#2217 - Brian Cox
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The Joe Rogan Experience. Showing by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Brian Cox. Good to see you, sir. Good to see you again. How's things in the world of the discovery of the universe?
Exciting, I would say. I've been doing some work on black holes recently, which I hadn't started last time I saw you, actually. So I got interested in it. And the amount of the progress that's been made in trying to understand how they work. And a question that was posed by Stephen Hawking a long time ago, really 1970s, early 1980s, which is what happens to stuff that falls in? The simplest question you could possibly ask. Right. There's progress being made on that now, which I think is profound and exciting.
How is the progress being made? Like, how do we... How do we study a black hole?
I mean, it's mainly theoretical, although we have now got photographs of them. So we have two photographs, which are radio telescope photographs. One of the one in the center of our galaxy, which is a little one. It's called Sagittarius A star. It's a little supermassive black hole. So it's about 6 million times the mass of the sun, which makes it a little supermassive. And then there's another one, the first photo that was taken. It's a collaboration called Event Horizon. And they took a photo of one in the galaxy M87, 55 million light years away. That thing is around 6 billion times the mass of the sun. I mean, imagine that, 6,000 million times more massive than our sun. Is that the largest black hole we've ever discovered?
No, there are bigger ones than that, but that's the scale of them. It's a big-ish one, that. But if you think about it, I mean, so there's a number. It's called the Schwarzschild radius of the thing. So if you took our sun, which you can fit a million Earths inside, and collapsed it down to make a black hole, it would form a black hole when it shrunk within a radius of three kilometers, about two miles. So you've got to take this thing, which is what I have to convert from kilometers to miles. That's okay. 700,000 kilometers. It's about 500,000 miles radius or something like that, the sun. So you squash it down until it's about two miles, and then that would form a black hole. Wow. Six billion times the mass of the sun means you multiply that by six billion. So these things, the so-called Schwarzschild radius is, I don't know, larger than our solar system, basically. Oh, my God. This thing that sits in a galaxy. So we've got these two photographs. Larger than our solar system.
Yeah, the event. So it's a big structure. Now, that's a Chandra X-ray image of... There it is. That's it. So that one there, that's the M87 black hole. So what you're seeing there is the emission from the material that's swirling around it. It's called the accretion disk. So you have material that's orbiting very fast, emitting a lot of radiation. And that's what you see. It's a flat disk, by the way. So you think Saturn's rings. So this material is very flat. But what you're seeing in that photograph is the light rays being bent around the black hole from that flat disk. So that was a prediction from Einstein's theory, basically. He published it in 1915. And you can predict that that's what one should look like.
And then just about, what was that, four years ago now, maybe five years ago, for the first time in history, we get an image of one. And it looks like the prediction. So it's a remarkable thing. How phenomenal is that?
Yeah.
So we've had those two photographs. The other thing we've had is so-called gravitational wave detections. So these are colliding black holes, and they collide and merge together. And obviously that's quite a violent event in the universe. And so that event, that process ripples space-time. So it sends ripples out in the fabric of the universe, space and time. And actually, Kip Thorne, I've spoken to him several times. He's one of the greats, right, won the Nobel Prize for this. And he calls it a storm in time. So you get a time storm. So really, we're to think, as we speak now, there will be these very tiny ripples from violent cosmic events passing through this room. And they're changing the rate that time passes as they go through.
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