Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast Cosmic Queries – Black Holes and Dark Energy About this episode Could the Earth become a black hole? Does dark energy impact your life? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice answer your fan-submitted questions on black holes, dark energy, and other mysteries of the universe.
NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons and All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free.
Thanks to our Patrons Ashod Kuyumjian, Tony Biell, Jon Emerson, Zap Andersson, and Ocean & Dylan McIntyre for supporting us this week.
Image Credit: NASA, S. Gezari (The Johns Hopkins University), and J. Guillochon (University of California, Santa Cruz).
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
0:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. We've got a cosmic queries edition for you today. And I got with me the one, the only, Jugg Nix.
0:26 Chuck Nice? What's up Neil?
0:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Jugg, I followed your tweets during the Super Bowl, they were hilarious.
0:31 Chuck Nice? Oh, thanks man, yeah.
0:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you were watching the game or tweeting, what were you doing?
0:35 Chuck Nice? You know what, I only tweeted during the halftime because I was actually watching the game and enjoying it. And then halftime came up and I started wa- and of course it was very Latino.
0:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's right, in every dimension.
0:47 Chuck Nice? Very Latino in every single way. And you know, I have a partial Latino household.
0:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
0:53 Chuck Nice? So you know, my wife is Puerto Rican and Korean.
0:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is my mother.
0:56 Chuck Nice? Right, yeah, so my wife's Puerto Rican and you know, so we're sitting around and the kids and we're all looking at all the Puerto Rican-ness happen on the screen and we're like, yeah, this is great. And then it occurs to me, they better get this show over quickly before Donald Trump supports the whole damn Super Bowl.
1:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Across the border.
1:14 Chuck Nice? But, uh, yeah, that was fun.
1:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Cosmic queries today, what's the topic?
1:18 Chuck Nice? It's black holes and dark energy.
1:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, I should have sufficient expertise for that?
1:25 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
1:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But if not, we'll get Jan 11 on speed dial.
1:29 Chuck Nice? Absolutely.
1:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And we'll have to check in on her.
1:31 Chuck Nice? We'll get a little Black Hole Blues boogie in over here.
1:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh yeah, that's her book, Black Hole Blues.
1:35 Chuck Nice? Yeah, right on. Alright, should we start?
1:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so she's my cosmologist at large.
1:39 Chuck Nice? Yes, yes. It's, I'm sorry we didn't have her here, I love when you guys get into it man because there's always such great information that you two, you two seem to, it's not quite, it's not-
1:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In physics language it's called resonate, there's a resonance.
1:55 Chuck Nice? Excellent.
1:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, in physics lingo.
1:58 Chuck Nice? Okay.
1:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so you have two waves?
1:59 Chuck Nice? Yeah, and they come-
2:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So if they're not resonating, they can actually cancel out and you get nothing.
2:04 Chuck Nice? Exactly.
2:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If the peaks go with the troughs.
2:06 Chuck Nice? Correct.
2:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But, once the peaks go with the peaks and the troughs with the troughs, then it magnifies the strength of the wave and then you have extra, uh, extra flow.
2:14 Chuck Nice? A little constructive interference.
2:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, oh!
2:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck remembered his high school physics lab.
2:22 Chuck Nice? And we're gonna stop right there. I'm gonna quit while I'm ahead.
2:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, give it to me.
2:27 Chuck Nice? All right, here we go. Uh, Sunil Engel from Patreon, because we always start with a Patreon patron because they give us money. Uh, and we appreciate that, so thank you, Sunil. And Sunil wants to know this. Why are we so sure that there are black holes at the center of ours and perhaps every galaxy? It could be empty space, like the eye of a hurricane spiraling outwards.
2:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ooh.
2:54 Chuck Nice? Wow, check this out.
2:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ooh, I love me the, some eyes of hurricanes.
2:58 Chuck Nice? Right on.
2:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There was a movie back in the 60s.
3:02 Chuck Nice? Really?
3:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You know, the Apollo program was fully up and running, and so it influenced storytelling. And there's a movie called Marooned.
3:10 Chuck Nice? Marooned.
3:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so there was some spacecraft that got marooned. It's like they couldn't come back down out of orbit.
3:16 Chuck Nice? Nice.
3:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so they had to launch, what do you mean nice? Nice for storytelling.
3:20 Chuck Nice? It's great for a story.
3:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's all, all space movies, people go to space and something bad happens.
3:23 Chuck Nice? Exactly.
3:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's the plot.
3:25 Chuck Nice? All right.
3:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so of course it's in Florida. Uh, you know, this, uh, space program, launch bases are in Florida. And so they had to ready a craft to get to them before they died. All right, so they ready the craft and then a hurricane shows up.
3:40 Chuck Nice? Sweet.
3:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Cause it's Florida, right? So they can't launch the hurricane and someone calculates, wait. The eye of the hurricane is gonna pass directly over the launch tower.
3:52 Chuck Nice? Right. But will there be a launch tower left? That's the problem.
3:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, but they didn't ask that question.
3:58 Chuck Nice? Of course.
3:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, but it was like, very cool, that's how I learned that the center of the hurricane is actually a very silent, quiet place.
4:04 Chuck Nice? Right.
4:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so the eye came over, then they launched and you see the, the rocket coming out from the center of the thing.
4:09 Chuck Nice? Right.
4:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what they're asking is, in this question, what, uh, it's Sunil.
4:13 Chuck Nice? Sunil.
4:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Sunil is asking is, We see all this activity in the center of the galaxy, stars orbiting a big dark area. Right. How do we know it's not just like the center of a hurricane? And the reason why we know that is because what we learned from Kepler and later Newton is the orbit that you have is the speed of your orbit is completely determined by the mass that's sitting inside your orbit. Ah. The mass around which you revolve. Right. So what you say is, here are these things, I can see how fast they're moving. Run back to Kepler's equation and say, there must be a mass, a huge. Huge mass. A huge mass, like bigger than the size of the orbit. Wow.
4:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, and then you say, but wait a minute. We don't know anything that's that massive that's smaller than the orbit, except for A black hole. Okay. So in other words, if it was a star with that much mass, it would be huge. Or some other thing, and you see it. You'd see it, right. See a glowing thing. Gotcha. This is dark, and it has huge mass, and it's small. Hmm. That's three smoking guns right there. Right. Implicating a supermassive black hole. Supermassive black hole? Yes. And our black hole is less massive than the one in the center of the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest big galaxy. Do we have black hole envy? I think we do. Yeah, yeah.
5:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, but we're talking about hundreds of millions of times the mass of the sun. But it's a black hole, so it's small for that much mass. Wow. And so that's why, so we do it for our galaxy, then we do it for a neighboring galaxy. It's such a. Wait a minute. Go ahead. And we can't, no, other galaxies are far away, so ground-based telescopes, you can't see it, so we sent up Hubble. Mm-hmm. And so we say, well, if we have it, and we're not really a special galaxy in the universe, and Andromeda has it, our nearest neighbor, maybe, this is astronomy, astronomy think, these two galaxies have it, maybe every galaxy has it. Right. Okay? Because why should we be special? Right. It's called the Copernican principle. You're probably not special.
6:19 Chuck Nice? Right. Exactly. Copernicus, better known as my father. Not so special. I don't know what you think, but go ahead.
6:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Your father interacting with you.
6:29 Chuck Nice? Exactly.
6:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so you, we, we hypothesized that maybe all galaxies have black holes. So you invoke Hubble, who can see farther away galaxies and measure the movements of stars down deep in the middle, and they were moving fast too.
6:44 Chuck Nice? Right.
6:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And every next galaxy, and so we've now done enough, we just resigned to the fact that every galaxy's got a black, even some of the smaller galaxies that might not have, they got black holes.
6:55 Chuck Nice? They still have black holes, right.
6:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, no, we haven't seen, we haven't measured every one of the hundred billion galaxies in the universe, but every galaxy we measured, the big ones, the small ones, the...
7:03 Chuck Nice? It's like taking a poll.
7:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, except even better.
7:06 Chuck Nice? Right.
7:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because the universe doesn't have weird people living in back roads who think weird stuff. Well, actually, it might. The universe could have some weird galaxy that we've never discovered before.
7:17 Chuck Nice? Right.
7:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Every galaxy that fits into a category of galaxies that we've observed, it's got a black hole of different masses, and the more massive the entire galaxy?
7:24 Chuck Nice? Right.
7:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Then the more massive the black hole is.
7:26 Chuck Nice? Gotcha.
7:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, there's some that have billions of times the mass of the sun.
7:30 Chuck Nice? Damn.
7:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? As a black hole sitting in the middle.
7:32 Chuck Nice? Wow.
7:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
7:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a very dated reference.
7:38 Chuck Nice? It is.
7:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? 1974.
7:40 Chuck Nice? It really is. It's a great, great movie and scene.
7:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Deliverance.
7:45 Chuck Nice? Deliverance, that's right.
7:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That movie was so great, I have on purpose never seen it a second time, because it was so disturbing.
7:54 Chuck Nice? It is a disturbing movie.
7:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's the most disturbing movie I've ever seen in my life.
7:57 Chuck Nice? It's, it's really, yeah.
7:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it had, it had...
8:00 Chuck Nice? Which is why I have it on a loop.
8:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That explains, Chuck, okay. That explains it.
8:07 Chuck Nice? Sorry.
8:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that had Ned Beatty, it had, it had, um...
8:10 Chuck Nice? What's his name?
8:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A boy?
8:11 Chuck Nice? Uh, a Bert, Bert Reynolds, right?
8:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Bert Reynolds.
8:14 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
8:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In a serious role.
8:15 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
8:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? At a time he was making comedies.
8:17 Chuck Nice? That's right.
8:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, he was very, really good.
8:19 Chuck Nice? All right, I guess we'll move on. Wait, why not do another Patreon?
8:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We took way too long to answer that question.
8:23 Chuck Nice? That's not true.
8:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right.
8:25 Chuck Nice? I, I, I know you always want to answer one.
8:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We took a poll.
8:27 Chuck Nice? But here's the thing.
8:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We took a definitive poll.
8:29 Chuck Nice? Yes, we did.
8:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you know what they said?
8:31 Chuck Nice? What?
8:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They said, so these folks said, we want, keep the long answers.
8:35 Chuck Nice? Right.
8:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And other people said, no, we want more questions.
8:37 Chuck Nice? This is true, but guess what?
8:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It split right down the middle.
8:40 Chuck Nice? Everybody wants that though. So there's always gonna be people who are like, I love your long answers. I, I, it's entertaining. I find out stuff, you know, that I otherwise wouldn't have thought about.
8:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Did you wanna know about the movie Marooned? From nineteen sixty?
8:50 Chuck Nice? I love that. And this is why I-
8:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's how I learned. I, as a kid, how old am I? Ten years old? The Eye of Hurricanes. It's a quiet place.
8:56 Chuck Nice? As far as I'm concerned, those are, that's what makes the show good. But listen, and here's the thing, people, and, and just listen to me, I'm, I'm, just trust me.
9:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Actually, good point, good point.
9:05 Chuck Nice? Here's the point.
9:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What?
9:06 Chuck Nice? We're gonna get to your question at some point.
9:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? At some point. Here's the thing.
9:09 Chuck Nice? At some point.
9:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You raise an interesting point. If I just gave answers, then you don't really need me.
9:14 Chuck Nice? No, you'd just be Black Google.
9:19 Chuck Nice? Neil, Neil the Black Google.
9:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, so these are not Google answers.
9:29 Chuck Nice? Right.
9:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? These are sort of fleshy.
9:31 Chuck Nice? Exactly.
9:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Notice like, again, I'm just dating myself here. In the old days, when you look something up, you go to an encyclopedia.
9:37 Chuck Nice? That's right.
9:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But, you never, it would take you an hour to get to the thing you were looking up.
9:43 Chuck Nice? Right.
9:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because you stumbled all along the way.
9:46 Chuck Nice? All along the way. That's right.
9:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There was a whole journey.
9:49 Chuck Nice? Yes.
9:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To find your answer.
9:50 Chuck Nice? And see, kids, this is what you're missing out on by not having an encyclopedia. Cause that experience you just said right there is one of the best things in the world. It is. You go look up in your world book.
10:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Same, same with, same with dictionaries.
10:04 Chuck Nice? Right.
10:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You get lost, oh, that's what about that word? Where'd that word come from?
10:07 Chuck Nice? Exactly. Abstraperous. What the hell was that? Right? You know, it's, no, and that's the fun of it. And this is kinda what we're doing, so.
10:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, alright.
10:15 Chuck Nice? Alright, here we go. Uh, Alex wants to know this.
10:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm glad you pronounced his name correct.
10:21 Chuck Nice? Alex from Omaha, Nebraska.
10:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I was just in Omaha, Nebraska.
10:25 Chuck Nice? You were there?
10:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
10:26 Chuck Nice? Yeah?
10:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Omaha.
10:27 Chuck Nice? Nice. Uh, yeah, every, every time I hear Omaha, all I think of is Peyton Manning. Uh, can a small-
10:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Really?
10:33 Chuck Nice? Yeah, cause that's, no, he's not, but he screams that out when he's at the line of scrimmage. He goes, three forty-five, two forty, Omaha!
10:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Does he really?
10:40 Chuck Nice? I swear to God, yeah. And I have no idea what it means in football or anything, but maybe somebody will write in and let us know.
10:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
10:47 Chuck Nice? Uh, this is what Alex Betts wants to know. Can a small black hole orbit a bigger black hole? And if so, uh, can it be a stable orbit where it would never fall into or merge with the larger black hole?
11:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Can I be Black Google here? Ready? The answer is- Yes.
11:06 Chuck Nice? Boom.
11:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, next question.
11:08 Chuck Nice? Let's move on.
11:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, no. So, here's the thing. I don't think a black hole knows it's a black hole.
11:17 Chuck Nice? Really?
11:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's just a lump of mass out there looking for love, okay?
11:24 Chuck Nice? That's why it's a black hole.
11:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In all the wrong places.
11:26 Chuck Nice? Now I get the black part.
11:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no. So, so the point is, so a way to answer that is, if Earth today turned into a black hole.
11:36 Chuck Nice? Right.
11:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It'd be a mini-black hole, like the size of a, of a, I calculated once, about, of a plum. Okay?
11:43 Chuck Nice? Oh, really?
11:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
11:44 Chuck Nice? So you mean, all of this Earth got down into the size of a plum?
11:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Our event horizon, it would be deep within the plum.
11:50 Chuck Nice? Right.
11:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But the, the, this plum is the size of our event horizon.
11:53 Chuck Nice? Wow, with the mass of the Earth?
11:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes!
11:55 Chuck Nice? Holy crap.
11:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Black holes don't play, dude!
11:57 Chuck Nice? Okay, so look at this.
11:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Black holes don't play!
11:58 Chuck Nice? Before we go on further with this, I just gotta, because you, you know, you just really freaked me out.
12:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm in the middle of an answer.
12:03 Chuck Nice? I know, but. Where's the space come from? To, so as you're collapsing, why don't you run out of space? Inside of what's collapsing?
12:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
12:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You wanting, you wondering, isn't there a point beyond which you cannot compress it any further?
12:24 Chuck Nice? Yes!
12:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
12:25 Chuck Nice? Yes!
12:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alright. Alright.
12:28 Chuck Nice? Alex, we're getting back to your question, I'm sorry. But this is, this is really freaking me out right now. And it just, I just gotta know.
12:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. So, there are various states of matter.
12:39 Chuck Nice? Okay.
12:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay? Why, why is a rock a rock? Because something is preventing it from collapsing.
12:46 Chuck Nice? Right.
12:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay? So what is it? Well, it's the forces between molecules and atoms.
12:51 Chuck Nice? Okay.
12:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay?
12:52 Chuck Nice? Right.
12:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So they're called electronic forces, they're called.
12:54 Chuck Nice? I got that.
12:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right? That's why you, we all have, so.
12:57 Chuck Nice? That's why I can't put my hand through my leg.
12:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Through your leg, okay?
12:59 Chuck Nice? Or through this chair.
13:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Correct.
13:01 Chuck Nice? Okay.
13:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Correct, okay.
13:01 Chuck Nice? I got you.
13:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Unless you're Invisible Man or something, or some other. Alright, so, now, it turns out, under high enough pressure, you can collapse that.
13:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, and close down the gaps that are between those atoms and molecules. Okay. All right, now they get closer. Okay. Together, okay? And you get something called electron degeneracy. That's what it's called, has nothing to do with its moral, uh, compass. That's it. Of electrons. Right, exactly. Okay, so electron degeneracy, they're so tightly packed, okay? That you're trying to cram electrons into the space of other electrons and they don't allow that. All right, from quantum, quantum physics. Okay. All right, so they, they keep their own identity within the structure. And then we have matter out there that resemble it, it's called white dwarfs. White dwarfs are electron degeneracy, and they're extremely dense. Mm-hmm.
13:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, wait, we can go further, okay? There's still the gap between the nucleus of an atom and the electrons themselves. Let's collapse that gap, and that is the biggest gap of them all. Ah. Okay, you know what that, that gap is? Take a football stadium, okay? And then put, uh, I don't know, a, uh, a mustard seed. Okay. Or something tiny. Tiny is a mustard seed. A poppy seed, mustard seed is biblical, but let's take a, like a poppy seed. All right. Put that in the middle of the stadium. Right. That's the nucleus and the outer size of the stadium is the orbits of the electrons. Wow. Atoms are mostly empty space. Gotcha. And the first dude to determine this, his name was, was J.J. Thompson.
14:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And he, he performed the experiment by firing particles through a very thin film of gold. Gold you can hammer it so thin you can have practically one layer thick of atoms, okay? All right, you can, it's very malleable is the chemistry term, right? Make it really thin, and he fired particles, and he's ready to see them, some bounced back, careened to the left, to the right, and ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine-nine-nine-nine percent of them went straight through like nothing was there. And he was the first person to realize. That matter is mostly empty space. Gotcha. And the next morning, he is rumored to be afraid to step onto the floor. Getting out of bed. Right. That he might fall through it. Wow. Cause he alone knew how empty matter was.
15:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the next stage is collapsing everything down and you're cramming the electrons into the protons. Cause they're no longer can they separate themselves, alright? But they're not gonna occupy the same space anymore. They're crammed together. If you combine a proton and an electron, what happens to the charge? It becomes what? I don't know. Proton. Thank you for that admission of total.
15:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alright, electron has a negative charge, proton has a positive charge, they cancel out. And what kind, how much charge are you left with? Uh, neutral. Neutral. So you put them together, you create a neutron. Right. Okay, so now you, so you don't have the electron degeneracy and you have a pack, a pack of neutrons. That is the densest matter that exists out there that is not a black hole. Okay, so, these are called neutron stars. Cause in my field, we tell it like, like it is, alright? And neutron stars that rapidly rotate have magnetic fields, they call, they pulse. In radio waves, we call those pulsars. Okay, that makes sense. The person who discovered pulsars, Anthony Huish, won the Nobel Prize for it back in the nineteen seventy, sixty's. And started a watch company. Little known fact.
16:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? People always taking our words. Exactly. We got Milky Way candy bar, we, excuse me, can we get some royalties for that, please? Okay, the Mars bar, I know it's a family name, but still, I'm taking it. Right. Alright. And you know how many car names are astronomically named? Uh. Okay, there's like, the Astro, that's the name of a minivan. That was a, oh my god, there is an Astro minivan. Yes, I made a whole list, I got a whole list. One, I will do a whole show. On cars? Car names. Alright. A whole show. Alright. I could do a whole show. Okay, gotcha. Don't get me started. Don't make me go there, okay? A whole show on names of stuff that came from my field. Came from your astrophysics. Yeah, okay. That's it. Promise, we'll do a show. Okay. Alright, so.
17:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So now we're a pulsar. Okay, now a pulsar, that stuff is there. So, that's, if you take, wanna know how dense that is? Take a herd of three hundred.
17:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Billion elephants and cram them into a thimble.
17:32 Chuck Nice? Holy crap.
17:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
17:35 Chuck Nice? Wow.
17:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So now, you can calculate how much pressure that makes to stop it from collapsing further. And you can calculate that, and then you figure out, in a black hole, the collapsing force is even greater.
17:47 Chuck Nice? Damn.
17:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, we don't know, we got no physics anymore after that.
17:52 Chuck Nice? Right.
17:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, in a black hole, it's denser than the density of 300 billion elephants.
17:57 Chuck Nice? In a thimble.
17:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Crammed into a thimble.
18:00 Chuck Nice? Right.
18:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And, just imagine trying to do that.
18:03 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
18:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You know, with your...
18:04 Chuck Nice? Definitely need a crowbar. Or something.
18:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Something.
18:07 Chuck Nice? It's just right.
18:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So...
18:11 Chuck Nice? Wow.
18:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, yes, you, I can get you to the neutron star density. After that, it's all black holes.
18:17 Chuck Nice? It's all black holes.
18:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's all black holes.
18:18 Chuck Nice? Wow!
18:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So now, Earth becomes a black hole, we just continue to orbit the sun. The gravity between us and the sun is determined just by our masses. Our mass didn't change.
18:28 Chuck Nice? Right.
18:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay? It's still the same mass, who cares if we're a black hole?
18:32 Chuck Nice? Right.
18:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right? Now, if you turn the sun into a black hole, we don't care if it has the same mass.
18:37 Chuck Nice? Right.
18:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, we're these mini-black hole orbiting big black hole, and there you go.
18:40 Chuck Nice? Right. So, we'd just be orbiting the little mini-black hole, that's all?
18:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, we'd be the mini-black hole orbiting...
18:46 Chuck Nice? Oh, no, I'm saying, if the sun became a black hole, we would just continue to orbit that little black hole.
18:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But, but we're littler, so we're the plum-sized black hole.
18:53 Chuck Nice? Right.
18:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The sun is the big black hole. It's a bigger black hole.
18:56 Chuck Nice? Bigger.
18:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right. So, so, the point is, the reason why we see black holes have such high gravity is they have high surface gravity. But if you step the same distance away from it that you were before it became a black hole, there's not any difference.
19:09 Chuck Nice? Not this is gonna happen.
19:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right. It's just that you can get real close to the center of gravity, and the power of the gravity keeps getting, the, the force of gravity keeps getting higher and higher and higher and higher and higher.
19:18 Chuck Nice? Okay.
19:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, that's how that works.
19:19 Chuck Nice? That's awesome.
19:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, the answer is yes.
19:20 Chuck Nice? The, the, the answer is yes!
19:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We gotta take our first break. When we come back, more cosmic queries, black holes, and...
19:27 Chuck Nice? Dark energy.
19:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Dark energy on StarTalk.
19:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back, StarTalk. Cosmic Queries, Chuck Nice.
19:54 Chuck Nice? That's right.
19:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The basic ingredients. You, me, Cosmic Queries, StarTalk.
20:00 Chuck Nice? That's it, that's it.
20:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let's take it from there.
20:02 Chuck Nice? Let's take it from there.
20:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alright, and topic again?
20:04 Chuck Nice? Uh, dark energy and black holes.
20:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let's do it, I thi- I think I can get through that top- those topics.
20:09 Chuck Nice? So far, so good. Alright, let's jump right back into this with a question from Facebook and Kent...
20:18 Chuck Nice? Ba- Baker.
20:24 Chuck Nice? Yep, Kent.
20:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? People, would you please give, like-
20:26 Chuck Nice? Phonetics!
20:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Pronunciation guides for Chuck.
20:29 Chuck Nice? Yes.
20:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay?
20:30 Chuck Nice? Yes.
20:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Cause reading is fundamental.
20:32 Chuck Nice? And I think you guys are just screwing with me, to be honest, I really do. Anyway, he goes like this, "Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, please! Ask Neil if a black hole can reignite into a star once it has lost enough mass through Hawking radiation."
20:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, really?
20:47 Chuck Nice? What a great question!
20:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Good question!
20:49 Chuck Nice? Interesting!
20:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No.
20:54 Chuck Nice? There you go, Kent.
20:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because, um... If somehow the black hole could stay the same size and you pulled mass out?
21:04 Chuck Nice? Right.
21:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Then, I dunno, I'd have to think that through. But what happens is, as you pull mass out, the black hole gets smaller and smaller and smaller to be the appropriate-sized black hole for the mass that's left over.
21:16 Chuck Nice? Okay.
21:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so that's what's happening.
21:18 Chuck Nice? Gotcha.
21:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the black hole just continues to shrink, keeping all of its parameters, sort of black hole, uh, proper.
21:24 Chuck Nice? Ah, gotcha.
21:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that's why.
21:27 Chuck Nice? Gotcha, gotcha. There you go, alright.
21:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alright.
21:30 Chuck Nice? That's pretty cool. Alright, this is John-
21:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But that's, I mean, that'd make a good sci-fi story. You know, someone in the future figures out a way to undo black holes.
21:39 Chuck Nice? Oh, cool.
21:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And turn them back into sort of masses that they once were.
21:42 Chuck Nice? Right.
21:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, okay.
21:44 Chuck Nice? That's kinda cool, that-
21:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let's do it.
21:45 Chuck Nice? That, well, you, if you could do that, you probably could just create a black hole.
21:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, once you start controlling black holes, they, they will, uh- Bend to your whims.
21:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And then the first thing people do is weaponize it.
22:01 Chuck Nice? Of course.
22:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, this is what humans do.
22:03 Chuck Nice? Now, that's a great sci-fi story. Instead of some stupid, like, Death Star.
22:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
22:08 Chuck Nice? Like, you actually have a killer black hole.
22:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, that's, they did that in Star Trek.
22:13 Chuck Nice? Oh, they did?
22:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes. It was this, uh, a drill that would drill down to the center of a planet and then drop red matter. And then it would turn this planet into a black hole.
22:22 Chuck Nice? That's right.
22:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, yeah, they've been there.
22:25 Chuck Nice? Yeah, damn. I'm late, I'm late, I'm late on that one. You're right, that was the red matter, that, yeah.
22:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Again, why destroy the whole planet? Wouldn't you want to keep the planet? If you don't, if you're enemies with who's on the surface, get rid of them. By some diabolical means.
22:39 Chuck Nice? Right.
22:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But keep the real estate.
22:41 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
22:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What, what are you doing?
22:43 Chuck Nice? And it's always about, like, revenge, like, you know? It's not gonna bring your wife and children back, okay? Get over it. All right, here we go. John Feltrin, a black hole warps space, time around it.
22:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
22:56 Chuck Nice? A star does the same.
22:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
22:59 Chuck Nice? What happens to the gravitational well that the star has formed? If the star begins to fall into the gravitational well formed by the black hole? Does it dissipate at the same rate as the amount of mass being stripped? Or do both wells combine? I love the people, there's some good. Nah, this is so good, John. You're just showing off.
23:26 Chuck Nice? That's what you're doing, John. John probably worked right here at the museum. John is downstairs. Sending us questions through, babe.
23:41 Chuck Nice? All right.
23:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, so.
23:44 Chuck Nice? There's a lot to.
23:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so if you think of it as the classical distortion in like a rubber sheet.
23:51 Chuck Nice? Right, the rubber sheet model.
23:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, the black hole is like a very deep hole in the rubber sheet. But everybody's got a dimple in the rubber sheet. Okay, you got, you have your own.
24:00 Chuck Nice? I have my own little dimple.
24:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Your own little dimple.
24:01 Chuck Nice? Right, they're adorable.
24:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Depending on the mass.
24:06 Chuck Nice? Exactly.
24:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Depending on the mass determines how deep the dimple is in the fabric of space and time.
24:12 Chuck Nice? Right.
24:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, as you merge two dimples, if the black hole, if it's a black hole in a star, if the black hole begins to flay the star, as black holes are known to do.
24:25 Chuck Nice? Hmm.
24:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Then its dimple will get deeper and the black hole's dimple will get deeper and the star's dimple will get shallower in response to this.
24:36 Chuck Nice? Welcome to Cooking with Black Holes. Today, we're gonna flay a star. Go ahead.
24:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, that's, I didn't say flay.
24:42 Chuck Nice? I know, you said flay.
24:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Flay.
24:45 Chuck Nice? Right.
24:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Flay, that's it. You know what that means?
24:48 Chuck Nice? Uh, it means to disperse.
24:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no.
24:51 Chuck Nice? Oh, what's it mean?
24:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No.
24:52 Chuck Nice? I thought it meant like to.
24:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No.
24:54 Chuck Nice? Pull apart.
24:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's to skin.
24:58 Chuck Nice? Got you. Okay.
25:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm pretty sure.
25:01 Chuck Nice? I'm, and listen, I'm not.
25:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let me, I'm checking right now.
25:04 Chuck Nice? I thought it meant to pull apart, but to skin, I'll take it.
25:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, it could be, generally, if you're pulling someone apart, you would do it with the skin first, because that's the outer layer. So maybe that could have led to your, your hypothesis that, all right, let's do this.
25:17 Chuck Nice? Okay.
25:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And we go here.
25:19 Chuck Nice? I love that he actually looks it up instead of just going, hey Siri.
25:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Flay. Okay, here we go.
25:25 Chuck Nice? Flay.
25:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To strip off the skin.
25:28 Chuck Nice? You're correct.
25:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or outer covering of.
25:31 Chuck Nice? Right, so it's not really pull apart. It is indeed skinned, because stripping is skinny.
25:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And then you metaphor it, and it's like to criticize or scold with scathing severity.
25:41 Chuck Nice? Oh, yo, you just got flayed, damn.
25:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And here's another one, to deprive or strip of money or property.
25:49 Chuck Nice? Oh, that's mine.
25:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because these are your outer accoutrements, right?
25:53 Chuck Nice? Exactly, gotcha. Better known as divorce.
25:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, that's what it is. So divorce is a, is a, is a legal flaying.
26:00 Chuck Nice? It's legal flaying, that's all. Sweet. All right, so anyway, the star is flayed by the bigger dimple of the black hole.
26:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, and so if you flay that, so the dimple's changed size relative to the mass that has changed hands.
26:16 Chuck Nice? Right.
26:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, so it is possible for the star to flay the star, for the black hole to flay the star completely, so that it no longer has a dimple and it has consumed all of its mass.
26:27 Chuck Nice? Got you.
26:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And then it is the sum of the two dimples together.
26:30 Chuck Nice? Got you.
26:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. Otherwise, you can have a star that's getting flayed while it's orbiting the two. And so you have two dimples just in orbit with a slow change in the two. And that's until one just disappears completely. This is kind of fun to watch.
26:46 Chuck Nice? Right.
26:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I mean, you can imagine that.
26:48 Chuck Nice? Right.
26:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
26:49 Chuck Nice? Okay.
26:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so there you go.
26:50 Chuck Nice? There you have it. So that's how it is.
26:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mm-hmm.
26:52 Chuck Nice? Okay. All right, let's go to Love Marauder.
26:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You knew how to pronounce that.
26:58 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
27:01 Chuck Nice? How big of an impact does dark energy have on my everyday life?
27:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? None. Okay, next question.
27:09 Chuck Nice? It's not always about you, Love Marauder. It's not always about you.
27:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so the thing is, dark energy is this, is this myster- still mysterious pressure in the vacuum of space that's forcing the universe to accelerate in its expansion against the wishes of all the galaxies and their gravity trying to slow the thing down.
27:35 Chuck Nice? Right.
27:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so, so some people thought of it as an anti-gravity force. Could we one day harness it and make spaceships out of it?
27:44 Chuck Nice? Right.
27:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, so there's an interesting sci-fi frontier there. But what I can tell you is, because it's manifesting in the vacuum relative to where there isn't a vacuum, there's not much vacuum here.
27:59 Chuck Nice? No.
27:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, so gravity and electromagnetism and all these other things are really dominating where you happen to be. So, no, there's no known, visible, or measurable effect on anything you will do in your life.
28:13 Chuck Nice? Right.
28:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's all I'm saying.
28:14 Chuck Nice? There you go.
28:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So just, just.
28:16 Chuck Nice? If you're not a galaxy, don't worry about it.
28:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, yeah, it's not a galaxy among other galaxies in the expanding universe.
28:21 Chuck Nice? Right.
28:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just chill.
28:22 Chuck Nice? Just chill.
28:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chill on that.
28:23 Chuck Nice? All right, well, there you go. That's it, Love Marauder. I, I hope that, I hope you find that sufficient to continue your love exploits. All right. All right, uh, this is Brian Bull, and he wants to know this. Um, does a black hole still produce light or other radiation that just can't escape the black hole's gravity? So. Yeah.
28:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, there's a lot of energy and matter inside of a black hole.
28:48 Chuck Nice? Right.
28:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So if you're in the black hole.
28:50 Chuck Nice? In.
28:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, he's probably.
28:51 Chuck Nice? Bright as I don't know what.
28:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, right, exactly.
28:53 Chuck Nice? Cause the light got no place to go.
28:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, it's got no place to go.
28:55 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
28:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so it's all in there. So now, we don't have direct evidence of this. Chuck, you wanna be? Chuck, you know, call me and when you get back.
29:04 Chuck Nice? I'll go find this out. Let me go get on this.
29:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, get, yeah, you, you report back to me. I'm on a full report on my desk in the morning.
29:09 Chuck Nice? I'll be like Matthew McConaughey in that string theory movie. Damn, what was the name of that movie?
29:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Interstellar.
29:14 Chuck Nice? Interstellar, yes.
29:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What do you mean, that's string theory? Interstellar.
29:18 Chuck Nice? Interstellar.
29:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Again with the program.
29:19 Chuck Nice? Listen, I'm on new medication. It's really bothering my memory.
29:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. So, um, yeah, there's no reason why you wouldn't still see light and other things inside the black hole.
29:29 Chuck Nice? Right.
29:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, it's just not getting out.
29:31 Chuck Nice? It's cool.
29:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
29:32 Chuck Nice? That's excellent, excellent, excellent. All right, um, oh.
29:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, you know what else you'd see?
29:36 Chuck Nice? Go ahead.
29:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you tried to look outside the black hole, you'd see all the stuff coming in.
29:42 Chuck Nice? Oh, really?
29:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, that'd be really bright. Oh, yeah.
29:45 Chuck Nice? That's kinda cool, actually.
29:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
29:47 Chuck Nice? Not a bad, yeah, the only problem is you'd just be like, "Don't come in here." "There's no way out. No, don't come in," you know? What's that guy saying down there?
29:59 Chuck Nice? All right, uh, this is R Y P. Thank you, R Y P, for just using your initials, okay? R Y P wants to know this.
30:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Maybe that's his name, Rip.
30:12 Chuck Nice? Like, yeah, that's, that's cool. Rip wants to know this. Could dark energy or matter, dark matter or dark energy?
30:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mm-hmm.
30:20 Chuck Nice? Is it possible to manipulate it, to use it as a fuel of some sort? Interesting.
30:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So here's a problem.
30:27 Chuck Nice? Mm-hmm.
30:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Dark energy, we don't know how to interact with it. We, we just measure its effects on the universe. Dark matter. Reveals itself to us through its gravity.
30:39 Chuck Nice? Mm hmm.
30:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. But it doesn't reveal itself to us in any other way that we normally interact.
30:45 Chuck Nice? So we can see its effects, but not what it is itself.
30:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Not materially.
30:51 Chuck Nice? Not materially.
30:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's correct, because materially, what do you do? You you touch it.
30:55 Chuck Nice? Right.
30:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You pinch it.
30:56 Chuck Nice? Right.
30:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You weigh it.
30:57 Chuck Nice? Right.
30:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I mean, you you you put it on, you grab it, piece of it, put it on a scale.
31:01 Chuck Nice? Mm hmm.
31:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You do all of this and dark matter. In order to have something, you you are this person called Chuck.
31:08 Chuck Nice? Right.
31:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because all your atoms are all attached to each other.
31:11 Chuck Nice? Thank God.
31:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay?
31:13 Chuck Nice? Yes.
31:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They're all there.
31:13 Chuck Nice? Right.
31:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Dark matter not only doesn't attach to your atoms.
31:19 Chuck Nice? Right.
31:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It doesn't attach to itself.
31:23 Chuck Nice? Ooh.
31:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So as far as we know, there are no lumps of dark matter out there.
31:29 Chuck Nice? Right.
31:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There are no dark matter planets.
31:30 Chuck Nice? Right.
31:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No dark matter galaxies.
31:32 Chuck Nice? In the cosmos that is oatmeal, there are no lumps of dark matter.
31:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You don't like lumps in your oatmeal?
31:41 Chuck Nice? No, I do not. I used to as a kid, because you would put, roll them in sugar, then eat them like oatmeal candy, but go ahead, sorry.
31:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow.
31:49 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
31:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, do you, that was early, uh, you were early out of the box with granola.
31:53 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
31:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Those are rolled, with dipped, rolled in sugar.
31:57 Chuck Nice? So you take the oatmeal lump, you roll it in some sugar and you eat it.
32:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, that was, yeah, alright.
32:02 Chuck Nice? So there you go. Alright!
32:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so, yeah, there's no, we have no way to harness it in that sense.
32:09 Chuck Nice? Gotcha.
32:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you, if you can't grab it because your hand goes straight through it.
32:12 Chuck Nice? Right.
32:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it doesn't make itself, given itself any kind of density.
32:16 Chuck Nice? Sweet.
32:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you can't.
32:18 Chuck Nice? There's nothing you can do to, right, so you can see it.
32:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, you can see its effects.
32:23 Chuck Nice? Its effects, you can see its effects, but you can't see it and. You can't interact with it.
32:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It is literally invisible.
32:31 Chuck Nice? Wow.
32:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because not only do your molecules and atoms not interact, light doesn't interact with it.
32:35 Chuck Nice? Oh my gosh.
32:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And light and molecules and atoms are all related to each other.
32:38 Chuck Nice? Correct.
32:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They all interact, they all, you reflect light.
32:41 Chuck Nice? Right.
32:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Some light goes through you, like, but gets absorbed inside of you, like X-rays go into your bones.
32:46 Chuck Nice? This is true.
32:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? See this on a map, they shadow your bones.
32:49 Chuck Nice? I absorb a little more light than most, I will say.
32:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's true, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a very, it's called albedo.
32:54 Chuck Nice? Albe- ah, wait a minute.
32:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We have a word for that.
32:56 Chuck Nice? Albedo.
32:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
32:58 Chuck Nice? Yes.
32:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, if you have an albedo of one.
33:01 Chuck Nice? Right.
33:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You reflect a hundred percent of the light that hits you.
33:03 Chuck Nice? Ah, not to be confused with libido.
33:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you have an albedo.
33:08 Chuck Nice? If you have a libido of one.
33:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you have an albedo of zero, you absorb everything that comes to you, that would be a black hole.
33:15 Chuck Nice? If you have a libido of zero, you are married. Go ahead.
33:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How many more libido jokes?
33:23 Chuck Nice? I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
33:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Into a minute.
33:25 Chuck Nice? I can't help it, I don't know what it is, but go ahead, albedo.
33:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, the point is, yeah, albedo, so, so, um, albedo, just, it's the ability of a surface of something to reflect light.
33:36 Chuck Nice? Okay.
33:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's all, and it's a percent, so one would be a hundred percent.
33:40 Chuck Nice? Nice.
33:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And zero, zero, so, the moon has a very low albedo, as bright as it can be, it doesn't reflect much light.
33:45 Chuck Nice? Wow.
33:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, it's like in the, like ten percent of the lighters, I forgot the exact number, but it's really, it's absorbing most of the rest of it.
33:51 Chuck Nice? Wow.
33:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, yeah, so, um, where was I, all I'm saying is, if you can't grab something and put it in a box.
34:01 Chuck Nice? You can't harness it.
34:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You can't, what do we, we don't know how to harness it, right, we need some other way that we invent, once we figure out what it is, we might be able to find a dark matter trap.
34:10 Chuck Nice? How do you figure out what something is if you can't interact with it?
34:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I know! Thank you!
34:16 Chuck Nice? He's like, "Welcome to my world!"
34:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I know, thank you! This is the longest unsolved problem in astrophysics. It's been with us since 1936.
34:25 Chuck Nice? Wow.
34:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
34:26 Chuck Nice? Dude, that is amazing. That is really cool.
34:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm just saying.
34:30 Chuck Nice? So, the guy who figures that out.
34:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The person.
34:34 Chuck Nice? The person.
34:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The human.
34:35 Chuck Nice? You're right. I shouldn't say guy. I don't know how to say, we're living in 2020 now. I should, the person who figures that out is gonna win a Nobel Prize time 10.
34:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, the person who figures out what dark matter is.
34:49 Chuck Nice? Right.
34:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And, and then we, ideally, we can control it, manipulate it, put some in a box. That'd be cool.
34:55 Chuck Nice? Nice. Alright.
34:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We gotta take a break?
34:57 Chuck Nice? Okay.
34:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? When we come back, more StarTalk, cosmic queries, black holes, dark matter. And energy.
35:17 Chuck Nice? Time to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons. Ashad Kuyamjian and Tony Biel. Thanks so much, guys, for supporting us and helping us make our little trek through the cosmos. And anyone else, if you would like your very own Patreon shout out, make sure you go to patreon.com/startalkradio and support us.
35:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back. StarTalk, Cosmic Query.
35:55 Chuck Nice? Yes.
35:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck Nice tweeting at Chuck Nice Comic.
35:58 Chuck Nice? Thank you, sir. Yes, that is correct.
36:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Very good. So, it turns out, we are luxuriating in these answers. I will, I will executive privilege and say, we will not do lightning round.
36:08 Chuck Nice? Excellent.
36:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, we'll just continue to, continue to bask.
36:12 Chuck Nice? Nice, nice.
36:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In the cosmic knowledge juxtaposed with cosmic ignorance.
36:18 Chuck Nice? Sweet.
36:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And therein.
36:19 Chuck Nice? Did you just, did you just describe the two people who are on this podcast? Wait a minute, what just happened?
36:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck, you need more self-confidence here. I was describing something bigger than us.
36:30 Chuck Nice? Okay.
36:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay?
36:31 Chuck Nice? Alright, alright.
36:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's the intersection of cosmic knowledge and cosmic ignorance. That is the moving frontier of cosmic discovery.
36:38 Chuck Nice? Ooh. Nice. That's, I love that. You should tweet that.
36:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let me go ahead and tweet that.
36:44 Chuck Nice? Yeah, you should. That's, that's, that's quite eloquent and elegant at the same time. All right, here we go. Martin Cuevas. And Martin wants to know this. What would happen to the Earth if it came close or directly in contact with a black hole? The one being hypothesized to be perhaps the Planet Nine orbit? So I didn't realize that Planet Nine was actually posit, um, posited to be a black hole. I thought that's why they call it Planet Nine because it's supposed to be this supermassive object that's out past the Kuiper Belt, but...
37:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's new to me, too.
37:23 Chuck Nice? Is it? Okay. All right, good.
37:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm just saying.
37:25 Chuck Nice? All right, good, then I'm not alone. Good.
37:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I, I don't know who's hypothesizing that we have external black holes orbit. I don't know.
37:33 Chuck Nice? Right.
37:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I don't, if, maybe it's, maybe I missed that.
37:36 Chuck Nice? Right.
37:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Maybe I missed that.
37:37 Chuck Nice? A new development?
37:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That Morning Edition with the Astrophysical Journal.
37:40 Chuck Nice? Right.
37:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I might have, you know, but, uh, so, but it's still a fascinating question. And I think about this all the time.
37:47 Chuck Nice? Oh, really?
37:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. If Earth happened upon a black hole that was traveling through space, an encounter between Earth and a black hole, Earth loses.
37:56 Chuck Nice? Gotcha.
37:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay?
37:58 Chuck Nice? Right.
37:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now, because we know about this tidal force that will stretch things, where the, the side of the Earth nearest the black hole will experience a much higher force of gravity than the side that's farthest.
38:11 Chuck Nice? Mm-hmm.
38:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That means the side closest to the black hole will pull towards it faster than the side of Earth, and so you'll end up stretching Earth.
38:18 Chuck Nice? Okay.
38:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now, the, the problem with the word "stretch" is, you know, Earth is not Gumby, right? Or Elastic Man.
38:25 Chuck Nice? I am Earth, dammit!
38:28 Chuck Nice? I'm sorry.
38:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's, so, it's not like, it's, Earth is not made of rubber. Earth is made of sort of solid substance. So if you're going to stretch, put under... Stress the solid sphere that is Earth. Earth will basically begin to crumble.
38:47 Chuck Nice? Okay.
38:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Into smaller and smaller bits of rock.
38:50 Chuck Nice? So you're looking at massive earthquakes.
38:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, yeah, but it would happen.
38:55 Chuck Nice? And tidal waves.
38:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, oh, yeah, I mean, if you're falling straight in.
38:59 Chuck Nice? Right.
39:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, oh, so, yeah, so Earth will distort. Become more and more oblong until the the the strength of the materials can't hold that shape any anymore.
39:09 Chuck Nice? Right.
39:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And then it'll start sort of crumbling apart. And we call that spaghettification is when you start becoming this long strand. But again, spaghetti is one continuous string.
39:20 Chuck Nice? Right, right.
39:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Whereas this will be a stream of of particles.
39:26 Chuck Nice? That's right.
39:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A parade of particles as they.
39:29 Chuck Nice? So is this Netflix-ication?
39:33 Chuck Nice? Instead of spaghettification.
39:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How do you get Netflix in there?
39:36 Chuck Nice? Streaming.
39:39 Chuck Nice? Now, I am going to.
39:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, you have to flub one every now and then.
39:42 Chuck Nice? I'm gonna, we're gonna cut that out. We're cutting that one out. That one was just for me.
39:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You were testing, new material, just testing material.
39:53 Chuck Nice? That was just for me. You're the person who came up with spaghettification, if I'm not mistaken.
39:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, I just popularized it.
39:59 Chuck Nice? Really?
39:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, it's.
40:00 Chuck Nice? Oh, I thought, I thought you, I thought you actually coined the term.
40:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, I, I popularized it, but the, the, it's traceable to Martin Rees.
40:08 Chuck Nice? Martin Rees.
40:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Sir Martin Rees, in fact, he got, he's now Lord, Lord Rees.
40:12 Chuck Nice? Gotcha.
40:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Lord Martin, do you go the first?
40:14 Chuck Nice? A little full of himself, isn't he?
40:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no.
40:18 Chuck Nice? You call me Lord Rees. Oh, Sir Martin Rees, that's Lord Rees to you. What the hell is up with Martin? Just.
40:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, Martin, Marty, Marty, Marty from the street corner, what happened to you?
40:32 Chuck Nice? Hey, Marty, it's Lord Rees now. What is Marty? What the hell is your problem, Marty?
40:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, he's not from Brooklyn.
40:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Marty.
40:44 Chuck Nice? Lord, I command thee to. I command thee to bring me my spaghettification. All right, so, okay, all right, well, yeah.
40:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Did we answer that? Oh, yeah, yeah, so we just break apart.
40:58 Chuck Nice? So we break apart.
40:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you're sitting here on Earth, it would just be an interesting phenomenon to behold.
41:02 Chuck Nice? Wow, yeah.
41:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
41:04 Chuck Nice? That's cool, man. All right, hey, Martin, great question.
41:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It would break open the, the, the very hot, liquid core of the Earth.
41:12 Chuck Nice? Now, that doesn't, that doesn't sound good.
41:15 Chuck Nice? I'm just gonna say, I don't, I don't know if I like that.
41:20 Chuck Nice? You cracking open the Earth.
41:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the whole middle.
41:23 Chuck Nice? And the whole middle.
41:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is glowing iron nickel ball.
41:26 Chuck Nice? Damn.
41:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of molten iron.
41:28 Chuck Nice? Right.
41:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, it's a bad day for Earth.
41:30 Chuck Nice? That's, yeah, that's not cool. Right on. All right, let's go to Todd Tobin, and Todd says, "How does a black hole not consume space-time itself? And just go BS crazy, bat crap crazy, and destroy the entire universe? Why aren't black holes running amok?"
41:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Did he say BC crazy?
41:54 Chuck Nice? He said bat, you know.
41:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, oh, with the S or the C?
41:59 Chuck Nice? Yeah, bat, the bat, the bad word.
42:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Did he say crap, or did he say S-word?
42:02 Chuck Nice? No, he said the S-word.
42:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, you, you were translating for us?
42:05 Chuck Nice? Yes, I was.
42:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because you're, you're acting as your own sponsor, uh, uh.
42:07 Chuck Nice? You know why? Because.
42:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Acting as your, as your own censor.
42:09 Chuck Nice? These little kids, they write me, and they're just like, "Hey, man, you know, children are listening to this." And I'm like, "Well, you shouldn't be." "Stop trying to learn stuff and give up your dreams." "Damn you."
42:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a joke, people.
42:25 Chuck Nice? Yes, it was, please, these are jokes, go ahead. But anyway, yeah, so he said BS crazy, bat crap crazy, and why aren't they, why aren't black holes running amok?
42:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, so.
42:37 Chuck Nice? So he's saying, why, why doesn't the whole thing just like, why aren't they out of hand? Why aren't they just like consuming not only?
42:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, I get it. That's why, why aren't they consuming space time itself?
42:49 Chuck Nice? And just, just eating away the entire universe? Just eat it away?
42:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, because black holes are not any more voracious as black holes than they were as stars before they became black holes.
43:02 Chuck Nice? Interesting. So it's really about mass?
43:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's just the mass.
43:05 Chuck Nice? It's just mass?
43:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's all. If you get, now, so the thing, so here's how to think about it. Think of the sun, okay? Um, before you, how close can you get to the sun? You get near the surface and you just vaporize, okay? All right, so now, the cer- the sun's surface, it's atmospheric surface, has a certain strength of gravity there.
43:26 Chuck Nice? Okay, okay.
43:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now, let's cram the sun into a smaller volume. Same amount of mass, it's just denser. You can now get closer to the sun's center of mass. So its surface gravity is now higher. Cram it smaller. The surface gravity is even higher. Black holes are fun to think about and talk about because you can get close to them. If you get closer to Earth's center of mass, you're leaving half of Earth behind you. And it's not interesting. The good thing, the fun thing about black holes is you can get close to their center of mass. And their entire mass is between you and their center. That's why they become interesting. But puff it back up to the original size, there's no difference. Nobody cares.
44:09 Chuck Nice? Right.
44:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's right. So black holes are just, they're, they're, it's, you can just get, it's, it's.
44:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They're, they're, they allow you to get close to them without you knowing how deadly they are in such a state.
44:29 Chuck Nice? Oh my.
44:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's all.
44:30 Chuck Nice? Oh, snap.
44:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's the difference.
44:32 Chuck Nice? Okay, I got you.
44:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, and but technically they-
44:35 Chuck Nice? I have an ex-girlfriend like that.
44:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Technically, they are consuming the spacetime around them. Space folds back on itself so that you cannot even come back out. You can think of a black hole as completely consuming the volume of spacetime in its vicinity. I have no qualms with you thinking of what's inside the event horizon as the black hole having eaten its own spacetime continuum. I have no problems with that.
45:05 Chuck Nice? That is super cool.
45:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
45:07 Chuck Nice? Wow, what a great question then, I mean-
45:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And there's that old ancient question, what happens if a snake starts eating its tail? And continues to do so?
45:18 Chuck Nice? Right.
45:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Will the snake, one day, disappear?
45:22 Chuck Nice? I don't know, but it certainly won't be hungry. This, this we're sure of.
45:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If it just keeps eating.
45:28 Chuck Nice? If it just keeps eating itself. Yeah, but then how does the head eat itself?
45:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It keeps, it comes in from behind the head. Okay, if you imagine a completely flexible snake at all times.
45:37 Chuck Nice? Right, it just keeps going, going, going.
45:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It comes eating, then it eats.
45:41 Chuck Nice? And there you go.
45:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I love that sound. That is the sound a snake would make if it did that.
45:46 Chuck Nice? At the end of the meal. And it's gone. No more snake.
45:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right. That's, that's a black hole.
45:52 Chuck Nice? There you go. Alright, that's cool. Alright, Christopher Carns, uh, uh-uh, Kyrens, wants to know this. Everything in space seems to be spinning and rotating. Planet spins and rotates around stars, stars.
46:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So just to be clear, if you rotate on an axis, if you turn on an axis, we say you're rotating. If you move around another object, we say you're revolving.
46:13 Chuck Nice? Okay, got you.
46:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So just, just, most people don't know that, but it's, since the language can distinguish it-
46:19 Chuck Nice? Right.
46:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Why not?
46:20 Chuck Nice? Right.
46:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And they're not weird words, we've all used them before. Okay, so go.
46:23 Chuck Nice? So, stars spin and revolve around galaxy centers.
46:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So things rotate, and then they revolve, yes.
46:30 Chuck Nice? Even galaxies are spinning.
46:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
46:34 Chuck Nice? Is there any evidence that there are rotate, that they are rotating around something?
46:42 Chuck Nice? They spin, but do they rotate or revolve?
46:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And with the new vocabulary, revolve around something else.
46:49 Chuck Nice? Around something else.
46:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So in our neck of the woods, no.
46:53 Chuck Nice? Wow.
46:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, well, because we don't have enough galaxies where we are to be able to create an orbital system.
47:01 Chuck Nice? Right.
47:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right now, as far as we can tell, we're on a one-way collision course with
47:04 Chuck Nice? Right.
47:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're not orbiting each other or anything like that. All right. However, there are places in the universe that have hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of galaxies in a sort of a beehive configuration.
47:19 Chuck Nice? Hmm.
47:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You can track those galaxies. Those would have orbits around the center of that galaxy super, we call it supercluster.
47:26 Chuck Nice? Superclusters.
47:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right. So yes, in, in not all cases, but in some interesting cases, you do have stars that rotate, orbit the center, revolve around the center of their galaxies, as do all the other stars in their galaxies, and the galaxy itself is orbiting the center of the supercluster. Yes.
47:46 Chuck Nice? Now, is it possible to see the, uh, to see the movement of the galaxy and measure it in such a way that we could possibly see if there's something there revolving around? Like a black hole or something that's at the center of the supercluster?
48:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, you know, centers of superclusters, that's an interesting thing.
48:06 Chuck Nice? That's what I'm saying. That would be a really, that would be a really cool thing to find out. If the supercluster is actually revolving around.
48:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Around a black hole.
48:15 Chuck Nice? A black hole itself.
48:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, that's an interesting question.
48:18 Chuck Nice? Hmm.
48:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I don't, I don't know.
48:20 Chuck Nice? Wow.
48:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I don't know.
48:22 Chuck Nice? Cool. Well, please go find out.
48:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is that my assignment between now and the next time?
48:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, Chuck, I'll get right, I'll get right on it.
48:31 Chuck Nice? I'll get on that for you, buddy.
48:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But it turns out, you might ask, could the supercluster be orbiting around some other concentration of some meta-mass of, of galaxies?
48:42 Chuck Nice? Right.
48:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Here's a problem. Ready?
48:44 Chuck Nice? Go ahead.
48:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You can look at the speed of galaxies moving in the largest of the superclusters. Because you can measure this with the Doppler shift. Okay, that makes sense. We all know the Doppler shift intuitively. Alright, so if a car is... Exactly. You stand on the edge of a freeway. Right. I can do better than that. Go ahead. Oh, that was good. That was a speedway. That was, yeah.
49:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Not bad. So no one ever asks, "Why doesn't it sound the same coming towards you as it does going away?" Wasn't it? No, it's...
49:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the pitch changes. Okay? Which is, "Why are you laughing? I'm trying to teach here, dude." I love it. Okay? Go ahead. So it's a higher pitch if it's coming towards you. Right.
49:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And a lower pitch as it goes where? So it's like compression and expansion. Exactly. Gotcha. And so even though it's only giving the same sound, if the car is parked in front of you, the engine is making one sound. Right. Alright. Inside the car, all you hear is... Exactly, exactly. But here it is. Okay? Gotcha. So, so... If you measure... Worst Kung-Fu movie ever. If you measure the change in the frequency of sound Right. as it comes towards you. Right. And compare it to... You can... And you know what that sound should be. There's a very simple formula that was developed by Christian Doppler, who was a German physicist. He might have even been a chemist, actually.
50:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But he was, I think this was 19th century, he figured this out. Okay. And he did it with a railroad train. The whistle of a train as it came by. Because they didn't have race cars Right. in the 19th century. Alright. So you measure how fast the galaxy is moving, and then you look at how big the galaxy cluster is. Right. You can say, "How long will it take at that speed to cross the cluster?" Gotcha. That's a perfectly honest question. Yeah, no worries. Okay? For the biggest of these clusters takes longer than the age of the universe. Wow. So the cluster has not had enough time to have everybody sort of organized into their orbits. Got you.
50:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So for many of these measurements, you can't use the speed as an indication of other stuff that's going on. Wow. Yeah, yeah. We don't live long enough. I know. Damn it. I know. Our time frame is like that. That was that during the Super Bowl, I tweeted that. What? No, I did not. You know, see, I read your tweets. You don't read my tweets? Um, now I'm embarrassed.
51:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All I said was while you're watching, if the hundred yards on the field were a timeline of the universe. Okay. Of the fourteen billion year universe, and in one end zone is the Big Bang. Right. And modern day is like the other end zone, then the thickness of a blade of grass, the width of a blade of grass at the other end zone is from thirty thousand years in our past to the present. Just one? The thickness. The thickness. Not, not the width, the thick, just. Just right. The thickness. Yeah. Cavemen to modern time. That's our little, that's what we occupy. Well, our humans, yeah, Cro-Magnon, Cro-Magnon humans, uh, o- over that time.
52:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that's the entire history of our species on a hundred yard long football field. Wow. So were it not for computers to simulate what's going on over time scales longer than we live, we would not know anything about things that lasted longer than we do. Damn. Oh, yeah. That's pretty wild. And our, our ego historically was we are the know everything. So why should Earth be much older than our history books? Exactly. Right. Why should it? Why should it? When this is all about us. Why should your eyes not see things that are seeable in the universe? Right, when I'm the only one that matters. Right. So even the telescopes that were first constructed only brought us visible light. Right.
52:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So we have better versions of our eyes, but it's still light that we can see. Discover infrared, X-rays, ultraviolet, X-ray, gamma rays, the whole rest of the spectrum you can't see? How dare the universe communicate in ways that our senses cannot detect?
53:03 Chuck Nice? Wow, you know what? This is really fascinating because it starts, as you look at the fact that we are indeed one chromosome away from, you know, the other apes.
53:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
53:12 Chuck Nice? But yet, at the same time, we're the only, or are we? Are other animals thinking about this kind of stuff that we're talking about right now? Are there dolphins just like, "Yeah, I'm telling you right now, man, there's something more than this ocean."
53:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There was a, uh, we'll end, we gotta end right, like, right now, but there's a comic, Gary Larson, you remember the, the illustrator?
53:39 Chuck Nice? Uh, he, there was a chicken, a horse, a, a cow, and some other farm animal in the barn. Right.
53:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They're having a conversation.
53:50 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
53:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay? And the chicken says, "But if you divide by the square root of the mass, you get the same result." And then, like, the cow said, "Wait, but you're missing the basic premise of my theory." And one of them looks out the window, "Farmer!" Okay, the farmer's coming towards them, and the farmer comes in, "Pluck, pluck, pluck."
54:12 Chuck Nice? Right, yeah, that's cool.
54:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, you don't know if they're not talking that way when you're not looking?
54:16 Chuck Nice? No, I'm pretty sure they're not.
54:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's like the refrigerator light. How do you know?
54:25 Chuck Nice? Right.
54:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You don't know if it's on, off, or closed? You don't know! All right, we gotta go. We went way over time here. This has been StarTalk, Cosmic Queries, Chuck Nice, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, I bid you keep looking out.
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