#astrophysics

After two weeks of episodes at the Grote Reber Museum, we’re headed next door to the Mount Pleasant Radio Observatory for our final episode in the space mini-series! 

Brett Reid, manager of the University of Tasmania's radio telescopes, and Dr Patrick Yates-Jones, research associate at the School of Natural Sciences at the University of Tasmania, tell us all about their work at the Observatory, as well as take us into the exciting world of the Control Room.

Show theme music: Kevin MacLeod

Host: Olly Dove (@littledove440) and Simin Salarpour (@SalarpourSimin)

Production: Meredith Castles (@MeredithCastles)

Media & Promotion: Georgia Stewart (@katyabandow)

In today's episode, Tony suggests a black hole as being the perfect pet while George wonders what an accretion disk is and why she'd want to smear the neighbours on it.

Vital questions are asked like:

• Will our black hole suck in our neighbours?
• Does a black hole clean up after itself?
• And, most importantly, are the goats on the mountain upside down?!

Tony's notes for this episode are as follows:

Pōwehi, a Hawai'ian word meaning "the adorned fathomless dark creation"
Star sign: Pōwehi is a Virgo! (Got it wrong but we don't know what that is anyway)

Bonus factoid: The apparent size of our supermassive black hole (the amount of night sky it takes up when we look at it from earth) is about the same apparent size of M87's SMBH in the night sky when we look at it from Earth - whilst M87's is about 2000x bigger it is also about 2000x further away. However, the actual size of it's event horizon is about 3x the orbit of Pluto. The accretion disk (orange bit) is about 0.4 light years, so its an absurdly big object.

Super recent addendum: After we made this video there has been some buzz about a recent paper suggesting that our SMBH is actually less massive but surrounded by a dense dark matter halo making up the rest of the mass. Basically, some objects (stars?) have been passing very close without being torn apart, and this is the explanation. In any case, it's an observation that may help us narrow down what dark matter is! (We have our own theory - see EP 7)

**Some recent Blackhole videos from some channels I follow pretty religiously.**
Anton Petrov, Dr Becky and Scott Manley are excellent for translating recent scientific papers into something understandable and explaining recent space related events and concepts.

Dr. Becky's video about the 5 Types of Black Hole (we missed intermediate ones!) and I kinda assume quasars are just big supermassive ones, but they are very far away so it is hard to tell!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeKLKyzsJ2g

Anton Petrov's video on the M87 black hole (Pōwehi) nicely shows off the size comparisons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2BFxfC8Ehk

Scott Manley's amazing 360 degree VR video (you can move it around!) that shows what it looks like as you fall into a black hole. He does great space videos, covers a lot of recent space exploration news (his breakdowns of launch failure videos are my go to whenever "we are not going to space today").
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDNZBT_GeqU

These two are also fantastic:

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell's Ultimate Guide to Black Holes. Kurzgesagt's videos are cute, beautiful and spectacularly well put together.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqsLTNkzvaY

PBS Space Time This channel was recommended to me by a friend who works at the Arcetri Observatory in Florence. They do some deeper dives into a range of topics we frankly brutalised. I always learn something new watching these, they are masters of making some of the most complex concepts in physics understandable. They have lots of great ones, too many to list here. Here are some tricks you can do with a rotating black hole...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjgGdGzDFiM