Meet Undead Stars Part 3 - Vampire, Zombie & Monster Stars - Nirks Halloween Astronomy / Space Song

Visit us: https://www.thenirks.com/shop WARNING: This video has strobing, flashing & swirling light effects that may affect photosensitive viewers. Let's meet more undead stars! Enjoy some Spooky Space with Vincent the Nirks & some of the creepiest and coolest undead stars in the universe! Please help us continue: https://www.thenirks.com/donate ©September 2026 Goes to Eleven Media. All Rights Reserved. Lyrics: I’m A Black Widow Pulsar, destroying my companion My name is PSR J0952-0607 With every single rotation, I’m destroying my mate Heating its surface with my radio and gamma-ray beams making it slowly evaporate Consuming and absorbing my companion’s mass is making me grow stronger While reducing it to the size of a gas giant planet, I’ve grown into one of the heaviest neutron stars ever A Millisecond pulsar, 707 rotations per second, one of the fastest spinning pulsars in the Milky Way Soon my companion will be no more, I’m a predator finishing its prey V404 Cygni, the first known black hole triple star system A vampire-like black hole, I feed on my inner star companion but my outer star stays at a safe distance My star probably imploded in place with little drama which is why our system is still intact But something’s a little off, because my jets don’t shoot straight and my disk is out of whack I have ejection jets shooting out of me like many black holes do But mine don’t shoot out straight or behave the way they are supposed to Probably because the disk of material around me is misaligned Causing the inner part of the disk to wobble like a spinning top slowing over time CHORUS I’m HM Cancri an X-Ray binary system of 2 white dwarf stars 2 dead, burnt out stellar cores orbiting each other about 50,000 miles apart We’re moving extremely fast, more than a million miles per hour One of the shortest orbital periods of a stellar pair, Every 5.4 minutes we complete one orbit around each other Because we’re so close, mass transfers from one of us to the hotter denser star This matter stream violently slams into the receiving star generating x-rays where we are The whirlwind around us is one of the strongest sources of gravitational waves in the galaxy We’re resisting our inward spiral because we don’t want to collide, we’d like to survive another day CHIME J1634+44 that’s me I’m a cosmic unicorn, an undead star that defies physics, a mystery I’m a special type of object called a Long Period Radio Transient or LPT A strange object that sends out repeating radio bursts lasting minutes or longer, not rapidly As weird as LPT’s are, I’m even weirder for many reasons, you see I’m speeding up and100% circularly polarized meaning my radio signals travel in a perfect spiral away from me I emit 2 distinct signals, one every 14 minutes and one every 70– exactly 5 times longer How can this be explained? Are there actually two stars here? CHORUS I’m a powerful and unique zombie star known as SGR 0418 (+5729) Called a Magnetar, a neutron star dead core with powerful magnetic fields, sporadic x-ray bursts and low spin rate But I’m not your typical magnetar, no, I’m a different kind of beast I have a hidden power not on my surface but beneath Most magnetars have extremely strong magnetic fields on their surface but my surface field is really low I caught astronomer’s attention with an extreme X-ray burst from below Erupting through cracks in my surface, my secret was revealed Hiding within me is a super-powerful, twisted and warped magnetic field AHHHH! I’m catapulting toward the edge of the Milky Way at almost 2 million miles per hour The result of a massive stellar explosion, a supernova that packed a lot of power LP 40-365, I’m the shrapnel that’s left, a broken piece from a dead white dwarf star A metal-rich hyper-runaway remnant, with my own 9-hour rotation, running fast and far CHORUS I’m Vela X-1, and I’m a little bit glitchy I rotate every 89 milliseconds, which is really fast, but I get twitchy Sometimes I’ll suddenly speed up just for a little bit And then calm back down to my regular rotation rate when the glitching quits A radio, optical, X-ray- and gamma-emitting pulsar I’m the core left behind with the supernova remnant from my star’s supernova I glitch every 3 years or so, but it’s not periodic or predicable If it was, I wouldn’t be glitching, I’d be stable I’m known as Space Jaws, a rogue, roaming supermassive black hole 600 million light years away, I’m an ancient black hole that probably formed billions of years ago Your scientists discovered me because I devoured a wayward star Which released an epic burst of light revealing my existence and something else bizarre I consumed the star in a process known as "spaghettification" to you The vertical stretching and horizontal squeezing of an object into a long spaghetti-like shaped tube Although I’m a supermassive black hole, I’m not the center of my galaxy, noI sneak through the darkness awaiting my next meal, I prefer to dine alone