Astronomy 2142: Black Holes
Autumn 2025

Slides from lectures:

• Introduction slides in pdf or pptx.
• A few slides on Newton in pdf or pptx.
• Slides for the 9/17 in-class question in pdf or pptx.
• Illustrations from Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland, by George Gamow.
• Empirical evidence for General Relativity in pdf or ptx.
• White dwarfs, supernovae, neutron stars in pdf or pptx.
• Stellar mass black holes in pdf or pptx.

Homework assignments:

• Homework 1: Newton's Law of Gravity, due on Monday, September 22, 5 pm.
• Solution set handed out on 9/26.
• Homework 2: Solar Energy and Time Dilation, due on Friday, October 3, 7 pm.
• Solution set handed out on 10/9.
• Homework 3: White Dwarfs, Neutron Stars, and Black Holes, i due on Friday, November 7, 7 pm.

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.
• Reader's guide for Black Holes and Time Warps, written by DW, last update 8/29/25.
• Review guide for the midterm exam, posted 10/3/25. (Exam is on 10/13/25.)
• Solution sheet for the midterm exam was handed out in class, on paper only.

Videos or images shown in class:

• Earth orbiting a black hole, an animation by Andrew Hamilton
• Stars orbiting the Milky Way black hole
• Kepler's laws
• Relativity of simultaneity: image and video.
• Time dilation: image and video.
• 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
• Black hole waterfall description from Andrew Hamilton's Inside Black Holes web site.
• 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.

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?.
• 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.

Links to videos available for extra credit assignments

• Interstellar Monthly Movie Night Panel, for the recording see here.
• Arrival Monthly Movie Night Panel, for the recording see here.

Links to black hole astronomy articles that I mentioned in class

• Spinning into the Gap
• NANOGrav
• Mass of MCG-06-30-15
• Little Red Dots
• Testing Hawking
• Visiting the closest BH
• BH destroys a star?
• Million Msun object found with gravitational lensing
• Big BHs in Little Red Dots