Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseCan a gravitational wave pass through a black hole?
Daniel and Jorge talk about what happens when one superstar of physics slams into another.
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Hey, Jorge, which superhero throws the hardest punch?
That's a hard one. It's maybe either at the Hulk or Superman?
All right? And then with superhero is the best at taking a.
Punch, either the Hulk or Superman.
I thought you might say the guy made at a rubber But then the obvious question is what happens when Superman punches the Hulk?
Oh man, you're making my comic book fan brain. I'm burst in the light right now. I think mostly Halt just gets mad, you know. That's what he.
Does, a shower of bricks. It doesn't blow up the multiverse.
Yeah it does, but it bursts into a shower of money for Marvel.
And DC, money flowing from our wallets to.
Theirs, and the light going into my brain. Hi am Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the co author of Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe.
Hi I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine. And I always fast forward through the punching scenes in superhero movies.
Always, really, what if you're at the theater? What do you do? Take a quick nap?
And then I run upstairs to the projection booth, force my way in and fast forward those scenes.
I see you get arrested is basically what you do.
No, I tune them out because in the end, none of it really matters. You know, A punches B, B punches A. In the end, they're still around. There's no consequences to the punching.
Right right, Yeah, it's kind of a cliche, I guess. In superhero movies and sci fi movies, it always ends in a mono amano, right exactly.
More houses get destroyed, some cars get flipped, but nobody really gets hurt.
Well, uh, sometimes sometimes the hero dies.
Sometimes the hero dies, but is it ever because of punching?
And usually they come back in the sequel. So, but anyways, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we try to punch through your confusion about the nature of our universe. We try to knock down the walls to prevent you from understanding how this incredible cosmos has come together, how it's woven at the very smallest scale, how it works at the very largest scales, and how the amazing emergent properties that are me and you and our curiosity come together to make this a wonderful universe to explore.
Right, because there is something about human nature that makes us mad when we don't understand how things work out there in the cosmos, and it makes us turn dream to think about that. Maybe there are aliens out there who do understand what's going on.
Or maybe just future humans will understand. And here we are trapped in antiquity, trapped in the ancient past, where humans are so clueless about the nature of our universe. We don't know the answer to basic questions about how it's put together, How old is the universe, how long will the universe survive, what's it made out of in the end, and how do all the pieces of it work? After all? Why are we so ignorant?
Oh man, you're jealous of future physicists. That's interesting. Do you put little notes for them in your papers?
Like?
I hope this helps you ie roll.
Every paper is just a note to future physicists, Right, that's exactly what it is. But yes, I am jealous of future physicists. I wish that I could live forever so that I could understand what they figure out. Sometimes I dream about taking a time machine and going forward just to steal like a child's astronomy book from the year three thousand or ten thousand, so I could figure out what it is that humanity has unraveled in the future.
I think you're assuming they're going to get it right. What if they get it rustic, you know, cosmically wrong, and those children's books are all, you know, made up.
I think that science always gets it wrong, but it sort of gently drifts towards more and more right. So I don't know that the future humanity will have final answers, but I think they will have unraveled more mysteries. It will have deeper questions, at least than the ones that we have.
I see the long arc of science fance towards being annoyingly right.
It naps towards the truth.
Yes, but it is a wonderful universe full of amazing and incredible things, things that seem unstoppable sometimes, and things that seem to travel across billions of light years to get where they will always get to go.
And it's a universe filled with things that we want to understand. We can't go out and visit all of these incredible things in the universe. I'm not going to take a trip to orbit a black hole. I'm not going to surf a lot a gravitational wave. I'm not going to walk along the surface of a neutron star. But we can still do thought experiments. We can imagine what might happen in crazy combinations of these events, what happens if you bank a neutron star off another one and into a black hole. These are fun games to play in your mind, and they can also teach us things about the universe.
Right, and if you're diluted it of the mind games are just as good as the real thing. Right, Surfing a neutron star in your head, is in your daydream, it could be just as good as doing it well.
As an experimentalist, I have to say that actually collecting data has no substitute because the universe is filled with surprises, and often we think we know what will happen in these situations, and the universe says, oops, sorry, silly human, We're going with secret option C. But to prepare for those things, just to sort of like test our understanding of concepts. We could try to bring together crazy intense ideas that we have in our minds and wonder, like, what would happen if they bounced off each other? What would happen if I sent a against b What would happen in these various scenarios. It's like tests understanding.
Wait, is this whole episode about the Hulk punching Superman? Are we actually doing this?
We're talking about the physics Hulk punching the physics Superman.
I thought you were gonna say the math Superman. That would be a matchup for the Ages.
But it's sort of similar. Like if you ask questions about what happens when Hulk fights Superman, then it makes you think carefully about those extremes you never imagined before, like who really is stronger? Like how hard of a punch can the Hulk really take? Does he have bones that can get broken? I mean, is it really impossible for Superman to break Hulk's bones? I think these are deep questions that you know, the writers of that universe then have to figure out in our universe. It makes us wonder about the mathematics of extreme situations, and those are places where we can really learn about the fundamental nature these objects we're tossing against each other.
Yeah, because I guess thinking about the extremes really kind of pushes your thinking about these things and really kind of pushes your theories to maybe the breaking point, right, because there are some questions that you can ask then maybe don't have an.
Answer exactly, and they can reveal inconsistencies. And we hear our listeners doing this kind of stuff all the time. You know, they're wondering about like what if I throw this into a black hole? What if I throw that into a black hole? What if I throw another black hole into another black hole? Right? And these are the games they're playing in their minds when they're just seeking to understand what are the rules and the way to figure out what the rules are are to push them are to break them. Every parent knows that's true.
And so today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question can a gravitational wave passed through a black hole? Now, Daniel, I'm disappointed. I would have preferred the question to be kind of gravitational wave punch a black hole that might get us more clicks.
Well, I guess you can ask the question is can a gravitational wave punch a black hole without getting slurped in?
Oh? Well, no, I want to see him fight. I want to see him go mono amounto for twenty minutes at the end of the movie.
But it is a question that's fun to think about because black holes are famously impenetrables, can survive anything, you can even throw another black hole into it, and gravitational waves are sort of famous for being able to pass through almost anything because there are ripples in space and time itself, and so it's our version of Hulk versus Superman.
Yeah, it's almost like this that famous question what happens when an unstoppable force meets an unmovable object? Is this one of these like questions that just go to infinity sort of?
Well, you know, in philosophy, you can make up any kind of thing you want and pit it against something else, and you're making up the rules also, so it doesn't matter. But here in our universe we think there are real rules and experiments should have outcomes, Like this is something which we think happens in the universe. You know, gravitational waves do hit black holes, and so there is an answer. Either they make it out the other side or they get slurped in. And so then the question is like, what do we think is going to happen? Does our understanding of these things allow us to predict the result, and then could we eventually go out and measure.
Yeah, because actually this thing is happening right like right now, all the time, probably, right, I mean, there are you know, as far as we know, you know, millions of black holes out there, probably, and there are definitely gravitational waves going around all the time all around this.
Yeah, we are bathed in very very gentle gravitational waves all the time. And so this in principles should be happening constantly, so something we should figure out eventually. Yeah.
And also kind of black hole surf a gravitational wave or is that the next episode?
That's the sequel? Yes, black hole surfer.
Yeah, one of them dies, then they come back in the sequel. Well, as usual, we were wondering how many people had thought about this impossible or maybe incredible question of what happens when a gravitational wave meets a black hole. And so, as usual, Daniel went out there to ask people on the internet.
And so if you'd like to hear questions that might blow your mind or at least blow up your understanding of physics, please don't be shy. Write to meet you questions at Danielandjorge dot com and we can all enjoy hearing your answers on the podcast.
Think about for a second, do you think a gravitational wave can pass through a black hole? Here's what people had to say.
I don't think so, because a black hole can suck in pretty much anything.
Okay, But a gravitational wave is just the change in the curvature of space as it propagates with distance from a source of gravity at the speed of light. I guess they could pass around a black hole.
Yeah.
Maybe, And no, and through a black hole, because.
You would be really the world the universe's trapdoor.
Yeah, because the gravity that you are feeling in a gravitational wave is based off the distance of the yourself from that object. So if there was a black hole in between, and yeah, it shouldn't affect it at all.
I would say that gravitational waves do because there is some form holding it all together. So I would say, well, I mean assuming that hawkings. Radiation can split, particles can split and enter it.
Yeah, maybe gravity can.
I don't know.
Prove me wrong.
Yes, I believe gravitational waves would pass through a black hole. More specifically, I think they would pass around a black hole. I think a black hole would fundamentally change the gravitational wave in the same way that an object would change a radar signal. Maybe the gravitational wave would be able to give us an intimate look at the structure, shape, the other factors that we are unaware of of a black hole.
Not sure, because what a black hole is as an infinite gravity and I'm not sure if they can pass through a black hole. I think they will be sucked in. That will be my answer for that question.
Now, I want to say, no, they can't, because surely nothing can pass through a black hole, Nothing can go through the event horizon and through the singularity and then come out the other end back into space. So no, no, I'm going to say, no, they can't do Surely they would be swallowed up within the black hole. And you know, kind of due to the massive curvature of space itself and gravitational waves are you know, kind of integrated with very fabric of space. Then they would be directed only in one direction like lights and all information that is to the singularity. So no, gravitational waves can't pass through a black hole.
I believe gravitational waves can pass through black holes, although I'm convinced that they will be distarted as they go through. They will also just started the black hole while they are passing through, because gravitational waves start space and time, and the black hole is part of the space and time, although almost its own universe. But the gravitational wave will also be started by the black hole.
Black holes attract each other, so I guess not.
First of all gravitational waves, they are the rebels in space and time fabric, and also a black hole distorts space and time and when this to interact, most likely these waves won't get to affect the object, the black hole itself its core.
I don't know if gravitational waves will pass through a black hole, but I do think that they do because we are able to know where they are black holes and when they shock with one another because of the gravitational waves.
So I'm guessing that they.
Do pass through it. They don't go inside it, but they go around it.
Yes, I think any.
Part of the wave that interacts with the event horizon is going to get trapped inside, because all all directions point towards the singularity once you're inside the event horizon. But I think any waves outside of that might get bent around the black hole, around the event horizon and actually get like gravitationally focused, like gravitational lensing.
All right, it seems like people are cheering for Superman here in this case, for the black hole. Know any things the hold will survive.
No, there's some people there that say it'll pass through it or at least around it. You know, in the end, these things are both curvatures in space. So it's tricky stuff to think about.
All right, Well, let's jump in and let's maybe tackle one of these combatants one at a time, and let's start with the black hole. Daniel, what's a good way to define a black hole?
So you might think of a black hole as something really weird, very strange in our universe, something that's hard to grapple with. But what a black hole looks like depends a lot on sort of how close you are to it, and from far away, a black hole just looks like anything else that has mass. Right, black hole is a massive object in space, which means that it bends space, and so that curved space then causes gravity. So you can be in an orbit around a black hole the same way you can be in the orbit around the Sun or an orbit around the Earth. Far away from any object, it's gravity is the same as like a point particle placed at the center of mass, And that's true for a black hole, or for the Sun, or for any weird like huge unicorn shaped rock for example, and so far away from a black hole, there's no difference. The difference is that a black hole is very very dense. So now take all the mass that's in the Sun, for example, compact it down to a very very small space. Now you can get much closer to the center of mass than you could before. When it comes to the Sun, you can only get to the surface of the Sun.
Right.
If you dig into the Sun, then the gravity from the Sun actually starts to decrease. But with a black hole, you can get closer and closer and closer to that point mass because general relativity tells us that that's exactly what's there, a point mass, but all of that stuff wrapped into a tiny little volume, so the gravitational curvature becomes really really strong, so powerful that there's an event horizon beyond which nothing can escape, no information can leak out past the event horizon.
Right, That's something that I think is kind of interesting about black holes. As you said, it's just a lot of mass compacted really tightly. And it's not like as you're squeezing this mass and suddenly something explodes or something pops, or a hole is punched through the spased time of the universe. It's almost like a gradual process. There's nothing exciting happens as you squeeze down this mass.
Yeah, that's a really interesting question to imagine, Like taking a star and compacting it down gradually, when does the black hole actually form? And so a black hole is defined by the presence of the event horizon, this region pass to which you cannot escape. I remember, the event horizon is not like, you know, there's no flashing lights or firewalls or anything crazy there. It's just sort of like a location. It's a distance from this center of mass beyond which every future ends up at the center. And you know, to actually know where the event horizon is, you have to know the whole future history of this object. It's the place past which no test particles ever escape. So you have to know sort of like the future history of every test particle you shoot at this thing to know where the event horizon actually is. But we can calculate it. We can say if you have a certain mass within a certain radius, then you get an event horizon. So now take the Sun and start squeezing it down smaller and smaller and smaller. At some point it's going to pass that threshold where you have enough mass within a radius, and then you get that event horizon.
Right, Like, as I'm squeezing the Sun, it's going to look like a sun that's just getting smaller and smaller and smaller, maybe brighter, but then at some point it's just going to blink turn black. Right, It's not like it's going to send out shockwaves or the universe is going to shake. It'll just like blink turn black.
Yeah, And actually it's going to gradually fade to black because as it gets more and more gravitational curvature, the light that's coming off of that Sun is going to get more and more gravitationally red shifted. So if you squeeze this object down, it gets redder and redder and redder and eventually black. So it's a gradual process. It's no like crazy fireworks.
Interesting. Yeah, pretty cool. And the other thing about black holes is that they're hungry. They can anything you throw into them, into this event horizon supposedly can never come out.
Yeah, it's the most fascinating aspect of these black holes that they eat anything. Right, Anything with energy that enters the black hole just grows its energy just makes it stronger. Right, So people ask me, like, what happens to you throw a nuclear weapon into a black hole? As if a black hole is like some structure that you could explode if you like push on it internally with enough force, and if you let this nuclear bomb go inside and then blow up, you could somehow explode the event from the inside. Remember, the event horizon is just there because of the strength of gravity. And as you add more energy, even an exploding nuclear bomb, you are just curving space more, which makes it stronger gravitationally. Right. So there's nothing you can do to a black hole to weaken it. Anything you do that adds energy makes it stronger.
Right.
And we talked about last time of what happens. Even if you put in a white hole into a black hole, right, the black hole sort of wins.
Yeah, we don't know that white holes are real, but theoretically a black hole will turn that white hole into another black hole and then gobble it and you'll get some big black hole. And we talked on the program recently also about exactly what happens when two black holes merge, how their event horizons come together. You get for a moment this weird peanut shaped event horizon, and then it turns into a new, larger black hole with a spherical event horizon. But it's super fascinating. Another thing that people ask about in terms of like growing black holes is how you actually see it happen. If you throw a banana into a black hole, it sort of like falls towards the black hole, but then time slows down because there's gravitational time dilation near the surface, so you never actually see the banana fall into the black hole. And people wonder about, like, well, how do we actually see black holes growing if things freeze before they fall into them. And so the answer is to think again about the gravitational energy of the black hole. Right as you throw this banana into the black hole. It's not like it needs to pass the event horizon some magical marker before the black hole officially has eaten it. You have the banana in the black hole, and they are now part of a larger gravitational system, So the banana is contributing to the gravitational energy of the black hole before it crosses the event horizon. Another way to think about that is that the event horizon is growing outwards to meet the banana. They never actually immed. You have to wait till time equals infinity for them to meet. But this event horizon is getting pulled out by the banana's mass, so they never actually cross. And if the banana was the last thing anybody ever threw into this black hole, you're right, it wouldn't actually fall in. But then if somebody else comes along and throw the donut towards the black hole, that donut pulls the event horizon out also past the banana, So now the banana has fallen in. So the last thing anybody ever throws into a black hole never actually falls in, but everything else that was thrown in before does pass the event horizon. So that's a useful way to think about like how the energy of the black hole is growing.
Right, It's almost like the black hole grows and eats the banana, which is always a good idea. A banana.
I mean, it doesn't have any choice, right, The black hole just eats whatever you throw at it. It might not like bananas. It might be really grumpy that somebody keeps throwing bananas in there, but it's got no options.
I guess it's not going to let it slide. Well, what about the idea that you know, sometimes black holes might be connected through a wormhole to a white hole, right, which would be spewing out energy instead of sucking in energy, and that energy is coming from the black holes. Is it's possible for a blacklack hole to kind of leak out or you know, shrink because it's leaking through a white hole somewhere else.
Yeah, there are ways that black holes can shrink. One of them that's some sort of stronger theoretical footing that we've never seen it before is hawking radiation. You know, the quantum effection of the edge of the black hole and the black hole having a non zero temperature suggests that it should be radiating away energy, which shrinks the mass of the black hole. So the key concept there again is the size of the black hole. The radius of the event horizon depends on the total energy there, so if you take away energy, the black hole shrinks. And another option, though even on much worse footing theoretically, is this question of white holes. It is possible that black holes and white holes sort of share a singularity. They're connected by a wormhole. But this is like speculation upon speculation, But yes, absolutely, mass could then move through that wormhole, come out the other side of the white hole, and shrink the size of that black hole.
And what would happen to the banana that was at the border that got absorbed. Would it then have a chance to escape the black hole.
Once it's inside the event and I think the only way for it to get out would be through the wormhole and out the white hole.
But what if the event horizon shrinks. I guess the banana would fall in a little bit too.
Right exactly, Yeah, banana would fall in with it. So the moral of the story is, if you drop your banana into a black hole, let it go, because man, it's gone.
Well, you can go to the nearest white hole and maybe it'll come out one particle at a time or something that's right.
Go near you a white hole and open your mouth and see if it tastes like banana or donuts. If you're lucky, maybe banana donuts. There you go, it's the ultimate smoothie maker. Just throw all of your ingredients into the black hole and go stand by the white hole and see what comes out.
No, Danny, what happens if I take a banana and put it through a donut?
I think you just invented the latest pop food craze.
A bonut a banonut. All right, Well, that's a black hole. It's full of interesting mysteries and amazing effects and physics that are going on and that we are starting to understand. But then there's another fundamental and monumental thing in the universe called a gravitational wave. So let's get into what that is and what's going to happen when the two meet at the same place. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about fun fan fiction. I guess you know. We're a conjuring imaginary meetups in the.
Universe physics fan fiction exactly.
It's not quite fan fiction because this thing is happening, this question is happening all over the universe. Probably gravitational waves are passing through all of space and time, and there are black holes in the universe. So somewhere out there right now, there's probably a gravitational wave hitting a black.
Hole, almost certainly, and the universe has to decide what happens, right. That's the amazing thing about experiments. You set something up and the universe has to have an outcome. It can't be like, I don't know, you figure it out right. It's an answer to experiments.
The universe can't pass the bug.
Exactly can't go pass. I'm not sure about this one.
They wrote themselves into a corner and now they've got to figure out how the movie.
Ends, right exactly. Maybe that's when the universe invents time travel so it can red con its own history.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or maybe that's when it invents event horizons so you can never know what's going on.
Yeah. Maybe that's just the plot hole fixer for the universe.
It is the ultimate.
Nice But you know, it's sort of an interesting statement in philosophy, this assumption that the universe is in the end following laws, that the laws aren't predictable, that we can figure them out, and that the universe is bound by them. Right, That every physical effect has a physical cause, and that means that any physical situation you set up must be predictable by those physical laws, and so something's got to happen.
Right, Something's got to happen. Is that the mantra for physics, Something's got to happen. What happens if I collide a bazillion particles together, Something's going to happen.
Yeah. In physics, it goes by the name of unitarity. It says that the wave function when you integrated. It has to be one, which means something's got to happen. The probability distribution has to go somewhere. It can't be like you do this experiment and nothing happens, or the particles just disappear. Right, Quantum information flows through the universe. It can't be deleted, which means that it's got to go somewhere.
That's the theory at least, or you think that's what's going to happen, or it has top right, it could be then maybe there are places where things break down, right.
It certainly could be. We definitely don't understand quantum mechanics that deeply, and we could also be philosophically wrong about the universe. It's assumption that every experiment has an outcome that makes sense and is reproducible. You know, that's just an assumption. It's been working really well so far, but we don't really know why even that is.
So.
Yeah, if you want to question the foundations, then we could go all the way down.
Yeah. I mean, we used to think that energy is always conserved, but it turns out that energy is not always conserved in the whole universe.
Yeah, exactly. Physics has been upending the Apple card for hundreds of years.
All right, well, we talked about black holes for a while, and now the question is what happens when it hits a gravitational wave, which is something that's pretty cool. So let's step through it and talk about what is a gravitational wave.
A gravitational wave is a combination of something that's very familiar to us, a wave, an update in information, and something that's very weird, right, which is gravity. So you can think about gravitational waves. It's sort of like a way to communicate gravitational information. You know, like you are in space and there's gravity around you, there's a gravitational field around you. Imagine for a moment that that's not changing. It's the same. You know, whatever's creating that gravitational field is fixed in place and not changing. So then there's no gravitational information, there's no updates. Right, every moment your gravitational force is the same. But what if that does change. What if somebody, for example, deletes the Sun, which is the source of your gravity, then how does that information propagate through the universe. Newton said that it was instantaneous that if you deleted the Sun, gravity far away from the Sun would instantly change, right, it would go to zero instantly. Einstein told us that that's not true. That gravitational information is information, and the gravitational field takes time to update, and that update the change in the gravitational field propagating through space because the source of the gravitational field has changed. That is a gravitational wave. It's an update to the gravitational field.
Right.
It's kind of like if you ask, like what happens if someone shakes the sun or the sun like wiggles, Like do you feel those wiggles right away? Or do you have to wait a while for those wiggles to get to you? And I guess you know. The idea is also that if you're closer to the Sun, you're going to feel those wiggles first. So there's sort of like a propagation like like a ripple of those wiggles that comes out of the Sun exactly.
And those ripples travel at the speed of light. So these gravitational waves is information that propagates through the gravitational field. These which really are in the end ripples in the curvature of space time because gravity, remember, not really a force, it's just the effect of the curvature of space time, which is invisible to us except for this weird effect that it has on the path of particles. And so as you say, if you wiggle the Sun, for example, that should change the curvature of space, and that causes a gravitational wave with frequency proportional to the wiggling, which is totally analogous to like how you create electromagnetic waves. You take an electron, which has an electric field all through space, and you wiggle it in an antenna, for example, at a certain frequency. Then it shakes the electromagnetic field. It changes that field which is emanating out from the electron, and that shake in the electromagnetic field is a photon. It's a wiggle in the electromagnetic field. And so in the same way, if you wiggle the source of gravity, like the Sun, then you get wiggles in the gravitational field, and that's a gravitational wave.
Right. Well, I wonder if you can get into a little bit of a rabbit hole here thinking about what simultaneity is and whether or not you can actually measure a wave moving or to claim that it didn't happen at the same time, because you know as we talked about in the last episode, it's kind of hard to synchronize clocks and make sure that the wave you didn't feel that gravitational wave at the same time that it was generated.
I mean, simultaneity is complicated and it's not trivial or intuitive. We can't think about a clock all the way through space and imagine that everybody agrees on the order of events. But that doesn't mean that we can't talk about it from our frame and say, like, what do we think happened first? What do we see? And in the case of gravitational waves, we can actually measure their propagation through space. So we've seen gravitational waves because we have detectors on Earth that are sensitive to these things, and we have multiple detectors, and we can see them propagating through space because they hit one detector before another detector. And this is the way we can actually get directional information about gravitational waves. We can say, oh, look, it hit in New Orleans before it hit in Washington and in Italy. Therefore it must have been going in that direction, and so that helps us triangulate the source of the gravitational wave because we can actually see it arriving at different places at different times, which shows you that it really is flowing through space at a certain speed.
Cool. Yeah, I guess if you measure it first in one place and then later in the other one, then it's moving. It's moving through space.
Yeah, and we can see the same wiggle, right, It's like each of these things have a very characteristic wiggle, usually formed by the black hole merger or neutron star merger that formed it. You can tell that it's the same gravitational wave. Now, as you said earlier, gravitational waves are everywhere in space because every acceleration generates them. When you run to the kitchen to get a banana and you've accelerated, then you are creating little gravitational waves. But remember that gravity is super duper weak, and so the gravity from your body or from your banana is really really weak. So while it does generate gravitational waves anytime anything accelerates, those are basically impossible to see. That's why when we look for gravitational waves, we usually look for ones generated by incredibly massive objects like huge stars or like black holes with tens of times the mass of the Sun, because you need a lot of gravity to generate gravitational waves that we can actually see.
Right, Well, it sort of depends how many bananas you eat too, right though, right Like, if you eat it enough bananas, you will technically generate a big gravitational wave.
Exactly. If you just throw everything in your fridge into the black hole and then eat it as a smoothie out the other side of the white hole, it's going to taste pretty funny and you're going to get pretty heavy.
But it's kind of interesting to think that everything does generate a gravitational wave, like, right like, as you said, if I jump up and down or move my arm, I am generating from gravitational wave. And in fact, that gravitational wave that I'm generating with my arm, even though it's really small and weak, it is sort of propagating through the universe, and technically it is gonna, you know, go out to the edge of the universe.
Right it will. In the same way that if you, like, you know, stand at night and shine your flashlighte up a the sky and turn it on and off, you're sending photons which could travel forever, right billions or trillions of years until they hit some alien eyeball on some other planet or never, right, they could just go forever. In that same way, everything that we throw out into space could go forever. Remember though, that your gravitational waves, they start off really weak, and they get weaker with distance because the energy that's in the gravitational waves get spread out over a larger and larger sphere as they get further and further from you. So the strength of these gravitational waves goes like one over the distance squared, just like all other kinds of radiation. So they start off already and then twice as far away they are four times weaker, and ten times as far away they are one hundred times weaker, And that gets pretty stiff pretty quick.
Right. But I guess, as far as we know, gravitational waves are not sort of quantum, right, So there's no minimum size to these waves. Is there a right? So technically the waves I'm making with my arm right now are going to travel throughout the entire universe.
Well, we don't know. It's a great question, you know. People might be wondering because we compared earlier gravitational waves to photons, and gravitational waves are classical objects, meaning that we don't know if they are made at the smallest scale out of some quantum unit. So a better analogy is probably not the photon, but like a big pulse of light, which might be made out of many photons. So gravitational waves might be classical objects, meaning it might be smooth and continuous and as you say, they could get as small as you like, or they might be made out of gravitons like the quantum unit of gravity. But we just don't know because we don't have a quantum theory of gravity, so we can see gravitational waves without knowing whether or not there even are gravitons. Gravitons, if they exist, would be like tiny little pieces of a gravitational wave. Each one might have like ten to the sixteen gravitons.
Yeah, and you know, I think this sort of gets down to the question of the episode, because you know, when you shoot a flashlight out into the sky, you're sending out photons and technically those photons could go to the ends of the universe and keep going, but more likely they're going to you know, hit a dust particle and bounce or get absorbed or something happens to them when they hit something else. And also if you think about the analogy of like a ripple and a lake. That wave, that water wave loses energy as it goes from the friction of the of the molecules. But gravitational waves are different, right, They sort of don't actually hit things when they hit things.
Yeah, gravitational waves are incredible because they in principle pass right through stuff. You know, you have some like huge gas cloud. Photons might not be able to penetrate it because they've got to interact with all this stuff in the gas cloud. They get absorbed by it, or they get reflected by it, whatever. Gravitational waves are ripples in the underlying substrate of space itself, right, So they pass right through these gas clouds. They can go basically through anything. They can go through neutron stars, right, some of the densest non black hole material in the universe. And so in that sense, they're an incredible way to see the universe because they can pass through stuff that is otherwise totally opaque to us. So they're incredible like new kind of eyeball that like, you know, excuse the analogy, but X rays everything in the universe. One thing we're really excited about is using them to see even further back in time. You know, the earliest light that we can see from the universe comes from the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is from the first moment when the universe was transparent too photons, Like three hundred and eighty thousand years after the Big Bang, universe went from opaque plasma to transparent gas, so the photons could fly free. We can't see before that with photons, but we might be able to see before that with gravitational waves. People are looking for gravitational waves created during the Big Bang that we might even be able to see.
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And so I guess what happens then if a gravitational wave hits something solid like a planet, like it just totally goes through it or does it lose a little bit of energy, does some of the gravitation wave get absorbed, or does it really you know, nothing happens to the wave.
It's a great question. So what happens to the stuff that's in space when a gravitational wave passes through it? And you're right, this is critical to understand when we get into the question of what happens when it hits a black hole? So in one sense, things do happen, right, Like we can see gravitational waves because they do have an effect on our physical systems. Like the way that we detect them is that we measure distances. Changing gravitational wave is a change in the curvature of space. The curvature of space really is another way of saying, like how far apart are different parts of space to each other. You know, you bend space by changing the intrinsic curvature of space by saying, like, this piece of space is now closer than that one. And so the natural path or a photon is what looks like a curve, it's really a straight line through this bent space. And so the way we detect them is by having these laser beams which are shooting back and forth between mirrors constantly measuring the distance between those mirrors. And so we see the gravitational wave because it changes the distance between those mirrors, because it actually shrinks the space between them. We can measure that because we know the speed of light and it's bouncing back. We can time essentially the distance between the speed of light. It's a bit more complicated because the measurement has to be very precise so they use interferometry. We have a whole episode and video about that. But basically it does shrink the stuff in space, so you can measure those distances, but then it shrinks it back right, so it squeezes it and then it comes back. So from that sense, no energy is lost, right, space is rippled, but then the gravitational wave just passes on.
Right, It's sort of like a go I was thinking, it's sort of like a slink. If you take a slinking out and then you sort of pinch one bit of it and then let go, it's gonna that pinching is sort of going to propagate, right, It's gonna squeeze the little bit of slinky next to it, But then it's gonna stretch out, and then that's gonna squeeze the little bit of slinking next to that one. And so like space, you see this kind of squeezing and stretching of space. But as you say, I think that's really kind of the question is like, is any energy going into moving and squeezing the stuff that's in the space, right, because you're technically sort of accelerating it, right, Like if a gravitation a waste passes through the Earth. You're squeezing all the earth molecules together a little bit and then spreading them out a little bit. Doesn't it take energy to squeeze them and also to unsqueeze them.
So this is a topic of great debate in the nineteen fifties about whether gravitational waves can actually deposit energy into matter or whether they just sort of like pass through, taking their energy with them. And Fineman came up with a great way of thinking about this. It's called the sticky bead example. And so imagine like some rod, and this rod is like really tightly held together with atomic forces, and then you have beads on that rod that can slide up and down. So as the gravitational wave comes through, the rod is sort of like held to a fixed length by the atomic forces, and the beads will be slid back and forth by the gravitational wave because the relative distances between the beads will change, but they'll slide back and forth and they'll end up in the same position because there's no friction. But then if you add friction to it, then what happens as they slide back and forth on the rod is that they do heat up the rod, and that takes some of the energy from the gravitational waves. The answer from this thought experiment is that the gravitational wave can deposit some energy in this matter as it's passing through if it generates friction between stuff, if some stuff resists the motion of the gravitational wave and other stuff doesn't, so you get friction sliding between them.
Right, But I guess wouldn't everything have friction to them, right? Like nothing is quite held together by a perfect.
Spring exactly, So there's nothing that's really friction lists So everything has some internal friction, even those mirrors in life. I go right where they're measuring these gravitational waves. They're held up on the wall, and the wall is in part of a larger cavity, and is internal friction in that whole setup. And so the answer in the end is that gravitational waves do deposit energy and stuff as they pass through, and so they do get fainter and fainter as they propagate out through the universe.
They do get sort of absorbed a little bit. But I guess I'm thinking, you know, kind of like a wave in the ocean or at the beach, You know, a wave is not just like in one spot. It's a long piece of the coast, right, and like a wave is really long, and if it goes through me, I might block a little bit of it where I am, but the whole wave is still going to keep going, and in fact, it sort of almost reassembles itself after it hits me.
A wave is a very long object, and in this case, a gravitational wave is more like a sphere right from a black hole Merger. Gravitational waves emit in every direction. So if you put whore a just in one direction, you will get heated up by the gravitational wave, but the rest of it won't be impacted at all. And you can calculate what would happen after it hits you, Right, the wave sort of reform, but it's a little bit distorted on the other side.
All right, Well that's a gravitational wave. They're pretty interesting. They are not quite unstoppable, right, You can stop them if you have enough mass, although they are so large, and maybe they might ignore an obstacle that is in their path. And so let's get into the ultimate question of what happens when a gravitational wave meets a black hole, which one will get matter, But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about the ultimate meetup of what happens when a gravitational wave meets a black hole. And I guess, first of all, Daniel, is it a friendly meeting, Like are they looking forward to seeing hanging out or is this a fight to be had?
I think black holes and gravitational waves are just sort of like screaming through the universe. So I think they're just going to get matter and matter about the matter.
And I guess are they going to turn red or green? And are there gamma rays involved? Because that right, black holes are full of gamma rays.
M Yeah, well, I think that as they curve space, they tend to red shift things, so they're going to get redder and redder, right, which is the color of anger in comic books, isn't it all?
Right?
Well, that's the ultimate comic book question.
Here.
What happens when a gravitational wave meets a black hole? And what happens, Daniel? Does it crack the black hole? Does the gravitational wave get sucked in or split in half?
So once again, black holes win? Right? Black holes seem to win every single time you throw something at them. Another black hole, a neutron, star, a banana, even a gravitational wave. You know, if you throw anything with energy at a black hole, it will just gobble it up. And that includes gravitational waves. And you know, in the end, gravitational waves there are ripples in space and time and they can be affected by the curvature of space the same way that like photons can.
Right.
Photons don't have any mass, but they are affected by the curvature of space. They are red shifted by a gravitational expansion, they are distorted by gravitational lensing, they are captured by black holes. All the same things also apply to gravitational.
Waves, right, well, I guess the question is, you know, what might be confusing is that, you know, a black hole is a distortion in space time. Right, It's like space sort of curves towards the center of the black hole, and a gravitational wave is a ripple in that space time. So does it even make sense for a gravitational wave to hit a black hole?
Right?
It's sort of like, you know, if it's a ripple and a rope, but the rope is just going down the drain. Nothing really collides, It just ripples down the rope into the hole.
Be careful about how we think about black holes. Right. There may be some mass concentrated at the center, but really, when we're talking about the black hole, we're talking about the event horizon. The event horizon is not a surface in the way that you can stand on. It's just a location past which nothing can emerge. And so a gravitational wave, you should think about it as energy the same way you think about it like a banana as energy. Bananas made of particles. They're just ripples in those quantum fields, and so a gravitational wave is ripples in space itself. But in the end, that's just energy. When that energy enters into the region around this dense mass inside the event horizon. Then that energy is affected by the curvature of space itself, even though that energy is in the curvature of space itself.
Right, I guess I'm thinking. You know, it's sort of like the wave. The energy doesn't really go anywhere or disappears or gets absorbed. It just sort of falls into the hole like everything else.
It falls into the hole and eventually ends up at the singularity. If you believe in classical general relativity that there are singularities at the hearts of black holes. Remember, singularities are like endpoints, right, you throw a particle into singularity, there's no direction for it to go. It's just sort of like ends there. That's the one reason why we think maybe general relativity is wrong, because it seems like information is being deleted from the universe when it goes into the singularity. But according to classical general relativity, then yeah, the gravitational wave just gets like slurped up into the singularity and ends there. It just adds its energy to the singularity. Doesn't matter what form of energy you're in, photon, banana, gravitational wave, anything that enters in the event horizon just contributes to the mass of that black hole.
Right, But we talked about earlier how like if you throw a banana into a black hole, never actually falls in because you know, time slows down and it just looks frozen at the surface of a black hole. Does the same thing happen into a gravitational wave, Like you'll see the ripples sort of ripple in and then stop at this at the surface.
Yeah, the same thing happens, but remember there's more gravitational wave coming behind it. Usually, like, unless you have a single burst of gravitational waves, then there's a train of these gravitational ripples coming through the universe, and so each one is growing the black hole a little bit, helping the one that came before it actually fall past the event horizon. So it's more like a long chain of bananas than an individual banana.
That's delicious.
But you were also asking earlier about like the whole wavefront of the gravitational wave. Because gravitational waves are affected by black holes, they can also be like lensed by black holes. So you can have like gravitational lensing of gravitational waves as they pass around a black hole. So the ones that like actually hit the event horizon are slurped in, but the ones that go nearby, they can get like bent around the black hole.
Right, and even get sort of like bent back right reflected back towards the source of the gravitational wave.
Yeah, that could the same way. If you look near a black hole, you're seeing all sorts of weird distortions. Like you could see the other side of the event horizon, you can see stuff that whizzed around the black hole and came back at you. Then you can get the same effects with gravitational waves. And so for example, if you have the bright source of gravitational waves and then between you and that bright source is a black hole, what would you see. You would see a little shadow, or you would see gravitational waves coming in all directions, except you would see this little shadow, just the same way. We saw a picture of a black hole recently, right that was in the X ray, and we saw an accretion disk around a little shadow. So you would see a gravitational wave shadow that's gobbling up some of the black holes, but around it you would see these other gravitational waves that are like lensed and distorted by the black.
Hole interesting, and would the gravitational wave also contribute to making the black hole bigger?
It would, right, absolutely, because it's got energy. But you know, there's an important caveat here, which is that we're assuming that the gravitational wave itself is pretty small, that like, relative the mass of the black hole, it's not that big a deal because black holes typically have very large masses and gravitational waves typically don't have that much energy. So we're assuming basically like the black hole is fundamentally unchanged. Maybe it grows a tiny bit, but it's not like really changing the structure of space time around the black hole. And then we're using that setup to like solve the wave equation for the gravitational wave in the presence of an unchanged black hole, what would happen to a gravitational wave If, however, the gravitational wave is like enormous, it's like really big, it's monster two super massive black holes have merged, then the kind of condition gets more complicated because you can't assume that the gravitational wave is going to not fundamentally change the black hole, And then it's trickier to say exactly what happens. You need to like fully solve the Einstein equations, you might get some weird distortion to the black hole, but in the end, all that energy is going to go into a bigger black hole.
Well, it's weird to think that a gravitational wave has energy in the traditional sense, because, as we talked about it before in the podcast, anything with energy also bend space and attracts other things. So it's almost like this ripple in space is also rippling in space or you know, attracting things.
Yeah, and the energy we're talking about is enormous. You know, when two black holes merge, maybe they start out each having like fifty times the mass of our Sun, they don't form a black hole that has one hundred times the mass of the Sun, and it ends up with something like eighty times the mass of the Sun, and the rest of it goes into gravitational waves. Just stop for a moment and think about how much energy we're talking about. We're talking about all of the energy it's stored in twenty times the mass of our Sun. Remember that, like a single raisin a gram of matter has as much energy as a nuclear bomb, right, So now imagine how much energy is stored in the sun and now twenty of those. So we're not talking about a small amount of energy here. We're talking about incredible cosmic quantities of energy radiated out through the universe.
Right, But is the black hole at all affected by the right wave, Like does it get even like squeezed a little bit, or or you know, does it kind of like move a bit at all? Or is does black hole literally totally ignore the gravitational wave and just sucks at it.
It definitely is affected by it. And as the gravitational wave gets larger and larger, you start to approach the case that we talked about recently, which is like two black holes merging. Remember when two black holes merge, then you don't just have like a big spherical event horizon. You get this weird blob that forms as they merge, and it becomes a peanut and eventually becomes a sphere. So something similar would happen if you had a super powerful gravitational wave that was approaching a black hole. It would distort the shape of the event horizon. You would like grow it out in one direction before another direction. Eventually a black hole would like stabilize and thermalize and get in at equilibrium and become a sphere again. But momentarily it would look really weird. And figure out exactly how that would look, you'd have to solve the Einstein equations for that particular setup, which is really hairy.
Well, you sort of make it sound like the black hole winds over the gravitational wave. I sort of feel kind of the opposite, because gravitational wave is not just huge, it's sort of like it's the size of basically all of the entire universe, right like when two black holes collide, or a black hole collides with a neutron star, it generates a sphere of a ripple, right like it's propagating in all directions at the same time. And you know, if you're billions of light years away from the source, then literally the size of that sphere is billions of light years wide, whereas a black hole is really just like a tiny little blip that it passes through, you know, sort of like if you dig a hole in the sand at the beach and the huge long wave passes through, Like you know, some of the wave is going to fall into the hole, but the rest of the wave is just going to keep going as if nothing happened.
Right, Yeah, that's true. Gravitational waves are bigger than black holes, and so some part of them will survive. Part of that hits the black hole, it's gone, but the rest of it will wiggle on through the universe. Yeah that's true.
Yeah, And in fact, a black hole might even sort of feel insignificant to that gravitational wave. Right, it's like, oh here's a little hole. Whoops, I'll just step over it.
It really is about the friends that the gravitational wave made along the way.
You're right, right, but do you know what I mean, Like it's just as little blue It's like putting a little obstacle in a huge long, you know, break at the beach in the wave, and in fact at the beach that when the wave goes through an obstacle, it sort of almost like reforms itself after the obstacle. The same thing happened here with a black hole. Like with the wave that immediately hits the black hole will get sucked in. But will the rest of the waves sort of like patch up that hole eventually?
Yeah? Absolutely. As the wave passes by the black hole, then the bits of the gravitational wave that are like just barely making it past, they will continue to disperse, so eventually they will fan out and sort of fill in that gap. It won't be totally unaffected. You could tell that that had happened. You'll see lensing effects on the gravitational wave from the black hole. But yeah, there is no way that one black hole can completely squash a gravitational wave. So if you imagine, for example, a billion Superman's all running out and differ in directions than Hulk, can only stop one of them. From that point of view, the billion Superman win.
The infinite sequels of Superman beats out the one movie of the Hulk theyve made.
Yeah, exactly, all.
Right, so it's sort of a toss up, I guess. You know, like at the local level, a black hole will win over the gravitational wave. But in the long term, you know, the gravitational wave is going to have a better life. Don't they say that's the best revenge to have a good life.
Yeah, I suppose so. And remember that the universe is filled with these gravitational waves. They're passing through you right now. Even if you're not the Hulk, even if you're not Superman, you are getting squeezed and tugged by gravitational waves probably generated by ancient black holes gobbling each other billions of years ago. It's everywhere. We have a whole episode about the cosmic gravitational background, if you'd like to learn more about efforts to discover and measure these very gentle gravitational waves.
Yeah, even though you're the size that you are compared to a giant black hole, you still affect that gravitational wave, right, It's passing through you, but you are sort of absorbing a little bit of it each time.
Right.
Part of the energy you have for your life today comes from those gravitational waves.
Well, I just have one more question, Daniel. If I'm at the surface of a black hole and I slip on a banana peal, do I still generate a gravitational wave?
You do? And then the black hole eats it? And you exactly, you eat it when you slip on the banana, and then the black hole eats your waves.
Right, lots of eating here in the universe.
Time to take a break for lunch.
All right, Well, we hope you enjoyed that and maybe it made you think a little bit about all of the amazing things that are happening out there right now. There are gravitational waves hitting black holes and black holes crashing into each other and making gravitational wave. It's a pretty busy universe.
It is, and those black holes continue to hide all of the plot holes from us. We can't even figure out what's going on in there by passing gravitational waves through them. If gravitational waves did pass through black holes, then they would be affected by it's inside, and we can use that as a way to see inside those black hole event horizons. But unfortunately we can't, and they remain black.
Oh oh, it's Daniel getting mad, you turning green or red.
I'm just frustrated by our inability to see the cosmic secrets in inside black holes.
Well you can always ask the billions, Superman's that around them?
Or future humanity.
All right, Well, thanks for joining us, see you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not the thinking about the environmental impact, but the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US Dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit us dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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