How Do Black Holes Fit the Young-earth Creation Perspective? - Dr. Danny Faulkner (Conf Lecture)

well welcome i'm going to talk here today about things that go bump in the night and more specifically about black holes dark matter and dark energy these are topics that i've found a lot of creationist recent creationists have doubts about and i think some of the doubts that real founded i'll try to go through the the science here and go with it with that through you through this with you and so you can perhaps understand better why i think i'm pretty excited about some of these topics i'll spend most of my time talking about black holes probably half the time a bit less time talking about dark matter and only a little bit of time toward the end talking about dark energy so the big question is do these things exist after all black holes don't give off any light dark matter by definition doesn't give off any light dark energy well you get the trend going on here these things are not visible so people sometimes argue say well we don't see these things you know seeing is believing so if you can't see them well maybe they don't don't exist another another tact that's taken was that many creationists get the impression that these things were hypothesized solely to salvage evolutionary ideas you know black holes were invented so because evolution was in trouble without black holes you got to have it and dark energy dark matter those were invented to save the big bang theory or whatever and you have to invent that to to to to salvage all of that well i won't deny that there's a component there but i think it's putting the cart before the horse we have to understand the history of these things and where they came from and then how people decided to use those so to the question do these things exist well there are a lot of things i think you believe in that you don't exist like for instance you all believe in electrons who's ever seen an electron no one's ever seen an electron but yet we believe they exist uh you ever you ever seen the wind sometimes my wife will look out the window look at the wind i'll say uh i don't see any wind i see trees doing like this you know but i don't see any wind you know you can't see it can you see the air well if you can see the air it's not a good thing all right okay you can't see air it's transparent there are plenty of things we believe in but we without seeing them we can see the effects of them and this indicates oftentimes in science that our evidence is indirect many times it's very indirect on these things okay what about the suggestion that they're hypothesized to salvage evolutionary ideas the confusion is here is that many popular discussions of these topics of black holes or dark matter are thrown into the discussion of how stars evolve how galaxies form how the big bang happened and so they're discussed within the context of what we patently recognize as evolutionary ideas and apparently people can't separate out the two i'll give you an example right here how often do you hear antibiotic resistance discussed in terms of evolution many times i've heard i've heard radio programs and discussions where people say well how do we know evolution is true we see it all the time antibiotic resistance a perfect example of evolution taking place for our eyes case close everybody go home evolution's true well turns out there's a creationary explanation for antibiotic resistance it has nothing to do with evolution it's that we can explain that totally apart from any true evolutionary changes so we're going to be very careful just because people talk about evolutionary ideas doesn't mean in conjunction with something doesn't mean that we simply say well it doesn't exist we'd be consistent we'd say well antibiotic resistance isn't true it doesn't happen well we know better than that what we need to do and i'm going to try to walk you through this today is to separate the physical data from the speculation that oftentimes is associated with discussion of these measures these things let me uh step back a minute how do we measure mass what is mass first of all mass is material okay it's a measure how much it's a measurement how much matter that you have right that's basically what it is and how do we usually measure mass well we do it by gravitational attraction don't we uh some of you uh each morning may or each evening may measure your your mass by stepping on the scales and when you do that you're technically not measuring your your mass you're measuring your weight which is a force of gravity so as long as the earth's mass hasn't changed overnight and the fundamental constant of gravity has not changed overnight then we're pretty safe in saying that if your mass is if your weights change your mass has changed hey uh but if i gain weight if i don't like it i can just simply blame the earth or blame the universe i didn't change they were everything else changed not me and it you could defend that position maybe not very well but you could defend that position out there well um in astronomy it's kind of difficult to get a a star to step on some scales all right so but what we do instead we we look at orbital motion we have two that's reason why we do binary stars we have these two stars orbiting each other presumably under mutual gravity and i'm measuring their weight at that point and by a little conversion i can convert that weight just like we a little more difficult what we do on the earth here well i can convert that weight into a mass pretty directly and so we can measure the masses of things in binary stars for instance well i've got a little graphic here showing you a binary star in orbit going around like that and i've sped it up tremendously of course you've got two stars normally you wouldn't see the two stars individually because they're too close together and too far away notice that one of them is a little larger and it's blue that means it's a hotter star and there's another star that's kind of red and as we're looking at it most of the time we see the light of both stars don't we but occasionally one star will pass behind the other like right now the the smaller one in front of the now the smaller one goes behind front behind front behind we call these transit and occultations this is an occultation this is a transit occultation transit all depends which one larger is in the front which one's in the back now across the bottom they show the integrated light that you get and outside of eclipse you see the light of both stars the light is brighter but when you go into eclipse the light dips and it dips again and the deeper eclipse is on the right side that's called the primary eclipse and that occurs when the hotter star is eclipsed and the secondary eclipse is shallower it occurs when the cooler stars eclipse because the amount of area blocked off is the same in either case but the temp the luminosity goes the fourth power of the temperature so the hotter stars always as eclipsed at the primary eclipse you'd be amazed how many indirectly astronomy textbooks get that wrong it's the hotter star in every case well this is an not a terribly interesting system because these stars are spherical and stars generally are spherical because it's the minimum shape that gravity will pull them into but the kind of stars i look at typically are close together and when they're close together they tidally distort each other the stars are not spheres anymore there's kind of a bold sticking out on either one of them they can get so close together that mass can actually slop from one star to the other that's when it gets really interesting because we can actually see these things developing with time let me show you a little more realistic situation this is where the blue star is more mass than the other one and so it has stronger gravity and it's tightly distorted the its companion the red star it's no longer shaped like a sphere's got kind of like a cam shape spun in a third direction there and notice there's like a little halo little blue light blue thing around the equator of the hotter star the blue star and that's what we call an accretion disk a creation disk because matter accretes onto it because matter is transferring from one star to the other the the gravitational pull of the the blue stars more massive star is so great that it pulls matter off of the cooler star the less massive star but because of angular momentum the mass can't fall directly onto the blue star instead instead it it falls into a kind of a holding tank a disc of material around it and that material is a gas it's got viscous losses frictional losses and so as it does that it loses orbital energy and slowly spirals down to the to the planets that's kind of like a holding tank and you'll see what it does these different shapes of the stars and everything will kind of whack out the eclipse curves and they have a very different shape than before and the kind of stars i look at are like this 40 years ago i first got into this we saw light curves like that we just got out our crucifixes that was just really bad but now we have these great models that were being developed back then uh we can actually apply them all this is the piece of cake now we the other ones are yawners we're even looking for asymmetries the curves are kind of whacked out like this because it indicates hot and dark spots and we model this stuff all the time it's pretty easy but 40 years ago it was just in its beginnings of all of this so we like these kind of systems now my research partners and i do so it's a cool sort of thing to do and by the way accretion disks are not just some wild ideas we actually have good evidence that accretion disks often occur in interacting binaries hundreds maybe thousands of examples i published a paper i was a co-author in a paper 30 years ago where we had simultaneous observations spectroscopy spectroscopically and photometrically i was doing the photometric one about 30 miles away from the other observatory simultaneously at the same time looking at these things so accretion disk well understood phenomenon in eclipsing binary stars it's been been known for decades well understood science okay what about black holes first of all what is a black hole well it's a massive object for which the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light what do we mean by escape velocity well if you take an object say a rock or a baseball and you throw it up in the air it goes up it falls back down if you throw it harder it goes up higher it's in the air longer but it comes back down if you keep throwing it harder and harder and harder faster velocity you eventually reach a point where the thing will go up and it will just be loose to the earth's gravity and never come back down that speed for the earth is called the escape velocity it's about seven miles per second 11 kilometers per second or about 25 000 miles per hour now we've got some good baseball pitchers like gerald's chapman who can throw pretty fast but he can't throw nearly that fast so all of his pitches are coming right back again but if you can launch things that fast they can we went to the moon with the apollo astronauts indeed we did 20 45 years ago they had to launch them up to 25 000 miles an hour just to get out of the earth's breakers orbit to get out to the to the to the moon that's called the escape velocity well obviously if our escape with velocity from the earth is seven miles per second the speed of light is 286 282 miles per second we're not even close to being a black hole you might think that black holes are kind of modern but it turns out they were first hypothesized by a guy named john mitchell way back in 1783 over three uh 230 years ago was a first discussion now he didn't call it a black hole what he did is he asked the question well how small would the sun have to be in order for it to be a bla to for light itself not being able to escape and it was astounded just a few miles across the sun is nearly a million miles across so the sun's not even close and then the famous french mathematician laplace a few a decade later addressed it more fully he actually did a better treatment than mitchell did mitchell just the first guy that did it in laplace more more deeply and it kind of sat there for much of 150 plus years it was until the 1960s that people began to look at it in more depth in fact the term black hole was coined in the early 60s i think around 1963 or 64 was the first terminology and a lot of things started coming together in the 60s by the end of the 60s we had actually started finding evidence that black holes might exist well how might you do that well suppose you have a black hole with a with an accretion disk it's got taking matter it could be from a companion star it could just be a matter nearby that's being pulled in by this thing now the black hole is not that black ball at the center of that disc the black hole is actually well inside of that disc okay it's a tiny little thing inside of there and you've got this disc of material and it's falling inward you get this you get these frictional losses which uh you know when you take friction like i'm rubbing my hands together they get warm you uh rob orbital energy and you turn it into thermal energy or heat but as you rob the orbital energy it falls inward and so as the star stuff falls inward it gets hotter and hotter the outer portion of that disc is kind of red and then yellow and then white you're getting the higher and higher and higher and higher temperatures as you fall down towards what's called the event horizon which kind of is the boundary of this black hole you can heat that gas up to very high temperatures like a million kelvin now getting a million kelvin temperature of a lot of gas is a hard thing to do there's a corona around the sun that's that high but it's very tenuous so it gives off a little bit of x-rays but not much you have to be close to it to detect it but in the case of the secretion disc it's a lot denser than that and so you have copious amounts of x-rays so you look for x-rays coming from sources in the sky like this unfortunately for astronomy you have to get above the earth's atmosphere to do this because the atmosphere blocks it fortunately for life it blocks it because otherwise it would kill us all right so it's good we have this atmosphere good for living things bad for astronomy but hey we've got rockets okay not a problem we can get above the earth's atmosphere in my lifetime to do this kind of work and open up a whole new area of astronomy we didn't have before now also black holes we believe have very strong magnetic fields associated with them and you have charged particles here because you're moving very quickly because you've ionized this gas when it gets heated this much these fast moving charged particles interact with this magnetic field in a complex way and it can cause a jet of two jets of matter and radiation to emit usually perpendicular to the to the plane of the accretion disk and that's what these two uh things with this blue and the spirally looking lines or this artist's conception are showing you i want to be very clear about something none of this radiation or matter is coming from inside the black hole it's coming from a region just outside the black hole i think sometimes when i give a presentation this people don't understand that they think it's coming out of the black hole it's not it's coming from a region just above the event horizon but it's caused by these interactions fast-moving charged particles and the strong magnetic field do we see things like this well actually this is an artist's conception but in the upper left corner is a radio image made from radio telescopes we think we see a disc there from the accretion material falling in and then there's a jet sticking up sometimes you don't see both jets and then just see one jet that's actual data up there the object is gb 1508 plus 5714. you've heard of that one right i'm not sure what the gb uh stands for i have to look that up but the again the 1508 where it gives its right ascension in the sky it's like longitude and the other the plus 5714 that's the uh declination or like latitude 57 degrees 14 minutes that's how we catalog these things and again i have to look up gb and see what that means all right types of black holes well we've classified these a number of ways we have what are called micro black holes these would be very very small they may not be stable probably those really small ones would pop out of existence pretty quickly then we have what are called stellar black holes and that typically be between three and 20 solar masses i put a check mark next to it because i think we have good data that stellar size black holes probably exist and then we have what are called intermediate-sized black holes these would have thousands of solar masses yeah i think i mentioned on my talks the other day that i'm real good at coming up with ideas only to find out that i'm a few years late on getting them and about i don't know in the last eight or ten years i thought about intermediate black holes i thought well i kind of thought well why don't why couldn't these things exist well i started doing a literature search and sure enough people were already talking about them i i independently came up with it but behind everybody else had already done it i'm not in this field so i don't keep up that much up with it but kind of nice that i anticipated what other people had already it makes me feel like i'm thinking the right way at least if i'm even if i'm a little behind everybody the by the way in the last year or so they've actually put forward now some potential candidates of intermediate-sized black holes so uh that's interesting that's really interesting but i won't put a check mark next to it because it's still pretty tentative but then i'll put a check marks next to this we think there are supermassive black holes these have millions of times the mass of a star of the sun and we believe that these are lurking at the cores of of uh most galaxies including the milky way there's a really massive super super massive black hole to the center of a milky way so you can understand why we have these different ranges here and we only have data to support two of them the stellar and the super massive let me continue on let's suppose we have a binary star here one is a black hole and one is a normal star the black hole again is at the center of that disk you've got an accretion disc where's the matter coming from we are tightly distorting and pulling matter off the companion star it's a normal star and that matter comes in as a bright spot on the disc where the matter from the incoming from the other star smacks into that that accretion disk and as it orbits around viscous losses friction losses cause it to spiral in heating up all the way so the inner part of that disc is going to give copious amounts of x-rays off and then you get this possibly a jet or two coming off perpendicular this thing so we can look for those jets maybe more likely we should look for those of x-ray sources particularly if they're in a binary star system that would help out a lot and we have found such things so the best detection for stellar black holes is in close binary stars that way you have you have material being fed to it all the time if it's an isolated one but detection is going to be a little trickier and the other companion fills what's called the roche lobe a mathematician named roche came up with this it's a gravitational equal potential surface and if the star expands outward to fill that up that means that material on that outer surface is free to kind of float around and even go through from one star to the other that's how it feeds that mechanism of feeding material from one star to the other so it's not a matter of just not a matter of the the gravitational force pulling it off but it as the other star swells fills its roche lobe and then it gets pulled off at that point we call this mass transfer matter transferring from one star to the other and mass transfer is something we believe we've observed many times in normal stars the kind of stars i look at i don't do black holes but the physics is the same the binary stars the same sort of principles going on i see mass transfer why can't we see mass transfer in these the matter as i said falls into the accretion disk settles there as a holding tank for a while and it says in physics anybody here study physics much we have what's called a steep gravitational potential well you've got this function that goes way down like this and as it does it liberates that gravitational potential energy it has to go into kinetic energy and then it gets we say it gets thermalized it's a orbital motion which is very ordered but then because of frictional losses viscous losses you rob that orbital energy but it has to go somewhere it goes into random motion of the particles involved and that is randomizing or thermalizing the motion you realize if you take a glass of water and you take a spoon and you stir it like this real fast vigorously you pull the spoon out the water continues to spin around for a moment then after a while that spinning stops and it just seems to stop again well what happened to that motion you can't destroy energy there's energy of motion there what's happened is through random collisions you randomize that motion and we say we thermalize it it turns out you've raised the temperature that water just a little bit guy william prescott jewel in the 19th century actually rigged up an experiment with water swirling around and he was able to show the mechanical equivalent of thermal energy that it actually is the energy of motion the sort of thing you learn in grade school science he confirmed 150 years ago in this experiment so it's a randomization of the motion we thermalize we turn it into heat we say so it becomes very hot and if it gets hot enough it produces x-rays and x-rays are very hard to to produce in copious amounts and again here's another example of an x-ray binary you got the disc the jets that black hole the center and material being pulled off on the accretion disk feeding the black hole black coal gains as the gains matter it uh continues to get to get bigger by the way the there's kind of a tricky quirky transfer what's going on as some of the matter falls in it liberates energy which powers those jets it's the magnetic field doing it but it's a it's it's trading off energy some falls in some it's an engine it's basically an engine it's a throwing matter in the inside that that furnace of the black hole to power those jets to make it happen okay we go out there we look for x-ray binaries discovered by x-ray satellites and other above atmosphere earth's terrestrial atmosphere experiments and since they are binary stars we can solve for the mass that's the whole point it's like asking getting back to my point probably thought what was the point of what i said about asking stars to step on scales well if we have binary star we're looking at orbital energy or orbital motion we're looking at gravity we can from newton's law of gravity we can figure out how much mass is involved typically when we do this we get the mass not of the black hole but of the whole system the black hole and its companion star so you get the mass together of the two you might think well you don't know the mass of the black hole yet do you well yes but we oftentimes we can infer what the mass of the companion star is if it's a main sequence star we definitely can because we know the masses of main sequence stars so all you have to do is subtract the mass of the visible star that we can see and actually characterize and get infer its mass from what we know about stellar astronomy and then subtract that from the total mass and what remains must be the mass of the object we're not seeing now i've got to put a little caveat in here i'm going to switch terminology i'm not going to talk about a black hole right now i'm going to call it a compact object a compact object is of just what the name implies a very small but massive object and a black hole is one possible compact object but there's another one out there the other possibility are what we call neutron stars sometimes the way we detect them is through pulsations we had pulsars in an earlier talk i mentioned pulsars very briefly now what's very interesting is that there is a maximum mass that a neutron star can have we think it's around three solar masses we're not sure the exact value but we know it it's no more than not much more than three if more than three so if we infer the mass of the unseen compact object in the system to be greater than three solar masses it can't be a neutron star and the only thing left is a black hole so we believe the cutoff point is three if we can go out there and find examples of x-ray binaries where we've inferred that we've measured the total mass we subtract off the inferred mass of the visible companion and it turns out to be more or less than three solar masses we can figure out what it is at that point and we've done this i'll give you an example one of the first ones discovered was cygnus x1 and what that means it was the first x-ray source discovered in the constellation cygnus and that was back in the 1960s turns out it's a it's an x-ray binary we see doppler motion of the and the x-ray uh emissions from it there are actually some x-ray eclipsing binary stars believe it or not the thing gets eclipsed for a while and that's really cool because it tells us a lot more we don't know otherwise when you subtract off from the total mass the mass of the visible companion you're left with 11 solar masses obviously that cannot be a neutron star coincidentally the the another object v616 monocerotis that means it's the 616th variable star discovered in the constellation monocerous and it's the the uh it also has 11 solar masses again it cannot be a a neutron star must be a black hole and there's a whole list now uh it's in the scores at least maybe more maybe hundreds now i'm not sure but you know astronomy textbooks ones i used to use teaching at the university they gave several examples under the last book i used they had like 15 examples of various ones and it was not exhaustive so do we have some good data to support the idea that black holes exist cellular-sized black holes you bet we do we got good data to support this what about supermassive black holes well we think these are lurking at the centers of galaxies centers of galaxies including our own there are some mighty peculiar things going on in the cores of galaxies our own galaxy is difficult to probe because of all the dust obscuring between here and there but we can probe it with other wavelengths that can penetrate the dust we can see into the galaxies near other galaxies nearby and the hubble space telescope has been very useful in that because you're above the earth's atmosphere and it helps us to probe deep with high resolution to center and what we see are orbital motions of stars and other objects near the center these things are moving around something at the very center moving very fast very short periods and a very small size so if we measure how fast they're moving how fast they're orbiting we assume it's orbital motion sometimes we see matter going this way on one side and this way on the other think of doppler radar they can now have been had the technology now for years they can do radar they did that at least since the 50s and 60s when i was a kid they could tell you where rain was falling maybe kind of intense that's all they can tell you but with doppler radar they can they can see there's this rainstorm over here about 40 miles away and on one side of the storm the the raindrops are blowing this way at 60 miles an hour in a short distance away they're blowing away at 70 miles per hour automatically they know that it's probably doing this and it's probably going to pick up speed it's going to turn into a tornado and by the way by the differential motion they tell you which direction it's going fortunately in this case i set it up it's going away from you okay but that's not too good for the people over there you know they can issue warnings now when i was a kid when they issued a warning it was because there's already one touchdown it's kind of late at this point but now they can anticipate a few minutes out maybe 20 minutes even and say there's a tornado warning in this particular area and it actually saves lives same thing going on here if you see motion on either side it's almost certainly because there's orbital motion involved here so we can then take that size we see the orbital size we can take the speed and we put it into what we call kepler's third law of mode planetary motion it works well we can derive it in a general sense from newton's laws of motion it's basic physics i used to teach at the university all the time and this will help us find the mass and we do this for the cores of galaxies we find oftentimes it's in the millions of solar masses if there's something that's millions of times more massive than the sun it ought to show up yeah but yet we look there and there's nothing there also it's confined in a very small area and so if you start doing the numbers there's no object that we know of outside of a black hole that can fit in such a small volume particularly it's not giving off any visible radiation so that's the that's the smoking gun we have here that there are black holes lurking here these also black holes of this type of many have been invoked to explain a whole range of very exhaust what i call exotic objects these are agns those are active galactic nuclei those are those are new galaxies for which there's unusually high emissions coming from the cores of their galaxies and in qsos those are quasars quasi stellar objects discovered back in the early 60s and what we have here is an object that if the distance is correctly inferred from the from the redshift they have you got an object that's pouring out maybe a hundred times the energy of the power of the milky way galaxy a galaxy that contains a couple hundred billion stars something that's pouring out a hundred times more energy than that and yet it's doing it in a volume that's probably no bigger than the solar system so i mean it's incredibly incredibly uh bright incredibly small and again the only thing we can think of that will work is is a supermassive black hole with an accretion disk and those jets operating you're sacrificing some matter to go in to feed this engine that's driving this oftentimes they have jets associated with them too like for instance here is a a nice image of the m87 it's a relatively nearby interacting acting agn it's a globular it's a elliptical galaxy a very big one by the way at the core of the virgo cluster probably 30 to 50 million light years away and you've got this jet coming out of this thing and we believe there's probably a super energetic thing they're powering this thing and the clumps of matter in that jet uh we can actually measure the speeds of these things and they're moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light like 80 percent the speed of light it's incredible so there must be one whale of an engine inside of this thing driving and the only thing we can come up with is the supermassive black holes once again let's come back to home and talk about some more mundane if you will examples of these supermassive black holes one is the object we call uh a sagittarius a star sgr stands for sagittarius the a means it is a the first radio source discovered in the uh in the in the gal in the constellation sagittarius this was actually discovered back in the 1930s probably was not named until the 50s it was uh the first radio source identified i believe uh outside of the sun in jupiter so extra extra solar system sources the little star is it means it's an appendage just things that it turns out under higher resolution has pieces and this is just one part of it now the object itself consists of a few things one of them is an object they call s2 and it has an orb it has an orbit it follows a 15.2 year period of going around it's a very eccentric orbit it's you know goes near and far so it moves pretty quickly down here and more slowly and falls then moves more quickly and then more slowly like this 15.2 year period and it's it's uh closest approach down there gives you some limits on how big this thing can be that it's orbiting all right from the orbital motion we can infer its mass it's by the way its closest approach is only 17 light hours 17 light hours that's that's a little farther out than the most distant planet in the solar system there are a few light hours so it's comparable in size to the planetary system we have and from the calculation from the data we infer that it has a mass of four million times out of the sun so you're going to take four four million star suns and put it in the sun no bigger than the orbiting the outer planets of the solar system and yet you don't see anything it's not giving off any radiation and if you do the numbers like how big a black hole would be for that mass it fits really well so it looks like we have a black hole here its radius again is less than 17 light hours it could be quite a bit less but it can be no larger than that or consider the galaxy m104 so it's called the sombrero galaxy it's also in the virgo cluster stars near its center are orbiting uh very quickly and it would require a billion solar masses to explain it that's one of the biggest supermassive black holes i know of a billion solar masses and there's nothing there to see this is showing the complex sagittarius a star down there and a radio map and the inset here shows you changes made over what three years time period so a lot of this is done with radio measure this is the photograph of the sombrero galaxy you can see what's called a sombrero there it's kind of a cool i've seen it through a large telescope a few times it you can see the dust laying in it's really really kind of not quite this nice but it is cool to see if you see photographs up and then look at it with the telescope you'll know what you're seeing there question i've been talking about this for 10 15 minutes where's the evolution of what i said i i didn't discuss any evolution did i no not a wit not a bit of it this is a very good example of my point we talk about operational science you know that it's a you know the science of the here and now how the world now operates we also talk about historical or origin science that's where the ideas of evolution or even creation come in here but i've been talking about operational science that's all i've been doing giving you the data getting the observations here's that we apply physics as we know it and this is the best explanation we come up with that's good operational science there's not a bit of evolution in what i've told you here so people creationists who doubt that black holes are real they have to realize that they're trying to shoehorn in some origin science here somewhere i think they're not looking at us very clearly we above all people should be able to separate the operational and historical science and i fear that many recent creationists fail at this point because they don't understand what's going on i don't believe now what happens is once you get to get the data showing that operational science data showing that these things probably are real then people want to ask the question where do they come from well that's a fair question to ask but it's not the same as operational science to ask here i mean i could say well god made them that way and it's no worse than saying this thing forms somehow well at this point there is no clear explanation for the micro black holes and that's just as well we haven't found any yet so we don't need an explanation as long as we don't have any but for stellar black holes the we believe they come from the implosion of the cores of very massive stars an event we call a supernova and a supernova can leave behind at least this type of supernova can leave behind either a neutron star or a black hole depending on how much mass the the the remaining core remnant has in it there's a dividing line there and it really doesn't matter from the physics which one you get but once you once you determine how much mass is there the physics will tell you it's going to be one or the other there's no origin scenario for intermediate-sized black holes the best bet they have is maybe mergers you form some some black holes out there and then stellar size then they kind of merge into bigger and bigger and finally grow up into being intermediate sized and then there's no origin scenario for supermassive black holes there have been some suggestions of mergers there's got to be a whole lot of merging going on to get from you know the score of solar masses up to millions or billions some people even suggest that there's some sort of unknown primordial process don't you love that some unknown mechanism in the early universe created these supermassive black holes oh yeah that must be the case scientists say with their patches and their pipes and everything and rubbing their chin like this the problem is that's merely conjecture just because a scientist conjectures something doesn't mean it's science doesn't mean it's true it just simply means they're conjecturing so i love that some unknown primordial process created a supermassive black holes and that's going to somehow pass for science well that's nonsense okay i'm not saying it couldn't have been a some unknown primordial process i'm simply saying though that's not the way science is supposed to work and again i like to separate out the historical origin science from the operational science all right dark matter as i find it before i'll define it again dark matter is this mysterious stuff that seems to be permeating the universe dominating the mass of the universe and it doesn't give off any light it gives off uh it betrays its existence by the gravity that exerts on the gravitational attraction all matter apparently is affected by gravity but this thing doesn't give off any light and that's uh that's really bizarre people sometimes ask me what's dark matter was it made out of and i tell them if i knew that i'd have a nobel prize in physics it's that big of a question i'm not going to deal with that much today i want to talk about the physics of or the reasons why we think it's there dark matter you might think it's pretty recent because it's all been abuzz in the last two decades or so but the first mention of dark matter goes back to 1933. that's almost 90 years ago 85 years ago there's a guy named fritz zwicky he was a swiss born astronomer and he came to the united states and spent his career here and he was observing what we call the coma cluster the coma cluster of galaxies i should say there's also a coma star cluster we say coma cluster it's almost always understood to be a cluster of galaxies it's a few hundred million light years away from us contains a few thousands of galaxies and what he was doing is he was looking at the motion these galaxies have he could measure their doppler motion coming this way and away from you they're all kind of orbiting and some were moving toward and some were moving away if you make a large enough measurement of these things and he did over the entire cluster you can then take the average motions that you measure and you can calculate how much mass is required to hold it together because you're looking at orbital motions it's like a a binary star again you're asking these galaxies the whole cluster to step on the scales except the different kind of scales here being used it's used with telescope to do it and it's it's the same basic physics all over again so he uh he determined the mass what we call the dynamic mass of these motions of the galaxies in the cluster assuming that they had bound orbits which i think is is pretty safe assumption to do and this is a robust result that it's no different from how we measure mass any other way if you're going to question this you might as well question your weight when you step your mass you know when you step on the scales in the morning it's that fundamental in that basic but there's another way you can get the mass as well what he did is he uh counted a bunch of light there was there and we've uh we figured this out that if you have more mass it's probably a lot of that mass is going to be in the form of stars and if you have a lot more mass in the form of stars you're going to have a lot more light and so there should be a nice relationship between how much light a galaxy gives off or a group of galaxies give off and how much mass is there and people have worked out the scale within the solar system now within the within the galaxy the milky way galaxy we do a census and we measure uh how much mass there is in a certain volume we measure how much light there is we get this mass to light ratio it turns out to be about one to one that is for every solar mass of matter you have you get about one solar luminosity of brightness that's pretty cool so if you measure up how bright a star a galaxy is and multiply or divide by this mass to light ratio uh well if you well if you do mass to light ratio you multiply if you do light the mass then you divide but anyway you take that factor you figure it in and you can convert that to how much matter should be in that galaxy and you can do that for all the galaxies the whole cluster as a whole and you get a lighted mass well when zwicky did this he found out that the dynamic mass greatly exceeded the lighted mass by a huge factor now one of the problems this wiki had was that he was seriously under estimating the distances to these galaxies and we cleaned that up over the next couple of decades but still it persisted the gap wasn't nearly as great as it had been but it was still pretty great on the order of a factor of 10. and he repeated it for other galaxies clusters and every time he did it he found the same result that there were there was more mass required by the orbital motion than there than you could account for by the lighted mass that was seen there and this became known as the missing mass problem they called the missing mass problem for probably 50 years and by the way astronomers just sort of thought hmm that's interesting rubbed their chins and moved on really recently written a paper about this i think a couple things happened right after this was second world war people got pulled away people people uh lost you know kind of forgot about it during that time they were pursuing other things after the war furthermore uh back in the 1930s they were pushing the technology to the limits that they could do and they kind of got lost for the next 30 or 40 years and then then in the late 60s early and in the 70s they had newer detectors could push the limit further again they started reinvestigating it even then it took more than a decade for astronomers to wake up and smell the coffee here by the way here's a photograph of the coma cluster most of the objects you see there are galaxies like here is this is a galaxy that's a galaxy that is that may be a star this is a galaxy that brighter thing with the spikes on it that's a star maybe at the top right there is but almost everything else in there is a galaxy there are thousands of them here and this is just one of many thousands and tens of thousands of clusters of galaxies it's starting to feel kind of small yeah the universe is like that they'll do it to you okay well in the 1970s a couple of astronomers vera rubin and kent ford began looking at this particular galaxy this is the andromeda galaxy we keep coming back to it because it's a real workhorse it's the nearest galaxy of any size to us comparable in size to our own galaxy a couple of uh million light years away from us and there's orbital motion going on in this galaxy and i'll stand up to point this out the um objects on this side are let's say i don't know which side it is we'll just say this side or overing towards you this thing is nearly edge on it's tilted a few degrees it's not quite edge on it's not face on like this it's tilted a little bit and so things on this side let's say are moving towards you and things on that side are moving away from you so if you take a spectrograph and you go across the the the thing and start measuring velocities you'll find over here that they're coming toward and over here they're moving away from you so far so good now if you parse it up and measure in the core of the galaxy down here you'll find a nice linear relationship the the as you move out from the center it moves faster and faster what's going on here is right on here you don't see any motion because it's all parallel to your line of sight over here it's in your line of sight nearly you do have to correct this for the amount of tilt but that's easy to measure and easy to account for but in within the core there's a nice linear relationship as you go up from the center it increases with increasing distance pretty linearly when you get out to the edge here it starts to roll over the curve does and then it should start to drop off because notice most of the light is coming from here isn't it right in that core region once you get out here the amount of light is falling off tremendously so you would expect once you get out of the core region the amount of matter is decreasing rapidly by the time you get out to here almost all the matter is accounted for and by the way it's a fundamental result in physics when you're orbiting around this mass distribution of matter whatever is orbiting closer to you all is all that matters as far as your speed is concerned so if you're right here in this region only this matter matters you have to hear only this matter matters you get out to hear this matter matters as you get father and father out less and you're getting more and more of the total matter you can treat it like a point mass at the center by the time you get out to the edge here virtually all of the matter is being accounted for in the galaxy so you can make these measurements along the way and you can calculate how much matter there is within successive rings of this thing okay pretty clever stuff that you can everybody understand what i'm talking about here so they start making the measurements and so vera ruben and ken ford look at this uh really starting in 69 but running through that by 1975 they really had something going on here the curve out there ought to roll over and become what we call keplerian the motions ought to drop down like this as you get out far enough but instead they remain very high and very level and even went up some beyond that and this implied there must be a lot of matter out there what we call the halo of the galaxy all right now i'll show you a plot here as soon as she takes her photograph there i'll show you the plot of what i'm just describing to you here okay here's the plot and what you have here is distance from the center i'm only doing one side one side would be away and one would be tour but you can flip it over and superimpose it to get and they match up pretty well actually but this is velocity and down here is the core region as you move out from the core you'll see a nice linear relationship as you move from the core the faster it moves the faster it moves and then you get outside of the core the light's starting to drop off very quickly so when you look at the lighted mass you would expect the curve to look like this a a dotted line that's called keplerian and that is what they expected and for a long time people would go up here and get to the top of the here and they'd stop measuring because it's hard to make measurements out here and they'd quit what reuben and ford did is they went out here and started measuring stuff out here and lo and behold instead of coming down like this it continued to go up and flatten out to great distance and if you make the measurement of how much matter is right here it's pretty good you go out here the amount of matter out here now is greater than what you found the matter between here and here is much greater than the matter that you had out here as you go out the matter gets greater and greater and greater in other words the bulk of the matter that you measure is way out in the boonies of the galaxy not where all the light is let me go back to the picture of the andromeda galaxy from this curve and the data analysis that you do here you look at this you'd say most of the matter is in here and as you work your way out less and less by the time you get out to here you're probably encompassed 90 or more of the matter of the galaxy that's what you'd say just by the way the light is but when you do the actual analysis of the orbital motion when you get out to here you have an even even when you get out there maybe you've done at most 30 percent of the matter the universe of the galaxy when you get out here start sampling all of it so most of the matter is out here while most of the light is in here there's almost like an anti-correlation between where the matter is and where the light is that's the problem again most of the matter is out here where there's almost no light and where all the light is is just a maybe ten percent of the matter you see the problem there and so there is an anti-correlation between where the light is and where the matter is and where the matter is where the light is it just doesn't fly and when you look at that that's startling when you when you when you uh when you grasp what's going on here so dark matter we can do it other ways too we can do gravitational lensing of distant objects that's the third way the first way was with the clusters of galaxies fritz wikis originally did and then reuben and ford in the 70s started showing the rotation curves of individual galaxies and by the way they repeat it for other galaxies and found the same crazy result it's pretty consistent they have found a few galaxies that don't follow the sky they behave themselves but they're the minority and by the way the results they get like you know ten percent of the mass is what we're seeing is consistent with what you find from the galaxy clusters the same number you they the the two agree very nicely and then you uh you can also do what's called gravitational lensing this was something that's predicted by einstein's theory of relativity almost a century ago but it wasn't confirmed really until like the 70s or probably the 80s and now we can actually use this to probe the masses of of distant what's distant objects in this way here's what's going on here's a diagram of it there's a galaxy cluster called abell 1689. this is another cluster of galaxies these are very very far away we're talking like you know maybe a billion light years away or something these little things here are cluster members of that cluster now directly lined up with it is a very distant object a single object and the mass of this cluster acts like a gravitational lens and there are little streaks that you can see over here and there little little streaks like bullseye patterns you see those those little streaks all the way around like little bullseye patterns those are multiple images of this distant object beyond see if we're here the a bill cluster is here and this distant object is way out there the light comes through it gets bent by the mass the space gets bent by the mass of this thing and it forms multiple images from our understanding of the physics of the situation we can see how much lensing is occurring and we can ask actually calculate compute how much matter there is inside this cluster of galaxies so it's again it's a dynamical mass we're getting based on general relativity and when we do that and we try to compare to the lighted mass we still get that ratio of roughly ten to one and this has been done as well so we kind of seeing again multiple lines of evidence showing that there's a lot of dark matter there so what is dark matter already told you i don't know i wish i did there have been many theories put out there and one by one we seem to have eliminated those different theories somebody suggested this kind of a particle it turns out we look for it we have things called machos and wimps and all these things and one by one they they they are eliminated and you know some people say some creationists have told me well look they did this experiment they found no dark matter no no no they didn't find wimps what they did is they eliminated one type of dark matter they didn't eliminate dark matter just eliminated one of the possibilities and this is very clever you know there's something going on out there by the way i'm convinced that there's no place in the chart of particles known particles out there you know they have the standard model of particles out there and it's filled in the higgs boson one of the last ones they found they fit it in the puzzle if 90 of the matter consists of a type of particle which there's no room on the chart then it says suggest to me the chart's wrong so think about that ninety percent of the matter of the universe is made up of a type of matter we haven't even dreamed up yet and it's totally invisible do you find that way cool i find that way cool i find it humbling and i find it exciting and i think it would be very very clever of a creator to do stuff like that to give us challenges like that so to me instead of being a bad thing i think we out on creationists ought to embrace this we had to make this our own and again it's probably some form of matter we haven't even come up with yet again i ask you where's the evolution and what i talked about well there really isn't any all right now i want to point out again i can't emphasize this enough so many creations i've encountered seem to think that you know these astronomers just made up dark matter to salvage all their evolutionary theories and such that's because they've been they've didn't start paying attention to about 10 years ago but i've been around and i was in grad school and a lot of stuff was coming together and the astronomers didn't know what to do well they looked at it and their eyes popped open their mouths fell open and it huh what and they were dragged screaming the whole way it really wasn't until the 1990s that astronomers after decades of being told you got dark matter they said you know what i think dark matter does exist you know it really took us a long time to come around to it it wasn't like we ran head long enough to grab this but once once they became convinced that dark matter existed then it became a lifeline and do we have questions about galactic structure well dark matter did it you got questions about uh about uh cosmology about the big bang well now the dark matter is just another free parameter you got another free parameter you can throw around so now they they manipulate these parameters within the big bang model within galactic structure problems to to solve these different issues but again keep in mind the dark matter didn't wasn't invented to do this the dark matter came along because we got mugged by reality the data of operational science said dark matter probably exists once you're convinced it exists then maybe you can start using it and if you know the true history of this you realize no we're not desperately trying to do this there's good observational science supporting the idea that dark matter exists what about dark energy well back in back almost 100 years ago probably 100 years ago now einstein took his his his general relativity applied to the entire universe he was steeped in this idea that the universe was eternal in his static universe he found out when he applied his field equations to the universe that even if the universe was infinite uh the universe should contract under its own gravity come down and collapse into a very dense heap and you look around you see the universe isn't like that at all so obviously one one out would be to say the universe hasn't always existed that would be one possibility but he didn't do that he's he was still tied into the eternal universe idea so he threw in this term called the cosmological constant which causes space to repel itself and you kind of put it in a balance you know space is repelling at the same time that gravity is pulling in you get this steady state situation and the universe is static once again well pretty quickly when hubble discovered the within a decade discovered the expansion of the universe he realized uh he made a mistake and he retracted it and that set for 70 years but in 1998 and 1999 a couple of teams of researchers found data that seemed to indicate that the the rate of excel rate of expansion the universe is accelerating and they one team actually got the nobel prize in physics a few years ago for that very important work so people said well what's causing this rapid expansion why the acceleration of expansion in the universe and they said well there must be some sort of field that does this this is uh we now we can describe things in uh in forces in in in physics with fields we have gravitational field electric field magnetic field we have all these other fields we put it's it's field there it's a way of describing its property of space that does this that produces these forces we take the derivative take the negative the derivative and that gives you actually it's a use the del operator to do that but it's in vector calculus to get this thing to work out and this term is similar to einstein's cosmological constant but they don't want to treat it as a constant it could be but they want to treat it as a possible variable it could be changing and so they decided to call it dark energy what they're doing here is they're saying okay you've got this dark matter we're going to also throw in dark energy because matter and energy are equivalent things but actually it's a totally different thing they're trying to do here and it's also how much dark energy is required is extremely model dependent and it becomes another frame free parameter within the uh the big bang model that you have and so i'm a bit suspicious of this i'm very bullish about black holes i'm very bullish about dark matter but i think that there may be some evolution behind this whole uh dark matter thing going on their dark energy thing going on so we may your instincts may be right maybe dark energy is being driven by uh more by the need for that there are there is evidence that the rate of expansion is increasing but it's modest and how much how much you need of dark energy is entirely dependent upon the model that you use this is a a map of the i think from the probably from the uh w map i believe of the the cosmic microwave background and they can use this to constrain how much dark energy there isn't even dark matter but the problem is to do that you have to filter it through a particular model the big bang you change your model your big bang you change how much dark energy you have and so it's again very model dependent i will point out again i've pointed out in other talk it's bears repeating these little light and dark spots uh different colors are color coded for hotter and cooler temperatures they can explain some of these features but this one feature over here this is called the axis of evil and that is unexplained at this point they don't know what's causing that this is called the great cold spot over here they don't know what's causing that either no explanation for either one of those they kind of keep quiet about it but if you want to just just google those you'll get probably more information you care here's a little plot goes back a few years uh on this this is probably outdated but the current thinking at least a few years ago was that the mass of the universe remember mass and energy and mass are equivalent things the equivalent mass of the universe uh dark energy dominates at 74 percent three quarters of the mass of the universe is in dark energy uh 22 percent is in dark matter that's most of the remaining quarter uh 3.6 of the mass universe is intergalactic dust four tenths of one percent is in stars planets and people so so that puts in perspective all the stuff we worry about as astronomers the things we think about in the universe if this is correct is only four tenths of one percent and we're kind of missing the big picture this is makes an iceberg look positively exposed by by comparison of this i don't necessarily agree with these numbers but i would i would say probably 90 of the universe is unobserved at this point and i think that is way cool on all of this i think final thoughts black holes really stretch our understanding to the limits it kind of takes it to the brink and just throws it off the brink as it were we don't know what most of the universe uh is made out of but don't we have an incredibly immense creator to make stuff we can't even figure out begin to figure out and i'll leave you with that thought thank you very much

Channel: Is Genesis History?

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Keywords: is genesis history, danny faulkner, black hole, dark matter, dark energy, big bang, cosmology, astronomy, outer space, origin, universe, creationism, young earth creationism, creation science

Id: bbfVLqszRMY

Length: 59min 15sec (3555 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020