off, one or zero. You flip one of them, that might have been enough to cause the pacemaker to go problem, resort back to default processing mode.

And that's probably what happened. Change a one to a zero and these are potentially the consequences of it. So, so far we've been talking about cosmic ray particles that have been detected.

by scientists using experiments that were watching for them. But we have evidence of high-energy cosmic rays doing really interesting things when we weren't even expecting them. Actually, when you consider how much electronic equipment there is, I mean... in the sky in planes for example the fact that this can happen the fact that a cosmic ray can interact with electronic equipment change a one to a zero or a zero to a one

sometimes it can have these really catastrophic consequences so mary's pace breaker being one there was also there was a um a quantus flight this is in 2008 and the plane was kind of going in the sky all happy and then twice in 10 minutes it does a nosedive right lots of people end up getting injured on board, just really sharp turn. And when they did this investigation, they found that there was this erroneous computer data going on in the onboard systems.

that misrepresented the angle at which the aircraft was flying. So you can imagine actually a one to a zero or zero to a one in that situation would make a huge difference if you're at like, there's quite a big difference between five degree angle and...

15 degrees, you know, or minus 15 degrees or whatever it might be. A lot of people, the explanation that people think is that it was cosmic radiation, that a particle from outer space, from some intergalactic collision, billions of years ago, travelled... across the galaxies and interacted with that computer at precisely the right moment, precisely the right way in order to confuse the onboard systems.

Not frightening at all. Not frightening at all. It's not just planes that are affected, though. And after the break, I want to talk about how it could be affecting your gaming. The most serious. The most serious. Pacemakers. Crashing airplanes.

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All right, before the break, we were terrifying everybody ever, whoever wants to get in a plane again. What we should add is that there are now systems in place, error correcting codes that account for this. You don't really have computer systems. in an airplane anymore that are just solely responsible for the angle of the aircraft. Should I nosedive or not? Yes, exactly. We've moved on a little bit from there.

But before we get on to the gaming story, which is extremely serious, I do want to add in the fact that those examples, so the Qantas flight and Mary Moe. happened at high altitudes, I think it's probably not a coincidence because, of course, you are more likely to interact with these particles the higher up you go. And actually, this is the reason why we know that these things exist in the first place.

in 1900 or so um this is a point people knew about atoms they knew about radiation they knew how to detect it But everyone thought that the radiation that they were detecting, this sort of background level, was probably coming from the sun. The sun was spitting out of this stuff. And then there was a guy called Victor Hess. 1912, this is. He was like, I've...

I know exactly how to test this. I know exactly how to work out whether this is coming from the sun. Why don't I get into a balloon filled with hydrogen, go up into the sky and measure how much radiation there is up there. And by the way, why don't I do this? during a solar eclipse perfect yeah

Because then when it's dark and I'm in my five kilometres high in my, frankly, explosive, explosive balloon with just a little dangly basket and some Victorian woolly gloves on. That's the point at which I'll be able to know. whether it really is coming from the sun or not. And what did he find? I mean, not only did the radiation not decrease during the eclipse, but it increased the higher up he got. So he had these two little gold leaves that will flutter.

you put a little charge through them and they kind of get attracted to each other when there's radiation. So they flutter in the presence of radiation. And he measured that actually the higher up you go, the more these things start fluttering. And the solar eclipse made basically no difference whatsoever. Right. So it wasn't the sun.

wasn't the source. Exactly. So that was the conclusion that he made was that the only way that it could be happening is that it's from deeper in space that these things are coming from. And when was this? 1912. Nice work. So pre-health and safety. Yes. He did get a Nobel Prize for it, to be fair. It kind of makes it worth it. Do you think so? I would do it. Were you in a hydrogen balloon? For the views. Everything's content, baby.

Go on. Tell us about Cosmic Rays and gaming. Well, OK, look, in 2013, a speed runner who I'll explain speed running is my favorite kind of gaming content to watch. It involves. Completing tasks or completing entire games in video games as quickly as possible.

Finding ways to optimize your strategy, whether it be the decisions you make or even the moves that you make to break the record and finish the level or the game or whatever the challenge is as quickly as possible. And people do this with quite retro games a lot, right? Retro games are particularly great because, I mean, we're all familiar with them and you can really like look at the programming and say, ah, the hitbox on that enemy is actually an octagonal shape. So you could clip.

through the corner of the octagon and avoid taking the enemy on at all. Yeah. I remember seeing one where somebody worked out that you could shoot a target through a window rather than going in the building and thus save two seconds and then the record fell and so on and so on. Exactly. And I love it because these are... people who are experimenting with and mastering not the universe we live in.

but a simulated one. And the detail that they get into and just understanding it. It's such a human thing. I mean, I sort of think that brain power could be used on something more effective. But anyway, go on. I disagree. I think this is what life is. And I think that Dota... Underscore teabag would agree with me. Go on. In 2013, Dota teabag was playing a level on Super Mario 64 called TikTok Clock. There was a technique that had been discovered where you could move through the air.

or across the level a lot faster, only under certain conditions. And at this particular moment, his character moved where it shouldn't have, shaving milliseconds off of his time. Basically teleported, which was a thing that they knew how to do in the game, but not where he did it. And so it became this big mystery. Why did it happen there? But no one could recreate it.

Everyone said this is a new piece of physics in the Super Mario 64 universe. That something special happens here, but no one could recreate it. They used the original console. They used emulators. They couldn't make it happen. And so the... Only explanation is that a cosmic ray or some spallation from a cosmic ray collision in the atmosphere hit his machine, flipped a bit, and sure enough, they found exactly which bit you can flip to make Mario do that exact move.

No. Once in a lifetime, once in a species existence phenomenon happened. Once in a lifetime. But then if you think about the number of people that are playing Mario, the number of, you know. cosmic rays that are hitting the atmosphere the number of bits that could be flipped that could result in something extraordinary happening actually maybe not so unlikely

Yeah, right, exactly. How many things can be explained by cosmic rays that aren't being explained by them yet? It could even be that human evolution. was affected by cosmic rays, right? They're ionizing. They can affect our DNA. Right. Who's to say that in the course of our species history, we didn't get a little helpful mutation from a cosmic ray? So then we are made by stars, by stars, not of cosmic rays may have played a role in our evolution.

They play a role in our daily lives and messing it up, but they also certainly play a role in death and what it means to be dead and how we change when we're dead. Go on. Picture this. You are an atom of nitrogen. floating around in the atmosphere, you get hit by a cosmic ray. I know. That was violent. That actually really hurt my hand. And it wasn't even true. You don't get hit by a cosmic ray. You get hit by a ball.

from a cosmic ray collision. So some of the things these cosmic rays make are free neutrons and they're just flying around. If one of them knocks into you, you're a little nitrogen atom. You've got seven protons, seven neutrons. It flies in. Now you've got eight neutrons. You become unstable and you kick out a proton. Oh. Now you're a whole new element. You're carbon now. You're carbon now with six protons but eight neutrons. You're fat carbon. Carbon 14.

unstable, radioactive carbon-14. This is happening in the atmosphere all the time. Because normally carbon only has 12, right? Exactly. If you make carbon in the traditional, boring way, you've got an atomic weight of 12. And it is the most common kind. carbon. But this radiocarbon, this carbon-14, it decays. It eventually turns back into nitrogen-14. Its half-life is about 6,000 years. But as long as you're alive...

you are consuming more and more of this radio because it's in everything. And more of it's being made all the time. More of it's being made all the time. You're breathing it in, you're drinking it, you're eating it. But when you die, you stop communing. with the universe. You stop taking in new carbon-14 and the carbon-14 that's in you continues to decay. So we can look at something that used to be alive and we can look at...

How much carbon-14 it still has in it versus how much it should have had. We can tell how long it's been dead. We can tell how old it is. That is extraordinary. Yeah. I did not know that's how it works. That's how it works. Because that moment you die, you essentially become sealed off from the rest of everything. Any new atoms no longer become part of you. Yeah. And we can see the atoms, at least the carbon-14 atoms, age.

in your remains. So cosmic rays play a role in making us. They play a role in our lives after we're dead. They mess with our video games and our flights. But like, what don't they affect? So can we say we're made by cosmic rays instead? We should. Okay, deal. Well, we're not only made by cosmic rays. Okay, but hold on a second, though. Yeah. Because, okay, cosmic rays I know applies to, like, single atoms that are floating around. Okay. But, like, star puke more generally.

Right? That's a kind of umbrella term which includes lumps of matter and cosmic rays. So can we say we're star puke? We can and should. Michael, we'll hunt you down if you... If you don't answer with star puke, whatever next ask that question. You are a bunch of star puke. Just our stars just ralphed you into existence. Like a hairball. and I'm glad you're here. Please reach out.

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