The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘Enigmatic, enticing’ black holes explored on ‘Nova’
Yale physics/astronomy expert Natarajan featured
It might be a season of icy tweetstorms and “bomb cyclone” snowstorms, but TV’s “Nova” has greater forces to explore in the two-hour special “Black Hole Apocalypse” Wednesday.
While the topic is almost unimaginably vast, a key voice in the show is very local in Yale’s Priyamvada Natarajan (Priya to friends), a professor of physics and astronomy in New Haven. Natarajan says that thanks to new technology and a momentous discovery in 2015, it is a special time for astronomy.
“I think this is a moment of grand confluence for many subjects in astrophysics in particular and science in general,” Natarajan says in a phone chat recently. “There is a convergence of the sophistication of the theoretical understanding ... and really amazing observational data from satellites and telescopes.”
We previewed some of the new special and it can be a tad mind-blowing, as Columbia University astrophysicist/author Janna Levin takes viewers on a CG-assisted journey to the frontiers of black hole science where Natarajan researches, interprets and teaches.
“I find these objects super enigmatic,” Natarajan says. “I mean, they’re just enticing” because they’re within reach in terms of science detection but out of reach in terms of being physically visible.
New research means opening the window on the universe in every wavelength, says Natarajan, from optical to infrared, mid-infrared, Xray and gamma ray. The one thing that still needs to happen, she says, is to get new space telescopes because the Earth’s atmosphere interferes with infrared wavelengths.
The Spitzer Space Telescope (2003) was a window to star-forming clouds, but it’s a battle to see clearly into the light of the distant past because there was so much space dust when galaxies were forming and the dust scatters that light. Using infrared detection helps peer further back in time, and Natarjan is looking forward to the James Webb Space Telescope launch in 2019.
Natarajan’s decade-plus work is trying to get a handle on the first black holes that formed — the seed black holes — and the new telescope will help prove certain theories. Scientists know that black holes can form from burned-out stars but they have also noticed powerful, ancient quasars (a billion times the size of our sun, powered by black holes) from the early years of the 13.8 billion-year-old universe.
Natarajan’s leading theory to explain these fast-developing beasts can be verified by the Webb telescope, she says.
The math and physics behind the theories trace back to a century ago and people like Karl Schwarzschild, but a big a-ha! moment came on Sept. 14, 2015, when twin interfermometers at the LIGO detection experiment produced audible chirps that confirmed the existence of long-sought gravitational waves produced by the collision of black holes more than 1 billion years ago.
“Oh my God, that was transformative,” says Natarajan, before we point out that the actual chirps sounded less than momentous in the TV special. “I totally get your point ... but remember, when we’re dealing with the cosmos, a lot of what we’ve uncovered about the cosmos is invisible stuff. So actually detecting something that you can hear, see, whatever, to test or to validate a model, is huge.”
Scientists knew black holes existed along with general relativity — for
example, we have GPS instruments in our pockets, says Natarajan, which are based on Einstein’s theory of relativity. But another part of that theory is when two black holes clash, they have to shake all of space time. The 2015 detection chirp made black holes and black matter real while bolstering theories about the supermassive black holes that Natarajan studies.
The show spends time exploring the twisting logic of these mysterious black holes, which hold gravity so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape their pull: Where do they come from? What’s inside them? And what can they tell us about the nature of space, time and gravity?
The “Apocalypse” title may be a little marketing flair, of course, but it evokes a black hole’s enormous power to pull everything into its gravity vortex.
The special does a fairly good job exploring the advances in our understanding, pointing out that black holes are at the center of each galaxy, including ours (another “local” angle, although our black hole is “dead” and no longer feeding). So says India-born Natarajan, who studied at MIT and in Cambridge, England, and has a favorite Japanese anime character, named Miroku, who — wait for it — holds the curse of a black hole in his hand.