Gargantua – Hard Science Ain't Hard

The local science museum had a showing of the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar so of course I went to see it again. Awesome visuals and (mostly) good science because Nolan had tapped the expertise of Dr Kip Thorne, one of the primary creators of LIGO. On the way out, Vinnie collared me.

“Hey, Sy, ‘splain something to me.”

“I can try, but first let’s get out of the weather. Al’s coffee OK with you?”

“Yeah, sure, if his scones are fresh-baked.”

Al saw me walking in. “Hey, Sy, you’re in luck, I just pulled a tray of cinnamon scones out of the oven.” Then he saw Vinnie. “Aw, geez, there go my paper napkins again.”

Vinnie was ready. “Nah, we’ll use the backs of some ad flyers I grabbed at the museum. And gimme, uh, two of the cinnamons and a large coffee, black.”

“Here you go.”

At our table I said, “So what’s the problem with the movie?”

“Nobody shrank. All this time we been talking about how things get smaller in a strong gravity field. That black hole, Gargantua, was huge. The museum lecture guy said it was like 100 million times as heavy as the Sun. When the people landed on its planet they should have been teeny but everything was just regular-size. And what’s up with that ‘one hour on the planet is seven years back home’ stuff?”

“OK, one thing at a time. When the people were on the planet, where was the movie camera?”

“On the planet, I suppose.”

“Was the camera influenced by the same gravitational effects that the people were?”

“Ah, it’s the frames thing again, ain’t it? I guess in the on-planet inertial frame everything stays the relative size they’re used to, even though when we look at the planet from our far-away frame we see things squeezed together.”

(I’ve told you that Vinnie’s smart.) “You got it. OK, now for the time thing. By the way, it’s formally known as ‘time dilation.’ Remember the potential energy/kinetic energy distinction?”

“Yeah. Potential energy depends on where you are, kinetic energy depends on how you’re moving.”

“Got it in one. It turns out that energy and time are deeply intertwined all through physics. Would you be surprised if I told you that there are two kinds of time dilation, one related to gravitational potential and the other to velocity?”

“Nothing would surprise me these days. Go on.”

“The gravity one dropped out of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. The velocity one arose from his General Relativity work.” I grabbed one of those flyers. “Ready for a little algebra?”

“Geez. OK, I asked for it.”
“You certainly did. I’ll just give you the results, and mind you these apply only near a non-rotating sphere with no electric charge. Things get complicated otherwise. Suppose the sphere has mass M and you’re circling around it at a distance r from its geometric center. You’ve got a metronome ticking away at n beats per your second and you’re perfectly happy with that. We good?”

“So far.”

“I’m watching you from way far away. I see your metronome running slow, at only n√[1-(2 G·M/r·c²)] beats per my second. G is Newton’s gravity constant, c is the speed of light. See how the square root has to be less than 1?”

“Your speed of light or my speed of light?”

“Good question, considering we’re talking about time and space getting all contorted, but Einstein guarantees that both of us measure exactly the same speed. So anyway, in the movie both the Miller’s Planet landing team and that poor guy left on good ship Endurance are circling Gargantua. Earth observers would see both their clocks running slow. But Endurance is much further out (larger r, smaller fraction) from Gargantua than Miller’s Planet is. Endurance’s distance gave its clock more beats per Earth second than the planet gets, which is why the poor guy aged so much waiting for the team to return.”

“I wondered about that.”

Then we heard Ramona’s husky contralto. “Hi, guys. Al said you were back here talking physics. Who wants to take me dancing?”

We both stood up, quickly.

“Whee, this’ll be fun.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Last week a museum visitor wondered, “What’s the volume of a black hole?” A question easier asked than answered.

Let’s look at black hole (“BH”) anatomy. If you’ve seen Interstellar, you saw those wonderful images of “Gargantua,” the enormous BH that plays an essential role in the plot. (If you haven’t seen the movie, do that. It is so cool.)

A BH isn’t just a blank spot in the Universe, it’s attractively ornamented by the effects of its gravity on the light passing by:

Gargantua 2c — Gargantua,
adapted from Dr Kip Thorne’s book, *The Science of “Interstellar”*

Working from the outside inward, the first decoration is a background starfield warped as though the stars beyond had moved over so they could see us past Gargantua. That’s because of gravitational lensing, the phenomenon first observed by Sir Arthur Eddington and the initial confirmation of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.

No star moved, of course. Each warped star’s light comes to us from an altered angle, its lightwaves bent on passing through the spatial compression Gargantua imposes on its neighborhood. (“Miles are shorter near a BH” — see Gravitational Waves Are Something Else for a diagrammatic explanation.)

Moving inward we come to the Accretion Disc, a ring of doomed particles destined to fall inward forever unless they’re jostled to smithereens or spat out along one of the BH’s two polar jets (not shown). The Disc is hot, thanks to all the jostling. Like any hot object it emits light.

Above and below the Disc we see two arcs that are actually images of the Accretion Disc, sent our way by more gravitational lensing. Very close to a BH there’s a region where passing light beams are bent so much that their photons go into orbit. The disc’s a bit further out than that so its lightwaves are only bent 90^o over (arc A) and under (arc B) before they come to us.

By the way, those arcs don’t only face in our direction. Fly 360^o around Gargantua’s equator and those arcs will follow you all the way. It’s as though the BH were embedded in a sphere of lensed Disclight.

Which gets us to the next layer of weirdness. Astrophysicists believe that most BHs rotate, though maybe not as fast as Gargantua’s edge-of-instability rate. Einstein’s GR equations predict a phenomenon called frame dragging — rapidly spinning massive objects must tug local space along for the ride. The deformed region is a shell called the Ergosphere.

Frame dragging is why the two arcs are asymmetrical and don’t match up. We see space as even more compressed on the right-hand side where Gargantua is spinning away from us. Because the effect is strongest at the equator, the shell should really be called the Ergospheroid, but what can you do?

Inside the Ergosphere we find the defining characteristic of a BH, its Event Horizon, the innermost bright ring around the central blackness in the diagram. Barely outside the EH there may or may not be a Firewall, a “seething maelstrom of particles” that some physicists suggest must exist to neutralize the BH Information Paradox. Last I heard, theoreticians are still fighting that battle.

The EH forms a nearly spherical boundary where gravity becomes so intense that the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. No light or matter or information can break out. At the EH, the geometry of spacetime becomes so twisted that the direction of time is In. Inside the EH and outside of the movies it’s impossible for us to know what goes on.

Finally, the mathematical models say that at the center of the EH there’s a point, the Singularity, where spacetime’s curvature and gravity’s strength must be Infinite. As we’ve seen elsewhere, Infinity in a calculation is Nature’s was of saying, “You’ve got it wrong, make a better model.”

So we’re finally down to the volume question. We could simply measure the EH’s external diameter d and plug that into V=(πd³)/6. Unfortunately, that forthright approach misses all the spatial twisting and compression — it’s a long way in to the Singularity. Include those effects and you’ve probably got another Infinity.

Gargantua’s surface area is finite, but its volume may not be.

~~ Rich Olcott

Hard Science Ain't Hard

Tag: Gargantua

Three Body Problems

Another slice of π, wrapped up in a Black Hole crust