Curiosity Daily

Emily Oster on Parenting Decisions, A New Type of Supernova

Episode Summary

Learn how parents can get smarter about making big decisions, with author Emily Oster; and electron-capture supernovas.  Additional resources from Emily Oster: Pick up "The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early Years" at your local bookstore: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781984881755?aff=penguinrandom  Website: https://emilyoster.net/  Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProfEmilyOster  Observation of a new type of supernova sheds light on a famous supernova from 1054 AD by Briana Brownell Scientists spotted an electron-capture supernova for the first time. (2021, July). Science News. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/supernova-electron-capture-space-astronomy-physics  ‌A star in a distant galaxy blew up in a powerful explosion, solving an astronomical mystery. (2021). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-07/tu-asi071421.php  ‌Hiramatsu, D., Howell, D. A., Van Dyk, S. D., Goldberg, J. A., Maeda, K., Moriya, T. J., Tominaga, N., Nomoto, K., Hosseinzadeh, G., Arcavi, I., McCully, C., Burke, J., Bostroem, K. A., Valenti, S., Dong, Y., Brown, P. J., Andrews, J. E., Bilinski, C., Williams, G. G., & Smith, P. S. (2021). The electron-capture origin of supernova 2018zd. Nature Astronomy. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01384-2  Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.

Episode Notes

Learn how parents can get smarter about making big decisions, with author Emily Oster; and electron-capture supernovas.

Additional resources from Emily Oster:

Observation of a new type of supernova sheds light on a famous supernova from 1054 AD by Briana Brownell

Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.

 

Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/emily-oster-on-parenting-decisions-a-new-type-of-supernova

Episode Transcription

CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.

ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn how parents can get smarter about making big decisions, with best-selling author Emily Oster; and why scientists think a supernova we saw nearly a thousand years ago may be a completely new type of supernova.

CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.

Emily Oster "Family Firm" (Cody)

Parenting comes with some tough decisions. For some of those decisions, you can use data to make the best choice — but others aren't so easy. That's what inspired today's guest to write her latest book. Emily Oster is an economics professor at Brown University and the author of several books on parenting including her latest: "The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early Years." It's full of data-backed answers to questions ranging from "how much screen time is too much?" to "how do you pick the best school?" For today's conversation, I asked her if there was one thing parents should do first to help them start making better decisions.

[CLIP 5:54]

So if you want to find the best school for your kid, pay attention to class size and don't sweat test scores too much. Again, that was Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University and the author of several books on parenting including her latest: "The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early Years." Emily will be back tomorrow to run down the research on learning to read.

Observation of a new type of supernova sheds light on a famous supernova from 1054 AD by Briana Brownell (Ashley)

About a thousand years ago, in July of 1054 AD, Islamic, Chinese, and Japanese cultures recorded a strange astronomical event. Suddenly, an extremely bright light appeared in the sky. This light was about four times brighter than Venus. And like Venus, it was so bright it could be seen in the daytime. And like the moon, it could even cast a shadow at night.

Scientists have long believed that this was a supernova, the final explosive stage of a star’s life. 

But just recently, an international team of scientists have found evidence that it’s even cooler than that. It may have been an entirely new kind of supernova: an electron capture supernova.

Scientists have always known there was something strange about the supernova in 1054. It left behind the Crab Nebula, a celestial object that has been studied for hundreds of years. It’s a weird one, too. The elements in it are different from what scientists would expect from either of the two main kinds of supernovas: thermonuclear supernovas and core-collapse supernovas.

A thermonuclear supernova starts as a binary star system, where a low-mass white dwarf star co-orbits a younger star. After the older star has used up all of its nuclear fuel, material from the second star gets sucked into the first star and its mass increases, eventually causing it to explode.

A core-collapse supernova happens when the star is much more massive.  At the end of its life, the star burns out all its fuel and cools down. Then, gravity takes over and the core collapses. This creates a shock wave that makes the outer part of the star explode, which leaves behind a superdense core.

Electron-capture supernovas are a Goldilocks case between the death of low-mass stars and really massive stars. Scientists have struggled to find one out there in the universe, even though they’ve been theorized for 40 years. But now, researchers think they may have found one.

Electron-capture supernovas start off with stars about 8 to 10 times the mass of our sun — just slightly too small to create a core-collapse supernova. After the star uses up all of its fuel and begins to collapse, heavier elements like neon and magnesium capture electrons, which combine with protons to produce neutrons. As more and more electrons are captured, the star becomes more compacted, and pressure increases. Eventually, the star’s core collapses completely, causing an explosion.  

The research team compared observations of a 2018 supernova to theoretical predictions and found a match. They confirmed that it was, in fact, an electron-capture supernova. Then, the team compared the unique signature to known historical supernovas, like the one in 1054, and saw some striking similarities. 

Scientists are now even more confident that the light that appeared in the sky 1,000 years ago was an electron-capture supernova. It just took us this long to see our first one.

RECAP

Let’s do a quick recap of what we learned today

  1. CODY: Emily Oster says that before you make big decisions as a parent, first decide what you want your life to look like, and what your priorities are. Doing that will help you avoid making decisions down the road that get in the way of living that life you want to live. And plan on doing a lot of thinking about your big decisions, but don’t let them consume every minute of your day.
  2. ASHLEY: Then, for each decision, follow the four Fs. The first F is “frame the question,” as in, think about your concrete alternatives; second F is “fact find,” so get whatever data you can about each decision; third F is “final decision” meaning actually make the decision and try to stick with it; and the fourth F is FOLLOW UP, which we often forget to do. Schedule a date and time in the future for a follow-up so it feels like if you change your mind, you’re still the one in control, and you’re the one making the decision to do that.
  3. CODY: For decades, scientists have theorized that there’s a third option between the two types of supernovas we know about: the thermonuclear supernovas that happen to low-mass binary star systems, and the core-collapse supernovas that happen to really massive stars. An electron-capture supernova would happen to a star that isn’t quite big enough for a core-collapse supernova, and that supernova gets its name from all the electrons that are captured by heavier elements as the star collapses. A team has finally discovered that a supernova studied in 2018 has all the hallmarks of this third type of supernova — and even cooler, so does the supernova that created the Crab Nebula way back in 1054.
    1. That’s not the only ancient supernova humans have witnessed. The first one was observed by Chinese astronomers in 185 AD. The most recent was in 1604, known as Kepler’s Supernova.

[ad lib optional] 

ASHLEY: The writer for today’s first story was Briana Brownell. 

CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer, who was also an audio editor on today’s episode.

ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.

CODY: [AD LIB SOMETHING FUNNY] Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.

ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!