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!

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! )

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?

Great stuff, as always. Thanks, BA!

Verah nice though!

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.

I would say that not only is a new narrator recommended, but absolutely necessary to make the video watchable to lay people.

How big can they theoretically get before they theoretically explode or demolish space as we know it or something?

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.]

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?

More!

Black holes always scare me a little… something about the monolithic size and threat… and they are unstoppable.

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.

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.

I hope they will work on that (or find a better narrator) next time around.

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.

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!!