Coming Up on May 14

Incredible! Head on, who would’ve thought?!

Rad Antonov

Please do not give Musk any ideas. He will convince NASA that it needs more tax dollars.

D Brown

So... about Sag A*... Albert Einstein (yes, that guy again) is still right. Yay for GR! Edit: Veritasium just put up a nice video on the Sag A* image released today with an explanation of how an interferometer works. In addition, he included some of the video he made for M87* with info on why the image looks the way it does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1bSDnuIPbo

There's also this idea that there's a planet called Nibiru sharing Earth's orbit and traveling opposite us, although that's more of a conspiracy-woo thing.

I promise this will be the last link before the release (I’ll save the electromagnetic lab analogues with meta materials for later) but back to Planet 9. It appears even Ed Witten got interested in the question and proposed an experiment to find out if it is a PBH: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.14192.

Rad Antonov

Of course I'm hoping for something to come of it, especially if it helps improve the Standard Model.

Sure! It'll be a reason to actually do it! Just credit me and provide a link to my online profile, and that'll be awesome. :)

I run a small, 40-seat planetarium on campus and we'll be opening up again in the fall now that covid appears to be in the rear-view mirror. When you have finished the Black Hole Laser suite (or just a song or two), may I have permission to play them in the planetarium? It would play in the background while lights are dancing on the dome overhead before the start of the show.

Is this just irony, or a paradox, or both? It's simultaneously a relief and a disappointment that so far there's been no black holes observed at the LHC.

arc of the COveNaNt is n electrochemical biology experiment that is also a portable power source. Works anywhere there is anything and the only thing that turns it off is the hominid that turns it on. So when you build one put a couple of resistors on there and a capacitor or two. The geniuses who built the one that they turned in to burnt toast were money makers not scientists. They produced a show and left a trail of breadcrumbs a big as the Earthen mounds in Tennessee which are all in all likellihood homies of the pi rhy mad dogs of the east swampy ginko leafed place called space around the nile while it runs its mouth into the med said enough? no of course not the river doth flow above and below whence the energy doth go to wheel the well wind the woosh weld the water width wise with carbonate components coagulating carefully copied copiously onto the walls from the walls which the walls were constructed of after being deconstructed on in around under over and at the point of presCiously prescient were our brothers before some smart penny coined the oily idea of pressing the flesh and in for a penny in for a pound here we are pounds later pondering pendulous on the sly perpendicular projectiles pointing at the point that waves snakes skyward silently as the dog of Zeus Suez sues smalls malls melts mosh pits pity pound ward where the dogs of war spend the rest of the one for sanity slumbering softly safe from savages Seek and she shall fine find wine with oil water mixing when nixing the electric charge hiding in the bi ts between the boards of the Arc just ask Irv https://youtu.be/PfYYraMgiBA

Beaches in the ocean of oceans. Fish live in an atmosphere where the eat breathe and in fact do every other thing that I am still not attempting to understand how are done when some challenger challenges the challenge of changing ones diaper in space. Black holes must be beaches and deserts in the ocean of us the Greeks who once upon a starry starry nicht of broken glass i believe used to call it OCeAneus which would be pictographicly correct were the pictographically proper punctuation points of pointy things like triangles stuck on the ends of sticks for instance or example might be an example of some such thing. Cu Ni FO rm Copper Nitrogen Iron Oxygen gamma rayed muward. I wish I was humpty dumpty and I could sit there crying a pool of h2o into the salt shaker and producing a molten salt reactor that would turn some of the sand on the beach into a better tool than an i can't think of any thing at the moment but ithink there fore an ad will come up to remind me not to forget later. The cat is out of the bag my friend. Over at the berry flavored Verisatum the dude is lighting up oxygen with flips of Cu in the eu bu t it isnt ketching on like ketchup. The

That is my new go to definition of karma!

Rad Antonov

We’ll, in that case, let’s waste some more time and look for the planet with μWave telescopes too: https://youtu.be/e5VP6tl5Fxo. Hear you on the PBH, too light for garden variety BHs. Though, there could be other exotic explanations. Say “nucleation from a dark matter condensate”, to make up some bologne that sounds fancy but doesn’t tell you anything. And @Colleen that was funny 😆. Full disclosure, in my heart of hearts, I am cheering for the LHC. I’d hate for it to go out with a whimper 😢. There are a lot of young and bright people working there and I’d like to see them chalk up a win. LHCb in particular seems to have a shot.

Rad Antonov

Damn it Rad, I have work to do, but instead I've been chasing down planet 9 evidence and primordial black holes and microlensing today. Microlensing observations have come a long way since I was a wee lass and it was only a glimmer in astronomers' eyes (pun intended) and it is amazing what they can now do. The evidence for planet 9 is not currently a smoking gun, but it is _very_ intriguing. I initially wondered why the authors went with primordial black holes as a possible explanation for planet 9 and the microlensing events they cite but then I looked at the masses -- planet mass black holes can only be primordial because it would take forever for a big black hole to radiate down to that size. If it could be proved that these are primordial black holes, that would really be exciting for cosmology and figuring out conditions in the early universe. Especially since Fermi LAT has not detected any gamma ray death throes of primordial tiny black holes. Now I really have to go do some work today :-). Thanks for the neat links!

I did grow up in the 80's and 90's, and have a special place in my heart for 90's Europop/Eurodance (one of the reasons I love Sabine's music is the musical nostalgia some of her tracks invoke) but by the late 90's and early 2000's I was listening to weird and wonderful stuff - drum'n'bass, electro, techno, break-beat... Add Enya, live punk and metal bands to the mix... I'm more likely to internally decapitate myself by head-banging to a punk or metal band, actually. I've decided to make some real Black Hole Laser music and if Sabine doesn't object I'll share a link to it in Patreon when I'm finished. 👾🚀

Were you a kid in the 80s? You won't be spinning around, break dancing on your floor like a maniac, right? It might be embarrassing to explain to your doctor that you were motivated by a black hole video on YouTube :-).

So, on rewatching the video on LHC black holes from 2015 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp2C4J2yMe4), I have a couple thoughts. 1. on primordial black holes -- that has changed since my intro astronomy class. The argument then was that (waving hands wildly) a. all galaxies have black holes at their centers and b. galaxies form very early in the universe so therefore c. galaxies formed around primordial black holes. If primordial black holes would have destroyed the baby universe, that blows up the hand-waving argument for early galaxy formation. Now I need to go do some research on what the current thinking is for these early black holes that are at the centers of galaxies if, indeed, they cannot be primordial. 2. on LHC black holes -- if the LHC did produce black holes, this would prove that the universe does indeed contain additional dimensions curled up on small scales. But because we would all die when the vacuum decay is triggered, string theorists would never know that they were right about these small extra dimensions. That's karma right there!

Ooh, planet 9, yes please! Next time I feel like I have achieved little in life, I'll think of the LHC. 😆

And we have rebooted the LHC, which got the black hole making frenzy going in the first place and has only delivered a Higgs thus far 😆 This https://duetosymmetry.com/tool/kerr-circular-photon-orbits/ is a neat app that I came across in a twitter feed and thought others might enjoy. While on the topic of black holes, have you made any episodes regarding the evidence for the existence of a yet to be observed planet 9? Reading this preprint with a to scale primordial black in the paper and figured I’d ask: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.11090

Rad Antonov

This sounds fascinating! 'Black Hole Laser' is my new musical break-beat electro-glitch project, maybe. 😉