Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseIs it possible to destroy a black hole?
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Hey, Jorge, do you think the universe is a friendly place?
Ah?
Yeah, you know, the Earth is pretty cozy here, whether scie, not too many erupting volcanos everywhere.
Yeah, but sometimes I feel like everywhere else in the universe is a bit crazy. You know. We got stars exploding, we got galaxies crashing into each other. Black holes seem to be gobbling everything up.
Oh man, I am so glad I picked this neighborhood to live in.
No black holes in the neighborhood that was your real estate.
Yeah, I do. I talked it over with my agent, but no, Yeah, you're right. Especially black holes. I feel like they are this incredible destruction source in the universe. You know, they're just these machines that eat everything up. Is there anything we can do about it?
I'm not sure.
Maybe we could nuke them.
Hi.
I am Poor Hamm, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics. Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I don't live anywhere near a black hole.
I have one in my backyard.
I hope it's a cute little baby.
Yeah. I feed it light and mass and energy.
Does it have preferences or does it care which you feed it?
Yeah? It does, like the you know, the high protein, organic light and matter.
I don't think black holes are discriminate to her. I think they'll eat anything you feed them.
Well, Welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe not pet black holes.
Daniel and Jorge explain how to take care of your black hole.
And there you go, a guide for the everyday black hole owner. Black Holes for Dummies by Daniel and Jorge oh Man. Is that taken.
I'm writing that book right now as we podcast. Quickly clackery, clickly Clackiti that's the sound of me writing it.
Well, Welcome to our podcast, which is a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we talk about all the fun, crazy, amazing bonkers things in the universe, how long they will last, what we can do about them? Can we understand them and try to explain them all to you?
That's right, all the amazing and beautiful things that produce light and illuminate this incredible universe that we live in, and also the really destructive and powerful things to shred things and gobble them up forever. Possibly.
I feel like one big lesson of astronomy is that things on Earth are calm and friendly and cozy, like sitting on the beach in Florida. But that out there in the universe is like a lot of cosmic violence.
Obviously you've never been to Cleveland, Ohio, Florida.
Man, right, there's whole there's that whole meme. No, but I feel like, you know, the sun is a huge exploding nuclear bomb, and galaxies are crashing into each other and black holes are gobbling stuff. I feel like it's less friendly out there. You know, we're lucky to live here on the nice, cozy Earth.
Yeah, yeah, it could be a lot worse, is what you're saying. Just lower your expectations and you're in paradise. Welcome to paradise.
Well, it's both awe inspiring because you have these incredible forces on cosmic scales smashing into each other, and also a little terrifying. You know. It's sort of like sitting ringside at a heavyweight match, you know, or I guess it's more like sitting ringsided like a wrestling match. You never know if some three hundred pounds dude is going to get tossed over the ropes and right on.
Yeah, some black hole is going to split it over and land in our lap.
Yeah. I read this wonderful science fiction novel recently. It's called Perry Helliuan Summer by Greg Egan, one of my favorite authors, and the premise of the book, it's not a spoiler, is that a small black hole enters our solar system and basically just screws everything up. It's really fascinating.
Do we have enough pet food for it?
We feed it?
You?
Basically you're the first. You're like, maybe if he eats this guy, it'll go away. It'll be like yuck.
It came here to liberate the black hole that you were keeping, you know, in the you're keeping in your backyard.
Unjust it called it, oh man, that's the sequel Perry Heilliuan Winter.
No, it's a great book, and you know, it just brings to mind that out there in the universe a really powerful forces, things that if they entered our neighborhood could do some serious damage.
Yeah. And so one of those, maybe the most powerful, you know, destructive force in the universe, is a black hole. You know, black holes are kind of scary, right.
They are kind of scary, And it's amazing that they're both super destructive, right, super powerful. Nothing can avoid their pull. And on the other hand, they're the product of the weakest force in the universe. You know, gravity we've talked about on the show of the fundamental Forces is the weakest by like a factor of ten to the thirtieth. So it's amazing that the most destructive thing in the universe comes from the weakest force.
Wow, that would be the subtitle, be like black holes colon Gravity's revenge, revenge other gravitons.
Gravity's back and it's pissed off.
It's coming back for your pet.
It's amazing to me that Gravity in the end wins, and it's because it's just patient. You know, everybody else is done with the party and Gravity's still there. Yeah.
And so I think it makes people wonder like, are we at the whim of these incredible forces in the universe? Are we powerless to do anything about it? Could we if a black hole came into our silver system, could we do something about it?
Yeah, this is a question that a listener wrote in, and I hope it wasn't a listener that was like worried about their existence, you know, wasn't worried like, uh oh, scientists, can you cook up some super fancy black hole killing gun? But Roy Stone wrote into us and asked us this question.
Hello, Daniel Hora, I'm roy from Florence, South Carolina. I really enjoyed your podcast and hope you have many more in the future. My question is this, is there anything that can destroy a black hole? Or how much energy would it take to before it is completely removed from our universe? Thanks? I look forward from hearing your answer.
Yeah. I love this question because it sort of like pays homage to the powerful forces out there in the universe, but also has some hope, like, hey, humans, scientists, can you come up with something to protect us from the bully of the cosmic neighborhood?
Yeah? My question is why does he want to know.
I mean, maybe he's got a black hole in his backyard and he's worried.
It's getting out of hend and need some tips here.
Maybe this wasn't such a great idea.
Or maybe he knows something we don't know. I don't know, Roy yea.
Or wait, maybe he's got a black hole he's going to use it to destroy the Earth, and he first he wants to figure out if Earth has any defenses, scoping out the defenses.
None of these answers make me feel comfortable.
Roy Stone, cosmic villain or or you know, just pure intellect wondering about this question from an academic point of view, let's go with that.
That's right, all right, let's let's curiosity is his intent?
Curiosity is his intent exactly. And it's a wonderful question, a super fun question.
So to the end the podcast, we'll be tackling the question can we destroy a black hole?
Dune?
Dumb, dumb, great question, right, like we think, I guess it's well, it's a weird question because how can you destroy a hole?
Like?
How do how do how do you like you have a hole? How do you destroy it? Do you just feel it?
Feel a something?
But yeah, the whole. Technically the hole still there is just full.
Mmm. That's interesting. Yeah, Like sometimes I have a hole in my schedule and I feel it with a meeting. Does the hole still exist? Is there a philosopher of time that can answer that question for us? Yeah?
There you go. But I think he means like, had not not be this? Like you have this black hole that's sucking things in and destroying them. Can you like do something about it, make it go away?
Yeah? But you know, your point goes to my my criticism of the name black hole, which I never really thought was a good name, because it implies that it's an absence of things, right, when in fact, the black hole is a super dense blob. It should be called like a black mass or a black rock or something, because there's a lot of stuff in there. It's not empty at all.
You wanted to name the whites and blob, the whites and whatever.
That's where, Oh my god.
It's the whites and whatever coming towards.
Us winning the Nobel Prize for discovering the Whites and whatever.
I wonder Dan, if you do discover something wor the of a Nobel prize or I guess when you discover something, Thank you for that. Could you name it whatever you want? Could you name it the whites and whatever? And people would have to use this name.
That is a great question. First of all, I'm going to make a pledge that if I ever do discover something nobel worthy, I will call you and you will get you will get to chime in in that case the cham whatever. No, I think that that basically, whoever names it gets to call it that. But there are some experiences in history where they've been overruled, you know, like the discover a particle. Yeah, the guy who discovered particles, he called it corpuscules. Nobody calls it corpuscules now because it's a terrible name, and so maybe just sticks around for a few years, and then eventually if it wasn't good enough, it just sort of falls out of favor.
Measure or society got to chime in on your your kids' names. They're like, I don't like that one. We'll go with whatever white son.
Well, you know, eventually your kids get to chime in and they can change their particles. Don't get to do that. But there's another famous story in history about two different groups discovering the same particle the same moment, giving it different names.
And how did they decide or do they call it? We didn't you hyphenate.
We call it we hyphenated exactly. We'll tell that story on another podcast. That story has so many fun wrinkles. We'll tell it on another podcast.
Right, we'll say it for later dash another.
Time, precisely. But I was curious how many people out there have plans to destroy a black hole, have ideas for how to destroy black hole, or worried about destroying black holes. So I walked around and I asked people what they knew about whether black holes could be destroyed.
Yeah, so think about it for a second before you listen to these answers. If you were approached and you were asked, do you think it's possible to destroy a black hole? What would you answer? Here's what you've had to say.
I can't, but thanks to Hawking Radiation, black holes would just do the job themselves.
I'm so much manually destroy it as far as I know. We can just wait as long as we can for all of it to be emitted. As Howking radiation.
Sort of watch it fall apart exactly.
We can watch it fall apart, but I don't know if on command we can accelerate that process.
I guess I don't know if I had to destroy it blow it up?
Yes, yeah, how much you destroy a black hole?
I think ste you and how consist something about it?
But I don't know, No, no, why not?
I don't know because I think because black holes are so dense and matter, I feel like we just don't know that much about it yet. But I mean, I don't know for sure of it. I think it's now, I don't know. I think it'd be cool. I don't know a lot of black holes, but from what I do know, they're like endless.
So just I don't it just seems cool. I can't explain why, but it just seems very cool. It's okay if I record your answers.
Yeah, that's just kind of like it count counts more to my fasystem.
Depends your answers, that's right. First question is do you think it's possible to destroy a black hole?
I think maybe how would you.
Go about if you had to? Is a black hole coming towards Earth, you can save the planet, how would you destroy the black hole?
I mean in a way like the black hole is like a gravitational field, right, so if you have something that can counter that singularity, then maybe you can destroy a black hole.
Black Holes are, like I know, they're like inescapable, so then you can't really do anything to a black hole.
All right. A lot of great answers.
Yeah, a lot of great answers. And here I went and asked some experts. I asked some particle physics graduate students what they thought, and.
I like the one who said, does this count towards my thesis?
That was my grad student?
Are judging me right now? This is a new chapter you want me to add, don't you know I'm already stressed out.
I know they have enough to do. Grad students can't really say no to their advisor. But my favorite part about these answers is that everybody had something to say. You know, everybody's like, ooh, fascinating. Everybody wanted that power. They wanted to know how you could destroy a black hole.
Yeah.
I think the overall reaction I got is that people were a little surprised by this question. You know, They're like, oh, what, like the the idea of destroying a black hole had never even occurred to them or heard of it.
But as soon as they heard the idea, they wanted to know how.
Yeah, it's a kind of cure a vampire. Oh I never thought. Oh, but it would be useful to know, wouldn't it.
Here I got ten ideas. Yeah, I should have asked people for money. Are you were collecting one hundred dollars towards the black hole gun? Continue doing it?
The fund is a black hole.
That's any money you give to particle physics, and the whole field is a black hole.
Yeah. But you know, I was surprised to buy this question. You know, I opened my EMA on and I saw that what you wanted to talk about. I was like, oh, wow, that's a great question. I never even thought about, like wanting to destroy a black hole. But it does seem kind like a useful thing.
There you go, folks, This is an episode of the podcast even Jorge would listen to.
Well, let's not get too ahead of ourselves here. I am listening to it right now. Technically, I listen to it, all of it, even the parts we cut out.
Even cartoonists want to know how to defend the Earth from black hole.
Yes, I can't hear all the behind the scenes, all the deleted delete it takes. That's right, that's right, all right. So let's get into this question and it's super interesting. How do you destroy a black hole? And so we'll get into uh, we'll recap what a black hole is and can they think about whether they can last forever? And we've ever read the story one. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel, what is the formula for destroying a black hole? Do they have an auto destruct button?
Yeah? You just announce self destruct in one minute, you know. Now, you send one tiny X wing in to the flaw the center of the black hole, and that can and you can.
Blow it up that way and then use the force.
That's right, stay on target. Yeah. The key to destroying something as a physicist is to understand how it's made, understand its life cycle, what holds it together, what it wants in life, and then try to use that against it somehow. I guess that's sort of the formula for destroying anything.
Yeah, that's isn't that one of the rules of war? Of war? Like know thy enemy.
Or is it know thyself? I'm not sure that's philosophy or war.
Both know thy cosmic a singularity that might destroy everything.
Just in case that was Socrates. You just plagiarize that from Socrates.
Yeah, so let's let us do a quick recap of what a black hole is. So you're saying it's not a hole or black.
It's not a hole. No, black hole is essentially run away gravity. Remember, gravity is a force and it pulls everything together. Anything that has mass or energy gets attracted to other things that have mass or energy, and that's what gravity is, and that's what holds us onto the Earth, and that's what keeps the Earth going around the Sun, and that's what squeezes the Sun so that fusion starts. It's the weakest force in the universe, but you get enough stuff together and it can be quite powerful. Right.
It's kind of like love, right, It's it's the underdog in this crazy universe, but at the end it holds everything together.
I thought that the lesson there is that love is the most powerful force in the universe. It can overcome everything.
Well, just like gravity.
There you go, So can love destroy a black holes? Is that?
I think that was the Interstellar Oh well, I think this podcast and just as people.
Go, remember Interstellar not a documentary people, okay, fiction?
Really sure that that wasn't it?
Yes, that's the answer. In every Hollywood movie, love is the most powerful force.
Yeah, yeah, even in Avengers.
I think in Arrival also, love wins out in the end. It's basically all about love, right.
Basically, love is what screenwriters go to when they don't know how to get out of the physics in a plot.
That's right, because physics has not yet discovered a fundamental force that aligns with love. We got gravity, we got electromagnetism, we got the weak force to strong force love. We don't really understand it yet.
What would you call the quantum particle for love?
The coupon?
I guess I see what you did there, I see it well. But anyway, So that's what a black hole is. It's gravity, just like the gravity that keeps this planet together and us on it. But if you take that gravity to an extreme and like crammed a lot of stuff held together by gravity in a small amount of space.
That's right because gravity never gives up. It just keeps pulling and pulling and pulling, and if you have enough stuff, you have your big enough blob. Eventually gravity gets so crazy that it pulls it into a dense enough object that there's so much gravity that it basically bends space. Because remember, gravity is not just this force that pulls stuff together. Gravity bends the shape of space, which is why it changes the direction that things move. So black hole is when space is bent so much that it basically pops off from the universe and becomes self contained. Nothing can go out of it. All the paths inside there lead closer to the center of the black hole. There's no way out of it anymore.
Right, But it doesn't close off itself off completely because you can still get into it, right. You can still go into a black hole, can you.
Yeah, it's like a trap. Yeah, maybe you should be called a black trap instead of a black hole.
A black trap.
Yeah, but this is funny discontinuity because it's like a one way wall in space now, and it's not like if you ran really fast or if you pushed really really hard, you can get out. There is no path out no matter how fast you go. Like photons inside a black hole, they're still moving at the speed of light. They're just moving towards the center. There's no direction they can go in to get out.
Right, What if I have a really strong rope and I lower you in, like it's the strongest rope in the universe, and I lower you and can I still pull you out?
No, you can't. And actually people have done all these sort of crazy thought experiments, like super strong ropes lowering people in. What would it look like once you cross the event horizon? Essentially that rope is broken?
Can oh because not even like the attraction between the molecules of the precisely of the rope can keep it together.
Yeah, a lot of these thought experiments try to cheat, like you have these rules, nothing can come outside of the event horizon. But then you add like, oh, a super strong rope that can't be broken. That basically breaks that rule that nothing can come out of the event horizon because the super strong rope implies that you could pull on the molecules that are inside the event horizon from the ones that are on the outside of the event horizon, and you can't.
Right, what if I use ononder Woman's lawsuit.
Again, fictional universe, you can do anything. In our actual universe, none of that works. But the cool thing about black holes is that they just keep going. They gobble stuff, and they gobble stuff, and the size of the black hole depends on the amount of stuff inside it. So as it eats stuff, it gets bigger, and then as it gets bigger, it can eat more stuff. And you see where this goes.
Yeah, let's talk about like the life cycle over a black hole. Right, Like when a black hole's form, it's really small, it's a little block, but then as it eats more things, it just grows and it doesn't peak. I guess it's one directional. It just keeps going bigger and bigger and bigger.
Kind of like your career, right, it never peaks. It just keeps going. Yeah, precisely, And black holes form when stars that are really big, when they collapse when they're done burning their fuel and they can't resist gravitational pressure. They form Sometimes that the centers of galaxies and those where the biggest ones are, and black holes just eat the stuff around them and just get bigger and bigger. They can even eat other black holes. Well we've seen that happen.
Wow, And they can get really big, Like there are some black holes that are like millions of times bigger than the mass of like our sun for example.
That's right, the ones that the centers of galaxies are enormous. There are millions of solar masses, and nobody knows how they got that big. Like if you just take a bunch of stars and form a galaxy, then you get a black hole in the center, and the black hole grows and grows, but it doesn't grow that much. So it's they'll try to understand, like how black holes are the centers of galaxies got so darn big. Our models don't explain it. But you know, we have these ideas that like, well, galaxies combine, you know, sometimes galaxies bang into each other and then the black holes that the center eat each other and become one mega black hole. And so there's some fun ideas there about how you can make super big and black holes by having them eat other super big black holes.
Wow. I mean basically there's no limit to their size, right, Like, as far as we know, it's not like a like a star that grows and gets brighter, but at some point it starts to run out of fuel and dims and becomes somebody else. Black holes, as far as we know, just keeps on going forever.
That's right. If you keep feeding on a black hole, it will keep growing. It's like that book. I don't know if you know I've ever read that book to your kids where they get a little pet fish and the guy at the fish store says, don't feed it too much and they can go once, you know, why not? And he feeds it too much, and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and it never stops growing. You know. Black holes are like that. If you keep feeding them, they will keep growing. This no theoretical limit. Nothing says you can't have a black hole the size of the galaxy or the size of the cluster of galaxies. The only reason why not.
At some point. It doesn't like collapse space. You know, I'm just thinking too.
What into a bigger blacker hole.
I don't know, Like it just detaches from our universe and goes off into another universe or something. I don't know, Like it doesn't it at some point it just collapse or it becomes a theoretical impossibility.
No, there's no limit there. Black holes can grow and grow and grow. If you keep feeding them, it will keep growing.
I guess the question is, why isn't the whole universe then just a black hole right now? Like why haven't hasn't at all just come together into a big giant black hole.
Yeah, that's a great question. There's two answers to that. One is things might turn into a black hole eventually, and we're just The reason that we're not in a black hole yet is basically rotation. Like the same reason that the Earth goes around the Sun instead of plummeting into it, Our star is going around the black hole in the center. It's not plummeting into it because we're orbiting and that rotation keeps us from falling in.
I see, we're in the flush part of the giant toilet flush universe.
That's right. I like to think that it's the cosmic suburbs. You know, instead of the gritty urban center.
Toilet flushing suburbs.
We're flushing the toilets in the suburbs. And the other reason is that galaxies are super far apart, Like why doesn't our galaxy just get gobbled up by black holes and other galaxies. Galaxies are crazy far apart, and dark energy is pushing them further and further apart. So the deep future of the universe might be that all these galaxies eventually collapse into their own individual super mammoth black hole. But then those black holes won't merge if dark energy is keeping them apart.
Uh, yeah, that's interesting. I guess I hadn't thought about it before, because you know, our Sun is kind of like a black hole. It is like a giant source of gravity, and if you think about it, we don't get sucked right into it. We are like in an equilibrium with our Sun and the rest of the Solar System.
Yeah, and we did a whole podcast episode about like what would happen if you replaced the Sun with the black hole of the same mass, And the answer is it would get darker, but we would keep orbiting because you still just have the gravity of the black hole. Pulling on the Earth, and it pulls on the Earth the same way any other object of that mass does. Black Holes don't have a special power to suck you in. They just have gravity, and you can resist gravity by rotating.
Running really fast, basically in the sideways direction.
Yeah. So, so the Earth is, you know, getting pulled on by the Sun. But it keeps missing right, and it misses again, it misses again. It's like constantly falling towards the Sun and missing right right.
It's like a lasso, like the Wonder Woman lasso.
All right, let's have a mini podcast episode inside this one about Wonder Woman. Get it out of your system.
Let's move on, all right. Well, so I guess the question is, does that mean that black holes last forever? You know? Can they just keep going and technically they'll outlast everything else in the universe. Will the universe eventually just be black holes?
That's a great question. And you know, as I said before, if you keep feeding a black hole, it will keep growing and growing and growing. But another question is what happens if a black hole stops being fed? So you have like a black hole in the middle of space and nobody feeds it anymore. You know, you go on vacation, you don't feed that black hole in your backyard. Will it last forever or will it eventually fall apart?
I see, if you starve the black hole, does it eventually wither or die?
Yeah? And it turns out that black holes not actually black. They give off the tiniest little glow, and that glow means they're giving away energy. So if you don't feed it, eventually that glow will leak out all the energy the black hole and it will evaporate.
Yeah, this is a Stephen. It's called Hawking radiation, right. It's he came up with this idea that black holes are actually leaking like they're not air tight.
It was the first one to think about black holes from a thermodynamic point of view, because from a point of view of like thermodynamics, everything in the universe has a temperature, and everything that has a temperature glows and it gives off radiation depending on that temperature. It's called black body radiation. We can do a whole other podcast about it. So his question was, like, what is the temperature of a black hole? If it's not zero, it must be radiating. And if it's radiating, where's that coming from? And that was a year of his life figuring that out.
Wow, can you imagine the moment he thought of that question, like, I wonder what the temperature of a black hole is.
It's actually pretty well documented. He was on a trip, i think in Moscow and a couple of Soviet scientists asked him that question. They're like, hey, what do you think is the temperature of a black hole? We think it might not be zero. And they had this moment and he's like, oh my gosh. And they went off and scribbled his notebooks for a year and figured it out.
Well, this is something I never quite understood about Hawking radiation. So the idea is that at the very border of a black hole, like the border of the event horizon or like the you know, the point where nothing can escape it, the idea is that the universe creates a particle there out of nothingness and it splits off, right, that's the idea, Like one half goes out, one half goes in, and somehow we call that evaporation. Can you explain that a little bit for me.
Yeah, So this is a tricky concept, and formally it comes from requiring that black holes have a temperature and then trying to figure out what that temperature is and finding a way to make that consistent for different observers moving at different speeds. It's very complicated. And then there's the sort of pseudoscience handwavy explanation that you often hear about Hawking radiation. And that's that's the what I just said, that's the way that you just said. Yeah, and it doesn't quite perfectly make sense, but it's a fine way to think about it. Sort OF's an introduction to the topic, all right. And the idea is you have a little blob of space just outside the event horizon, not inside, right, anything that's inside the horizon will never leave. You have this blob of space just outside, and then you have this gravitational force from the black hole. It's incredible gravitational power. And then blob a space borrows a little bit of that energy and it gives it a fluctuation and turns it into a particle. Okay, so you're getting like a boost of energy from this gravitational field. That boost turns you into a particle, and that particle splits into two other particles, matter and matter. One of them falls into the black hole, and by conservation momentum, the other one has to go the other direction, so it goes away from the black hole, and so it escapes. And so what you have is basically a blob of energy that originally was inside the black hole because it came from the gravitational field of the black hole, and that energy is now leaving with this particle that's gone. And so the mass of the black hole essentially comes from its energy. And so if it has to give up some energy to boost away this other new particle, then it's lost some of its mass.
Oh I see, it loses the energy when it creates this particle.
Yeah, it's energy gets used to create this particle, and then it loses one of it and doesn't come back. And remember that the mass of an object equals mc square. That tells you that the mass of an object comes from its stored internal energy, and so if it gives up some of its energy, then it loses some mass. And so it's not like something that was inside the event horizon actually escaped, but some of that you stolen some of the energy from the black hole.
Oh I see, it's about the one that got away, not about the one that went into the black hole.
It's like the one you love story again.
No, there's a heartbreaking story here because they they broke they broke up and they never got back together.
That's sort of a way to think about how a black hole could lose some of its energy, which is another way to think about you know, warm objects radiating like black body radiation shouldn't be something weird in particle physics. It's just like if you have something hot on your stovetop, it glows, right, it gives off energy. So anything that has a temperature, it's glowing using energy out. So the idea is, well, black holes have a lot of energy, so why don't they lose some of that also into the outside universe. And this is like a little picture of how microscopically that might happen.
Right, And so the ideas of the black hole is at the very surface kind of emitting light or photons and that energy that's going away from the black hole, which means that eventually it's like a candle, it will eventually maybe burn out.
Yeah, And it's not just light, it can give off any kind of particle. Hawking radiation can produce positrons and electrons or muons and anti muons. And that's actually one of the cool things about black holes that we might be making it cern is that if you make a tiny little black hole it's sern, it'll evaporate super quickly, and it will evaporate into every kind of particle that's out there through hawking radiation. So the signature of a black hole in a collider is this like crazy spray of a huge variety of particles. Nothing else makes that, which is why black holes and colliders are so fascinating to look for. Mmm.
All right, well, I guess the main lesson is a black hole. Holes don't live forever.
That's right. But it's a very very slow process. You have some enormous black hole. This is it's pretty black, so it's leaking a tiny, tiny bit of energy.
All right, let's get into how slow are black holes dying on their own? How slow they're getting snuffed out? And also if we needed to accelerate the process, could we actually do something to destroy a black hole? But first, let's take a quick break.
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Apply, all right, Daniel. So black holes evaporate slowly, meaning they give up a little bit of light and energy just sitting there if you don't feed them, which means that eventually a black hole sort of shrink down into nothingness basically, right.
That's right. If you have a black hole pet and you're going on a long vacation. You do need to arrange somebody.
To feed it, otherwise it will not be a runaway prize. And this great Earth is what they're saying.
Yeah, so depending on your motivations they're evil, villain or savior, make your decisions. But it takes a very long time. If you had a black hole like the mass of the sun, and we've never seen a black hole as small as the sun. The smallest black hole we've ever seen is many times the size of the Sun. But even the black hole with the mass of the Sun would take ten to the sixty seven years to evaporate.
Oh what ten to the is there even a name for a number that big? Ten? Because like, the age of the universe is not that long, or the size of the universe is not that big.
No, the universe remember, age is in billions, which the eight tens billions, So it's like ten to the ten, right, because a billion is ten to the nine and the universe is thirteen point eight billion years old, so we're like, you know, ten to the ten years into the universe, this is ten to the fifty seven times as long.
Jeez. So basically they live forever because they're I mean that sounds crazy to me. Think about being still alive then, or you know the universe what the universe might look like at that point.
Yeah, but remember we have no idea what the time scale for the universe is. Like, you know, so one hundred thousand years into the universe lasting billions of years might have seemed crazy. And so you know, only a ten billion years into the universe, maybe this is still basically the first flash and the universe will last for ten to the one hundred years. We just don't know.
Can you imagine some aliens at ten a year, ten to the one hundred quick? Hey remember back then when there were all these black holes everywhere?
Wow? Yeah, I used to listen to this great podcast back then. What happened to those guys?
They evaporated.
Like everything else.
It's called hawking cancelation of your podcast.
But the more mass of the black hole, the longer it takes. So if you have a smaller black hole or wrap evaporates more quickly, which is why for example, black holes we make it cern if we do make them, which are super tiny like the mass or proton, would evaporate super quickly, even like a black hole that's like two hundred tons of stuff would only take about one second to evaporated.
Oh wow, that's amazing. So if you take two hundred and thirty tons and make it black hole, that would be massive, but it would only last one second.
Yeah, it would evaporated away in just a second. So the thing that black holes need to do to survive is to eat. Right, The bigger they get, the longer they will last, because the slower they will evaporate.
All right, So the black holes don't last forever, but they last a very long time, practically forever. And so the question now is, Daniel, if a black hole came towards us and threaten the existence of our solar system and our way of life, could we destroy a black hole that? What can we do to accelerate the destruction of a black hole?
It's pretty tough. I got three ideas. I'm not sure any of them are going to work though.
Oh wait, these are your ideas or like the scientific community.
Or are you saying I don't speak for the scient of the community.
Is this a royal we or is this the Daniel Daniel and his basement ideas?
I have gathered together all the ideas that are out there and I speak for scientists. You know, I'm wearing a white lab coat. I'm on the news. Here are the best ideas from all of songs.
Good, Okay, I just want to I just want to make sure here.
First idea is a bad idea. It's sort of the Bruce Willis of ideas, and that's let's nuke it, right. We've got these powerful weapons. Every time something comes to endanger the Earth in movies at least, they just like shoot up a new and try to blow it up.
Right, like break it up like this, disrupt it.
Yeah, Because the idea is the black hole comes from its density, so if you could somehow like crack it in half, then maybe you could weaken its power.
Right you well, I guess technically right, like, if you take a black hole and split it in the middle and separated the two has, it would sort of dissipate the black hole, right like, because the density would go down eventually.
And also it depends exactly on the structure of the matter inside the black hole. If it's if general relativity is correct and black holes have a singularity inside them, then you know, splitting them and just makes two smaller black holes. Oh, I see you can't actually get rid of the black holiness. But if there's some distribution of stuff and you can break it in half and you can lower the density enough, if quantum mechanics is right, then it has to be distributed a bit. You could lower the density enough, then maybe you could stop it from being a black hole.
All right, So then is it possible to break one up and blow it up?
No, it's totally not possible, and it would backfire dramatically and act three of this screenplay because you're basically just throwing fuel on the fire. I mean, a black hole is not just a collection of mass, it's energy, right. The mass of the black hole comes from its energy. So if you just pour more energy into it, like a nuclear bomb has a lot of energy, it just makes it stronger.
Oh man, it's like it's like that supervillain that takes all your punches and transforms it into energy. That isso you back with.
It's exactly like that. It's like you know, you've got a pile of glue and you're pouring more glue onto it. Right, it doesn't.
So I even if I throw a giant bomb and it explodes inside of the event horizon, it wouldn't help break things apart.
No, it would just make it more dense. And remember, nothing can leave the event horizon, So even if it blows up inside the event horizon, it's still just going to be an exploding nuclear repon inside the event horizon, making the mass of the black hole larger. Right, it won't blow it up. Nothing can leave, and so it makes it more intense. Even if you threw a star into a black hole, right, which is basically a huge bomb.
Oh wow, okay, hold on, yeah, somebody tell bris willis to that we're canceling the plan where all right? Yeah, yeah, you're saying.
His agent is not gonna be happy with that. It's basically nothing, no matter or energy can break it up because it's already a dense collection of matter and energy. I even thought, you know, what if you threw like another black hole into it, but this time it's an anti matter black hole.
What it's like an anti a black hole mate out of entire where you fed as a little kid with antimatter.
That's right, yeah, because antimatter and matter are both matter, and so in principle, you could make a black hole out of pure anti matter. But again it's just more energy. So you throw an anti matter black hole into a matter black hole, and you're just gonna pour more energy into it's going to make a stronger black hole. It doesn't matter what kind of matter you put into it.
Oh man, this is giving me nightmares here. Let's it's making me really uncomfortable for some reason, like the like like some villain. You can't stop. So that's a bad idea to try to blow it up to give it more energy. Well, what are some of the other ideas?
All right, So there's some other ideas that involve trying to make the black hole spin. Now, black holes are dense blobs of stuff, right, but some of them we think are spinning. Not necessarily, they don't all have to spin, but some of them can spin.
You mean inside, whatever's happening inside it has some sort of rotation of momentum to.
It, precisely because angular momentum can't go away. And so something falls into a black hole and it was originally spinning around it. It's still spinning around the center of mass when it goes inside the event horizon. So the overall rotation of the black hole reflects the overall rotation of the stuff originally. That's why I like the solar system is still spinning because angular momentum from the initial gas cloud is still here. So if our solar system eventually becomes a black hole, it will be spinning.
Wow. But we don't know what's going on inside the event horizon though. Do we know for sure that it can still keep you know, spinning energy.
We don't know for sure, but we're pretty sure that angular momentum is conserved in our universe. So it's a pretty fair assumption. And the fascinating thing is that the size of the black hole depends not just on the mass of the stuff inside of it, but also on this rate of spin. And the faster the black hole spinning, the smaller the event horizon. Oh really Yeah, So the idea is maybe you could like shrink the event horizon by making the black hole over spin. You could like drop stuff into it that has a really high spin rate, like going really fast, almost tangent to the event horizon. Right, Like if you want, if you're pushing someone on the merry go around, you want to make them go faster, you give them a little push on the edge and you you could overspin it.
Maybe So if we take all those spinning toys that kiss we're playing with a couple of years ago, you know, the ones that with the ball.
Bearings fidget spinners save.
But if you take all those fidget spinners that were a huge fat and you toss give the Bruce Willis to deliver, Bruce.
Get back on the ship. We have a new idea.
Let's come back fidget spinners. You're saying, but that's basically yes, right. I mean you're saying, if you give it to throw a bunch of stuff in there that has a lot of spin, and it might shrink the black hole.
Yeah, and this is crazy. This is a theoretical idea, and nobody knows it would actually work. But if you did that, you might be thinking, but the mass is still there, right, wouldn't you still have a singularity even if it's spinning. The answer is yes, Potentially you could take a black hole and turn it into what we call a naked singularity, which is a singularity without basically an event horizon around it. Nobody knows what that would look like, what it would be like, and if it would be any better or worse than having a black hole.
Well, having him naked anything you know makes Moss screenplay.
Yeah, yeah, that's why you know. That's that's what I got paramount interested in our screenplay.
I feel like that's a spoof version of the Bruce Willis movie.
Nobody knows if it would work, and nobody knows if it'd be better or worse, you know, than just suffering through the destruction the original black hole. But in theory, it might be possible to overspin the black hole and turn it into a naked singularity.
Okay, but we don't know that might be better or worse.
We don't know, yeah, exactly, but technically, right, if you hire me to destroy your black hole and then I turned into a naked singularity, I'm going to be invoicing you.
All right, and I'm sure we'll gladly pay that if we're still alive from your naked singularity.
And then the last idea actually came from a listener.
Really, so you have one listener asking a question, and you had another listener answer the question.
Yeah, another listener spontaneously wrote in with an idea for how to destroy black holes and wanted to know if it would work, And I thought, oh wow, perfect, I'm trying to figure out how we could destroy it.
Oh amazing, that's a little suspicious. I feel like these two guys or two people are playing you here, Daniel.
Oh, maybe they're just different. One is an alter ego of the other one.
One is the anti black hole version of there No.
James Castiel from Indiana, he wrote in asking about dark energy because remember, dark energy is expanding space, and so it's essentially diluting everything. So he wanted to know is dark energy happening inside black holes? And if so, could it like expand the space inside a black hole enough to basically shrink the density so you no longer have a black hole?
Oh clever, like eat the black hole from the inside out.
Yeah, but just remember a black hole ate a star from an inside out. So it's like sort of turn its own strategy back on itself.
Yeah, like blow it up from the inside through space itself.
Yeah, exactly. So great idea, James, And when we do want to build a black hole gun, you were definitely invited to be on the task play. He can pull the trigger, you compress the big red button.
But so is there something to this idea? Could you make like a dark energy gun or ray or bomb, and to expand the space inside of a black hole.
Well, there are a lot of problems with this idea. Number one is we don't understand what dark energy is like at all. We think it's some property space that when you have various configurations of matter in the universe, it causes space to expand. But it's actually very very weak. It's not very powerful at all. It only adds up to a big effect because space is so huge. But dark energy, for example, plays no role in the structure of our solar system because the gravity of our solar system is powerful enough to overcome dark energy, and so when it comes to a black hole, dark energy is basically negligible, has no effect at all.
Yeah, but it is everywhere like love, isn't it.
It's everywhere like love. But we don't actually know if there is dark energy inside a black hole, because we don't know what dark energy is. If it's a property of space itself, then yeah, there's some effect from dark energy inside a black hole, but we don't know if it means the expansion of space.
And anyways, it would be much weaker than the gravity and keeping the black hole together.
Dark energy is just one factor and to answer whether space is expanding. You have to fold in dark energy, you have to fold in the matter and the radiation density of the universe. Then you crank it through general relativity equations to discover whether or not you're getting expansion. The reason there's expansion out there in space is because dark energy is the only thing out there. But if you have matter and energy, like in a black hole, then you're not going to get expansion, right.
But I guess the question is the idea is that, you know, maybe one day we'll understand what dark energy is. Maybe one day we might be able to harness it or concentrate it. You know, like if there is something out there in space in the universe that can expand space, maybe that's one way to kill a black hole. It's like, if we understand it, maybe we can make something that will expand the space inside of a black hole.
I lost count of how many maybees.
But yeah, this is Hollywood, man, It doesn't You can call those.
We can build a dark energy gun and give it to Bruce Willis. Then yeah, this plan is rock solid. But the point you make is, the point you make is reasonable, right, is that there is something that can balance gravity we described earlier, black holes are runaway process because gravity just takes over and eventually wins because it's always attractive. But you're right, we do know that there is something about gravity that can be repulsive, and that's dark energy, and so right, eventually, if we understand it, we might be able to manipulate it and cause black holes to fall apart from the inside using dark energy. But there's a lot of maybes between now and then.
Right, all right, So it sounds like our best ideas are fidget spinners and magical unicorns. Is our base idea here?
Yeah, magical uniforms is definitely a good idea about It's.
A spinner on a magical unicorn.
Being written by Bruce Willis us love to save the universe. Welcome to our pitch. Thank you for coming to our pitch.
We'll take those billions of dollars now, thank you much.
That's right, we want a big advance. We're not delivering this script until the end of the universe.
All right, Well, I guess I mean that to answer the question can we destroy a black hole? It so of sounds like maybe not. I mean, it sounds like we have some wild ideas, but so far, they seem like a pretty inevitable part of the universe that will basically be around here forever and maybe never go away.
Yeah, if I had to bet on the most likely fate of the universe, it would be a bunch of galaxies that collapsed into black holes, separated by vast distances. So it's a pretty dark and bleak version of the future.
Well, we hope that stimulated some thinking out there in you guys about what black holes are and whether they'll be around for a very long time, or whether we could destroy one if we had the need.
To, and whether or not it was a good idea to start a little black hole pet in your backyard.
That's right, And just in case, save those fidget spinners. They might come in handy later.
And anybody out there with a magical unicorn please get in touch.
Yeah, so this is a great question, and so if you guys have a question out there, please send it to us. What's the email address, Daniel.
Questions at Danielandjorge dot com.
That's right, and you can also write to Daniel on Twitter. And I'm doing the Instagram for this podcast, which explains why some of the answers in the comments are coming from a cartoonist.
Basically a physicist. You're a deputized physicist by.
Now, yeah, so you can find on this both at Daniel and Jorges at Daniel and Joorhey.
Thanks for sending in questions and thanks for your attention.
See you next time.
Before you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielanjorge dot com. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple.
Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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