Mad Dog 357 Plutonium

i often give updates on strange stars on thischannel that have no ready explanation, such as boyajian's star and the possibility thatit might indicate alien activity. but there is another star that also may bean indicator of an alien civilization that's currently making the rounds on several scienceblogs, links in the description below. and it may even be a better candidate forbeing a potential detection of alien life

Mad Dog 357 Plutonium, than boyajian's star. the difference between the two is that whilekic 8462852's strange dimming events could indicate alien megastructures blocking lightfrom the star, that's probably not the case, see the other videos dedicated to that staron this channel.

its much more likely that what we're actuallyseeing an incredibly rare natural event, such as the star recently having ingested a planet. but, while the explanation for boyajian'sstar is going to be interesting whatever it might be, it's probably going to be a variantof something we've seen before or expected to be going on in the universe and won't requirea rethink of a whole area of science. this circumstances of this other star, however,are very different. now, i tend to try to get the naming of thecelestial objects i talk about on this channel as correct as i can get them, or i simplydefault to the official catalog numbers if there is ambiguity surrounding it.

after all, kic 8462852 is also known as thewtf star, tabby's star, boyajian's star, the alien megastructure star and so on, thoughit seems to be settling on boyajian's star as a matter of giving proper scientific namingcredit to the lead investigator. but with this star i fall completely short,this star does have an accepted name and i apologize to any polish speakers in the audiencein advance. the pronunciation for this star is all overthe place on the internet, and the best i could do was ask a person i know that speaksa bit of polish. i'm told that something close to the properpronunciation for this star is przybylski’s star.

i'm sure i got that wrong, polish words areabout as tough to pronounce as it gets for native english speakers, but at least i didn'tchicken out and tried. but, for the sake of clarity, i will run andhide for the rest of the video and use the catalog name for the star, which is hd 101065. but we could also call this star the plutoniumstar because it apparently contains it, along with a bunch of other ultra heavy elementsthat are both highly unstable, and very short-lived. those should not be there and can mean oneof three things: elements exist that we did not really expect to see in nature, the detectionof the ultra-heavy elements is a mistake, or aliens made them artificially and dumpedthem into this star.

now, these elements are at the very end ofthe periodic table, a mysterious place where we know comparatively little about the chemistryof the transuranic elements and some of them have only relatively recently been synthesizedartificially in the lab. outside the lab, we see these elements, sofar, nowhere in the universe other than in this type of weird star. in fact, these heavy elements are so far upthe table that some physicists and chemists are skeptical that they can exist in natureand can only be artificially synthesized. given that they seem present in this starit means that we either need to rethink the mechanisms for which heavy elements can beproduced in nature, or we must consider the

possibility that aliens put them there. hd 101065 is chemically weird in many ways. first studied in 1961 by the aforementionedpolish-australian scientist whose name is in the title of the video, apologies to himand his original paper is also listed in the description, the star features very low ironand nickel but comparatively high amounts of heavy elements like thorium and uranium. now, these do occur in nature, so it's reallythe ratios that are strange. but it also seems to contain actinide elementsheavier than uranium that don't make a whole lot of sense for being there.

these include, reportedly, in ascending order,americium, curium, berkelium (only about one gram of that element has ever been createdon earth), californium and einsteinium. there is some ambiguity as to whether thoseare really there, only more study will clear that up, but also present are the lighterbut still radioactive elements technetium, which has no stable isotopes and is extremelyrare in nature, but may be related to the presence of the uranium, and promethium whichalso has only radioactive isotopes. plus, lots of other rare elements that youdon't hear much about. yet, hd 101065 has them in comparative abundance,apparently impossibly so. in fact, as jason wright of pennsylvania stateuniversity notes in his blog, this star has

more praseodymium -- how often do you hearabout that element -- than iron. this could be somewhat illusory however. dr. wright details how those elements mightget concentrated in the star's atmosphere in layers due to the very strong, somewhatmysteriously so, magnetic fields of this type of peculiar star. i highly recommend those wishing to dig deeperinto this story check out his blog and the other related materials which i have includedlinks and citations for in the description below. so how do all of these strange elements endup in a star's upper atmosphere?

a 2008 paper by vera gopka and colleagues,link below, details that they might be produced by a nearby neutron star. trouble is, hd 101065 does not appear to havea nearby neutron star. strike that explanation. the next explanation has to do with the periodictable. now here is where we get into scientific rethinkterritory. the heavy actinide elements do not like toexist. the nuclei of these atoms are truly huge andessentially fall apart or decay into more stable atoms releasing energy along the way.

this allows you to do interesting things,such as easily split atoms of uranium, this yields nuclear energy, but also unfortunatelyallows for the creation of nuclear weaponry. but above the unstable actinides there ishypothesized to be what is called "the island of stability" where there could be more stable,but really heavy atoms. we've never seen any of these yet, but thenuclear physicists do keep synthesizing heavier and heavier elements and seem set to eventuallyexplore this area of the periodic table and confirm the properties of these atoms. but a paper from march 13 by v.a. dzuba and colleagues proposes that such elementsmight be produced in a certain type of supernova

and that the weirdness of hd 101065 mightbe the result of the decay of more stable, but still radioactive, elements located inthe island of stability leading to all these short-lived unstable actinides and rare elements. if this is the case, it would be revolutionaryfor both nuclear physics and chemistry that such elements could exist in nature. but, i suspect this one will be contentiousbecause conventional thinking has been that these elements are not likely to be presentin nature. and a further question would be that if asupernova was responsible, where is all the iron that is normally associated with supernovas?

so to explain this star, we must rely on hypotheticalelements decaying after being created by a hypothetical mechanism that counter intuitivelydidn't produce much iron, or that iron is somehow obscured in this star's makeup. messy indeed. and that leads us into alien origin territory. in 1980 daniel whitmore and david wright,again citations below, advanced a rather extraordinary proposition. they suggested that a civilization using nuclearenergy might dump the waste into their star. the problem with this though is that it seemsunlikely that a civilization with the ability

to dump that waste into their star would stillbe using nuclear fission but instead would have moved onto fusion. after all, we're getting close to that ourselvesand within 100 years fission as an energy source seems likely to go obsolete. that takes us to another possibility. in 1966 sagan and shklovskii suggested thatone way to announce your presence to the universe is to dump a bunch of artificial elementsinto your star. they might rightly assume that other civilizationsin varying stages of advancement would be doing astronomy and actively looking at thespectra of stars.

so rather than blast out huge, energy consumingradio signals it might be simpler to use the heavy elements to inform others that theyare not alone. that doesn't really convey much information,unfortunately but if it turns out that island of stability elements cannot be naturallycreated then this will be one of the biggest stories in the history of science. in the end, however, it's always safest toassume that a natural explanation will eventually be found and aliens are a very broad explanationand always the least likely. if you have to bet, bet on nature. but out of all the weird potential alien-relatedmaterial that i cover on this channel, this

is the weirdest i have yet seen. thanks for listening! i am futurist and science fiction author johnmichael godier currently inching closer to opening my second channel which will focuson science fiction and sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailerand subscribe to my channel for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird andunknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.