please spellcheck this subtitle, keep the time code unchenged:

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Okay, strap
yourselves in listeners.

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Today, we're diving headfirst into the
cosmic enigmas that are black holes.

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And they're even stranger
counterparts, white holes.

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And you've come to the right place
for a journey like this.

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We're going beyond the usual
black hole basics.

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You know, I thought I had
a handle on black holes,

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but looking at your
notes, I realized there's a

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whole lot more weirdness
than I ever imagined.

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It's true. Black holes really
push the limits

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of what we know about
the universe. Think

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about it. They emerge
from the death of stars.

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Warp the fabric of space and time itself.
And might even hold clues to

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a deeper understanding of,
well, everything.

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See, that's what always
blows my mind. The sheer

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scale, the power, it's
almost too much to grasp.

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So maybe we should start with some basics,
just to ground ourselves.

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What exactly happens for
a black hole to even form?

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All right, picture this. A massive star,
way bigger than our sun,

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reaching the end of its life. It's like
a cosmic balancing act playing out.

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Oh, I like where this is
going. Right. You've got gravity,

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this relentless force trying to
crush the star inwards.

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But at the same time,
you have nuclear fusion happening

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in its core,
pushing outward.

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Okay, so it's a cosmic tug of war. Got it.
Exactly. For most of the star's life,

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those forces are balanced.

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But when the star runs at a fuel, the
outward pressure from fusion, it stops.

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And gravity. Gravity wins.

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Yeah. The core collapses
in on itself. It's like turning

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off the engine's mid -flight.
Gravity just takes over.

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So what happens when everything collapses?
That's where things get really wild.

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The core of this massive star,
it shrinks down to an

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incredibly small point,
smaller than an atom.

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We call this point a singularity.
And here's the kicker.

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All of the star's mass gets concentrated
into this tiny infinitesimal point.

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Hold on. All that mass squeezed
into something infinitely small.

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I think I need a moment to process this.

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It's mind-bending, isn't
it? And surrounding this

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singularity is where we
find the event horizon.

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You can think of it as a point in
no return. Because once you

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cross that boundary,
there's no escaping the gravity.

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You got it. Not even the light.
The fastest thing in the universe can

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outrun the pull of a black hole
once it crosses that event horizon.

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Imagine a cosmic trap door once you
fall in. There's no coming back.

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So we've got collapsing stars,
singularities,

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these event horizons. It's a lot
to wrap your head around.

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But, and maybe this is a
bit of a leap, don't we have a

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super massive black hole right
in our own galactic backyard?

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We do. Lurking at the very heart
of our Milky Way galaxy,

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we have Sagittarius A.

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And get this, we
actually have an image of

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it captured by the
event horizon telescope.

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Wait, there's an actual picture
of a black hole?

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There is. Of course, you can't
directly see the black hole itself.

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It's black, after all,
no light escapes.

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But the image shows us its shadow,
this dark silhouette against a

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backdrop of glowing
gas and dust swirling around it.

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That's incredible. But it does
make you wonder,

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if we can't directly see them, how do we
even know these black holes are out there?

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It's not like they send us postcards.

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It takes some cosmic detective work.
We detect their presence

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by observing how they affect
the stuff around them.

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Take Cygnus X-1, for example. It was one
of the first black holes ever discovered.

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Oh yeah, I've heard of that
one. It's a binary system, right?

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Exactly. Cygnus X-1
is a black hole locked in

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a gravitational dance
with a companion star.

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As the black hole pulls in
material from its stellar partner,

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that material spirals inward,
kind of like water going down a drain.

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And that's where things get
really interesting and bright.

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So we've got this black
hole pulling in material,

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creating this swirling disk of
superheated matter around it.

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It's like a cosmic whirlpool. And this
is where things get really bright, right?

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Exactly. All that matter swirling around
in the accretion disk.

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It heats up to millions of degrees,
partly from friction,

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partly from the intense gravity of
the black hole itself.

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Wow, millions of degrees. That's kind of
be giving off some serious energy.

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It does. And that energy is what
tips us off to the black hole's presence.

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See, all that superheated
matter in the accretion disk,

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it emits x-rays.

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And we can detect those x
-rays here on Earth.

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So it's like a cosmic spotlight,
but instead of visible light,

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it's x-rays revealing the
black hole's location.

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You could say that.
It's like trying to understand a

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hidden object by the way
it affects its surroundings.

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We can't see the black
hole directly, but we

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can see its influence
on the material around it.

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That's a really cool way
to think about it.

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So it's not just that black holes are
these isolated things out there in space.

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They're actually interacting with
their surroundings

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in these really dramatic,
energetic ways.

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Absolutely. And those interactions,
they can get really interesting.

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Sometimes they even challenge what
we thought we knew about black holes.

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For example, did you
know that black holes?

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Well, they aren't
entirely black.

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Wait, hold on. I thought nothing. Not
even light could escape a black hole.

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Isn't that kind of
their whole deal?

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That was the prevailing thought
for a long time.

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Then along came Stephen Hawking and kind
of turned our understanding on its head.

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Oh, this is going to be good. I can tell.

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Right. So Hawking,
he proposed that black holes actually

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emit a type of radiation.
It's faint, but it's there.

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We call it Hawking radiation.

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Okay, now my mind is blown.
How can anything escape from

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a place where gravity is
supposed to be inescapable?

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It all comes down to the
weird world of quantum mechanics.

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You see, at the event horizon,
right at the edge of a black hole,

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you have these things
called virtual particles.

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They're constantly popping in and
out of existence.

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For virtual particles? Are you talking
about ghost particles now?

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Kind of. They're more like
fluctuations in quantum fields.

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Pairs of particles
and antiparticles that

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usually annihilate each
other almost immediately.

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Okay, so far, so good. But how does this
lead to anything escaping from a black hole?

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All right, picture this.

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A particle -antiparticle pair pops into
existence right at the event horizon.

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Sometimes one of these particles
falls into the black

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hole while the other escapes
off into space.

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And because they were born together,
right at that critical point,

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the escaping particle can make
a run for it.

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Precisely. The escaping particle
becomes real,

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carrying away a tiny bit of the
black hole's energy with it.

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And here's where Einstein comes in.

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Energy and mass are equivalent,
remember? EM-S-EOS mole.

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Oh, right, of course.

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So when the particle escapes with
a bit of energy,

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the black hole actually loses a tiny,
tiny bit of mass.

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Whoa. So even though nothing can escape
from inside the event horizon,

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this quantum quirkiness
happening at the edge

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allows them to leak
a little bit of energy.

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You got it. And over ridiculously
long periods of time,

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way longer than the current
age of the universe,

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this hawking radiation could actually
cause a black hole to completely evaporate.

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Black holes aren't eternal,
they could just fade away.

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That's kind of beautiful in a way.

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It is, isn't it? But
it also leads to a

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pretty big puzzle, the
information paradox.

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Uh-oh. What's that?

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Well, if black holes can
evaporate, what happens

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at all the information
that fell into them?

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Everything that gets sucked in,
stars, planets,

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even light, it all carries information.

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That's a good point.
So what happens to it all?

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That's the paradox.
According to quantum mechanics,

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information can't be truly destroyed.

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It might get scrambled up,
but it's always conserved in some form.

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So if a black hole
evaporates completely, does

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that mean all that
information is just gone?

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That doesn't seem right. It's one of
the biggest mysteries in physics.

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The information paradox highlights
a potential

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conflict between general relativity,
which governs black holes,

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and quantum mechanics,
which governs information.

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It's like needing a cosmic rule book to
tell us which one wins out in this scenario.

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Exactly. There are lots of
proposed solutions out there.

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Some involve the information being encoded
in the hawking radiation itself.

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Others suggest it might
be stored within the

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black hole in some way
we don't yet understand.

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So the jury's still out on this one.

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It is a head scratcher.
It's a problem that continues

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to fascinate physicists and frustrate
them in equal measure.

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But hey, maybe you'll be the
one to crack the code.

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Ha! Don't hold your breath.
But speaking of things that

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might not exist,
can we talk about white holes now?

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We've been dancing around
the mall episode.

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Of course. Buckle up. Because if you
thought black holes were strange,

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white holes are about to get even weirder.

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Okay, white holes. They're kind of like
the mysterious cousins of black holes,

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shrouded in a whole other
level of weirdness, right?

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Think of it this way.
What if we hit the rewind

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button on everything we
know about black holes?

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That's essentially the concept behind
a white hole.

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A region in space time
where matter and energy

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are constantly being
interjected outward.

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And nothing. Absolutely nothing can enter.

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It's like a black hole
flipped inside out. Instead of

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pulling everything in, it's
pushing everything away.

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That's a great way to
put it. You see, a black

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hole's event horizon
is a point of no return.

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But a white hole, if they exist,
would have an event horizon that

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acts like a barrier,
a point of no entry.

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That's a pretty wild concept.
But here's a thought,

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and maybe it's just me, but if
they're like the opposite of black holes,

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and we've got evidence of black
holes all over the place,

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shouldn't we have stumbled upon a
white hole by now?

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That's the catch with white
holes. They're purely theoretical.

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We're working with concepts and equations,
not concrete observations.

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We haven't actually observed anything that
definitively points to their existence.

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So they're more of a what if
a mathematical possibility rather than

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something where certain exists out there
in the vast universe?

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Exactly. There are also some
pretty big hurdles,

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even conceptually,
when it comes to white holes.

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Like their very existence seems to clash
with a fundamental law of physics,

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the second law of thermodynamics.

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Oh, right, thermodynamics.
Remind me about that again.

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Well, the second law
basically states that

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entropy always increases
in a closed system.

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Entropy is like a measure of disorder.
Things tend to get messier over time.

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Right, like a cup of coffee
getting cold or neat

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stack of papers scattering all
over my desk.

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Precisely. Entropy always increases.
A white hole,

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though, would be like that messy
room spontaneously cleaning itself up.

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Everything neatly ejected
and organized. It kind

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of goes against the
natural order of things.

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So white holes,
they seem to go against

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the natural flow of, well, everything.
That's a pretty big strike against them.

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It definitely raises eyebrows.
For a white hole to exist,

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we might have to rethink
some pretty fundamental physics.

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But, and this is where
it gets really interesting,

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some physicists believe that white holes
could be connected to black

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holes through these theoretical tunnels in
space-time called wormholes.

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Whoa, okay, now we're talking wormhole
shortcuts through the universe. I'm all ears.

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It's highly speculative,
I'll admit. But imagine a black hole

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and a white hole connected
at their singularities,

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forming this cosmic tunnel.

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Matter falling into the
black hole could theoretically

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journey through this wormhole
and pop out the other side

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from the white hole,
maybe even ending up in a different part

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of the universe or
another universe entirely.

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So it's like a cosmic subway system.
Black holes are the entrances,

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white holes are the exits. I love it.

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You've got quite the imagination.
That's a very simplified analogy.

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But you've got the right idea.

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Of course, this is all very theoretical,
almost bordering on science fiction.

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We haven't even
found concrete evidence of wormholes yet,

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let alone their connection to white holes.

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I guess it's all part of
the grand cosmic mystery.

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Even if they do turn out to be
just a product of our imagination,

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the fact that we can even conceive of white
holes is pretty amazing, don't you think?

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00:11:13,500 --> 00:11:15,179
Makes you wonder
what other mind-voggling

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possibilities are out there
waiting to be discovered.

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I completely agree. And that's
the beauty of science, isn't it?

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Whether or not white
holes actually exist,

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grappling with these concepts pushes the
boundaries of our understanding.

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It sparks new questions,
leads to new insights.

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It's all part of the adventure.

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That's a great way to put it.
The universe is full of mysteries,

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and we're just beginning to
scratch the surface.

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While on that note,
I think we've done some serious exploring

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in the realm of black holes
and white holes today.

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We've covered a lot of ground.
The formation of black holes,

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the theoretical world of white holes,
and even touched on the

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search for a theory
of everything. It's a lot to digest.

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It certainly is. And for our listeners,
remember,

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the universe is full of wonder,
and there's always more to discover.

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So keep those questions coming,
and who knows what incredible

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things you might uncover
until next time on The Deep Dive.