Years ago, I worked with producer and director Tom Lucas on a documentary, and last year we made a series of short astronomy videos I blogged about here.
Tom’s latest endeavor is a partnership with Space.com to create short-format videos about astronomy. The Largest Black Holes in the Universe is the newest of these, and it’s pretty impressive. Make sure you hit the HD button!
The graphics are very nice. The science is good too! I’ll have to take some time (when I get some, someday) to watch the rest.
October 2nd, 2009 at 3:05 pm
I just got internet installed in my new house today. I am so happy, because now I can watch things like this!
By the way, shouldn’t you be at a pub or something by now? Stop posting and have a pint!
October 2nd, 2009 at 3:13 pm
@ Larian LeQuella,
The British Imperial pint (~568 ml) is 20% greater than the U.S. pint (~473 ml)!
October 2nd, 2009 at 3:17 pm
guess that’s why they call it ‘Great Britton’
October 2nd, 2009 at 3:33 pm
As a Hollywood visual effects artist, I have to say whoever worked on this video did some great work
October 2nd, 2009 at 3:45 pm
The video mentions light traveling 13 billion years to reach us, but that would imply that the object emitting the light was 13 billion light years away from us 13 billion years ago. How is that possible if the universe was only roughly 700 million years old? Sorry if this is a stupid question, I’ve only recently started reading about astronomy.
October 2nd, 2009 at 4:01 pm
I have a question about black holes that didn’t come up in the video, but I’m sure someone here can answer it.
I often see people listing the diameter of a black hole. My question is, when someone refers to the diameter of a black hole, are they referring to the diameter of the event horizon? I’m assuming this is the case, because we have no real way of knowing what is inside of a black hole.
October 2nd, 2009 at 4:06 pm
I am always curious to know…where are those “quaser” massive black holes are now? Did they grow even bigger…or did some other weird mechanic whitle them away to nothing? Because you would think if nothing else could effect them because their beyond imagination size and energy…they would still be around today, bigger than ever.
October 2nd, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Great video, although I wish they didn’t find it necessary to ascribe volition to black holes. It’s not like they’re ferocious hunters that make a conscious decision to eat matter.
October 2nd, 2009 at 4:24 pm
3.48:
“These giants burn hot, and fast, and they die young.”
There was a saying: live fast, die young and leave a good looking corpse.
For stars? Burn hot and fast, die young and leave a black hole…..
J/P=?
October 2nd, 2009 at 4:46 pm
@#4
As a video games artist (and wannabe astrophysics filmmaker), these movies look great!
And Brando – funny how we keep running into each other on the web. I glanced at your site – it looks awesome. I’ll have to check it out at home later on.
October 2nd, 2009 at 4:53 pm
@6: a quasar, or any Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) is actually just any large supermassive black hole undergoing a “feeding frenzy” upon a large amount of material. Our supermassive black hole eats stars fairly rarely, but produces a sizeable flash with each instance. If the black hole was being fed a constant, massive stream of gas or an entire cluster of stars, it would mostly likely resemble the AGN we see in other, usually older galaxies.
October 2nd, 2009 at 4:54 pm
[...] (via BadAstronomy blog) [...]
October 2nd, 2009 at 5:09 pm
@ #5. Jason,
In general relativity, the black hole’s mass can be thought of as concentrated at a singularity, which can be a point, a ring, or a sphere; the exact details are not currently well understood in all circumstances. Surrounding the singularity is a spherical boundary called the event horizon. It is this event horizon that marks the ‘point of no return’, a boundary beyond which matter and radiation inevitably fall inwards, towards the singularity. The distance from the singularity at the centre to the event horizon is the size of the black hole — equal to twice the mass in units where G and c equal 1.*
@ #6. Utakata,
Quasars are thought to be the accretion disks of supermassive black holes, since no other known object is powerful enough to produce such strong emissions. The huge luminosity of quasars results from the accretion discs of central supermassive black holes, which can convert on the order of 10% of the mass of an object into energy as compared to 0.7% for the p-p chain nuclear fusion process that dominates the energy production in sun-like stars. This is why quasars were more common in the early Universe, as this energy production ends when the supermassive black hole consumes all of the gas and dust near it. This means that it is possible that most galaxies, including our own Milky Way, have evolved from an active stage (appearing as a quasar or some other class of active galaxy depending on the black hole mass and accretion rate) and are now quiescent because they lack a supply of matter to feed into their central black holes to generate radiation.**
*Source: Wikipedia — Black Hole.
**Source: Wikipedia — Quasar.
October 2nd, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Damn gina, that was good
October 2nd, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Love the video and explanation. Would suggest springing for some pro talent for the narration.
Also, I smiled when he said the satellite “looked south” in outer space. How exactly does one do that?
October 2nd, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Nice video! Thanks for sharing Phil!! How does one truly fathom 18 billion solar masses?
October 2nd, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Superb. I watched it in HD and full screen. Glorious.
I find myself forced to object to the suggestion that a black hole “feeds”.
Living things feed. They seek sustenance in order to stay alive.
Black holes do not feed. They are not alive. They do not seek anything. They are simply there and the matter flooding into them simply happens. The black holes have no interest in what drops into them; black holes have no interest in anything.
I wish science reporters would become much more rigorous and would stop using emotional terms for events that are without emotion. We humans, on Earth, watching through our amazing instruments, feel deep emotions. The universe does not feel.
October 2nd, 2009 at 7:25 pm
I’m impressed. Narrator Dave Brody is an old friend.
KP
AstronautCentral.cxm
October 2nd, 2009 at 7:31 pm
Well, that IS fairly good, especially compared to space.com’s usual low standard of making trivially wrong statements. It’s hardly perfect however, as witnessed by the misconceptions that have had to be cleared up here. Other examples: BHs don’t “swallow planets whole” unless you learned your physics from a bad Star Trek movie, BHs DISTORT space and time, and don’t “swallow space”, and there’s a confusion about a singularity created by a SN and the BH that surrounds the singularity. More importantly, it’s completely wrong to say that supermassive BHs played ANY role in the formation of our sun and solar system. Even the relatively small BH (a few million solar masses) at the center of the Milky Way has no important dynamic or energetic effect on anything more than a few thousand light years distant. Now that’s the kind of mistake one expects from space.com! Finally, as someone else pointed out, why spend the time and money on something like this and have an awful, thready-voiced narrator?
October 2nd, 2009 at 8:46 pm
That is Hot.
October 2nd, 2009 at 9:47 pm
11. IVAN3MAN AT LARGE
Actually, it is possible to retrieve as much as 47% of the mass energy falling into a black hole, if the star that became that BH was rotating near light speed just before it collapsed and formed an event horizon. The calculations are quite tricky, since if it’s rotating TOO fast it will fly apart, too slow and you don’t get the maximal mass/energy release. I suppose it might be possible for an advanced civilization to use such a BH to power not only their civilization but as an energy source for their space drive. Not quite as good as anti matter but it can be fed from the gas in the interstellar medium, so it would never run out of “fuel”.
GAry 7
October 2nd, 2009 at 10:25 pm
@ #10 & #11:
Oh okies…
*Gently pokes at the center our Milky Way*
…so that’s where one of them are hiding.
Thanks for sharing that info. Always been a little confused about quasars…your explanations makes a lot more sense now.
October 2nd, 2009 at 11:32 pm
I want to see the next installments of these videos, where will they be at?
October 2nd, 2009 at 11:37 pm
Am I the only one who thought the narrator sounded like William Shatner?
October 3rd, 2009 at 4:16 am
[...] to Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy for bringing this video to my [...]
October 3rd, 2009 at 4:18 am
[...] to Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy for bringing this video to my [...]
October 3rd, 2009 at 6:33 am
Brilliant! Fantastic video! I really enjoyed it! Very well done!
Black Holes ARE such extreamly cool objects – and there is so much that we can still learn about them! Can’t wait to do it!
Btw: What happens to black holes if they aren’t feeding any more?
Probably they just vaporize, as crazy as that may sound. According to Hawking (he applied the laws of thermodynamics to black holes) black holes radiate. There are some complicated processes going on. But in the end all black holes should come to an end. The problem is that the more massive a BH is the less energetic is the radiation. That means that more massive BHs tend to live far longer than less massive ones (the relation is not linear). This is also means that it is highly unlikely that we can observe evaporating BHs (although, there are some theories that we may observe evaporating BHs that formed right after the BigBang).
This is, of course, not the best thing for a theory that its prediction might be unobservable.
October 3rd, 2009 at 7:38 am
Pretty cool stuff. I would love to have “Cosmic Web” as a screen saver–it’s much more interesting than starz.
October 3rd, 2009 at 9:45 am
fluffy, October 2nd, 2009 at 4:22 pm:
Oh yeah? How much money is NASA paying YOU to help hide the TRUTH about super-intelligent MAN-EATING black holes??
ADMIT THE TRUTH!! The GOVERNMENT is putting HAPPY JUICE in our WATER so that we’ll NEVER KNOW NASA sold OUR ENTIRE PLANET (children, whales, polar bears, and everything else) to a super-intelligent MAN-EATING black hole!!
October 3rd, 2009 at 11:03 am
Excellent video, but I have to say that the narration was very distracting. There was nothing wrong with the script, but Brody’s inflections and speech pattern was very distracting. Pauses occur in some very odd places and emphases occur at the wrong moments in sentences. Someone else noticed he sounds a bit like William Shatner—that’s true, and that’s not a good thing when you’re a narrator.
I hope they will work on that (or find a better narrator) next time around.
October 3rd, 2009 at 1:21 pm
[...] Bron: Voor NGC 253 is dat Eurekalert en voor die video Bad Astronomy. [...]
October 3rd, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Phil – was that documentary you worked on with Tom Lucas “years ago” – “Mysteries of Deep Space”? That was a two-part series shown over PBS and it was terrific. It was a cut above a lot of the science shows we occasionally see today on the Discovery and History channels.
This clip on black holes is on the same high level with insightful narration, great graphics and visual effects and, as with the “Mysteries of Deep Space” series – really high quality, imaginative symphonic music by Richard Fiocca.
October 3rd, 2009 at 4:13 pm
There were a couple of bits from the music that sounded like the soundtrack to the game Half Life. Or maybe Half Life’s composer stole from whoever this was.
October 3rd, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Some (most?) of the comments at Youtube are a riot. Those folks should spend a little time reading this site!
October 3rd, 2009 at 7:39 pm
There are at least 2 scientifically grossly incorrect visualisations, I noticed – ignoring those that relate more to artistic licence…
A planet consumed by a black hole will not simply flow along a radius, but end up spiralling in – as far as I know, all known black holes rotate, and so does the inflowing material.
Another is the jet from thousands of millions of years ago, the jet would most likely be wider than our Solar system when it hits us, yet it is depicted as a narrow beam much less than the diameter of the Earth, this is very misleading. Note that a laser beam fired from the Earth to the moon spreads to a diameter of several kilometres before it hits the moon surface.
October 3rd, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Omfsm that was AWESOME!!! Thanks for the link, Phil!
Black holes always scare me a little… something about the monolithic size and threat… and they are unstoppable.
October 3rd, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Love it.
More!
October 4th, 2009 at 5:16 am
[...] Huge black holes video | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine [...]
October 4th, 2009 at 8:20 am
@ #32 arensb:
Some grabs in there have also shown up in Severance: Blade of Darkness and other places I can’t quite place. No doubt all are sourced from licensed sample collections that are fairly popular. The same thing happens with sound effects.
Great video anyway. I too would have liked to have seen more about the quasars, since they were built up as being terrifyingly huge and ancient. How big can they theoretically get before they theoretically explode or demolish space as we know it or something?
October 4th, 2009 at 8:21 am
That video, flawed as it was in parts, wasn’t entirely a black hole with respect to my time. Thanks for the tip!
October 4th, 2009 at 8:37 am
Ha, you made a funny. The main character of black holes is that they demolish space as we know it by way of their singularity.
One answer is that they can grow indefinitely as long as you can feed them mass. Which isn’t easy seeing that you need to transport the mass to the BH. Light speed limits tend to screw things up.
Another is that they, or rather similar objects that would emerge if somehow the universe would be collapsing instead of expanding and thus circumventing the LS limits, AFAIU some cosmologists (IIRC, Aguirre?) can’t encompass a universe wholesale. But such results are arguable.
[Anyway, since the universe isn't going to collapse by way of standard cosmology, the exact process is moot. Then BHs aren't the end of the universe, but the universe is the end of BHs by way of evaporation.]
October 4th, 2009 at 10:57 am
@#37
Severance: Blade of Darkness (one of my favorite games of all time) has tons of music/sounds that are public domain or licensed samples.
October 4th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Very interesting subject matter… but the narrator completely destroys the flow of the video. Making it not very engaging and probably only hard-core astronomy buffs will watch the whole thing. I had to struggle to stay focused on it and resist the overwhelming urge to navigate away.
I would say that not only is a new narrator recommended, but absolutely necessary to make the video watchable to lay people.
October 4th, 2009 at 11:16 pm
Torbjörn Larsson: Well I am most concerned with the demolition of the “space as we know it” that has me in it, naturally
Thank you for the further info.
October 5th, 2009 at 12:24 am
Hey! I’m a layperson and I watched the whole way through — enthralled, I might add. The visuals alone would rivet the attention of any but the most insensitive, never mind the narration.
As to that, it was the sound quality of the voice-over that was off, not the narrator’s voice. The rest of the mix was fine, but the voice-over was fuzzy and a bit thin. Maybe some electrical interference in the mike or the recording equipment that couldn’t be fully fixed in post-production? Or just a cheap mike, or a bad cable, any one of a number of things. Not the narrator’s fault, though.
After the first few sentences I didn’t find it at all distracting. Don’t fret too much about it; this video really grabs the eyeballs.
October 5th, 2009 at 2:34 am
Yus, sounded a bit like Shatner.
Verah nice though!
October 5th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Some of the graphics, like the one describing the black hole OJ 27, would make awesome crop circles.
Great stuff, as always. Thanks, BA!
October 5th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Just wondering if anyone knows, but are there any theories/speculations out there as to why some supermassive BHs are so much bigger than others? Like why the one in Andromeda is many orders of magnitude heavier than the one in the Milky Way, even though both galaxies are roughly the same size?
Would the “wimpiness” of the Milky Way’s BH be a indication of a relatively smaller amount of material falling into it in the past, and could that be an indication that our galaxy would have had either a comparatively shorter, or significantly less spectacular, period in its past as a quasar or other type of active galaxy?
October 5th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
[...] by venturefree on October 3, 2009 Thanks to Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy for bringing this video to my [...]
October 5th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
@ amphiox
Sorry, but AFAIK there is no definite answer yet on why and especially how those monsters grow and become as massive as they are. In fact, this is a current topic of research.
Although the video seems to claim otherwise, it is almost unknown how SMBHs have grown so fast. They accumulated masses of billions of suns in less than a billion years. This is incredibely fast.
Last year I heard a talk about a numerical simulation with self-gravitating accretion disk. The pre-fix is important, because it indicates that the disk is massive enough to be an important part of the gravitational potential, which is negelegted normally. This means that the potential is not influenced by the black hole alone. The simulation gave interesting results: According to them it was possible to give rise to such massive monsters in such a short period of time.
(P.S.: Isn’t it a wonderful thing when physicist talk about scales, espacially time? Ask a partical physicist and he will tell you that 10^-16 seconds are incredibely long – and an astrophysicist will tell you that a few million years are rather short! I love physics!
)
October 6th, 2009 at 7:22 am
at 2:16, the gallaxy is spinning… but the correct way? seems counter intuitive the way its shown there. Can anyone who knows about these things comment on it? Thanks.
October 6th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
WOW. Is hardly an adequate response. But it will have to do for now. The visuals were incredibly beautiful, and narration was interesting and engaging.
I’d be interested in seeing a similar video presentation on the life cycle of stars, particularly about fusion reactions and the “evolution” of elements through fusion. Also, why does fusion stop at iron? I’ve never really understood that.
I have a question that’s not really related, but is something I’ve wondered for a long time. Maybe somebody here can answer this, or at least point me in the right direction: It’s now fairly commonly accepted that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old (give or take). Are there theories out there addressing the question of what stage of development the universe is at? If we use the analogy of human development, is the universe an infant, toddler, adolescent, adult, middle-age, senior…?
@ 51. Elkin
I read from Lee Smolin’s book, “Life of the Cosmos”, that the distribution of stars in a galaxy are actually fairly uniform. The spiral arms we see have more to do with the age or brightness stars in those regions. The arms are populated by hotter, brighter, younger stars, and the “gaps” are populated by older, dimmer stars and the interstellar medium: gas and dust left over from the explosive death of old stars. The “movement” of the spiral arms don’t correlate directly with the movement of the stars within the arms. Instead, the movement of the spiral arms shows the moving trend of the life and death of the regional stellar community. Young, hot stars are born our of the interstellar medium and over time, burn themselves out or blow themselves up, leaving behind gas and dust, and the cycle repeats itself. Think of “the wave” in a stadium. The wave moves, but the people making the wave don’t move with the wave. Amazing how galaxies work!
October 6th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
@ 17. Blizno
I must object to your objection. Yes, science reporters could describe scientific events with dry, cold, rational language. But the thing is, we humans are warm-blooded, emotional creatures, and we react to events emotionally. We’re moved by rainbows; we see pictures in clouds; we’re struck speechless by breathtaking photos beamed in from Saturn. So, I think it’s appropriate to allow for some poetic license in describing the incredible, amazing things that go on in the universe. So there’s really nothing wrong with talking about black holes devouring surrounding gas, or binary stars dancing around each other. Using emotional or even anthropomorphic language helps us, as emotional creatures, better relate to and connect with such abstract concepts as black holes and quasars and such. Otherwise we don’t really have a frame of reference, and this is doubly true for laypersons or armchair scientists such as myself.