Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / What's the fastest spinning thing in the Universe?

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What's the fastest spinning thing in the Universe? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:08
Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, do you know what's weird about the universe?
0:12
Speaker 1: Everything all right, that's true, but I mean when I
0:14
Speaker 1: look at the planet, it kind of makes my head
0:16
Speaker 1: spin a little. Oh yeah, what makes your head spin?
0:19
Speaker 1: Because all the planets are spinning, you know, none of
0:22
Speaker 1: them are just sitting there. True, And they're also spinning
0:25
Speaker 1: around the Sun, right, which is also spinning around the galaxy.
0:29
Speaker 1: And our galaxy is spinning around other galaxies. It's like
0:33
Speaker 1: the whole universe is spinning around. Oh my gosh, now
0:36
Speaker 1: my head is also spinning. I am r Hammad, cartoonists
0:55
Speaker 1: and the creator of PhD Comics. I'm Daniel. I'm a
0:58
Speaker 1: particle physicist, but I don't have spin. Welcome to our podcast,
1:01
Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I
1:04
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, a no Spin zone about the true facts
1:08
Speaker 1: of the universe. Everything that's crazy, everything that's amazing, everything
1:12
Speaker 1: that's fascinating, everything that makes you wonder. We dig deep
1:16
Speaker 1: into it and explore it and try to explain all
1:18
Speaker 1: of it to you. I like how you put a
1:20
Speaker 1: positive spin on the fact that we put no spin
1:23
Speaker 1: on science. It's just a facts around here. When we
1:26
Speaker 1: know something, we say we know it. When we don't
1:28
Speaker 1: know something, we are happy to say we are clueless. Well,
1:32
Speaker 1: do you think maybe the universe does need a little
1:34
Speaker 1: bit of spinning, you know, just if people feel a
1:37
Speaker 1: little bit more positive about it. It is pretty dark
1:39
Speaker 1: and dangerous out there. It is dark and dangerous. But
1:42
Speaker 1: I prefer to take a direct approach because then those
1:45
Speaker 1: moments when you do learn something amazing and true and
1:48
Speaker 1: incredible about the universe and really just sort of fills
1:51
Speaker 1: your heart with light to know something about the universe,
1:54
Speaker 1: that's that's a good way to spin it. But anyways,
1:57
Speaker 1: we like to talk about all the amazing things have
2:00
Speaker 1: pening out there in the cosmos, all of the crazy
2:02
Speaker 1: and all of the mind blowing objects that are out there.
2:07
Speaker 1: And we have a series of podcasts where we talk
2:08
Speaker 1: about the most extreme things in the universe. The best
2:12
Speaker 1: snowboarder in the universe? What how the snowboarding fitting? It's
2:18
Speaker 1: an extreme sport, man. No, we'd like to talk about
2:21
Speaker 1: all the extremes in the universe because they tell us something.
2:25
Speaker 1: We are interested in the limits. Why do stars only
2:28
Speaker 1: get up to a certain size? How hot can something get?
2:32
Speaker 1: What prevents something from getting bigger or hotter or faster,
2:36
Speaker 1: or spinning even more rapidly. There are lessons there about
2:39
Speaker 1: the limits of physics and about what is allowed in
2:42
Speaker 1: the universe and what is not allowed in the universe,
2:44
Speaker 1: because in the end, that's our goal to figure out
2:47
Speaker 1: what are the rules of this crazy, beautiful, bonkers universe,
2:51
Speaker 1: and the extremes help point the way. So we have
2:54
Speaker 1: episodes in the archive about the biggest thing in the universe,
2:57
Speaker 1: the hottest thing in the universe. I think we've also
2:59
Speaker 1: done the coldest thing in the universe, right, we have,
3:02
Speaker 1: we did the emptiest places in the universe, and we
3:05
Speaker 1: haven't done one about the fastest thing in the universe
3:07
Speaker 1: because that one's a little bit tricky because basically, the
3:10
Speaker 1: fastest thing in the universe is a photon. Is just
3:13
Speaker 1: the speed of light, right, Oh, that was a short
3:16
Speaker 1: podcast that was the mini warm up podcast to the
3:20
Speaker 1: real podcast today. But also because you know, the speed
3:24
Speaker 1: of something depends on the speed that you're measuring from,
3:27
Speaker 1: so you can make anything fast by just getting in
3:29
Speaker 1: a spaceship and zooming around. So the fastest thing in
3:33
Speaker 1: the universe not that easy to pin down, other than
3:35
Speaker 1: of course a photon. I guess My question is is
3:38
Speaker 1: a photon a thing? First of all? And those some
3:41
Speaker 1: other things move with the speed of light too. You
3:44
Speaker 1: know what what happens if you race them? Yes, Actually,
3:46
Speaker 1: gravitational waves move at the speed of light, and everything
3:50
Speaker 1: that is massless moves at the speed of light. So
3:52
Speaker 1: that includes gluons, for example, and photons. So if you
3:56
Speaker 1: had a race between photons and gluons, it would be
3:58
Speaker 1: an exact tie. All right, Well, so we can't fill
4:02
Speaker 1: a whole hour on the fastest thing, but we can
4:05
Speaker 1: talk about another fastest thing that happens in the universe.
4:09
Speaker 1: So to the other podcast, we'll be talking about what
4:17
Speaker 1: is the fastest spinning thing in the universe. I'm guessing
4:21
Speaker 1: most people saw this coming, probably because they read the
4:23
Speaker 1: title of the episode before they play. But yeah, we're
4:28
Speaker 1: we're spinning up an interesting story here today, and also
4:30
Speaker 1: because we made a hundred spin jokes before we told
4:33
Speaker 1: them the topic of the episode. But this, to me
4:36
Speaker 1: is a really fascinating question. The whole notion that things
4:39
Speaker 1: in the universe are spinning, and this is spinning this way,
4:42
Speaker 1: and that's spending that way, and why are things spinning anyway?
4:45
Speaker 1: And the whole question of angler momentum to me really
4:48
Speaker 1: fun and fundamental, and you learned something really interesting about
4:51
Speaker 1: sort of the way the universe works and the way
4:53
Speaker 1: space works from studying how things spin right, spinning it is,
4:57
Speaker 1: by itself kind of a weird thing, isn't it. It's like,
5:00
Speaker 1: if I'm spinning, am I really turning? Or are just
5:02
Speaker 1: my particles going around in a circle? Whoa, It's like
5:05
Speaker 1: a whole other teleportation question. Yeah, like are my particles
5:10
Speaker 1: actually like turning around or are they just moving around?
5:14
Speaker 1: I see, Yeah, this is an interesting question. I mean,
5:16
Speaker 1: you can imagine all of them moving in a circle
5:19
Speaker 1: but pointing in the same direction, like their internal acts
5:22
Speaker 1: not changing, or you can imagine them like a car
5:25
Speaker 1: moving around on a track, where they actually do change direction.
5:28
Speaker 1: If you stand in a circle and turn, then you
5:31
Speaker 1: know your molecules are held together by pretty tight bonds
5:34
Speaker 1: and so they're gonna be pulled to turn with you.
5:37
Speaker 1: So I think if you stand in turn, then you're
5:39
Speaker 1: more like a car going around the track. All of
5:41
Speaker 1: your molecules and particles are definitely turning with you. They're
5:44
Speaker 1: not like little gyroscopes, right, but their point particles can
5:47
Speaker 1: they have a direction they do have spin, right, These
5:51
Speaker 1: particles do have spin absolutely all right, Well, this is
5:54
Speaker 1: a fascinating question. What is the fastest spinning thing in
5:57
Speaker 1: the unerse And I'm guessing Daniel will be measuring that
6:00
Speaker 1: by revolutions per second or like or how dizzy they get? Yeah,
6:05
Speaker 1: I think revolutions per second is probably the best metric.
6:08
Speaker 1: But then it's also fun to calculate like the speed
6:11
Speaker 1: at the surface. You know, how fast how close to
6:14
Speaker 1: the speed of light is the surface of a neutron
6:16
Speaker 1: star moving, and this kind of stuff. Well, as usually,
6:19
Speaker 1: what we were wondering how many people out there had
6:21
Speaker 1: an opinion or a favorite as to what is the
6:24
Speaker 1: fastest spinning thing in the universe. So Daniel went out
6:27
Speaker 1: there and ask people on the internet this question. So
6:30
Speaker 1: thank you to everybody who participated. As usual, if you
6:34
Speaker 1: would like to take your turn and answer questions without
6:37
Speaker 1: Googling about a tough physics topic that we are going
6:39
Speaker 1: to unpack, please volunteer two questions at Daniel and Jorge
6:43
Speaker 1: dot com and the use of different search engine Daniel,
6:47
Speaker 1: or is googling now a universal verb? I'm working on
6:50
Speaker 1: a physics version of Google. Yeah, that just gives you
6:51
Speaker 1: the physics answer to everything. Time it says no, or
6:57
Speaker 1: we have no idea. By the way, by this book
7:00
Speaker 1: that these two podcasters wrote, that's all it does. It
7:03
Speaker 1: just links you to our book. There you go, perfect,
7:07
Speaker 1: let's make it happen. All right, Well, think about it
7:09
Speaker 1: for a second. As if you listening, if someone ask
7:12
Speaker 1: you what you thought is the fastest spinning thing in
7:14
Speaker 1: the universe, what would you say? Here's what people had
7:17
Speaker 1: to say. So I'm guessing that by spinning, it makes
7:21
Speaker 1: like actually spinning, not like a quantum spin. So I'm
7:25
Speaker 1: guessing it's probably some type of special star or maybe
7:30
Speaker 1: like a black hole, a neutron star, and I think
7:36
Speaker 1: that's the same thing as like a pulsar pulsar I think,
7:39
Speaker 1: or possibly even like a magneto, which I think maybe
7:41
Speaker 1: spins at a faster rate, or maybe just has a
7:43
Speaker 1: much larger magnetic field. I'm not sure unless we are
7:46
Speaker 1: including a particle's spin like it's spin up and spin
7:49
Speaker 1: down properties as a definition of a fast spin. But
7:53
Speaker 1: I don't think that's quite the angular momentum that we're
7:55
Speaker 1: familiar with. Probably a Tasmanian devil. No, it's probably a
8:00
Speaker 1: spinning neutron star or maybe a black hole that spins. Well,
8:05
Speaker 1: there's a pulsar, and above pulsar it's a magnetor so.
8:13
Speaker 1: Electrons spins pretty fast. I think X ray or gamma
8:17
Speaker 1: ray particles in real activistic teams shot from quasars. All right,
8:22
Speaker 1: I like the person who said the Tasmanian devil. I've
8:25
Speaker 1: obviously we've been watching physics cartoons. There's a lot of
8:29
Speaker 1: physics consulting going on in looney tunes. Let me tell
8:31
Speaker 1: you the whole time delay of the gravitational effect in
8:36
Speaker 1: the road Runner cartoons. Yeah, not sure, but I think
8:38
Speaker 1: the research center is called ACNE. Yeah, exactly. They are
8:42
Speaker 1: very generous with their funding, apparently. And now there's a
8:45
Speaker 1: lot of great answers in here, a lot of cool ideas,
8:47
Speaker 1: a lot of informed answers, but none of them are
8:50
Speaker 1: actually right. Wow, nobody could to grind and they went
8:53
Speaker 1: for the whole shi bank here. They went with pulsars
8:56
Speaker 1: and neutron stars. There pretty extreme things. Yeah, all the
8:59
Speaker 1: way down to a electrons and everything. Oh, nobody got
9:01
Speaker 1: it right. Nobody got it right. Zero points for all
9:04
Speaker 1: of you folks, But thank you for trying. Boy, this
9:07
Speaker 1: is a pretty negative website here. It doesn't give you
9:10
Speaker 1: any points. We will send you all an ACME company
9:13
Speaker 1: gift package. All right, well maybe three. A lot of
9:16
Speaker 1: people talked about particle spin, and so because it's so small,
9:21
Speaker 1: I think I would imagine that maybe it is the
9:23
Speaker 1: fastest spinning thing in the universe, right, I mean, it's
9:25
Speaker 1: it's almost like an abstract quantity. So could you say
9:29
Speaker 1: it's the fastest spinning thing in the universe. Yeah, it's
9:31
Speaker 1: really weird, actually, right. We talk about particles as having spin,
9:35
Speaker 1: and we know that there's spin is something closely related
9:39
Speaker 1: to angular momentum. Like if something is actually physically spinning,
9:43
Speaker 1: like it's moving around the nucleus of an atom, you
9:46
Speaker 1: can take that motion and you can convert it into
9:49
Speaker 1: particle spin. So it's like a real kind of anglar momentum.
9:52
Speaker 1: But we don't think it's an actual physical spin of
9:56
Speaker 1: an object, because an electron, as we think about, is
9:59
Speaker 1: a really time the particle maybe even just a point,
10:03
Speaker 1: and it doesn't actually make sense to think about that
10:05
Speaker 1: object as spinning. Like if you try to do the calculation,
10:08
Speaker 1: you say, well, how much energy is in the spin
10:11
Speaker 1: and what's the mass of the electron, And what can
10:13
Speaker 1: I assume about the radius to the electron if you
10:16
Speaker 1: put in what we know to be like the upper
10:18
Speaker 1: limit of the radius to the electron, like our measurement
10:21
Speaker 1: for the biggest an electron could be though you know
10:23
Speaker 1: it could be zero. And you crank all the numbers
10:26
Speaker 1: and you ask like how fast is the surface of
10:29
Speaker 1: the electron moving? You get a crazy number, it's like
10:32
Speaker 1: a hundred times the speed of light. Wow, what but
10:36
Speaker 1: that would be impossible. That would be impossible, which tells
10:38
Speaker 1: you something about your calculation is wrong. Like taking the
10:42
Speaker 1: energy of an electron spin and thinking about it as
10:45
Speaker 1: actual physical spin doesn't make sense. We don't think that
10:48
Speaker 1: this is a tiny little object that's actually spinning. It's
10:52
Speaker 1: a quantum spin. It's something weird, something different from actual
10:57
Speaker 1: physical spin. But it is related, like it's can you
11:00
Speaker 1: can't just say put it in that quantum box and
11:02
Speaker 1: say we don't understand it. Whatever, put a quantum in
11:05
Speaker 1: front of it. It's something connected to actual spin. You
11:08
Speaker 1: can take again real angular momentum and convert it into
11:11
Speaker 1: quantum spin and back again. So they're definitely connected, but
11:15
Speaker 1: we can't really say it's actual spin. Well, I do
11:18
Speaker 1: that all the time, tied Daniel with thinks I don't
11:19
Speaker 1: want to understand. I just put quantum in it, and
11:22
Speaker 1: I stick it in the box, you know, like my
11:24
Speaker 1: taxes or m Yeah. Yea deadline deadline, quantum deadlines plus
11:30
Speaker 1: our minus you know a year. Yeah, I got this
11:34
Speaker 1: in within the uncertainty right there, you go. I did,
11:37
Speaker 1: and I didn't turn it in. How about that? That's right,
11:41
Speaker 1: your contract is dead and alive at the same time.
11:44
Speaker 1: But I still get paid right in quantum dollars. But
11:47
Speaker 1: it is really fascinating, Like it's definitely something you can
11:50
Speaker 1: think about as a spin. These particles have a spin.
11:53
Speaker 1: It's definitely a quantity we connect with spinning things. But
11:57
Speaker 1: if we want to talk about what's the fastest spinning
11:59
Speaker 1: thing in the universe, I don't think it's really fair
12:01
Speaker 1: to say that a particle is something that is in
12:04
Speaker 1: the running for it because it's not physically spinning. But
12:08
Speaker 1: can you give it a value like a certain revolutions
12:11
Speaker 1: per second on an electron? Right, because you have the
12:13
Speaker 1: angular momentum and you know the mass of the electron,
12:16
Speaker 1: can you just divide that to get some kind of
12:18
Speaker 1: spinning velocity? Yeah? You can do that because you know,
12:20
Speaker 1: the angular kinetic energy is proportional to the moment of
12:25
Speaker 1: inertia and the number of revolutions per second. But the
12:28
Speaker 1: moment of inertia depends on the radius of the object, right,
12:32
Speaker 1: how much angular momentum there is depends on the distribution
12:34
Speaker 1: of stuff. This moment of inertia is like rotational mass,
12:38
Speaker 1: so it doesn't just depend on the mass and the object.
12:40
Speaker 1: That depends on where the mass of the object is,
12:42
Speaker 1: like is it all on the surface or all at
12:44
Speaker 1: the core? Sort of like how a figure skater, you know,
12:47
Speaker 1: when she moves her arms in closer, she spins faster
12:51
Speaker 1: and faster, even though she has the same mass. So
12:54
Speaker 1: the revolutions depend not just on the mass and on
12:56
Speaker 1: the energy, but also on like how that's distributed. And
12:59
Speaker 1: we just don't owe anything about how electron looks like inside.
13:03
Speaker 1: Is it really a point particle? Is it made of
13:05
Speaker 1: tiny vibrating strings? We just don't know, alright, So I
13:08
Speaker 1: guess the thing is that it just doesn't make sense
13:10
Speaker 1: to think of an electron as spinning, even though it
13:13
Speaker 1: has quantum spin, it's not actually like turning around. Yeah,
13:16
Speaker 1: So I think the physics referee, and this one is
13:18
Speaker 1: going to rule it out of bounds. For this competition.
13:21
Speaker 1: It's probably spinning in some crazy awesome way we just
13:24
Speaker 1: don't understand yet. It might take the cake and be
13:27
Speaker 1: the fastest spinning thing in the universe, but for the
13:29
Speaker 1: purposes of today's competition, it's been de cute. All right. Well,
13:33
Speaker 1: that's a bummer for particles there for Team Electron. I
13:38
Speaker 1: was trying to put a positive spin on it, Daniel,
13:39
Speaker 1: but um, you totally shut that down. I mean for particles,
13:43
Speaker 1: I know, and usually I'm pro particles, right, Like, that's
13:45
Speaker 1: sort of my job. I'm made of particles. I study particles.
13:48
Speaker 1: But in this case, I don't really think they qualified.
13:51
Speaker 1: Physicist are fickle alright, Well, um, let's talk about real things, like,
13:56
Speaker 1: you know, how fast is the Earth spinning? For example?
13:58
Speaker 1: I mean we I know that it's been once a day,
14:01
Speaker 1: but is that fast relative to other things in the universe.
14:04
Speaker 1: It's actually pretty fast, Like for our solar system, it's
14:07
Speaker 1: one of the faster spinning things. You know, Like the Sun,
14:10
Speaker 1: for example, rotates every twenty seven days. The Sun rotates.
14:14
Speaker 1: The Sun rotates, oh absolutely every month, yea once a month.
14:17
Speaker 1: The Sun completes a revolution, and you know the rest
14:20
Speaker 1: of the Solar system is basically just an extension of
14:22
Speaker 1: the Sun. Most of the stuff in the Solar system
14:25
Speaker 1: is the Sun, and everything is spinning. The whole thing
14:28
Speaker 1: is spinning, and most of its spinning in the same direction. Right.
14:31
Speaker 1: The planets move around the Sun the same direction the
14:34
Speaker 1: Sun spins because it all comes from the same original
14:37
Speaker 1: angle momentum of the huge blob of gas and dust
14:40
Speaker 1: that form the Solar system. So, yeah, the Sun is
14:43
Speaker 1: definitely rotating, but not that fast. Well, I guess it's
14:46
Speaker 1: weird to think of it like an explosion rotating, right,
14:48
Speaker 1: because that's what the Sun is. It's like a constant explosion,
14:51
Speaker 1: and so it's kind of weird to think of it
14:53
Speaker 1: as or like fire. You know, it's it's hard to
14:55
Speaker 1: think of fire spinning. Yeah, it is pretty cool. And
14:58
Speaker 1: you know, inside the Sun there's also all sorts of
15:01
Speaker 1: really complex conductions and currents and like streams of plasma
15:05
Speaker 1: that move around, and you know, the Sun's magnetic field
15:08
Speaker 1: flips every eleven years or so, probably because these streams
15:11
Speaker 1: of plasma are like swapping directions. And there's a whole
15:15
Speaker 1: podcast episode about that where we're doing the future about
15:17
Speaker 1: what's going on inside the Sun. But yeah, it's a
15:20
Speaker 1: really big, complex, spinning beast. So so what does that
15:24
Speaker 1: mean about the surface of the Sun. How fast is
15:26
Speaker 1: in moving? So the speed of the surface of the
15:28
Speaker 1: Sun is pretty fast, because the radius of the Sun
15:30
Speaker 1: is really large, right, So if something is rotating once
15:33
Speaker 1: every day or so, then the speed of the surface
15:36
Speaker 1: depends on how far you are from the center. And
15:39
Speaker 1: so the Sun is huge, and that means that it's
15:42
Speaker 1: moving at like sixty six thousand kilometers per day per day. Wow,
15:48
Speaker 1: that's close to what the Earth is moving, isn't it. Yeah,
15:50
Speaker 1: service of the Earth moves obviously, the circumference of the
15:53
Speaker 1: Earth twenty four miles per day. All right, so those
15:57
Speaker 1: are pretty fast. And what else in our solar system
16:00
Speaker 1: is spinning pretty fast? Well, surprisingly to me, Jupiter actually
16:03
Speaker 1: spends faster than the Earth. I was thinking the begger
16:06
Speaker 1: the object, maybe the slower it rotates, because the Sun
16:09
Speaker 1: rotates more slowly than the Earth. But Jupiter actually spins
16:12
Speaker 1: faster than the Earth. It does a revolution in ten hours.
16:17
Speaker 1: So wait, the like the core of it, or the
16:19
Speaker 1: whole thing, or just the clouds in the surface we
16:21
Speaker 1: can't really measure very well what's going on inside Jupiter.
16:24
Speaker 1: We think that there's differential rotation, like the internal core
16:27
Speaker 1: might be rotating at different speeds than the outer cloud cells,
16:30
Speaker 1: and this could be what's contributing to all that turbulence.
16:33
Speaker 1: But we can just look at stuff on the surface
16:35
Speaker 1: of Jupiter and watch it rotate. So like that red
16:38
Speaker 1: eye actually goes around once every ten hours, once every
16:42
Speaker 1: ten hours. Yeah, it is kind of like the iosaurin
16:45
Speaker 1: it's looking around keeping an eye on the Solar system.
16:49
Speaker 1: That's right. So if you're gonna sneak around, you've got
16:50
Speaker 1: about ten hours until the eye turns around and looks
16:53
Speaker 1: at you, so you can finish your plans. All right,
16:56
Speaker 1: let's get into other things that are spinning fast in
16:58
Speaker 1: the Solar System and into wider space. But first let's
17:02
Speaker 1: take a quick break, all right, Dannel, we're asking the
17:17
Speaker 1: question what is the fastest spinning thing in the universe,
17:20
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of spinning things in the universe.
17:23
Speaker 1: A lot of things are spinning around. They certainly are,
17:25
Speaker 1: and in our Solar system, Jupiter spins every ten hours,
17:29
Speaker 1: but it's not the champion in our Solar system. We
17:31
Speaker 1: have a lot of little objects out there, like past Pluto,
17:36
Speaker 1: around the size of Pluto, and some of them has
17:38
Speaker 1: been pretty fast. Like well, the king of the Solar
17:41
Speaker 1: System or queen, depending on the gender of this object,
17:44
Speaker 1: is the dwarf planet how maya. It's out in the
17:47
Speaker 1: Kuiper Belt. It's about the size of Pluto, and it
17:50
Speaker 1: spins around every four hours. Whoa, So I guess if
17:53
Speaker 1: you're standing on it, a day would be four hours,
17:57
Speaker 1: like every four hours the sun would set and rise. Yeah, exactly.
18:00
Speaker 1: And we don't know that much about it because it's
18:02
Speaker 1: really far away. It has this like dark red spot
18:05
Speaker 1: on its surface, so you can see it move around.
18:07
Speaker 1: But it's spinning, and you know that must have come
18:10
Speaker 1: from some like crazy collision with some other object to
18:13
Speaker 1: get it spinning so fast. Really, like maybe it was
18:15
Speaker 1: just standing there and then it got knocked or grazed
18:18
Speaker 1: by another thing and that said it to spin. Yeah,
18:21
Speaker 1: or it was spinning in some other way and then
18:23
Speaker 1: it got knocked into and some crazy collision and it
18:26
Speaker 1: came out with more spin. You know, Like a lot
18:28
Speaker 1: of the objects in the Solar System, like Uranus has
18:31
Speaker 1: weird spin and Venus has weird spin, and that can
18:34
Speaker 1: also be the result of collision from something else outside
18:37
Speaker 1: the Solar System. Wow, alright, so it's a super short day.
18:41
Speaker 1: But you know what about out further in space? What
18:44
Speaker 1: else do we know is spinning out there pretty fast?
18:47
Speaker 1: So the listeners were on the right track when they
18:49
Speaker 1: were thinking about pulsars and neutron stars, because these are
18:53
Speaker 1: objects that do spin pretty fast. And remember, a neutron
18:57
Speaker 1: star is when a star has collapsed, like it's mostly
19:01
Speaker 1: done with its life, and the core of it has
19:02
Speaker 1: collapsed into a very very dense object that's dense enough
19:06
Speaker 1: to like squish all of the protons and electrons together
19:09
Speaker 1: to make neutrons, but not so dense to overcome the
19:14
Speaker 1: pressure of the neutrons and compacted into a black hole.
19:17
Speaker 1: So it's sort of like a black hole that didn't
19:19
Speaker 1: quite make it into a black hole. This is a
19:22
Speaker 1: neutron star. This is a neutron star. And so they're
19:25
Speaker 1: all neutrons. They're very very dense, and because they've been
19:28
Speaker 1: compacted very very small, like it's a huge amount of
19:31
Speaker 1: stuff in a very very small space, they also gained
19:34
Speaker 1: a lot of spin, just like that figure skater you're
19:37
Speaker 1: pulling in all that angular momentum, but now you're radius
19:40
Speaker 1: is much much smaller, so you have to be moving
19:42
Speaker 1: faster to have the same angular momentum. So these things
19:46
Speaker 1: can spin really really fast. How fast are they spinning? Well,
19:49
Speaker 1: there's one variety of them called pulsars, and these guys
19:52
Speaker 1: shoot out a beam of light from their north and
19:54
Speaker 1: south poles, and so we can actually see them spin.
19:57
Speaker 1: That's how they were discovered. That this beam of lights
20:00
Speaker 1: of like washes over the Earth once every rotation, and
20:03
Speaker 1: so you might imagine, Okay, these things they've probably spin
20:06
Speaker 1: once a day, or once every hour or once every minute.
20:09
Speaker 1: But the fastest spinning pulsars spin like six or seven
20:12
Speaker 1: hundred times a second per second per second. Yeah, these
20:17
Speaker 1: are huge objects that are spinning hundreds of times a
20:20
Speaker 1: second right totally blowing away the Sun, Jupiter, the Earth,
20:25
Speaker 1: even our dwarf planet. Like, these things are really spinning.
20:29
Speaker 1: I can't even hit wrap my head around something. I mean,
20:32
Speaker 1: how big is this thing? How can something that large
20:34
Speaker 1: spin that fast? But did it just explode? Well, it's
20:37
Speaker 1: held together really tightly right by gravity. It's about sixteen
20:41
Speaker 1: kilometers in radius. So this one that's like the Queen
20:43
Speaker 1: of pulsars is about eighteen thousand light years from Earth.
20:46
Speaker 1: It's in the constellation Sagittarius. It has a radius of
20:49
Speaker 1: only about sixteen kilometers. Tiny, so these things are not big. Yeah,
20:54
Speaker 1: but it's spinning super duper fast. And if you do
20:57
Speaker 1: the calculation, like the surface of this thing is spinning
21:00
Speaker 1: at a quarter of the speed of light. Wow, that's crazy.
21:03
Speaker 1: How do is it something that massive and large spin
21:06
Speaker 1: that fast when it explode at some point or break apart. Well,
21:10
Speaker 1: there's a lot of things going on here, right. You
21:12
Speaker 1: have gravity pushing it down, and then you have rotational
21:15
Speaker 1: pressure preventing it from collapsing. Right. One of the things
21:18
Speaker 1: that prevents things from collapsing into black holes is rotational pressure.
21:22
Speaker 1: It's hard to get things to get smaller and more
21:25
Speaker 1: compact because they would have to spin even faster. So
21:28
Speaker 1: what we're looking at here is sort of a balance
21:30
Speaker 1: between all the forces at play. You have the pressure
21:32
Speaker 1: from the molecules not wanting to get squeezed down more.
21:35
Speaker 1: You have the rotational pressure, which makes it harder and
21:37
Speaker 1: harder for things to get smaller, But then you have
21:39
Speaker 1: gravity pushing down on it. So you know, that's why
21:43
Speaker 1: the Earth has not fallen into the Sun, right because
21:45
Speaker 1: our angular momentum protects us. That's why the galaxy is
21:49
Speaker 1: not fallen into the black hole at the center of
21:51
Speaker 1: the galaxy because of our angular momentum. And so as
21:54
Speaker 1: you get smaller and small, you have to spin faster
21:56
Speaker 1: and faster. So meaning if you stop these neutron stars
22:01
Speaker 1: or pulsars from spinning, they would collapse into a black hole.
22:04
Speaker 1: They might collapse new black hole. They would definitely get smaller. Yeah,
22:07
Speaker 1: something that's spinning is definitely bigger than something that's not spinning. Right, Well,
22:12
Speaker 1: that sounds pretty crazy, but there's even crazier spinning things.
22:15
Speaker 1: There's another one out there. This is neutron star, which
22:17
Speaker 1: has sort of the crown for the fastest spinning thing
22:20
Speaker 1: that we know about out there in outer space at least.
22:24
Speaker 1: And it's got some crazy name, and it's about thirty
22:26
Speaker 1: thousand light years from Earth and it's spinning at more
22:29
Speaker 1: than a thousand times a second twenty two hers. Wow. Yeah,
22:35
Speaker 1: it has a pretty cool name. It sounds like a
22:37
Speaker 1: science fiction name. E J one eight five that's right,
22:44
Speaker 1: not to be confused with a four. That's a totally lame.
22:47
Speaker 1: Neutron star to eight five is the one that wins
22:51
Speaker 1: the spinning contest. Yeah, it's incredible, and this thing is
22:54
Speaker 1: only ten kilometers wide, right, it's a tiny dot. It's
22:57
Speaker 1: amazing how much stuff is crammed into these tiny little
23:01
Speaker 1: areas and the incredible speeds they move at. And this
23:04
Speaker 1: surface is also spinning. It just about a quarter of
23:07
Speaker 1: the speed of light, but again, because it's smaller, that's
23:10
Speaker 1: a faster rotation speed. And these things are really dense, right,
23:13
Speaker 1: like it's about the mass of the sun. Maybe, yeah, exactly,
23:16
Speaker 1: they're both the mass of the Sun. But it's only
23:18
Speaker 1: ten kilometers wide, so like you know, a tea spoon
23:21
Speaker 1: of this stuff weighs like a billion tons. It's really
23:24
Speaker 1: pretty incredible, and it's not something that we understand very well,
23:28
Speaker 1: like what's going on inside a neutron star? What is
23:31
Speaker 1: the pressure? How do all these things squeeze together? And
23:34
Speaker 1: one of the reasons we don't understand it is because
23:36
Speaker 1: what's at work here is the strong force, like the
23:39
Speaker 1: force that holds protons together and neutrons together and the
23:42
Speaker 1: nucleus together. It's taken over because everything is so squeezed together,
23:46
Speaker 1: and we don't really understand how to do calculations with
23:49
Speaker 1: a strong force really nasty because it's so strong that
23:52
Speaker 1: any small change in your calculation means a big change
23:55
Speaker 1: in what happens. And so it's hard to describe. Like
23:58
Speaker 1: the internals of an entire neutron star, it's kind of
24:02
Speaker 1: hard to imagine, you know, something the size of you know,
24:05
Speaker 1: Los Angeles spinning a thousand times a second. Yeah, and
24:08
Speaker 1: their spin can change. Also, because they're a tiny bit unstable,
24:12
Speaker 1: sometimes when they're spinning, they get this glitch where like
24:15
Speaker 1: this like a quake on the crust of the neutron stars,
24:19
Speaker 1: things shift and then it might like compact a tiny
24:22
Speaker 1: little bit and then speed up, or if it quakes
24:25
Speaker 1: in a different direction, they can glitch and then slow down.
24:28
Speaker 1: It's pretty amazing. Wow, it's almost kind of like a
24:31
Speaker 1: surreal you know, like if you were standing next to it,
24:34
Speaker 1: your mind would just be blown. Yeah, exactly. And these
24:37
Speaker 1: things are hard to see. Also, we can see the
24:40
Speaker 1: ones that are pulsars that emit these beams of light
24:44
Speaker 1: along their magnetic axis, and obviously we see those beams,
24:47
Speaker 1: but if they don't shine in our direction, they're pretty
24:50
Speaker 1: hard to spot. Because these neutron stars are not undergoing fusion.
24:53
Speaker 1: They don't glow like our stars, right, so it's not
24:56
Speaker 1: clear exactly what you would see. I think it's just
24:58
Speaker 1: a big hot, lowing rock basically, So it'd be fascinating
25:02
Speaker 1: to actually see one up close. We've only ever really
25:05
Speaker 1: seen them because of their pulsar radiation. All right, Well, um,
25:08
Speaker 1: I feel like we can have a discussion of wild
25:11
Speaker 1: things in the universe without talking about black holes. Can
25:15
Speaker 1: black hole spin as well? Black holes definitely can spin.
25:18
Speaker 1: And one of the amazing things about black holes, of
25:21
Speaker 1: all the amazing things about black holes is how little
25:24
Speaker 1: you can know about them. Like two black holes that
25:28
Speaker 1: have the same amount of stuff in them, you can't
25:30
Speaker 1: tell them apart, Like there's no information about what went
25:34
Speaker 1: into the black hole that you can extract, and that
25:37
Speaker 1: includes information about like what order the stuff went in,
25:40
Speaker 1: or when it went in, how long ago went in.
25:42
Speaker 1: The only things you can know about a black hole
25:45
Speaker 1: are its mass and its spin and it's electric charge.
25:50
Speaker 1: So if you have two black holes that have like
25:52
Speaker 1: no electric charge and no spin and the same mass,
25:56
Speaker 1: there's nothing you can do to tell them apart. They're
25:58
Speaker 1: like as quip lent as two electrons to us. I mean, right,
26:03
Speaker 1: but if you were inside the black hole, could you
26:06
Speaker 1: tell the difference? That's an awesome question. If you were
26:08
Speaker 1: inside the black hole, then yes, you could tell the
26:11
Speaker 1: difference if things were thrown in after you or before you. Right,
26:16
Speaker 1: But if everything has been thrown in before you, it
26:18
Speaker 1: would be closer to the singularity than you would be,
26:22
Speaker 1: and so you wouldn't be able to probe any of
26:24
Speaker 1: that stuff. But you can tell if a black hole
26:28
Speaker 1: is spinning. So like, if you make a black hole
26:30
Speaker 1: by just dropping a bunch of bananas with no spin
26:32
Speaker 1: and make a black hole, that will look different than
26:35
Speaker 1: a black hole where you've like thrown the bananas in
26:38
Speaker 1: so they have angular momentum relative to the center of
26:41
Speaker 1: the black hole. You throw them sort of like a
26:43
Speaker 1: little bit to the side, so you get the thing spinning.
26:46
Speaker 1: And now I guess a question is what does it
26:47
Speaker 1: mean for a black hole to spin? Does it mean
26:50
Speaker 1: that the stuff inside of it is spinning? Or is
26:52
Speaker 1: it also sort of like a quantum quantity That doesn't
26:55
Speaker 1: really make sense. Man, I wish black holes did make sense.
27:00
Speaker 1: We have to use just the only theory we have,
27:02
Speaker 1: which is general relativity, to describe what we think is
27:05
Speaker 1: happening inside of black holes. We know that theory is limited.
27:08
Speaker 1: We know it breaks down when you get to the singularity,
27:11
Speaker 1: that you cannot describe what happens in infinite curvature. So
27:14
Speaker 1: we know this is wrong, but it's also sort of
27:16
Speaker 1: our best idea for what's happening. So in the universe
27:20
Speaker 1: without quantum effects and only general relativity, then yes, we
27:24
Speaker 1: think that the stuff inside the black hole is actually spinning,
27:27
Speaker 1: like orbiting around the center. Well, we think that there's
27:29
Speaker 1: a singularity at the heart of the black hole, and
27:32
Speaker 1: the singularity is a point, right, and so how can
27:35
Speaker 1: a point spin? Well, we think that a spinning black
27:37
Speaker 1: hole doesn't have a singularity that's a point. We think
27:40
Speaker 1: it's singularity is a ring. What what does that even mean, Daniel.
27:45
Speaker 1: It means that the place where the curvature goes infinite
27:47
Speaker 1: is not just one place in space because a point
27:50
Speaker 1: cannot spin, right, the singularity that's a point cannot have
27:55
Speaker 1: any angular momentum. However a circle can. So you have
27:58
Speaker 1: a singularity which is not a point but a perfect circle. Well,
28:02
Speaker 1: so that means that things are spinning around the ring
28:05
Speaker 1: or towards the ring. The ring is spinning itself is
28:09
Speaker 1: spinning because it has a radius and so it can spin,
28:12
Speaker 1: you see. But it could also mean the stuff between
28:15
Speaker 1: that ring and the surface of the black hole is
28:18
Speaker 1: also spinning, right like. It could be a swirling thing
28:22
Speaker 1: inside of the black hole, or it could just be
28:24
Speaker 1: things falling in right, Yeah, exactly, And it's very likely
28:27
Speaker 1: that if something is approaching the end of the black hole,
28:30
Speaker 1: it will be spinning because it's hard to otherwise. Like,
28:33
Speaker 1: if you're gonna fall into a black hole, you have
28:35
Speaker 1: two options. One is go straight to the heart of
28:38
Speaker 1: the singularity right exactly right on, or any other direction,
28:43
Speaker 1: And any other direction will mean you're falling in with
28:45
Speaker 1: some spin because you're not gonna be going straight at it,
28:49
Speaker 1: and so you're gonna be giving it like a little
28:51
Speaker 1: bit of torque. And so most likely things that fall
28:54
Speaker 1: into the black hole do give it some spin. So
28:56
Speaker 1: we think that most black holes are spinning. And if
28:59
Speaker 1: you look at the stuff around the black hole, the
29:01
Speaker 1: accretion disk, the stuff that has not yet fallen in,
29:04
Speaker 1: that's spinning, right's swirling around, gradually losing its Anglo momentum
29:09
Speaker 1: as it falls into the black hole. All right, So
29:12
Speaker 1: we can know the mass, the charge, and the spin
29:14
Speaker 1: of a black hole. So how do we measure the
29:17
Speaker 1: spin of a black hole? Because it's it's just a giant,
29:21
Speaker 1: you know, black ball. How can you tell if it's
29:23
Speaker 1: spinning or not? And how much? That's a great question
29:26
Speaker 1: because your first thought might be, well, a black hole
29:29
Speaker 1: is just a big gravitational object, and according to Newton,
29:32
Speaker 1: the force of gravity only depends on the mass of
29:35
Speaker 1: the thing, right, not on its spin. So you can't
29:38
Speaker 1: tell gravitationally if something is spinning. And since gravity is
29:41
Speaker 1: the only way to probe the spin of these things,
29:43
Speaker 1: how could you tell at all? Well, Newton wasn't right right.
29:47
Speaker 1: Newton's theory of gravity is not complete, and it fails,
29:51
Speaker 1: especially around black holes. There are more complicated effects here,
29:54
Speaker 1: and there are corrections to Newton's theory in Einstein's theory
29:58
Speaker 1: that do depend on the spin of the black hole.
30:01
Speaker 1: So the gravitational effect of an object depends not just
30:05
Speaker 1: on how much stuff is in it, but also on
30:07
Speaker 1: its energy density. Right, energy density, and one component of
30:12
Speaker 1: its energy density is its spin. So how much it's
30:15
Speaker 1: spinning changes its gravitational effects, right, I see, so kind
30:20
Speaker 1: of because mass is energy and spin is also energy.
30:25
Speaker 1: You can sort of maybe tell the difference between the two. Yeah,
30:28
Speaker 1: And there's one really awesome test case where they have
30:31
Speaker 1: a super big black hole. There's this black hole that's
30:34
Speaker 1: eighteen billion solar masses, so it's like one of the
30:39
Speaker 1: biggest black holes we know about, and it's being orbited
30:43
Speaker 1: by another black hole, a tiny little black hole that
30:46
Speaker 1: only has a hundred and fifty million solar masses right
30:49
Speaker 1: now on its own. This one would also be an
30:51
Speaker 1: awesome black hole, but in comparison to this monster black hole,
30:55
Speaker 1: it's pretty small. So the little one is orbiting the
30:59
Speaker 1: big one, right, and it's affected by the gravity of
31:03
Speaker 1: the big one. But because the big one is spinning,
31:06
Speaker 1: this causes a procession in the orbit of the smaller
31:09
Speaker 1: black hole. So the smaller black holes orbiting the bigger one,
31:13
Speaker 1: but it's orbit itself is spinning. It's like an ellipse,
31:16
Speaker 1: and the ellipse is moving around the bigger black hole,
31:19
Speaker 1: and that tells you something about the spin of the
31:21
Speaker 1: big black hole exactly. The procession of the orbit of
31:25
Speaker 1: the little one comes from the spin of the big
31:28
Speaker 1: black hole. And you can do these calculations. It's not
31:30
Speaker 1: trivial to think about, like Newton's laws, Einstein's calculations are
31:34
Speaker 1: much more complicated. But the spin of the big black
31:37
Speaker 1: hole affects how things move around it and affects the
31:40
Speaker 1: orbit of this little black hole. Interesting, and so that's
31:43
Speaker 1: how they were able to measure in this case that
31:45
Speaker 1: very precisely the spin of the big black hole. I see,
31:48
Speaker 1: so like a black hole that has mass would affect
31:51
Speaker 1: things differently around it than a black hole that has
31:54
Speaker 1: mass and spin exactly. And the way you probe that
31:57
Speaker 1: is by looking at the stuff around the black hole
32:00
Speaker 1: seeing the effect on that stuff. Usually is on the
32:03
Speaker 1: accretion disk. Sometimes it's on other big massive objects like
32:07
Speaker 1: a black hole, And so typically looking at the accretion
32:11
Speaker 1: disc you can tell how fast is this black hole spinning?
32:14
Speaker 1: Does that apply to other things? Of our Sun wasn't spinning,
32:17
Speaker 1: would our orbit be totally different? Yeah, if the Sun
32:20
Speaker 1: wasn't spinning, our orbit would be different. The Sun's gravitational
32:24
Speaker 1: energy is mostly due to its mass though, because it's
32:26
Speaker 1: not spinning that fast. But yeah, we would have settled
32:29
Speaker 1: into a different orbit that I don't think it's by
32:31
Speaker 1: a big number. But that's how you can tell how
32:33
Speaker 1: much a black hole is spinning, yes, exactly, and you
32:35
Speaker 1: could look at the accretion disc. So, for example, a
32:38
Speaker 1: black hole that's spinning in the same direction to see
32:41
Speaker 1: acretion disc, the acreation disc can actually get closer to
32:44
Speaker 1: the black hole than otherwise a black hole that's not spinning.
32:48
Speaker 1: The acreation disc can't get quite as close because remember
32:50
Speaker 1: the acreation disk sort of ends not at the edge
32:53
Speaker 1: of the black hole, but like a little bit further out.
32:57
Speaker 1: All right, that's a pretty impressive black hole to eighteen
33:01
Speaker 1: billion times the mass of our Sun. But surprisingly it's
33:04
Speaker 1: not the fastest spinning black hole. So let's dig into
33:09
Speaker 1: what is the fastest spinning black hole and whether or
33:11
Speaker 1: not that is actually the fastest spinning thing in the universe.
33:14
Speaker 1: But first, let's take a quick break. All right, Daniel,
33:28
Speaker 1: we are spinning black holes here, and my head is
33:30
Speaker 1: spinning a little just to think about a black hole spinning.
33:34
Speaker 1: I mean, how can a weird thing like a black
33:35
Speaker 1: hole spin? But it can, and you can measure it.
33:38
Speaker 1: And we're gonna talk about the fastest spinning black holder
33:41
Speaker 1: is because it's not this big one we just talked about. Yeah,
33:43
Speaker 1: and that big one is not actually even spinning that fast.
33:46
Speaker 1: And the reason is that it's huge. Like the radius
33:50
Speaker 1: of that black hole is like three hundred and sixty
33:53
Speaker 1: times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. It
33:56
Speaker 1: is this enormous. It's much much bigger than our entire
33:58
Speaker 1: solar system. And so even though the surface of that
34:02
Speaker 1: black hole is moving it like of the speed of light,
34:06
Speaker 1: it takes five million seconds to complete a spin. Wow,
34:11
Speaker 1: so the surface is going really fast, but it's actually
34:14
Speaker 1: not spinning that fast. Yeah, because it's so big. The
34:17
Speaker 1: surface is so far away from the center that even
34:20
Speaker 1: moving a of the speed of light, it takes a
34:22
Speaker 1: long time to complete one circumference. All right, So what
34:25
Speaker 1: is the fastest spinning black hole do we know? Or
34:28
Speaker 1: what is this fastest spinning black hole we know about?
34:30
Speaker 1: So there's another black hole that we think is spinning faster.
34:33
Speaker 1: It's another one of these big black holes that has
34:36
Speaker 1: two million solar masses. Remember that there are two categories
34:39
Speaker 1: of black holes. The ones that come from like stars
34:42
Speaker 1: that collapsed, and those tend to have you know, like
34:44
Speaker 1: ten to a hundred solar masses, and then there's just
34:47
Speaker 1: like a leap. There are no black holes in between that,
34:49
Speaker 1: and like the really big monster ones that the centers
34:52
Speaker 1: of galaxies that have millions and millions or even billions
34:56
Speaker 1: of solar masses. So this is one of those. It's
34:58
Speaker 1: two million solar mass is again pretty small compared to
35:02
Speaker 1: the monster we talked about, but a really very massive object.
35:05
Speaker 1: All right, So this one is near us? Is it
35:08
Speaker 1: in another galaxy? So this one is in another galaxy.
35:11
Speaker 1: It's at the center of another galaxy about fifty million
35:13
Speaker 1: light years away in the constellation formats, and it's called
35:16
Speaker 1: n g CT. And we can study the spin of
35:21
Speaker 1: this one by looking in detail at the accretion disc.
35:24
Speaker 1: So this acreation disc is like the stuff that's swirling
35:27
Speaker 1: around the black hole that's waiting to fall in. And
35:30
Speaker 1: can we actually see it or do we just kind
35:32
Speaker 1: of see it as a a star almost We don't
35:34
Speaker 1: have an image of it the way we have imaged
35:36
Speaker 1: another black hole in another galaxy. But what we can
35:38
Speaker 1: do is look at the radiation from it admits in
35:41
Speaker 1: the radio and an X rays, and all this hot
35:44
Speaker 1: gast that's surrounding the black hole sends us information according
35:47
Speaker 1: to how it's emitting radiation. So that's how we measured
35:50
Speaker 1: these things. By looking at the X ray spectrum at
35:53
Speaker 1: the center of those galaxies. Yeah, like I guess you.
35:56
Speaker 1: You see kind of lips and dips. It tells you
35:58
Speaker 1: how fast the black hole is spinning. Yeah, exactly. And
36:01
Speaker 1: you can get the radiation from mostly from the iron
36:03
Speaker 1: that's emitting inside this secretion disk, and it's really hot
36:07
Speaker 1: and it's smashing into itself, and so it has a
36:09
Speaker 1: lot of energy and it tends to emit in the
36:11
Speaker 1: X ray and that information comes all the way to
36:14
Speaker 1: our X ray telescopes and tells us about what's going on.
36:17
Speaker 1: And we can look at sort of like how close
36:19
Speaker 1: to the center of the black hole is this accretion
36:21
Speaker 1: disc getting. And if the black hole is spinning in
36:24
Speaker 1: the same direction as the accretion disc, then the stuff
36:26
Speaker 1: in the acreation disc can actually get closer and closer
36:28
Speaker 1: to the center of the black hole. Remember we talked
36:31
Speaker 1: once about how if a black hole starts spinning, it's
36:34
Speaker 1: event horizon actually shrinks, right, Because if you're converting sort
36:38
Speaker 1: of the energy of the black hole directly from mass
36:40
Speaker 1: and into spin, then the event horizon shrinks. And if
36:43
Speaker 1: you spin it actually fast enough, the event horizon collapses
36:48
Speaker 1: down and you can actually see the singularity on this thing,
36:51
Speaker 1: so we're not talking about that. We don't have any
36:53
Speaker 1: naked singularities that we're looking at. But if a black
36:56
Speaker 1: hole is spinning really really fast, then it's event horizon shrinks,
36:59
Speaker 1: and so they creation disc also gets closer and closer
37:03
Speaker 1: to the center of this thing. So how fast is
37:05
Speaker 1: it spinning? Do we know for sure? This one we
37:07
Speaker 1: think is spinning at eight of the maximum speed that
37:11
Speaker 1: a black hole can spin before it turns into a
37:14
Speaker 1: naked singularity. Wow, I imagine that's a lot. But do
37:17
Speaker 1: we have a number for that? I don't actually have
37:19
Speaker 1: a number for that. It depends a little bit on
37:21
Speaker 1: the mass of the object. But they think that there
37:24
Speaker 1: is this theoretical rate that black hole can't spin faster
37:28
Speaker 1: than this theoretical rate without losing its event horizon and
37:31
Speaker 1: revealing itself as a naked singularity. And this one's moving
37:34
Speaker 1: at eight four percent of that speed. So it's a
37:38
Speaker 1: real spinner. I see. We just have to imagine a
37:41
Speaker 1: ridiculous spinning rate that would strip away the event horizon
37:46
Speaker 1: of a black hole and then imagine that exactly of
37:52
Speaker 1: a big number is a big number. But I guess,
37:55
Speaker 1: you know, I just did not leave us hanging. Is
37:57
Speaker 1: it like millions of revolutions per second? Is it bill
38:00
Speaker 1: revolutions per second? What is there a rough estimate? Now,
38:02
Speaker 1: these things are not spinning that fast, right, It's a
38:05
Speaker 1: lot of energy. But these things are big, and so
38:07
Speaker 1: they're not spinning as fast as pulsars or neutron stars.
38:11
Speaker 1: So you know, the other black hole took five million
38:14
Speaker 1: seconds to spin. I did some calculations for you. You
38:17
Speaker 1: have to know something about the distribution of mass inside
38:20
Speaker 1: the black hole to actually figure it out, and of
38:23
Speaker 1: course we don't know that. But if you make some
38:25
Speaker 1: pretty dubious assumptions, you find if this one takes even
38:29
Speaker 1: longer to spin than the last one, even though the
38:32
Speaker 1: surface of it is actually moving closer to the speed
38:35
Speaker 1: of light. Oh, I see, these things are large, so
38:38
Speaker 1: they have a high speed at their surface. But again
38:41
Speaker 1: they are so big that they can't spin around very
38:44
Speaker 1: many times per second. Well, disappointed here, Daniel. I thought
38:47
Speaker 1: black holes were gonna beat out neutron stars and pulsars,
38:50
Speaker 1: but it sounds like not. No, they're more awesome and
38:53
Speaker 1: weird than neutron stars and pulsars, but they do not
38:56
Speaker 1: spin faster. But there is something else which is faster
39:00
Speaker 1: than both black holes and neutron stars. Yeah, so this
39:03
Speaker 1: is where we get to the winner of the spinning contest.
39:05
Speaker 1: And it's not pulsars, it's not neutron stars, and it's
39:09
Speaker 1: not black holes. It's actually pretty surprising. It's right here
39:12
Speaker 1: at home. It's engineers and how they spin, how they
39:16
Speaker 1: spend their safety protocols. Yeah, you know, it's hard to
39:21
Speaker 1: spend something that's really really big, Right, You're gonna take
39:24
Speaker 1: a planet and spin it really really fast. That's a
39:26
Speaker 1: lot of energy, and if you don't want it to
39:29
Speaker 1: tear itself apart, you have to really compact it to
39:31
Speaker 1: a dense object. So it's not actually that hard to
39:34
Speaker 1: make something that spends more than a thousand times a second. Right,
39:37
Speaker 1: every time you drive your car, if you have a
39:39
Speaker 1: gas car, you probably get it up two thousands of rpm, right,
39:43
Speaker 1: and that's spinning pretty fast, faster than a neutron star
39:47
Speaker 1: or pulsar. Well, you have to do the conversion because
39:49
Speaker 1: a neutron star spending a thousand times per second in
39:52
Speaker 1: your car probably you know, red lines at five or
39:54
Speaker 1: six thousand revolutions per minute, so your car is probably
39:58
Speaker 1: not spinning as fast as a new on star. But
40:01
Speaker 1: you know, there are jet engines out there that's been
40:04
Speaker 1: really really fast and those things spin at like rpm,
40:09
Speaker 1: and so that's approaching the speed of a neutron star. Wow.
40:12
Speaker 1: So I guess if you're in an airplane, then you're
40:14
Speaker 1: next to something spinning as fast as an adron star. Yeah, exactly.
40:18
Speaker 1: Those things are pretty awesome. But there's something of a
40:20
Speaker 1: race going on. There's folks trying to make things spinning
40:24
Speaker 1: as fast as they can. There are these physicists that
40:27
Speaker 1: build these tiny little objects, these nanoparticles, and then try
40:31
Speaker 1: to get them spinning. And there's been something of a
40:34
Speaker 1: race over the last ten twenty years to make nano
40:36
Speaker 1: particles and then spin them as fast as possible. Really,
40:39
Speaker 1: there's a race, yeah, like a contest for real. Or
40:42
Speaker 1: is it just kind of like bragging rights among physicists
40:45
Speaker 1: who can make something small spin as fast as possible.
40:48
Speaker 1: It's definitely bragging rights. There's no like X prize or
40:50
Speaker 1: anything that people are going for. It's like a lower
40:52
Speaker 1: case xpress. But if you read the papers over the
40:56
Speaker 1: last ten or fifteen years, they're all announcing the fastest
40:58
Speaker 1: spinning thing ever and then the number just keeps going
41:01
Speaker 1: up and up and up. So, for example, in two
41:04
Speaker 1: thousand thirteen is a paper announcaying the fastest spinning nanoparticle ever.
41:08
Speaker 1: And they took this tiny little thing they built, and
41:11
Speaker 1: they levitated it with a laser. Right, It's so light
41:14
Speaker 1: that just shining a laser on it will float it up.
41:16
Speaker 1: And then they spin it with another laser, a pulse
41:19
Speaker 1: laser that gives it like a little push every time
41:22
Speaker 1: it goes around. And this thing goes around six hundred
41:25
Speaker 1: million times a minute, what six hundred million times oh
41:31
Speaker 1: a minute? A minute? What ten million times a second?
41:36
Speaker 1: Ten million times a second exactly, So you know, every
41:40
Speaker 1: time you take a breath or whatever, this thing has
41:42
Speaker 1: done ten or twenty million last what are we trying
41:46
Speaker 1: to learn about? Are we trying to learn about the
41:47
Speaker 1: physics of spinning? Why are they doing this other than ragging? Right,
41:51
Speaker 1: that's not enough for you? That seems pretty awesome. I
41:54
Speaker 1: think they're trying to understand, you know, the materials, like
41:56
Speaker 1: how fast can you make this thing spin? How fast
41:59
Speaker 1: can you hold it to other? But I also think
42:01
Speaker 1: that it's just pure questioning. It's just pure like how
42:04
Speaker 1: fast can we do this, is there a maximum number?
42:07
Speaker 1: And so they're just pushing it and pushing it and
42:09
Speaker 1: you know that number ten million times per second. That
42:14
Speaker 1: and now they're up to three hundred billion revolutions per minute,
42:19
Speaker 1: so that would be five billion revolutions per second, which
42:23
Speaker 1: is pretty awesome. Five billion times each second. This thing
42:26
Speaker 1: goes around and it still holds together. It still holds together. Right,
42:30
Speaker 1: it's a it's made of silica, right, which is sort
42:32
Speaker 1: of like related to sand and glass, And it's amazing.
42:36
Speaker 1: But to make these things spin this fast, they have
42:38
Speaker 1: to be really really tiny. Interesting. There are these viral
42:41
Speaker 1: videos on YouTube where they people spin apples like they
42:45
Speaker 1: suspended in a jet of air and they spin it
42:47
Speaker 1: and it actually like explodes at some point because they
42:50
Speaker 1: can't hold together. Yeah, exactly, See physics works, right, That's
42:54
Speaker 1: exactly what happens. Maybe if you had dark matter apple
42:57
Speaker 1: right there, you could hold it together dark apple. Yeah,
43:00
Speaker 1: I just let it rot a little bit and make
43:03
Speaker 1: us messier. Explosion. But I guess, I guess. My question
43:07
Speaker 1: is like, at what point will it fall apart or
43:09
Speaker 1: explode these nanoparticles or never? Maybe because the atomic bond
43:13
Speaker 1: is so strong, we don't know. There are some theories
43:16
Speaker 1: that if you go fast enough, you could reach some
43:19
Speaker 1: quantum effects, like there are these virtual photons, these quantum
43:22
Speaker 1: fluctuations in the vacuum that might affect how this thing spins,
43:27
Speaker 1: and so you might reach some sort of limit. That's
43:29
Speaker 1: like probing quantum physics. But they don't really know it's
43:32
Speaker 1: it's really it's an area where the experiment is sort
43:35
Speaker 1: of pushing past with the theory can calculate like you're
43:37
Speaker 1: just trying to break the rules and see what happens.
43:40
Speaker 1: We're trying to break the rules exactly. Hey, that's what
43:41
Speaker 1: physics is all about, right, pushing the boundaries, understanding the universe,
43:45
Speaker 1: breaking things and taking notes and hopefully not destroy the
43:49
Speaker 1: Earth in the process. This is just take things apart,
43:52
Speaker 1: engineers put them back together. Well, in this case, it's
43:55
Speaker 1: the engineers doing the amazing stuff. I'm trying to spin
43:59
Speaker 1: it for the engineers. Yeah, and so for the record,
44:01
Speaker 1: these were folks that Perdue that have the currently the
44:04
Speaker 1: fastest spinning thing in the universe at five billion times
44:07
Speaker 1: per second. Alright, go boiler makers. All right, well, I
44:11
Speaker 1: guess maybe that we can crown out as the winner.
44:14
Speaker 1: The fastest spinning thing in the universe that we know
44:16
Speaker 1: about is man made in apparently Indiana exactly. Yeah, West
44:21
Speaker 1: Lafayette holds the record for the whole universe as far
44:25
Speaker 1: as we know. All right, they should put that on
44:30
Speaker 1: their brochures for visiting West Lafayette. Yeah, they'll get alien
44:33
Speaker 1: tourists stopping by just to see that. Right. Well, I
44:36
Speaker 1: guess that answers the question that is the fastest spinning
44:38
Speaker 1: thing in the universe that we know about? Right? I mean,
44:41
Speaker 1: we don't know of anything else out there. Could there
44:43
Speaker 1: be smaller particles out there spinning that we don't know about.
44:45
Speaker 1: There certainly could be, And it could be that strings
44:48
Speaker 1: are real that they are spinning. And it could also
44:51
Speaker 1: be that alien physicists have spun things even faster and
44:54
Speaker 1: hit these quantum limits. We just don't know. But as
44:57
Speaker 1: of today, this is the fastest spinning thing that we
45:00
Speaker 1: are aware of. All right. Well, hopefully that made everyone's
45:04
Speaker 1: head spin a little, if not think a little bit
45:07
Speaker 1: about the extremes of the universe and what happens when
45:10
Speaker 1: you push things to their limits. That's when we learned
45:13
Speaker 1: things when we push and push and break things and
45:15
Speaker 1: understand why they break, or why they don't break, or
45:17
Speaker 1: why they do something weird. Those are our opportunities to
45:21
Speaker 1: sort of pull on a thread of mystery and unravel
45:24
Speaker 1: something we didn't understand before, and that, in the end,
45:27
Speaker 1: is what our curiosity is all about. And just give
45:29
Speaker 1: a hammer to physicist and everything will look like yeah, exactly,
45:33
Speaker 1: especially a big ten billion dollar you'd spend faster than
45:39
Speaker 1: a black hole. That's the title of my next funding proposal.
45:43
Speaker 1: All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for
45:45
Speaker 1: joining us, See you next time. Thanks for listening, and
45:55
Speaker 1: remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is a
45:58
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio. Or more podcast from my
46:02
Speaker 1: heart Radio. Visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
46:05
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.