Astronomy 2142: Black Holes
Spring 2025

• Instructor: David Weinberg, Distinguished University Professor, Department of Astronomy
• Textbook: Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, by Kip Thorne.

Downloadable Items (PDF format):

• Course Syllabus.
• Theme description of the Number, Nature, Mind theme of the GE.

Course Notes:

Notes are in PDF format. I can provide a double space version for anyone who wants more space to add their own notes.
• Part 1: Introduction, posted 1/3/25.
• Part 2: Newton's Laws of Motion , posted 1/14/25.
• Part 3: Universal Gravity, posted 1/21/25.
• Part 4: Transition: Electromagnetic Radiation, Momentum and Energy Conservation, Reference Frames, new version posted 2/4/25.
• Part 5: Special Relativity, posted 2/4/25.
• Part 6: General Relativity, posted 2/12/25.
• Part 7: Stellar Death and Black Hole Birth, posted 2/24/25.
• Part 8: A Short Digression: Angular Size, Resolution, Spectra, posted 3/3/25.
• Part 9: Stellar Mass Black Holes, posted 3/17/25.
• Part 10: Supermassive Black Holes, posted 3/24/25.
• Part 11: Gravitational Waves, posted 3/31/25. (Updated 4/9/25.)
• Part 12: Imaging Black Holes, posted 4/7/25.
• Part 13: Black Hole Evaporation, posted 4/13/25.
• Part 14: Frontiers of Black Hole Research, posted 4/21/25.

Slides from lectures:

• Introduction slides in pdf or pptx (updated 1/9)
• Isaac Newton bio in pdf or pptx. (This info is in the section 2 course notes.)
• Jupiter-Saturn interaction in pdf or pptx, from 1/27/25 in-class question.
• Empirical successes of Newton's theory of gravity, in pdf or pptx. The course notes are more complete than Slide 1, but the figures on Slide 2 may be useful.
• EM radiation, slides from 1/31/25 lecture, in pdf or pptx.
• Special Relativity summary slides in pptx. The same info is in the last two sections of the Sec 5 notes.
• Empirical evidence for General Relativity in pptx or pdf. Accompanies last section of Part 6 notes.
• Slides from Chris Kochanek's lecture on stars, supernovae, and black formation, in pdf.
• Stellar mass black holes in pptx or pdf. Accompanies Section 9. (Updated 3/24/25)
• Supermassive black holes in pptx or pdf. Accompanies Section 10. (Updated 3/28/25)
• Gravitational waves in pptx or pdf. Accompanies Section 11.
• Imaging black hole event horizons in pptx or pdf. Accompanies Section 12.
• Black hole frontiers in pptx or pdf. Accompanies Section 14.

Homework assignments:

• Homework 1, due Friday, 1/31, 5 pm.
• Homework 2, due Friday, 2/14, 5 pm.
• Essay assignment, part I, due Monday, 3/24.
• Homework 3, due Monday, 3/31, 5 pm.
• Homework 4, due Friday, 4/11, 5 pm.
• Essay assignment, part II, due Monday, 4/21.

Information sheets:

• Manipulating equations. To help you remember some rules of algebra that you might have forgotten.
• Scientific notation.. Some reminders on scientific notation and test problems to check that you can use it correctly on your calculator.
• Review guide for the midterm exam.
• Answers for the midterm handed out in class on 3/3/25.
• Reader's guide for Black Holes and Time Warps, by DW, updated 4/13/25 and covering chapters 3-13.
• Review guide for the final exam.

Videos or images shown in class:

• Earth orbiting a black hole, an animation by Andrew Hamilton
• Stars orbiting the Milky Way black hole
• Relativity of simultaneity.
• Time dilation.
• Excerpt from Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland, by George Gamow.
• Shoot-the-monkey illustration of the equivalence principle.
• Einstein's elevator, a simple demonstration that objects travel on straight paths in a freely falling reference frame.
• Weightlessness in the International Space Station
• 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.
• A new way to visualize General Relativity. This video proposes an alternative to the conventional "rubber sheet" visualization of curved spacetime, one that better represents what is going on in GR.
• Now a set of items related to LIGO and gravitational wave detection; these and others can be found at this LIGO website
  • Kip Thorne interview on gravitational waves"
  • The journey of a gravitational wave discovered by LIGO in 2015.
  • Interferometer response to a gravitational wave
  • Black hole merger ripples in a spacetime pond
  • Gravitational wave chirp
  • Simultaneous gravitational and electromagnetic detection of a neutron star merger
  • LIGO signal from a binary neutron star merger
• Inspiral calculation for a supermassive black hole. This video shows the predicted orbit of a stellar mass black hole orbiting a spinning supermassive black hole and eventually merging. This kind of event should be detectable with LISA, but not with LIGO.
• Similar inspiral calculation for a supermassive black hole; this movie stops at several points and shows you the patterns.
• Excerpts from the book The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime, by Stephen Hawking and George Ellis (1973). I showed this so that you can admire the figures.
• 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.

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.
• A journey into a black hole. This 7-minute video has quite good (and carefully calculated) visualizations and narration explaining what is going on.
• The Black Hole. Not what they are really like.`
• 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. We will watch the first few minutes of Part 1 in class. Part 3 is my favorite.
  Part 1.
  Part 2.
  Part 3.
  Part 4.
  
• Excerpts from English translations of Einstein's 1905 papers On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies and Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?.
• Excerpt from English translation of Einstein's 1911 paper On the Influence of Gravitational on the Propagation of Light
• Space Time Animation. A bit odd, but the animation in the second half is pretty good.
• Visual summary of GR. This video, by the same animator as the "new way to visualize General Relativity" above, covers GR more broadly, from the equivalence principle to black holes.
• A Slower Speed of Light Trailer for a (downloadable) video game that illustrates relativity by steadily slowing the speed of light.
• Kip Thorne interview on spacetime (14 mins).
• Scenes and interviews on the first LIGO discovery (3 mins)
• The article from the LIGO team on the first gravitational wave discovery.
• Fuzzballs. A (16-minute) video discussing the black hole information paradox and the proposed solution based on string theory ``fuzzballs'' from OSU Physics professor Samir Mathur. This is an advanced topic, but the explanation in this video is very good, and accurate.
• Black hole waterfall description from Andrew Hamilton's Inside Black Holes web site.

Links to videos available for in-class question replacement assignments

• Interstellar Monthly Movie Night Panel, for the recording see here.
• Arrival Monthly Movie Night Panel, for the recording see here.
• Supernovae: The Secrets of Exploding Stars, interview with OSU Professor Laura Lopez, in OSU Astronomy's Making Space for All series.

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  Go to David Weinberg's Home Page

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  Updated: 2025 April 21[dhw]