#space documentary

*epic bass noises*

Me: BWAHAHAHAHA HERE IT COMES

“They could swallow a star completely intact”

“They spew these huge jets”

Me: A-grade black hole awesomeness!

(This one is narrated by an actual astrophysicist…hopefully it’ll be better!)

“Black holes are invisible…”

Me: Not if silhouetted against a bright background…how many times do we have to go over this…

“Black holes even slow time!”

Me: Uh…not your own proper time. There’s a reason it’s called relativity.

“At a remote location in Washington state…”

Me: Oh sure, ignore the one in Livingston, Louisiana. Screw you.

“They record a message…it looks and sounds like *bwoop*.”

Me: It doesn’t actually look and sound like anything. For the gravitational waves to be audible you’d need to be so close you’d be inside one of the black holes when they collide. 

“The signal traveled over a billion light years to reach us!”

Me: You make it sound as if it was intended for us as an audience, instead of just a weird noise.

“You will see the entire future of the universe (if you approach a black hole.)”

Me: AAGH, there you go again, Neil de Grasse Tyson! You can only do this if you hover at the event horizon, which takes infinite energy.

*Andrea Ghez appears*

Me: Well, there she is.

“So if you want a villain in a sci-fi movie, cast a black hole.”

(Interstellar movie poster appears in the background)

Me: BOO! NOT COOL! People keep talking about the black hole in Interstellar as being the antagonist of the story. It barely does anything in the film besides sit there ominously, and did less damage to the protagonist than a headbutt from Matt Damon. Darth Vader is a better black hole than ye, Gargantua.

(Poster for the Black Hole platformer appears)

Me: Hey! That’s not even a movie; that’s a video game on Steam!

…Speaking of which, I need to actually play it sometime.

“You might think a black hole is an object…but it’s not.” 

Me: THANK YOU! This is a big misconception! But you got the “infinite future of the universe” one wrong…you got this right only because you got Kip S. Thorne to give his schpeal. 

“…Karl Schwarzschild…”

[Interrupts video because then has idea to calculate how much alcohol it would take to get a supermassive black hole drunk. Realizes that nobody has given a mathematical relationship between BAC and body mass. Realizes this is stupid because black holes cannot get drunk, and video is over an hour long. Gives up. Resumes video.]

“That is the boundary…the event horizon…beyond which nothing can escape….not even light. And we’re going there!”

Me: Oooooh, gonna get dangerous…

[Narrator falls into black hole to describe what would happen]

“…Maybe if they waited millions or bilions of years, the ship would see me disappear.”

Me: Actually, you can calculate that the luminosity of an object just falling straight into a black hole decays exponentially (Note for physicists: This is done in MTW’s Gravitation). Your crewmates would see you disappear much more quickly than that.

“…I’m falling towards the center, where the mass of the black hole is concentrated.”

Me: The black hole’s mass is not localizable to a specific place like that.

[Talking about Cygnus X-1]

Me: OH MY GOD I HEAR THE RUSH SONG PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND!

[Discuss the Cygnus X-1 bet between Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne where the wager was an issue of Penthouse]

Me: …not that story again.

[Shows a grad student in the background behind one of the scientists they’re interviewing]

Me: Wait…I think I know that guy! 

“Every galaxy that we’ve looked for a supermassive black hole in, we’ve found a supermassive black hole.”

Me: NdT at it again. There are many galaxies we’ve looked and found no evidence for SMBHs in them. The first one that comes to mind is Triangulum. 

“Let’s say we release a swarm of autonomous robots into the accretion disk of the supermassive black hole.”

Me: WHOA THERE! This is getting too weird.

“…One robot will see its own back, the light forever orbiting in a complete circle.”

Me: The photon sphere is an unstable orbit. Light doesn’t collect there, and you won’t be able to stay on it.

[Note also all the accretion disks depict gravitational lensing. I swear that all the accretion disks show gravitational lensing now only because of Interstellar. We’ve known this was a thing for well before that movie was released, but I guess artists and documentarians needed an obnoxious Nolan piece to actually get cracking. ]

[The narrator constantly refers to supermassive black holes as “supermassives.” Ironically, the only other time I’ve heard that turn of phrase is when writing Tartarus’ dialogue in my science fiction novel, where he refers to other SMBHs as such. However, this is because Tartarus speaks using his accretion disk emissions and as such tends to swallow most of his words, and his dialogue is generally awkwardly cut short, drawn out, or broken up. It’s not because I think this is a good way to refer to supermassive black holes. Oh yeah…my novel…remember that?…Pretty much not going to get a chance to work on it much until I get my PhD. Derp.]

[A bunch of pictures of generic quasars are shown. One of them I recognize as 3C 273, but the rest look like they might just be computer generated, or even regular galaxies with the smudge and lens flare tools abused.]

“These black holes seem to know about their larger galactic environment.”

Me: Well yeah, you can’t be president of the galaxy without understanding the larger astropolitical context. [Note: Dammit, I haven’t even finished my first novel, and I’m already thinking of who Tartarus becomes after a several billion year time skip.]

“These black holes might control the growth of the universe.”

Me: RESPECT FOR THE DEAD STAR! RESPECT FOR THE DEAD STAR! 

(Once you learn, once you learn, that you’ll never get out….there is nothing you can do…there is nothing you can do...)

[Oh yeah...that’s another thing I planned to do at some point. A parody of “Respect for the Dead Man” but with black holes in it. Too bad I lost the lyrics I wrote out..]

[Documentary goes on a diversion about the Event Horizon Telescope, aka the project that would be amazing to work on if it didn’t already have thousands of people working on it.]

[Documentary closes out on LIGO. Shows wave reaching Livingston first.]

Me: FINALLY! But you still waited until the end to show the Louisiana station, so I’m still deducting points.

If NASA announced an asteroid had a real chance of hitting Earth in six months, would you want them to tell the public immediately?

Or should they wait until they knew exactly where it would hit?

That is the question I pinned under my new documentary.

Because asteroid defense gets stranger the deeper you look.

In 2013, the Chelyabinsk meteor exploded over Russia with the force of roughly thirty atomic bombs.

Nobody saw it coming.

No telescope detected it before it arrived.

Now imagine the next one is bigger.

My new dark science documentary breaks down what would actually happen if astronomers discovered an Earth-bound asteroid with only six months of warning.

The first telescope detection.

NASA’s orbit calculations.

The International Asteroid Warning Network.

FEMA planning.

DART.

Apophis.

NEO Surveyor.

And the uncomfortable reality that if warning time is short, the options get extreme very fast.

An asteroid impact may be the only natural disaster humanity can predict and prevent.

But only if we see it in time.

Watch the documentary and answer the pinned question on YouTube: