4.8 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2018
⏱️ 27 minutes
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Why are small stars red? Why are small stars so common? Why are small stars so interesting for the hunt for life? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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Music by Jason Grady and Nick Bain. Thanks to WCBE Radio for hosting the recording session, Greg Mobius for producing, and Cathy Rinella for editing.
Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, Chief Scientist at COSI Science Center, and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).
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0:00.0 | There are, and I know you come to this show to know the essential truths of complete knowledge of space and time, and I'm going to lay it out for you, there are a lot of stars in the night sky. |
0:17.0 | Yeah, yeah, that's worth it. That's worth a Patreon contribution right there. |
0:27.1 | There are about, there are about 3,000 stars that you can see with the naked eye. |
0:30.9 | Of course, that depends on the person, on the clarity of the night. |
0:33.4 | You know, if there's a cloud, you're obviously going to see fewer stars. But maximum, it's around 3,000 in any one hemisphere. |
0:38.0 | Then you go the opposite hemisphere. |
0:39.6 | There's another 3,000. |
0:40.7 | So total stars visible to the naked eye in the night sky about 6,000 or so. |
0:48.9 | But there are a lot more stars in the universe than 6,000. |
0:55.2 | I hope you've already by now internalized that bit of knowledge. |
1:00.0 | So what makes a star visible? |
1:02.0 | Why can't we see all the stars? |
1:03.4 | Well, the star either has to be close or it has to be really bright. |
1:07.7 | Preferably both. |
1:08.7 | Close and bright is like the perfect combination to see a star |
1:12.6 | in the night sky. And there's a bias in what we see. The stars we see in the night sky are not |
1:20.8 | representative of the stars that actually out there. Both in the sense of closeness, most stars in the |
1:27.1 | universe are in other galaxies, |
1:29.5 | on the other side of the cosmos. They're obviously too far to be seen, but they're also |
1:35.0 | preferentially brighter. There's a bias. We tend to only see the bright ones. We don't see |
1:39.8 | the dim ones. We tend to see it bright and hot stars. We tend not to see the dim stars. |
1:46.0 | And to give you a sense of what we're missing with just our eyes, |
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