Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hey, this is also I don't know,
Speaker 1: the science editor at how stuff works dot com. And
Speaker 1: this is Robert Lamb, science writer at how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. So today it's kind of a fun way
Speaker 1: to start off our podcast about black holes. Yeah, how
Speaker 1: many people can you fit into a ninety one Volkswagen
Speaker 1: Beetle Um sixteen? Well that may have been the record
Speaker 1: at one point, but the record I read was actually
Speaker 1: seventeen in seventeen. According to what record tracking body would
Speaker 1: this beginness, This would be Guinness. Uh, and they insist
Speaker 1: that all the people that you cram into the Beetle
Speaker 1: are neither under five ft tall or younger than eighteen
Speaker 1: years of age. So no filling it with midgets or
Speaker 1: babies because this are probably a lot of babies in
Speaker 1: a Beatle, but especially premies. Yeah, you could really load
Speaker 1: up on premies. Yeah. Um, well, I I think that
Speaker 1: record that you just spouted off this is kind of
Speaker 1: it's kind of weak. Actually, because I was wandering around
Speaker 1: online and I came across the International World Record Breakers Club.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, this is kind of cool because if you
Speaker 1: want to join, you have to be a world record breaker.
Speaker 1: I like that aspect of it anyway. I was just
Speaker 1: perusing this record club's knowledge and they said that back
Speaker 1: in nine, three hundred and fifty four pupils three hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty four, not a single less, not a single
Speaker 1: more from the middle school located in Chunet. And this is, uh,
Speaker 1: this is somewhere in the UK. I'm assuming, yes, three
Speaker 1: fifty four pupils piled into a standard fifty six theater
Speaker 1: London double decker bus. Well that's a lot, of course,
Speaker 1: that's bigger than a Beatle. Yes, yes it is. So
Speaker 1: it kind of depends on the car. And but even
Speaker 1: more there was a there was all so, yeah, a
Speaker 1: British Leland Metro, a car by the new Have you
Speaker 1: ever heard of such a car? No, neither of us.
Speaker 1: I looked it up. It's it's a small car and
Speaker 1: I guess they kind of like the sort of thing
Speaker 1: in the UK. And they're about twenty one members of
Speaker 1: the Plymouth Young Wives Association who packed themselves into a
Speaker 1: to this tiny Leland Metro. Yeah, so that beats your record.
Speaker 1: Well you just got me thinking, um, have you heard
Speaker 1: the dance hit Too Many Men by Boy Better? No?
Speaker 1: You know, there's too many men, too many many men,
Speaker 1: and then fly the concords to a parody of it
Speaker 1: that I can't actually say that the title of the song,
Speaker 1: but that got me thinking that the song is basically
Speaker 1: saying that there are too many men on the dance
Speaker 1: floor and that they need more women. I was just thinking, like,
Speaker 1: how many men is too many men? And apparently like
Speaker 1: I was looking into it, like out the Fabric nightclub
Speaker 1: in London has a capacity of eighteen hundred, so I
Speaker 1: think eighteen hundred and one would probably be too many men.
Speaker 1: I agree, I agree, and probably all of them are
Speaker 1: in Spandex as well. That's what you have to do
Speaker 1: to squeeze yourself into a car is making at pictures.
Speaker 1: And if you allow babies in like we said, that
Speaker 1: like doubles the capacity. But seriously, if you really want
Speaker 1: to compress something into a tiny space, you're not going
Speaker 1: to look at these babies in Spandex or people piling
Speaker 1: into a car. You're gonna look to the black hole,
Speaker 1: which is the universal standards. Oh, I thought you met
Speaker 1: the nightclub. Sorry no, no, not the nightclub, but the
Speaker 1: cosmic phenomena. Yesh, Yeah, with the power of a black hole. Uh,
Speaker 1: you could. There's really no limit to the number of
Speaker 1: of college students or dancers or babies or what have
Speaker 1: you if you could fit into a space. Um, you could.
Speaker 1: You could get them all into an area no larger
Speaker 1: than an Adam's nucleus and still have a few room
Speaker 1: for say, you know, a solar system or two. The
Speaker 1: key to the black hole is its gravitational pull. The
Speaker 1: same force that holds us onto on the Earth um
Speaker 1: same force and mixes trip and fall on our face occasionally.
Speaker 1: Or maybe that's just my clumsiness exactly. Yeah, but with
Speaker 1: a black hole, this force is infinite al right. Not
Speaker 1: even light can escape it. It's it's that heavy. And
Speaker 1: to understand how this happens, we have to to start
Speaker 1: up talking about the origins of a black hole and
Speaker 1: take us to a black hole forms when a star dies.
Speaker 1: Basically what happens is the core of the star runs
Speaker 1: out of fuel and collapses. This sets off a shock wave.
Speaker 1: It blows out the outer layer of the star. Uh,
Speaker 1: and we call this a supernova, huge blast, very bright,
Speaker 1: and then the star's heart collapses while the rest of
Speaker 1: it explodes, and it's the core core collapses it's gravity increases. Okay,
Speaker 1: because it's getting denser, it will eventually reach the point
Speaker 1: where the core is massive enough. There's so much mass
Speaker 1: just just crunched down, and it reaches the point where
Speaker 1: it has as much mass is about three sons, and
Speaker 1: gravity gets so strong that right at the surface of
Speaker 1: the collapsing core, the escape velocity increases to the speed
Speaker 1: of light. Light cannot escape it. When a star burns
Speaker 1: to the last of its nuclear fuel, its own gravitational
Speaker 1: pool causes it to cave in on itself. And if
Speaker 1: it's if the core mass is large and off, the
Speaker 1: enormous star instantly collapses to a sub atomic size called
Speaker 1: a singularity. Right, so instantly, we're not talking about, say,
Speaker 1: the aging process among humans, when some little old lady
Speaker 1: is just getting smaller and smaller and more wizzen by
Speaker 1: the year. This is instantly we're talking The estimates are
Speaker 1: tenth of a second to half a second. That's crazy.
Speaker 1: So a black hole is some anatomical parts that will
Speaker 1: take you through. Um, it's not just this massive darkness
Speaker 1: that's swallowing up things willy nilly. It has an event horizon,
Speaker 1: which is basically signifying the opening or the surface of
Speaker 1: the black hole. Now it's important to note that we're
Speaker 1: not talking about the surface of the singularity, but this
Speaker 1: is the point at which everything speeds up to the
Speaker 1: to the speed of light as it approaches the singularity
Speaker 1: good point. And then, as as Robert is talking about,
Speaker 1: you have the singularity, which is just this ridiculously tiny
Speaker 1: point smaller than you know, an atom's nucleus, and to
Speaker 1: which all that dying star stuff is condensed. And then
Speaker 1: you have the swartz Child radius. And the idea roughly
Speaker 1: here is that if you're thinking about the black hole,
Speaker 1: so you're looking at it, you know, top down, if
Speaker 1: that were possible to do. The swords Child radius is
Speaker 1: just marks the radius of a spear pass which we
Speaker 1: can't get light, we can't get particles, we can't get
Speaker 1: any information. And it was thanks to a scientist by
Speaker 1: the name of schwartz Child. And the swartz Child radius
Speaker 1: is also really important in our ability to determine where
Speaker 1: a black hole might be located. And we're only talking
Speaker 1: about suspected black holes because it's physically impossible to to
Speaker 1: see them, so we can we can only look and
Speaker 1: sort of look at the area surrounding where this black
Speaker 1: hole suspect is suspected to be. This includes radiation given
Speaker 1: off my by material rushing towards the event horizon. Uh.
Speaker 1: This includes the bending of light from other stars, so
Speaker 1: we can basically see how the light um moves in
Speaker 1: towards where the black hole be and the movement of
Speaker 1: objects around a black hole, and the light speed jets
Speaker 1: of ejected material, so you have, you know, everything surrounding
Speaker 1: it rushing rushing in, so we're able to perceive some
Speaker 1: of that energy moving so interact observation and UH. We
Speaker 1: of course have to mention Einstein here because the black
Speaker 1: hole really comes out of his nineteen fifteen theory of
Speaker 1: general relativity UH. And this is basically involves the idea
Speaker 1: that that motion, the gravity and motion can affect the
Speaker 1: intervals of time and space. The first really good black
Speaker 1: holes suspect that we found was UH, Sickness x one
Speaker 1: and it's about seven thousand light years from Earth UM.
Speaker 1: And ironically, Einstein himself did not believe the exist in
Speaker 1: the existence of black holes, even though they were predicted
Speaker 1: by his theory, So the Sickness isn't the only black hole.
Speaker 1: Of course, black holes are all over the place. As
Speaker 1: as far as we can indirectly observe. Astronomers have found
Speaker 1: a small black hole inside a star heavy cluster of
Speaker 1: space in the Elliptical galaxy by the name of n
Speaker 1: g C four four seven two. It's an enchanting name,
Speaker 1: if ever there were one, I imagine that'll be climbing
Speaker 1: up the Social Security Administration ranks of most popular birth
Speaker 1: names any day now. But typically scientists think that supermassive
Speaker 1: black holes UM are found in the center of most galaxy.
Speaker 1: And what's the supermassive black hole? I mean black holes
Speaker 1: are ginormous, ginorous type things. So to quantify that UM,
Speaker 1: a supermassive black hole is believed to be between one
Speaker 1: million and one billion solar masses. So it's the scale
Speaker 1: that is almost incomprehensible. And our beloved Milky Way galaxy
Speaker 1: may have millions of black holes cool, so UM this uh,
Speaker 1: you know, these are the question what happens to these
Speaker 1: black holes? Because it's easy to sort of think of
Speaker 1: this enormous event occurring, a black hole forming, and it's
Speaker 1: just going to eat and eat and eat till it
Speaker 1: just absorbs everything. It starts absorbing other black holes, except
Speaker 1: but it it doesn't really work like that. On one hand,
Speaker 1: like you mentioned, we have supermassive black holes, uh in
Speaker 1: the center of of of of you know, vast systems,
Speaker 1: and they're not they haven't eaten everything, and they're not
Speaker 1: even in the process of eating everything. And it's because
Speaker 1: everything sort of stabilizes after a while. They think, uh,
Speaker 1: you have a lot of matter falling into these into
Speaker 1: these things, and it gets very hot, gives off a
Speaker 1: lot of light, and in the same way that a
Speaker 1: solar wind can can move an object. They say that
Speaker 1: this actually kind of like ends up eventually canceling it
Speaker 1: everything out to where, you know, not as much stuff
Speaker 1: as coming in, but the black hole sort of maintaining
Speaker 1: and holding its own kind of like Sean Connery stops
Speaker 1: being in movies, though he's still a big star, you know.
Speaker 1: But but even a black hole has a finite life.
Speaker 1: And we owe this to Stephen Hawking, who discovered that
Speaker 1: black holes should radiate energy due to a quantum mechanical
Speaker 1: process called that we call a Hawking radiation. How However,
Speaker 1: um we're talking when we're talking about a black hole
Speaker 1: eventually dying, we're talking a long long time in the future. Um,
Speaker 1: A black hole of the mass of our son, for instance,
Speaker 1: would take more than a billion times a billion times
Speaker 1: a billion times a billion times a billion times a
Speaker 1: billion times the age of the universe to evaporate um completely.
Speaker 1: So that's you know, don't try and wait one out.
Speaker 1: That's what we're seeing. So that's the basics on black
Speaker 1: holes are our knowledge and our theories regarding them continues
Speaker 1: to change as we make new observations and discoveries about
Speaker 1: the observable universe. But uh, but that's all. That's it
Speaker 1: in a nutshell, a very compact, um dense nutshell. So
Speaker 1: there you have at Mark when Cincinnati, your wishes our podcast.
Speaker 1: If you guys have any suggestions or any thoughts about
Speaker 1: black holes, send us an email at science stuff at
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Speaker 1: podcasting about and what's happening in the scientific world around us.
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