StarTalk Podcast: Cosmic Queries – Black Holes and Dark Energy, with Neil deGrasse Tyson

hello YouTube Chuck what are you doing hello youtubers coming up cosmic queries on black holes and dark energy star talk Neil deGrasse Tyson here your personal astrophysicist we've got a cosmic queries edition for you today and I got with me the one the only jugnu what's up me oh yeah I filed your tweets during the Superbowl they would hail areas oh thanks man yeah so you were watching the game or tweeting what were you doing you know what I only tweeted during the halftime because I was actually watching the game and enjoying it and then halftime came up and I started what and of course it was very let you know it's very Latino in every single way and you know I have a partial Latino household okay so you know my wife is Puerto Rican and my mother yeah so my wife's Puerto Rican and you know so we're sitting around and the kids and we're all looking at all the Puerto Rican this happened on your screen and then we're like yeah this is great and then it occurs to me they better get this show over quickly before Donald Trump's Deportes the whole damn Super Bowl across the border but cosmic were today what's the topic it's black holes and dark energy I should have sufficient expertise for that yeah but if not we will get Jan 11 on speed dial I absolutely have to check in get a little black hole blues boogie in over oh yeah that's her book yeah all right should we start yeah so she's my cosmologists at large yes yes it's all right I'm sorry we didn't have her here I love when you guys get into it man because there's always such great information that you two you two seem to it's not quite it's in a physics language called resonate there's a resonance excellent yeah yeah that's in physics lingo okay yes so you have two waves wait and that one so if they're not resonating they can actually cancel out and write nothing exact the peaks go with the trough correct but once the peaks go two peaks and the troughs then it magnifies the strength of the wave and they have extra extra flow a little constructive interference Oh Oh Chuck remember his high school physics lab stop right there give it to me all right here we go Sunil Engle from patreon because we always start with a patreon patron because they give us money and we appreciate that so Thank You Sunil and Sonia wants to know this why are we so sure that there are black holes at the center of ours and perhaps every galaxy it could be empty space like the eye of a hurricane spiraling outwards oh wow check this out ooh I love me some eyes of hurricanes right on there was a movie back in the 60s really you know the Pala program was fully up and running and so it influenced storytelling and there's a movie called marooned in the room yeah so there was some spacecraft that got marooned it's like they couldn't come back down out of orbit nice and so they had to Lawton what do you mean nice story it's great for a story that's all space moves people go to space and something bad happen exactly that's the plot right so so of course it's in Florida you know this space program launch bases are in Florida and so they had to ready a craft to get to them before they died all right so they've ready the craft and then hurricane suisse because it's Florida alright so they can't launch the hurricane and someone calculates wait the eye of the hurricane is gonna pass directly over the launch Tower right but will there be a launch tower left it was like very cool that's how I learned that this Center the hurricane is actually very silent quiet place right and so the I came over then they launched and you see the the rocket coming out from the center of the thing so what they're asking is in this question what Sunil Sunil is asking is we see all this activity in the center of the galaxy stars orbiting a big dark area right how do we know it's not just like the center of a hurricane and the reason why we know that is because what we learned from Kepler and later Newton is the orbit that you have is the speed of your orbit is completely determined by the mass that's sitting inside your orbit ha the mess around which you revolve right so what you say is here are these things I can see how fast they're moving run back to Kepler's equation and say there must be a mass or a huge mass huge massive the orbit Wow well it and then you say but wait a minute we don't know anything that's that massive that's smaller than the orbit except for a black hole God said okay so in other words if it was a star with that much mass it would be huge or some other thing and you see it's it a glowing thing this is dark and it has huge mass and it's small mmm that's three smoking guns right there right implicating a supermassive black hole supermassive black hole yes then and our black hole is less massive than the one in the center of the Andromeda galaxy our nearest big galaxy we have black hole Envy I think we do the black hole so but we talked about hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun but it's a black hole so it's small for that much mass and so that's why I do it so we do it for our galaxy then we do it for a neighboring galaxy go ahead we can't no other galaxies are far away so ground-based telescopes there you can't see it so we sent up Hubble mm-hmm and so we say well if we have it and we're not really a special galaxy in the universe and Andromeda has it our nearest neighbor maybe this is astronomy astronomy think these two galaxies have it maybe every house yes right okay because why should we be special right it's called the Copernican principle you're probably not special right it's exactly Copernicus better known as my father nice especially I don't know what you think we'll go ahead your father interacting with you so so you we we hypothesize that maybe all gower these have black holes so you invoke Hubble who can see farther away galaxies and measure the movements of stars down deep in the middle and they were moving fast too right and every next galaxy and so we've now done enough we're just resigned to the fact that every gal she's got about even some of the smaller galaxies that might not have they got black holes still have black clothes right so no we haven't seen we haven't measured every one of the hundred billion galaxies in the universe but every galaxy if we measured the big ones the small one with a it's like taking a poll yeah except even better right because the universe doesn't have weird people living in back roads who think weird stuff might the universe could have some weird galaxies that we've never discovered before right every galaxy that fits into a category of galaxies that we've observed it's got a black hole of different masses and the more massive the entire galaxy right then the more mass of the black hole is that's here yeah there's some that have billions of times the mass of the Sun as a black hole sitting in the middle Wow yeah dated for it really is it's a great great movie and seen deliverance deliverance that's right that movie was so great I have on purpose never seen it a second time because it was so disturbing it is a disturbing the most disturbing but I've ever seen in my life it's it's delivering really yeah and had which is why I have it on a loop that explains Chuck okay that explains it so that had Ned Beatty it had had a Burt Reynolds yeah in a serious role yeah at a time he was making comedies that's right it's very super cool really good all right I guess we'll move on away why not to another page it took way too long to answer that that's not true right I know you always want to answer we took a poll we took a definitive poll yes we did and you know what they said what they said so these folks have we want to keep the long answers right other people said no we want more questions this is true but guess what that's right now nobody wants that though there's always gonna be people who are like I love your long answers I it's entertaining I find out stuff you know that I otherwise would learn about the marooned from 1968 how am i ten years old I have hurricanes a quiet place as far as I'm concerned oh those are that's what makes the show good but all right and here's the thing people and and just listen to me I'm just a good point here's the point what we're going to get to your question at some point at somewhere here's the thing at some point you raise an interesting point if I just gave answers then you don't really need me know you just be black Google so these are not Google answer eyes are sort of fleshy notice like again I'm just dating myself here in the old days when you look something up you're going encyclopedia that's right but you never it would take you an hour to get to the thing you would look it up right because you shut up there was a whole journey yes to find your answer and see kids this is what you're missing out on by not having an encyclopedia because that experience you just said right there is one of the best things in the world it is you go look up in your world same same with same with dictionaries right you get obstreperous right no and that's the front of it and this is kind of what we're doing so all right all right here we go Alex wants to know this you were worried yeah yeah everything every time I hear Omaha all I think of is Peyton Manning kind of smart but yeah no he's not but he screams that out when he's at the line of scrimmage Dean goes three and forty five to Omaha oh my god I swear to god yeah and I have no idea what it means in football or anything but maybe somebody will write in and let us know okay this is what Alex Betts wants to know can a small black hole orbit a bigger black hole and if so can it be a stable orbit where it would never fall into or merge with the larger black hole all Academy black Google here right the answer is yes boom okay so here's the thing I don't think a black hole knows it's a black hole really it's just a lump of mass out there looking for love okay that's all the wrong places now I get the black part no so so the point is so a way to answer that is if earth today turn into a black hole right you'd be a mini black hole like the size of a calculator points about a plum okay oh really yeah so you mean all of this earth down the horizon it would be deep within the plum right but the the the plum is the size of our event horizon with the mass of the earth yes black hole don't play dude okay so before we going further with this no I just I know bear it work where's the space come from too so as you're collapsing why don't you run out of space inside of what's collapsing okay you wanna you wondering isn't there a point beyond which you cannot compress it any further yes okay yes all right Alex we're getting back to your question I'm sorry but and they just I just got to know okay so there are various states of matter okay okay why why is a rock a rock because something is preventing it from collapsing right okay so what is it well it's the forces between molecules and atoms okay okay right so the electronic forces they're called I got that right that's why you hit we all have rights oh no no why I can't put my hand through my lady's chair correct okay correct okay I got you Invisible Man or something mother what's the what's the X minute we could do that walls yeah I know I know I know you're talking about alright but go ahead so the alright so now it turns out under high enough pressure you can collapse that okay and close down the gaps that are between those atoms and molecules okay all right now they get closer okay together right okay and you get something called electron degeneracy that's what it's called has nothing to do with its moral compass okay of electrons right is that okay so electron degeneracy they're so tightly packed okay that you're trying to cram electrons into the space of other electrons and they don't allow that alright from quantum akwonton physics okay all right so they keep their own identity within the structure and then we have matter out there that resemble is called white dwarfs white dwarfs are electron degenerate and they're extremely dense mm-hmm okay why don't you go further okay there's still the gap between the nucleus of an atom and the electrons themselves let's collapse that gap and that is the biggest gap of them all okay you know that that gap is take a football stadium all right hey and then put I don't know a a mustard seed okay I think tiny tiny zoster Suzie seed monsters he's biblical right but let's take a like a poppy seed all right put that in the middle of the stadium right that's the nucleus and the outer sides of the stadium is the orbits of the electrons Wow atoms are mostly empty space that's in the first do to determine this his name was was JJ Thompson and he performed the experiment by firing particles through a very thin film of gold gold you can hammer it so thin you have practically one layer thick so the atoms okay alright you can it's very malleable is nice chemistry term right make it really thin and he fired particles and he's ready to see them some bounce back Carine to the left to the light in 99.9 man and I presented him went straight through like nothing was there and he was the first person to realize that matter is mostly empty space that's him and the next morning he is rumored to be afraid to step onto the floor getting out of bed right that he might fall through it Wow cuz he alone knew how empty matter was so the next stage is collapsing everything down and you're cramming the electrons into the protons because they're no longer can they separate themselves alright but they're not gonna occupy the same space anymore they're crammed together if you combine a proton and an electron what happens to the charge it becomes what I don't know alright Alexa that's a negative charge the protein has a positive charge they cancel out and what kind of how much charge you left with neutral neutral so you put them together you create a neutron right okay so now you so you don't have the electron degeneracy and you have a pack a pack of neutrons that is the densest matter that exists out there that is not a black hole okay so these are called neutron stars because in my field we tell it like it is yeah right and neutron stars that rapidly rotate have magnetic fields that call they pulse and radio waves we call those pulse house lines all right that makes sense the person who discovered pulsars Anthony Hewish won the Nobel Prize for it back in the 1970s since he started a watch company little known for people always taking our word exactly well we got lucky where candy bar we excuse me can we get some royalties for that please okay the Mars bar I know it's a family name but still I'm taking it right all right hey hey you know many car names are astronomically named uh-huh okay there's like the the Astro that's the name of a minivan that was a oh my god there is an ass yes yes I made a whole list I will do a whole show on the cars okay car names all right show all right I could do a whole show okay that's it don't get me started don't make me go there okay a whole show on names of stuff that gets my from your astrophysics yeah okay that's it promise okay all right so so now we're a pulsar okay now pulsar that stuff is there so that's if you take one of them how dense that is take a herd of 300 billion elephants and cram them into a thimble holy crap okay alright so now you can calculate how much pressure that makes to stop it from collapsing further and you calculate that and then you figure out in a black hole the collapsing force is even greater damn so we don't know we got no physics anymore after that right so in a black hole it's denser than the density of 300 billion elephants in a thimble crammed into a thimble okay and just imagine trying to do that ya know with you definitely need a crowbar so Wow so yes you I can get you to the neutron star density after that it's all black holes all black holes all black holes oh so now earth becomes a black hole we just continue to orbit the Sun the gravity between us and the Sun is determined just by our masses our maths didn't change right okay it's still the same mass who cares if we're a black hole right all right now if you turn the Sun into a black hole we don't care if it has the same mass right so weird these mini black hole orbiting bleep back hole and there you go great so we just be orbiting the little mini black hole that's all no we'd be the mini black hole orbiting oh no I'm saying if the Sun became a black hole we would just continue to orbit that little black hole but but we're littler so we're the plum sized black hole right the Sun is the big that's a big Gert black hole right so so the point is the reason why we see black holes have such high gravity is they have high surface gravity hmm but if you step the same distance away from it that you were before it became a black hole it's not and nothing's gonna happen right just that you can get real close to the center of gravity and the power of the gravity keeps getting the the force of gravity keeps getting higher and higher and iron iron iron so that's how that works that's all the answer is yes the answer is yes we gotta take our first break when we come back more cosmic queries black holes and dark energon dark energy on star Rebeca Startalk cosmic queries Chuck nice that's right the basic ingredients you me cosmic queries star talk that's it that's it let's take it from there let's take it from there alright in topic again yeah dark energy and black hole let's do it I think I think I can get through that top so far so good alright let's jump right back into this with a question from Facebook and Kent by dieter mm-hm yep Kent people would you please give like phonetics pronunciation guide for Chuck yes okay yes this Reading Is Fundamental with me to be honest I wrote anyway he goes like this Chuck Chuck Chuck please ask Neil if a black hole can reignite into a star once it has lost enough mass through Hawking radiation oh no because if somehow the black hole could stay the same size and you pulled mass out right then I don't know I have to think that through but what happens as you pull mash up the black hole gets smaller and smaller and smaller to be the appropriate sized black hole for the mass that's left over okay okay so that's what's happening that's it so the black hole just continues to shrink keeping all of its parameters sort of black hole proper ah that's so that's why gotcha that's it there you go all right all right that's pretty cool all right this is John but that's I mean that'd make a good sci-fi story so someone in the future figures out a way to run do black holes I can turn them back into sort of masses that they once were right yeah yeah okay that's kind of cool that let's do it that was you you could do that you probably could just create a black hole yeah once you start controlling black holes they they will bend to your whims and then the first thing people do is weaponize it of course if this is what humans do now that's a great sci-fi story instead of some stupid like Death Star right like you actually have a killer black hole no no that's they did that in a Star Trek oh they did yes it was this drill that would drilled down to the center of a planet and then dropped red matter and then it would that's right planted into a black hole that's right so yeah if they've been there yeah damn what I have done late I'm late I'm late on that one you're right that was the red matter that right again why destroy the whole planet wouldn't you want to keep the planet if you know if your enemies with who's on the surface get rid of them by some diabolical means right but keep the real estate yeah what are you doing and it's always about like revenge like you know it's not gonna bring your wife and children back okay get over it all right here we go John felt ran a black hole warp space-time around it yes a star does the same yes what happened to the gravitational well that the star has formed if the star begins to fall into the gravitational well formed by the black hole does it dissipate at the same rate as the amount of mass being stripped or do both wells combine I love to people this be some good this is so good John you're just showing off that's what's doing John John probably work right here all right all right so there's a lot too okay so if you think of it as the classical distortion in like a rubber sheet right the revelation the rubbers nozzle so the black hole is like a very deep hole in the rubber sheet but everybody's got a dimple in the rubber sheet okay okay you got you have your own my own little gentle little dimple right there adorable the atom and huncle's depending on the mass exactly depending on the mass determines how deep the dimple is in the fabric of space and time right as you merge two dimples it's the black hole if it's a black hole in a star if the black hole begins to fillet the star as black holes are known to do hmm then its dimple will get deeper and this the black holes and will get deeper and the stars dimple will get shallower in response to this welcome to cooking with black holes today we're gonna fillet a star go ahead that's a fillet I thought you said way slay that's it you know what that means it means to disperse no no what's it mean no I thought it meant like - no pull apart it's to skin God you okay I'm pretty sure to pull apart but today it could be generally if you pull pulling someone apart you would do it with the skin first that's the outer layer so maybe that could have led to your your hypothesis that I listed to do this okay yeah yeah he actually looks it up instead of just going hey Siri play okay here we go to strip off the skin you're correct so it's outer covering of right so it's not really pull apart it is indeed skin for stripping is skinning and then you you metaphor it and it's like to criticize or scold with scathing severity ah okay you just got Flav Flay exactly and here's another one to deprive or strip of money or property oh that's mine these are your outer right boot remove exactly that's better known as divorce so divorce is a legal fly it's legal flaying that's sweet all right so anyway star is flayed by the bigger dimple of the black hole yes and so if you Flay that so the dimples change size relative to the mass that has changed hands right right so it is possible for the start to flay the stark the for the black hole to flay the stark completely so that it no longer has a dimple and it consumed all of its mass gots it and then it is the sum of the two dimples together that's it alright otherwise you can have a star that's getting slayed while it's orbiting the two and so you have two dimples just in orbit what with a slow change in the two and that's until one just disappears completely this is kind of fun to watch right um you can imagine that right yeah okay yeah there you go there you have it so that's how it is okay all right let's go to love marauder going on you know how to pronounce that how big of an impact does dark energy have on my everyday life none okay next question not always about you love marauder [Laughter] okay so the thing is dark energy is this is this mr. steel mysterious pressure in the vacuum of space that's forcing the universe to accelerate in its expansion against the wishes of all the galaxies and their gravity trying to slow to thing down right and so so some people thought of as an anti-gravity force cuy one day harness it and make spaceships out of it it's so there's an interesting sci-fi frontier there but what I can tell you is because it's manifesting in the vacuum relative to where there isn't a vacuum there's not much vacuum here no right so gravity and electromagnetism and all these other things are really dominating where you happen to be so no there's no known visible or measurable effect on anything you will do in your life right so just just if you're not a galaxy don't worry about right yeah it's not a galaxy among other galaxies in the expanding universe right just chill just till chill on that that's I will add oh no that no I won't add okay all right there you go all right well there you go that's it love marauder I hope that I hope you find that sufficient okay to continue your love exploits right all right this is Brian bull and he wants to know this does a black hole still produce light or other radiation that just can't escape the black hole's gravity so yeah yeah there's a lot of energy and matter inside of a black hole so if you're in the black hole yeah yeah he's probably right a zone like that no place to go right it's got no place to go yeah and so it's all in there so now we don't have direct evidence of this call me and let me go get on this yeah yeah you you report back then I want a full report yeah my desk in the morning like Matthew McConaughey in that string theory movie interstellar interstellar yes what I mean that string theory interstellar intercept with the program listen I'm gonna be medication it's really bothering my memory all right so yeah there's no reason why you wouldn't still see light and other things inside the black hole right right it's just not getting out that's cool yeah I think next one excellent excellent all right oh you know what else you'd see go ahead if you tried to look outside the black hole you'd see all the stuff coming in oh yeah Oh that'd be really bright oh yeah that's kind of cool Ashley yeah not a bad yeah the only problem is you just be like don't come in here there's no way down there all right this is our YP thank you our YP for just using your initials okay our YP wants to know this goody that's his name rip like yeah that's Britton Etten that's cool rip wants to know this could dark energy or matter dark matter or dark energy is it possible to manipulate it to use it as a fuel of some sort so here's a problem mm-hmm dark energy we don't know how to interact with it we we just measure its effects on the universe dark matter reveals itself to us through its gravity okay but it doesn't reveal itself to us in any other way that we normally interact so we can see its effects but not what it is itself not in material not material that's correct because what T really what do you do you touch it right you pinch it right you weigh it right I mean you you put it on you grab it piece of it put it on a scale you do all this and dark matter in order to have something oh you you're this person called Chuck right because all your atoms are all attached to each other thank God okay yes they're all there right Dark Matter not only doesn't attach to your atoms right it doesn't attach to itself so as far as we know there are no lumps of dark matter out there little dark matter planets right no dark matter galaxies in the cosmos that is oatmeal there are no lumps of dark matter I used to as a kid because you would put raw lemon sugar then the eat of like oatmeal candy but go ahead sorry wow that was early you were early out of the box with granola yeah those are rolled another world Oh twister with dipped rolled in sugar and take those boat meal of you rolling some sitting eating yeah yeah so there you go all right yeah so yeah there's no we have no way to harness it in that sense that's if you if you can't grab it because your hand goes straight through it and it doesn't make itself given itself any kind of density sweet so you can't there's nothing you can do this right so you can see it no no you can see its effects you can see its effects but you can't see it and you idiot interact with it is literally invisible Wow because because not only do your molecules and atoms not interact light doesn't interact with it oh my god and light and molecules and atoms are all related to each other okay they all interact they all you reflect light right some light goes through you like but gets absorbed inside you like x-rays go into your bones and they see this on a map they shadow your bones shelves or have a little more light than most that was that's true it's a very urgent call albedo I'll be wait a minute have a word for that albedo yes yes okay if you have an Obito of one right you reflect 100% of the light that hits you not to be confused with libido what if you haven't albedo have a libido of one that's albedo of zero you absorb everything that comes to there would be a blonde have a libido of zero you are married or libido job to a minute I don't know what it is but go ahead I'll be them so the point is yeah I'll be so so I'll be just it's a the ability of a surface of something to reflect light I'll kids off and it's a percent so one would be a hundred percent nice zero zero so the moon has a very low albedo as bright as it can be it doesn't reflect much light Wow yeah it's like in the like 10% of the lighters I forgot the exact number but really it's absorbing most of the rest of it Wow yeah yeah yeah so um where was I all I'm saying is if you can't grab something and put it in a box you can't harness it you can't what do we get we don't know how to heart light right there we need some other way that we invent once we figure out what it is we might be able to find a dark matter trap how do you figure out what something is if you can't interact with it I know I know thank you this is the longest unsolved problem in astrophysics it's been with us since 1936 Wow yeah dude that is amazing that is really cool I'm just saying so the guy who figures that out the person-to-person you're right I shouldn't say guy I just don't know how to say I'm we're living in 2029 I the person who figures that out that person is gonna win a Nobel Prize time 10 yeah the person who figures out what dark matter is all right and and then we ideally we can control it manipulate it put some of the box that'd be cool nice yeah all right yeah yeah we gotta take a break okay all right when we come back more stark our cosmic queries black hole dai manage my energy when we return we're back star Hulk cosmic we're yes Chuck nice that's meeting it Chuck nice comic thank you sir yes that's correct very good so it turns out we are like luxuriating in these answers wait I will I will executive privilege and say we will not do lightning round excellent okay good just continue to look your to continue to bask yes then I in the cosmic knowledge juxtaposed with cosmic ignorance sweet and therein did you just describe the two people who are on the spot wait a minute what anymore self-confidence here describing something bigger than us okay okay all right all right it's the intersection of cosmic knowledge and cosmic ignorance that is the moving frontier of cosmic discovery oh nice that's I love that you should tweet that go ahead yeah you should that's a that's that's a quite eloquent and elegant at the same time all right here we go Martin Cuevas and Martin wants to know this what would happen to the earth if it came close or directly in contact with a black hole the one being hypothesized to be perhaps the planet nine orbit so I didn't realize that planet nine was actually pustule a positive to be a black hole I thought that's why they call it planet nine because it's supposed to be this super massive object that newly has the Kuiper belt but it's new to me too is it okay all right good did you say all right good then I'm not alone I don't know who's hypothesizing that we have external black holes or but I don't know right I don't if maybe it's uh maybe I missed that hey man is that a new development that morning edition when I Astrophysical Journal you know but so but it's still a fascinating question and I think about this all the time oh really yeah if earth happened upon a black hole that was traveling through space an encounter between earth in a black hole earth loses gods yeah okay right now because we know about this tidal force that will stretch things where the of the earth nearest to the black hole will experience a much higher force of gravity than the side that's farthest mm-hmm that means the side closest to the black hole will pull towards it faster than the side of the earth and so you'll end up stretching earth okay now the problem with the word stretch is you know earth is not Gumby right or elastic man I am Earth dammit I'm sorry it's so it's not like it's an earth is not made of rubber the earth is made of sort of solid substance so if you're going to stretch put under stress the solid sphere that is earth earth will basically begin to crumble okay into smaller and smaller bits of rocks so that you're looking at massive earthquakes oh yeah but what happened and tidal waves oh hell yeah if you fall straight in right oh oh so yes sir Earth's will distort become more and more oblong until the the the strength of the materials can't hold that shape anything anymore right and then it'll start sort of crumbling apart and we call that spaghettification is when you start becoming this long strand but against spaghetti is one continuous string right right right whereas this will be a stream of particles it's right a parade of particles as they so is this net flix occasion instead of spaghettification how do you get Netflix in there screaming now I am going okay you have to flub one for me you just material yes yes for me spaghettification if I'm not mistaken no I just popularized it really yeah it's true I thought I thought you were I thought you actually joined the tour no no I I popular eyes it but the the it's traceable to Martin Rees Martin sir Martin Rees in fact he got it he's now Lord Lord Reese that's a little full of himself isn't he I command thee I command thee to bring me my spaghettification all right so all right okay all right well yeah do we answer that oh yeah yeah so we just break up our city here on earth it would just be an interesting phenomenon to behold oh yeah yeah that's cool man all right hey Martin it would break open the very hot liquid core of the earth glowing iron nickel ball of molten iron right yeah yes a bad day for that's the air that's not cool right on all right let's go to Todd Tobin and Todd says how does a black hole not consume space-time itself and just go be s crazy bat-crap crazy and destroy the entire universe why aren't black holes running amuck did he say B C crazy he said bat you know oh yeah bat the bat but the bad word did he say crap were decent yesterday s words oh you were translating for us yes yeah I think as your own sponsor you know why because as your own censor these little kids they write me and they're just like listen to this and I'm like well you shouldn't be started trying to learn stuff and give up your dream damn you was a joke people is that one please go ahead but anyway yes so he said BS crazy bat-crap crazy and why aren't they why are black holes running amok wait so so he's saying why doesn't the whole thing just like why aren't they out of hand why aren't they just like consuming not only oh I guess that's why so why are they consuming space-time itself and just just eatin the way the entire universe eat it away okay because black holes are not any more voracious as black holes than they were as stars before they became black holes interesting so it's really about mass it's just the man it's just max that's all if you get now so the thing here's how to think about it think of the Sun okay before you how close can you get to the Sun you get near the surface ages vaporize okay all right so now that the sun's surface its atmospheric surface has a certain strength of gravity there okay okay now let's cram the Sun into a smaller volume same amount of mass it's just answer you can now get closer to the sun's center of mass so it's service gravity is now higher crammed it's smaller the surface matter is even higher black holes are fun to think about and talk about because you can get close to them if you get closer to Earth's center of mass you leave in half of Earth behind you and it's not interesting the good thing of the fun thing about black holes is you can get close to their center of mass and their entire mass is between you and their center that's why they become interesting but puff it back up to the original size there's no different nobody cares all right that's nice the black holes are just there there they allow you to get close to them without you knowing how deadly they are in such a state oh my that's all oh snap that's the difference okay that's all right so and but technically an ex-girlfriend like that they tell you they are consuming the space-time around them space folds back on itself so that you cannot even come back you can think of a black hole as completely consuming the volume of space-time in its vicinity I have no qualms with you thinking of what's inside the event horizon as the black hole having having eaten its own space-time continuum I have no problems with that that is super cool right wow what a great question then I mean and there's that old ancient question what happens if a snake starts eating its tail mm-hm and continues to do so right will the snake one day disappear I don't know but it certainly won't be hungry if it just keeps eating it wraps yeah but then how does the head eat itself it comes in from behind the head okay if you imagine a completely flexible snake right it just keeps going and there you go yeah that is the would make the end of the meal and it's gone no more snake right that's that's a black hole there you go all right all right that's cool hmm all right Christopher Karns Chiron's wants to know this everything in space seems to be spinning and rotating the Atlantic spins and rotates around stars stars just to be clear if you rotate on an X if you turn on an axis so we say you're rotating if you move around another object we say you're revolving okay okay so just just most people don't know that but it's since the language can distinguish it right why not right and they're not weird words we've all used them before okay so go so stars spin and revolve around galaxies centers rotate and then they revolve yes even galaxies are spinning yes is there any evidence that there are rotate that they are rotating around something they spin but do they rotate or revolve end up with a new vocabulary revolved around something else so in our neck of the woods no wow okay well because we don't have enough galaxies where we to be able to create an orbital system right right now as far as we can tell we're on a one-way collision course with ladawna doesn't right we're not orbiting each other anything like that all right however there are places in the universe that have hundreds and in some cases thousands of galaxies in a sort of a beehive configuration hmm you can track those galaxies those would have orbits around the center of that galaxy super cool called super cluster super clusters right so yes in in not all cases but in some interesting cases you do have stars that rotate orbit the center that revolve around the center of their galaxies as do all the other stars in their galaxies and the galaxies self is orbiting the center of the super cluster yes now is it possible to see the to see the movement of the galaxies and measure in such a way that we could possibly see if there's something there revolving around like a black hole or something that's at the center of the super cluster oh you know centers of super clusters that's an interest yeah I'm sure that's from saying that would be an early that would be really cool thing to find out if the super cluster is actually revolving around around a black black hole itself yeah that's an interesting question right I'll get on that for you buddy but there turns out you might ask could the super cluster be orbiting around some other concentration of some meta massive galaxies right here's a problem you ready go ahead you can look at the speed of galaxies moving in the largest of the super clusters because you can measure this with the Doppler shift okay okay that makes sense but we all know the Doppler shift intuitively alright so for cars yeah exactly you stand on the edge of a freeway right oh that was good those a Speedway that was yeah okay so no one ever asked why doesn't it sound the same coming towards you as it does going wasn't no so so the pitch changes okay what you teach here do I love it okay so so it's a higher pitch if it's coming towards you right at a lower pitch as a cooler so it's like compression and explain exactly that's and so even though it's only giving the same sound if the cars parked in front of you the engine is making one sound right right side the car all you hear is okay God so so you if you measure the kung-fu movie ever if you measure the change in the frequency of sound right as it comes towards you right and compare it to you can and you know what that sound should be is a very simple formula that was developed by Christian Doppler who was a German physicist he might even been a chemist actually but he was I think this was a 19th century you figure this out okay and he did it with a railroad train that the whistle of a train as it came by because they didn't have race cars right right so you measure how fast the galaxies moving and then you look at how big the galaxy cluster is great you say how long will it take at that speed to cross the cluster that's perfectly honest question and the words no okay for the biggest of these cluster takes longer than the age of the universe Wow so the cluster has not had enough time to have everybody sort of organize into their orbits that's yeah so first many of these measurements you can't use the speed as an indication of other stuff that's going on Wow yeah yeah we don't live long enough no no damn it I know at times like that during the Super Bowl I tweeted that no I did not you know you I've read your tweets you don't read my tweets oh now I'm embarrassed all I said was while you're watching if the hundred yards on the field were a timeline of the universe okay of the 14 billion year universe and in one end zone is the Big Bang right and modern day is like the other end zone then the thickness of a blade of grass the width of a blade of grass at the other end zone is from 30,000 years in our past to the present just one the thickness thickness not not the width of thick just just right the thickness yeah cavemen to modern time that's our little that's what we occupy well out humans yes from so magnin cro-magnon humans over that time so that's the entire history of our species on a hundred yard long football field so we're not four computers to simulate what's going on over timescales longer than we live we would not know anything about things that lasted longer than we do damn oh yeah that's pretty wild and our our ego historically was we are the know everything so why should be much older than our history directly right why should it why should it when this is all about us why should your eyes not see things that are seeable in the universe right when I'm the only one that matters right so even the telescopes that were first constructed only brought us visible light right we said we have better version of our eyes but it's still like that we can see discover infrared x-rays ultraviolet x-ray gamma rays the whole rest of the spectrum you can't see how dare the universe communicate in ways that our senses cannot detect you know what this is really fascinating because it starts as you look at the fact that we are indeed one chromosome away from you know the other apes yeah at the same time we're the only or are we are other animals thinking about this kind of stuff that we're talking about right now are there dolphins just like yeah I'm telling you right now man there's something more than this ocean yeah there's a well and we got an end right like right now but there's a comic that Gary Larson you remember that's right he there's a chicken a horse a a cow and some other farm animal in the barn way they're having a conversation yeah okay and chickens sense but if you divide by the square root of the mass you get the same result and then like the cow said but what you're missing the basic premise of my theory and one of them looks out the window farmer okay these performers coming towards them and the farmer comes it right yeah that's so you don't know if they're not talking that way when you're not looking no I'm pretty sure they're not it's like the refrigerator right right you don't know if it's really close all right we gotta go we went way over time here this has been star talk cosmic queries Chuck nice Neil deGrasse Tyson your personal astrophysicist as always I bid you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 543,638

Rating: 4.9154744 out of 5

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, Chuck Nice, black holes, dark energy, mysteries of the universe, galaxy, Copernican principle, Marooned, electron degeneracy, neutron star, pulsars, Hawking radiation, Star Trek, spacetime, Interstellar, Planet 9, supercluster, Albedo effect, Doppler shift

Id: BEwYqByCIUs

Length: 54min 16sec (3256 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2020