Death By Black Hole & Other Cosmic Quandaries

by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

  In the design of exhibits for a natural history museum, or for any museum where real things matter, what you typically seek are artifacts for display cases—rocks, bones, tools, fossils, memorabilia, and so forth. All these are “level 0” specimens and require little or no cognitive investment before you give the explanation of what the object is. For astrophysics displays, however, any attempt to place stars or quasars on display would vaporize the museum.

  Most astrophysics exhibits are therefore conceived in level 1, leading principally to displays of pictures, some quite striking and beautiful. The most famous telescope in modern times, the Hubble Space Telescope, is known to the public primarily through the beautiful, full-color, high-resolution images it has acquired of objects in the universe. The problem here is that after you view such exhibits, you leave waxing poetic about the beauty of the universe yet you are no closer than before to understanding how it all works. To really know the universe requires forays into levels 3, 4, and 5. While much good science has come from the Hubble telescope, you would never know it from media accounts that the foundation of our cosmic knowledge continues to flow primarily from the analysis of spectra and not from looking at pretty pictures. I want people to be struck, not only from exposure to levels 0 and 1, but also from exposure to level 5, which admittedly requires a greater intellectual investment on the part of the student, but also (and perhaps especially) on the part of the educator.

  IT’S ONE THING to see a beautiful color picture, taken in visible light, of a nebula in our own Milky Way galaxy. But it’s another thing to know from its radio-wave spectrum that it also harbors newly formed stars of very high mass within its cloud layers. This gas cloud is a stellar nursery, regenerating the light of the universe.

  It’s one thing to know that every now and again, high-mass stars explode. Photographs can show you this. But x-ray and visible-light spectra of these dying stars reveal a cache of heavy elements that enrich the galaxy and are directly traceable to the constituent elements of life on Earth. Not only do we live among the stars, the stars live within us.

  It’s one thing to look at a poster of a pretty spiral galaxy. But it’s another thing to know from Doppler shifts in its spectral features that the galaxy is rotating at 200 kilometers per second, from which we infer the presence of 100 billion stars using Newton’s laws of gravity. And by the way, the galaxy is receding from us at one-tenth the speed of light as part of the expansion of the universe.

  It’s one thing to look at nearby stars that resemble the Sun in luminosity and temperature. But it’s another thing to use hypersensitive Doppler measurements of the star’s motion to infer the existence of planets in orbit around them. At press time, our catalog is rising through 200 such planets outside the familiar ones in our own solar system.

  It’s one thing to observe the light from a quasar at the edge of the universe. But its another thing entirely to analyze the quasar’s spectrum and deduce the structure of the invisible universe, laid along the quasar’s path of light as gas clouds and other obstructions take their bite out of the quasar spectra.

  Fortunately, for all the magnetohydrodynamicists among us, atomic structure changes slightly under the influence of a magnetic field. This change manifests itself in the slightly altered spectral pattern caused by these magnetically afflicted atoms.

  And armed with Einstein’s relativistic version of the Doppler formula, we deduce the expansion rate of the entire universe from the spectra of countless galaxies near and far, and thus deduce the age and fate of the universe.

  One could make a compelling argument that we know more about the universe than the marine biologist knows about the bottom of the ocean or the geologist knows about the center of Earth. Far from an existence as powerless stargazers, modern astrophysicists are armed to the teeth with the tools and techniques of spectroscopy, enabling us all to stay firmly planted on Earth, yet finally touch the stars (without burning our fingers) and claim to know them as never before.

  SIXTEEN

  COSMIC WINDOWS

  As noted in Section 1, the human eye is often advertised to be among the most impressive of the body’s organs. Its ability to focus near and far, to adjust to a broad range of light levels, and to distinguish colors are at the top of most peoples’ list of eye-opening features. But when you take note of the many bands of light that are invisible to us, then you would be forced to declare humans to be practically blind. How impressive is our hearing? Bats would clearly fly circles around us with a sensitivity to pitch that extends beyond our own by an order of magnitude. And if the human sense of smell were as good as that of dogs, then Fred rather than Fido might be the one who sniffs out contraband from airport customs searches.

  The history of human discovery is characterized by the boundless desire to extend the senses beyond our inborn limits. It is through this desire that we open new windows to the universe. For example, beginning in the 1960s with the early Soviet and NASA probes to the Moon and planets, computer-controlled space probes, which we can rightly call robots, became (and still are) the standard tool for space exploration. Robots in space have several clear advantages over astronauts: they are cheaper to launch; they can be designed to perform experiments of very high precision without the interference of a cumbersome pressure suit; and they are not alive in any traditional sense of the word, so they cannot be killed in a space accident. But until computers can simulate human curiosity and human sparks of insight, and until computers can synthesize information and recognize a serendipitous discovery when it stares them in the face (and perhaps even when it doesn’t), robots will remain tools designed to discover what we already expect to find.

  Unfortunately, profound questions about nature can lurk among those that have yet to be asked.

  The most significant improvement of our feeble senses is the extension of our sight into the invisible bands of what is collectively known as the electromagnetic spectrum. In the late nineteenth century the German physicist Heinrich Hertz performed experiments that helped to unify conceptually what were previously considered to be unrelated forms of radiation. Radio waves, infrared, visible light, and ultraviolet were all revealed to be cousins in a family of light that simply differed in energy. The full spectrum, including all parts discovered after Hertz’s work, extends from the low-energy part that we call radio waves, and continues in order of increasing energy to microwaves, infrared, visible (comprising the “rainbow seven”: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet), ultraviolet, x-rays, and gamma rays.

  Superman, with his x-ray vision, has no special advantage over modern-day scientists. Yes, he is a bit stronger than your average astrophysicist, but astrophysicists can now “see” into every major part of the electromagnetic spectrum. In the absence of this extended vision we are not only blind but ignorant—the existence of many astrophysical phenomena reveal themselves only through some windows and not others.

  WHAT FOLLOWS IS a selective peek through each window to the universe, beginning with radio waves, which require very different detectors from those you will find in the human retina.

  In 1932 Karl Jansky, in the employ of Bell Telephone Laboratories and armed with a radio antenna, first “saw” radio signals that emanated from somewhere other than Earth; he had discovered the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Its radio signal was intense enough that if the human eye were sensitive to only radio waves, then the galactic center would be among the brightest sources in the sky.

  With some cleverly designed electronics, you can transmit specially encoded radio waves that can then be transformed into sound. This ingenious apparatus has come to be known as a “radio.” So by virtue of extending our sense of sight, we have also, in effect, managed to extend our sense of hearing. But any source of radio waves, or practically any source of energy at all, can be channeled to vibrate the cone of a speaker, although journalists occasionally misunderstand this simple fact. For example, when radio emission was discovered from Saturn, it was simple e
nough for astronomers to hook up a radio receiver that was equipped with a speaker. The radio-wave signal was then converted to audible sound waves whereupon one journalist reported that “sounds” were coming from Saturn and that life on Saturn was trying to tell us something.

  With much more sensitive and sophisticated radio detectors than were available to Karl Jansky, we now explore not just the Milky Way but the entire universe. As a testament to our initial seeing-is-believing bias, early detections of radio sources in the universe were often considered untrustworthy until they were confirmed by observations with a conventional telescope. Fortunately, most classes of radio-emitting objects also emit some level of visible light, so blind faith was not always required. Eventually, radio-wave telescopes produced a rich parade of discoveries that includes the still-mysterious quasars (a loosely assembled acronym of “quasi-stellar radio source”), which are among the most distant objects in the known universe.

  Gas-rich galaxies emit radio waves from the abundant hydrogen atoms that are present (over 90 percent of all atoms in the universe are hydrogen). With large arrays of electronically connected radio telescopes we can generate very high resolution images of a galaxy’s gas content that reveal intricate features in the hydrogen gas such as twists, blobs, holes, and filaments. In many ways the task of mapping galaxies is no different from that facing the fifteenth-and sixteenth-century cartographers, whose renditions of continents—distorted though they were—represented a noble human attempt to describe worlds beyond one’s physical reach.

  IF THE HUMAN EYE were sensitive to microwaves, then this window of the spectrum would enable you to see the radar emitted by the radar gun from the highway patrol officer who hides in the bushes. And microwave-emitting telephone relay station towers would be ablaze with light. Note, however, that the inside of your microwave oven would look no different because the mesh embedded in the door reflects microwaves back into the cavity to prevent their escape. The vitreous humor of your peering eyeballs is thus protected from getting cooked along with your food.

  Microwave telescopes were not actively used to study the universe until the late 1960s. They allow us to peer into cool, dense clouds of interstellar gas that ultimately collapse to form stars and planets. The heavy elements in these clouds readily assemble into complex molecules whose signature in the microwave part of the spectrum is unmistakable because of their match with identical molecules that exist on Earth.

  Some cosmic molecules are familiar to the household:

  NH3 (ammonia)

  H2O (water)

  While some are deadly:

  CO (carbon monoxide)

  HCN (hydrogen cyanide)

  Some remind you of the hospital:

  H2CO (formaldehyde)

  C2H5OH (ethyl alcohol)

  And some don’t remind you of anything:

  N2H+ (dinitrogen monohydride ion)

  CHC3CN (cyanodiacetylene)

  Nearly 130 molecules are known, including glycine, which is an amino acid that is a building block for protein and thus for life as we know it.

  Without a doubt, a microwave telescope made the most important single discovery in astrophysics. The leftover heat from the big bang origin of the universe has now cooled to a temperature of about three degrees on the absolute temperature scale. (As fully detailed later in this section, the absolute temperature scale quite reasonably sets the coldest possible temperature to zero degrees, so there are no negative temperatures. Absolute zero corresponds to about-460 degrees Fahrenheit, while 310 degrees absolute corresponds to room temperature.) In 1965, this big bang remnant was serendipitously measured in a Nobel Prize–winning observation conducted at Bell Telephone Laboratories by the physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. The remnant manifests itself as an omnipresent and omnidirectional ocean of light that is dominated by microwaves.

  This discovery was, perhaps, serendipity at its finest. Penzias and Wilson humbly set out to find terrestrial sources that interfered with microwave communications, but what they found was compelling evidence for the big bang theory of the origin of the universe, which must be like fishing for a minnow and catching a blue whale.

  MOVING FURTHER ALONG the electromagnetic spectrum we get to infrared light. Also invisible to humans, it is most familiar to fast-food fanatics whose French fries are kept warm with infrared lamps for hours before purchase. These lamps also emit visible light, but their active ingredient is an abundance of invisible infrared photons that the food readily absorbs. If the human retina were sensitive to infrared, then an ordinary household scene at night, with all lights out, would reveal all objects that sustain a temperature in excess of room temperature, such as the household iron (provided it was turned on), the metal that surrounds the pilot lights of a gas stove, the hot water pipes, and the exposed skin of any humans who stepped into the scene. Clearly this picture is not more enlightening than what you would see with visible light, but you could imagine one or two creative uses of such vision, such as looking at your home in the winter to spot where heat leaks from the windowpanes or roof.

  As a child, I knew that at night, with the lights out, infrared vision would discover monsters hiding in the bedroom closet only if they were warm-blooded. But everybody knows that your average bedroom monster is reptilian and cold-blooded. Infrared vision would thus miss a bedroom monster completely because it would simply blend in with the walls and the door.

  In the universe, the infrared window is most useful as a probe of dense clouds that contain stellar nurseries. Newly formed stars are often enshrouded by leftover gas and dust. These clouds absorb most of the visible light from their embedded stars and reradiate it in the infrared, rendering our visible light window quite useless. While visible light gets heavily absorbed by interstellar dust clouds, infrared moves through with only minimal attenuation, which is especially valuable for studies in the plane of our own Milky Way galaxy because this is where the obscuration of visible light from the Milky Way’s stars is at its greatest. Back home, infrared satellite photographs of Earth’s surface reveal, among other things, the paths of warm oceanic currents such as the North Atlantic Drift current that swirls ’round the British Isles (which are farther north than the entire state of Maine) and keeps them from becoming a major ski resort.

  The energy emitted by the Sun, whose surface temperature is about 6,000 degrees absolute, includes plenty of infrared, but peaks in the visible part of the spectrum, as does the sensitivity of the human retina, which, if you have never thought about it, is why our sight is so useful in the daytime. If this spectrum match were not so, then we could rightly complain that some of our retinal sensitivity was wasted. We don’t normally think of visible light as penetrating, but light passes mostly unhindered through glass and air. Ultraviolet, however, is summarily absorbed by ordinary glass, so glass windows would not be much different from brick windows if our eyes were sensitive to only ultraviolet.

  Stars that are over three or four times hotter than the Sun are prodigious producers of ultraviolet light. Fortunately, these stars are also bright in the visible part of the spectrum so discovering them has not depended on access to ultraviolet telescopes. The ozone layer in our atmosphere absorbs most of the ultraviolet, x-rays, and gamma rays that impinge upon it, so a detailed analysis of these hottest stars can best be obtained from Earth orbit or beyond. These high-energy windows in the spectrum thus represent relatively young subdisciplines of astrophysics.

  AS IF TO herald a new century of extended vision, the first Nobel Prize ever awarded in physics went to the German physicist Wilhelm C. Röntgen in 1901 for his discovery of x-rays. Both ultraviolet and x-rays in the universe can reveal the presence of one of the most exotic objects in the universe: black holes. Black holes emit no light—their gravity is too strong for even light to escape—so their existence must be inferred from the energy emitted by matter that might spiral onto its surface from a companion star. The scene resembles greatly what water looks like as it spirals down a toi
let bowl. With temperatures over twenty times that of the Sun’s surface, ultraviolet and x-rays are the predominant form of energy released by material just before it descends into the black hole.

  The act of discovery does not require that you understand either in advance, or after the fact, what you have discovered. This happened with the microwave background radiation and it is happening now with gamma ray bursts. As we will see in Section 6, the gamma-ray window has revealed mysterious bursts of high-energy gamma rays that are scattered across the sky. Their discovery was made possible through the use of space-borne gamma-ray telescopes, yet their origin and cause remain unknown.

  If we broaden the concept of vision to include the detection of subatomic particles then we get to use neutrinos. As we saw in Section 2, the elusive neutrino is a subatomic particle that forms every time a proton transforms into an ordinary neutron and positron, which is the antimatter partner to an electron. As obscure as the process sounds, it happens in the Sun’s core about a hundred billion billion billion billion (1038) times each second. Neutrinos then pass directly out of the Sun as if it weren’t there at all. A neutrino “telescope” would allow a direct view of the Sun’s core and its ongoing thermonuclear fusion, which no band from the electromagnetic spectrum can reveal. But neutrinos are extraordinarily difficult to capture because they hardly ever interact with matter, so an efficient and effective neutrino telescope is a distant dream, if not an impossibility.