Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. I like that. Absolutely. It's also, there's some things that are so awesome, it's like, that's fucking awesome.
I was trying to talk about black holes to some high school students just seriously earlier this week, and I kept saying, you know, what the fuck?
Yeah.
I got nothing to pitch, but the Shorewood Men's Club, I was giving a talk there. The Shorewood, Wisconsin, is where I live. The Men's Club invited me to give a talk about astronomy last week, and when I mentioned I was coming to the show, they just freaked out. And so the only thing I have is my Shorewood Men's Club water bottle.
Well, shout out to the Shorewood Men's Club. That's awesome. That's so cool that you give those speeches. I love your YouTube talks. They're fantastic.
Well, thank you. Wow.
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Chapter 2: How does Michelle Thaller engage with students about black holes?
I have watched probably every one you've ever done. I've watched at least, I mean, how many have you done? I've watched at least like 10 of them.
Yeah. I mean, so, I mean, pretty much what I did at NASA, I did a lot of sort of the science spokesperson stuff. And so most of that was, you know, I'm more on the NASA videos. I hosted like launch events. I haven't done much privately on YouTube. I'm thinking about starting some stuff. Oh, you should. Yeah, I'll work on that.
Please.
Okay. 100%. Thank you. 100%.
You've said so many things that made me just go, what?
Yeah.
Like, here's a big one that you said. You were talking about if the size of Earth, if the Earth was the dot of an eye in a book, in regular print, that the Milky Way galaxy would be as large as the Earth itself.
Actually a little bigger. Yeah. So, I mean, the thing is, this is an interesting thing about science communication. You say that if the sun were the size of a dot of an eye, and you've got to remember, you can fit a million Earths inside the sun. This is a huge thing. So if that's the size of a dot of an eye on text, then the galaxy would be the size of the Earth.
That's when people's eyes get big and people respond to it.
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Chapter 3: What insights does Michelle share about her experiences at NASA?
There's nobody that can process it. I mean, one of the really kind of, you know, the thing about sort of demystifying scientists is the idea that our brains somehow work any differently. And like we can visualize what a light year is, right? You know, a light year is about six trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year. No, we're human beings. We get used to using the terms.
We get used to using the numbers. But we've got the same brain as everybody else. Nobody can visualize what a galaxy really is. And you can take pictures of them. You can say the word galaxy. But people have no idea what monsters these are. And then with the James Webb Space Telescope, all of a sudden you're taking pictures of billions of them. And they're right in front of your eyes.
This is not something that you can argue about. It's an image. And you see these foggy hazes of stars, basically so many stars you can't see them individually. And that's real. And I mean, it still gives me goosebumps.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
It gives me goosebumps, too, but it's so cool that it gives it to you when you actually study it your whole life.
Oh, that's the whole point. I mean, you know, working for NASA was a huge, huge honor. And, I mean, all of us there are doing this. I mean, we were all science fiction fans. We all love imagination. You know, that was the best thing about working at NASA was the joy and the teamwork and the camaraderie and the people that you're working with. They think this is the best thing in the world to do.
Well, I mean there's a real problem that we have where I think that cities and light pollution have really – you know, it's great that we have cities. It's wonderful. It's wonderful that we have all this electricity and that we can see things at nighttime. But, boy, we have done ourselves a massive disservice by not being able to see the stars all the time.
And I think people have kind of lost the wonder of it when you're only looking at it as images on your phone or when, you know, the only time you get it is on vacation. Occasionally you look up in the sky, wow, look at all the stars here. It's different here. This is something that everyone should be absolutely blown away by.
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Chapter 4: How do black holes and neutron stars challenge our understanding of physics?
They're not as far away as the geostationary satellites. But they're not actually going that fast. They're only going about 9,000 miles an hour around the Earth. The astronauts in the space station, by the way, are going much faster. They're going more, let's say, approximately 20,000 miles an hour. So the GPS satellites are going a little slower.
And yeah, 8,000 miles an hour is a lot, and that does slow your time down. But the bigger effect for GPS satellites is how far away from the Earth they are. We're actually going slower in time than they are because we're closer to the Earth's gravity. And they're so far away, they're actually going a little faster than we are in time. Now, they're also slowed down by their fast velocity.
The faster you go, the slower your time goes. But people don't realize there's another factor, and that's how far away you are from gravity. For the astronauts, the astronauts are closer to the Earth, right? So they're actually not so far away as the satellites, and they're going much faster. So for the astronauts, it's the motion. It's the time dilation from the motion that's a bigger effect.
If you are on the space station for a year, you come back about one one-hundredth of a second younger than you should be. And, you know, obviously that's not a big deal, but it's easily measurable.
Wow.
And in the case of the satellites, you wouldn't get the right location, the data wouldn't be right unless we take into account two things. How fast they're going, the closer to the speed of light you go, the slower time goes, but also how far away from the gravitational pull of the Earth they are. The closer you are into gravity, the slower time goes.
I think the weirdest thing that I've ever heard anybody say is that all time exists currently.
That's Einstein. I mean, that goes back 120 years.
That's such a bizarre thought.
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Chapter 5: What fascinating questions about black holes are currently unanswered?
And, I mean, they're doing incredible work about the nature of physics and testing where our limits are. It's unbelievable what you can do with even a relatively inexpensive mission.
When you look at the size of some black holes, we were talking the other day about the largest black hole where the event horizon goes past Pluto, if it was the size of our solar system. Absolutely. That's almost impossible to even think about, that there's a black hole that's bigger than our solar system. And how did it get that big?
How much time does it take for it to gather up that much matter to get that big?
Well, you were talking about these little red dots that the Webb telescope is seeing. So, I mean, what you've just done is put your finger on, I think, one of the most fascinating unanswered questions in astronomy right now, that every major galaxy has a big black hole in the center. You know, the one in the middle of our galaxy is about four million times the mass of the sun.
And physically, it's not that big. It's about, let's say, round about the orbit of, say, the inner solar system, Mercury, kind of around there.
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Chapter 6: How do black holes form and grow in size?
But then the bigger ones we know in other galaxies can get up to hundreds, I mean, let's say tens of billions of times the mass of the sun. And those, the event horizon's about the size of the orbit of Pluto. The question is, how do you gather 10 billion times the mass of a star together in the beginning?
Black holes, the only thing we know that forms big black holes like that, so a star collapses, a star dies, and this tremendous crush of gravity as the star collapses creates this bottomless pit of gravity called a black hole. So how do you get that many stars to die? I mean, in the early universe, how many stars, how many generations of stars had to burn through to actually get that to happen?
And there was nothing that we could figure out. I mean, how do you make that big of a black hole? So these little red dots that we're seeing with Webb, and we don't know exactly what these are, but right now the observations are pushing us in a very interesting direction. They're about a million times the mass of the sun. And at first we thought, okay, well, are these whole galaxies?
And that was the controversy you alluded to, that how could there be galaxies that far back in time? We're looking back to a time about 400 million years after the Big Bang. We're looking so far away. The light took that long to travel to us. So we saw these sort of bright objects. At first we thought they were galaxies, and that was like, whoa, how'd they get there so fast?
But then we took a better look at them, and they don't actually shine in the same light a galaxy would. And they appear to have the signature of something inside, some of them rotating very fast, very fast. And what we're wondering is if the first generation of stars, the very first stars that existed, were nothing at all like the stars we have today. The universe was denser.
There was probably more of this stuff called dark matter that had gravity pulling everything together. So maybe at that time, there were cores of huge amounts of gas that collapsed together. Instead of forming a star, the core basically collapsed into a black hole immediately. And it started pulling in material, and all this sort of hot stuff formed what they call a pseudo-star.
There's all this atmosphere of hot gas being heated up by the black hole in the middle. As the gas spirals in towards the black hole, it gets hotter and hotter. So instead of a nuclear fusion core of a star, you have a black hole heating everything up on the inside, accumulating all this mass. And are we looking at, for the first time, the seeds of these giant black holes?
that instead of there being, you know, the first thing was stars, the way we think of stars, was the first thing, huge amounts of gas and dust collapsing into black holes and heating up sort of a pseudo-star around it, millions of times the mass of the sun. And then in a dense area like the heart of a galaxy, these things then start to combine.
Over time, gravity pulls them together, and you build bigger and bigger black holes. So once again, we don't know yet that these objects are. But at the moment, it's one of the best explanations we have. And it fits the data quite well. So, you know, we will keep observing these things.
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Chapter 7: What recent discoveries have been made about the origins of life in the universe?
We will keep finding new ones. One of the big questions has been why don't they give off more X-rays? Because if there's matter streaming down a black hole, it should give off very high radiation like X-rays. And then just in the last couple of months, there's some observations coming out where we're finding some of these are indeed X-ray sources.
So we may have found the answer to where you get these big black holes. And that was one of the big hopes for the James Webb Space Telescope, that it would help us answer the question of where do you get these giant black holes in the cores of galaxies? Where do they come from? There shouldn't have been enough time for that many stars to make them.
I watched a documentary on black holes once where they were talking about that in the center of every galaxy, there's a supermassive black hole that's one half of 1% of the mass of the entire galaxy.
It seems to be correlated. Yeah, the bigger the galaxy, the bigger the black hole, yeah.
Which is nuts. And what they were theorizing was that if you went through that black hole, you could potentially be in a completely different universe filled with galaxies, all that have black holes inside of them,
through that, another universe, that you would have an infinite number of universes that exist, and there's these black holes, and if you can go through them, all of them, and it broke my brain, because I'm just sitting there, I'm thinking, wait a minute, how many billions of galaxies are there? Like, what? And each one of them has a black hole in the center of it?
Well, and I mean, we don't know yet how many... I mean, there are these giant black holes in the middle of galaxies, and then there are smaller black holes caused when massive stars dies. Our galaxy probably has millions of those. But the ones in the center of the galaxies are fascinating. The one in our galaxy... So we're about 25,000 light years away from this guy, so we're safe. But...
We actually observed stars that are trapped around the black hole that are orbiting the black hole. This was the first way we found the location of the black hole. Stars were orbiting kind of like this angry swarm of bees almost in every direction. And they were orbiting around something you didn't see.
And the mass needed to make all these stars orbit was about 4 million times the mass of the sun. There was a star called S2 we observed orbiting close to the black hole, kind of like a comet. It would come in and whip around the black hole and then go back out again.
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Chapter 8: What is the significance of the OSIRIS-REx mission?
But, you know, people have said, you know, why is it the universe has about the same density of a black hole, the same size and mass? Is that just a coincidence or are we looking at something deeper?
Or is it fractal? The entire universe exists inside of a black hole.
Yes, exactly.
That's bananas.
There we have the very large array. That was in Chile. That's a wonderful observatory. There we have a great depiction. You found, okay, yeah.
I've never seen a depiction like this. That's the stars moving around a black hole.
Yeah, the stars moving around a black hole.
What would this ejection be?
So that, okay, what that is is that that's a consequence of the black holes. That doesn't come from inside the black hole. All of that swirling gas gets really fast. We actually observe some of the swirling gas going close to the speed of light. Black holes, you know, they're going down the drain. They're going faster and faster as you get closer to the black hole.
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