JANNA LEVIN: But how exactly do they grow? Black holes are empty space, but neutron stars are dense dead stars that can crash together and light up the skies. Season 45 Episode 1 | 1h 52m 46s | Video has closed captioning. If you waited long enough, maybe millions or billions of years, the ship would finally see me disappear. Over hundreds of millions of years, it would have consumed all of the available gas and the closest stars. The collision creates a massive blast, putting out 50 times as much power as the entire visible universe. They're constantly devouring anything that comes within their sphere of influence, so they grow. JANNA LEVIN: Yet slowly, as scientists investigate black holes by observing the effect they have on their surroundings, evidence begins to mount. Our home is a spiral galaxy, hundreds of billions of stars, drawn together into a gigantic disk. And it will be a wild ride across the cosmos to places where everything you think you know is challenged, where space and time, even reality, are stranger than fiction. Now, Sagittarius isn't just any constellation. Could it be that one day everything will end up inside them and they will rule the universe? JANNA LEVIN: Only when they add an enormous invisible mass at the galaxy's center, does the model match the Hubble observations. Sinopsis: Estos astrofísicos muestran que los agujeros negros podrían tener las respuestas a cómo evolucionó el universo, surgió vida en la Tierra y se desarrolló la raza humana. What if we could visit a galaxy far, far away? RAI WEISS: They began to realize that this very placid thing that we see out there, all this very quiet thing that looks like nothing is happening and the only thing that's moving is the planets, found out that there was madness going out there. There are ways to investigate if something is happening somewhere, even if I can't see that thing directly. Then, the sky gets even stranger, when scientists mount Geiger counters on captured German rockets and discover the cosmos is also full of X-rays. JANNA LEVIN: So that's Cygnus X-1, if we could see it up close: a growing, feeding black hole with huge jets blasting particles way out into the universe. They're using a global network of radio telescopes. What everybody could agree on was this was extremely difficult. A half-century after Karl Schwarzschild mathematically showed that black holes are theoretically possible, scientists have identified a natural process that might create them: the death of large stars. And the whole spiral slowly rotates. Black Hole Apocalypse is available to stream now on Netflix and for free on PBS. The wave approaches as close as Alpha Centauri. PRIYAMVADA NATARAJAN: We are talking about things that are a billion times the mass of the sun. PRIYAMVADA NATARAJAN: If you're in a bathtub, and you pull the plug out and you see the water flowing in in a vortex, very fast down to the center, that's exactly what happens. The center, where any supermassive would be found, lies in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, the Archer. PRIYAMVADA NATARAJAN: The stuff in the inner regions would get slowly pulled in, sped up, will reach the event horizon, and then that's it. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You'll be extruded through the fabric of space and time like toothpaste through a tube. In this dense center, there are millions of stars and lots and lots of dust and gas. Pairs of stars are called binaries. DALE KOCEVSKI (Colby College): They're giving off so much energy that they have to have very massive supermassive black holes at their center. Because the angle is so very tiny, it can't be measured by any one telescope. TOD LAUER: The second step, where the real work begins, is to try to model the observations. So, as this gas around the black hole swirls inwards and actually hits the event horizon, it leaves a silhouette, a very well defined shadow on the surrounding light. JANNA LEVIN: A group of scientists, led by Shep Doeleman, is now attempting the impossible: to take a picture of a black hole. JANNA LEVIN: Now he has a triangle that goes between the earth at its two positions, and Cygnus X-1. Now, astrophysicists are realizing that black holes may be essential to how our universe evolved—their influence possibly … PETER GALISON: More and more evidence of these merging black holes tells us there are a lot of these stellar black holes around, that they can find each other and, and merge. Anything that enters that region will be trapped, unable to escape, even light. Was this review helpful to you? The immense gravity of the black hole pulls the gas in toward it. Many of the stars we see, perhaps half, are actually binaries: pairs of orbiting stars, locked together by gravity. Now, let's say I want to get even closer, by taking a spacewalk. In August 2017, LIGO detected gravitational waves from a collision of two neutron stars. Pretty amazing. There was one star there; there wasn't the second star there. It's to bring into focus something that science has told us for many, many years is precisely something we can't observe, the, the black hole. Ghez takes on a daunting challenge. Would you like to write a review? Anything that falls into them vanishes…gone forever. SCIENTIST #1: I've got 5 by 5. TOD LAUER: And we say, "let's try a star here; let's try one over here; let's have it go around this way; let's have this one go around that way." Drawing much closer to the event horizon, the gravitational lensing would become so extreme that one of my robots could look straight ahead and eventually see its own back, the light forever trapped in an eternal circle. How might a black hole reveal itself? Other astronomers agree it could be a black hole, but no one knows for sure. There were many people who feared that LIGO would suck the money out of the room. After decades of skepticism, scientists now accept that burned-out corpses of large stars can trap light inside them, warp space and time around them, attract matter and accelerate it to mind-boggling speeds. Check to see if it was April Fools' Day, and somebody didn't just tweak the knobs. JANNA LEVIN: Gravity crushes the stellar core down, smaller and smaller and smaller, until all its mass is compressed in an infinitely small point, a black hole. NIA IMARA: The life cycle of a star really depends on its mass. But we can imagine their future. EILAT GLIKMAN: Stars are born in litters, and you get a distribution of sizes and masses, thousands of little stars and a few big stars, very big stars, incredibly massive. MARCIA BARTUSIAK: Two-billion light years away, putting out the energy of a trillion suns each second, what could possibly create that? Even when I reach the event horizon. And so, what happens is the cloud fragments. JANNA LEVIN: It would have to be very massive; at least three times the mass of our sun. In order to calculate mass, Paul Murdin had to rely on rough estimates of the distance to Cygnus X-1, which varied by a factor of 10. What's inside a black hole? But a black hole that is feeding is different, when it feeds, it blasts out X-rays. PRIYAMVADA NATARAJAN: You could, potentially, have these direct collapse black holes, so black holes whose original masses, seed masses, the initial masses, are about 10,000 to maybe a hundred-thousand times the mass of the sun, and that they form from the get-go with that mass. But the spectrum of a quasar turns out to be incomprehensible. See how the image of distant stars is distorted and smeared into a circle? I'll be here at 12 ET to answer your questions about black holes! I can't move it without touching it, but if I drop the apple, it moves towards Earth. The instrument Ghez uses is Mauna Kea's Keck Observatory, one of the largest in the world. ANDREA GHEZ: The essence of this experiment comes from watching stars orbit the center of the galaxy. There’s no instruction manual, which means discerning fact from fiction and reasonable from ridiculous can be maddening. Black Hole Apocalypse Onkar Swaroop Uncategorized 13th Oct 2019 20 Minutes The mysteries of space and time are so exaggerating that if we start solving one of the many questions that our cosmos provides us, we will get a hundreds of new mysteries.Of all the objects in the cosmos, planets, stars, galaxies; none are as strange, mysterious or powerful as black holes. The one in the Andromeda galaxy is 100-million times as big as our sun, and it's not the biggest, not even close. Imagine I'm exploring space, with some advanced technology for interstellar travel, so that we could visit a black hole, maybe one in our own galactic neighborhood. JANNA LEVIN: Their primary target is Sagittarius A*, the supermassive in the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Electromagnetic radiation includes waves of many different frequencies: radio waves, microwaves, infrared and ultraviolet light, X-rays and gamma rays. SHEP DOELEMAN (Director, Event Horizon Telescope): Black holes are the greatest mystery in the universe. But Newton's laws can only describe gravity's effects, not explain what it is. JANNA LEVIN: …none are as strange, mysterious or powerful as black holes. What happens if you fall into one? Apparently black holes are not some anomalous or rare event in the cosmos. The apple just keeps falling. ANDREA GHEZ: They're the most exotic objects in the universe. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: We now just assume every galaxy, even ones we have yet to confirm, will have a supermassive black hole in their center. But imagine I could get the apple moving much faster. KIP THORNE: Stephen claims that Cygnus X-1 is not a black hole, and I claim it is a black hole. JANNA LEVIN: …the bizarre solution to a seemingly unsolvable equation. Which means that I want to get access to the largest telescope I can possibly get my hands on. TOD LAUER: Step one, we take a picture of the galaxy with the Hubble Space Telescope. JANNA LEVIN: A sound wave compresses and expands air, a gravitational wave compresses and expands space and everything in it. And here, 26,000 light years from the earth, is the center, which we see in the direction of Sagittarius. EILAT GLIKMAN: When a black hole is growing, a tremendous amount of energy is being liberated and sent out into the galaxy. Their mysteries are many, and we're just starting to unlock the secrets of these strange, powerful places. RAI WEISS: Those records had a terrible problem. And six months later, the earth goes around the sun to the other side, we get a different vantage point from Cygnus X-1. Documentário; Astrofísicos demonstram como os buracos negros podem deter as respostas relativamente à evolução do universo, à vida na Terra e, em última instância, à raça humana. What is creating all this energy? NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: We're troglodytes, drawing in caves. In his solution to Einstein's equations, he discovers something Einstein himself had not anticipated. And that could only mean one thing: the quasar is moving away from us at fantastic speed. JANNA LEVIN: Because these objects resemble stars, but were discovered through radio signals, astronomers name them "quasi-stellar radio sources," "quasars.". And like all black holes, it has an event horizon, a distinct edge to the darkness. This black hole rotates rapidly, distorting and dragging the fabric of space-time. And the goal of the adaptive optics system is to introduce a second mirror that's the exact opposite shape and make you look flat again. Now that I've crossed the event horizon, I'm falling toward the center, where all of the mass of the black hole is concentrated, and I'm beginning to get stretched. KIP THORNE (California Institute of Technology): I thought it was crazy. The apple is in orbit, falling freely, just like the International Space Station and the astronauts inside it. We needed an entirely new kind of observatory to detect it. JANNA LEVIN: But Schwarzschild isn't done. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: There's no known force to prevent the collapse to an infinitesimally small dot. Now, comes the gravitational wave that's coming, let's say, at this structure. I can't see the field; I can't see any players or baseballs or bats; but I can definitely tell if there's activity around the park. So, how does the earth move the apple without touching it? If Jupiter moved that fast, it would complete its entire orbit in a few hours. But Murdin wonders: is it possible there are binaries where only one of the stars is visible? First, it's colossal. The stars are whipping around the center of the Milky Way at phenomenal speeds. It originated over 50 years ago, when a few visionary scientists imagine a technology that hasn't yet been invented, searching for something no one is certain can be found. And they’re destructive. Unlike the slow steady nibbling of Cygnus X-1, this black hole is devouring most of an entire star in one gulp. Two and a half years later, in November 1918, World War I ends. TV-G | 1h 51min | Documentary | Episode aired 10 January 2018. Black Hole Apocalypse ( 4 ) IMDb 8.7 1 h 52 min 2018 NR Join astrophysicist and novelist Janna Levin on a mind-blowing voyage to the frontiers of black hole science, which is shining new light on the most powerful and mysterious objects in the universe. It starts with gas clouds made of hydrogen, helium and other elements, the same raw materials from which stars are born.