Astronomy 142: Black Holes
Winter 2012
If you want the Autumn 2021 incarnation of A1142, go
here.
- Instructor: David Weinberg, Professor of Astronomy.
- Textbook: Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's
Outrageous Legacy, by Kip Thorne.
For more information, download the syllabus.
Downloadable Items (PDF format):
Course Notes (PDF format):
- Part 1: Introduction, posted 1/3/12
- Part 2: Newton's Laws of Motion, posted 1/4/12
- Part 3: Universal Gravity, posted 1/10/12
- Part 4: Transition: Conservation Laws,
Electromagnetic Radiation, Reference Frames, posted 1/22/12
- Part 5: Special Relativity, posted 1/26/12.
- Some figures to accompany section 5,
posted 1/27/12.
- Part 6: General Relativity, posted 2/2/12.
- Part 7: Stellar Death and Black Hole Birth,
posted 2/10/12.
- Part 8: A Digression on Angular Sizes, Resolution, and Spectra, posted 2/15/12.
- Slides for section 8.
- Part 9: Stellar mass black holes,
posted 2/20/12.
- Slides for section 9.
- Part 10: Supermassive mass black holes,
posted 2/24/12.
- Slides for section 10.
- Part 11: Waterfalls and Tornados: Measuring
Black Hole Spin,
posted 3/3/12.
- Slides for section 11.
- 12. Black Hole Evaporation,
posted 3/4/12.
- 13. Gravity Waves,
posted 3/6/12.
Items handed out in class:
Videos or images shown in class:
- Earth orbiting a black hole,
an animation by
Andrew Hamilton.
- Stars moving
around the Milky Way's central black hole. Based on data from
a group at UCLA.
-
Animation of planet orbits in the solar system.
-
Frames of reference.
This is the first part of four (and we watched only the
first three minutes of this part in class); links for the rest are below in
"other video links."
-
Einstein on E=mc2.
-
Relativity of simultaneity.
-
Time dilation.
-
Time dilation experiment.
Follows a re-creation of the 1970 clocks-on-airplanes test
of time dilation.
- A couple of illustrations from
"Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland," by George Gamow,
showing length contraction from the
bicycle reference frame and the
street reference frame.
- Overhead views of the
Fermilab and CERN
particle accelerators.
-
Shoot-the-monkey illustration of the equivalence principle.
-
Weightlessness in the International Space Station
-
Space Time Animation.
A bit odd, but the animation in the second half is
pretty good.
-
Pulsar animation (artists conception), showing how a rotating
neutron star produces pulsed radio emission.
- Sound of
a pulsar. The image shows the Vela supernova remnant, and
the sound is a translation of the central pulsar's pulsating
radio signal into sound.
- Inspiral of a pair of white dwarf stars
as they lose energy by emitting gravity waves. This is an artist's conception.
-
Black hole waterfall description from Andrew Hamilton's
Inside Black Holes web site.
- Waterspout video.
- BBC video
clip on Hawking radiation. I showed a few of minutes of this
7-minute video in class. While this video is generally good, if you
aren't careful you will come away with the very incorrect
impression that Hawking radiation is what we see when we observe
distant black holes, whereas what we see is actually emission
from accreting gas outside the event horizon.
- Gravity waves
and the LIGO observatory.
- Inspiral of a pair of white dwarf stars
as they lose energy by emitting gravity waves. This is an artist's conception.
- Merger of a pair of black holes as they
lose energy by emitting gravity waves. This is a real calculation,
showing the final 126 days before the merger, with
the red lines tracing the motion of the smaller black hole over the preceding
day. Note that the scale of the volume shown shrinks with time as
the black holes get closer together. The trace on the bottom shows
the gravity wave signature.
- Merger of galaxies followed by merger
of their central black holes. This starts with visualization of
a real calculation of galaxy mergers, then shifts to artist's conception.
- Orbit of the LISA spacecraft.
Other links, some to videos, some to informational web sites or images:
-
Death by black hole.
A conversation with the always-entertaining Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
-
The Event
Horizon Telescope Project. We talked briefly in class (1/18) about
efforts to link the world's radio telescopes in order to make an
image of the event horizon around the Milky Way's central black hole.
-
Measuring the Milky Way's central black hole.
Video on a 16-year effort to map the motions of stars at the
center of the Milky Way.
-
A journey into a black hole. This 7-minute video
includes the ``falling into a black hole'' animation
on the above list, but it also has a quite good narration
explaining what is going on.
- Frames of Reference. I vividly remember this science film from
high school physics class; even then it was comically retro.
Someone has broken it into chunks and posted it to YouTube.
Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.
Part 4.
- The Black Hole.
Not what they are really like.`
Go to David Weinberg's Home Page
Updated: 2012 March 6[dhw]