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 up there went 10 years or something. I think that's amazing. But yeah, yeah, crazy ratio of 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, I will wait till I get somebody else to do this. It's something you're the guy for that. 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. But I give a city site. All I hear is that there's a university here and I have colleagues. My people. I got people. I got people.
I got people. 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 forgot a settle for a Brit. Okay. As my co-host. I am not from the new chop episode. Okay. I have a colleague who I met many, many years ago. All right. Like decades ago. All right. He still wants to know you. And I found him and I call him a salm in town and he invited me to come chill with him. Nice. He's sitting right here. Is that who he is?
Steve Balbus. Steve. Hello, Neil. I'm good to see you again. Welcome to StarTalk. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. You're a fellow astrophysicist. Yes. And you know, he has astrophysical phenomenon named after him. Did you say? Are we having a phenomenon envy? Oh, we are we having a little bit of phenomena envy. Is that a thing? I didn't know. It is now. I'll just haven't gotten to that. I see. I see. I just invented up claiming it. So tell me about this thing that carries your name in our field.
So it's work based on work that are theorists. Yeah, I do theory. Yeah. pencil a lot of pencil and paper. And of course, nowadays, computational work. And in particular, back in the 90s, I did some work with a colleague named John Hawley and 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 make compact objects. Where you go so far back to a time before we knew how to make black holes. That's how old you were. That's how old I am. Go back to time when black holes were controversial.
You know that polite astrophysic. And since then, no bell 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. If you read it, you put a fake cover on it. 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 disc. A little bit like the planets go around the solar system. Our solar system was once a disc. It's probably how the sun was made. But the planets and the solar system just go around in orbits. Whereas the gas and a disc 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. The 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, millions, it was millions of times too inefficient, which is a fun state of mine of research to be in where you think you're on top of the physics or something, you calculate it out and you're off by factors of thousands.
Yeah. And then but you still go to work in the next day. Exactly. You don't let that kind of thing bother you or you should find another line of works. The stimulation to seek you know that you're almost 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 disks work the way they do is it's not just friction, but the gas itself is turbulent.
So it's a little bit like the what you see in your sink when you turn on the faucet. There's a lot of order 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 higher than more efficient. So you say you can get like an eddy. We can lots of eddies. So these random things, spinning and spinning exactly. Yeah, exactly. They they rub against each other.
Yeah. That's exactly what the professionals call them. I knew what a turbulent eddy. I think we all do. Probably not the same guy, but there's always a turbulent eddy. Actually, I got that from Al Roker. I mentioned the phrase turbulent eddy and he said I knew a turbulent eddy and I thought I walked right into it. I said, what's he doing now? He said five to ten. He's the straight man. I didn't know. I walked into the straight man. Yeah. We had a little bit of that.
That was with Al Roker a few years ago. Al Roker is 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. It 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 disk in astrophysics exists. This is the Eucretion disk. This is the Eucretion disk around. This is the Eucretion disk around. This is the circulating toilet bowl style. Exactly. The world is. Yeah. 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.
Yeah. 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, Bobbison Holy, and then the polite way is you just publish it and let other people say, the Bobbison Holy paper talked about this instability. Oh, the Bobbison Holy instability. And then it just becomes part of our lexicon.
Is that how that happened? Yeah. Or did you have a campaign? No, I can't say that I had a conscious campaign. Yes, he did. And in fact, it's known by a few people. It's known by a few names. It's not known, I should say exclusively by Bavits, also called magnetorotational instability, because that describes why, what breaks to what it actually, it's a combination of the magnetic field and the rotation that renders the gas unstable and makes it break down into these kind of turbulent headies.
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 emergence? 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 disc, 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've just pushed and penciled at that level. But you get more clues. You said there was something missing in your puzzle.
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, that's 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 when I'm talking about 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 it's a sense that the whirlpools in your kitchen sink or something like that won't be sort of run by a magnetic field. No, just in every of the last sort of things you could see in nature. Absolutely.
In terms of what 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 to 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 transclantable. 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 know. And I'm going to get the t-shirt. Physics is my god. Oh, okay. Are you going to get that t-shirt? No, I'm going to get it for startle. I'm going to have it made up, going to have a muck 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 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 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. That's exactly right. So this is the same as Hawking's. No, that's a different kind of radiation. This one was like that. Then I won't blow the line.
Okay, sorry. Is it radiation straight? Sorry, dude. Let's not invite you on this program trip. This is the force of gravity itself being radiated in a way which is something rather similar to the way that electromagnetic radiation is being radiated. An effect predicted by Einstein a hundred 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.
It's very, the lot has been going on on the observational side. Yeah, and so I'm fortunate because the textbook can discusses that as well. So it's a textbook. So is there like a general relativity for dummies that you can, is there like the crib, crib notes version of the textbook? Have you considered that? I haven't considered, I've been 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.
What's the big general relativity for non-oxford physics majors? Yeah, you know what a very good book is. One that I love. And I mean, you know, but it's meant for, you know, 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 Kip Thorne. That's your guy. We all live love Kip Thorne. Kip Thorne, co-executive producer of the film, Interstellar. 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 reading. He did a lot of the heavy lifting on the theory side of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he writes brilliantly and very, very close.
For the layman, okay. 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 when he wrote it. How do you do it? He did okay. He predicted the prize. He just damneded by fine price. Well, that's very hard. I'm just impressed that we live in a time where okay means not so well. Well, how do you do it? Okay. I can't throw shade on a Nobel Prize, which he just can't do. And look, it's given credit. He was being optimistic.
So at that point, gravitational radiation was still two decades in the future. And or more. And he predicted that. That would happen. And what about roughly the right time scale? On the more theoretical side of things, theories that would combine quantum mechanics with general relativity. It was much too optimistic. So he did get quite those right. So 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 16. Yeah, which is the general theory of relativity. Yes. And we've been working with it for more than 100 years. That's right. And so what I ask of you, picking up his question. Yeah. 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. So because he laid it out.
Yeah. More than a hundred percent. Well, he gave us the equations for it. And that's of course a very big step because you can't begin to do anything. Right. 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 way? Well, I would say you said context that how powerful. Content of the equations.
That was definitely content. The content of the equation. Do you want to know what 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 tell me he gave us equations, but not solutions. That's not that any right. Leave us hang him. Any great physicist will do that. Let's just let homework. Isaac Newton didn't solve all the equations of gravity. Okay. Maxwell didn't solve. Zip it at least.
Half does a Nobel Prize is given to people working on Einstein's equations. Absolutely. Very much. That's crazy. Crazy. Yeah. In fact, 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 mathematician Roy Kerr published his solution to what a rotating black hole looks like. And everything of yours rotates. Everything rotates. So that's a very, very important black hole. That's a whole kind of black hole. That's right. It has his name. There's a short-shield 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. I'm Kaius from Bangladesh. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. And this is StarTalk with Neil Degresteisen. So today, what are some unsolved problems? Well, 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 see a black hole because of the effect of the black hole has on the surrounding gas. For anything. Surrounding anything. But this 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 at the black hole.
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 know, black hole is not some giant sucking machine. Right. So if you have a stable orbit around a black hole, your cool. The sun could become a black hole today. We'll get very cold. But we'll just keep orbiting it like it was not 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's going to be up to the, to the, to the, to the entire space around it. Right. You would get very cold. But other than that, that's right. It's a free stretch of gravity. But ignoring that complication, we'd be fine. Right. Right. Okay. Just the gravitational part.
Do they rotate the same direction every single time? The black holes? Yeah. No. Interesting. They can rotate however they like. Right. Like the 900 pounder roller. I don't think so. It's where it wants. Yep. These orbits, they, they, 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 the black hole. Pull a Newton on a black hole. And the answer is, you're a guy. I know. He's not from Oxford, he's from Cambridge. Okay. Well, that's okay. Yeah, you'll take it. Yeah, yeah, big science in Newton.
Okay. And so when you're dealing with orbits around curve black holes, the equations are so daunting. They just to write down the equation takes up a page of your notes. That's just to write it, let alone find a solution, that most people were put off by that task. Yeah. 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 the environment, that we haven't really had in a while. That's fair statement. I think that's a very fair statement. I think it's a very fair statement. Contrary to sort of, you know, popular impressions, physicists don't really love complexity. If they have to deal with it, they'll muster the fortitude, and they will do so. But if they can find something. One of the four two of them is, that's so pretty.
No, fun away to get the facts. Thank you. Thank you for the translation. I'll do this one. Muster the fortitude. Thank you, William Shakespeare. But if they can find a simple way to 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 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. 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. I didn't arrange the schedule. Okay. All right, guys, let's get him out of here. Okay. Right? I'm three. I'm on three. One, two, three. There you go. There you go.
Hello. I'm Andy. Andy, please to meet you. That's me. Welcome. You sound like this guy. Yes. How about that? I am a bridge. He's a bridge. Okay, what gave you the way? Okay, you'll help me translate the code. Okay. Yeah. Made out till the truth, but I'll translate. So you're not literally a student. You're a poster. I'm a poster. So I was a student, uh, 2014 to 20, no, 2018 to 2022. Okay. And then I've been a, a research fellow here since then. You hear it? Oxford. Oxford.
Oxford. Yeah. Yeah. So you picked up some of Einstein's mantle here. That's the send is very generous. So the mantle of Einstein. Yeah. 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. Yes. Had a hand in that. Help 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, the 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 up there went 10 years or something. I think they mentioned it 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 till I get somebody else to do this. It sounds like you're the guy for that. Yes. Yeah. That's the day. How many people do we bump into? How many people? Or just not an accidental bump into? No, no, no, no, I'm not bumping into Andy.
But how many people in our star talk realm and universe want to know how close can I orbit to a black hole? Because that's what they do. Before I get or have a curious people. I'm sure they ask that question. And they're not just going to receive it assuming it just can happen. Give me some answers there. So you get pretty close. So for your simplest short shield black hole. So that's the non-rotating black hole? Non-rotating. So let's make the event horizon one.
Okay, we're all going to see the event horizon. The weight of no return. Yeah. That we all know about. So the edge of the black hole, that's one. Then you can, you can stably orbit on a circle, down to three. But not less than three. Not less than three. So it's the roundabout force. When you drive round and roundabout, you get pushed out. Okay, so that's what an orbit is. You balance that with gravity. A roundabout via traffic circle. Yes. So roundabout.
When you're here, you're roundabout when you back home, traffic circle yourself silly. So the planet gargantuan. To have that much time dilation difference. Because I think our most of our audience knows, as you get to a stronger and stronger gravitational field, your time slows down relative to others. I'm slow. Okay. So, so how close was the gargantuan planet? I don't remember them saying so. Do you? 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. Oh. Uh oh. Uh oh. Uh oh. Uh oh. Yeah. So, okay. So this would mean, kip. Kip. Oh boy. Kip thorn. You're pulling them out. We're calling out kip thorn. Yeah. Kip thorn. Yeah. So them landing on the planet, that would have been unstable. That little kick could have sent it spiraling in. Wow. So, 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 big, big, big, big, big. Absolutely. You're urged to fly off. This is a balance. Yes. This is a balance. Okay. So now what? And then you write down the same problem in Einstein's equation. Yes. And you find that there's, there's a new force effectively. Oh, there's a new force. A new force? Well, no. Okay. So the force is gravity.
That's the only one for the force, okay? But there's something that an effective force effectively, which is gravity times rotation. So that's, that's what the equation looks like. So that's 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 Newtonian equations.
No, no, no. So as you get closer and closer, like, hold this other term shows up that prevents you from sustaining a balance. So this is, 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. Yes. So you get, cosy, if you go faster and faster and faster, it's better to stabilize that extra term. To stay in orbit, but that just makes this, this third term even bigger. Because it's gravity times rotation.
And that eventually destabilizes the orbit. Wow. So the faster you go, it starts to work. Yeah, exactly. And eventually, that is right. diminishing returns. Exactly. And then, that's wrong. That's wrong. Why did you come up with that? That's the universe. Are you telling me no one figured this out for you? So, so, so this was known. We know that we knew that orbits became unstable. Okay, but the point was, was how, how simply can you describe the plunge effectively?
So you get flicked off the circle orbit and you dive in towards the black hole. And the question is, is how, how do you describe that? And by the way, as I understand it, as if you dive into the black hole, your orbital speed increases, which would further increase the term. Is that correct? Well, you've just, so catastrophically unstable. Yeah, exactly. So, so it's unstable in which you perturb it and you've gone. And it takes even more and you're in.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're not, you speed up to try and break the orbit. And you just end up making it worse. Make it worse, worse. And you're gone and you plunge into, across the event horizon and you're doomed. Yeah, absolutely. Goodbye. Thank you. Yeah, and so, you know, this is a prediction. I'm going to say, yeah, yeah, I'm sorry. So what is the universe's fault? Oh, okay. Yes, but your fault. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's get the understanding just so we know how science works.
Some of this was known before your work. Yes, we knew this. We knew this happened. Okay, so you're, how did you contribute to that problem? So, so, so, so, just 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 touching the elephant, trying to understand it. It's like a pie, it's like a piece of paper that someone's ripped into tiny little bits and then scattered.
Okay. So, you know, you're trying to bring it all back so as you're doing it. Well, the papers were the pre-existing 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 saying. Okay, so how did you come in on this? So we knew this, we knew we knew this should happen. Okay. And the, 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 want to observe the unstable work. Yeah, the crunch. You want to see this gas that's plunging. That's what you want to do. And because then you know it's there, you know. And so before you can tell that you've seen this, you need to know what to look for. Okay, so you've got to build a model of this plunging gas. So build a model, this on a computer.
Yeah, a pen and paper computer. Dude, where, what did you use? I used pen and paper. So... Oh! Oh, chalkboard! Oh, oh! Oh! Oh! These are like the cheapest scientists to keep around. No, they're not. Yes, they are. No, they're totally cheap. There's no computer, there's no telescope, there's no particle accelerator. You see in the price of graphite later? I need some pencils. I need the best choice. Just stick a little bit of pencil to it. 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 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. So what does it look like? Well, essentially, it's hot and small. I just said that. Yeah. But I said stop. You did it. And you didn't go for swirling and unstable.
You were going to go for swirling and unstable. Okay. But precisely how hot a precisely hot small, that's for the money. You got it. Yeah. So, yeah, so we have these these theories that Steve worked on since the seven. You're a advisor. You advise us. Yeah, absolutely. Who has snapped him out of existence? Yeah, he did work. Yeah. And they had these models and they just stopped at this stable, less stable orbit because they wouldn't.
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. And then eventually we started getting data that we couldn't explain if these models. Okay. Okay. So now that you have insights right down to the orbits at the event horizon, not orbits at the event horizon, tell me now where you think. Where you think our Genshin had to have been to give you that stark difference in time dilation. I think it's well inside.
It's well inside your unstable orbit. Yeah. So that planet just would have not been hanging out. No, I'm sorry. It would have been gone. Gone. Yeah. 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 probably going to truce in it. 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 they were unstable orbits. He certainly would have known there's unstable orbits, because his middle name is General Relativity. He's co-author of the most famous Relativity book there ever was. Okay. It's called Gravitation. It has the proportions of a Manhattan Yellow Page's phone book. Okay. Well, he certainly simplified the title, didn't he?
Well, it's the only book you learn all about just by carrying it around. Right? That's what you said. Yeah, yeah. I got that. You see what you did. So it says three authors, Ms. Ner 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. Oh, I've got it. 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 time dilation difference and took some cinematic liberties to get it. I mean, the man's got a notable privacy. He's, you know, he's... It might not have been him. He might have been overridden by producers and directors. Yeah. Yeah. Because that does happen. Okay. People swear. Yeah. I know. If the idea is kind of right, even if in detail as well. That all bit exists. That all bit exists that the plan is on. It's just unstable.
So just won't exist for long. But it would be... You wouldn't exist for longer for them to do anything they would do. Yeah, yeah. But it exists. It's a solution that's valid. It's just won't... We'll take the Thorne out of your side for the moment. The Kip Thorne? Yes. Thank you. So what do you talk about where finding new data coming in? Now, if you're a forensic accountant, follow the money's stupid. You're going to find what's all about. This, for me, is you being forensic for the data.
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 my telescope. So what are your data sources? Is it telescopes? Is it computational? Where are we headed? So these are actually telescopes. So they're satellites in orbit? Exray telescopes. Yeah. And where about the lose are last exray telescopes? The Chandra. What? Great observatory. That's going to be a real...
It's going to be worth it very soon. Yeah, that will be others. But Chandra is a wonderful instrument. Yeah. So it's... Maybe that's what Chandra said. Chandra said, gosh, very good. No, I'm just checking it out. I'm still a student. I'm allowed to be my professor Neo every now and then. Okay. And as I remember, he's a great astrophysics theorist and good tradition in the steps you're following. If I have half the success of chemistry. So you publish this? Yeah, yeah. So it's x-ray data.
So these disks are super hot. They're incredibly hot and they produce x-rays. And they are detected by satellite. They're so hot they radiate x-rays. Absolutely. As opposed to being so hot like your electric stove, it radiates, being for red. Then you can radiate ultraviolet if you get hotter and then x-rays. You keep radiate up the spectrum. What goes hot? How hot do you have to radiate to get worse to x-rays? How hot? Millions of degrees. So it's not even hotter as gamma rays.
And what I was going to say, like, we're in Hulk territory. So that's very hot. Where's your stove? It's a thousand degrees. You know? Yeah. We're talking millions. We're talking millions of degrees. And so yeah. And it's tens of kilometers from the edge of a black hole. Millions of degrees, x-ray photons coming across the galaxy. 10,000 light years. So you published your theoretical predictions and found some data. So we did that. That's the best way to do that. We did exactly.
Yeah. We had a bit of a heads up. We knew that there were mysteries out there. And we thought we had the answer. And they did us all, my friend. And we were able to show you. So you had this data, this beautiful data, and you just can't explain it without this plunge, this gas on the plunge. And you read it out here. I was in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. A very British journalist. You kept it breath. You know, we have journals too in America.
Yeah, but they're not royal. Yeah. Oh, I 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. It was good fun. Classic, pretty sound distinct. It was a stir. Which means people went anxious. A couple of heads blew out.
So before we let Andy go, what is your top unsolved problem? So I'm at this point in your career. Yeah. Surely you have some ambitions. So I want to know how fast Blackhols are rotating. The backhols we have are in the galaxy. I want to know how fast they've been. They would think bigger than that. Come on. Oh, no, this tells us how they're formed. So this tells us that you know, you want to know. Okay, the question you answer is how fast they're spinning. But that's one question.
But the real answer is how do they form and how do they evolve of the age of the universe? Okay. And this includes supermassive blackhols. Absolutely. Yeah, supermassive blackhols. I go the hint. Supermassive, the big one. Yeah. So you think you can have a general understanding that can apply to all the regimes of blackhols that we know. That's the plan. So you're going to be the blackhole guy. Yeah, absolutely. The blackhole, go to guy. Go to blackhole guy. So good luck with that sometimes.
Sometimes you need a little bit of that. Yeah. Yeah. My little island leading away now. How about that? So tell me, why must everything circle a blackhole to go in? Why can't it just fall straight in? It's got angular momentum. It's actually an angular momentum's hard to lose. Hard to lose. Yeah. Why? Stuff that's spinning. Why can't I just... It's conserved. It's conserved quality. What about a blackhole that doesn't spin? What do you call those? That's a Swarshall blackhole.
How about that one? No, but we're talking about stuff that falls in. Yeah, that's something. It's not... I guess what I was saying is... If you're not going to have a little diskey 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 blackhole. And you're peeling off the outer edge. I learned what word it says that. The star is getting flayed.
Is that a good word? Oh. That's a good word. It gets skinned alive as to be flayed. Okay. Did I teach a Brit a word? That's not about American. I'm not supposed to be a Brit. I think we'd actually tell you. So... But okay, so you have these disks, but suppose other material comes the other way. Doesn't it all cancel out? Well, we've got one source to matter. That's the problem. Oh. So you got... So it's all coming in from the same direction. It's all from one thing that circulates in that way.
So it's your peeling, so you inherit this angle. It would be odd to have two things simultaneously. Absolutely. Doing that. Okay. So that's what gives you a job thinking about the spiraling material. Yeah. If everything just fell straight in, you'd be out of track. Right, right. And what about really, really big bike holes where they wouldn't necessarily have a disk? They're not always. Oh, because it's just really, really big.
And how you're going to coherently create a disk and then you just fall in. But within that supermassive black hole, does it not spawn its own little miniature? Sometimes there's gas in the middle of the galaxy. It comes nearby and you switch on. You switch on the effect of that supermassive black hole. I like that phrasing. Because the buckles is lurking. Yep. Right. And I think to Dynapon does the mechanism turn on. Very good. I like this work. Interesting ones. Yes, it works.
It actually fits it great. Yeah. Well, this is great. Well, thank you. Yeah. You're sharing your expertise and we look for great things. And I still want you to be more ambitious. I just want to have black holes for it. Do it as a big universe. Okay. All right. Do you think one thing to do at a time? No, no, one thing to do at a time. Okay. I learned to not. I'm going to come. All right. Okay. Maybe why is here. The wise elder.
Okay. In my day, people said, I just want to know the value of the Hubble constant. I just want to know the rate of 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. All right, dude. Thanks for being on start talk. Thank you. You got it.
You have one less bridge thing you want to tell us before we sign off. Hoping the last thing just ignored. 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. And, but what does that mean?
Those who have 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 asking questions probing the universe and finding answers is the passing of a torch. I think it would be 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 B-Craft building, on the campus of Oxford University, we got a little taste of that. And I'm delighted to brought you a slice of how science works. And that is a cosmic perspective. Till next time, as always, keep looking up.