Back to Show
PBS Space Time
How Stars Destroy Each Other
Season 6
Episode 24
Our galaxy is full of dysfunctional stellar relationships. With more than half of all stars existing in binary orbits, it’s inevitable that many stellar remnants will end up in parasitic spirals with their partners. Today we’re going to look at the worst of these - from the novae produced by white dwarfs, to X-ray binaries created by neutron stars and black holes - and much weirder things besides.
Support Provided By
14:20
Gigantic black holes existed in a cosmic eyeblink after the Big Bang. That should be impossible.
15:15
A decade later, a leading theory may finally explain Tabby’s Star, the galaxy’s weirdest star.
16:31
LIGO may have found an impossible black hole, hinting at primordial relics from the Big Bang.
17:40
DESI and DES studied dark energy. Together, what can they tell us?
16:28
Could sending a quantum twin across the galaxy make you both old and young at the same time?
17:39
It's possible that an event horizon is forming right behind and you won't know until its too late.
20:48
Are there no alien signals to find... or do we need to update how we search for them?
14:27
Physicists hope Planck stars can save us from black hole singularities and paradoxes.
17:41
Galaxies older than the universe? Webb's findings keep defying our best explanations.
16:16
Earth's core: solid or liquid? Yes — we know more about distant galaxies than our own interior.
14:42
Gödel found a time-travel solution in General Relativity, revealing spacetime can loop on itself.
18:46
Tardigrades can survive almost anything—even most of Mars. But one Martian chemical stops even them.