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Astro 101: Black holes in pop culture
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Astrology 101: Black holes in pop culture
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Black Holes in Pop CultureLet's start our journey into the realm of pop culture with a franchise
that has been attracting fans for the last 50 years. A generation of
Star Trek enthusiasts grew up watching Star Trek The Original Series,
which first aired in 1966. A lot has changed in the time since Captain
Kirk fought a gorn by hand in the original series. Star Trek isn't merely
science fiction but is also known to challenge inequalities in society.
But Star Trek is known for singlehandedly inspiring a generation of
scientists and engineers whose work saw human exploration of the
moon and permanent laboratories in space. My favorite Star Trek
movie reboot of the franchise in 2009 with an epic space adventure
with the tagline, the future begins. The story begins following James
Kirk's exploits as a cadet in Starfleet Academy but an attack on the
Vulcan homeworld forces the cadets to become crew of the newly
commissioned USS Enterprise. Without spoiling too much of the movie,
the writers of the film employed a strange form of fictional matter
called red matter, which appears to create black holes that can
consume entire planets.
In the movie, the Vulcan homeworld has been attacked, and the planet's
surface collapses inwards. Although visually impressive, Star Trek gets a lot
of the black hole physics wrong. For one, the audience is meant to
understand that red matter black holes are traversable. Unfortunately,
traversable wormholes are merely a theory and would require a super
advanced civilization and a number of notable scientific discoveries to permit
travel. In fact, travel through a wormhole, if possible, would likely expose
travelers to a serious dose of radiation, making the journey fatal to squishy
humans like me. On the other hand, Star Trek explores some very interesting
physics of black holes, specifically how a spacecraft might escape if it
becomes trapped within the gravitational pull of a black hole. In one scene,
the enterprise is at maximum thrust and is still being accelerated towards
the black hole. In order to save the crew, the chief engineer Scotty suggests
that the last option is to eject the warp core and ride the shockwave from
the explosion to safety. At best, it explores interesting science fiction
concepts. At its worst, it makes some small, maybe forgivable errors, in
scientific judgment for the sake of entertainment.
, One movie that did satisfy me was the 2014 movie
Interstellar, which presents the science of black holes as
accurately as possible. There is still black hole physics that is
unknown, like what happens when you cross an event horizon?
So, the movie makers do engage in some speculation about
what happens inside a black hole. The black hole in Interstellar
is a supermassive black hole named Gargantua. Two planets
are in orbit around the black hole at a safe distance, which is a
reasonable possibility even though in the TV show Doctor Who,
they claim that planets orbiting black holes are impossible. It is
important to the plot of Interstellar that Gargantua is a
supermassive black hole, since the strength of the tidal forces
that could spaghettify an astronaut is weaker for more massive
black holes. Although Gargantua causes enormous tides on
Miller's planet, the planet that orbits closest to Gargantua, the
tidal forces aren't strong enough to destroy the planet orthe
characters on the surface. Another cool bit of science that
Interstellar gets right are the extreme time differences between
Miller's planet and the spaceship that orbits farther away from
the black hole. When one hour passes on the planet, seven
years pass for the astronauts far from the black hole.
For me, the most exciting part of the movie is the view of
the black hole and the disk of material flowing around it.
This view of the black hole incorporates most of the
science of how light travels on curved paths around
regions with gargantuan gravity. The black hole Gargantua
is extremely far away from us, but luckily the writers
included a wormhole that allows a quick shortcut through
space between Saturn and Gargantua. Black holes exist
but wormholes probably don't so this part is science fiction.
In the movie, they speculate that the wormhole was
constructed by aliens. I don't know how to construct a
wormhole but then I'm not an alien. I won't spoil the ending
of the movie for you. However, I'll just let you know that
there is a trip into the black hole. What happens when they
enter the event horizon is pure speculation, but who
knows? Maybe the screenwriters are correct.
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