The Updated Physics of Black Holes with Steve Balbus & Andrew Mummery
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He's in a different gravitational field from the ones who went down to the planet, which was near the black hole. They lived 15 minutes or something, and the guy went 10 years or something. I think maybe even more. But yeah, crazy ratio of time. Time dilation. Crazy time dilation. So I was going to try to calculate how close that orbit had to be, and then I said, no, I'm not going to wait until I get somebody else to do this. It sounds like you're the guy for that. I'm not going to wait.

Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Gary, we're in the UK now. Good. This is your place. It is. I'm here as your interpreter. We're in the town of Oxford. Is it city or town? Oh, I don't know. We'll give it city-science. All I care is that there's a university here and I have colleagues.

My people. You got peeps? I got people. All right. I got people. Okay. All right. Very good. Are you going to meet any? Yeah. And by the way, like, where's Chuck? Chuck is otherwise disposed. Okay. And I figured I'll settle for a Brit as my co-host. I am not the new Chuck. Okay. I have a colleague who I met many, many years ago. All right. Like decades ago. All right. And he still wants to know you? And I found him and I called him and said, I'm in town. And he invited me to come chill.

Nice. He's sitting right here. Is that who he is? Steve Balbus. Steve. Hello, Neil. Good to see you again. Welcome to StarTalk. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Dude, you're a fellow astrophysicist. Yes. And, you know, he has astrophysical phenomenon named after him. Does he? Yeah. Are we having a phenomenon envy? Yeah.

Are we? Are we having a little bit of phenomena envy? Is that a thing? I didn't know. It is now. The psychologists haven't gotten to that one yet. I see. If I've just invented it, I'm claiming it. So tell me about this thing that carries your name in our field.

So, it's work based on work that I... You're a theorist. Yeah, I do theory. Yeah. A lot of pencil and paper, and of course, nowadays, computational work. Yeah. And in particular, back in the 90s, I did some work with a colleague named John Hawley. Uh-huh.

The late John Hawley. The late John Hawley. So he passed away a few years ago, unfortunately. And at the time, we were trying to figure out how you make black holes. And the hard part of doing that, gravity is present, and of course gravity ultimately is the reason that things happen.

make compact objects. Wait, wait. You go so far back to a time before we knew how to make black holes?

That's how old you are? That's how old I am. I would go back to a time when black holes were controversial. Oh, okay. You know, that polite astrophysicist. And since then, Nobel Prizes have been given for black holes. We take pictures of them and put them on our iPhones. But there was a time when respectable astrophysicists didn't talk about it in mixed company. Okay. If you read it, you put a fake cover on it. Oh, all right. So people wouldn't know.

But the hard part was if you have a black hole forming, the last stages, stuff is going around in a disk, a little bit like the planets go around the solar system. Our solar system was once a disk. It's probably how the sun was made.

But the planets in the solar system just go around in orbits, whereas the gas in a disk around the black hole or any other type of sort of compact object that's being made has to get out of those orbits and down into the center. So how does it do that?

And people talk about friction now. The gas rubs against itself, planets don't do that. But when you put in the numbers to see whether that would work or not, it would fail by orders of magnitude. - The powers of 10. - Yeah, powers of 10, yeah. Millions, it was millions of times too inefficient.

Which is a fun state of mind of research to be in, where you think you're on top of the physics of something, you calculate it out, and you're off by factors of thousands. Yeah. But you still go to work the next day.

Exactly. You don't let that kind of thing bother you. Or you should find another line of work. It's a stimulation to seek. You know that you're on to something, but there's an important piece that you're missing. Evidently. Yeah, okay. So what people suspected, and with good reason, is the reason that the discs work the way they do is it's not just friction.

But the gas itself is turbulent. So it's a little bit like what you see in your sink when you turn on the faucet. There's a lot of, or in a river, there's a lot of churning and bubbling. And under those circumstances, the friction in the flow can indeed be thousands or tens of thousands, millions of times higher and more efficient. So you say you can get like an anti-fossil.

You get lots of eddies. So that random thing spewing and spewing up. Exactly. They rub against each other. That's exactly what

the professionals call them. I knew a turbulent Eddie. I think we all do. Probably not the same guy, but there's always a turbulent Eddie. Actually, I got that from Al Roker. I mentioned the phrase turbulent Eddie, and he said, I knew a turbulent Eddie. And I felt, I walked right into it. I said, what's he doing now? He said, five to ten. Yes.

You're the straight man. I didn't know I walked into the straight man. That was with Al Rucker a few years ago. Al Rucker's Turbulent Eddies. That's what we're talking about. But you want to understand why they're there.

Because when you actually write down the mathematical equations for the flow and you analyze whether it should break down into this kind of structure, the answer is no. There just wasn't any way that you could do that.

So it occurred to me that there was one thing that people were leaving out, which seemed kind of inconsequential. But because of other work I had done, I wondered whether it might be a good idea to put it back in. And that is that every magnet, every disc,

in astrophysics. This is the accretion disk. This is the accretion disk around... Circulating toilet bowl style into the abyss. Exactly, the whirlpool. Any kind of a disk or even any astrophysical gas, wherever it might be, has some kind of a magnetic field in it. There's magnetic field in this room. And if there are enough charged particles to make a current,

then the magnetic field can affect the way that that gas flows. And you don't need very much. Even a very little bit will work quite well for that gas to act as though it's magnetized. So you publish this, Balbus and Hawley, and then the polite way is you just publish it and let other people say,

The "Balbus and Hawley" paper talked about this instability. Oh, the "Balbus and Hawley" instability! And then it just becomes part of our lexicon. Is that how that happened? Or did you have a campaign?

No, I can't say that I had a conscious campaign. Yes, you did. Look at that face. And in fact, it's known by a few names. It's not known, I should say, exclusively by Baal, but it's also called magnetorotational instability because that describes why, what breaks, what it actually, it's a combination of the magnetorotational

the magnetic field and the rotation that renders the gas unstable and makes it break down into these kind of turbulent eddies. And what John was able to do, John Hawley, my colleague, at the time, which nobody, very few people in the world could do, was to set up a computer program

which could actually follow the equations at a level of detail, that we could actually see not just the breakdown of the circular orbits, but the emergence of turbulence itself, and actually visualize that. Was it able to predict

So that's an interesting question. So yes, it was able to predict if you put a magnetic field which is this strong in this kind of a disk, then there won't be a breakdown. If you put a magnetic field which is this strong, then there will be, and that could be tested.

And without that, you're just pushing pencil. Yeah. Right, at that level. Yeah, but you're getting more clues. You said there was something missing in your puzzle, so now you're filling in that. So it was clear that that was what was missing. And the amazing thing is, is that even a very weak magnetic field would be enough to completely disrupt the stability properties of the gas. And that's when a lot of people had a hard time getting their head around it.

that something that seems so weak could have such an important effect. So this was an astrophysical instability, not an emotional instability. Well, I had those as well. But what I'm talking about, right, the astrophysical side of things. So you mentioned like a whirlpool effect. Yes.

Would it have been any use to study whirlpools and maybe construct the computational element of that to see if there was anything that you could learn from that? Yes and no, in the sense that the whirlpools in your kitchen sink or something like that won't be sort of run by a magnetic field.

No, I was just thinking the sort of things you could see in nature. Absolutely. In terms of what people... People can do rather detailed studies now of turbulence, its statistical properties and so forth, and absolutely those kinds of studies would be of interest and are of interest

for the people who do this kind of turbulence and accretion distance. So I think what's fun about this is, the great thing about physics, when you break it down, is physical principles are transplantable to multiple different questions in search of various answers. So the power of physics knows no bounds. Yes. What is it you said to me earlier on today? I don't remember. That I'm going to get the T-shirt?

Physics is my god. Oh, physics is my god. Okay. Are you going to get that t-shirt? No, I'm going to get it for StarTalk. We're going to have it made up. We're going to have it murk and make money. Okay. So let's fast forward. And I understand recently that this year, 2024, you have a textbook coming out on Einstein's general theory of relativity. That's right. I've taught a course here at Oxford for several years.

and had a set of notes and then I've been encouraged because people liked it to turn it on to into a textbook on general relativity and the timing was very good because the very first year that I taught the course was the year that gravitational radiation was discovered.

That would have been 2016. 2016, that's exactly right. Is that the same as Hawking's radiation? No, that's a different kind of radiation. This one was light. Then I won't blur the lines here, sorry. Get your radiation straight, dude. Sorry, dude. Last time I invited you on this program. Yeah, no, this is the force of gravity itself being radiated.

In a way which is rather similar to the way that electromagnetic radiation is being radiated. An effect predicted by Einstein 100 years ago, but so small and so difficult to measure. It was only in the last few years that the technology was there to do that. And so the book covers that. Yeah.

So it's an update. It's very, a lot has been going on on the observational side. And so I'm fortunate because the textbook discusses that as well. All right, so it's a textbook. So is there like a general relativity for dummies that you can, is there like the crib notes version of the textbook? Have you considered that? I haven't considered that, but talking to you now,

Makes me think perhaps I should consider that a little bit more. That's a thought. There are good, very good books. So it would be General Relativity for Non-Oxford Physics Majors. Yeah. You know what a very good book is? One that I love. But it's meant for the layman because it's written very clearly. There's a book from the 1990s by Kip Thorne.

probably the most famous relativist in the world, but also very gifted for writing and for making things very, very clear. So yeah, the book is called Black Holes and Time Warps, Einstein's Outrageous Legacy. That's Kip Thorne. And that's Kip Thorne. That's our book guy, Kip Thorne. That's your guy, Kip Thorne. We all live love Kip Thorne. Kip Thorne is... Co-executive producer of the film...

Absolutely. Yes. And he's the man who knows all there is to know about general relativity. He's one of the co-winners of the Nobel Prize for LIGO and the discovery of gravitational radiation. He did a lot of the heavy lifting on the theory side of that. Okay. And he writes brilliantly and very, very clearly. For the layman. Okay, good. Yes, and so that's an excellent book. And he makes predictions about what...

he thought was going to happen in the years after 1992. How'd he do? He did okay. He predicted the traffic. You've just damned him by faint praise. Well, that's very hard. I'm just impressed that we live in a time where

"Okay" means "not so well." How did you do it? Okay. I mean, I can't throw shade on a Nobel Prize winner. I really just can't do it. And look, to give him credit, he was being optimistic. So at that point, gravitational radiation was still two decades in the future, or more, and he predicted that, that that would happen, and at about roughly the right time scale.

On the more theoretical side of things, theories that would combine quantum mechanics with general relativity, he was much too optimistic. So he didn't get quite those right. Where are we now with what we don't know?

And what is it we think we need to know and sort of move on from... Yeah, let me add punctuation to that. Einstein in 1915 or 1916 publishes the general theory of relativity. - Yes. - Right. And we've been working with it for more than a hundred years. That's right. And so what I ask of you, and I'm picking up his question, are there still loose ends today?

We're a quarter of the way into the 21st century. Are there still loose ends, not only in general relativity, but in those fields,

Are there still parts of black holes we don't know or understand? That's an interesting question. Because he laid it out more than a hundred years ago. He gave us the equations for it. And that's, of course, a very big step because you can't begin to do anything. But it's only the beginning step because unless you know the content of the equations and are able to understand their implications,

You only know relatively little. I think you just said you have to know the power of the equations. Is that another? Is that a translation of what you just said? You said context. How powerful. Not context. Content. The content of the equations. That was definitely content. The content of the equation.

You want to know what's sort of hidden in there? What do the solutions to the equations actually look like? For example, we now know that the most general kind of black... Wait, you're telling me he gave us equations but not solutions. That's not... That ain't right.

- Leave us hanging? - Any great physicist will do that. - They just left homework. - Right. - Homework, yeah. - Isaac Newton didn't solve all the equations of gravity. - Okay. - Maxwell didn't solve all-- - There have been at least a half dozen Nobel prizes given to people working on Einstein's equations. - Absolutely, very much. - That's crazy, crazy fact. - Yeah. - Yeah, okay.

We didn't even really know what a black hole was in terms of solving Einstein's equations in a relatively simple context, just what they call the vacuum solutions.

the solutions to Einstein's equations when there's nothing there but some kind of a little point mass, the black hole. So the solution to that really didn't come until the 1960s when the mathematician Roy Kerr

published his solution to what a rotating black hole looks like. And everything in Europe rotates, so that's an important solution. And everything rotates, so that's a very, very important solution. So it's the Kerr black hole. It's its own kind of black hole. That's right. It has his name. There's a Schwarzschild black hole. That came pretty quickly. That came within a month of when Einstein published his theory, but that's no rotating at all.

And that's a little too simple for nature. That's an important solution, and we learn a lot from it. Yeah. But it's not really a practical solution, as we learn later, because most black holes have a lot of rotation, and that makes a big difference in terms of how they behave. ♪

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I'm Kais from Bangladesh and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Alright, so today, what are some unsolved problems? Well...

So there are different kinds of unsolved problems. So one problem which is still not really well understood is what happens, how do you see a black hole? Because the black hole itself is just empty space. You

You see a black hole because of the effect that the black hole has on the surrounding gas. Or anything. Surrounding anything. But gas is usually what you have at hand.

And under some circumstances, if there are a lot of stars, you can see how the stars are concentrated near the black hole and learn something from that. But most of the time you get most of your information from the gas, which is around the black hole. So it was important to learn, for example, in my earlier work, that the gas is turbulent and to make use of that.

But there was still things to learn about the orbits that are very, very close to what they call the singularity, to the real point mass, which is the black hole. That's where the effects of relativity become very important. So just to be clear, you can...

you know, a black hole is not some giant sucking machine. - That's right. - Right? So if you have a stable orbit around a black hole, you're cool. The sun could become a black hole today, we'll get very cold, but we'll just keep orbiting it like it was no, like we're fine. - Well, even more than that, there would be absolutely, if the sun were perfectly spherical as it is, versus the sun which was a black hole, there would be no difference whatsoever

in terms of what it's doing to the entire space around it. Right. You would get very cold. But other than that, and we'd freeze to death. But ignoring that complication, we'd be fine. Right. Just the gravitational part. Do they rotate the same direction every single time? The black holes? No. No.

Interesting. They can rotate however they like. Like the 900-pound gorilla. - I don't think so. - It sits where it wants. These orbits, it seems to me they'd be easy to calculate. Well, no, because the equations themselves, I mean, they are easy to calculate in some sense if you put it all on a computer. But it's often very hard to understand what the results mean.

The hard part is to be able to calculate orbits, say, the same way that Isaac Newton was able to prove that the orbits in his theory of gravity would be exactly ellipses. So that's very useful to know. So can you do the same thing around black holes? Pull a Newton on a black hole. Pull a Newton on a black hole. Mm-hmm.

And the answer is... Newton is your guy. I know. He's not from Oxford, he's from Cambridge. Okay, well, that's okay. You'll take it. Oh, yeah, we're big fans of Newton. Okay. And so when you're dealing with orbits around Kerr black holes...

The equations are so daunting. Just to write down the equation takes up a page of your notes. That's just to write it, let alone find a solution. Most people were put off by that task. But it turns out when you study black holes,

there are some simplifications that you can bring to bear that people were not really aware of, that people didn't fully appreciate. And you can exploit those and then it turns out you can kind of pull a Newton for some of the orbits which are not just, you know, kind of mathematical curiosities, but which actually have some practical interest as well.

And so I have a student who is actually able to do precisely that.

And so that, I think, has been able to advance the field significantly. Interesting. So this would be a fresh advance on our understanding of black holes' effect on their environment that we haven't really had in a while. Is that a fair statement? I think that's a very fair statement. Okay. I think it's a very fair statement. Contrary to sort of popular impressions, physicists don't really love complexity. If they have to deal with it, they'll...

They'll muster the fortitude and they will do so. But if they can find something... Muster the fortitude, what does that mean? That sounds very British. They'll find a way to get it done. Thank you.

Thank you for the translation. I told you that's what I meant. Muster the fortitude. Thank you, William Shakespeare. But if they can find a simple way, that is really the holy grail. That's really what they're after. And so that, I think, is where we're heading with that. We really do have a much simpler way of understanding the

What is going on with the orbits which are quite close to the black hole? And those are the ones of also not just kind of mathematical interest,

but astronomical interest, observational interest as well. - With observational consequences. - With observational consequences, very much so. - Okay, so you have a student who did this. - I do. - So why am I still talking to you? - Well, I don't know, Neil. I didn't arrange the schedule. - Okay, all right, Gary, let's get him out of here. Okay, ready, on three. - One, two, three.

There you go! There he goes. Hello! Hello. Your name? I'm Andy. Andy, pleased to meet you. Nice to meet you. Welcome. You sound like this guy. Yes. How about that? Are you a Brit? I am a Brit. He's a Brit. What gave it away? Okay, you'll help me translate. Of course. May not tell the truth, but I'll translate. So, you're not literally a student. You're a postdoc. I'm a postdoc. So, I was Steve's student, uh...

2014 to 20 no 2018 to 2022 okay and then I've been a research fellow here since then here at Oxford in Oxford Oxford yeah so you you picked up some of Einstein's mantle here yeah

That's very generous. So what exactly did you do? And let me tell you our angle into this, all right? The public's. The public's angle is everyone has seen the movie Interstellar. All right? And Kip Thorne had a hand in that. Helped write a lot of the physics that was in it. And one of the more intriguing scenes was this visit to this black hole planet. Mm-hmm.

Gargantuan, I think was the name of it. And it left one of their astronauts up in the orbiting spacecraft. And so he's in a different gravitational field from the ones who went down to the planet, which was near the black hole. And I forgot what the ratio was, but they lived 15 minutes or something, and the guy went 10 years or something. I think maybe even more. But yeah, crazy ratio of time. Time dilation. Time dilation.

Crazy time dilation. So I was going to try to calculate how close that orbit had to be, and then I said, no, I'm not going to wait until I get somebody else to do this. It sounds like you're the guy for that. Yes, yeah, I'm all bits near to a black hole. That's the day job. He's the guy. That's the day job. How many people do we bump into? How many of our audience? This is not an accidental bump into. No, no, no, I'm not bumping into Andy, but how many people in our StarTalk audience

and universe want to know how close can I orbit to a black hole because that's what they do before I get or we have very curious people who watch this I'm sure they ask that question frequently because you'll see it and they're not just going to receive it assuming it just can happen give me some answers there

So you can get pretty close. So for your simplest Schwarzschild black hole... So that's the non-rotating black hole. Non-rotating. So let's make the event horizon one. Okay, we all know about the event horizon. The point of no return that we all know about. So the edge of the black hole, that's one. Then you can stably orbit on a circular orbit down to three.

But not less than three. Not less than three. So, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it's the roundabout force. When you drive around a roundabout, you get pushed out, okay? So that's what an orbit is. You balance that with gravity. A roundabout would be a traffic circle. Yes, sorry. It's a roundabout. When you're here, you're roundabout. When you're back home, traffic circle yourself silly. So the planet Gargantuan. Yeah.

to have that much time dilation difference because I think our most of our audience knows as you get to a a Stronger and stronger gravitational field your time slows down relative to others. I'm so okay. So so

How close was the gargantuan planet? I don't remember them saying so. It would have to be really, I mean, fantastically close. In fact, I'm not... Closer than three? I'm pretty sure it's going to be closer than three. Uh-oh. Yeah. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Yeah, that's...

Okay, so this would mean Kip. Kip, our boy. Kip Thorne. You're calling him out. We're calling out Kip Thorne. Kip Thorne. Yeah, so them landing on the planet, that would have been unstable. That little kick would have sent it spiraling in. Wow. So what happens? Why can't you just orbit right above the...

the event horizon. In Newtonian gravity, so the Earth going around the Sun, you have to balance two forces. You've got gravity coming in and revolution pushing you out. So that keeps you at the same distance from the... Absolutely. Your urge to fly off is a balance. Okay, so now what? And then you write down the same problem in Einstein's equation, and you find that there's a new force, effectively,

- Or there's a new... - A new force? Well, no. Okay, so the force is gravity. That's the only force. But there's something, an effective force, which is gravity times rotation. So that's what the equation looks like. So this is a new term... It's a new term in the energy equation. ...that operates on the stability of the system. Yeah, and that points in. Okay?

So the faster you go around... So that term is not there in Newton's equation. No, no, no. So as you get closer and closer to the black hole, this other term shows up that prevents you from sustaining a balance. So this is one of the things that we didn't know that we need to know because this is helping solve...

why this happens the way it does. Yes. So you get closer, you have to go faster and faster and faster to stay in orbit. In order to stabilize that extra term. To stay in orbit, but that just makes this third term even bigger. Because it's gravity times rotation. And that eventually destabilizes the orbit.

So the faster you go, the worse it is. Yeah, exactly. That ain't right. Diminishing returns. Exactly. That ain't right. That's wrong. That's just wrong. Why did you come up with that? I mean, that's the universe. Are you telling me no one figured this out before you? So this was known. We knew that the orbits became unstable. But the point was how simply can you describe the plunge effect?

So you get flicked off the circular orbit and you dive in towards the black hole. And the question is, how do you describe that? And by the way, as I understand it,

If you dive into the black hole, your orbital speed increases, which would further increase the term. Is that correct? So it's catastrophically unstable. Yeah, exactly. So it's unstable in that you perturb it and you're gone. And it gets even more and you're in. Yeah, you're not. So you speed up to try and break the orbit and you just end up making it way worse. And you're gone. And you plunge across the event horizon and you're doomed.

Yeah. Say goodbye. Damn, dude. Rich, I'm sorry.

Yeah, and so, you know, this is a prediction of... You're bumming us out here. Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry. Well, it's the universe's fault. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's not your fault. The universe revealed it. Right, so let's get the understanding just so we learn how science works. Some of this was known before your work. Yeah, so we knew this happened. Okay, but so your... How did you contribute to that problem? So this guy, just to make it clear, so much of what's out there, people have little bits of solutions to it, right? And we're all sort of...

the elephant trying to understand it. It's like a piece of paper that someone's ripped into tiny little bits and then scattered. Okay. And then you're now trying to bring it all back. Well, the paper is the pre-existing how the universe works. So they're trying to piece it back together to say, oh, no, that goes there, this goes here. Right. And then we're getting there. So this is what I think Andy's kind of... Okay, so how did you come in on this? So we knew this should happen, okay? And, I mean, you know something should happen, you want to go see it effectively, okay?

So you want to go see it out in nature. You want to observe it in a real physical system. Now, to know that you... You want to observe the unstable world. Yeah, the plunge. You want to see this gas that's plunging. That's what you want to do. Because then you know it's there. And so before you can tell...

that you've seen this, you need to know what to look for. So you've got to build a model of this plunging gas. So build a model of this on a computer? Yeah, pen and paper, computer. What did you use? I used pen and paper. Oh! Oh, chalkboard! Oh! Oh!

Oh, these are like the cheapest scientists to keep around. No, they're not. Yes, they are. No, they're not. They're totally cheap. There's no computer, there's no telescope, there's no particle accelerator. Have you seen the price of graphite lately? It goes through pencils. I need the best chalk. Just stick it in his office. I need the best chalk. And then he'll be busy and come out later. Okay, so go on. So you want to simplify these equations down to make them useful so that you can make predictions and then you can go and look in the data and see if there's any...

black hole sources out there that we just can't understand without this plunging gas. So you have to predict what unstable spiraling gas would look like. Exactly, yeah. So what does it look like?

Well, essentially it's hot and small. I could have said that. You didn't. But I said stop it, Pat. You didn't. And you didn't go for swirling and unstable either. But precisely how hot and precisely how small, that's where the money is. You got it. So we have these theories that Steve worked on since the 70s. Your advisor, Steve Vavas. Who we snapped him out of existence moments ago. Yeah, he did work on it.

And, you know, they had these models and they just stopped at this stable, less stable orbit because then it plunges, it gets difficult, and we'll just ignore it, basically. And so you stop there. That's what I would have done. Okay? You know? And then eventually we started getting data that they couldn't explain with these models. ♪

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Okay, so now that you have insights right down to the orbits at the event horizon, non-orbits at the event horizon, tell me now where you think Gargantuan had to have been to give you that stark insight

difference in time dilation? I think it's well inside. Inside you are unstable. Absolutely. So that planet just would have not been hanging out. It would have been gone eons ago. Okay, why didn't Kip Thorne know this? I'm sure Kip Thorne did know this. I'm sure it was just very inconvenient for the plot.

That may well have more than a grain of truth in it. Oh, okay. So, you're being very kind here. What you're saying, let me reword what you're saying. Okay, you're saying, apart from the extra detail that you have provided all of us inside those unstable orbits, we knew there were unstable orbits. He certainly would have known there's unstable orbits, because his middle name is general relativity. Okay.

He's co-author of like the most famous relativity book there ever was. Okay. It's called Gravitation. It has the proportions of a Manhattan Yellow Pages phone book.

Well, he certainly simplified the title, didn't he? Well, it's the only book you learn all about just by carrying it around. Yeah, I get that. I see what you did. So it has three authors, Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, and Kip Thorne is the middle author there. So we all have it in my generation. It's too old for you. No, I've got it on there. You do have the book, okay. He'll have a book. All right, so what you're suggesting is that he wanted that degree of...

of time dilation difference and took some cinematic liberties to get it. I mean, the man's got a notable price. He's, you know... It might not have been him. He might have been overridden by producers and directors. Yeah.

Because that does happen. Okay, I've had people slack in movies. If the idea is kind of right, even if in detail it's wrong. That orbit exists. That orbit exists that the planet's on. It's just unstable. So it just won't exist for long. It wouldn't exist for long enough for them to do anything they were doing. But it exists. It's a solution that's valid. It just won't hang around. We'll take the thorn out of your side for the moment. The kip thorn out of my side? Yes, thank you.

You talked about we're finding new data coming in. Now, if you're a forensic accountant, follow the money, stupid. You're going to find what's all about. This, for me, is you being forensic for the data. So,

So what kind of data is coming in and what are you able to kind of... And what kind of telescopes? Yeah, coming to you as an astronomer, I want to know what I should point at my telescope. So what are your data sources? Is it telescopes? Is it computational? Where are we headed? So these are X-ray telescopes. So they're satellites in orbit. X-ray telescopes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And we're about to lose our last X-ray telescope, the Chandra Great Observatory. That's going to be a real... It's going to get de-orbited very soon. There will be others, but Chandra is a wonderful instrument. So it's, you know... Chandra Sekhar. Chandra Sekhar. Very good. He knows. I'm just checking in. He's still a student. I'm allowed to be my Professor Neil every now and then. Okay.

And as I remember, he was a great astrophysics theorist and good tradition in the steps you're following. If I have half the success of Chandrasekhar, I'll take that. So you published this.

Yeah, so it's X-ray data. So these disks are super hot, incredibly hot, and they produce X-rays, and they are detected by satellites. They're so hot, they radiate X-rays. Absolutely. As opposed to being so hot, like your electric stove, it radiates infrared. Then you can radiate ultraviolet if you get hotter, and then X-rays. You keep radiating up the spectrum. What goes hot?

How hot do you have to radiate to get worse than X-rays? Millions of degrees. Because why do you get even hotter? And it's gamma rays. And then what's it going to say? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're in Hulk territory. That's very hot. Whereas your stove is 1,000 degrees. You know? Yeah. We're talking millions. We're talking millions of degrees. And so we... Yeah. Yeah. And it's...

And it's tens of kilometers from the edge of a black hole, millions of degrees, X-ray photons are coming across the galaxy, 10,000 light years. Okay, so you published, did you publish your theoretical predictions and found some data that explains? That's the best way to do that, right? We did, exactly. Yeah, yeah. We had a bit of a heads up. We knew that there were mysteries out there, and we thought we had the answer. Mysteries halted.

As they do us all, my friend. And we were able to show, yes, you have this data, this beautiful data, and you just can't explain it without this plunge, this gas on the plunge. And where did that appear? It was in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a very British journal. You kept it British. You know, we have journals too in America. Yeah, but they're not royal. They didn't have the king's approval. Okay, here we go. I've got to get used to this. Not the queen's approval.

The King's approval. King Charles, okay. So this is a leading journal in our field. Yes, so congratulations on that. Yeah, thank you. And if I understand correctly, that got some media attention. Yeah, it caused a bit of a stir. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was good fun. Classic British understatement. A bit of a stir. Which means people went apeshit. A couple of heads blew up.

Before we let Andy go, what is your top unsolved problem? And at this point in your career, surely you have some ambitions. So I want to know how fast black holes are rotating. The black holes we have out in the galaxy, I want to know how fast they're spinning. Dude, think bigger than that. Come on. This tells us how they're formed. So this tells us... There you go. That's why he wants to know. Okay, the question you answer is how fast they're spinning. But the long term... But that...

that's one question but the real answer is how do they form and how do they evolve over the age of the universe okay and this includes supermassive black holes absolutely yeah supermassive the big ones I got the hint

Super massive, the big ones, yeah. So you think you can have a general understanding that can apply to all the regimes of black holes that we know? That's the plan. So you're going to be the black hole guy? Yeah, absolutely. I'm a black hole go-to guy. Go-to black hole guy. So good luck with that. Sometimes you need a little bit of that, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My little island leading the way now. How about that? So tell me, why must everything...

circle a black hole to go in? Why can't it just fall straight in? It's got angular momentum, basically. And angular momentum is hard to lose. Hard to lose? Yeah. Stuff that's spinning. Why can't I just... It's conserved. It's a conserved quantity. What about a black hole that doesn't spin? What do you call those? That's a Schwarzschild black hole. How about that one?

No, but we're talking about stuff that falls in. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. If it's not rotating, is it... If you're not going to have a little disky thing, somehow it has to have been exactly pointed at it. And in these systems, we're peeling off the outer edge of a star. That's where this gas is coming from. So you've got a star in an orbit around a black hole, and you're peeling off the outer edge. I learned one word that says that. The star is getting flayed.

Is that a good word? Oh. That's a good word. It's skinned alive. It's to be flayed. Okay. Did I teach a Brit a word? That's not, I'm an American. We're not supposed to do that. I think we'd actually tell you. So, but okay, so you have these discs, but suppose other material comes the other way. Doesn't it all cancel out?

We've got one source amount. That's the problem. So it's all coming in from the same direction. From one thing that's circulating that way. So you're peeling, so you inherit this angularity. It would be odd to have two things simultaneously doing that. So that's what gives you a job, thinking about the spiraling material. If everything just fell straight in, you'd be out of a job. And what about really, really big black holes where...

they wouldn't necessarily have a disk. Not always, no. Because it's just really, really big. And how are you going to coherently create a disk? You just fall in. Within a supermassive black hole, does it not spawn its own little miniature? Sometimes there's gas in the middle of the galaxy, it comes nearby, you switch on, you switch on, that affects the supermassive black hole. I like that phrasing.

Because the black holes is lurking. Yeah, right and only when it has something to dine upon Does the mechanism turn on? Very good. I? Like this interesting ones. Yes, of course Yeah, well, this is great. Well, thank you. Yeah, we're sharing us your expertise and look for great things And I still want you to be more ambitious. I just wonder how black holes for Do it as a big universe. Okay, so

Give him one thing to do at a time. One thing to do at a time. I learned to not... I'm kidding. Can I be wise here? Go ahead. The wise elder? In my day, people said, I just want to know the value of the Hubble constant. I just want to know the rate that the universe... I just want to know... And then we discover that and we're on to other questions. Because it's not so much I want to know the answer...

to these questions I posed, I want to know the answers to questions I have yet to think of. And that's your future. Whether you like it or not. Absolutely. All right, dude. Thanks for being on StarTalk. Thank you. You got it. You have one last Brit thing you want to say before we sign off? Pardon the last thing, just ignoring. What is science if not this eternal quest to decode the operations of nature?

Isaac Newton once said, if I can see farther than others, it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants that have come before me. Now, I don't really believe him because he was completely brilliant, but for most of us, that's true. But what does that mean? Those who come before you, they put together part of that cosmic puzzle, but no, it's not completely solved. And there are parts of the puzzle we don't even know exist yet that will need to be assembled. And this, the act of

of asking questions, probing the universe and finding answers is the passing of a torch. I think of like the Olympic torch. It goes from one group to another, from one generation to the next, and is the sum of all of this that is responsible for our understanding of the world as we know it. And in this little slice of theoretical physics in the Beecroft Building on the campus of Oxford University,

We got a little taste of that. And I'm delighted to have brought you a slice of how science works. And that is a cosmic perspective. Until next time, as always, keep looking up. Compassionate Healthcare is in high demand in Arizona. Creighton University offers medicine, nursing, OT, PT, pharmacy, and PA programs on our Phoenix campus at Central and Thomas. Learn more at creighton.edu slash phoenix.

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