Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / What is a black hole eclipse?
Transcript
- 0:08Speaker 1: Hey or hey, are you a fan of Pokemon cards? Yeah,
- 0:12Speaker 1: a little bit. My son used to play them. My
- 0:14Speaker 1: son also, though I think he mostly collected and traded them.
- 0:17Speaker 1: I don't think he ever actually played with them. M Yeah,
- 0:20Speaker 1: I think that happens a lot, although I did play
- 0:22Speaker 1: with him for a few times. It's a pretty interesting game.
- 0:24Speaker 1: And do you have any of those cards with like
- 0:26Speaker 1: super awesome powers? Yeah? They have pretty good names, like
- 0:29Speaker 1: flame body. My personal favorite is the card that can
- 0:32Speaker 1: do a black hole eclipse. Although that sounds kind of
- 0:37Speaker 1: like a random combination of words from physics that they
- 0:40Speaker 1: just kind of put together. I think that's the same
- 0:42Speaker 1: way that physicist name things though. Ah, so you admitted
- 0:46Speaker 1: it's all random. We just type the words into an
- 0:49Speaker 1: online random number generator and that's where we go with.
- 0:53Speaker 1: They have a bunch of physicists working for Pokemon, just
- 0:55Speaker 1: in case that the whole physics scurity doesn't work out.
- 0:57Speaker 1: Do you have a promising career working for That's always
- 1:00Speaker 1: been my backup plane. Hi am Poor Hamming, cartoonist and
- 1:18Speaker 1: the co author of Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe. Hi.
- 1:22Speaker 1: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at
- 1:24Speaker 1: UC Irvine, and I probably have hundreds of dollars worth
- 1:27Speaker 1: of Pokemon cards somewhere in the closets of my home.
- 1:31Speaker 1: Are they wrapped an individual plastic though, to keep him
- 1:33Speaker 1: in mint condition? Otherwise I'm not sure they're worth that much.
- 1:38Speaker 1: They have definitely been prepared as an investment in the future.
- 1:42Speaker 1: That's how you plan to pay for your son's college education.
- 1:44Speaker 1: I think that's how my son plans to pay for
- 1:46Speaker 1: his retirement. Yeah. Wow, if it's worth that much, maybe
- 1:49Speaker 1: they should conveniently disappear from your closet. Only if I
- 1:51Speaker 1: could find them in my son's closet. I think that's
- 1:54Speaker 1: part of his security plan. Yes, it's such a mess,
- 1:57Speaker 1: it's like a black hole in itself, but anyway is
- 2:00Speaker 1: Welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe,
- 2:02Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio in which we try
- 2:05Speaker 1: to clean up a mess that is this universe and
- 2:08Speaker 1: all of its crazy, confusing glory. We dig right into
- 2:12Speaker 1: everything that doesn't make sense, everything that should make sense,
- 2:15Speaker 1: and things that might never make sense. We talked about
- 2:18Speaker 1: the biggest questions at the heart of philosophical inquiries about
- 2:21Speaker 1: the nature of our universe, and we talk about practical
- 2:24Speaker 1: stuff like how things around you actually work. We dive
- 2:27Speaker 1: into all of these questions and try to explain to
- 2:30Speaker 1: you what scientists do and do not know about them
- 2:33Speaker 1: because it is a pretty fun universe full of interesting
- 2:36Speaker 1: and amazing characters, not all of them with superpowers like
- 2:39Speaker 1: Pokemon characters, but there are a lot of interesting objects
- 2:42Speaker 1: out there in the universe with the seemingly superpowerful powers.
- 2:46Speaker 1: And it is our belief, or at least our hope,
- 2:49Speaker 1: that the universe does make sense, that it's following some
- 2:52Speaker 1: set of rules, and that if we dig into it
- 2:54Speaker 1: hard enough, if we use our brains, if we come
- 2:57Speaker 1: up with a clever set of experiments, we can figure
- 2:59Speaker 1: out what those rules are. That in the end, there
- 3:01Speaker 1: isn't magic in the universe, but that everything can be
- 3:04Speaker 1: explained with science. I'm not sure the same can be
- 3:07Speaker 1: said about Pokemon powers. What are you saying that Pokemon
- 3:11Speaker 1: aren't physically accurate there? How do you know, Daniel, I'm
- 3:15Speaker 1: not sure we have to suspend disbelief. But I did
- 3:17Speaker 1: do a bit of research into what the black hole
- 3:20Speaker 1: eclipse move is for the Pokemon character, and here's the
- 3:23Speaker 1: official description. The user gathers dark energy with its Z
- 3:28Speaker 1: power and forms a black hole that sucks the opponent up. Interesting.
- 3:33Speaker 1: That seems like a bit of a dangerous weapon there,
- 3:35Speaker 1: because once you start the black hole, I guess, can
- 3:38Speaker 1: you turn it off? Or is there a Z switch
- 3:40Speaker 1: for it? It depends on what your Z power can do.
- 3:44Speaker 1: If you can tap into dark energy and expand or
- 3:47Speaker 1: contract space, then hey, you have got a lot of options. Well,
- 3:50Speaker 1: there is the idea that maybe there are unknown forces
- 3:52Speaker 1: in the universe we haven't discovered. Maybe the Z force
- 3:55Speaker 1: is one of them. And if I discovered an unknown
- 3:57Speaker 1: force and called it the Z force, would you be
- 3:59Speaker 1: impress with my naming? I guess I mean to try
- 4:03Speaker 1: out any of the other letters in the alphabet first.
- 4:05Speaker 1: The Z force makes me think it's related to the
- 4:07Speaker 1: Z boson, which we know is a very feeble boson.
- 4:10Speaker 1: It carries the weak force, probably not capable of making
- 4:14Speaker 1: black holes. So there is technically a Z force in
- 4:17Speaker 1: the universe right now, like the force made by a
- 4:21Speaker 1: Z boson is technically a Z force. Yeah, that's right,
- 4:24Speaker 1: though I'm not sure you can use it to gather
- 4:26Speaker 1: any dark energy and throw your opponent into a black hole.
- 4:29Speaker 1: But hey, best to luck to you. How do you know, Daniel,
- 4:32Speaker 1: have you tried? I haven't tried, but I'm going to
- 4:34Speaker 1: write a grand proposal to the Pokemon Science Foundation to
- 4:38Speaker 1: see if I can get some funds to try it out. Yeah,
- 4:40Speaker 1: the PSF, they fund a lot of work out here.
- 4:42Speaker 1: But technically, in a multiverse, isn't it possible that there
- 4:45Speaker 1: are Pokemon characters out there? I mean, if you say
- 4:48Speaker 1: in a multiverse, isn't it possible that I suppose almost
- 4:50Speaker 1: anything is possible because in some theories of the multiverse
- 4:54Speaker 1: there are universes with other laws of physics, which basically
- 4:57Speaker 1: allows almost anything to happen. Oh, there you go, It's official.
- 5:01Speaker 1: Here in the podcast, Daniel thinks Pokemon are real. They
- 5:06Speaker 1: are a really good investment in my son's feature and
- 5:09Speaker 1: a real possibility. But it is interesting. How did you
- 5:12Speaker 1: end up googling Pokemon powers online? What's going on there? Daniel? No,
- 5:17Speaker 1: I was googling black hole eclipse, of course, in preparation
- 5:20Speaker 1: for today's episode. And the top hit was not black
- 5:23Speaker 1: holes or eclipses or anything scientific. The top like ten
- 5:27Speaker 1: hits were all about Pokemon. I think that tells you
- 5:29Speaker 1: a little bit about the priority of the Internet. But
- 5:32Speaker 1: it is interesting. What do you think is going on
- 5:34Speaker 1: inside the head of those Pokemon creators, artists and writers
- 5:37Speaker 1: when they come up with these things, Right, because they
- 5:39Speaker 1: used to work dark energy, they must know a little
- 5:41Speaker 1: bit of something about physics. Well, you know, I think
- 5:44Speaker 1: as they make more and more Pokemon characters, that have
- 5:47Speaker 1: to be more and more powerful or as my son
- 5:49Speaker 1: would say, totally opie, and so they want to come
- 5:53Speaker 1: up with something really dramatics and they're really crazy. And
- 5:55Speaker 1: I guess black holes are on the top of the
- 5:57Speaker 1: list of like aspirational powers to whether you can make
- 6:00Speaker 1: a black hole using dark energy. You know, we don't
- 6:03Speaker 1: really know what dark energy is at all. We just
- 6:06Speaker 1: know that it's accelerating the expansion of space and separating
- 6:09Speaker 1: the black holes from each other. So if anything, it's
- 6:12Speaker 1: keeping black holes from getting bigger. Well, I guess my
- 6:14Speaker 1: question is what kind of energy car does that attack us?
- 6:18Speaker 1: Dark energy cars? Is there such a thing? If there
- 6:21Speaker 1: isn't such a thing, then there should be Pokemon Science Foundation,
- 6:24Speaker 1: please fund that. There should be a science type Pokemon.
- 6:28Speaker 1: You know, there's like a water type, fire type. There
- 6:31Speaker 1: should be like a physics type. We have exhausted my
- 6:33Speaker 1: knowledge of Pokemon. Now I have nothing else to contribute
- 6:35Speaker 1: to this conversation. I went a little opie on you
- 6:40Speaker 1: all overpowered you. But it is an interesting name to
- 6:42Speaker 1: give a power to a fictional character. But it kind
- 6:45Speaker 1: of makes you think, is it actually possible for something
- 6:48Speaker 1: like that to happen? And we know that crazy things
- 6:50Speaker 1: happen out there in the universe. We are constantly surprised
- 6:53Speaker 1: by what's going on in the hearts of other galaxies
- 6:56Speaker 1: and even in between galaxies, and so you should never
- 7:00Speaker 1: say never, and so do they. On the podcast, we'll
- 7:02Speaker 1: be asking the question can a black hole be eclipsed?
- 7:11Speaker 1: And can you use it to suck up your enemies?
- 7:13Speaker 1: Is the question that a lot of kids are probably asking,
- 7:17Speaker 1: and maybe some physicists. Please, if you do have the
- 7:20Speaker 1: z power to manipulate dark energy to create black holes,
- 7:23Speaker 1: don't do it. You might win the battle and then
- 7:26Speaker 1: destroy the planet. Although they'll give you a Nobel prize, though,
- 7:28Speaker 1: wouldn't they in the five minutes between the creation of
- 7:31Speaker 1: your black hole and the destruction of the Earth. I'm
- 7:33Speaker 1: not sure the Swedish Academy acts that fast. I don't know.
- 7:36Speaker 1: I've seen you talk, Daniel, you will sacrifice anything for science.
- 7:39Speaker 1: If you have such a Z power, create a black
- 7:41Speaker 1: hole out in the depths of space where we can
- 7:44Speaker 1: study it. Please. I guess if you have that kind
- 7:46Speaker 1: of power, you can afford to go out into space. Right.
- 7:48Speaker 1: Maybe you also have the ex power and the why power?
- 7:50Speaker 1: Right right? Although I thought the why power was physicist
- 7:53Speaker 1: superpower or is that the philosophers? It's the four year
- 7:56Speaker 1: olds power? Why? Why? Why? Why? Yes, it's an interminable
- 8:01Speaker 1: source of energy. But it is an interesting question, and
- 8:03Speaker 1: as usual, we were wondering how many people out there
- 8:06Speaker 1: had thought about this question whether a black hole can
- 8:09Speaker 1: be eclipsed. So thanks very much to everybody who volunteers
- 8:12Speaker 1: to answer these questions in advance. Were very grateful to you,
- 8:15Speaker 1: and we hope that you enjoy hearing your voice on
- 8:17Speaker 1: the podcast. If any of you out there would like
- 8:20Speaker 1: to participate, please don't be shy. Right to me two
- 8:22Speaker 1: questions at Daniel and Jorne dot com. So think about
- 8:25Speaker 1: it for a second. Do you think a black hole
- 8:28Speaker 1: can be eclipsed? Here's what people had to say. Assuming
- 8:31Speaker 1: the definition of eclipse is for one body to obscure
- 8:37Speaker 1: another body from a given a vantage point. Um sure,
- 8:42Speaker 1: I don't see why a black hole could not be
- 8:44Speaker 1: eclipsed by another celestial body. I thought that might be
- 8:48Speaker 1: how we discovered them or something. I guess a black
- 8:51Speaker 1: hole can be eclipsed. I mean normally in eclipse is
- 8:54Speaker 1: when the light from something is blocked by something else
- 8:58Speaker 1: in space. So as a black hole doesn't have any
- 9:01Speaker 1: light emitting from it, I wouldn't have thought it could
- 9:04Speaker 1: be eclipsed as such. But I guess if you get
- 9:06Speaker 1: something massive enough in front of it, in between us
- 9:09Speaker 1: and it, then it would be eclipsed. I don't see
- 9:12Speaker 1: why not. As long as something subjectively larger than them
- 9:17Speaker 1: is between them and the observer, it would eclipse. The
- 9:22Speaker 1: black hole might have to be subjectively larger than the
- 9:25Speaker 1: disc around it to really have a shot at it. Well,
- 9:29Speaker 1: the concept of eclipse, the way I understand it, is
- 9:31Speaker 1: that light from a star as blocked from Earth's view
- 9:37Speaker 1: by an intervening body. Certain's black holes do not emit light.
- 9:44Speaker 1: I don't think they can be eclipsed. I don't think
- 9:47Speaker 1: so because I believe when black holes mass passes before
- 9:52Speaker 1: a gravity you see lensing effects. And I don't know
- 9:55Speaker 1: I've ever heard of one being eclipsed before. Yes, I
- 9:58Speaker 1: think they can do if they're is a planet or
- 10:00Speaker 1: star closer to us in the right alignment with the
- 10:06Speaker 1: black hole. Yes, I think they can be eclipsed. Yes,
- 10:08Speaker 1: I think it can in the sense that is coming
- 10:11Speaker 1: in front of something else. Um. But like instead of
- 10:14Speaker 1: blocking the light like the moon we block the Sun's light,
- 10:17Speaker 1: I think it would just absorb the light of whatever
- 10:20Speaker 1: is behind it. But um, it could also have this
- 10:24Speaker 1: gravitational lensing effect where the light of the objects that
- 10:27Speaker 1: aren't directly behind it kind of get curved um due
- 10:31Speaker 1: to the black hole, and we perceive it um in
- 10:34Speaker 1: that way. So that's kind of the black hole version
- 10:36Speaker 1: of an eclipse. Yes, they can be eclips Let's say
- 10:41Speaker 1: instead of our son, it will be a black hole
- 10:44Speaker 1: like we heard at a podcast Danielle and Horhan. We
- 10:49Speaker 1: would need to be at a safe distance from it,
- 10:51Speaker 1: and we can safely go around it. And if we
- 10:56Speaker 1: have the moon that would be between us and the
- 11:00Speaker 1: that hole. I don't see why not the more collectives
- 11:03Speaker 1: the site of the black hole. All right, A wide
- 11:07Speaker 1: range of answers here. Somebody said, why not always a
- 11:10Speaker 1: good answer? Am I talking about physics of the universe.
- 11:13Speaker 1: Why not, there's the multiverse, Doctor Strange says, anything can
- 11:17Speaker 1: happen in the multiverse. Or do you think they were
- 11:19Speaker 1: taking it as a proposal, like, hey, should we make
- 11:21Speaker 1: a black hole eclipse? Why not? Let's go right now.
- 11:25Speaker 1: I'm up for it. I guess it made me think,
- 11:27Speaker 1: what do you mean by eclipse, like in terms of
- 11:29Speaker 1: attention or in terms of blocking its light? But it's
- 11:34Speaker 1: a black hole. Yeah, it's a good question. And I
- 11:36Speaker 1: noticed that there was like two different interpretations of eclipse there,
- 11:39Speaker 1: one the black hole being eclipsed like something blocking light
- 11:43Speaker 1: from a black hole, and the other the black hole
- 11:46Speaker 1: doing the eclipsing, like passing in front of something else
- 11:50Speaker 1: that makes light. So there's sort of two possibilities there. Interesting,
- 11:54Speaker 1: and I guess we're going to argue about which one
- 11:56Speaker 1: is more correct. For the next hour, we're going to
- 11:58Speaker 1: talk about both possibility. At least. Of course, we're gonna
- 12:01Speaker 1: do the quantum superposition. We're gonna do the forwards and
- 12:03Speaker 1: the backwards. All right, Well, let's start with the basics here, Daniel,
- 12:06Speaker 1: What is a black hole? First of all, so we
- 12:08Speaker 1: don't really know what a black hole is in the
- 12:11Speaker 1: actual universe, and we don't actually even really know if
- 12:15Speaker 1: black holes exist. As described by the theory, we have
- 12:19Speaker 1: this concept in general relativity that if you get enough
- 12:23Speaker 1: stuff together, it's gravity will overcome any sort of internal strength,
- 12:28Speaker 1: any power of the material to resist being compressed. The
- 12:31Speaker 1: gravity will eventually get so strong that it will just
- 12:33Speaker 1: squeeze it down further and further and further, and as
- 12:36Speaker 1: it gets denser and denser, and the gravity gets stronger
- 12:38Speaker 1: and stronger, and you get this crazy runaway effect, and
- 12:42Speaker 1: where gravity essentially becomes infinitely strong in a tiny little dot,
- 12:46Speaker 1: this singularity at the point in space where you have
- 12:50Speaker 1: not infinite mass but infinite density, because gravity is compressed
- 12:54Speaker 1: some blob of stuff down to a very very small distance,
- 12:57Speaker 1: and because it's compressed it so far and means that
- 13:00Speaker 1: you can get pretty close to a lot of mass,
- 13:02Speaker 1: which means the gravity even nearby it would be very strong,
- 13:05Speaker 1: so strong that we think that it curves space so
- 13:08Speaker 1: much that light cannot even escape it. So if these
- 13:11Speaker 1: things are real, if they're out there in the universe,
- 13:14Speaker 1: then whatever falls into this black hole you will never
- 13:16Speaker 1: see again because light from it cannot escape. Would you
- 13:20Speaker 1: say it's an actual hole in space, Daniel. And you know,
- 13:23Speaker 1: if you define a hole is something that you can
- 13:25Speaker 1: fall into, then it's technically it is. That's why it's
- 13:28Speaker 1: called a whole. Right, if you accept the general relativity
- 13:30Speaker 1: view of it, it's kind of a hole because it
- 13:32Speaker 1: makes a portion of space that's cut off from the
- 13:35Speaker 1: rest of the universe. It's like a little sub universe,
- 13:39Speaker 1: and once you enter that sub universe, you really are
- 13:41Speaker 1: cut off from the rest of it. I mean inside
- 13:43Speaker 1: the black hole, you can still see the rest of
- 13:46Speaker 1: the universe. Light from the rest of the universe can
- 13:48Speaker 1: still reach you, so you can see out from it,
- 13:50Speaker 1: but nobody can see into it, right, So in that sense,
- 13:53Speaker 1: it's a hole in space, right, Although that's assuming your
- 13:56Speaker 1: eyeball is still in one piece when you're inside of
- 13:58Speaker 1: a black hole, right, Yeah, precisely, assuming that you survive
- 14:02Speaker 1: long enough to look out into the black hole. And
- 14:04Speaker 1: black holes can come in all sorts of sizes. You
- 14:06Speaker 1: can make a black hole in theory out of a
- 14:09Speaker 1: pretty small amount of mass as long as you squeeze
- 14:11Speaker 1: it down to a small enough radius. You can also
- 14:14Speaker 1: make black holes out of enormous masses. Some of the
- 14:17Speaker 1: things out there that we think are black holes probably
- 14:19Speaker 1: have millions or billion times the mass of our sun.
- 14:24Speaker 1: Those black holes are really really big, and if you
- 14:26Speaker 1: fall into one of those, the gravity at the outskirts
- 14:30Speaker 1: of the black hole is not actually that strong. I mean,
- 14:33Speaker 1: it's strong enough to suck up light, but it's not
- 14:35Speaker 1: so strong to like tear you apart to spaghettify you.
- 14:38Speaker 1: So you might be able to survive the very first
- 14:41Speaker 1: few moments of falling into a really really big black hole,
- 14:44Speaker 1: and then you can take it selfie, although you can
- 14:47Speaker 1: never send that selfie to anyone. Hey, selfies are just
- 14:49Speaker 1: for yourself, right, that's why they're called selfie. Ironically, that
- 14:54Speaker 1: is the opposite purpose of a selfie. They should be
- 14:57Speaker 1: called that everyone else's. But it is interesting what you
- 15:00Speaker 1: said about the black holes having a size, because it's
- 15:02Speaker 1: it's kind of into it's like a hole in space,
- 15:04Speaker 1: but it does have volume, right, Like, it does occupy
- 15:07Speaker 1: three dimensional space. In fact, it's a sphere in space, right,
- 15:11Speaker 1: I mean, it's just kind of distort space, but it
- 15:13Speaker 1: does sort of occupy a certain you know, length, width
- 15:16Speaker 1: and in height. Yeah, if you say black hole, you're
- 15:19Speaker 1: probably imagining like a circle on the ground a two
- 15:22Speaker 1: dimensional object that things can fall into and disappear, like
- 15:25Speaker 1: in cartoon shows. But as you say, they are three
- 15:27Speaker 1: dimensional objects. So the simplest black hole, one that isn't spinning,
- 15:32Speaker 1: would be a perfect sphere, and you can fall into
- 15:34Speaker 1: it from any direction. If you're looking at a perfect
- 15:37Speaker 1: sphere that's perfectly black, it's always just gonna look like
- 15:40Speaker 1: a circle to you because there's no texture to it,
- 15:42Speaker 1: so you can't sort of like tell how much curvature
- 15:45Speaker 1: it has. But actually, if you look at a black hole,
- 15:47Speaker 1: you don't even really just see a black sphere. It
- 15:51Speaker 1: looks even bigger than it actually is because the paths
- 15:54Speaker 1: of light around the black hole are really really weird.
- 15:56Speaker 1: Like if somebody was very close to the edge of
- 15:58Speaker 1: the black hole on the back side of it and
- 16:00Speaker 1: turned on a flashlight, you could see it from the
- 16:03Speaker 1: other side of the black hole because the light from
- 16:05Speaker 1: that flashlight would curve around the black hole, bent by
- 16:08Speaker 1: its incredible gravity to your eyeballs. So if you're near
- 16:11Speaker 1: a black hole, if you're just looking at it, you
- 16:13Speaker 1: can actually see the entire surface of the black hole
- 16:17Speaker 1: right in front of you. You can see the front
- 16:19Speaker 1: and the back right though it just looks black, right, Yeah,
- 16:22Speaker 1: it just looks like a bigger black circle than it
- 16:25Speaker 1: actually is. It's like puffed up, yeah, like puffed up
- 16:27Speaker 1: because in the vicinity of a black hole, space is curved,
- 16:30Speaker 1: and when space is curved, you can't trust your eyes
- 16:33Speaker 1: to be just showing you what he's there. You're seeing
- 16:36Speaker 1: now an image of what is there, and then image
- 16:38Speaker 1: can be distorted, just like if you're in a fun
- 16:40Speaker 1: house mirror and it's not flat and what you're seeing
- 16:43Speaker 1: isn't reality the same as true. Near a black hole,
- 16:46Speaker 1: light doesn't travel in straight lines anymore, and so what
- 16:49Speaker 1: you see is an image is generated by the physical
- 16:52Speaker 1: stuff that's there, but it's not a fully faithful image
- 16:55Speaker 1: of what's actually out there. It's a little bit mind
- 16:57Speaker 1: bending because a black hole is sort of like a sphere.
- 17:00Speaker 1: It sort of has the surface, but it's not really
- 17:02Speaker 1: a surface because it's not solid. It's just kind of
- 17:04Speaker 1: like the edge of the hole. So it's like a
- 17:06Speaker 1: three dimensional edge of a hole is the surface of
- 17:08Speaker 1: a black hole. Yeah, And what you call the edge
- 17:10Speaker 1: of a black hole is a little bit arbitrary. We
- 17:13Speaker 1: usually use the location of the event horizon, the point
- 17:16Speaker 1: past which light and particles and nothing can escape, and
- 17:20Speaker 1: to mark the edge of the black hole. But there's
- 17:22Speaker 1: nothing there at the edge. It's sort of like a
- 17:25Speaker 1: calculation we do to say where it is, and you
- 17:28Speaker 1: can't actually even tell where the event horizon is until
- 17:31Speaker 1: the end of the universe. The definition of the event
- 17:34Speaker 1: horizon is any particle past this point never escapes. But
- 17:38Speaker 1: it's not always easy to tell exactly what can escape
- 17:41Speaker 1: and what can't, and so you can't actually know in
- 17:44Speaker 1: any moment where the event horizon is. You have to
- 17:46Speaker 1: sort of like wait to the end of time and
- 17:48Speaker 1: then say, particles that got closer than this, none of
- 17:51Speaker 1: them escaped. So here was the event horizon, right, because
- 17:54Speaker 1: we actually like fall into the hole that sort of
- 17:57Speaker 1: almost sort of never happens, right, because time gets distorted
- 18:00Speaker 1: around the black hole that it basically as you said,
- 18:02Speaker 1: happens never. Yeah. And also there's just like nothing there
- 18:06Speaker 1: at the event horizon. It's not like a surface you
- 18:08Speaker 1: land on. It's just a point of no return. It's
- 18:10Speaker 1: like if you got into your car and you drove
- 18:12Speaker 1: too far away from a gas station so that you
- 18:14Speaker 1: didn't have enough gas to get to the next gas station.
- 18:16Speaker 1: Nothing would happen at that moment when you had gone
- 18:18Speaker 1: too far. You would only realize it later, like, oops,
- 18:21Speaker 1: we forgot to get gas and now we're stranded. The
- 18:24Speaker 1: moment when you crossed that threshold where you now too
- 18:26Speaker 1: far away from the nearest gas station you don't have
- 18:28Speaker 1: enough fuel to get one, no warning light necessarily goes off.
- 18:31Speaker 1: And the same is true for the event horizon. It
- 18:33Speaker 1: just feels like the rest of space. You pass through it,
- 18:36Speaker 1: and unbeknownst to you, you are now wrapped inside the
- 18:40Speaker 1: black hole. Right, Although you know, if you're flying that
- 18:43Speaker 1: close to a black hole, you can't claim not to
- 18:45Speaker 1: have seen it because it's going to look pretty big
- 18:47Speaker 1: to flying close to a black hole. Right. Oh yeah,
- 18:50Speaker 1: it's definitely irresponsible space flight in the same way like
- 18:53Speaker 1: you should know if you're about to run out of gas,
- 18:55Speaker 1: and somebody should be paying attention to it, or at
- 18:57Speaker 1: least there should be a warning alarm on your space ship.
- 19:00Speaker 1: Black hole ahead, turn right, use your Z powers now.
- 19:05Speaker 1: But as you said, it doesn't occupy space because it
- 19:07Speaker 1: is an object. It doesn't have less solid surface, and
- 19:10Speaker 1: it's also like moving around in space, right, black holes
- 19:13Speaker 1: can move around in space. Even though their holes in space,
- 19:17Speaker 1: they can move around in space. It's like a moving hole. Yeah,
- 19:20Speaker 1: well they are a thing, right, They are made out
- 19:22Speaker 1: of mass, and so like everything else, they have a location,
- 19:25Speaker 1: and then they can have a velocity. But you know,
- 19:27Speaker 1: the velocity of the black hole is relative, just like
- 19:29Speaker 1: everything else. If you are moving towards a black hole,
- 19:32Speaker 1: you could also say the black hole is moving towards you.
- 19:35Speaker 1: There is no difference in the physics of the universe
- 19:38Speaker 1: in those two pictures, and so black holes, like everything else,
- 19:41Speaker 1: can have location and velocity. Yeah, there could be one
- 19:44Speaker 1: moving towards us right now, right almost definitely, because we
- 19:47Speaker 1: know that there's a supermassive black hole at the heart
- 19:50Speaker 1: of the Andromeda Galaxy which is coming for us. Right
- 19:52Speaker 1: The Andromeda Galaxy is going to collide with the Milky
- 19:55Speaker 1: Way in a few billion years, and so the black
- 19:57Speaker 1: holes at the heart of each galaxy are moving towards
- 20:00Speaker 1: the other galaxy. So, yeah, black holes are headed our way.
- 20:04Speaker 1: Better get working on that Z force, Daniel. We're counting
- 20:07Speaker 1: on you. I only have the P force, the physics force.
- 20:09Speaker 1: Other people have to work on the Z force, or
- 20:11Speaker 1: it could be the W force. For whites and there
- 20:13Speaker 1: you go. I guess the the Andromeda black hole. That's
- 20:16Speaker 1: something we don't want to catch alther if you find
- 20:18Speaker 1: a good container for it. I guess, yeah, maybe you do.
- 20:21Speaker 1: All right, well, let's talk about whether or not a
- 20:23Speaker 1: black hole can be involved in an eclipse, whether it
- 20:26Speaker 1: can eclipse other things, or whether you can eclipse a
- 20:29Speaker 1: black hole. But first let's take a quick break. All right,
- 20:45Speaker 1: we're talking about the physics of Pokemon, right, that's the
- 20:49Speaker 1: title of the episode. That's right, Pokemon characters use physics
- 20:53Speaker 1: on each other. I feel like that would be a
- 20:54Speaker 1: pretty viral title to put on this episode. What do
- 20:57Speaker 1: you think, physics of Pokemon? It might be viral. It
- 20:59Speaker 1: would also be totally misleading, but I guess that's how
- 21:02Speaker 1: everything goes viral. But we could do a whole episode
- 21:04Speaker 1: on this, right, just pick a bunch of Pokemon cars
- 21:06Speaker 1: and we'll break down the physics of their superpowers. Yeah,
- 21:09Speaker 1: le's good like this. Yeah that's totally made up. Yeah
- 21:11Speaker 1: that doesn't where Yeah that's ridiculous, But could it happened?
- 21:15Speaker 1: Aren't there books about the physics of Star Trek and
- 21:17Speaker 1: Star Wars in a multiverse where Pokemon is real, But
- 21:20Speaker 1: we are talking about the powers of one specific Pokemon.
- 21:23Speaker 1: Which Pokemon has this power? Daniel did, did you look
- 21:26Speaker 1: up the name? Well, according to my research, it says
- 21:28Speaker 1: any non mega evolved non primal Pokemon can use black
- 21:33Speaker 1: hole eclipse if it knows a damaging dark type move
- 21:37Speaker 1: and holds darkinium z and if it's trainer where's a
- 21:41Speaker 1: z ring? So if that made sense to you, please
- 21:44Speaker 1: explain it to me. Well, that's a lot of preconditions there,
- 21:48Speaker 1: so any Pokemon that checks those boxes can use it. Yeah,
- 21:51Speaker 1: apparently any non mega evolved non primal Pokemon. I don't
- 21:55Speaker 1: know if there's a lot of them or just one.
- 21:58Speaker 1: We we should you should have interviewed an expert. But anyways,
- 22:00Speaker 1: we're asking the question of whether or not you can
- 22:03Speaker 1: actually eclipse a black hole or I guess involved a
- 22:06Speaker 1: black hole in an eclipse. And you said, Daniels, there's
- 22:08Speaker 1: two possibilities here. You can either eclipse a black hole
- 22:12Speaker 1: or have the black hole eclipse something else. And so
- 22:15Speaker 1: I guess, first of all, Daniel, what's the legal definition
- 22:18Speaker 1: of an eclipse? So an eclipse is a fun astronomical
- 22:20Speaker 1: situation where two things fall along the same line, your
- 22:24Speaker 1: line of sight. So you're looking out into the universe
- 22:27Speaker 1: and you can imagine a line between your eyeball and
- 22:30Speaker 1: some object. If something else passes along that line, then
- 22:34Speaker 1: it has eclipsed whatever you were looking at. So if
- 22:37Speaker 1: you're looking at the Sun not recommended, and the Moon
- 22:40Speaker 1: passes in front of it, then that's a solar eclipse. Right.
- 22:43Speaker 1: The moon is eclipsing the Sun because it's passing along
- 22:47Speaker 1: the line between your eyeball and the Sun. Interesting, so
- 22:51Speaker 1: if a technically, if I put my thumb in front
- 22:53Speaker 1: of me and block out the Sun, I'm creating a
- 22:55Speaker 1: solar eclipse. That's what you're saying. Yeah, I mean your
- 22:59Speaker 1: thumb is not an astronomical object. Have you seen my sun?
- 23:03Speaker 1: It's pretty stiller. It's been a while, So assuming you've
- 23:06Speaker 1: upgraded it with your Z powers, than maybe or his
- 23:09Speaker 1: them can perform in eclipse. One of my favorite things
- 23:12Speaker 1: though about solar eclipses is that they're possible. Right, Like,
- 23:15Speaker 1: the moon can block the Sun in the sky, which
- 23:19Speaker 1: requires not just that the Moon goes in front of
- 23:21Speaker 1: the Sun, but that the Moon is the same size
- 23:24Speaker 1: or bigger than the Sun in the sky. The amazing
- 23:26Speaker 1: thing is that the Moon and the Sun are just
- 23:29Speaker 1: about the same size in our sky, like they can
- 23:31Speaker 1: eclipse each other just about, which is a total cosmic coincidence.
- 23:37Speaker 1: The Moon could have been bigger, or it could have
- 23:38Speaker 1: been further, or it could have been closer. They don't
- 23:41Speaker 1: have to be the same apparent size in the sky,
- 23:43Speaker 1: and yet they are. Yeah, that's a pretty wild coincidence.
- 23:46Speaker 1: Although it is also a function of where we are
- 23:48Speaker 1: right now, right, because eventually the Moon is going to
- 23:51Speaker 1: move further away from Earth and so it will look
- 23:53Speaker 1: smaller than the Sun. Yeah, exactly, it gets smaller and
- 23:56Speaker 1: smaller every year, and before like it maybe increased or
- 24:00Speaker 1: times or millions of years ago, the moon looked bigger
- 24:02Speaker 1: than the Sun during a solar eclipse. Yeah, And the
- 24:04Speaker 1: Sun is also growing in size as it gets older, right,
- 24:08Speaker 1: and pushing out more of its layers further and further.
- 24:11Speaker 1: So the Sun is getting bigger and the Moon is
- 24:13Speaker 1: getting smaller. And it's a really valuable lesson about coincidences.
- 24:17Speaker 1: You know, sometimes we see coincidences out there in the
- 24:19Speaker 1: universe and we go, oh, there must be an explanation
- 24:21Speaker 1: for that, and can't be by chance, But sometimes it is, right.
- 24:25Speaker 1: We don't think there's a reason that the Moon and
- 24:27Speaker 1: the Sun happened to appear to be the same size
- 24:29Speaker 1: in our sky, but it seems like a huge coincidence.
- 24:34Speaker 1: But sometimes they just happen. Yeah, And I guess the
- 24:36Speaker 1: coincidence is that they're almost the same size and from
- 24:40Speaker 1: our point of view and the sky. But it's sort
- 24:41Speaker 1: of not a coincidence that it just happens to fly
- 24:44Speaker 1: in front of the Sun, right, because the Moon is,
- 24:46Speaker 1: you know, spinning around Earth all the time, and we're
- 24:49Speaker 1: spinning around the Sun all the time, and so technically
- 24:52Speaker 1: the Moon kind of sits everywhere at any point in
- 24:55Speaker 1: the sky at some point eventually, right, So it's not
- 24:58Speaker 1: a coincidence that it just happens to line front of
- 25:00Speaker 1: the Sun, that's right. And most of the things in
- 25:02Speaker 1: the Solar System are in the same plane, and so
- 25:04Speaker 1: it's possible for them to line up. If the Moon,
- 25:07Speaker 1: for example, was orbiting the Earth outside the plane of
- 25:10Speaker 1: the Earth's orbit, it would be much harder for it
- 25:12Speaker 1: to eclipse the Sun. But because it moves around in
- 25:14Speaker 1: the same plane than it gets itself between the Earth
- 25:18Speaker 1: and the Sun, and of course it doesn't eclipse the
- 25:20Speaker 1: entire Earth. The Moon casts a shadow on the Earth,
- 25:23Speaker 1: and that shadow moves across the surface of the Earth.
- 25:26Speaker 1: When you're in that shadow, then you can see the eclipse.
- 25:29Speaker 1: And at the same time, there are people who are
- 25:31Speaker 1: not in that shadow who can still see the Sun
- 25:33Speaker 1: sort of around the side of the moon because they
- 25:35Speaker 1: have a different angle. I saw the total eclips back
- 25:37Speaker 1: in two thousand eighteen. Was it? It was pretty awesome event. Yeah,
- 25:40Speaker 1: And there's another one coming up in a in a
- 25:42Speaker 1: year or two. Right. There are a bunch of eclipses
- 25:45Speaker 1: all around the world the next few years, and if
- 25:47Speaker 1: you have the opportunity to see them, I totally encourage you.
- 25:50Speaker 1: Even though it has no deep astronomical significance, is just
- 25:53Speaker 1: sort of like a cool event. It makes you feel
- 25:56Speaker 1: connected to people who have seen these things since prehistoric
- 25:58Speaker 1: times and looked up and wondered, like, WHOA, something is
- 26:01Speaker 1: different about the sky today. I wonder what that means. Yeah,
- 26:04Speaker 1: just like I feel connected to my thumb whenever I
- 26:06Speaker 1: put it in front of the sun. Are there times
- 26:09Speaker 1: you don't feel connected to your thumb. That's what we
- 26:12Speaker 1: should worry about. Sometimes I feel like the thumb is
- 26:17Speaker 1: like we're not connecting into a deep level. You know,
- 26:20Speaker 1: you and your thumb needs to go to therapy. It
- 26:22Speaker 1: sounds like work out these issues. Yeah, yeah, do you
- 26:24Speaker 1: know anyone Maybe there's a good podcast for that. Maybe
- 26:27Speaker 1: I can point you to one I could point off
- 26:30Speaker 1: with my index finger isn't talking to me either, so
- 26:33Speaker 1: there's always a surprise in the podcast. This is the
- 26:35Speaker 1: direction I never would have guessed. Yeah, but it's interesting.
- 26:39Speaker 1: So what do you call a solar eclipse? Is when
- 26:41Speaker 1: something blocks your view of it? Right, Like, you can
- 26:44Speaker 1: also have a moon eclipse, right, the lunar eclipse, Yeah,
- 26:48Speaker 1: that's right. That's when the Earth gets between the Sun
- 26:51Speaker 1: and the Moon, and so the Moon is then blocked
- 26:54Speaker 1: from the Sun by the Earth, and so you can
- 26:56Speaker 1: still see the Moon, but it's sort of like shaded.
- 26:59Speaker 1: It turns a funny color because it's no longer getting
- 27:01Speaker 1: as much direct sunlight because it's in the Earth's shadow.
- 27:05Speaker 1: So basically, eclipses are like when somebody gets into somebody
- 27:07Speaker 1: else's shadow, right, or I guess technically a lunar eclipse
- 27:11Speaker 1: is like an earth eclipse if you were standing on
- 27:13Speaker 1: the moon. Yeah, although if you were in the moon
- 27:14Speaker 1: you would probably call that is solar eclipse, right, because
- 27:17Speaker 1: the Sun would be getting eclipsed. Are you saying it's
- 27:20Speaker 1: all relative, Daniel, It's all relative and the names are
- 27:24Speaker 1: not consistent. That's exactly the lesson of the podcast, all right.
- 27:28Speaker 1: And so it's interesting that you can you can block
- 27:30Speaker 1: out the light from the Sun, but that applies also
- 27:32Speaker 1: to any star, right, Like, you can have eclipses out
- 27:35Speaker 1: there in space with any star, not just our sun.
- 27:37Speaker 1: That's right. Stars out there have their own planets, and
- 27:40Speaker 1: those planets have moons, and so on those planets there
- 27:44Speaker 1: are eclipses happening. Those planets. Moons are blocking that Sun's
- 27:48Speaker 1: light and creating shadows which crawl along the surface of
- 27:50Speaker 1: those planets around other stars, and maybe aliens are looking
- 27:54Speaker 1: up at those and being impressed by the astronomical display.
- 27:58Speaker 1: But we can actually see those eclipses as well, because
- 28:01Speaker 1: sometimes those planets pass in front of their star, blocking
- 28:05Speaker 1: a little bit of the light from that star. So
- 28:08Speaker 1: instead of making a line from your eyeball to our sun, now,
- 28:11Speaker 1: imagine a line from your eyeball to some star far
- 28:15Speaker 1: far away, millions or billions of miles away, and a
- 28:18Speaker 1: planet can pass along that line. Now, because you're so
- 28:21Speaker 1: far away. The planet can't hope to block the entire star,
- 28:25Speaker 1: but what it can do is dim it a tiny
- 28:28Speaker 1: little bit. And that's actually one way that we discover
- 28:31Speaker 1: planets around other stars. We see them making these sort
- 28:34Speaker 1: of many or partial eclipses of their star. Yeah, it's
- 28:38Speaker 1: one way we can detect a planet and other stars.
- 28:42Speaker 1: And in fact, you sort of look for its stars
- 28:44Speaker 1: that twinkle a little bit periodically, right with a constant beat,
- 28:47Speaker 1: and that kind of tells you, hey, maybe it has
- 28:49Speaker 1: a planet swinging around it. Yeah. You study the brightness
- 28:52Speaker 1: of the star and you notice a dimming and it
- 28:54Speaker 1: dims periodically. So it dims for like a few days,
- 28:57Speaker 1: and then it gets bright again for a fixed amount
- 28:59Speaker 1: of days, and then dims again, and it happens periodically,
- 29:02Speaker 1: and that's how you can tell that something is going
- 29:04Speaker 1: in front of it and blocking it, because otherwise stars
- 29:07Speaker 1: can just twinkle and dust clouds can interfere with your observation.
- 29:10Speaker 1: But if it's something regular, then you know that it's
- 29:12Speaker 1: probably something orbiting near the star that's moving around it.
- 29:16Speaker 1: And so it's a really powerful way to discover these
- 29:19Speaker 1: other planets and also to measure their size because the
- 29:23Speaker 1: more dimming you get the bigger the planet is, and
- 29:25Speaker 1: these are always tiny little eclipses. You need really sensitive
- 29:29Speaker 1: telescopes to even notice that these things are dimming. You
- 29:32Speaker 1: could never see this with a naked eye, right, And
- 29:34Speaker 1: so if you see a star out there dimming and
- 29:37Speaker 1: being eclipse regularly, it might be a planet in its orbit.
- 29:40Speaker 1: But it's kind of interesting also to think about that.
- 29:42Speaker 1: You know, there are probably eclips is happening all the
- 29:45Speaker 1: time with all the stars out there, right, Like maybe
- 29:47Speaker 1: even asteroid flies near us, or it gets in our
- 29:50Speaker 1: way between us and another star. Technically that's an eclipse too. Yeah,
- 29:53Speaker 1: that's probably true, And there are eclips is happening that
- 29:56Speaker 1: we can't see, right this technique of seeing these planets
- 29:59Speaker 1: and we're lo eyes on the planet lining up with
- 30:01Speaker 1: our line of sight to that star. There are plenty
- 30:04Speaker 1: of planets out there around stars that are just not
- 30:06Speaker 1: aligned with us. Like we talked about how in our
- 30:09Speaker 1: Solar system, the Moon and the Earth and the Sun
- 30:11Speaker 1: of mostly aligned in the disc of the Solar system.
- 30:13Speaker 1: But the disc of our Solar system is not the
- 30:16Speaker 1: same as the disc of other solar systems. Those are
- 30:18Speaker 1: mostly random. I mean every solar system has its own
- 30:21Speaker 1: disc and the planets mostly follow that disc, but the
- 30:24Speaker 1: arrangement of our disc relative to other Solar System discs
- 30:28Speaker 1: is kind of random, which means that most stars, when
- 30:31Speaker 1: their planets passes in front of them, don't cause an
- 30:33Speaker 1: eclipse that we can see. All right, Well, we're talking
- 30:36Speaker 1: about whether or not you can involve a black hole
- 30:38Speaker 1: in an eclipse, and so Daniel, can can you eclipse
- 30:41Speaker 1: a black hole? Or can a black hole eclipse something else? Yeah,
- 30:44Speaker 1: it's a really fun question. Let's first talk about whether
- 30:47Speaker 1: you can eclipse a black hole. And the very question
- 30:49Speaker 1: is like, well, could you see a black hole anyway? Right? Like, technically,
- 30:53Speaker 1: what does it mean to see a black hole? Like,
- 30:55Speaker 1: even if there was nothing between you and the black hole,
- 30:57Speaker 1: are you actually seeing a hole? Like the whole it
- 31:00Speaker 1: was the absence of something, right, Exactly. A shadow can't
- 31:03Speaker 1: cast a shadow, right in the case of an eclipse
- 31:05Speaker 1: on the Earth, the moon is casting a shadow on
- 31:08Speaker 1: the Earth. But a black hole doesn't give off anything
- 31:11Speaker 1: to create a shadow. And so technically a pure classical
- 31:15Speaker 1: general relativity black hole is completely black. You saw it
- 31:19Speaker 1: out in the middle of space, you would not see
- 31:21Speaker 1: it doesn't give off any light. The only way you
- 31:23Speaker 1: could see it is if it was in front of
- 31:25Speaker 1: something else that was bright. It was like passing in
- 31:28Speaker 1: front of a star and eclipsing it. So a classical
- 31:31Speaker 1: black hole doesn't give off any light. Something could technically
- 31:34Speaker 1: block your view of the black hole, right, Like if
- 31:37Speaker 1: a planet happened to fly between you and the black hole,
- 31:41Speaker 1: you wouldn't see the black hole anymore? Would you call
- 31:44Speaker 1: that an eclipse? That sounds like a legal decision? Mean
- 31:47Speaker 1: the black hole not giving off any light than is
- 31:49Speaker 1: it being eclipsed? Right, And let's say behind the black
- 31:52Speaker 1: hole isn't like a galaxy or something bright or a
- 31:55Speaker 1: cloud of a bright cloud of gas or something, so
- 31:58Speaker 1: you can actually without the planet blocking, you would see
- 32:00Speaker 1: the black hole. But now there's a planet between you
- 32:02Speaker 1: and the black hole, so you don't see the black hole.
- 32:06Speaker 1: And technically it would sort of look like an eclipse, right,
- 32:08Speaker 1: It would be like a black circle getting blocked by
- 32:10Speaker 1: something maybe brighter. Yeah, that's technically possible. But we do
- 32:14Speaker 1: think that black holes do give off a little bit
- 32:17Speaker 1: of radiation in some cases, and the black holes create
- 32:20Speaker 1: an environment that gives off a lot of radiation, a
- 32:23Speaker 1: lot of light. So if you move away from just
- 32:25Speaker 1: like the classical general relativity pure black sphere and talk
- 32:30Speaker 1: about like the quantum version of it, or if you
- 32:32Speaker 1: talk about the stuff around the black hole, in the
- 32:35Speaker 1: environment created by the black hole, then that could be eclipsed, right,
- 32:38Speaker 1: because what stuff falls into the black hole, it tends
- 32:41Speaker 1: to get sped up so fast that it actually burns up.
- 32:44Speaker 1: And then that's right right. So things when they come
- 32:46Speaker 1: near the black hole, they don't always fall right in.
- 32:48Speaker 1: I mean, if your head is straight for the black hole,
- 32:50Speaker 1: you're going into the black hole. But if you sort
- 32:52Speaker 1: of go near the black hole, then you get bent
- 32:54Speaker 1: towards it and you sort of spin around it for
- 32:57Speaker 1: a long time before falling in. And so that's all
- 33:00Speaker 1: the accretion disc. It's like stuff that's on deck to
- 33:03Speaker 1: be sucked into the black hole. And while you're in
- 33:05Speaker 1: the accretion disk, the black hole is still working you.
- 33:08Speaker 1: It's got these tidal forces. It's pulling on the part
- 33:10Speaker 1: that's closer to you harder than the part that's further
- 33:12Speaker 1: from you, because gravity is stronger for closer things, and
- 33:16Speaker 1: so big clouds of gas and dust that are about
- 33:18Speaker 1: to fall into the black hole have a lot of
- 33:20Speaker 1: internal friction because of the black holes tidal forces, so
- 33:23Speaker 1: they get heated up incredibly hot and admit a lot
- 33:26Speaker 1: of radiation, and some stuff almost falls into the black hole,
- 33:30Speaker 1: but the strong magnetic fields like guided around the black
- 33:33Speaker 1: hole and it gets spun out at the top of
- 33:35Speaker 1: the black hole, making these enormous jets of radiation. So
- 33:39Speaker 1: black holes, even though themselves past the event horizon are black,
- 33:43Speaker 1: the stuff around them could actually be very, very bright.
- 33:45Speaker 1: These things quasars are some of the brightest things in
- 33:48Speaker 1: the universe. Yeah, we've had episodes about that. Now. It's
- 33:51Speaker 1: kind of ironic, right that some of the brightest things
- 33:53Speaker 1: in the universe actually come from black holes. Yeah, because
- 33:56Speaker 1: they are the source of a lot of gravitational energy,
- 33:59Speaker 1: so they can speed stuff up, they can focus stuff,
- 34:02Speaker 1: they can shoot stuff in another direction, even though you know,
- 34:05Speaker 1: if they actually ate that stuff up, you would never
- 34:07Speaker 1: see it. But when they're not actually eating stuff, they're
- 34:10Speaker 1: also powering the acceleration of other stuff nearby, which creates
- 34:14Speaker 1: fantastical light shows. And those light shows can be eclipsed
- 34:18Speaker 1: right right, although, as you said earlier, not every black
- 34:21Speaker 1: hole has these light shows, right, Like, there's a whole
- 34:24Speaker 1: range of black holes. There are maybe black holes who
- 34:25Speaker 1: are sitting all by themselves somewhere with nothing around it
- 34:28Speaker 1: to feed it to make it bright. And there are
- 34:30Speaker 1: black holes with huge clouds of stuff that is constantly
- 34:33Speaker 1: falling into the black holes. Yeah, there's a broad diversity
- 34:35Speaker 1: of black holes. The ones with big accretion disks are
- 34:38Speaker 1: the ones that are easier for us to see because
- 34:41Speaker 1: you can see the accretion disk right. Otherwise, it's very
- 34:44Speaker 1: difficult to spot a black hole. You have to see
- 34:46Speaker 1: it passing in front of something else. You have to
- 34:48Speaker 1: see it eclipsing something in order to spot it. Mostly
- 34:51Speaker 1: the way that we've identified black holes is from their
- 34:54Speaker 1: accretion disk or from like the motion of stuff near them,
- 34:57Speaker 1: indicating that there must be something very very heavy but
- 35:00Speaker 1: not right there. Well, I think I see what you're saying. Like,
- 35:02Speaker 1: if you define an eclipse as when you're blocking the
- 35:05Speaker 1: light that's coming from something else, then you sort of
- 35:08Speaker 1: need the situation where the black hole is giving off
- 35:11Speaker 1: light from its incretion disk to have a black hole eclipse. Yeah,
- 35:15Speaker 1: Otherwise you're just having a shadow of a shadow. And
- 35:17Speaker 1: I don't even know what that is, but probably exists
- 35:19Speaker 1: in the Pokemon universe. A shadow of a shadow is
- 35:22Speaker 1: a it's a double shadow, it's a shadow squared. But
- 35:25Speaker 1: I guess you could thankically block the shadow of a shadow, right,
- 35:28Speaker 1: like you could blog looking at the shadow. Yeah, I suppose.
- 35:31Speaker 1: I mean, if you stand in a shadow, do you
- 35:33Speaker 1: still have your own shadow? I don't know. That's a
- 35:35Speaker 1: philosophical question. That's like the sound of one hand clapping. Well,
- 35:39Speaker 1: I guess you need like a third source of light
- 35:41Speaker 1: or something, right, right, Yeah, and then you can also
- 35:43Speaker 1: it's a complicated shadows, but you're saying there's a situation
- 35:46Speaker 1: in which a black hole could have an increation disk
- 35:48Speaker 1: around it, which would make it bright, in which case
- 35:50Speaker 1: something could float between you and it and block your
- 35:52Speaker 1: view of this light source exactly, And that would be
- 35:55Speaker 1: a really powerful way to see interesting things really really
- 35:58Speaker 1: far away. Because black holes are very very bright when
- 36:02Speaker 1: we see them. We can see them in very very distant,
- 36:04Speaker 1: very ancient galaxies. So the very powerful probe of what's
- 36:08Speaker 1: out there in the universe. There's sort of like these
- 36:10Speaker 1: pencil rays of light that shine out into the universe.
- 36:13Speaker 1: We can use them to measure like the density of
- 36:15Speaker 1: stuff along that ray. We once talked about the cosmic
- 36:18Speaker 1: web and how we use these pencil rays of light
- 36:21Speaker 1: from quasars to like illuminate the universe and tell like
- 36:25Speaker 1: where the dark matter is and where these filaments of
- 36:27Speaker 1: gas between the galaxies are super interesting. And when something
- 36:31Speaker 1: else happens to pass in front of that pencil ray
- 36:34Speaker 1: of light in a way that we can see it,
- 36:36Speaker 1: then we can use that to identify something. We can
- 36:38Speaker 1: use that to see something that otherwise would have been
- 36:41Speaker 1: invisible to us. So we can use these eclipses as
- 36:44Speaker 1: ways to find stuff really really far away. Wait wait
- 36:47Speaker 1: you mean, what what does this stuff do well? For example,
- 36:49Speaker 1: the technique we talked about for finding planets around other
- 36:53Speaker 1: stars that mostly only works in our galaxy because the
- 36:56Speaker 1: stars have to be close enough for us to like
- 36:59Speaker 1: resolve a single star and measure its brightness very effectively.
- 37:03Speaker 1: So it's very difficult to see exoplanets in other galaxies
- 37:06Speaker 1: because remember, our galaxies like a hundred thousand light years across.
- 37:09Speaker 1: Other galaxies are like millions of light years away, So
- 37:13Speaker 1: we can't really use that technique to find planets around
- 37:16Speaker 1: stars in other galaxies. But scientists have recently used this
- 37:20Speaker 1: to find planets passing in front of black holes in
- 37:23Speaker 1: other galaxies because black holes are such intense sources of
- 37:27Speaker 1: this kind of radiation whoa, because they act like a
- 37:31Speaker 1: beacon within that other galaxy. But is this a planet
- 37:35Speaker 1: that is part of the black hole system or is
- 37:38Speaker 1: this like a random planet floating around another star that
- 37:40Speaker 1: just happens to ones fly in front of the black hole.
- 37:45Speaker 1: We don't know, and in the case of a recent observation,
- 37:47Speaker 1: the theories that it might be a planet orbiting black
- 37:50Speaker 1: hole with a period of about seventy years, which means
- 37:54Speaker 1: that we wouldn't know for another seventy years because we'd
- 37:57Speaker 1: have to wait that long to see the next eclipse.
- 37:59Speaker 1: If it is in fact orbiting that black hole, it's
- 38:02Speaker 1: just like a random transit, some blob passing in front
- 38:05Speaker 1: of the black hole. Then it won't happen again. But
- 38:07Speaker 1: they actually did see this. They looked out with the
- 38:10Speaker 1: Chandra X ray telescope at a galaxy called the Whirlpool
- 38:14Speaker 1: galaxy and they saw this kind of eclipse, meaning that
- 38:17Speaker 1: we're looking at this galaxy that's far away, and we
- 38:20Speaker 1: think that the light coming from it is a black hole.
- 38:23Speaker 1: That's right. We can zoom in on one part of
- 38:25Speaker 1: that galaxy, and they think that there's a binary system there.
- 38:28Speaker 1: They have like a normal like star and around it
- 38:31Speaker 1: is orbiting a black hole, and the black holes probably
- 38:34Speaker 1: from some other star which collapsed and left a black hole.
- 38:37Speaker 1: So the origin is probably some binary star system. Two
- 38:41Speaker 1: stars orbiting each other, and that's a little bit surprisingly
- 38:44Speaker 1: not uncommon, because stars tend to form near each other.
- 38:46Speaker 1: One of them becomes a black hole. They have this
- 38:48Speaker 1: binary system where the black hole is now like sucking
- 38:52Speaker 1: material from the other star and it generates a very
- 38:55Speaker 1: bright accretion disk. And so from that black hole you
- 38:58Speaker 1: now have this invariant hence source of radiation, and the
- 39:01Speaker 1: telescope consume in on that and see the radiation from
- 39:04Speaker 1: the accretion disc of this black hole as it eats
- 39:07Speaker 1: its sibling. Wait, the black hole is orbiting the Sun.
- 39:11Speaker 1: I guess it. It's it's a smaller mass than the Sun. Well,
- 39:14Speaker 1: the sort of orbiting each other, right, the two both
- 39:17Speaker 1: came from stars, and the black hole doesn't have all
- 39:20Speaker 1: the mass of the original star came from Probably these
- 39:23Speaker 1: two stars started out similar mass, and so more accurately
- 39:27Speaker 1: you would say they orbit each other m And then
- 39:29Speaker 1: on top of that they think that maybe there's a
- 39:32Speaker 1: planet orbiting around the black hole that's orbiting around the
- 39:35Speaker 1: Sun exactly, because the black hole is actually quite small,
- 39:39Speaker 1: it's very compact, and so when this planet passes in
- 39:42Speaker 1: front of the black hole, it actually eclipses a good
- 39:45Speaker 1: fraction of it. We would think about a planet transitting
- 39:47Speaker 1: in front of a star in our galaxy, it's a
- 39:49Speaker 1: tiny little dip in front of that star. But here,
- 39:53Speaker 1: because the accretion disc in the black hole are very compact,
- 39:56Speaker 1: every compressed by gravity, this planet actually blocked most of
- 40:00Speaker 1: the light from the secretion disc as it passed forward.
- 40:03Speaker 1: So you can look at like the brightness of this
- 40:05Speaker 1: black hole over time, and they see this huge dip
- 40:08Speaker 1: as something apparently eclipsed it. It clips the black hole,
- 40:12Speaker 1: lips the black hole. Yeah, but they only saw this once,
- 40:15Speaker 1: or have they seen this periodically. They've only seen it
- 40:18Speaker 1: once and now have a model for this system and
- 40:20Speaker 1: how far aware this plant would have to be and
- 40:22Speaker 1: how big it is, and in that model it takes
- 40:24Speaker 1: about seventy years to orbit this system. But of course
- 40:27Speaker 1: they're not making the grad student wait seventy years to graduate,
- 40:29Speaker 1: although it could have also been like an asteroid passing
- 40:32Speaker 1: in front of the Chindra telescope or something that could
- 40:34Speaker 1: have caused this dip. Right, Yeah, there's a lot of possibilities.
- 40:36Speaker 1: We don't see this thing very directly. We only just
- 40:39Speaker 1: see a dip in this black hole, which we otherwise
- 40:41Speaker 1: can't explain, which means something probably passed in front of
- 40:45Speaker 1: it to block our view. And one hypothesis is a planet,
- 40:49Speaker 1: but we can't tell very precisely. Right, it could have
- 40:51Speaker 1: been somebody's thumb. Maybe did you put your thumb on
- 40:55Speaker 1: Chindre that day? Is that what happened? I don't know.
- 40:59Speaker 1: My son doesn't tell me everything it does. That's the
- 41:01Speaker 1: whole problem. But if it's true, then it's really interesting
- 41:04Speaker 1: because it's the first time we've discovered a planet in
- 41:07Speaker 1: a far away galaxy using this transit technique. Interesting. That's amazing,
- 41:14Speaker 1: and it would be amazing to be on that planet.
- 41:16Speaker 1: Can you imagine living on that planet and having like
- 41:18Speaker 1: not just a sun but a black hole also kind
- 41:21Speaker 1: of like sunrising and sunsetting every day and seeing the
- 41:25Speaker 1: black hole eat your sun. Right, That sun gets dimmer
- 41:28Speaker 1: and dimmer every year as the black hole pulls the
- 41:31Speaker 1: material out of it. Wow, that'd be a pretty amazing
- 41:33Speaker 1: view when you look up from that planet. I wonder
- 41:36Speaker 1: if that's where Pokemon out from, that's where they get
- 41:39Speaker 1: their Z power from the view. It's so amazing. Alright, Well,
- 41:44Speaker 1: we've seen a black hole get eclipse, and there are
- 41:47Speaker 1: other examples of that, and there's also the reverse situation
- 41:50Speaker 1: of whether or not a black hole can eclip something else.
- 41:53Speaker 1: So let's get into those. But first let's take another
- 41:56Speaker 1: quick break. All right, we're talking about black hole eclipses,
- 42:11Speaker 1: whether or not you can eclipse a black hole or
- 42:14Speaker 1: whether a black hole can eclip something else. And it
- 42:16Speaker 1: turns out that yes, you can eclipse a black hole.
- 42:18Speaker 1: We've seen it. We have data from a black hole
- 42:20Speaker 1: being eclipse out there in another galaxy. That's right. Even
- 42:23Speaker 1: though black holes are super powerful in the real world
- 42:26Speaker 1: and in Pokemon, you can just stand in front of
- 42:29Speaker 1: them and block their light. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. We
- 42:31Speaker 1: have data from that. And you said there's another example
- 42:34Speaker 1: of a black hole eclipse that we've seen. That's right.
- 42:36Speaker 1: There's a really cool galaxy about sixty million light years away.
- 42:40Speaker 1: It goes by the exciting name of n GC, and
- 42:44Speaker 1: it's exciting because it has a very active galactic nucleus.
- 42:48Speaker 1: This is what astronomers say when they mean that there's
- 42:50Speaker 1: a big black hole at the heart of it, and
- 42:53Speaker 1: it's very powerful and it's shooting a lot of stuff out.
- 42:55Speaker 1: So if you imagine a galaxy is like a big
- 42:58Speaker 1: flat disc of stuff, maybe with arms trailing behind it.
- 43:02Speaker 1: Now add to that huge jets of stuff shooting up
- 43:05Speaker 1: and down sort of from the middle of that disk.
- 43:08Speaker 1: So the galaxy is no longer just like flat. It
- 43:10Speaker 1: now has like an axle around which it's spinning. And
- 43:13Speaker 1: so we've seen this galaxy and and has something eclipses. Yeah,
- 43:16Speaker 1: astronomers were really curious about what was going on in
- 43:19Speaker 1: the heart of that galaxy, and they wanted to know
- 43:21Speaker 1: how big was the black hole and how big was
- 43:22Speaker 1: the active part of it, this sort of like really
- 43:25Speaker 1: intense part of the center of the galaxy. How big
- 43:28Speaker 1: is that accretion disk. Problem is that the galaxy is
- 43:31Speaker 1: so far away that it's really hard to measure that.
- 43:34Speaker 1: Like we've taken pictures of black holes and their acreation disks,
- 43:37Speaker 1: but it's very very difficult, and for this galaxy, it's
- 43:39Speaker 1: too far away for us to even use the event
- 43:41Speaker 1: horizon telescope. So they were trying to figure out how
- 43:44Speaker 1: big this thing was. And then they got lucky. They
- 43:47Speaker 1: got lucky because a big cloud of gas, when they
- 43:50Speaker 1: already knew and they had studied before, passed in front
- 43:53Speaker 1: of the black hole and eclipsed it. Because they knew
- 43:56Speaker 1: how big this cloud was and how fast it was going,
- 43:59Speaker 1: they were able to use that to measure the size
- 44:02Speaker 1: of the black hole accretion disc itself. Wait, what so
- 44:06Speaker 1: there was a black hole in another galaxy far waing
- 44:09Speaker 1: and a gas cloud within that galaxy pass in front
- 44:13Speaker 1: of it, or between us and that other galaxy. The
- 44:15Speaker 1: gas cloud is part of that other galaxy. You know, Oh,
- 44:18Speaker 1: I see? And how do we know how big that
- 44:20Speaker 1: gas cloud was? Because it's so far away. It's so
- 44:22Speaker 1: far away, but it's really big. And so they were
- 44:24Speaker 1: able to measure the size of this gas cloud. It's
- 44:26Speaker 1: much bigger than the black hole, but it's big enough
- 44:29Speaker 1: to see with the telescopes. It's big enough to see. You.
- 44:32Speaker 1: We can see other galaxies and we can see individual
- 44:34Speaker 1: components of it. We can't always resolve things as small
- 44:37Speaker 1: as stars, but big gas clouds we can resolve. And
- 44:41Speaker 1: so the cloud eclipse the black hole in the middle
- 44:44Speaker 1: or the quasar in in the middle, like it blocked
- 44:46Speaker 1: it completely or it just made it kind of fuzzy
- 44:48Speaker 1: for a while. It blocked it almost completely. I mean,
- 44:51Speaker 1: some light can get through it at some wavelengths. But
- 44:54Speaker 1: you can see definitely the dramatic dimming of this black
- 44:57Speaker 1: hole because this cloud passes in front of the accretion disk,
- 45:01Speaker 1: and so as it passes in front of one side
- 45:03Speaker 1: of the acreation disc, it starts to dim. And then
- 45:05Speaker 1: if it's totally blocking the disk, then you get the
- 45:07Speaker 1: minimum brightness. And then as it starts to reveal the
- 45:10Speaker 1: accretion disc again, the light comes back up. And so
- 45:13Speaker 1: from the size of the gas cloud and the speed
- 45:16Speaker 1: and with the gas cloud was moving, you can figure
- 45:18Speaker 1: out the size of the accretion disk, which is what
- 45:20Speaker 1: the astronomers are really curious to know. Interesting, So these
- 45:24Speaker 1: are recorded instances of black hole eclipses, Like you could
- 45:27Speaker 1: be the astronomer that saw a black hole eclip. Yeah, exactly.
- 45:32Speaker 1: And these are lucky coincidences, right, just like the Sun
- 45:35Speaker 1: and the moon lining up. In the case that these
- 45:37Speaker 1: things line up in the sky, we can use that
- 45:39Speaker 1: to learn something about these systems. We're always taking an
- 45:42Speaker 1: advantage of what's going on in the universe. Astronomers never
- 45:45Speaker 1: get to like build experiments and say what happens if
- 45:48Speaker 1: I crash these two things together, or if I pass
- 45:50Speaker 1: this in front of the other thing. They have to
- 45:52Speaker 1: just be clever in other ways of saying, well, I
- 45:55Speaker 1: didn't get to design this situation, but what can I
- 45:57Speaker 1: do to learn about the universe? Frum it anyway, And
- 46:01Speaker 1: so I love seeing astronomers be clever this way and
- 46:03Speaker 1: figure out, like how to use the lucky lining up
- 46:06Speaker 1: of these two objects to learn something about them. And
- 46:08Speaker 1: in this case, I used the gas cloud to learn
- 46:11Speaker 1: about the size of this black hole. What did they
- 46:12Speaker 1: learn about it? So they learned the size not just
- 46:15Speaker 1: to the black hole, but also the disc around it, right,
- 46:17Speaker 1: because it's the disc around it, the accretion disc that
- 46:19Speaker 1: really is generating that radiation. So they learned that this
- 46:22Speaker 1: disc is about seven a U wide, where a us
- 46:25Speaker 1: the distance from the Earth to the Sun. And so
- 46:28Speaker 1: if you put this thing in our solar system and
- 46:30Speaker 1: you extend out past the Earth's orbit and out past Mars,
- 46:34Speaker 1: so this thing is really pretty big. Wait, we can
- 46:36Speaker 1: measure the size of the cloud before, but we couldn't
- 46:39Speaker 1: measure the size of the black hole. Yeah, and the
- 46:40Speaker 1: cloud is bigger than the black hole, so we were
- 46:42Speaker 1: able to resolve it all right. Well, the final question
- 46:45Speaker 1: is whether a black hole could eclipse something else. Like
- 46:49Speaker 1: if there's a star or a sun out there and
- 46:51Speaker 1: a black hole pass in between it and us, would
- 46:54Speaker 1: it create an eclipse? That would be pretty dramatic, wouldn't it.
- 46:57Speaker 1: That would be pretty dramatic, But it's almost impossible. If
- 47:00Speaker 1: somebody standing on the other side of a black hole
- 47:03Speaker 1: and like turning on and off a flashlight, then a
- 47:06Speaker 1: lot of those photons would get to you anyway. Remember
- 47:09Speaker 1: that space around the black hole is really really curved,
- 47:12Speaker 1: so light doesn't always travel in straight lines. So light
- 47:15Speaker 1: that comes out from their flashlight that wouldn't otherwise get
- 47:17Speaker 1: to your eye gets bent by the black hole towards
- 47:20Speaker 1: your eye. So the black hole would eat some of
- 47:23Speaker 1: the photons from the flashlight, but other photons that were
- 47:26Speaker 1: going in other directions would get bent towards your eyeball,
- 47:29Speaker 1: so you would still see it. Right, Like if a
- 47:32Speaker 1: black hole just happened to fly into our solar system
- 47:34Speaker 1: and get between us and the Sun, it wouldn't totally
- 47:37Speaker 1: block the Sun. It would only block some of it. Yeah, Like,
- 47:41Speaker 1: if somebody stood on the other side of a black
- 47:42Speaker 1: hole with a laser of single photons, they could shoot
- 47:45Speaker 1: them at the black hole and you would eat them
- 47:47Speaker 1: and you wouldn't see it. But if their source has
- 47:49Speaker 1: any sort of width to it, if the photons come
- 47:51Speaker 1: out at any sort of angle, then some of those
- 47:53Speaker 1: are going to get bent around the black hole and
- 47:56Speaker 1: towards your eye. We see the same thing happening actually
- 47:59Speaker 1: already with the moon the Desiginstein's famous proof of general
- 48:02Speaker 1: relativity that space is curved by mass, because he showed
- 48:06Speaker 1: that photons from the Sun don't always get blocked by
- 48:09Speaker 1: the Moon. The Moon bends them around itself a tiny
- 48:12Speaker 1: little bit. The Moon is lensing the light from the
- 48:15Speaker 1: Sun a little bit, and a black hole would be
- 48:17Speaker 1: a very very powerful gravitational lens. So it's almost impossible
- 48:21Speaker 1: to hide behind a black hole, right, you're saying, like,
- 48:24Speaker 1: because the Moon is almost the same size as the
- 48:26Speaker 1: Sun and the sky, it doesn't totally block the Sun
- 48:29Speaker 1: because some of the light kind of flows around the
- 48:32Speaker 1: Moon and gets to us anyway. But if the Moon
- 48:34Speaker 1: was bigger, right, and the sky might like ten times
- 48:37Speaker 1: bigger than the Sun. It would almost totally blocked the Sun, right, Yeah, exactly.
- 48:41Speaker 1: Although the Moon was more massive than it would be
- 48:44Speaker 1: more effective at bending some of the Sun's light towards us.
- 48:47Speaker 1: And so there's two different effects going on there. And
- 48:49Speaker 1: so something is very small, like a black hole and
- 48:52Speaker 1: very very dense, it's going to be excellent at gathering
- 48:55Speaker 1: light that otherwise wouldn't have gone to you and sending
- 48:57Speaker 1: it your direction. So what would we see if a
- 49:00Speaker 1: black hole stood between us and our son. We would
- 49:02Speaker 1: see like a black circle with a bright ring around it, right,
- 49:06Speaker 1: and then that ring would sort of merge with the
- 49:10Speaker 1: Sun and kind of distort the light around it, and
- 49:13Speaker 1: then they would block the Sun, and then it would
- 49:16Speaker 1: keep going. Yeah exactly. It would look really weird and awesome.
- 49:20Speaker 1: It reminds me actually of a great science fiction book
- 49:22Speaker 1: I read, Paraheli In by Greg Egan. He talks about
- 49:25Speaker 1: what happens when a black hole enters our solar system,
- 49:28Speaker 1: and it's not something you should look forward to because
- 49:30Speaker 1: it would disrupt everything in the solar system even before
- 49:33Speaker 1: it made an impressive distortion of the Sun's light. Would
- 49:36Speaker 1: be bad news, but let's say it was a really
- 49:38Speaker 1: big black hole. It would totally eclipse our sun, right,
- 49:41Speaker 1: or we we still see all of the light from
- 49:43Speaker 1: the sun. We wouldn't, right, We would only see some
- 49:46Speaker 1: of the light from the sun get bent around the
- 49:48Speaker 1: black hole, but mostly it would be blocked. We wouldn't
- 49:50Speaker 1: see all of the light from the sun because photons
- 49:53Speaker 1: shot directly towards the center of the black hole would
- 49:56Speaker 1: still fall into the black hole, but photons shot in
- 49:58Speaker 1: other directions would get bent around it. To us, well,
- 50:01Speaker 1: there would be a range, right, wouldn't there be a range? Like,
- 50:04Speaker 1: It's not just the ones directly to the center of
- 50:06Speaker 1: the black hole and the ones a little bit off
- 50:08Speaker 1: to the side also get sucked into the black hole. Yeah,
- 50:11Speaker 1: the bigger the black hole, or the closer you are
- 50:13Speaker 1: to it, the sort of the wider range of photons
- 50:16Speaker 1: that do fall into the black hole. But also the
- 50:18Speaker 1: more powerful the black hole, the more it's able to
- 50:20Speaker 1: bend other photons around it so that you can see it.
- 50:24Speaker 1: And have we seen an example of this, I guess
- 50:27Speaker 1: we kind of have, right, I mean, we've taken pictures
- 50:30Speaker 1: of black holes, right, we have pictures of black holes,
- 50:33Speaker 1: and presumably there are stars behind the black hole that
- 50:36Speaker 1: we're not seeing because they're getting blocked by this black hole.
- 50:40Speaker 1: I don't know that we've seen that directly. We've discovered
- 50:42Speaker 1: smaller black holes because of their gravitational effects on the
- 50:45Speaker 1: nearby stars. Like if you see a star and it's
- 50:48Speaker 1: moving in such a way that you can tell it's
- 50:50Speaker 1: orbiting something, but you don't see the thing there, then
- 50:53Speaker 1: you deduce that there's probably a black hole there, even
- 50:56Speaker 1: if you don't see it. I don't know if we've
- 50:57Speaker 1: seen direct lensing of background stuff from a tellar mass
- 51:00Speaker 1: black hole. Well, I guess if we have a picture
- 51:02Speaker 1: of a black hole, technically it was blocking something behind it, right,
- 51:06Speaker 1: assuming there was something behind it, then yeah, it's getting blocked. Yeah, well,
- 51:09Speaker 1: technically there that has to be something behind it, doesn't there.
- 51:12Speaker 1: I mean, it's not like they're it's totally empty space
- 51:14Speaker 1: behind it, right, Yeah, there's always background galaxies no matter
- 51:17Speaker 1: how far you look. All right, Well, I think your
- 51:19Speaker 1: point is that it's complicated, right, because black holes bend
- 51:22Speaker 1: space so much that it and they act like lenses
- 51:25Speaker 1: out there in space that it's it's kind of a
- 51:27Speaker 1: complicated situation to have a black hole block something else. Yeah,
- 51:31Speaker 1: black holes are great at bending light and eating photons,
- 51:34Speaker 1: but they're also great at showing you what's behind them. Yeah,
- 51:36Speaker 1: but definitely, for sure, we've seen things block black holes
- 51:40Speaker 1: from our view. It's just that the situation is more
- 51:42Speaker 1: complicated for a black hole blocking our view of something else. Yeah, exactly.
- 51:46Speaker 1: All right, Well, I think the main lesson is Pokemon
- 51:48Speaker 1: is right. I think that's what you're seeing, right, that's right.
- 51:52Speaker 1: You don't need a physics degree. You just invest your
- 51:54Speaker 1: college savings in Pokemon. That's right. Just catch them all
- 51:57Speaker 1: and you can't retired to that tropical island or at
- 52:01Speaker 1: least pay for your son's college. It kind of caused
- 52:03Speaker 1: the same these days, does cause the same. Maybe you'll
- 52:06Speaker 1: get a PhD in Pokemon. I think there are pro
- 52:09Speaker 1: hard people getting their PhDs on the cultural impact of Pokemon.
- 52:13Speaker 1: I'm sure you can get a PhD on anything, exactly.
- 52:16Speaker 1: Everybody can get a PhD. Al right, Well, I guess
- 52:19Speaker 1: the next time you look out into the night sky
- 52:21Speaker 1: or even the daytime sky, imagine that there are black
- 52:24Speaker 1: holes out there being eclipse and also eclipsing our view
- 52:27Speaker 1: of the universe. Because the universe is full of all
- 52:29Speaker 1: these amazing objects and be impressed by how astronomers are
- 52:32Speaker 1: taking an advantage of coincidences and happenstands out there in
- 52:36Speaker 1: the universe to teach us lessons, to reveal the nature
- 52:39Speaker 1: of the mysteries of our cosmos. That's right. The main
- 52:42Speaker 1: lesson here is don't put your thumb down on physics.
- 52:45Speaker 1: Give it those thumbs up. Yeah, two thumbs up to astronomy.
- 52:47Speaker 1: All right. We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us,
- 52:50Speaker 1: See you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that
- 53:00Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is a production of
- 53:03Speaker 1: I Heart Radio. For more podcast from my Heart Radio,
- 53:06Speaker 1: visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
- 53:10Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows. Ye