Science Friday - A New Controversial Black Hole Theory, Saving The Great Salt Lake. March 10, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: March 10, 2023

Despite Superconductor Breakthrough, Some Scientists Remain Skeptical This week, researchers unveiled a new superconductor which they say works at room temperature. Scientists have been working on identifying new superconductors for decades—materials that can transmit electricity without friction-like resistance. However, previously discovered superconductors only work at super cold temperatures, and under incredibly high pressures. The newly discovered superconductor, lutetium, could be much more useful in applications, like strong magnets used in MRIs, magnetically floating trains, and even nuclear fusion, than those which must be kept super-cold. But there’s a bit of a wrinkle. The research team which published their results in the journal Nature this week, had their previous study on another superconductor retracted in 2020. As a result, many scientists in the field have concerns about the quality of this new research Ira talks with Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American, to make sense of this superconductor saga and other big science news of the week including bumblebee culture, extreme ways to save mountain glaciers, and identifying the worms in Mezcal. Can Utah’s Great Salt Lake Be Saved Before It’s Too Late? Utah’s Great Salt Lake is one of the state’s treasures and is vital to the local ecosystem and economy. But since the 1980s, it’s been drying up—and now the lake’s water level is at a record low. The lake is fed by three rivers, which are fed by Utah’s snowpack. It’s also a terminal lake, meaning that there’s no outlet for water to exit. And as the population of Utah has increased, more water has been diverted from those rivers to agriculture, industry, and local residents. As more of the lakebed has become exposed, wind has picked up dust plumes and blown them into local communities. Dr. Kevin Perry, a professor of atmospheric science sciences at the University of Utah, discovered that those lakebed dust plumes contain heavy metals, including arsenic. But despite these challenges, Perry and local politicians are confident that if the right water usage reductions are put in place, the lake will have a chance to bounce back. Science Friday digital producer Emma Gometz visited Perry at the Great Salt Lake in January, who describes how we got here and what the future holds. Exploring A New Theory About Dark Energy’s Origins Black holes remain one of the great mysteries of the universe. Another enigma? Dark energy. Little is known about this concept, aside from the belief that dark energy accelerates the expansion of the universe. These are two of the most mind-bending concepts in physics. There’s a new theory that brings together black holes and dark energy into one mind-bending solution: research led by the University of Hawai’i at Manoa posits that dark energy could actually come from supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies. If true, this would be a massive breakthrough in what we know about astrophysics. But many experts in the field have reservations about this idea. Two of those experts join Ira to talk about this theory, and other recent black hole breakthroughs: Janna Levin, PhD, author of “Black Hole Blues” and “Black Hole Survival Guide,” and a physics and astronomy professor at Barnard College in New York City, and Feryal Özel, a professor and chair of physics at Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, Georgia. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, we'll take you on a trip to the Great Salt Lake and meet a scientist trying to save it. Yep, it is drying up. Plus, we'll be talking about new research that links black holes and dark energy. And we'll be answering your, I got to know. I got to know questions about black holes in cosmology. So if you've got them, tell us about them. Our number 844-724-8255-8-44-Sight-Talk, or you can tweet us. at SciFri. But first, this week's researchers have unveiled a new superconductor, a superconductor, which they say works at room temperature. Scientists have been working on identifying new superconductors for decades, materials which can transmit electricity without pesky friction-like resistance. And the ones discovered in the past only work at super cold temperatures, so this would make this material much more useful in applications like strong magnets used in MRIs, magnetically floating trains, even nuclear fusion. But there is a bit of a wrinkle. And Sophie Bushwick is here to iron it all out. See what I did there, Sophie? Sophie Bushwick is the technology editor at Scientific American.

She's here with me in our studios in New York. Welcome back, Sophie. Thanks. It's great to be here. And I'm really excited to be talking about this topic. I think it's very interesting. Well, let's get right into it. First, tell us what superconductivity is? So superconductivity is when electricity can travel through a material without losing any of its energy in the form of heat. So it's, it's, imagine if you had a wire carrying electricity, say, in a power grid across the country. As it moves, the wire is going to heat up a little bit. It's going to shed some of this energy in the form of heat. And if you had that wire made out of a superconducting material, it would have zero energy loss. And so you can imagine more efficient

energy transmission, but also, you know, a computer that never overheats. And because of superconductors are, they exhibit some weird behavior, including pushing out magnetic fields. So if you've ever seen an experiment or performed an experiment where you have a magnet levitating above a superconductor, that's a result of that phenomenon. Cool. Yes, I have done that a couple of times. All right, so what's exciting about this news then? So this news is exciting because to get a superconductor to work, you've got to have it in extremely controlled conditions. It's either, so there's some materials that can be superconducting when they're chilled to very low temperatures.

And there's others that can be superconducting at room temperature. But you have to squeeze them in this vice-like device called a diamond anvil that raises the pressure around them to, you know, roughly a quarter or half of the pressure found at the center of the earth. Oh. Right. So it's not super practical for building, you know, train tracks for a Maglev train out of this stuff. So this new material is interesting because not only is it working at room temperature, but it's supposed to be working at a pressure that's not quite room pressure, but it's like a hundred times less pressure than is required for other materials like this. And it's at room temperature, right? That's right.

That's an important thing. Yes, that's definitely an important thing as well. But I said there's a wrinkle here. There's some controversy about the researchers who did this. That's right. So the research team that put this out had previously published a study about a different superconducting material that worked at room temperature. And that was published in 2020 in nature. But other researchers in the superconductivity community started pointing out problems with the data that had to do with, for a lot of these measurements, when you take the measurement, you can't just use the raw data because there's all this background noise.

So you have to measure the background noise, measure the signal from this superconducting sample, and then subtracting. out the background. And they said that there's some discrepancies here in this process that don't make sense. And as a result of a lot of back and forth between these researchers, nature have retracted that paper. And that's not the only paper to have weird issues with the data from these same researchers. So for that reason, there are people in the superconductivity community who are saying we're not necessarily going to trust these results on base value. And you talk to them, what did they say it would take to trust these results? So they think it would take replication, which is something that the authors also say they want,

the idea that another lab, not affiliated with this one, could try to make the same material, tested for superconductivity, and find the same results. So replication is what it would take to make them as excited as the authors are. You know, it reminds me a little bit, just a little bit of cold fusion back in the day where you could not replicate the results. People couldn't do it, but they might be able to, right?

They might. And also, this isn't unique to this particular study. So back in the 80s, there was the discovery of superconductors that still had to be chilled, but not to quite as low temperatures. And the researchers who published the paper on it, for about the first six months after they published the paper, there wasn't a ton of excitement. It was only when those results were replicated, that people were like, wow, I think you're really on to something here. And the original researchers eventually won a Nobel Prize for it. Wow. I'm tempted to say that's really cool, but I'll try to stay with it.

It is literally and metaphorically cool. Thank you for bailing me out. There's another story getting a lot of buzz this week. Speaking of dad jokes. Bumblebees. Bumblebees are capable of creating and transmitting culture. Tell us about that. Right.

So we think of culture as something humans have. But if you define culture the way scientists do, which is socially learning a behavior within a population, then they've actually demonstrated this in a bunch of different species. And now they've demonstrated it in bumblebees. So the way, the thing that they wanted to transmit was the ability to transmit was the ability to solve this puzzle box, it's this kind of cool apparatus where there's this sugar solution

under a lid, and in order to access it, you can push either a red tab in one direction or a blue tab in another. And then they took some bees from different colonies and taught them how to solve it in a specific way, either the red tab method

or the blue tab method. And then they put them back in their hives. And sure enough, the bees that knew how to do it taught the other bees in their colony, but they taught them the specific method they learned. So even though either method would work, the bees in a colony that had learned to do the blue tab method would do the blue tab method. And if they accidentally did the red tab method and it worked, they wouldn't necessarily pick that up. They might do it and solve it, but then they

would go back to the blue tab way that they knew their culturally chosen way. Yeah, let's talk about the definition of culture. Why do we call this culture that the bees have culture? Well, we have to talk about, if you're trying to find something like culture, which is such a broad category and you're a scientist, you're like, well, let's give this a good definition. So it's a socially learned behavior, right? They learned it from the demonstrator bees that had been trained. And it was used within this set population. So it was used within the population of the specific colony. If you went to another colony that had learned from a different demonstrator bee, they would do that method instead. So you can see, think of these colonies as having different cultures

when it comes to solving this puzzle box. And you know, that doesn't sound so weird because bees live in big colonies. Like the ants live in colonies, you'd think there is a culture. Absolutely. That's developing, right? Right. And there's also more complex communication than we would have expected. So not bumblebees, but honeybees do a dance called the waggle dance where they can teach other members of the colony where to find a source of nectar. So it's clear that what's going on among animals is communication and learning that's more complex than we used to think they were capable of,

which kind of, you know, makes you think that all the things we think of, oh, well, only humans can do this. It turns out in a lot of ways we're not so special. They have some culture. This next story raises more questions than it answers. I'm talking about a new analysis into tree rings shows that what scientists once thought were solar flares might actually be caused by something else. Tell us about. What do we know about what's going on here? This is super cool.

So trees absorb carbon dioxide, as we know. But sometimes a teeny tiny fraction of the carbon that they take in is, a radioactive isotope of carbon. And those radioactive molecules are formed from sometimes, from humans doing our human thing, you know, testing nuclear power or weapons. But sometimes it comes from cosmic radiation, which we think of as coming from like big solar flares from the sun. And if you look at the historical record preserved in tree rings, you can see where historically

there were big solar flares. But when researchers started studying these events called Miyaki events, they think that they could also be caused by things like maybe a comet passing by, maybe a far-off neutron star or even a supernova. So I guess to sum it up then, they're not quite sure. They're not quite sure. The mystery continues. But it's a fascinating topic of study. Scientists love that. Yeah. Your next story you brought us is about some unexpected solutions to a problem we've talked about quite a bit on the show. And that's melting mountain glaciers. your colleagues at Scientific American Amanda Ruggieri, she wrote about some extreme measures to save glaciers.

Tell us about some of these measures. They sound very, go ahead. Some of this is a little out there, right? So one idea is just making extra snow. Cover those glaciers with a little extra snow, help replenish them. The problem is, of course, it takes energy to make snow and it takes water. So researchers are developing snowmaking methods that rely more on things like gravity to help the process along and make them less. energy-intensive. But another option is just take some white paint, paint some rocks,

have those rocks reflect the sunlight back into the sky. Cheap. It's yet enough paint, right? Right. But, you know, not as effective as, say, what if you could cover the whole glacier in a big white blanket that would insulate it from the sun and reflect those rays away? You know, there was a team of Crystal and Jean-Claude. They were artists back in the day. They covered buildings and the work of art with big sheets and stuff. They're not among us now, That would fit right in for what they were doing. Absolutely.

But, of course, there, the problem is that glaciers are big. Even shrinking, these glaciers are still very, very large. It would take, you know, more than a billion dollars to cover just the thousand largest glaciers in Switzerland with blankets like these. So, again, that's more appropriate for sort of small areas as opposed to big ones. Fine, and let's end with some fun fact. You'll be sure you want to share over the weekend with friends. Scientists identified the worms. you sometimes find in a bottle of mescal.

That's right. They did a genetic analysis of the quote-unquote worms found in 21 different bottles. And I say quote-unquote because they're not actually worms. They're not. What are they? They are the larva of a moth. And these are called, unfortunately, I'm going to contradict myself here. The name of the larva colloquially is the red agave worm.

So people call them that. But they are not worms. They are moth larva. And in fact, they turn into cream-colored moths once they reach adulthood. So the red color is only in their larval stage. How did they discover this? Well, they were sitting around a bar and they said, you know, I wonder. And then they grab, you know, they grab some bottles of mescal and they decided to do genetic testing on the larva inside.

And some of them they couldn't genetic test. They had actually been baked before they were put into the bottle. So those they just had to look at and say, well, can we identify the characteristics and the physical traits of this insect that? could help us tell us what it is. I wonder if this idea came before or after drinking a couple of margaritas on the weekends. I think we'll never know. It's another mystery of science. Something we have to perform on our own.

Thank you, Sophie. Thanks for having me. Sophie Bushwick Technology Editor at Scientific American based in New York. We have to take a short break. And when we come back, the Great Salt Lake is in trouble. It's drying up. Can anything be done? We're going to take a road trip.

So stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. Hey there, podcast listeners. I were here with a simple request. If you're listening to this podcast, learning something, enjoying yourself, please go to ScienceFriday.com slash support to make a donation. Our work and this podcast depends on public support from listeners like you. You know that. You're here listening, which means you find our programming valuable. Any amount makes a difference, even two bucks. But the Lasting gifts are the ones we can count on sustaining donations which we can rely on every year. So please go to ScienceFriiday.com slash support to make your gift. Again, that's science Friday.com slash support. And thanks. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Utah's Great Salt Lake is one of the state's treasures and is vital to the local ecosystem and economy. But since the 1980s, the lake's water level has declined to a record low, leaving large parts of the lake bed exposed to the air and the region's wildlife disappearing.

Yet despite its bleak current state, local scientists and politicians are cautiously optimistic about the lake's future, meaning that if the right efforts are put in place, the lake still might have a chance to bounce back. Here's digital producer Emma Gomez, talking to one of the scientists trying to save the great salt. Lake. Coyote. Coyote. Just making its way up the mountain. Just being a little coyote.

At a lookout point above the Great Salt Lake, I saw a few bison, high-flying birds, and tiny coyotes living by the surrounding mountain range that looked straight out of Lord of the Rings. But one thing that I couldn't get out of my head was just how quiet it was. For some people more familiar with the lake, its silence is a newer development. It was only when I started studying it in detail that I realized what an absolute gym and oasis in the desert this place actually is for wildlife, for serenity, for recreation. And the thought that we're at the cusp of losing this vital ecosystem in this absolutely wonderful place just makes me really sad. We visited Dr. Kevin Perry on a brisk January morning on the lake.

He's a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, and he's been studying the Great Salt Lake. for seven years. The lake has undergone a dramatic transformation in the last century. It used to be home to millions of migratory birds, herds of large herbivores and insects. But one thing that it noticeably doesn't have anymore is an abundance of water. As I squinted out into the distance over a lookout point, I could catch a glimpse of the lake's waterline, hundreds of meters beyond the shore. If the lake was full, it would be teeming with life. But the exposed, Lowe's lake bed was dry, cracking in the cold January air. It would have been truly a magical place.

As the lake's water level has diminished for the last three decades, so has the ecosystem. Science Friday producer D. Peter Schmidt and I walked to the original shoreline of the lake, where we were met with what seemed like miles of dry sediment mounds that resembled a dead coral reef. Perry told us they used to be microbialite communities, which are habitats made by microbes that fed the millions of brine fount. flies and brine shrimp native to the lake. Since at the moment we were standing on dry land, we had to take his word for it. 30 years ago, you were standing here right now, the water would be about six feet over your head. Although climate change and drought are a factor in the lake's desiccation, Perry says there's

more at play. So people are always asking me, is the lake shrinking because of climate change or because of the megadrout? And the answer is actually no. The Great Salt Lake is fed by three rivers, and those rivers are fed by the snowpack on the surrounding mountains. It's also a terminal lake, meaning there's no outlet for water to exit. So if the lake's water sources are cut off, then it's at risk for shrinkage, which is exactly what's happened. Local residents, industry, and agriculture all rely on these snowpack-fed rivers for water. Agriculture making up 87% of that usage.

And as the population of Utah increases, more water has been diverted for those purposes. You know, we're the second driest state in the United States, and we use water like we have an endless supply. And we're facing the consequences of those decisions that we've made now. The wildlife biologists have been sounding the alarm about the shrinking Great Salt Lake for, you know, more than 20 years. And it didn't resonate with the public. But that changed when the dust plumes started. As the water has receded, the wind has picked up dust from the exposed lake bed and blown it into the local communities, made up of 2 million residents. When dust plumes come off the lake, it reduces the horizontal visibility to less than a mile, and you see this wall of dust coming.

And people had to go wash their cars because of the amount of dust that was depositing on their cars, and they could see it in their gardens and on their decks, and they were wondering what it is that we were actually breathing. Seven years ago, Perry got funding to study what exactly was in that dust. But he isn't the type to just sit around and wait for a plume to come his way. I'm just not that patient. So what I decided to do was to go out onto the lake bed using a fat tire bike and actually collect soil samples. I ended up riding more than 2,300 miles on the bike to sample all 800 square miles of the lakebed. And Perry discovered something concerning about the composition of the soil. Every single measurement that I took had higher arsenic concentrations.

then would be recommended by the EPA. As we walked onto the lake bed with Perry, he squinted at the ground and started kicking at the crusty surface. I think you're going to be able to get some dust here. So if it wasn't frozen, you could kick that and you generate a dust plume, basically. Researchers like Perry have been sharing their findings with the public and raising awareness about the shrinking lake's effects. They've become part-time advocates for the lake,

calling up legislators, appearing on local media, and holding educational seminars. As the surface area of the exposed lakebed grows, local residents have become concerned about what might be in the lake's dust. To what extent is this elevated level of arsenic harmful to people in local crops? That's unknown. Researchers are working to answer those questions. But the shrinking water levels, the collapsing ecosystem, the dust plumes, the heavy metals and the soil, all of this. has spurred Utahans to call up their politicians and express their concerns. And the legislators have listened?

Multiple bills are moving through the state Senate to address the lake's issues. And after Utah's governor, Spencer Cox, surveyed the area, he said, quote, on my watch, we are not allowing the lake to go dry. Late last year, President Biden signed a federal bill for $25 million that will go towards researching local Great Basin Saline Lake hydrology and other conservation efforts. thanks to sponsorship by Representative Blakemore and Senator Mitt Romney. The beautiful thing is that the lake is a nonpartisan issue. It affects everyone in northern Utah and beyond.

And because most of the state's water is being used by agriculture, lake advocates have been engaged with those local stakeholders. An agriculture water optimization task force was assembled, and grant funding has been allocated to independent farmers to use less water. But is all this enough to save the Great Salt Lake before it dries up? Brigham Young University estimates that if the current rate of water loss continues, the lake will disappear in five years. And the lake has already crossed several tipping points that have fundamentally changed the current ecosystem. And we're nearing the last and final tipping point, which is the salinity tipping point.

As the lake gets drier, it becomes saltier, meaning that if the lake passes a certain level of salinity, it will become too salty to support even its most salt-loving wildlife. Like brine shrimp. Brine shrimp and brine flies are at the base of the Great Salt Lake's food chain. So hitting this salinity tipping point could mean food chain collapse. Despite the challenges, Perry remains hopeful. Now that there's a groundswell of support for saving the Great Salt Lake, I'm cautiously optimistic that we can change our behavior.

We got into the situation from decisions that we made on how we use our water, which means that we can alter our decision-making process, and we can actually turn this around. For Science Friday, I'm Emma Gomez. Thank you, Emma. If you want to read about how scientists are working together with politicians and community members to save the lake and see photos from our trip, read Emma's full article at ScienceFriday.com slash Salt Lake. Black holes remain one of the great mysteries of the universe. Another great mystery, dark energy.

Little is known about this aside from the belief that dark energy accelerates the expansion of the universe. And these two are among the most mind-bending observations of our universe. Now, let's ratchet up the mystery just a bit more because there's a new theory that brings together black holes and dark energy. Research led by the University of Hawaii posits that dark energy could actually come from supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies. And if this is true, this would be a massive breakthrough in what we know about astrophysics. But many experts in the field have reservations about this idea. So joining me to help analyze this theory and other black hole news are my guests, Dr. Janelle Levin, author of Black Hole Blues and Black Hole Survival Guide. She's also a physics and astronomy professor at Barnard College in New York.

And Dr. Ferial-Ozell, Professor and Chair of Physics at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Welcome back both of you to Science Friday. Always good to be here. Nice to have you. I want to invite our listeners to join the questioning about black holes, dark energy, other cosmic thoughts within limits. Not everything. It's not too wacky.

But here's our number. 844-724-8255-8-44-Sy-Talk. You can tweet us at Sci-Fi if you have questions about black holes or any of this kind of stuff we're talking about. Jan, let's talk about this new theory, this idea, that dark energy may come from supermassive black holes. Explain that idea to us. So I do think the idea is quite contentious, but I find it really interesting. A lot of ideas live and die on the page and get bashed out this way. So the idea is that interior to a black hole, we don't fully understand the physics there.

So maybe we can play a game like sew a different kind of a space time on the interior of a black hole. And one possibility is that we imagine almost like building a quilt, that we could sew together this universe interior to the black hole, which is dominated by dark energy. And it can be smoothly sewn together mathematically. That's not the same as saying that nature makes such a thing. And would this solve a problem, if this was true?

That alone doesn't necessarily solve any problems. There's still more steps. So the idea of connecting it to the dark energy, you have to then couple the black hole to the entire expansion of the universe. And the idea would be these black holes are little nuggets of dark energy. and if I average them together across the whole universe

and I connect the way the black holes evolve with that expansion, that I get a combo. I get a little black holes plus dark energy as a sort of bonus. Would this sort of serve as the source of where the dark energy is? That's the idea that maybe the dark energy all along has been hiding in the interiors of these black holes.

And we've just, we've been looking for it exterior. We've been looking for it as this, diffuse background that's everywhere and dominates the energy density of the universe, but maybe it's actually locked in the interiors of black holes is the idea. And that the black holes masses grow with the expansion of the universe, not just by acquiring matter and stars and merging, which is how we think of black holes growing and accumulating mass, but maybe its mass simply grows because it is tied to this dark energy and expansion of the universe. Cool. For Yale, what's your take on this theory?

Well, I can see the motivation behind it, for sure. There are certain problems with black holes that we will all acknowledge, and the authors use as motivation for their work. It's interesting to try and solve the problems of the magnitude of the dark energy and how we still don't have a solution for spinning black holes and how they match to an expanding universe with effectively killing two birds with one stone, connecting the two, and speculating that black holes are just basically vacuum condensates the way that Jana was describing.

But on the observational front, I think there are problems with what the study is putting forth. So theoretically an interesting idea, but I'm on the side. I got to press you on it. What do you mean on the observational side? What's the problem here? Sure. So our current understanding of black holes is that they grow from normal matter. And they grow, for example, when stars die and collapse into black holes and then accrue matter from their environments, like gas and other stars and maybe merge with other black holes.

And we think that this has something to do with how galaxies are growing as well, in the sense that there is a symbiotic relationship there. Both grow from early on in the universe. They seem to grow roughly in tandem, but roughly is the key word here. So we don't expect a one-to-one relationship between how a black hole grows and how the galaxy grows. So what the authors are doing is looking at supermassive black holes in a survey of galaxies at the centers of galaxies. And they're saying, look, the galaxies have not grown much over the time period that we are surveying, but the black holes have. So as a result, they must have another way of growing. And then they're speculating how the black hole growth relates to the expansion of the universe.

and they're finding that that theory is favored compared to black holes growing from just gas and stars. I see. So there are two speculations here, and if you make two speculations, it's easy to see how you would find a theory or some data that better matches one over the other. Let me just jump in and say this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Sorry, that's how I Go ahead for real. Finish your thought, please. No, no, I think

So they want it. They just are they taking, I hate to say a quantum leap here, you know, in logic? I think the observation that they're referencing is that here are these very old galaxies with these very big supermassive black holes

in their interiors and not a lot of like gas and dust to absorb. So why are their masses growing so much? Their observation was essentially the mass of the black holes seemed to have grown by seven to ten times, even though it wasn't consuming ordinary matter. So how else could it grow? And their argument was, well, it's really growing because it's linked in this way to the expansion of the universe and the dark energy. And that is a leap. If you're asking, is it a leap? It's a leap. Now, I'm all for making leaps and seeing how they pan out. Do we need more observational evidence? Absolutely. What kind of? What kind of

kind of stuff would you be looking for? Well, you have to look for more galaxies that have this behavior, and the big surveys are a good way to go. So you start to see if you have an aberrant case that looks very odd. But you also can look at more greater details of the light coming from the galaxies to see if you can find some evidence of matter being taken down that you missed the first time around. For y'all, in the minute before the break, would this change our whole view of the universe? would we have to change our view if this is correct? It would.

I mean, basically it's saying black holes aren't really black holes, that they don't have horizons, they don't have singularities. They are basically condensates of this vacuum energy. And because of that, actually, I think there is a better way to probe this theory observationally than looking at black hole growth or looking at galaxies. And that's looking at the immediate horizon environments of black holes and making precision tests, because what we call black holes now versus these vacuum condensates

actually behave differently just outside of their horizon. It's a small difference, but for spinning black holes, it's real. And observatories like Lisa and even maybe the Event Horizon Telescope could give us those better precision tests. That is amazing. We'll have to come back. We are going to come back and talk more with Dr. Janelle Levin. Ferial-Ozell, if you have a question you'd like to ask us.

844-8-255-8-4-Sai Talk or tweet us at SciFRI. Or on black holes and dark energy after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're continuing our conversation about black holes and dark energy and what you would like to know about cosmology with my guest, Dr. Janelle Levin, author of Black Hole Survival Guide, Dr. Friyal Ozel.

Professor and Chair of Physics at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. On number 844-8255, as you can imagine, lots of folks would like to get in on the conversation. So let's go to them right now. Hi, Imran and Houston. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much. My question is, actually, this new theory says that dark energy could be coming from black holes. Now, dark energy expands the universe, and black holes pulls everything in. Even light cannot escape it.

So how can someone that expands the universe be coming from something that only pulls? I mean, it's like saying black is coming from white. Do you understand? Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Jenny, can you tie that, Matt? Yeah, I mean, I do think that this is a contentious suggestion, but I'll do my best by the authors. I think that the idea is that, yes, black holes act like regular matter, and that causes space time to contract. But dark energy is just a form of energy in the universe, and if the black hole traps in its interior this sort of dark energy, or if, as was previously expressed, they're kind of just those nuggets of dark energy, then that part of the system would cause the universe to expand.

but you have to average. It's almost as though you have these little pools of dark energy all over the universe, and you have to kind of average over all of them, which we're accustomed to thinking about, and ask what is the global consequence of all of those interiors, and they would, in fact, have the effect of causing the universe to expand faster. So, Ferial, is so the black holes are just sucking up little pools of dark energy here? I'm visualizing it in a slightly different way.

actually still requires a form of energy, for example, a field of some sort to exist everywhere in the universe. And it speculates that black holes are some condensates of these. So some collapsed versions where, like Jenna was just explaining, there are these little pools of it that have collapsed into what we are now calling black holes, even though they are actually not black holes. they're just condensates of this different form of energy. So let's just be clear. This theory still requires that there is something extra that is causing these condensates and the expansion of the universe to happen.

The difference is that it's linking it. We say in the standard astrophysical understanding that black holes are formed from standard matter, and maybe there's a cosmological constant or some vacuum field out there that's called. causing the expansion. So this theory is actually trying to link the two and saying, no, well, I can take that field, speculate that it condenses into these little pools. And when I average over the large scales, like Jana was just saying, then it gives me the expansion, the accelerated

expansion of the universe. It's also interesting that the black hole, we usually imagine as being fixed on the outside, but it can be quite big and different on the inside. And in some ways, you know, black holes can be bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. The authors are kind of playing with that idea, but they're allowing the black holes to actually increase as their interiors expand. And so they are different kinds of objects, as Fariel was saying. But the idea of doing away with the event horizons, isn't that a central concept of black holes? It's essential up to a point in the sense that we're very confident how black holes behave in trapping light, but do they 100%? Are they full-blown event horizons? Or are they just sort of trapped surfaces that are a little looser in their rules of gatekeeping? I mean, those are things that we don't have as much direct observation to confirm. Right. Okay, let's go, because so many people are interested in this, you would think they have, you know, other interests, but they don't. Let's go.

Dee in Boulder Creek, California. Hi, Dee. Hello? Hi there. Go ahead. Yeah, thank you. Maybe we're looking at the problem wrong. Rather than the universe is expanding, the universe is contracting down into each and every massive black hole, and it just appears to be expanding. Well, I think that we would notice, the difference in the sense that we are saying the universe is expanding because we are actually seeing things go further away from us in all directions. And the supposition is that if you went to a different galaxy in a different part of the universe, you would see the same thing, that there's nothing special about our position. And the whole thing is in fact getting larger. If things were coming towards us, let's say collapsing towards our Milky Way and the black hole in the center,

everything would look bluer. It would look hotter. And that's exactly the thing. the opposite. What we see, in fact, is that things look redder and cooler like they're moving away from us. Here's a couple of tweets we have and a call about the same question. I'll just go to Jonathan in San Rafael, who tweets, does dark matter fall into black holes? There's a difference between dark energy and dark matter. Friyal? Yes, indeed. Dark matter should be falling into black holes. But centers of galaxies where these

supermassive black holes reside are actually poor in dark matter. The dark matter halos are more prominent in the outskirts of galaxies. So there is some contribution as far as we understand to growth of black holes from dark matter, but it's not the prominent way in which they grow. There is far more just normal, regular, luminous matter that makes up the centers of galaxies. And here's a tweet from D.P. Coast, he says, would the world be a better place if we called black holes black spheres instead? I'm not sure how that improves the world. You know, not all black holes are perfectly spherical. We were talking about spinning black holes earlier. Very often mentioned them. And they're not strictly speaking spherical. They get a little oblate. And by them, we don't really mean that there's anything there. I really want to emphasize. Black holes. In the conventional thinking are completely empty space, there is nothing there. When we say they are spheres, what we really mean is that region beyond which you can no longer

escape, that horizon, is spherical in shape. But it's empty space. You've just blown my mind again. Every time we talk about there's nothing there. How do we have to sucking stuff in? Where does it go? All that stuff is nothing. Feryal, go ahead.

Let's be clear, though, there is a singularity at the center, right? I mean, there is that infinite energy density, but we don't really associate it with a location. It's just within that horizon, within that region that we have no information access to, there is a singularity that has formed and it is of infinite energy density. So there is really nothing there. It's not like we could describe the structure of it. It's just weird space time within that horizon. But, yeah, there is energy there.

To be clear, when we talk about the spherical of a non-spinning black hole, we are talking well outside the singularity, and we are just assigning a size spatially. We say black hole the size of the sun would be six kilometers, the mass of the sun would be six kilometers across. What we're referring to is that horizon, that shadow. And at that shadow is empty space. Yes, yes, absolutely.

And in fact, if you were falling into it, you wouldn't know that you've gone through anything special. thing, yeah, it would be quite unspectacular. There's literally a principle called no drama. No drama. But there should be no drama at the event horizon. Seems like an oxymoron in physics. Let's go, speaking of which, let's go to Jason in Pennsylvania. Hi, Jason. Hi. Hi. The rotation of the galaxy, how is that determined? Like on earth, the rotation of a hurricane, you know, was determined? by the Coriolis effect, but what determines the rotation of the stars around a black hole?

For Yale? What, yeah, what, is it a North Pole or a South Pole? You know? Oh, wow. It's angular momentum, actually, because most matter particles possess not just a speed, but also a direction in which they rotate. So our entire galaxy is rotating. rotating around its, it's what we call it spin axis because it has angular momentum, just associated with its formation. And the very center parts of the galaxy also have an angular momentum, and we can see this in the motions of stars that are circling around. And we actually don't know if the black hole rotates in the same direction, same sense as the stars around it. It would make sense that it does because it's, I mean, again, in the standard theory, not a lot of in the dark energy theory, it grows from this matter that it sucks up from the stars around it.

So it should have the same handedness. But if this changes over time, then maybe it doesn't have to be aligned. Hope that answers your question, Jason. Well, is there a pattern to it among galaxies within, like in the universe, like in different regions? Yeah. I mean, do you see, does it predominate? If that's the question, they're not all. It's quite randomized, but it's more like imagine a bunch of ice skaters on the ice pulling their arms in and spinning faster, or better, imagine spinning pizza dough.

It flattens out like a lot of the galaxies that are flat and spinning and spiral galaxies. But there is no cohesion amongst all the different galaxies in that they're not all rotating the same way. Thank you, Jason. Let me ask this question. Last month, astronomers looked at data from the web telescope, and they found six huge, galaxies. We talked about that on the show. In fact, they were too big for their age, and that was the big mystery, and it's still a mystery. How big of a deal is this, Janet? I think it's quite fascinating, actually, but it's a problem that's existed for a while. These galaxies are

between 500 million, 700 million years old. They're really young in the scheme of a 14 billion year old universe, and yet they seem very heavy. And so the question was, is all of that, mass or all of the luminosity they're seeing in in stars because how did they make all these stars so fast in such a short time and you know we it might be that actually part of what they're seeing is really a supermassive black hole at the center that's very luminous and that they don't have to make all these stars very quickly but then you're just transferring the question to why do we have such huge supermassive black holes so early in the universe's history they're not

forming from the destate of stars they're forming some other way. And we are pretty confident that this supermassive black holes are simply a different channel than the black holes we're used to thinking about. Let me think about that as we go to a, and then as I mentioned, this is Science Friday. Hang on a second. Ferreale, I got to get this. We have to pay the bills. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Okay, now please jump in. Okay, I actually wanted to tie that question back to our initial discussion. of how do black holes grow? How does it relate to the growth of stars in galaxies?

And this is a perennial problem. We don't quite understand how galaxies grow, this study that you're referring to from JWSC about, how did these galaxies become so big, so early? We have the same problem with black holes. Some of them are 10 billion solar masses in 700 million years. How did that happen? So I think it's a folly to think that we actually

truly understand how black holes and galaxies grow and how they relate to one another. And that's why I was thinking about this dark, dark energy idea for black holes, that really we should be looking more at understanding how black holes and galaxies grow before we jump to a conclusion like this. Still mystery on top of mystery, that doll within a doll. It's just, is the, is the chase more exciting than the discovery? Oh, it is so great to have a perplexing question. I mean, we'd be unemployed, right?

Friel, if everything was understood. The fun is in the discovery. I have to tell you, as a scientist, there's nothing more fun than having your own mind blown or your presumptions challenged. It's kind of what we live for. But sometimes we overreach to find something that's too exotic and too exciting, and maybe the world's more pedestrian than that. Until you find out it was true.

And that dark energy is exactly the example, because people thought dark energy was outlandish. Right. And it's persisted. Let's go to Mark in South St. Paul, Minnesota. Hi, Mark. Hi. Hi there. Go ahead.

I have a bit of a ponderance here. I've been thinking about. You know of Einstein's thought experiments? Sure. You have one for us? Well, goes like this. You have a fish. be either a whale shark or a minnow in the middle of the Pacific.

Now a minnow, being small as it is, could swim for its entire life and never hit either the bottom, the surface, or the shore. But does it really understand what the ocean is? It swims through it, it breathes it, it defecates, and all that exists, but it doesn't really understand what the ocean is. The question is, is space our ocean? We don't really understand.

Well, I... Okay. We don't know how to have measurement or anything else. In regards, in regards, scientists have been saying that over 80% of the universe is missing in matter. What if space is dark matter? Okay. That's Feryl. What if space is dark matter?

Could that be? Well, I'm going to go to the Minow and the ocean example. Good, good. Does this Minow have powerful telescopes with which it can collect light? from all parts of the ocean, or at least all the visible parts of the ocean, and a framework in which to interpret it. So it is true that we are tiny, not even a speck of dust in the universe, but somehow we've evolved to a point where we make these powerful tools, not just to use on Earth, but also to study

our environment with and reach information that is very, very far away. from us. And these are the powerful telescopes that we rely on as astrophysicists. And we collect that information from different parts of this ocean that we live in. And we try to make sense out of it. So I'm not claiming that we have made sense out of everything. In fact, there are more unsolved problems than solved ones. But we are not really just a little fish. Quick, Janem. Yeah, just quickly, I think what we have done with things like our telescopes, is extend our senses well beyond the fact that we're minnows. And that is what's so extraordinary.

We're collecting light that our eyes can't see, and we're understanding things that are well beyond our immediate experience. You have the last word, Dr. Gianna Levin, author of Black Hole Survival Guide, Professor of Astronomy at Barnard College in New York. Dr. Friall O'Zell, Professor and Chair of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Always fun to talk to dark, to talk about dark stuff with you. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. So nice to be here, Ira.

You're welcome. Here's Kyle Marion Verterbo with some of the folks who help make this show happen. Our radio producers are Kathleen Davis, Shoshana Bucksbaum, and Rasha Aridi. Diana Plasker is our experiences manager. Our controller is Beth Rami. And I'm community manager, Kyle Marion Viterbo. Thanks for listening. Oh, thank you, Kyle.

I wanted to jump in to say, we're going to be missing you. This is your last week with Science Friday, your intelligence and win and finesse with social media. We're going to miss your warmth. and stand-up comedy stylings, and we're going to wish you look on your next journey, so stay in touch. That's about all the time we have for this hour. BJ Leiderman composed our theme music. I'm Ira Flato.