Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Can You See A Black Hole?

Episode Date: April 9, 2019

What would a picture of a black hole look like? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I know how overwhelming it can feel if flying makes you anxious. In session 418 of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, Dr. Angela Neal-Barnett and I discuss flight anxiety. What is not a norm is to a lot. allow it to prevent you from doing the things that you want to do, the things that you were meant to do. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So, Jorge, if you could visit any place in the universe, where would you choose to go?

I'd go to the top of Mount Everest to check out the view. What, you would waste free teleportation to end. Anywhere in the universe, I'm going to the top of Mount Everest? Yeah, I mean, how many people get to see that view of being at the top of Mount Everest? All right, well, I'll have to remind you that this was a one-way offer. So if you do that, you're going to have to climb down by yourself. I'm not teleporting your back. Great.

Well, where would you go, Daniel? I would go somewhere near a black hole, like the black hole in the center of our galaxy. Hmm. What would that look like? That's the point. Nobody really knows what a black hole looks like. And so I want to get close enough to figure it out. I want to go be a tourist at a black hole. You would take a picture. I went to see this black hole and all I got with is crazy t-shirt.

And you got ripped your threads by gravitational way of the tides. That's right. That's right, yeah. Hi, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel. And welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio. In which we zoom around the universe and zoom inside your head and try to bring one inside the other. That's right. We try to paint a picture for you of all the amazing and incredible things out there in the universe to know about and to see.

Because all these ideas are like exploding inside our minds. And we want to share that with you. We want to take them apart, break them into pieces, send them down the internet and little electronic bits so they can reassemble inside your mind. And you can also have that crazy mind-blown experience when you realize how insane the universe is. That's right. But I guess the question is, are there things in the universe that we can't see? Definitely.

There are lots of things in the universe we can't see. I mean, there are lots of things we can see only very slightly. There's things we can see very indirectly, right? But there must also be things in the universe that we can't see at all, right? Yeah. Or things that we might never see. Yeah, I mean, imagine if the universe was filled with some sort of particle that didn't interact with our kind of matter at all, right? So it had no, it was like dark matter, but it had no mass, for example.

Then we couldn't interact with it at all, and we would never know it was there. There would be no way to tell if it's there or not. Well, today on the podcast, we are going to talk about one such thing, there in the universe that maybe we can or cannot see. Can you see a black hole? What would a black hole look like and what technology do you need to use to detect it and to spot it? That's the topic of today's podcast. Yeah, like if you were out floating in space and you saw one and you took out your phone and took a picture,

what would that picture look like? Yeah, exactly. What would your black hole selfie look like, right? Just before you got shredded by the black hole. hole and slurped up and by the universe's biggest blender slash toilet what would that awesome last instagram post look like and how many likes would you get that's the that's the real question yeah exactly it'd be an infinitely dense like is there an option on instagram to like things in different ways like thumbs up smile black hole yeah so black holes are a fascinating thing right

you hear about them a lot in science fiction. And they're also depicted often in movies. And I wonder sometimes the folks that have to put these visuals together. You know, how much research have they done to figure out what would this thing actually look like? Do they just like sketch in their minds what they think a black hole might be?

Do they call up a physicist and say, what would this look like? It's a huge variety. If you just Google, for example, black hole, do a Google image search for black hole. You get a big variety of results. Well, how many variations can there be? Isn't it just a black hole?

Yeah, they're all just black, right? Very clever. No, they all feature some black thing in the center, right, that looks like a hole. And then it's what's around them that's interesting. And that's the clue for today's episode, that what's around a black hole is the fascinating bit. Some of them have, like, distorted space. Some of them have, like, gas being pulled around. Some of them have just, like, general, mystical, swirly stuff.

Yeah. But I guess it kind of touches on this idea. that, you know, as humans, we like to see it to believe it, right? Like, we need to see something to know that it exists. Yeah, we'd like to have the most direct evidence of something before we really think that it exists. And this applies in lots of cases, like, you know, in solving a murder, right? You have to be, basically you have to have a body to convict somebody of murder, right?

No matter what evidence you have, if there's no body, you know, no court is going to send somebody to jail. In the same way, if you speculate, oh, maybe they, thing exists out there in space, people want to know, all right, well, show us one, right? I think that's totally reasonable. Yeah, in the sense, it's theoretical until somebody sees it

or touches it, right? Yeah, and it applies also to questions of like life. We can get indirect evidence for life on another planet based on like what's going on in the atmosphere and changes into methane rates or whatever, but still people are like, okay, send something over there with a microscope, let's see it

in action. We want to see it to believe it, right? You're right. I think I think you're right. If physicists came out with the news tomorrow, hey, we have some methane readings from planet, the variations in the orbit of planet X, Y, Z, 3,000 light years away, that tells us that there's life there. How many people do you think would believe it? How many people believe physicists in general? Yeah, that's another question. I know the answer to. Zero. I don't know. I think physicists have a pretty good reputation because we don't, we're pretty conservative about making claims. We don't make big bold claims until we're pretty sure of them. But I think a lot of people would want to see it.

And anyway, even if you believed physicists, the next thing you would want them to do is, like, go check it out. Like, let's build a bigger telescope or let's send a ship there. I want to go. Like, what is on that planet, right? Your curiosity would just demand to see this thing. Yeah. Is that the last step in the physics handbook for how to do research is check it out? Check it out.

Yeah. No, we do a lot of that actually in research. right is we try to visualize our data. We try to show, we try to look at what we're studying and show it in a clear way that makes it obvious what it is we've learned or what it is we're trying to study. Even for example, you know, like the Higgs boson, you know, when we look for the Higgs boson, you could argue, well, we're just looking for the Higgs field. It's this thing that fills space.

But to prove that it exists, we needed to see it turn into the Higgs boson. We needed to actually identify this particle directly. even though all the theoretical indications suggested that it really had to exist, so the universe didn't make sense without it. We had a lot to indirect knowledge until we actually produced the Higgs and could see it, then we couldn't really claim that it was part of physics. Right. Even though it affects everything else, you see the effects of it.

It wasn't until you saw that little particle turn into other particles that you were convinced that it existed, right? Exactly. And now let me get out of that chair and sit in the other chair and argue the complete opposite side of the story, which is that... Daniel versus Daniel. All right. Which is, that's ridiculous because everything we see is indirect.

I mean, what does it really mean to see something directly, right? Does it mean the photons from it landed in your eyeball? Yeah. You know, most of the stuff we see from space, the photons are not landing in your eyeball. They hit some telescope, and that telescope converts them from radio into something else, and then you get a picture on your screen. The photons from that thing are not hitting your eye. eyeball, right?

Yeah, but the sensor in that telescope is acting as a proxy for your eye, right? I know there's a photon that came from that star and that hit something on Earth, and I believe that the chip, the microchip registered it. Yeah, okay, so you're

saying, you're still seeing it even if there's some indirect proxy, right? If there's a step between you and it where some machine has translated the information from one kind of thing to another kind of thing, right? You're saying that's still seeing it. Yeah, because I think it has to be a photon related, right? Like, if you told me, it's kind of harder to believe if it's just like the gravitational effect or, you know, the something else.

You know, knowing that there's light coming from that thing makes me believe in more. I see. That's interesting. It has to be light, huh? Because, for example, you know, cosmic gray particles, right? They hit detectors and we say, oh, we saw that particle, even if it wasn't the photon. And I would say everything is indirect. I mean, every kind of information you get is indirect. I mean, the folks who are listening to this right now, they're not actually listening to the sound waves that are coming out of my mouth.

They're transformed into electrons and stored on a hard drive somewhere, right? And those sound waves are recreated. Except for the live studio audience I have here in front of me. They are getting it live. Is that all the people who've made the pilgrimage to your house and you've trapped them in the basement and forced them to be a live audience? I have a 200-person auditorium in my garage. I knew it.

I mean, it's empty right now. Nobody came today. That's why you're using the laugh track. Well, I would say that it's a pretty subtle distinction. It's hard to make a really solid point to distinguish between seeing things directly and seeing things indirectly. Because in the end, I think everything is indirect at some level. I mean, there's layers there, but some things are less indirect than others. Well, the question was, can we see a black hole?

And so this touches on, like, if you can't see a black hole, how do you know it exist? Yeah, exactly. And if you can't see it directly, what are you looking at? And the teaser is that black holes, while they're black, actually produce some of the brightest, the strongest radiation in the universe. But before we dig into that, we thought, let's find out what people around town think about seeing a black hole. Yeah. As usual, Daniel went out into the streets and asked people out there, complete strangers, if they could see a black hole. Here's what they had to say. Do you think it's possible to see a black hole? Maybe detects some radiations from them, maybe.

I don't think a telescope would do it, but I do know that they are able to probably get pictures of black holes, but I'm not entirely sure how. Cool. I don't know much about that, but I feel like technically you want to say that you wouldn't be able because it's a black hole so there would be no light. But it may be in contrast with the rest next to it, it might be possible? Yes. Yes, you think so? Okay, great. I actually don't know if it's possible to see it, but maybe you can feel it.

You can feel it, yeah. Yeah, this is a really dumb answer, but, like, TV shows and movies, I think they depict it as if we can, but I really don't. I think it's just for, like, show, for all of that, so I don't think. What does it look like on TV or in the movies? It's just, like, a void. It's literally, like, a black hole. Yeah, all right, cool. Oh, well, from my, like, understanding.

based on the books I'm reading. I think the black hole looks like just a hole, but there's nothing can see just like the black daughter on the universe. Okay, cool. A black hole, I don't think we can see with our bare

eyes. What about with a telescope? Telescope, I don't think so. No, right? The light gets sucked in. On the other hand, I suppose you can see the absence of, in this case, absence of evidence, evidence of absence, or something like that. So maybe I changed my answer to yes.

Okay. All right. A pretty good mix of opinions there. Yeah, people really touched on the same issues that we were just raising, which is like, what does it mean to see a black hole, right? One guy even switched his answer mid-thought, right? Yes, no, yes, yes, yes, no. I like the person who just said yes.

Like, did they have, have they seen one? Did they have some proof that nobody else has? They spoke with a lot of confidence I was like, yeah, wow, I'd like to be that certain about anything. It would have been funny with they said, yes, how did you know, or who told you? I know if there were aliens that came here from a black hole, maybe they would have felt like I had outed them, right?

Accidentally stumbled across the visitors. Not at all. That would be ridiculous. What do you mean? Zapp. I have never seen a black hole or a green hole. Or a white hole. And that's how Daniel got fried by a. laser gun.

So let's dig into it. Let's think about what it's like to take a picture of a black hole. All right, Daniel, here's the question. Can you see a black hole directly? No. Podcast over. No, the, obviously the black hole itself is black, right? And for those of you who don't know a lot about black holes,

remember they are very, very dense objects, right? They're enormously dense, so dense that they have really strong gravitational pull and the gravity is so strong that even light can't escape them, right? So the general trope is that something that goes into a black hole, a light,

a chair, a banana, a podcast host will never leave, right? Which means that they appear black. Well, here's a president confuses me. I thought a black hole was like a point. Like a, the thing that you can actually call the black hole is actually like an infinitesimal point, right?

Isn't it? Well, that's a great question. We don't actually know what's going on inside the black hole. But let's break it down. The black hole itself, what we consider the edge of the black hole, something we call the event horizon, is the point where any closer the gravity is so strong and you'll never leave.

Okay, so say you're right, say that there is a singularity, a super duper dense blob of matter that's infinitely small. There would still be points, even if you're not actually touching it, where the gravity would be so strong and you could never leave. So there's like a circle, a sphere around it. We call the event horizon.

And so what you would call a black hole then is basically anything inside of the event horizon. That's right. But it's important for people to know that we don't know what's going on inside the event horizon. We don't. General relativity tells us maybe it's a singularity. There's a super dense blob of matter there that's dense enough to cause this gravitational hole to create this event horizon. But quantum mechanics tells us that's impossible

because you can't have so much stuff in such a tiny isolated spot. So we don't know what's going on inside it. So generally when we talk about the black hole, we mean seeing inside of the event horizon or seeing this object, which is essentially like a black sphere. Right. And that can be of different sizes, right?

Like between the event horizon and the actual middle of the black hole, that distance can vary, right? Like you can have a little black hole or you can have a huge, huge, huge, black hole, right? Yeah, exactly. You can have tiny little cute black holes or enormous black holes. And they would look like different size black balls, basically. And the difference is in the mass, right? The more mass you have, the further away you can be from the black hole and still have

enough gravitational pull that you can't ever escape. So the mass of the black hole determines the size of the event horizon. Okay, so if you call the black hole basically the event horizon, which is defined as the sphere from which no light escapes, then by definition you cannot see a black hole. That's right. By definition, you can't see it, but there's always a caveat in physics, right? And in this case, you know, black holes do give off a tiny little glow. All right, I mean, they are black, right?

Nothing can leave them. They don't reflect any light because a photon hitting them gets sucked in. But this clever guy named Stephen Hawking says that, they do give off a very, very little glow. It's called hawking radiation. And so what is that? It means that at the edge of the event horizon, it's kind of leaking radiation, right? Yeah, because remember that particles are always doing crazy stuff,

and sometimes a particle very close to the event horizon will split into two particles momentarily. This is a normal thing for particles to do when they're going around their business. They split into two particles and then they come back, like a photon. might turn into an electron and positron and then back into a photon. So what can happen if it's very close to the event horizon is that one side gets bumped out of the event horizon while one side is in the event horizon

if the photon is like right on the event horizon. So one side gets sucked in and the other side leaks out and that's called hawking radiation. Wow. So the way you would see that is at the very kind of surface of this black sphere you would see kind of a boiling, right? You would see kind of these particles

just kind of popping out. Yeah, exactly. And how often it happens depends on something of the temperature of the black hole. So Stephen Hawking was the first person to think about black hole thermodynamics. I know. You can have a hot black hole and a cool black hole? Yeah, I know. Exactly.

You can have a spicy black hole and a mild black hole. And there's all sorts of different flavors. Halapena black holes. No, it's actually a really interesting question sort of philosophically and physically is how many properties can a black hole have? You know, what can you know about a black hole?

But that's a whole other topic we should investigate sometimes. Can you have a fat black hole? Yeah, but you should know that this hawking radiation is really, really mild. Like, you know, it's a few particles here and there. It's not something that you could reliably detect. It would be really hard to see that over the background of anything. But the point is that a black hole, even if you were looking straight at it, it wouldn't be perfectly black, right?

Like, you know how in a computer you can have zero value for black? If you look at a black hole, you would see just a little tiny glow. right? It wouldn't be a perfect black. Yeah, just a little tiny glow. I don't think it's possible to detect that with any sort of current technology. But I think we should, you know, for those listeners out there who are very knowledgeable black holes, I want to give a shout out to those folks. They do emit hawking radiation.

But as you say, with today's technology, that's not detectable. Right. But if you were there and you had a perfect selfie camera, you would detect a little bit of stuff there. Yeah, but you would have a hard time arguing that it came from the black hole. because you might just be picking up random photons, right? So distinguishing radiation from the black hole, from radiation from something else nearby, it might be very difficult.

That's why it's hard to see things that are very, very soft, right? Because they look like a lot of other stuff. Well, you could also see a black hole if it floated in front of something bright. Like you would see, like if it passed in front of a big sun, then you would see this little black circle, right? Yeah, exactly. And so one way to see a black hole is to see it occludes something else, right? for it to block something bright.

But that has to be just the right arrangement of stuff, right? You have to have something bright line up exactly with the black hole. And it's not like we have remote control where you can like say, hey, what would happen if I zoomed this star over here? Or let me just like pan back and forth across the sky, moving stars around until I notice one of them disappearing, right? You have to be in the right place at the right time and be looking for this kind of thing.

All right, so I guess the answer is no, you can't see a black hole directly. Yeah, I think the answer is no with the couple caveats, right? There is hawking radiation, which maybe in the future we could detect, and you could see it indirectly by seeing it block the things behind it. Okay, well, let's get into the stuff that you can see from a black hole, but let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything

changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking about whether you can see a black hole, and the answer is no. It's called the black hole for a reason. It's black. That's right. But this is like the podcast of caveats,

because everything we say, we're going to have a qualifier and explain. And in this case, the qualifier is a pretty big one. Like, yes, you can't directly see the black hole because it doesn't give off photons, but it has a pretty big effect on the stuff. near it. And that can turn out to be very easy to spot. Yeah, you were telling me that black holes are at the center

of the brightest objects in the whole universe. Yeah, in fact, when people saw these things, they were called quasars. They were so bright that they were puzzled. They were like, what could these things be? It was a big mystery because they knew these things were really far away sometimes, yet

they were so bright here on Earth, which meant that they must be incredibly bright where they are, and people were really puzzled. They were like, what could be so bright. Right. It's not just like a bright star. You were telling me these quasars are a thousand times brighter than the entire Milky Way galaxy.

Yeah. And so what happens is that the black hole has a huge effect on the stuff near it, right? So before you actually fall into the event horizon and disappear, it's not like you can just hang out there and have a picnic, right? It's a pretty intense gravitational experience. Stuff is being sucked in. You're like at the mouth of a vacuum cleaner. Yeah, exactly. And stuff is being really smushed and pulled. And so if you're like a big blob of gas, for example, near the event horizon of a black hole, then you're being swirled in. This is called the accretion disk. Accreting means just like adding. So the stuff that's about to fall into the black hole. And this stuff is getting squeezed. And what happens if you have a bunch of gas and you heat it up by squeezing it, right, is it's going to emit radiation, right? All that energy, the squeezing of it from the gravitational field gets turned into radiation, often x-ray. radiation. Wow. So it's not the black hole that's super bright, but it's just like all the

stuff waiting in line to fall into the black hole that's making all the noise and the crazy light. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's like the paparazzi surrounding a star of slavery or something, right? But it's direct, it only happens because the black hole is there, right? The black hole is having this effect on the gas. It's causing the gas to emit. And so you could say that, you could even say that the gas is part of the black hole, right? It's a totally arbitrary definition to say the black hole ends at the event horizon. You could say the black hole, you know, includes all the stuff in the accretion disc that's like on deck to get sucked in. It's like the band, it's not just the band, it's the bands and the roadies and the groupies. Yeah, exactly. That's right. It's

part of a community man. It's a movement, not a, not a band. Yeah, no man is an island, even a black hole. But when this happens, when you get the right kind of stuff assembled near the black hole, it's incredibly bright. And so, yeah, these quasars can be thousands of times brighter than entire galaxies. But not every single black hole has one of these things. Oh, I see. So a quasar is just a black hole with the right kind of stuff around it that is glowing and exploding.

It's kind of exploding, right? Or it's squeezing. Yeah, it's definitely, it's being squeezed and it's not happy, or I guess it likes it, I don't know. And it's emitting a huge amount of radiation. And the spectrum is really broad. You know, it's like x-ray to radio. It's on a lot of channels.

And that's one of the things that puzzled people for a long time. It's like, what? It's doing this. It's such an crazy tense source. It's super far away. And, you know, part of it with the mystery was that, like, the Milky Way doesn't have one of these things. We have a black hole in the center of our galaxy, but our galaxy doesn't have a quasar. It's not emitting this incredible radiation.

Yeah. Whoa. Wait, so some black holes are just there and they're sucking stuff in. but they don't light up the space around them. Yeah, because they don't have that stuff nearby that gets lit up, right? It's like one in a hundred galaxies have a quasar, have just the right assembly of stuff to get squeezed in, to emit this crazy radiation.

Oh. And how did we figure out that what was going on with these super bright objects? Well, you know, first we just didn't really believe the data. We were like, something must be wrong with these measurements because these things can't be so far away and so bright. but you know they checked and they double checked and it turns out they were correct and then they started to believe

they're like okay well if these things really are super bright what could they be and then they noticed that they were coming from the more accurate measurements of their direction they noticed they were coming from the centers of galaxies and then they started to associate that with black holes and then people built models they're like how could you get a black hole to give out this much radiation

and you know somebody had the idea maybe it's a stuff near it and they started building simulations of it and then they could reproduce the kind of thing that we're seeing in simulations and that convince them, okay, we understand what we're seeing. What we're seeing is crazy radiation from the neighborhood of a black hole. Wow. Is it just the amount of stuff? Like if there's a lot of stuff around a black hole, then you'll get these quasars or is it some other strange factor? Yeah, it depends a little bit on the stuff too. Like rock doesn't, you know, give us as much radiation

as gas, for example. So more gas and less dust, you get more radiation. But it's the kind of thing that seemed to happen earlier in the universe and that's not something we understand. A lot of these things are also really far away because further away means older, right? The farther away something is, the older the light is that's coming from it.

And so for some reason we don't understand, quasars aren't really being made anymore. There's sort of like something that happened earlier on in the party that is our universe and sort of out of fashion now. Oh, it's like the 80s, bright and bright and flashy but now a little, now

a little silly looking, to be honest. Yeah, exactly. In hindsight, you know, kind of intense and pretty awesome, but maybe not something we wanted to do anymore. Yeah, so something the universe used to do a lot more of, you know, when it was younger for reasons we don't quite understand. But it must have to do with, you know, the distribution of gas and dust and galaxies

and how that's broken up and supernovas and the cycle of stars. And it's all part of that really amazing story that is the history of our universe. So some black holes, about one in a hundred, you can definitely see because they have, they become quasars with all the stuff around them. Exactly. And I would say that that's seeing a black hole because there's no other way to make these things. Like a quasar means a black hole is there. And so that's, you know, it's the black hole sending you a big message. Like, hey, I'm destroying everything around me. Pay attention. That sounds like my daughter on some days. You just compare your daughter to a black hole. beautiful, unique, stellar miracle.

She sucks in knowledge, right? She's just like a black hole for information, right? That's what you meant. Yeah, yes, a galactic miracle, really. She's an incredibly powerful force. But it's not seeing all of the black holes because not all of them form quasars. That's right.

Then there's some of the quasars that are even weirder than that. Weird quasar. Yeah, weird quasers already are kind of weird. But sometimes the Quasar will do this thing. It'll create a galactic jet. And so if you imagine the black holes at the center of a galaxy, and galaxies are usually flat, right? Not like a jet you ride around in,

but like a stream of stuff. Yeah, not like a jet you ride around in at all. Although if you are riding around in your private jet right now listening to this podcast, please send us a donation. Clearly you have enough cash. Yeah, please. Give us a ride. We'll do a podcast from your jet.

Lighting cigars from burning $100 bills. No, this is like a jet of stuff. It's the stuff that comes out of the back of a jet engine. That's why it's called a jet, right? Because it creates a jet of stuff. And so if you imagine a galaxy sort of like a cinnamon roll, like it's a big flat swirl, these jets shoot up away from the plane,

sort of like above and below. This is an enormous stream of really, really high-velocity stuff getting shot out from sort of the top and the bottom. It's almost like an escape valve, right? like it's so intense and it's swirling that it just kind of all let's lose in one direction. Yeah, and these things are huge. I mean, if you see pictures

of galaxies with jets, the jets are like the size of the galaxy. These are not just like tiny little valves, you know, whistling off at the end of a day. This is like a huge enormous spew of stuff going like at relativistic speeds. Right. And

if they do this weird phenomenon, they're called something different. They're not called quasars anymore, right? Yeah, they have a, they graduate we'd have an even cooler name. They're called Blazars. I don't know if that's a cooler name. Oh, Blazor. I'd much rather be a Blazor than a Quasar.

Than a quasar? Oh, yeah. Quasar sounds sort of iffy. There's like a questiony. There's like a questiony name about Quasar. It's like, uh, what am I? Am I in black hole? I'm not really sure.

I'm quazing. No, it sounds like a quantum star, you know, a quasar. But a blazer, a blazer just sounds like a, you know, a blaze or... No, it sounds like the coolest thing you could wear to a faculty meeting like, hey, I'm wearing my blazar. In the 80s. Maybe in the 80s, Daniel. You'd wear your blazers

with the giant shoulder pads. No, but the reason they're called blazars is that some of them are pointing right at the earth. And if they point right at the earth, the physics of it, the relativity of it, enhances the brightness of that jet by a huge factor.

If it's pointing right at you, then relativity increases the intensity of it, and then they're just like redonculously bright. Wow. Much brighter than even quasars. Brighter than even quasars, yeah. Wow. And it's fascinating because they're super bright,

and we don't know, like, why do some quasars have jets? You know, it must be related to the magnetic field. That's why it gets, like, siphoned off. And we talked in another podcast episode about neutron stars that sometimes turn into pulsars that emit radiation along the pole. It must be something similar to that, some huge forces that are siphying off all this material and sending it up and down.

But we really don't understand it. It's a huge mystery. But this is only like one in ten quasars have these jets. Yeah, exactly. So now you're talking about a one in ten out of one in a hundred black holes become these blazing saddles of a blasey blasts. And that's, see, exactly, blasars are rarer than quasars, which also makes them cooler. Like, you've got lots of quasars at the party, but when the blazar shows up, everybody pays attention.

Right. But I guess the point is that these things only happen. around black hole. So if you see a blazar or a quasar, then you know there is a black hole there and you're kind of sort of practically seeing it. Exactly. It's very clear evidence that the black hole is there. So, yeah, it's how direct is it? You know, the black hole is creating this huge stream of radiation that's hitting a telescope, which then gets downloaded to the internet, and you whiz by it on your Twitter feed and see this picture for 0.02 seconds. Have you then seen a black hole? I would say yes.

Well, it's kind of cool that the blackest things in the universe are also the brightest. That's pretty cool. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The darkest, dankest things in the universe also create the brightest sources of radiation. There's some poetry there. The universe always ends up being poetic. Right, right.

Like in the 80s. Exactly. Hot pants and poetry. That's what I remember from the 80s. And hammer time. Oh, wait, that was 90s. Sorry. It was the 90s, sorry.

Well, let's get into the other ways that you can see black holes, quote-unquote, see. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances.

Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in place. sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

podcasts hola it's honey german and my podcast graces come again is back this season we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite latin artists and celebrities you didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs,

and those amazing vivras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again as part of my Cultura podcast network on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then.

And I just hit call. Said, you know, hey, Jacob Schick, I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation, and I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month,

so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own mom. to suicide. One tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. Don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, I know, so what are other ways that we can see black holes?

So we can see the black holes themselves, and sometimes they're really super-duper-bright as quasars or blazars. But what about all the other black holes? How can we possibly see them or know they're there? Yeah, so I was thinking about this. I came up with three ways to see black holes today. But then there's a bonus way we'll talk about at the end that's only going to be possible starting tomorrow.

So way number one is actually the way that we discover the black hole the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. And that's again indirect in that it affects the stuff around it. So we were talking about quasars, how they squeeze gas and make them radiate. If you're not lucky enough to have the right kind of gas near your black hole to make a quasar, you can still have a big impact on the stars that are there. Just the gravity will change the orbit of those stars. So you can see it because if you see a lot of stars kind of going

around something really, really massive, then you know there must be a black hole there, right? Exactly. And there's a team, I think, at UCLA that's been pointing a telescope at the center of the galaxy

for a long time just to watch the orbit of these stars. And they see the stars moving around something invisible, something they don't see in a way that's consistent with something really, really heavy being there. So we don't know that it's a black hole,

but we know that there's some really dense blob of matter that's invisible right at the center of the galaxy. So that's pretty good evidence and it's a black hole. And by invisible, you mean like it doesn't shine like a star. It's not like a giganto star. It's just something that's really massive but doesn't shine. Yeah, exactly.

And remember, it's also difficult to see the center of the galaxy. It's not like a clear view because all the gas and the dust between us and it. You have to see these things in non-visible frequencies of light. You know, like radio waves and x-rays and stuff like that. So even then you're not like really seeing it directly. But yeah, this black hole doesn't give off radiation directly, right? As we were saying, and it doesn't induce radiation into stuff around it. So effectively, it looks like there's nothing there,

but we know that it's having a gravitational effect on the stuff around it. So it's sort of like the way we see dark matter, right? We only see dark matter through gravity. We're pretty sure it's there. Is that seeing it? Like, well, you know, it's indirect evidence, but I would say everything's indirect. Yeah, like I always thought it was pretty cool this idea that if our sun here in our solar system,

suddenly turn into a black hole, like all that mass suddenly compressed down into a black hole, like things would kind of keep going the same way, wouldn't they? Like the planets would still orbit in exactly the same way they are now. And so even though you couldn't see anything bright in the middle of the solar system, you could still say there's something there, dark, black, and that has all that mass. That's true.

It wouldn't change the orbit of the Earth, but it would have a pretty big effect on life on Earth, right? I mean, things would get a little dark. Yeah, exactly. The gravitational pull of the sun depends only basically on the mass of the sun. It doesn't actually matter what the distribution of the matter is, as long as the sun's radius is smaller than the orbit of the Earth. It all averages out to be the same as just like one particle with the mass of the sun at the center of the sun.

You're right, if the sun collapsed into a black hole, that wouldn't change the orbit of the Earth. Right. Things would just get a little chilly. Exactly. I like that you've thought about this scenario. Do you have specific plans for what to do if the sun goes black hole? Yeah, no, well, I think it would be over. You would just see the black hole and you'd be like, all right, I've seen a black hole. You're like, I'm going to call Daniel and Jorge and let them know their podcast is now out of date. Yeah, all right, so tell me what are the other two ways that we can see black holes?

Well, another way is from gravitational waves. So folks might remember that we saw wiggles in space and time from black holes merging with each other. So this is two black holes spinning around each other, getting sucked in by each other's gravity. It's like, I'm going to eat you. No, I'm going to eat you. Eventually they just like eat each other and become one super big black hole. Yeah. And when that happens, it sends off these ripples in space and time, right?

Remember, we think about gravity not as a force, but as something that distorts space and time with mass. Like a shock wave. Yeah, it's like a shock wave. And these things, when they orbit each other and they merge, it's a lot of acceleration. that creates these wiggles in space and time. And we can see those with this awesome device called LIGO, which sees these ripples in space and time. They've seen like 11 mergers so far.

11? Wow. Yeah. But it sounds like a lot. But knowing how many black holes are in the universe, it's actually kind of a rare thing, right? Yeah, exactly. But they can only search a very small volume of the universe so far, right? Things that are sensitive, that they're sensitive to,

they have to be pretty big black hole mergers, and they have to be near enough by, that the black hole, that the gravitational wave would have reached us, for example. So, you know, they're upgrading it and they're looking in a larger and larger volume all the time. But we wouldn't have these black hole merger events if you didn't have black holes, right? So that's another piece of evidence that black holes are real that they're out there. We've seen them in another way. And I think it's cool to see things, you know, and we call this multi-messinger,

see them with light, see them with particles, see them with gravitational waves. It's like lots of different ways to probe the same thing. And you can ask different kinds of questions. and then if your model of what's going on is wrong, it's another way to figure that out, to get a clue as to what might actually be happening. Right. So you can't see the black holes,

but you can see the shockways of their crash. Yeah, exactly. All right, so what's the last kind of way that we can see a black hole? My last way is my favorite way. It's my fantasy way, right? Which is, what if, we could see them more directly. Tell us, Daniel.

What if we could see them more directly because we could create them in the lab, right? So this is, you know, I like to see things directly. We were talking earlier about, like, if you want to believe it, you got to see it. I think it's more than that. Like, if you want to believe it, you've got to be able to make it.

You're going to be able to reproduce it. Like, is the Higgs Bose not real? Well, if so, we got to be able to make it. Like, let's isolate the conditions needed to create it so we can really understand it. And we can control its creation and, you know, study it. So that's what we're trying to do. at the Large Hadron Collider, we're trying to create these

really, really tiny, super duper mini cozy black holes so that we can understand how they're created and the rate at which they're created and what happens to them. Really? Is that really a project? Like a project make black holes? I know you have all kinds of projects like dark matter and antimatter and looking for

particles, but is there actually like a team that's the make a black hole team? Yeah. Yeah, that's the project. You have to understand also that the Large Hageon Collider we just do the same experiment over and over again, which is we smash protons together. And then there are different teams analyzing that data looking for different stuff

because you can't control what happens when you smash two protons together. Basically, everything that can happen will eventually happen. You just got to look through all the data see, oh, did we make any Higgs's? Do we make any top corks? Do we make any dark matter?

Do we make any black holes? So the black hole team is not doing anything different from the other folks in terms of the actual experiment that are inducing black holes to be made, but they're looking through the data, to see if there's evidence that black holes were made. Right. Well, I think we should get into the wisdom

of making black holes here on Earth, maybe in another episode. But let me just add a very quick reminder to the folks who are out there who are worried. Number one, we're very confident that this is safe that if these black holes are created, they would evaporate, and they're no danger to Earth. And if you are worried about it,

there's a website you can check called Has the Hadjohn Collider Destroyed the World Yet.com, and we promise to always keep it up to date. Are you sure? Yeah. If you check that website, then you know the world has not been destroyed. What if your credit card subscription ends?

Or you're going to send the whole universe into a panic? If you don't have internet, there's nothing I can do for you. Then you have bigger problems. All right. So that answers the question. Can you see a black hole? And it sounds like the answer is you know. You can't see it directly.

That's why it's called a black hole. But you can see all this stuff. stuff around it and the effect it has on everything around it. And I would say that seeing it indirectly in so many different ways and understanding the physics of it pretty well, I would say that's seeing it. So I think we all understand what it means to see a black hole, but we might disagree about whether that is seeing it or not. Right, right.

But taking a picture of it, like a photo from your phone, we're still pretty far away from that, right? Yeah. And, you know, there is a new telescope coming online called the Event Horizon. telescope, it's basically the patching together of lots of different telescopes that I'm going to try to image the center of our galaxy and understand exactly where is the edge of the black hole, where is that event horizon, where is all the stuff around it? And, you know, we can't see the black hole directly, but by studying in detail, all the stuff that's around

the black hole, we'll get a lot more information about the black hole formation and the black hole physics and is the black hole spicy or is it mild, right? All this kind of stuff we want to know about black holes. Cool. Well, do they have an Instagram account that I can follow so that, you know, when they finally post pictures? I can see it. I don't have any internet, so I can't answer that question for you. Oh, great. So the world could have ended right now, thanks to you guys, and we wouldn't know.

But you should stay tuned because the Event Horizon Telescope is going to release their first ever results tomorrow. That's right. Wednesday, April 10th will be the date humanity first glimpses a black hole. Now, of course, we're not going to see the black hole directly. The Event Horizon Telescope uses radio telescopes from all over the Earth and stitches that together to penetrate the gas near the galactic center and see all around the black hole. So what we're going to get is we're going to see the first image of the event horizon of a black hole,

which means we're going to learn the shape of a black hole. Is it a sphere? Is it a square? Is it a donut? We're going to find out tomorrow. Well, I think it's a cool reminder that there are still things in the universe out there that are complete mystery. You know, we haven't seen them. We definitely won't know what's inside of them, yet they exist. and we know they exist. It's pretty cool. Yeah, and I think that's one of the jobs of physics is to figure out ways to probe this stuff.

How can we get some information from the universe? How can we ask questions in just the right way so we can get some understanding of what's going on out there, even when we can't see it directly? Because that's the easy stuff, right? Right. Well, coming to you live from Inside of Black Hole, this has been the podcast, Daniel and Horheit, Explain the Universe.

Good luck, everyone surviving the Black Hole Apocalypse. Thanks for listening. See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the universe is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed.

There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged. Terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why are TSA rules so confusing? I'm Mani. I'm Noah.

This is Devin. And we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called No Such Thing, where we get to the bottom of questions like that. Why are you screaming? I can't expect what to do. Now, if the rule was the same, go off on me. I deserve it. You know, lock him up.

Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. No Such Thing. I'm Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford. host of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast. I know how overwhelming it can feel if flying makes you anxious. In session 418 of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, Dr. Angela Neal-Barnett and I discuss flight anxiety. What is not a norm is to allow it to prevent you from doing the things that you want to do, the things that you were meant to do.

Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Thank you.