Science Friday - Heart and Exercise, Consumer Electronics Show, Black Holes. Jan 11, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: January 11, 2019

You’ve heard the news that smoking is bad for your health. But it turns out not exercising could be even worse for your chances of survival, according to a recent study in the journal JAMA Network Open. But is it possible to overdo it? While you’re trying to boost your overall health, could you instead be doing damage to your heart? In this segment, Wael Jaber of the Cleveland Clinic and Maia P. Smith of St. George’s University talk about how sports like weightlifting stack up to running and cycling in terms of health effects, and how the sport you choose could actually reshape your heart. Discovered only decades ago, black holes remain one of the universe’s most mysterious objects, with such a strong gravitational pull that  that light—and even data—can’t escape. Oftentimes researchers can only observe black holes indirectly, like from blasts of energy that come from when the massive bodies “feed” on nearby objects. But where is that energy generated, and how does that eating process actually progress through the geometry of the black hole? Erin Kara, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, describes new research published in Nature into how echoes of X-rays in small, stellar-mass black holes can point the way. At the other end of the spectrum, supermassive black holes billions of times the mass of our Sun are believed to dwell at the hearts of galaxies. Many are active, drawing in nearby gas and dust and emitting energy in response, but others are dormant, with nothing close to feed on. MIT postdoctoral fellow Dheeraj Pasham talks about what happens when these dormant black holes suddenly encounter and tear apart a star—and how the fallout can shed light on how these black holes spin. His research appeared in Science this week. The researchers also discuss how black holes could lead the way to understanding how galaxies evolve, and other black hole mysteries. Every year, the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, meets in Las Vegas to showcase the latest in consumer tech trends. This year was no different—but what should we expect in tech in 2019? WIRED news editor Brian Barrett was on the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center all week and joins Ira to talk about what he saw, including a flying taxi and other concept cars, delivery drones, robot companions, and ‘5G’ products mean without a 5G network.     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. Imagine a place in the Nevada desert where you can see taxis fly straight up into the air. Robots that are your best friend and a TV that folds. No, we're not talking about the latest sci-fi novel. It's, of course, this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. My next guest tried to take it all in, and I can tell you it's impossible. I've been there. Tried to do that.

But he's here with some of the latest gadgets and trends. crowding the exhibit halls. Brian Barrett is news editor for Wired. He's based out of Birmingham, Alabama. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks so much for having me. There were a few very interesting concept cars at the show this year. Tell us about the taxi that flies and the walking car.

That's right. You know, for the last few years, CES has been as much a car show as anything. That's where we're seeing a lot of really interesting innovation. The two that sort of stood out the most this year are probably a few years off if they ever do get here. But as you mentioned, there's the Bell Nexus, which is a, they called, I think, a flying taxi. And the goal is, you know, sort of this big vertical lift-off, basically mini-helicopter that, you know, Uber says by the mid-2020s, we're going to be riding around instead of actual cars. And it seems fanciful, and people have obviously promised flying cars for a long time. But you do remember Bell is the same company that makes the OSP.

They're an actual helicopter company that is their specialty. They know what they're doing. And so, you know, that might be a better chance than we're used to from actually seeing one of these come to fruition. Do you know how much noise a helicopter makes? I can't wait to find out in 2025. If you have your drone, you know what a drone noise a drone makes, think about that multiply it by 100 and then 100 again. Okay. So they're not going to be rolling out onto the highway soon.

Every year, CES, there's a very new type of TV. There have been curved TVs and 3D TVs. What's this about a folding television? Yeah, so CES is, you know, as it's an auto show, it's also, you know, one of the, one of the technologies that really still has major announcements are televisions. Everyone else kind of scatters there throughout the year, there throughout the year. But there were two big ones I saw. The first one that you mentioned is from LG, and LG has, for a long time, made these really beautiful OLED displays. It's organic light-emitting diets, but they're basically, it's a nearly perfect picture.

And what they figured out how to do is, you know, roll it up like a newspaper. And, you know, we've seen concepts like that before. seen it in a lab, but they've actually put it in a product that you will be able to buy. And as you, I'm sure you know, a CES rarity, you will be able to buy in a few months. And what they do is they put sort of a large, long box, say, it looks nice than a box, but it's who say box, in your living room. And when you want to watch TV, you hit a button, and this giant 65, 70-inch, whatever it is TV, rolls up out of the box straight into the air.

You watch it when you're done. You tap the button again, and it rolls back down. You don't have to think about it. And it's technologically neat, but what I like about it, too, is that, you know, it sort of frees you from the constraints of if you're designing a room to design around the television, right? You can just sort of have your space. And when you want the TV, it's there, and when it's not, it's not just sort of like a projector screen would today. But with, you know, a much fancier picture. And so it would be very flat, too, I imagine.

Ultra. Extremely flat, yeah. And I think the, and I assume that's one of the major problems of getting it to market is you have to put some, you know, connectivity things in there. I assume that is mostly at the base, and then you can sort of roll up. Because OLED itself is sort of very malleable that way. You can sort of do what you want with it as long as the sort of panelist of the class panel. Right, right. Well, what about personal robots?

We keep seeing that scary-looking robotic dog or animal that Boston Dynamics creature. Is that going to come to fruition? Well, you know, I tell you the closest thing we had to the scary boss dynamics dog was a car. far this year, actually, is the Hyundai Elevate, which can sort of roll around on wheels when you want to drive, but when you want to get to sort of somewhere else, it'll sort of stand up on all fours, and you can basically walk it where you want to go. That's another sort of far-flung sort of transformers-ish vision of the future. But in terms of thoughts, I think what we saw this year most of all was a focus on sort of elder care and companion robots, a lot of which

are also, you know, actually available, not comps as real things. I think one that stuck out to me was the Lovot, and there's a chance I'm mispronouncing that, but I think I'm right. It's this sort of, it's almost sort of Furby 3.0, if you remember the Furby doll. It's sort of a fuzzy, it's got these deeply expressive eyes, digital eyes, but, you know, they really found a way to convey some depth there. It's got a sort of sensor packet on its head that looks a little bit like a hat, but they can sort of, it knows who's talking to it. It knows if you're tickle it, then it knows to laugh.

if you cradle it, it knows to fall asleep, which is some people might see it creepy, but I do see how if you are sort of lonely in this world, that is something that might be appealing. Maybe not, but that is sort of a lot of what we're seeing, which I think is both a reflection of, I think there's probably a demand for it, I think it's also a reflection of where robot technology is right now in terms of what can be affordably done with it. You know, I think we're not at robot butlers yet. or more robot pets. And it's certainly for people who can't get out and walk a dog, right?

Exactly. Yeah. And there are some, and they're developing into sort of something of all different stripes. So you've got, there was a Kiki, which is sort of a, looks like a little fox, but you actually have to feed it, sort of pretend to feed it. But that gives you sort of a sense of responsibility and sense of purpose. And then you have the more practical sort of Samsung has something called bot care, which, you know, helps you run through if you have to take your blood pressure every day,

if you have to do different other medical diagnostic tasks, it can help walk you through that and make sure that you're staying on task. That's interesting. Are we seeing a lot more of personal gadgets being connected to the smart speakers, you know? You know, we have. We've seen, I think Alexa, Amazon in particular, has been leading this. Alexa really opened up in 2017. They sort of really started actively courting gadget makers, and we're seeing the fruition of that even more.

I think on the most extreme end of the examples, you have Kohler this year, the venerable bathroom and kitchen company, brought an Alexa-powered toilet, the new Me2.0. So if you want some, wanted to play music or just want to have a conversation with a voice assistant, that's there for you. I think we're also seeing more practical applications, too, though. Simple human makes something I actually really liked. It's a mirror with a speaker in it. just if you're getting ready in the morning and you want to check the weather or you want to listen to NPR, it sort of condenses all those functions in the way that still looks nice and satisfying.

Well, if you're of a certain age, like me, you would say you'd want to see mirror, mirror on the wall. Who's the most smartest or best-looking of all? I'll have an answer to you, right? Exactly, exactly. What about personal security? You know, one of the things I keep looking into are home locks and security devices. Stuff like that. Yeah, so there's been a, I think that's an area where the technology has become affordable enough to make that you're seeing a lot of competition in the space, which is neat.

I don't know, you know, in terms of innovations we're seeing on that level, in terms of home locks, I think it's sort of variations on the theme. You've got some locks that can let you, I think there was one lock that had six different ways you can get in, whether it's biometric or with a physical key or with whatever else. In terms of the personal security that I was most excited about at the show, there's a company called Ubiko, which makes these things called Ubikis, which enables sort of these two-factor authentication, right? So you basically plug it into your computer, and it can give you a little bit of extra security, and also now it can sort of replace your password altogether.

So what we finally saw at the show is Apple approved this little gadget, which is super handy. I recommend it to everyone who cares about their own device security. Apple finally is letting them make one for the iPhone. So you're going to be able to bring that same protection that PCs have had for years and in a few months apply it to the iPhone, which will this make life a lot easier for people.

You know, we used to call that a dongle. It is something of a dongle. Bring back dongles in 2019. And there's also about this talk about, about 5G is coming real soon now, which is an old computer phrase. It's just always over the horizon. Any closer?

You know, that struck out at me at CES. I think for its absence. You know, we were anticipating a lot of 5G this year, but it's just not there yet. And I think that was what was really clear, is that as much as there has been a lot of hype, especially from carriers who are still, you know, right now they're jockeying for position in terms of, you know, consumer, mindshare, whatever you want to call it, there's still so much infrastructural work to be done. You know, the carriers still need to build out their towers.

people still need to, you know, have 5G phones to buy. It's going to be a couple of years until, A, the products are there, and B, they're there in a way that people can actually use them. And in the meantime, I guess we advised our readers to ignore 5G for now because in the meantime, there's a lot of sort of misleading marketing around this stuff. So AT&T recently started putting a little icon on people's phones saying 5G, which is not 5G, it's 4G, it's the same stuff. stuff you have now, but with some little tweaks.

So it's a little bit misleading, and then my favorite of those is the cable companies who are a little anxious about 5G have started marketing 10G, which is a lot more Gs, even though it doesn't really mean much at this point. And it could be money, a lot more G's. Exactly. Wow, you know, that's the thing. Are people not, you know, phones are not selling as well? The high-priced phones are not selling as well as they thought there would be.

Certainly the iPhones, right? Yeah, which I think, honestly, is a good thing. I think the reason they're not selling as well is that they last for longer. I think that you don't need a new iPhone. And to Apple's credit, and its most recent sort of big software overhaul, you know, every year it decides how many phones back it's going to support. And it supports now iOS 12. It supports phones going back to the iPhone 5S, which is, I don't know, four or five years old.

So, you know, I think that phone sales are slowing down. I think that only for good reasons it's that the phones last longer and people are realizing they don't need a new phone every two years. And that's good for consumers. It's good for the environment. It's not great for Apple and Samsung. But, you know, I'll take it. Well, if you see the, I have an SC, if you see that small phone factor coming back.

Oh, I miss it. I wish it would. Yeah, I mean, it's the thing you put in your pocket. Remember a pocket? Yeah, and I think, you know, what is coming back a little bit, Not at the show, but in general, I think people are, there's a trend towards these feature phones. I think Nokia's had a little bit of a resurgence. They're bringing back the sort of old models that people love.

For folks who want to get so small that they don't have the screen all together and they can just lose the distractions entirely. Back to the, you know, someone will vent a phone you can fold over. Wow, what an idea. Which is, which is coming. I think we saw that. Samsung has one coming, and a company called Royale showed one at the show, although I would not. I would hold off and see how that well they actually work. Old company named Motorola used to do.

All right, Brian. We could schmuse about this all week long. Brian Barrett is News Editor for Wired. He's based out of Birmingham, Alabama. Thank you for forging ahead in Las Vegas for us. Yeah, no, any time. Thanks again. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about why the shape of your heart might actually reveal your exercise habits.

And if you have a question about your workout routine and its effects on your health, Give us a call. Our number 844-8255. We'll be talking about the different kinds of workouts, you know, weightlifting, walking, aerobic, all kinds, and some interesting news of how bad it is not to work out. We'll talk about it after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We all know that smoking is bad for your health, but you know what could be even worse for your chance of survival? Not exercising. That's one of the findings of a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network open. And we get it.

We've heard this before. Exercise is good for you. Right. But the thing we got to be wondering was, what exactly does this miracle drug exercise do for your health? And is it possible to overdo it? Maybe doing damage to your heart while you think you were doing the right thing. If you're a runner or a weightlifter or a cyclist or a roller derby skater,

you want to hear your questions about exercise. your heart and your health. So give us a call. 844-724-8-255-8-4-8-4-7-24-8-255. You can also tweet us at SciFri. My next guest is an author on that JAMA study and a professor of medicine at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Wild Jaber, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much. This is a great pleasure to be on the show. It's one of my favorite public radio shows. Thank you so much. It's been my companion on many of my rights.

runs and cycling expeditions. Well, thank you very much. That's very kind of you. Let's talk about your runs and cycling expeditions because I know that your study found that neglecting exercise is actually right on par with or maybe even worse than smoking and diabetes in terms of your health. So what we did, it actually was out of personal interest. We looked at about 122,000 individuals who showed up at the Cleveland Clinic for various reasons to have a stress test. which is a routine stress test that many individuals are familiar with. You get on a treadmill, they hook you up to an EKG machine,

and they assess how far you can go on the treadmill. And we were fortunate that we have the database to follow up or the tools to follow up these individuals over the past 25 years almost. And the mean follow-up for these patients were about eight years. And we looked at one important outcome, I think the most important outcome, which is death. And we found out after we sorted out, sorted out these individuals into their age groups, their gender or sex differences and their level

of exercise that the lowest group, the lowest quintile group, which is the bottom 20% or so of the individuals had the highest mortality in each age group and in both males and females. And the benefit from getting fit actually does not plateau out. So if you're fitter, you improve, that your chances of not dying, and if the next level gets better, the next level gets better. And then we focused on an elite group of athletes. Those are individuals who are in the top 2% or so of the group. And we found that these individuals benefited the most. In both males and females, as well as in all age groups, all the way up to individuals in their 80s.

But the bottom percentage, how much exercise is minimum to get benefit? Promise. So we did not, in our study, this was basically an objective observation of what people can do. So most of the prior studies looked at self-reported level of exercise. So they show up to the office. We tell them, how much do you do? And you know, there is a lot of bias in that and optimism, I would say, about how people,

how much they think they exercise. The bottom part, if you compare the lowest exercise group or the lowest fit group, or the lowest fit group, let's put it, the people who are least fit, and compare them to individual who are the most fit, you almost have five, what we call hazard ratio of five, which is almost about 500% difference in mortality. This is huge. So if you take smoking, for example, it gives you about 40% or so, in our study, at least, risk of mortality, higher risk of mortality. If you take things that people are very familiar with, including, let's say, diabetes, high blood pressure, all these other things. So usually they give you a risk about 20 to 40 percent risk of higher

mortality, whereas in the lowest to the highest individuals, the risk difference is about 500 percent. That's amazing. Let's talk about the heart because part of the study says that the type of exercise you do actually shapes your heart. Can I actually shape it? So this is derived not from our study, but from other parts of the literature. So exercise, as far as its impact on muscles and heart, is not the same. So this is not my area of expertise. But let's say if you're a swimmer, your heart remodels in a different way than if you're a runner, than if you're a cyclist, then if you're a weightlifter, or a rower.

So each type of exercise exerts a different type of demeanor. on the heart as well as different type of pressure loading and it requires different conditioning for the heart so that the shape of the heart looks would look much different in a swimmer than a a let's say a biker right that's that's interesting and I think what's also interesting from your study is what you said before is that there is no you can keep improving your heart doing more and more exercise so you can keep improving your risk or improving your risk or your odds for dying by being more fit.

So that's probably the most important message. All right. I want to bring on another guest now who has compared the health effects of strength training to aerobic activities like walking and biking. Maya P. Smith is a sports medicine epidemiologist, assistant professor of St. George's University School of Medicine in Grenada. Welcome to Science Friday. Well, I'm glad to be here.

Thank you. Yeah, you looked at the effects of weight training versus. walking and biking on heart health, and you found that weight training is more important than we think it is in maintaining heart health? Yes, I looked again at the self-reported data that you were talking about a minute ago. Number of people just reported,

do you do weight training and or do you walk or bicycle? And then we look to see how many and how badly did they have these four major markers of heart problems, namely hypertension, overweight, diabetes, and cholesterol problems. and for everything that both weight training and walking and cycling were associated with, weight training was better. And for many things, weight training was the only thing that mattered. And walking and bicycling didn't seem to be associated at all.

Now, what level of weight training were you talking about? Me going to the gym and lifting a few weights or working out on the machines? Or are we talking about Olympic level deadlifts and squats and stuff like that? I may have misspoken when I said weight training. this was only resistance training. This could be like doing a couple of push-ups, a couple times a week. This is push-ups, chin-ups, free weights, anything at all designed to strengthen your muscles. And this is a level of, this is what I was actually interested in looking at was, are the levels of activity that the average American is willing to do on their own without a major sustained intervention?

Are those enough to have a significant effect? And the answer is yes. Wow, that's terrific. Let me go to the phones. Jerome from Grand Torrance, California. Hi, Jerome. Hey, there. Yeah, my question is almost specific to that with in regards to Olympic weightlifting because I used to do only muscle-specific lifting, like a bodybuilding style, and then switch to Olympic lifting. And I feel like I've seen more results as far as having more strenuous workouts. So I was curious if that's better or has anything been proven that is better. Dr. Smith? I didn't.

My study was a population-based study. I really wouldn't be able to inform on that, and I know, as a matter of fact, that there's a great deal of individual variation in how quickly strength develops, how easy it is to injure yourself, what kind of workout is best. So the study I did is really not equipped to answer that, except that the biggest effect was people who did any and people who did versus people who did none. So if you found a workout that works for you that you're willing to keep on doing, then that is the best one for you.

Now, why would building muscle, and because that's what you're doing, is you doing this strength training. Why does that reduce the effects of, say, diabetes? Because muscle is an organ. And when muscle contract, it secretes various substances. They're called myokines. They used to, they're chemokines, et cetera. And they have effects throughout the body. And one of the known effects they have is improving blood sugar control. That's interesting, because I don't think any of us believed in that or thought, well, you have to, can't just do weight training. You have to do aerobics and things like that. that's quite interesting. Well, you saw the biggest benefit of exercise in your study was in people over 70. Why might that be? So this is, this was one of the biggest surprises we have because

we expected to see the benefits in a middle-aged individuals like myself. But what we noticed here, and at least this is a hypothesis, is that these are individuals who are probably, I compare it myself to almost like a 403B or 401k account, which is basically, depositing these probably are individuals who have deposited in that fitness bank all along their life probably these are people individuals who are genetically different than other individuals who are able to stay active all their life or probably these are individuals who live in neighborhoods that are favorable for walking staying fit they have lived near a park they have a zip code that that allows them to do that so it's

It's probably a combination of all of above, but at least my belief is this is something that you don't arrive to be fit when you're 80 or 75 by accident. You arrive to it by depositing in that fitness bank throughout your life. And in fact, Dr. Smith, you looked at older adults in your study as well. People up to 85 years old. Did they benefit from weight training? Yes. The effect was somewhat smaller in older adults, but the,

that's because they started out at a much higher risk, the absolute risk reduction was much, was probably greater in those groups. You know, 10% of 80% is a much larger number than 50% of 2%. You know, we hear that older people begin losing muscle mass as they get older, and is it possible to regain it or stop it or even add to it? Yes, as you get older, you tend to lose muscle mass if you don't do anything about it. And however, this interesting study came out. It was, sorry, it was in the American, I forget where it was. I think it was in circulation and the journal circulation.

And they found out that randomizing people to a high-intensity workout for two years actually reversed the signs of aging in their heart specifically. Their left ventricle became less stiff and more flexible. Wow, that's interesting. Let's go to the phones. Let's go to Eric in Waterbury, Connecticut. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you, taking my call.

Go ahead. I have a question. I'm a 50-year-old male cancer survivor, and I'm recently going to the gym about twice a week, and I get on the elliptical, and I work my brains out for about 45 minutes, and my heart rate gets up to about 190. I'm wondering, is that an exercise that I should continue? To me, that's amazing. A heart rate of 190.

I mean, I almost wonder if you've got some kind of artifact in that measurement there, because that, I would not have believed that was possible. can't get mine up to 190 and I'm in my 30s. Wow. So this is, you know, we should never answer a question specific to an individual because myself and Dr. Smith here are, these are population studies. Again, your target heart rate should be, so you're 50, you said, your target heart rate should be 220 minus 50, so you should be about 170, and that's the maximum heart rate.

That's why we're both surprised here to see that you can get to 190. Well, I have a tweet here from Robert who says, Avid cyclist for 40 years, able to easily ride with avid cyclists in their late 20s. For someone of my age, isn't it all anecdotal because there are 50-plus years of history of what I have been doing from my heart? And someone else says,

Abby says, I have anxiety and sometimes I'm anxious. I worry I'm going to have a heart attack. I run regularly and very much enjoy it. I avoid going on my run while anxious because of these concerns. Is it possible to have a heart attack? in this way? It's possible to have a heart attack at any time, but physical activity is actually shown

to be a good treatment for, I know, depression. Anxiety specifically I haven't looked into, but at least one study has shown that moderate exercise, 30 minutes of aerobic activity three times a week, totally doable for the average person, is about as good for depression as Prozac. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. That's an amazing, that's an amazing statistic. that you just quoted, as good as depression as Prozac? Yep, there was a fairly small study.

I would love to see more follow-ups on it. But in any case, if you have depression, then exercising out of depression is one therapy that a lot of people have reported success with. Let me ask this question about stretching out your exercise during the day. If you're saying to do 30 minutes, can you do that in five or 10-minute chunks during the day? While then, Maya, you can follow up.

So there is, I don't think this is, this has been studied very well, but that is, as far as we're concerned, the maximum effect you're going to get is from cumulative exercise. So it's not the, it's not the, it's not like if you have to go and hit the gym for an hour and a half to get the benefit. I think if you can divide it for most people who have jobs like myself and you and, and Dr. Smith, if you can divide into this into chunks and do it 15 minutes for, let's say, being on the bike, 15 minutes for weight lifting. 15 minutes for swimming. I think you will get probably same of probably more benefit than doing it all in one time and then injuring yourself. Dr. Smith, let me ask you this question about weight. How do I know I've lifted enough weight? I mean, do my muscles get tired? Do I get fatigued? How much should I know? Just working to failure is a generally good rule. go until you can't do anymore and to minimize the risk of injury, especially once you're just starting out, you want to do a large number of repetitions and with a relatively low weight.

Aiming for being able to do 10 to 30 reps until you get to failure is about right for many, many slash most people. But again, my study was population-based. You may not want to talk to it. My general rule for working out is go to the gym, pick out someone who looks the way you want to look and ask them. Most people are, afraid of the gym now because they don't, you know, they don't look like the fit people working

out. They feel, you know, self-conscious that they're not. That's like making fun of a homeless person going to a job fair. Well, they do feel that way. Finally, let me ask you, while, what is your routine? How would you say the best routine to go about staying fit is? So I came about this, like most people come about, which is family history, having a strong family history of heart disease, having moved from actually a city where you can walk around from New York City to Cleveland, where it's not as easy to walk around. I've noticed myself that I started getting some weight after I moved from New York City to here. So I started slow. That's why I always say start slow. find a routine that you're comfortable with.

Myself, I vary. I run some days. I bike some days. I walk some days. I snowshoe other days in Cleveland. So I think variability is important, too, so you don't injure yourself and you can work different muscles.

And for the average individual, that's probably the best advice is to have a variable exercise program. And your study says, basically, bottom line, just do something. Moving from a lowest-fit category to the next fit, you don't have to be in the elite group, gives you enough benefit to equal many of the medications

we give, actually probably more than many of the medications we give for blood pressure or cholesterol or diabetes. Just moving around and getting from the least fit category to the next one, I think is sufficient. All right, we've run out of time. I have to move on. I want to thank Maya Smith, sports medicine epidemiologist and assistant professor at St. George's University School of Medicine in Grenada.

and while Jaber is Professor of Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Thank you and have a good day. Thank you. You're welcome. After the break, how do you plumb the depths of a black hole's immense gravitational force? Well, you do with light, also somewhat indirectly. Well, we're going to look at some new research at talking about black holes,

including the discovery one that's spinning at half the speed of light. Details after the break. This is Science Friday. Phaereto. Black holes live eventful lives. It makes sense, right? You have voracious gravitational fields, gobbling up any matter or energy that gets too close. These feasts of matter often turn to bursts of energy, which is some of the few ways we can actually observe a black hole because it is a black object. But we have a lot of questions still about the structures around black holes, and how the black holes evolve as they absorb and emit.

energy over time. Where does that energy actually come from? And black holes spin, but we can't actually measure how fast they do it all the time. Well, new research in two journals this week reveal some surprising answers, including a black hole spinning at half the speed of light. We're going to talk about that with my next guest. De Raj Pesham is MIT's Cavalry Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, happy to hear. And Erin Kara of Nassas Guadred Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland in College Park. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you. Great to be here. Let me ask both of you, this idea of a black hole spinning and a half the speed of light, it sounds crazy. I mean, we're going to get back to that in a moment. But first, I want you to help me visualize the structures we're talking about. A black hole isn't just a hole. It's got stuff around it, right, Derage? Yes, that is correct.

Tell us about that. So most astronomers think that the way to think about structures around the black hole is you have the black hole, and there is some sort of an accretion flow around the black hole. It's debated what the structure of this accretion flow is, but it's most likely in some sort of disk-like. Why would it be formed into a disk? I mean, why, you know, I'm thinking of the rings of Saturn. Is it spinning?

Is that what makes it form into a disk? So the reason you have disk is to conserve angle of momentum. So when Michelle starts off from far distance, as it gets closer, it has to still conserve angle momentum. In order to do so, it forms a sort of a ring-like structure around the black hole. Aaron, and you observed something that might explain the inner workings of small black holes. What was going on in this black hole you observed? Yeah, that's right.

So in addition to this accretion disk that DJ was talking about, about, we also see a lot of emission coming from this very mysterious part of the close to the black hole. It's a region of subatomic particles, electrons, positrons, protons, protons, protons that are moving very quickly and are very hot, about a billion degrees Celsius. And we call this region the corona, and it emits in high energy x-ray light. And the thing is, we know that this emission is coming somewhere from close to the black hole, but we don't understand a lot about what this structure, the corona is. How is it so hot in the first place? And so that's part of the work that we did for this paper. It sounds familiar because we really don't understand

the corona around the sun. Exactly, yeah. And it's akin to that you can make clear analogies. Corona in Latin means something, it means crown. So that's, you know, the corona of the sun is something that's around the sun. It's a hot plasma around the sun. And similarly, this corona around a black hole is this hot plasma that kind of is a halo around this accretion disk. Well, let's talk about this accretion disk. What happens to the energy that comes out of the black hole?

I understand there's like an echo in the black hole. Explain that, please. Yeah, that's right. So we want to understand more about what this corona looks like, what the structure of the accretion disc. is, and yet these systems are incredibly small and they're very far away. So this particular stellar mass black hole system that I was observing is 10,000 light years away. And so we can't really ever spatially resolve these regions close to the black hole. And so we need to rely on

other properties of the light to kind of infer what's going on. And so what we were able to measure in this observation, thanks to an incredibly bright outburst and a new telescope called Nicer on the International Space Station, is that we were measuring light echoes. Basically, this corona, this hot plasma that emits in high-energy x-rays, it'll shine in all directions. And some of those photons will come to us directly, and some of those photons will hit the accretion disk, causing the disc to heat up again and re-emit light. At some time, and there will be some time delay between that reprocessed light from the

accretion disk. and the coronal light. And that time delay is due to the light travel time between the accretion disk and the corona. So kind of just like how bats use echolocation to map out a dark cave that they can't see with their eyes, we're using these light echoes to map out what it must look like around a black hole

that we can't spatially resolve with our telescopes. So you're saying by measuring the difference in time it takes for the light to get bouncing and directly from the black hole, you know how big that accretion disk might be. Yeah, so in this particular discovery, we were able to measure light echoes that were smaller than ever before possible

in one of these stellar mass black hole systems. We're talking about time delays of half of a millisecond, and this is closer to the black hole than ever before possible. And it helped us understand the structure of the corona, actually. What we discovered was that as we watched the system evolve over several weeks, these light echoes that already started out incredibly small got shorter and shorter by an order of magnitude. So the light echoes got closer together that suggested that the corona was actually becoming more compact over time. Wow. It's getting smaller and small.

I'm thinking of the corona is like the surrounding it, so it's shrinking? Yeah, exactly. So it goes from something kind of vertically extended and then compacts into something extremely close and spherical to the black hole. And this vertical structure, now that we can constrain that it has this vertical structure, it may be hinting that the corona is related to the base of this relativistic jet that you see coming out of a lot of black hole systems. And so it could be that the corona is really the birthplace of jets. Wow. And it's just coming out the top and the bottom of the black hole. Why does it black hole have a top and the bottom? Well, you have a material that's kind of orbiting around this black hole in this accretion disk, and it kind of has a direction to it. And then energy just, you know, it has to come out somewhere and comes out, you know, basically where there is along the rotation. axis of this system.

And basically, it can the jets themselves and other kinds of outflows just take, you know, in some ways the path of least resistance kind of perpendicular to this accretion flow. One question about, in the introduction, I was talking about reading the research as saying that the black hole is spinning at half the speed of light. Yeah. So a lot of these black holes that we measure, both the stellar. mass and the supermass of black hole systems, we can measure how fast they're rotating. And we can make these kinds of observations in systems that have strong accretion

disks like the one that I studied. And we do find that they are spinning extremely fast, most of them. And in DJ's work, he was able to put these new constraints on how fast the black hole is rotating in a system that doesn't normally have an accretion. disc. And this is one of the first constraints that we have on measuring the spin, the rotation in a dormant, quote-unquote, dormant black hole. Daraj, how confident are you that it's spinning at such a high rate? And is that rate surprising? So this is a different kind of a black hole compared to what Aaron was studying.

This is a supermassive black hole that is sitting at the center of a galaxy that's 290 million light years away. And before November of 2014, there has not been any emission from the or near the black hole, from near the black hole. But around November of 2014, a star passed close enough, and it got shredded, and that provided a soup of gas for the black hole to feed on. And that is what we observed.

We observed the X-ray emission from this shredded material as it approached the event horizon of the black hole. And by essentially tracking the motion of this material, we're able to figure out what is the last orbit of this material. And the last orbiter material is a strong function of the spin of the black hole. And that's how we were able to constrain the spin. Is that sort of like a Doppler shift that you measure or some other way? We actually measured regular changes in x-ray emission, x-ray radiation from the source.

and there was a periodicity associated with that. And if you assume that this periodic city is associated with a blob just about to fall into the black hole, then you have a size of the orbit of that blob. And that size is directly proportional to the spin of the black hole. So that's how we were able to set a constrain, a lower limit on the spin of the black hole. We have a tweet from Darrell who says,

black hole spinning at half the speed. Is that the surface of the black hole? or the event horizon? So I think the best way to think about it is in terms of test particles. So imagine a test particle in the equatorial plane of the black hole. It's the change in the azimuthal position of the test particle as a function of time. So the black hole itself is not rotating. It's a space that's around it that's actually getting dragged

because of the angle momentum of the black hole. Yeah, so as these black holes spin faster and faster, it changes the space time. And it means that basically the inner edge of that accretion disk gets moved in closer and closer to the black hole as you spin it up faster and faster. So by measuring the material moving in that last orbit, you can constrain what that last orbit is,

and then that will give you an estimate of what the spin must be. Yes. So that's what we did. So the periodicity that we observed, we associate that with the last orbit of the material. Wow. You know, I'm trying to think of what the spacetime around a black hole spinning that quickly must be like.

Is it imaginable? Is it dragging the universe with it as it spins like that? You know, because we've heard from studying gravity waves that the universe is really a gravity. It's just a field of gravity. Is it dragging all of that stuff with it? I mean, I wouldn't say all of it. It's definitely dragging the space right next to it.

So right next to the black hole. The space is just being dragged. Does it look like a whirlpool? Yeah, it's exactly like a whirlpool, if you want to compare. My mind is sufficiently blown to give the idea. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYCCC, studios. So around a spinning black, how fast, how many times a second would it be spinning?

So it would be spinning once every two minutes. Once every two minutes. At half the speed of light, that is a big black hole then. Yeah. So if you want to compare, Earth takes 24 hours to rotate. Right. And this black hole is roughly 300 times bigger than Earth, and it's spinning 700 times faster than Earth. So imagine an object that is 300 times bigger than Earth, rotating 700 times faster than Earth. I can't. I'll try. So, okay, so you know all this, this is great, useful, you know, information. It's wonderful to hear it. But is there anything useful about knowing how fast the spin in? What do we do with that information? Yeah. So spin contains information about how the black hole grew in the first place. So, so, so, we're going.

Supermassive black holes, we currently don't know how supermassive black holes grew since the last couple of billions of years. There's two channels, or two major channels, people think. One is supermassive black holes can grow by mergers with other supermassive blackolds. So they start off small, but they can merge with others, other black holes, and then get to the weight that they are now. Or the other way is they could be embedded in a big soup of gas that can constantly be dumped onto the black hole and then that's another way to grow the black hole. So in the first case, when you have mergers of just black holes

with random spin orientations with respect to each other, in the end, after several mergers, you would expect the spin to be very low because you're just canceling out the angular momentum as you're merging in random orientations. But in the second case, When you're constantly dumping material in the same direction, what you're doing is you're spinning up the black hole.

So in the second case, you end up with a highly spinning black hole. So by just knowing this one number, the spin of the black hole, you're able to tell the channel through which it grew all the way from a couple of years after the Big Bang until now. I saw some news this morning. Researchers were saying they saw a flare last June that may have been our first look at birth of a black hole. Erin and Gerage, too early to say? Yeah, so this was an exciting discussion at our recent American Astronomical Society meeting this past week.

This is a transient called AT-2018 Cow, C-O-W, and that's just because it was assigned to those numbers, those letters as it came in, this new transient was found, but it just happened to spell out cow, so we call it the cow. And it was an extremely bright flare in another galaxy, kind of not in the center of the galaxy, but kind of in the spiral arms of this galaxy. And it was a very fast evolving flare. And, you know, after the initial discovery, it was announced to the community, many, many telescopes from all different wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum,

started taking observations of this object. still don't understand what it is. Whatever it is, it's a completely unprecedented finding, which actually happens quite a lot in astronomy. We're often surprised. But it could be that it's some new kind of fast-evolving supernova. This is the death of a massive star and collapse into a black hole. Or the other competing interpretation is that it is sort of like a a system that DJ was telling us about that it's a black hole and a star. In this case, it would have to be a white dwarf star, gets too close to that black hole, and it gets ripped apart.

And what we're watching in real time is the feeding of that white dwarf as it falls into that black hole. And again, in this case, it would also launch these relativistic jets and fast outflows. Exciting stuff. Exciting stuff. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Thanks very much. You're welcome, Daraj Prishamas, postdoctoral fellow at MIT's Cawley Institute in Cambridge and Aaron Karaz, professional, postdoctoral assistant at the NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

and University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. Thanks again. And have a great weekend. Thank you. That's about all the time we have. B.J. Leitman composed our theme music. And if I missed any part of the program, of course, we've got our podcast, and you can play our podcast on, you know, your smart speaker now. Just ask it to play and you get the latest

episode of Science Friday and we're active all day on our website and on all social media. Have her great weekend. I'm Ira Flato in New York.