NOVA Now Universe Revealed Podcast Episode I Black Holes: To the Event Horizon and Beyond
Black holes: theyโre dense, elusive, light-absorbing pockets of spacetime that are critical to our understanding of the universe.
Subscribe for free to get all episodes of NOVA Now on Apple Podcasts at https://apple.co/2U5GyYp
But black holes are difficult to peer into, so thereโs a lot scientists still donโt know. This leaves some room for science fiction to take over. Tall tales of galactic adventure may pair well with popcorn, but they also blur the lines between fact and fiction.
To explore what humanity knowsโand what we think we knowโabout black holes, Dr. Alok Patel and a theoretical cosmologist journey to Earthโs closest black hole: the Milky Wayโs own Sagittarius A*, approximately 26,000 light-years away. (Donโt worry, no scientists or science nerds were harmed in the making of this podcast.)
NOVA Now Universe Revealed is a production of GBH and PRX. Itโs produced by:
Terence Bernardo
Jennie Cataldo
Ari Daniel
Caitlin Faulds
Jocelyn Gonzales
Julia Cort and Chris Schmidt are the co-Executive Producers of NOVA
Sukee Bennett is Senior Digital Editor
Christina Monnen is Associate Researcher
Robin Kazmier is Science Editor
Robert Boyd is Digital Associate Producer
Shyla Duff is Digital Video Intern
And Devin Maverick Robins is Managing Producer of Podcasts at GBH
Thanks to our guests Hakeem Oluseyi, author of A Quantum Life, and Dennis Whyte, director of MITโs Plasma Science and Fusion Center.
ยฉ WGBH Educational Foundation 2021
@varshajasoliya9700
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
Will it improve my English vocabulary.?
@jtboss8139
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
I Never get tired of black holes. ALWAYS entertaining and exciting. Only time I got tired of them was my last girl friend. Hers didn't look that great amd was more of a supermassive black hole, so we only dated a month. But my new girls black hole is amazing and small and she let's my manicotti break thru her event horizon ring whenever I want and let's it spaghettify and takes and sucks all my photons inside and doesn't let them out.. I love her.
@k.infante3624
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
No visuals to understand what's being talked about
@mikeypiros6647
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
SAY'ING BLACK HOLE IS RACIEST !
Get woke already !
@virginialopez4166
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
I'm so so โค๏ธ proud ๐ฅฐ of Rover Perseverance, this Rover Perseverance take the videos from Mars so clear and clean, and slowly so โค๏ธ we are able to enjoy the view from Mars, Perseverance is so โค๏ธ perfect โค๏ธ and the best of the best to do the job ๐ in Mars, I hop๐ค lon
@nobullman5853
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
I was an underachiever in school..bored with the yada yada..however time and experience have forced me into reality of conciousness.
@uneducatedguess6740
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
Newtonian "Shell Theorem" proves that event horizon cannot be created: a sphere, a ball, or a dot โ if mass the same โ produces the same gravity around – mass distribution does not matter! So, radius of the event horizon for a star does not depend on how mass of the star is distributed. So, event horizon cannot rise above the surface unless some star layers move through the event horizon. And any move through the horizon takes infinite time – by definition of the event horizon (either way, up or down, since mechanics is symmetric in time).
Black Holes were introduced to provide asylum for missing antimatter and protect it from annihilation by event horizon. The intent/attempt was to resolve matter-antimatter asymmetry – failed. Newer but similar intent/attempt explaining missing antimatter is by giving mass to a neutrino, otherwise massless universe only can be speculated out of difference in neutrino and antineutrino lifetimes – claimed by Japanese researches. That attempt failed too. Black and dark cosmology failure recently published in my Time Matters.
@nobullman5853
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
Realism is the Black Hole that swallows up all Falsity.
@bobshakor8184
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
Blackhole doesn't have singularity and existence of blackhole proves string theory is correct.
Long stretches of integrated strings on the surface of Blackhole make it a fuzzyball with inverted space-time at its center.
@kerryswails4581
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
They intentionally didnโt put podcast in the title,to me thats misleading.I came here to watch Nova
@halosawz
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
be nice if Podcast was in the title.
@joshvanguard852
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
Lovely podcast but this is not the platform for podcasts … We come to YouTube to watch videos ….
@bloopsmee3694
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
Levin's explanations are evocative af. Really helped me understand. Mindblowing… Damn space is cool
@TheManion123
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
Narration is terrible. Itโs like they are talking to a little kid.
@dededenver9560
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
Whoever the woman narrator is, she needs to be replaced. Her voice and fake way of reading a script causes me to turn off the program. She must be used to reading to kindergarten kids. Ugh, people. What were you thinking? ๐
@JuniorTennis
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
The Universe revealed is so woke that they can hardly bring themselves to a let white male say a word. The people they choose must be women or minorities. The result is that hardly any comment comes off non-scripted. Itโs narrated poorly and the five-second talking head clips that we are suppose to believe are real scientist come off as amateur broadcasters let alone scientist. Theyโve actually done damage to women and minorities in science and the STEM disciplines. Nova used to be great. Now itโs just another tool for the Woke to preach false inclusivity to the masses.
@ู ุงูุฑู ุญู ูุฏุนูู-ุธ1ุธ
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
(black holes and D-branes )
What, then, are the "degrees of freedom" which can give rise to black hole entropy?
๐๐๐
String theorists have constructed models in which a black hole is a very long (and hence very massive) string. This model gives rough agreement with the expected entropy of a Schwarzschild black hole, but an exact proof has yet to be found one way or the other. The chief difficulty is that it is relatively easy to count the degrees of freedom quantum strings possess if they do not interact with one another. This is analogous to the ideal gas studied in introductory thermodynamics: the easiest situation to model is when the gas atoms do not have interactions among themselves. Developing the kinetic theory of gases in the case where the gas atoms or molecules experience inter-particle forces (like the van der Waals force) is more difficult. However, a world without interactions is an uninteresting place: most significantly for the black hole problem, gravity is an interaction, and so if the "string coupling" is turned off, no black hole could ever arise. Therefore, calculating black hole entropy requires working in a regime where string interactions exist.
๐๐๐
Extending the simpler case of non-interacting strings to the regime where a black hole could exist requires supersymmetry. In certain cases, the entropy calculation done for zero string coupling remains valid when the strings interact. The challenge for a string theorist is to devise a situation in which a black hole can exist which does not "break" supersymmetry. In recent years, this has been done by building black holes out of D-branes. Calculating the entropies of these hypothetical holes gives results which agree with the expected Bekenstein entropy. Unfortunately, the cases studied so far all involve higher-dimensional spaces โ D5-branes in nine-dimensional space, for example. They do not directly apply to the familiar case, the Schwarzschild black holes observed in our own universe.
@ู ุงูุฑู ุญู ูุฏุนูู-ุธ1ุธ
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
(black holes and D-branes )
What, then, are the "degrees of freedom" which can give rise to black hole entropy?
๐๐๐
String theorists have constructed models in which a black hole is a very long (and hence very massive) string. This model gives rough agreement with the expected entropy of a Schwarzschild black hole, but an exact proof has yet to be found one way or the other. The chief difficulty is that it is relatively easy to count the degrees of freedom quantum strings possess if they do not interact with one another. This is analogous to the ideal gas studied in introductory thermodynamics: the easiest situation to model is when the gas atoms do not have interactions among themselves. Developing the kinetic theory of gases in the case where the gas atoms or molecules experience inter-particle forces (like the van der Waals force) is more difficult. However, a world without interactions is an uninteresting place: most significantly for the black hole problem, gravity is an interaction, and so if the "string coupling" is turned off, no black hole could ever arise. Therefore, calculating black hole entropy requires working in a regime where string interactions exist.
๐๐๐
Extending the simpler case of non-interacting strings to the regime where a black hole could exist requires supersymmetry. In certain cases, the entropy calculation done for zero string coupling remains valid when the strings interact. The challenge for a string theorist is to devise a situation in which a black hole can exist which does not "break" supersymmetry. In recent years, this has been done by building black holes out of D-branes. Calculating the entropies of these hypothetical holes gives results which agree with the expected Bekenstein entropy. Unfortunately, the cases studied so far all involve higher-dimensional spaces โ D5-branes in nine-dimensional space, for example. They do not directly apply to the familiar case, the Schwarzschild black holes observed in our own universe.
@markcarter9474
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
Thanks๐ฆ๐ฆ๐ฆ
@kristensorensen2219
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
Science fiction on Nova.๐ฆday?
@mascadadelpantion8018
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
Oh black holes…………will there ever be a day when you're not underestimated
@martensjd
October 6, 2025 at 11:52 am
No video?
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