 Our first talk is coming from a graduating senior undergrad at the University of Washington. Join me in welcoming Nick Saunders. My name is Nick Saunders. I'm graduating from the University of Washington in six weeks. I'm a Bachelor of Science in Astrophysics and a Bachelor of Arts in Cinema Studies. So what you're going to see up here is basically what the inside of my brain looks like most of the time. So as you can see, we're starting off with this gorgeous view of the twin sunset over the Dether Planet Tatooine. And by the end of this show, we will return to this beautiful sunset. But first, I'm going to talk about a few of the more recent popular slide find movies and kind of analyze what they've done right and wrong. So we're going to start with fan favorite, Peter Steller, science advisor, Dr. Kip Thorne. So a lot of the amazing visualizations that you see in this movie came from his theory of what a black hole would look like visually. We've never been able to see one. So what you're seeing here is a supermassive black hole that contains the mass of about 10 million suns. It's a lot of suns. This is a number that astronomers refer to as hell-of-bake. And so what you're really seeing here is not the light from the black hole. You're seeing the accretion disk of material around the black hole. And so this is a bunch of hot gas and dust that's being heated up as it accelerates by being pulled by the gravity of this black hole. And it looks like it has kind of this double structure to it, right? We have this horizontal disk that cuts across it, and then this vertical disk that wraps around it. What we're actually seeing is a single disk. The black hole is so massive that it gravitationally interacts with the light behind it and lenses it around the black hole and puts it into your eye. And so you see this version of the accretion disk behind the black hole wrapping around the edges of the black hole. And so this was Kip Thorne's work to visualize what it would actually look like. So I'm going to call this science. So let's talk about some other stuff that happens this week. So something else that happened is Matthew McCartney, a blind spoiler. There's going to be a couple of spoilers in this. Nothing too major. But Matthew McCartney flies into a black hole and he survives, which is miraculous. So let's talk about what would happen if you were to fly towards a black hole. So first, you would start to get stretched a little bit. And that's because the mass of the black hole is so intense that its gravitational field is actually significantly stronger where your feet are than where your head is. And so you would be pulled in a disproportionate way and stretched and squeezed in a very uncomfortable kind of way. And this is something that astronomers refer to as spaghettification. That was not a joke. That's correct. It would be uncomfortable. So I'm going to go ahead and say that surviving on the black hole fiction. Okay. So one other thing that happens is as McCartney approaches the black hole, he ends up on this planet that's pretty nearby it. Time slows down for him. This is something that happens. This is a real physical effect called time dilation. And what's really happening here is the black hole is so massive that it bends space-time completely down. It puts a dent in space-time so massive that it basically punctures it. And what happens is the space-time near the black hole gets stretched. So it takes longer to travel along that length of space-time. But light can't slow down. It always has to go at the same speed. So it will count for it time slows down. And so this is a real effect that we observed even just from the gravitational pull of the Earth. When we put satellites into space, we actually have to synchronize their clocks with the clocks on the surface of the Earth because they're experiencing a less significant gravitational pull than we do on the surface. So that is some quality science. Moving on to another movie that... And a great book and great movie that got a lot of attention for being very scientifically accurate. Science advisor Dr. Jim Green, NASA. So here's our nice Martian landscape. My favorite, of course. So let's talk about getting to Mars. The first step in this journey. So in the book they talk about making this transfer from Earth to Mars not by making the shortest distance in our orbit which would only be half the distance to the Sun but instead meeting up with Mars on the opposite side of the Sun from where we are. And this is called a home in orbit. It was theorized decades ago. And it's what we use is an effective way to get to Mars and were we to send astronauts to Mars it's probably the method that we would end up using. So I'm gonna end saying science. Another thing that happens that starts off the movie is there's a very dramatic dust storm on Mars. As you know Mars is kind of a dusty, rusty, red rock out in space so there's lots of very fine powdery sand and dust on the surface. And the wingspeeds of the surface get incredibly fast and in the book it says that the ones we got up to 175 kilometers per hour. Which is about 110 miles per hour. That's very fast. So I'm gonna need a volunteer, someone who's brave enough to be willing to experience the force of the winds on Mars. Yeah, come on. Get a nice sturdy sand, sprays yourself. You ready? You got a very strong sand. It's very good. Thank you. Stay standing there very well. So what's happening? The air pressure on Mars is actually significantly lower than the air pressure on Earth. That's because the atmosphere is so much thinner. It's almost entirely out of carbon dioxide and it doesn't have the same heavier elements like oxygen and nitrogen that we have in our atmosphere. And so wind speed of 110 miles per hour on the Earth would only feel like about 10 miles per hour on Mars. And just for reference, the wind speed in Seattle today was about 12 miles per hour. So I think all of you made it here pretty easily without getting well 30 feet up into the air and missing your spaceship home. You can go and see a picture. They had to get the story started somehow. So let's move on to another movie. I'm hoping to talk about one thing in this movie. There's a lot of very interesting, accurate stuff going on in terms of satellites crashing and exciting stuff happening. But there is one thing that I've never really gotten over after watching this movie and I'm going to show it to you. So where we last left our heroes, they were swinging from a rope from a space station and they were at rest with respect to the space station. And here they are at rest with respect to each other and they are holding on to a nice little rope, a tether. And were they to pull themselves towards each other, they would most certainly move towards each other. Wait, no. Wait, where are you going? Back. Say to the bullet, where are you going? So this is something that I think would make Sir Isaac Newton very unhappy. I think you would remind Mr. Kalini that the acceleration of an object is equal to the force acting on it divided by the mass of that object. And if the force acting on that object is zero, the acceleration of that object is going to be zero and he's not going to go anywhere. So unless there's something, some ghost force pulling him away, then he's going to stay right where he is and probably move towards the ship. That's my hair. It's going to go up the floor. I'm going to go and say fiction. Here's a movie that I could talk about for a very long time. I could spend hours talking to you. But for the sake of time, I'm just going to go through a few very quick points because there's a lot to cover. So let's start with just a few things. Humans having lived on the earth in this film for thousands of years, but everything has apparently evolved to kill them. Why? Jaden Smith turns on a radio transmitter and it shoots a laser into space. Will Smith detects a graviton buildup which could be a precursor, he says, to mass expansion. And an asteroid storm is imminent. How many of that means? I got that one. The way that he detects it is he takes off his wedding ring, holds it to the hull of his ship, and goes to the pilot and says, we've got graviton buildup. That's serious. Please don't, please don't say that. So we've returned to our beautiful, Tatooine Sunset. We've put in Suns of Tatooine, as promised. So we have this planet that is apparently habitable to live down by some moisture farmers. And it orbits two suns. So does this happen? Well, let's talk about stars with companions. And it turns out that about 80% of the stars that are visible to the naked eye have a companion around them. And it's very common for these high-mass stars that are very bright to have other stars orbiting them. And here's a nice little dance that they do. And you can see that this companion star actually has a much smaller star, probably a brown dwarf, orbiting it as well. And so there's three stars, two and a half or three stars in the system. And it is possible for planets in these kind of binary systems to have, or for stars in these kind of binary systems to have planets around them. And there's two configurations possible. You could have a planet that orbits around one of the stars individually and passes periodically between the two stars, such as this planet that we're approaching now. And we'll take a closer look at what the view from this planet might look like. So as we come into view, you could see, yeah, that looks kind of like what Luke was gazing longingly off into the distance towards. But we can do better. I think we can find something a little more similar. So yeah, these stars can have planets, but there is a system called Kepler-16B, the center of which is two stars in a binary system. One is a more massive yellow dwarf and then a smaller red dwarf, and they orbit each other. They orbit the same center of mass. And there is an exoplanet that orbits around both of them, and so it has two stars. And so a view from this planet might look something like this. This is a nice travel poster if you're ever interested in visiting Kepler-16B. They have a great tourism department. So this looks pretty similar. There's a view from Luke's hut. So we're going to say science. Good job, Star Wars. OK, so something else that happens in this movie that actually, in the next movie, is on solar flies into an asteroid field in the Hawaiian Gulf. And you can see there's an explosion, and we're going to see some sweet maneuvers, and we're going to get one more explosion. Is this what an asteroid field would really look like? Is this an accurate depiction of what we would be seeing? We're going to get a lot of nose. So if you were to visit the asteroid belt, you'd be more likely to see something that just looks like this. And this is probably the most you would ever see in the asteroid belt. We've got a large asteroid that's actually being orbited by a much smaller asteroid. It's its moon. And so this is probably the most crowded it's going to get. There are many, many objects, many millions of objects in the asteroid belt, but the distances between them are so vast that you wouldn't be able to see any asteroids were you to stand on an asteroid. You also wouldn't be able to stand on an asteroid. You can't have to cling to it, because they're not very massive. What Han Solo was trying to do looked much more similar to the ring system of a large gas giant, like this artist's impression of what the rings of Saturn might look like, where the material is much closer together and far far away. So were they flying through the rings of a gas giant? He called it an asteroid field. It's hard to tell. So I'm going to go ahead and say science fiction. It was also a long, long ago, and far, far away. So we've seen this rise recently in a lot of sideline movies trying to be as scientifically accurate as possible. Things like the Martian interstellar trying to get it right as much as possible and only sacrifice that to drive a story forward. I think this is really promising. A lot of people are asking questions like is this really what a black hole would look like? I think that's an awesome trend in movies. But it's also important to kind of keep in mind that not everything you see in a sci-fi movie is going to be accurate even if it's a claim for having high accuracy. Either way, space is awesome. So thanks so much for coming out everyone. I have a quick question for you. The question was, for binary systems, how does the companion star form? What's the second star and that's the system form? That's the question. I'm not sure how it forms in any case. I think in crowded nebulae where you have clusters of stars forming, nebulae are clouds of gas and dust that collapse into stars. So the birth place of stars. In crowded clusters of stars you're going to get stars forming questions for each other than or sorry, are some and the questions aren't isolated whereas you can have binary and trinary and block star systems that form dense regions of gas and dust. Other questions? Yeah, that's another good question. And that's something you see in almost every sci-fi movie. Yeah, the question was would you really have an explosion with flames and that kind of thing in space and it's something you've seen pretty much every sci-fi movie. Explosions are definitely possible in space but the kind of flames that you tend to see would not last very long. That's oxygen burning and that's what you're seeing. But when gases combust they do they do turn into very hot vapor so it's possible for explosions to happen in space. Other questions? Yeah, the question was how is a day defined in binary systems? So we have those two configurations we have circum-binary systems where we have a planet that orbits around both of the stars and the day would be pretty similar to our days on the Earth. The suns the two suns are in the same direction and so you're receiving light from basically one side as a rotate. It gets complicated when you're on a planet that orbits in between the path of two stars because at some point in the orbit there will be no light on that planet. You'd be right between the two stars and it would be for a few day time all over the planet. So we went over to England to live there. The question went in the back so the question was would we be able to see the jets coming out of the top and the bottom of this supermassive black hole? And what I suspect is that those jets are primarily the energy that our eyes can detect. Things that are we can pick up with X-ray telescopes and things that are able to see much more wavelengths than our eyes are capable of. So I don't think visibly we'd be able to see it. We won't be able to see the gas that's excited by those jets if that really is visible light. It's a good question. So the question is in the film they spend about 10 minutes on this planet near the black hole and many years pass and there's a shift that's more distant. And so is time value not intense? Yeah. It's powerful near something this massive. Right? This Gorgantua, the things that they call it in the film is 100 million times more massive than our sun. And so the gravitational field as you approach it gets incredibly strong and so the time value should be significant. The closer you are to it the more intense the time value of science in movies. What's your most egregious example of a movie that got basic science wrong? Because I have mine. I want to know who yours is. All right. So many. After Earth is one of the things I got because it just it's madness. It's crazy to include the entire thing. One that I saw recently that I loved was GeoSorn in my last year Gerard Butler was a master of businesses. He builds a grid of satellites around the Earth that are physically connected to each other and they control the weather. It's great. We're in like sonic waves. That's what comes to mind right now. What's yours? Okay. There's two movies that do it. One is Voyage of the Bottom of the Sea, the original one. The other one is G.I. Joe. Two words. Voyage by three words. Ice freaking floats. The Voyage of the Bottom of the Sea that the man, Alabel, catches fire for those of you who haven't seen it. Catches fire. Ice comes down and hits a submarine and then in G.I. Joe, don't touch. I saw it when it was drowning. They are fighting this battle and they shoot missiles in the ice cap and there is a line that someone says look out, the ice cap is coming down. And you think Michael Bay would just look at his cocktail and realize that doesn't work. But those are mine. Ice freaking floats. I love it. I'm going to watch G.I. Joe now. I'm inspired. Oh, don't do that on my camera, please. I feel so guilty. Excellent question. The question was when falling into a black hole, what would an outside observer see? And so when you think of the situation in Interstellar where you have someone getting closer to a black hole and for them very little time passes but for an outside observer a lot of time passes. And so as you get closer to a black hole from their perspective you would slow down. And the closer you got to the black hole the slower you would get and you would never see someone actually fall into a black hole. They would get to the event horizon and not be able to move any further in your reference frame, essentially. Or they would be so incredibly slow that you would never be able to see them fall into that black hole. Great question general relativity. Yeah, so the other question was are they actually still there? And it's all relevant. It depends on your reference frame. In your reference frame they are still there in their reference frame it's not. They would fall into a black hole in their reference frame but from your reference frame you would never see them in your life. I don't think we're drunk enough to answer your black hole question. So I'm going to call it there and let's thank make one more call. We're going to take a 5 minute break before we get into the results. So this is a good time to go get a drink. Go to these restaurants. We'll see you in a few minutes.