M87’s changing magnetic field

35:50>> When you say a solar masses, >> yeah, it's the sun. >> Our sun. >> Billions of suns. >> Billions of our sun >> inside a black hole that is like accreing. And all of those lines that you see, this is this is what's um what's very special about this new finding. Those lines are the polarization of the radio waves from that part of the accretion disc. Now, why is that important? Polarization is a property of light that has to do with the fact that, you know, light is a wave. So, well, it could oscillate this way or it could oscillate this way or it could oscillate anywhere in between, right? There's a there's a 2D degree of freedom. >> Mhm. >> The direction of the polarization tells you something about the direction and

36:31the strength of the magnetic field. >> Right. >> Okay. And black holes have intense magnetic fields around them because you've got all this plasma which is a bunch of charged particles. Charged particles moving around Maxwell's equations you get giant magnetic fields. The giant magnetic fields are the reason why M87 has that giant jet that we saw earlier. And so and so studying that magnetic field is extremely important for figuring out the properties of not only the black hole but also the properties of elliptical galaxies in general. Um, I don't know if you remember the Carnegie episode that we had. Yes. With Michael Blandon. >> Yes. >> Um, we asked him, "What's the one like question that you would want answered

37:12>> at the towards the end of the episode?" 100%. >> And he said, "I'd really like to know why these large elliptical galaxies and like these large old galaxies don't create any new stars." >> He he was like, "For some reason." >> Yeah. For some reason. >> For some reason. And there's like [laughter] there's like 10 different theories and everyone's got an idea but no one knows this happens. >> Yeah. >> But it's just for some reason. >> Yeah. And every single one of those theories, the culprit is the black hole. Okay. The black hole does something and then and then and then all of the stars stop forming. No new babies in the galaxy because of the black hole, >> right? um studying the black hole like M87 is going to give us clues as to

37:55whether one theory is correct versus the other. So I mean first of all just like the technological achievement of creating this video of a of a black hole that's 55 million years 55 u million light years away um is is insane. You can see the magnetic field changing. It's even flipping some which is kind of crazy which means that like >> you know the stuff in the accretion disc is moving at near the speed of light >> and the size of that accretion disc is about where like if the sun was at the center Voyager would be where the main donut is. So it's like it's like like outside the the realm of Pluto, but it's

38:35not that big. Which means if this stuff is going at near the speed of light, this is a highly dynamic system where we are going to see changes on a yearly basis. And if we can get that time down to even monthly, we are going to see changes on a monthly basis. >> It the system is highly turbulent. It's it there it's it's a highly active >> relatively maybe not dense is the right word. >> No, it's [clears throat] of course it's dense relatively like like like dense and the amount of activity that's happening. We've never been able to visualize in motion. >> No, we never have in motion. >> Right. And most things in astronomy just stay put. They like the pillars of

39:16creation that were photographed by Hubble and then we photographed with James Webb. They look the same, right? And [laughter] it's like 20 years later, but they it looks about the same because the stuff is not moving at relativistic speeds and the size of the stuff is like light years across. But here you've got something that's like light hours to light days and the stuff is moving at light speed. So you're going to have a lot of motion. It's extremely exciting for theorists, for astronomers, for people in AI that are like like putting algorithms to the test with like how to make this data better because you've got pabytes and pabytes of data, right? It's um it's a it's a really cool cool thing. >> If you're looking for motion in the

39:58universe, check out M87 because that's where the motion is. >> M87 has motion, as the kids would say. Yeah, it's it's I think it's it's it's an incredible story. Okay, so moving on