Latest / Stuff You Should Know / How Black Holes Work

Transcript

How Black Holes Work · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to you Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff
0:04
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
0:12
Speaker 1: Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You put the
0:16
Speaker 1: two of us together in front a couple of microphones
0:18
Speaker 1: in an alarmingly red room. You have stuff you should
0:23
Speaker 1: know the podcast. That's right, the podcast, the one and only. Yes,
0:29
Speaker 1: not Catholic Stuff you should know. Is it still around?
0:33
Speaker 1: I don't know, but they need to do penance for that.
0:35
Speaker 1: There's a guy on YouTube too that has a little
0:38
Speaker 1: um video series called stuff you should Know that. Um,
0:44
Speaker 1: that's copyright infringement. I don't know. I think he's been
0:46
Speaker 1: dealt with. Actually is Yeah, that's what happens. And it's
0:51
Speaker 1: not about thick stuff you should know. I mean, it's
0:53
Speaker 1: really I don't know why you called it that. It's weird.
0:57
Speaker 1: What's it about? Just go watch it? Everybody out there
1:01
Speaker 1: watch it, right, We're just gonna boost him to fame. Huh. Um, Chuck,
1:07
Speaker 1: have you ever seen a black hole? Um? No, no
1:11
Speaker 1: you haven't, and you know why because no one has.
1:13
Speaker 1: They're invisible. As a matter of fact, we can't even
1:17
Speaker 1: say that they are real. If you're an empiricist and
1:22
Speaker 1: empiricism if you forgot your philosophy. One oh one is
1:27
Speaker 1: the idea that nothing exists unless you can detect it
1:31
Speaker 1: with your senses one or all of the five senses.
1:35
Speaker 1: Do you know who champion that I'm just asking? Let's
1:38
Speaker 1: say Bacon. Okay. I thought you were gonna say Decart,
1:41
Speaker 1: but I don't think so. No. Deck Cartes was more
1:44
Speaker 1: into himself. He talked a lot about the eye. Yeah. Yeah, Um,
1:49
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say, Sir Francis Bacon, all right, Okay, I'm
1:53
Speaker 1: probably totally wrong, but not love Bacon. Empirically speaking, black
1:57
Speaker 1: holes don't exist because we can't detect them. We can't
2:00
Speaker 1: hear him, although I have heard that they do make
2:02
Speaker 1: a sound. Yeah, and I have. Morgan Freeman said that
2:06
Speaker 1: we can probably hear them before we could see them.
2:09
Speaker 1: The reason we can't see them. So let's just say,
2:11
Speaker 1: if you are um part of hearing or deaf, okay,
2:17
Speaker 1: and you can't taste, yeah, and you can't touch you,
2:23
Speaker 1: you have no sensations. It's just your eyes that you
2:25
Speaker 1: rely on. Black holes will probably never exist to you.
2:29
Speaker 1: Got you? That's my inter that's good, Thank you. This
2:34
Speaker 1: one melted my brain a little, have to admit I
2:36
Speaker 1: was expecting a brain melt. But I thought Fred and Rick,
2:39
Speaker 1: Fred and Rich. We've never figured out how to pronounce
2:41
Speaker 1: his name. Let's go Rich, the only um writer that
2:45
Speaker 1: how stuff works with a PhD. That's what they toss him,
2:48
Speaker 1: ones like how black holes work. He I thought he
2:51
Speaker 1: did a decent job. I think it's a high time
2:53
Speaker 1: we get our honorary PhD. Where would you want yours from?
2:57
Speaker 1: I don't know, some I don't know. Maybe Georgia. Okay,
3:03
Speaker 1: why not I take a doctorate from Georgia that I
3:06
Speaker 1: didn't have to lift a finger for. Okay, well we
3:09
Speaker 1: just put the call up. My dad got a doctor
3:11
Speaker 1: from Georgia. Yeah, but he got a real one. Yeah. Sure,
3:14
Speaker 1: he had to write the whole thesis and all that stuff.
3:15
Speaker 1: Do you ever call him doctor? Uh No, but that's
3:18
Speaker 1: what he You know, he went by the whole time,
3:20
Speaker 1: Dr Bryant. If you got an honorary doctor, you could
3:24
Speaker 1: do that whole um spies like us thing with your
3:26
Speaker 1: dad doctor doctor. Yeah. Yeah, we're really stalling on this one.
3:34
Speaker 1: Don't want to talk about black all right, I'm gonna
3:37
Speaker 1: kick it all off, all right, So black holes we
3:41
Speaker 1: don't know that they exist for certain, although yes we do.
3:45
Speaker 1: You can't see him, I guess, is ultimately what I'm saying.
3:48
Speaker 1: But um, there was a real lag in between the
3:52
Speaker 1: time that they were predicted to exist, um, before we
3:56
Speaker 1: started figuring out how to detect them, and we detect
3:59
Speaker 1: them indirectly. Sure, but um, A lot of people say
4:02
Speaker 1: Einstein was the first one to predict black holes. Not true. Yeah,
4:06
Speaker 1: this blew me away. Oh yeah, this dude, yeah, pretty smart.
4:11
Speaker 1: Uh what's his name? Pierre Simon Laplace? And he used
4:17
Speaker 1: Newton's theory of gravity and he said he calculated, you know,
4:21
Speaker 1: if there's an object compressed small enough, um, the escape
4:25
Speaker 1: velocity of that object would be faster than the speed
4:27
Speaker 1: of light. And he was like right on the money, Yeah,
4:30
Speaker 1: which means that nothing can escape this, including light. Yeah,
4:34
Speaker 1: because if light can't escape it's the fastest thing around,
4:37
Speaker 1: then nothing can. Yeah. I guess we should just say
4:40
Speaker 1: simply straight up. First of all, I still haven't even
4:42
Speaker 1: said what it is. Yeah, it is what remains after
4:46
Speaker 1: a former star um collapses upon itself, after Gordon Webb
4:52
Speaker 1: collapses upon himself, either by super nova, which is a
4:57
Speaker 1: little more um explosive. I understand it's dramatic um or.
5:02
Speaker 1: I just learned this term and nova. Have you heard
5:04
Speaker 1: of that? No, I haven't. I think that's newer on
5:06
Speaker 1: the scene, and that is a little a little more anticlimactic.
5:10
Speaker 1: And that's when a star will just sort of disappear.
5:14
Speaker 1: It's not a big explosion. It just kind of shrinks
5:16
Speaker 1: and collapses. It's like the credit Garbo of black Holes exactly. So,
5:21
Speaker 1: uh yeah. Or an un nova. I've not heard of
5:25
Speaker 1: that one. I watched through the Wormhole today and there
5:28
Speaker 1: was a guy just going on and on about the unknova. Yeah. Yeah,
5:31
Speaker 1: He's like, seriously, they're so understated. It's okay. So, uh well,
5:36
Speaker 1: let's let's just give a quick primer of what a
5:38
Speaker 1: star is. The star is essentially a big fusion reactor, right,
5:41
Speaker 1: So there's nuclear explosion after nuclear explosion. It's constant and
5:44
Speaker 1: they're massive, and they want to blow the star, which
5:48
Speaker 1: is a ball of gas outward. But you have another
5:52
Speaker 1: force called gravity, which is trying to draw the star
5:55
Speaker 1: inward toward its center. So you have this interplay, this
5:59
Speaker 1: push and pull between nuclear explosion and gravity, and that
6:04
Speaker 1: defines the star. Yeah, the equilibrium between the two. Yeah,
6:09
Speaker 1: and as I understand it, as they have these reactions,
6:12
Speaker 1: they're actually burning up these gases in like a specific order,
6:16
Speaker 1: even until eventually there is none left. Is that right? Right? Yeah,
6:20
Speaker 1: Gravity is always gonna win out because the star is
6:22
Speaker 1: going to spend its fuel, right, Okay, So when the
6:26
Speaker 1: star spends its fuel, gravity, it's like, ha ha, I
6:29
Speaker 1: got the better of you, and I'm going to start
6:31
Speaker 1: pulling in like I've always wanted to. And it compresses everything.
6:35
Speaker 1: And then in the case of a supernova, the supernova
6:37
Speaker 1: happens that explosion, right, Yeah, it sends stuff all out
6:41
Speaker 1: all over the place, and then what's left is a core,
6:45
Speaker 1: but it's a super compressed core, which is fairly small,
6:48
Speaker 1: the most dense thing you can imagine. Right. So, our
6:51
Speaker 1: Earth has a gravitational field. It's a pretty massive body.
6:54
Speaker 1: Comparatively speaking, it's a speck, but to you and me,
6:58
Speaker 1: it's pretty big, and it's big enough so that the
7:00
Speaker 1: gravitational field prevents it from from being sucked inward. Right.
7:05
Speaker 1: But if the Earth were smaller, the gravitational field will
7:08
Speaker 1: get stronger and stronger because the more dense something is
7:12
Speaker 1: and the smaller it's radius. As I believe, is how
7:16
Speaker 1: they put it. Astrophysically speaking, the stronger the force of
7:20
Speaker 1: gravity acting on that. So the gravitational field around that
7:24
Speaker 1: small object, like the core of a dead star um
7:29
Speaker 1: is incredibly strong. Right. So you've got that core and
7:33
Speaker 1: this gravitational feel acting on it, and gravity just keeps
7:36
Speaker 1: pressing and pressing and pressing until the thing actually sinks
7:41
Speaker 1: into the fabric of time and space. And my friend,
7:45
Speaker 1: you have a black hole. Now do you have a
7:47
Speaker 1: hole in the fabric of time and space? Yeah, you
7:50
Speaker 1: can't see into it. You can't send anything into it
7:53
Speaker 1: to report back. Well, yeah, that's the caveat. You can
7:57
Speaker 1: send whatever you want into it. It ain't it ain't
7:59
Speaker 1: coming back. It will. It will swallow anything that crosses
8:03
Speaker 1: the event horizon like mouth. Yeah, it's like the rim, right,
8:08
Speaker 1: but it doesn't. Just like, uh, this thing I read
8:11
Speaker 1: and we need to give a shout out to Hubble
8:13
Speaker 1: Hubble site, hubble site dot org. They have this great
8:17
Speaker 1: interactive thing on black holes. It's just really extensive. That's
8:21
Speaker 1: where you fly through space. Yeah, it's very cool. It's
8:23
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Uh So they what's important to point out
8:26
Speaker 1: because I thought it was just like this vacuum that
8:28
Speaker 1: just sucked everything, you know, sucked everything inside of it
8:32
Speaker 1: and like killed it. Yeah, it dejects stuff even well,
8:35
Speaker 1: it ejects stuff, but it also doesn't suck anything into
8:38
Speaker 1: itself anymore so than anything else in space with similar mass. Yeah,
8:44
Speaker 1: like vacuum cleaner. Right, Yeah, exactly. Like if we weren't
8:48
Speaker 1: going so fast around the Sun, we could potentially be
8:51
Speaker 1: pulled into the Sun, but because we're going around it
8:54
Speaker 1: like I think sixty seven thousand miles per hour, it
8:56
Speaker 1: prevents it from happening. And theoretically, if you could go
9:00
Speaker 1: super super fast around in an orbit around a black hole,
9:03
Speaker 1: you wouldn't get sucked in either, but you'd have to
9:05
Speaker 1: be in a perfect orbit. Okay, if you're off at all,
9:08
Speaker 1: then bye bye. Okay, So you mentioned the event horizon, right, Um,
9:12
Speaker 1: that core, that super compressed core is called the singularity. Yeah,
9:16
Speaker 1: we don't know a lot about that um, and black
9:19
Speaker 1: hole has a lot of really cool quirky UM aspects
9:23
Speaker 1: to it. Number one one quirky. One thing I learned
9:26
Speaker 1: about this that I didn't realize is that black holes
9:27
Speaker 1: like move around space. Yeah, so, like you have a
9:31
Speaker 1: hole in space, the fabric of space and time. Because
9:36
Speaker 1: time and space are totally intertwined, they can't be separated. Um,
9:41
Speaker 1: that's moving around, right, and there could be lots of them, right,
9:45
Speaker 1: So yeah, depending on the kind. Um, there's probably tens
9:51
Speaker 1: of millions of ones called stellar black holes, which are
9:55
Speaker 1: about anywhere between ten to twenty four times the mass
9:58
Speaker 1: of our Sun. And then there's super massive black holes,
10:01
Speaker 1: which are tens of millions to billions of times more
10:05
Speaker 1: massive than our Sun. And they think that there may
10:08
Speaker 1: be one of those at the center of every galaxy. Yeah,
10:11
Speaker 1: and at the very least at the center of the
10:12
Speaker 1: Milky Way. Right. So the other quirky part, this is
10:17
Speaker 1: my favorite thing about about black holes, is so gravity,
10:22
Speaker 1: if it's strong enough, it has the capability of bending
10:26
Speaker 1: space that pulls on space spacetime. Yes, because space and
10:30
Speaker 1: time are intertwined, that means it also pulls on time.
10:32
Speaker 1: So if you get close to a black hole, um,
10:36
Speaker 1: and I think we talked about this a little bit
10:38
Speaker 1: in the time travel episode. Uh, as you get closer
10:41
Speaker 1: to the event horizon, they drag on time will actually
10:45
Speaker 1: slow time for you relative to say the people back
10:49
Speaker 1: here on Earth because at the event horizon, the reason
10:53
Speaker 1: they call it an event horizon. Is an event is
10:55
Speaker 1: a point in space time and as you get closer
10:58
Speaker 1: to the event horizons, time slow until you hit the
11:01
Speaker 1: event horizon and time stands still. You're going faster than
11:06
Speaker 1: the speed of light. And once you pass that, there's
11:09
Speaker 1: there's time to stops. That's a pretty quirky characteristic. The
11:14
Speaker 1: quirkiest great word for it. Yeah. Uh. The event horizon
11:18
Speaker 1: has a radius called the schwartz Field swatch Child radius.
11:23
Speaker 1: Sorry about that, And it's name for Carl Schwartzchild and
11:28
Speaker 1: he was one of the early leading theorists on black holes.
11:32
Speaker 1: And I think the radius, I believe where don't have
11:36
Speaker 1: that note if the Earth where to become a black hole.
11:39
Speaker 1: I think the radius is the size of a marble.
11:41
Speaker 1: That's what you'd have to shrink the Earth down to. Yeah,
11:45
Speaker 1: pretty cool and very small. It's mind blowing. It is
11:47
Speaker 1: mind blowing. Um. And I think they the supermassive black
11:53
Speaker 1: holes like the supernovas have only I think they happen
11:56
Speaker 1: like once or twice per century. It's like we haven't
11:59
Speaker 1: observed one of these because it's too far away and
12:02
Speaker 1: it's too intermittent. Huh. But I think they're on the
12:05
Speaker 1: lookout and like the next time there is one, hopefully
12:08
Speaker 1: it's within the range that we can see or here
12:12
Speaker 1: and the dude on through the wormholes. Like we wouldn't
12:16
Speaker 1: sleep for weeks if that happened, Like we'd be running
12:18
Speaker 1: so many tests trying to measure and uh, you know,
12:22
Speaker 1: see how big it was and how far away it is.
12:24
Speaker 1: And so it's a bit of a quandary. Do you
12:28
Speaker 1: think it will happen anytime soon? I don't know. I
12:31
Speaker 1: don't know when the last one was. So we're you
12:34
Speaker 1: just mentioned the supermassive black hole, and they think that
12:36
Speaker 1: there's one at the center of every galaxy, right, um,
12:40
Speaker 1: And but there's there's kind of a mystery if black
12:43
Speaker 1: holes aren't mysterious enough, there's a mystery to like why
12:46
Speaker 1: there's such a huge difference in the two sizes the
12:49
Speaker 1: stellar black hole which is like ten to twenty four
12:51
Speaker 1: times our son, which, by the way, our son will
12:53
Speaker 1: never become a black hole on its own, it's too small.
12:57
Speaker 1: The that guy Simon Pierre Loss or Pierre Simon Lapasse,
13:02
Speaker 1: he calculated that it has to be three times the
13:05
Speaker 1: mass of our Sun, So our son is like a
13:07
Speaker 1: third of the mass right, so it will never become
13:10
Speaker 1: a black hole, but it could become a black hole
13:14
Speaker 1: if it becomes a neutron star, or even as a star,
13:17
Speaker 1: if it collides with another star, it can form a
13:20
Speaker 1: black hole. It can be sucked up by a black
13:22
Speaker 1: hole to make an even bigger black hole. And they
13:25
Speaker 1: think perhaps, or I suspect this is the way that
13:27
Speaker 1: they're headed. They think that a super massive black hole
13:30
Speaker 1: is just a bunch of black holes pushed together. Yeah,
13:33
Speaker 1: because I did read it. If they collide, they potentially
13:36
Speaker 1: would just like join forces. Yeah. And they think also
13:39
Speaker 1: that stars can collide and create bigger stars and bigger
13:42
Speaker 1: stars and bigger stars, and then when those die, they
13:46
Speaker 1: could on their own form a super massive black hole.
13:48
Speaker 1: But if it's at the center of a galaxy, probably
13:52
Speaker 1: what's going on. It's like if you have a sheet
13:54
Speaker 1: and you put a baseball in the middle. Remember we
13:56
Speaker 1: were talking about wormholes, It kind of bends the sheet.
13:59
Speaker 1: So if you drop a marble on the sheet, it's
14:01
Speaker 1: going to go towards the center. So what I think
14:05
Speaker 1: is going on is that there's this there's super massive
14:09
Speaker 1: black holes at the center of a galaxy, and it
14:10
Speaker 1: just eventually everything is moving toward that to form a
14:14
Speaker 1: huge black hole. Really, that's what I think is happening.
14:17
Speaker 1: So we're yeah, but not in our lifetime. Well, who
14:22
Speaker 1: cares about our children and their children? Yeah? I can't
14:25
Speaker 1: even conceive how far down there it is? Should we
14:28
Speaker 1: talk about? Um? The different too, A couple of two
14:30
Speaker 1: different types. UM, the Schwartz Child non rotating type, in
14:35
Speaker 1: the ker or ker Newman rotating type. UM. It's pretty simple.
14:40
Speaker 1: If the star was rotating before it collapsed upon itself,
14:44
Speaker 1: it will continue to rotate afterwards, for I guess as
14:48
Speaker 1: long as it's around, Is that right? Yeah? It's the
14:52
Speaker 1: angular conservation of angular momentum, where like if something spinning,
14:58
Speaker 1: why would it stop? I think it's how to put
15:00
Speaker 1: like an ice skater pretty much. Uh. And the curb
15:04
Speaker 1: black hole is a little more complex. Um. It has
15:06
Speaker 1: the singularity which we've talked about, the event horizon, which
15:10
Speaker 1: you've talked about but you don't want to go near.
15:13
Speaker 1: Did you see that movie? I love that movie. It's
15:16
Speaker 1: one of my favorite horror movies. I need to go
15:18
Speaker 1: back and rewatch it. You should because I remember liking
15:21
Speaker 1: it to a point and then not thinking it was
15:23
Speaker 1: so great, No you're thinking of yeah, okay, and never
15:28
Speaker 1: has a movie spectacularly fallen upon event horizon was Sam Neil, Right, yeah, okay,
15:34
Speaker 1: the class act he is, isn't he? Uh? And then
15:38
Speaker 1: there's the ergosphere and that is the UM egg shaped region.
15:43
Speaker 1: Basically that's the spinning part because it's dragging space around it,
15:47
Speaker 1: so it's gonna have the shape. And then the static
15:49
Speaker 1: limit is the boundary between the ergosphere and what they
15:52
Speaker 1: call normal space. So there was something in here that
15:55
Speaker 1: UM and I couldn't find this time, but before I've
16:00
Speaker 1: found that a car ring, right, the rotating black hole.
16:04
Speaker 1: UM doesn't have a singularity because the centrifugal force combats
16:10
Speaker 1: gravity enough so that the core can't be compressed enough
16:13
Speaker 1: to form a singularity, which is the whole reason why
16:16
Speaker 1: they think that that could potentially be used as a
16:19
Speaker 1: wormhole to travel through time bridge perhaps because with the
16:23
Speaker 1: singularity you have spaghettification, which is a real word, right, Um.
16:29
Speaker 1: Where As you get closer and closer to it, gravity
16:31
Speaker 1: just pulls you on an atomic and cellular level and
16:35
Speaker 1: stretches you into like this dead string version of yourself. Right,
16:42
Speaker 1: But the centrifugal force prevents gravity from becoming that powerful
16:46
Speaker 1: around the carrying, which supposedly you should be able to
16:49
Speaker 1: go through it. Is that your theory? No, No, I've
16:53
Speaker 1: seen it elsewhere. I'm just saying, I don't know that
16:55
Speaker 1: caring or care black hole has a singularity. Dispute that, Okay,
17:00
Speaker 1: I got you. Um, And I think that the schwartz
17:04
Speaker 1: Child black hole does not have the ergosphere of the
17:06
Speaker 1: static limit. Is that right? Yeah? I don't think so,
17:09
Speaker 1: just the singularity in the event horizon. Yeah, the swarts
17:11
Speaker 1: Child one is the one that you think of when
17:13
Speaker 1: you think of a black hole. Oh, isn't Huh. It's
17:16
Speaker 1: just like a black hole. It's got a singularity, it's
17:18
Speaker 1: got the event horizon. Can escape caring, light can escape,
17:22
Speaker 1: and things can become injected, and if you get up
17:25
Speaker 1: enough speed you could pass by it as long as
17:29
Speaker 1: you don't cross the event horizon. Man, there's so many
17:32
Speaker 1: rules I know. And plus it's all theoretical too, or
17:35
Speaker 1: not all theoretical, but a lot of it is because
17:37
Speaker 1: if you could only see. Yeah, we don't even know
17:40
Speaker 1: that black holes exist, what we do? Um, but we
17:45
Speaker 1: can detect them in a few different ways. Is that right? Uh? Three?
17:50
Speaker 1: Ways mass um mass estimates. So basically you can't necessarily
17:55
Speaker 1: measure a black hole, but you can study the things
17:58
Speaker 1: swirling around it. Get some idea from that about like
18:01
Speaker 1: how big it is. Yeah, it's Kepler's third law of
18:06
Speaker 1: planetary motion appropriately enough, and that it says that the
18:11
Speaker 1: time of orbit squared equals the average orbital radius cube,
18:18
Speaker 1: which somehow translates to mass. But basically, if you watch
18:22
Speaker 1: something spinning, first of all, you have to say, why
18:25
Speaker 1: is that thing orbiting something that we can't see? Yeah,
18:30
Speaker 1: is why is it wobbling? Right? If it's wobbling and um,
18:34
Speaker 1: if if you can, if you trace its orbit and um,
18:41
Speaker 1: take that to the second power square it. Uh, if
18:46
Speaker 1: that equals the mass of three times or more of
18:48
Speaker 1: the Sun, then you probably have a black hole. You've
18:51
Speaker 1: probably detected a black hole that's in the vicinity of
18:54
Speaker 1: that thing that you're tracking. So basically, this thing is
18:57
Speaker 1: acting like it's near a black hole and there's no
18:59
Speaker 1: other reason, right, we can pinpoint, so it must be
19:02
Speaker 1: a black hole. Yes, is simple enough gravity lens Uh.
19:08
Speaker 1: Einstein predicted that you could be in space. Pretty smart dude,
19:13
Speaker 1: and he actually confirmed this. Actually did he confirm it. No.
19:17
Speaker 1: He basically theory of general relativity and special reality. He
19:21
Speaker 1: just made a bunch of predictions that was like, you guys,
19:24
Speaker 1: go out and figure it out, and everybody did and
19:26
Speaker 1: if he was proven right, so it was confirmed during
19:29
Speaker 1: a solar eclipse, star's position was measured before, during, and afterward,
19:34
Speaker 1: and the position shifted because light was bent by Sun's gravity. Yeah,
19:40
Speaker 1: pretty amazing. It was like here I am here, you
19:42
Speaker 1: am here, I am And another um effect that a
19:48
Speaker 1: black hole can have as far as lights concerned, as um,
19:51
Speaker 1: it can concentrate light by bending it by that gravitational lens.
19:55
Speaker 1: So a star can become brighter all of a sudden,
19:58
Speaker 1: And when you can't see what's doing that, you must
20:02
Speaker 1: assume that a black hole passed in between your line
20:05
Speaker 1: of sight and the star, sort of like a eclipse,
20:09
Speaker 1: right all right? And then uh, emitted radiation. This one
20:13
Speaker 1: makes a lot of sense because it emits um X
20:16
Speaker 1: rays because of the heat generated when something falls into
20:20
Speaker 1: the star. And you can actually measure and detect these
20:23
Speaker 1: X rays, right, So, and that's just X rays camera
20:27
Speaker 1: rays too, apparently. Yeah, but this this stuff, it's called
20:31
Speaker 1: acretion where if something is swirling around a black hole
20:35
Speaker 1: and it goes in or it's sucked into the swirl
20:37
Speaker 1: around a black hole towards the event horizon through gravity. Um.
20:42
Speaker 1: That's called acretion. And what I don't understand. I didn't
20:46
Speaker 1: think black holes spit anything out like I thought they
20:49
Speaker 1: were the cosmic vacuum cleaner too. But it turns out
20:53
Speaker 1: they can spit out matter, and when they do, they
20:55
Speaker 1: form these things called jets. So if you see a
20:59
Speaker 1: solar system um or um a galaxy and there's a
21:02
Speaker 1: lot of matter flying out in these concentrated forms called jets,
21:08
Speaker 1: there's probably a black holder. All right, Well, I went
21:12
Speaker 1: to the Hubble site and picked out a few questions
21:14
Speaker 1: about black holes that are I think helped clear up
21:18
Speaker 1: a few things at least did for me. Do black
21:20
Speaker 1: holes live forever? I'm going to say yes. No. Uh,
21:28
Speaker 1: we used to think that actually, so you were thinking
21:31
Speaker 1: with your nineteen three brain. Stephen Hawkin came along in
21:34
Speaker 1: nineteen sev and uh showed that they actually evaporate over
21:39
Speaker 1: time really slowly and just sort of emit their energy
21:44
Speaker 1: back into the universe. I'm just kind of sweet, I guess, yeah, yeah,
21:49
Speaker 1: But I don't understand how like the core burns out
21:53
Speaker 1: or the core breaks up. I don't know. He just
21:55
Speaker 1: said they slowly evaporate, And who am I to argue, Um,
22:00
Speaker 1: how large are they? The size and event horizon is
22:03
Speaker 1: proportional to the mass of the black hole, and so
22:06
Speaker 1: they found them, um with event horizons from six miles
22:11
Speaker 1: to the size of our entire solar system. So yeah,
22:14
Speaker 1: big big differences in size, like you were talking about. Yeah, Um,
22:17
Speaker 1: I can't remember the name of the the galaxy, but
22:20
Speaker 1: there's a galaxy that's like the size of our solar
22:23
Speaker 1: system at the center, but it has a mass of
22:26
Speaker 1: like one point two billion times in size of our Sun.
22:29
Speaker 1: So they're like, okay, there's probably a black hole there.
22:32
Speaker 1: This is when my brain starts melting. It's like, you
22:34
Speaker 1: can't even can see I can't even conceive this stuff.
22:37
Speaker 1: I know. We're like just we're talking about like the
22:40
Speaker 1: layman's interpretation of you know, the stuff, Like we're not
22:45
Speaker 1: even throwing numbers out there. Yeah. I don't mean, I
22:47
Speaker 1: don't feel too bad because the more I researched it,
22:49
Speaker 1: the more I saw a lot of really smart people
22:51
Speaker 1: saying like this is mind blowing stuff, you know, So
22:55
Speaker 1: I'm not that big of a dummy. What types are there?
22:58
Speaker 1: I think we already said super massive or stellar maps.
23:02
Speaker 1: Can you safely orbit of black hole? You can if you,
23:06
Speaker 1: like I said, I was gonna say, now if you
23:08
Speaker 1: get in the exact right circular orbit, but it's very
23:13
Speaker 1: unlikely that that would happen. But once you the event horizon,
23:16
Speaker 1: that's that toast. Uh. And then what is inside a
23:20
Speaker 1: black hole? Because we cannot glimpse inside of it, we
23:23
Speaker 1: don't know for sure, but they think that the singularity
23:26
Speaker 1: is like they think everything is piled up in the center,
23:30
Speaker 1: like just stacked up, like whatever it's sucking in is
23:32
Speaker 1: stacked up at the center. But to understand it fully, um,
23:36
Speaker 1: they're having to marry basically two different um parts of science,
23:39
Speaker 1: which is quantum mechanics and gravity. And they've even named
23:43
Speaker 1: it quantum gravity. And they don't they don't know how
23:46
Speaker 1: that stuff works, but they did name it. Well at
23:49
Speaker 1: least that's at yeah, and the Hubble site said it's
23:52
Speaker 1: it's uh, one of, if not the most important unsolved
23:55
Speaker 1: problems in physics. Still, so yeah, because there's like a
23:59
Speaker 1: whole in this fabric of space time. And Morgan Freeman
24:03
Speaker 1: thinks in the black hole could be the answers to
24:05
Speaker 1: everything I wonder. I've also wondered like if if say,
24:11
Speaker 1: the Singularity is really just forming a tunnel, does it
24:15
Speaker 1: break through? Can you break through space time? Or is
24:19
Speaker 1: it really just like a like a well because you know,
24:24
Speaker 1: well it doesn't go all the way through the Earth.
24:27
Speaker 1: Morgan Freeman talked about it. Well, that's funny. Well I
24:29
Speaker 1: mean that, but that's I think what it is, because
24:32
Speaker 1: something has to hold the Singularity in place, right, It's
24:35
Speaker 1: got to be butted up against something. So I wonder
24:37
Speaker 1: if it's just pressed down to a degree that gravity
24:41
Speaker 1: can't push it any further, or is it something that's
24:44
Speaker 1: just like punched through and we assume that the core
24:47
Speaker 1: still there but it's long gone, right it's in China.
24:50
Speaker 1: Good question, they'll answer it in I just read um.
24:55
Speaker 1: You know, our friend Joan d Azo, he recommended these
24:59
Speaker 1: books to his time travel books. I read one of
25:01
Speaker 1: him over the weekend. The Man who Folded Himself highly recommended,
25:05
Speaker 1: Very trippy. Written in nineteen seventy three. It's like one
25:08
Speaker 1: of those you know, and uh, it's nonfiction. It's it's
25:13
Speaker 1: about a guy who gets a time belt from his
25:15
Speaker 1: uncle's nonfiction. What did I say? It was nonfiction? No fiction?
25:23
Speaker 1: Who is this man? Uh No, it's very much fiction
25:27
Speaker 1: science fiction. And he gets a time belt from his
25:29
Speaker 1: uncle that basically, um, he subscribes or the author ends
25:33
Speaker 1: up subscribing to the mini worlds theory because every time
25:36
Speaker 1: this guy time travels, he creates a different version of
25:38
Speaker 1: himself in a different world, but they meet up, so
25:41
Speaker 1: he ends up he ends up having a relationship with himself, really,
25:47
Speaker 1: and then he ends up having a relationship with many
25:50
Speaker 1: of himself, like has a relationship or makes relations he
25:55
Speaker 1: he has sex with himself, and then he has an
25:58
Speaker 1: orgy with himself and then that is it is. Dude,
26:03
Speaker 1: when you're reading it, you're like, you get to see
26:04
Speaker 1: this guy like he's from California's and then he eventually, um,
26:12
Speaker 1: there are female versions of himself created in these different realities,
26:15
Speaker 1: and he has a relationship and gets his female self
26:18
Speaker 1: pregnant and has a little boy who ends up becoming
26:21
Speaker 1: who he was, and he delivers the time belt to
26:25
Speaker 1: him at the end. I guess it just ruined it. Yeah,
26:28
Speaker 1: that's pretty much the book. Yeah, it's well worth reading now,
26:31
Speaker 1: I mean it's it'll like it'll melt your brain. Almost
26:35
Speaker 1: no fiction these days, anyways, thank you for that. It's good.
26:38
Speaker 1: You're like a walking cliffs notes. And it's it's short,
26:41
Speaker 1: so like you could read it. I read it over
26:43
Speaker 1: the weekend when I was at the cabin, so it
26:45
Speaker 1: was nice. And the Hunger Games. Did you read that really? Yeah?
26:50
Speaker 1: I read it in a day. How was it? Um?
26:53
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's those books like that are it's
26:56
Speaker 1: like popcorn movie. You know. It wasn't bad. It really
26:59
Speaker 1: moved along and then we saw the movie and the
27:01
Speaker 1: movie stunk. Does it have like a like three page chapters?
27:04
Speaker 1: Is it like one of those books? Okay? I mean
27:07
Speaker 1: it was fine. You know, I don't know anything about it.
27:13
Speaker 1: It's the most Dangerous game. Oh that's a good one.
27:17
Speaker 1: I think there's an RC plane out it sounds like it.
27:22
Speaker 1: There's a couple of them. I think there's an RC
27:25
Speaker 1: dog a drone outside office. So if you want to
27:33
Speaker 1: learn more about black holes, there's this really cool article
27:35
Speaker 1: on the site called how black holes Work. It's a
27:38
Speaker 1: pretty good approach. Initial approach too, black holes pretty understandable.
27:43
Speaker 1: Do you think you'll like it? Puts theres some neat pictures,
27:45
Speaker 1: UM type black holes in the search bar house to
27:47
Speaker 1: works dot Com, I said, search bar, chuck it down
27:50
Speaker 1: and read the listener mail. This is from Mark in
27:56
Speaker 1: New Jersey, fifteen year old just smarter than me. Um. Hey, guys,
28:00
Speaker 1: I'm fifteen. I'm a big fan of the show. Find
28:02
Speaker 1: it very interesting and funny, and I listened to it
28:04
Speaker 1: whenever I have a long car ride. Right, boring, mindless
28:07
Speaker 1: task to accomplish. I was just recently listening to the
28:10
Speaker 1: Reagan Star Wars program. The Cold War and global thermonuclear
28:14
Speaker 1: war are perhaps my favorite topics. How about a nice
28:18
Speaker 1: game of chess. Chuck should read that part in a
28:20
Speaker 1: robot voice, and you did. I was listening to the
28:24
Speaker 1: part about Um shooting off nukes willy nilly in space.
28:27
Speaker 1: You were wondering if that had a negative effect, and
28:30
Speaker 1: said some really smart guy at email the answer. Then
28:32
Speaker 1: I remembered something that's all on Discovery Channel. I don't
28:36
Speaker 1: remember all the details, but I believe Michio Kaku said
28:39
Speaker 1: nukes don't work in space because of the way they
28:42
Speaker 1: transfer energy. Adam to ADAM spaces a vacuum, so there
28:46
Speaker 1: was a lack of atoms to transfer energy through Um,
28:50
Speaker 1: this is how he remembers it. At least. UM, I
28:52
Speaker 1: hope I was the really smart guy who helped to
28:54
Speaker 1: answer your question. Technically, Michio Kaku was the one is
28:58
Speaker 1: the really smart guy. But Mark with a C from
29:02
Speaker 1: New Jersey was smart enough to relay that information to us,
29:05
Speaker 1: and we we talked about this. We followed it up
29:08
Speaker 1: kind of inadvertently. Um, with the testing nuclear weapons that'll
29:13
Speaker 1: fall out, that's true, and it seemed like they were
29:16
Speaker 1: like the nukes worked right, I guess worked enough to test.
29:20
Speaker 1: I mean they made some crazy fireworks displaying this guy.
29:25
Speaker 1: But who am I did disagree with the Mischio Cockum exactly. Um,
29:29
Speaker 1: thanks a lot, Mark. We appreciate you being so smart
29:31
Speaker 1: and taking the time to write in. If you think
29:33
Speaker 1: you're smart, we want to hear from you. Tell us
29:36
Speaker 1: about black holes or whatever. You want show off your
29:39
Speaker 1: smarts to us. UM. You can tweet to us at
29:42
Speaker 1: s Y s K podcast. You can join us on
29:44
Speaker 1: Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know, and you
29:47
Speaker 1: can email us at Stuff podcast at Discovery dot com.
29:57
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
30:00
Speaker 1: how staff works dot com. M HM hm