Up Next
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.
Sign up now for inspiring and thought-provoking media delivered straight to your inbox.
Support Provided By
19:03
Many World’s lack wavefunction collapse might be the key to the measurement problem.
18:32
The holy grail of physics is a quantum theory of gravity. What if it’s not possible?
18:32
Alien life will most likely be discovered by faint changes in the color of alien sunsets.
12:05
The 2023 Physics Nobel prize has been awarded to three physicists for attosecond physics.
15:59
With the James Webb Space Telescope we’ve now seen the earliest star ever detected.
17:24
Some are arguing that Many Worlds and Pilot Wave are really the same.
18:00
What if we could produce superconductivity at room temperature? It would change the world.
20:39
We may need to build a radio telescope in the quietest place nearby - the moon!
14:59
Spacetime on its smallest scale is an ocean of black holes and wormholes...or so we think.
11:49
Did JWST just find a new type of star powered by dark matter?
16:21
Did we just uncover new evidence to support Cold Dark Matter?
15:51
The gravitational wave background has probably been detected using a pulsar timing array.