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There are those who have the edge with 5G+, on EE and others, not so much. Those who can download a kids' film while boarding a plane, or those who can't. Those who put the only taxi nearby, or those that are like... We're gonna have to walk, Sarah! Stay one step ahead when you get the edge with 5G+, on EE, the UK's best network. Search EE Best Network. RootMetrics.io to age 225. Verify at EE.cd.claims. Check coverage at EE.cd.c Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the Supermassive Podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society. With me, science journalist Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr. Bikki Smitha. This is the place where we dive into the Supermassive mailbox, which admittedly is a greeting at quite a quick rate right now. With all of the questions that are coming in from you all, we still absolutely love your questions. You ask the best questions that we don't even think to put in the show. So thank you so much for all of you that have got in touch. We will cover as many as we can. Yes, and you can email us, or you can slide into the DMs on Instagram. We read them all. Check you out, talk about the kids. I'm here and cool. So, Robert, before we get on to the questions, I think you'll be pleased with this email that we've had from Jamie Collins. And he says, hello fellow space nerds. Robert promoted his book on a recent podcast and he said he's not even sure if it's in print anymore. I ordered it and can confirm it is. I look forward to reading it in the next few weeks and he sent a picture of it. Well, Jamie, I'm flattered and thank you. Thank you for confirming it's still available. There you go. You can still get the book. Where was this published? Oh, well, it was 2019. It was the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. So, no, it's great. If it's still out there, then obviously I'm going to recommend it. And yes, please go ahead and tell me what you think, Jamie. Okay. What is it called, Robert? Plug it properly. I have to do that. Moon Art Science Culture by me and Alexandra Lossaker, who's an art historian. And she was actually the inspiration behind it and drove it forward. So, credit to her, really. Yes. And thank you, Jamie, for letting Robert know that his book is still out there. Mine book is out there still. Somewhere in the void. Exactly. I think so. Okay. So, onto the questions. Becky Mike Potter has a question about Einstein's work. He says, greetings to the supermassive team. I recently finished reading Proving Einstein Right by S. James Gates Jr. and Cathy Paletier, which details many of the adventures of the total solar eclipse hunters of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Oh, that sounds good. Okay. One thing that puzzled me was a statement that the deflection of the starlight as it passed by the sun expected using Einstein's theory was twice that expected using only Newton. They had the idea that light was composed of massless particles. But how would the sun change the path of starlight without the bending of space time? I don't understand why they expected any displacement under Newton. Help me understand supermassive wise ones. By the way, Proving Einstein Right would be great to add to the book club. Yeah, consider it done. Also, I'm putting supermassive wise one on my seatbelt. Yeah, exactly. That's all we'll only refer to ourselves as from now on. Thank you. That's from Mike in Oregon. Oh, nice. I've just been out your way of the world, Mike. Essentially, it's what you said in your email, Mike. They actually weren't assuming the particles of light were massless. Like Newton, for example, when he came up with his theory of gravity, definitely did not know the speed of light at that point. It was like faster than they could measure at that time. And he also didn't know like what light was and whether it was a massless particle or not. So you can still apply Newton's theory to this if you assume that light has mass, but you also don't need to know what the mass is to do it. If you've ever sort of worked through sort of like, I guess it's like a level like, you know, at high school, 17, 18, sort of like physics, 17, 18 year old. And you can sort of like put the equations together to work out what the acceleration due to the sun's gravity would be and cancel out the mass of the thing that's being accelerated. And so as long as you know that acceleration, you know what the angle of deflection would be. And that's what they're talking about here when they say that there's going to be a deflection of starlight. What angle of a deflection is there going to be, which then produces this angle of offset on the sort of, you know, curved sky that we see. And so in Einstein's theory of general relativity of gravity, you can also get at that angle offset as well. And so what they measured during the eclipse is was this angle of offset of what the star, where the stars appeared to be during the eclipse versus six months earlier or six months later when the sun wasn't in that part of the sky. And to say, okay, that means the light has been accelerated by this amount and therefore bent by this amount. In Einstein's theory of general relativity, it's due to the curvature of space. In Newton's theory, it's just because mass is there. Newton never really explained what gravity was, right? He was just like, this is the equation that just describes what gravity does, right? And so it is really interesting to think that you can get an expectation of what it should be using Newton's theory. And again, this is just one of the things that proved Einstein right as the book was called along with Mercury's orbit as well. So it's also worth mentioning that the RAS, one of the biggest things we did, I suspect ever in science, was to fund an expedition along with the Royal Society off to Prinkipa, off the coast of Africa and Sabar in Brazil to do this test in the 1919 Soviet eclipse. And that got loads of newspaper coverage and it made Einstein the kind of science rockstar. That's what did it, you know, because his, and then the amazing headlines about Heaven's All Asunder and all this stuff that, you know, quite incredible. Yeah, the heavens askew. No one would need worry or something. Right, the headline as well. I think along with your, you know, very rich history at the Royal Astronomical Society, you should also have a plaque that says, we made Einstein a science rockstar. I think we will. Thank you. On it. We made Einstein famous. Yeah, it's pretty taken credit. Okay, and Robert Carldan has sent us an email. He says, hi team, long time listener, first time emailer. I've always been interested in the mind boggling subject of time. I'm vaguely aware of certain things that can disrupt or warp time, you know, mass and speed, but we'd be really interested to hear what are the causes of distortion of time and what repercussions does it have. Also, I watched the thing just now saying that time was slower in the early universe than it is now. Is that true? And if so, how does that affect observations and calculations regarding the history of the universe? I apologize for any headaches caused by these questions. Ta. Well, Carl, that's going to get the good and deep question description as well, I think. Personally, I find time slows down my perception of it definitely slows down in certain settings. And perhaps the headache I'll get will last longer too. But more seriously. I had a friend who did their PhD at the same time as me at college and they had a title. They were in the psychology department. It was sort of like a cross-discipline thing. And the title of the PhD was, does time really fly when you're having fun? That's always like amazing to think that you could even sort of try special relativity to that. But I mean, more seriously, this is where Einstein's theories really help us out. So special relativity describes how time slows down at speeds close to the speed of light and that science fiction consequence or one that's written about a lot is the twin paradox. So if you go off and explore the universe at high speed and then you come back to the Earth, a few years might have passed for you and everybody on Earth, you knew that is long dead. It's a classic motif of science fiction. And then general relativity includes gravity in that as Becky was describing and predicts how time near a mass slows down and that even includes the Earth. So it means that clocks in orbit on satellites run faster than on the ground. And if we didn't take it into account, then GPS and car sat-nav would not work. I think they're out by areas of hundreds of meters a day just due to that tiny, tiny difference. So everybody ever asks you why astronomy matters? Well, you know, your sat-nav wouldn't work for a start. But as for... Have you heard the story of when they first actually tested that with like two planes in the opposite direction? I knew they'd done it with planes with atomic clocks. They did it with atomic clocks. Yeah, atomic clocks on like two just commercial planes and they had to buy a seat for the atomic clock. Imagine if you were sitting next to that. Hello, Mr. Clock. Would you like a drink? Yeah, but you know, as for a time in the early universe running more so, that was intriguing. I didn't go across that across. It's, you know, makes perfect sense. And it was confirmed by observing quasars and these are very active galaxies with big black holes in the centre of it. You know, consuming a lot of matter and devouring it. And they go, you know, they were looking at them as far back as a billion years after the Big Bang. And yes, they observed that change in the, you know, the time running more slowly. And it confirms again that general relativity works, that that denser universe of an influence on gravity as a whole was slowing down time as expected. And I think the answer to the question is the consequence is what it's consistent with Einstein's theories and with our understanding of how the universe has evolved since then. So yeah, it's great stuff. It's intriguing stuff. It may or may not cause me a headache later on, we'll find out. And I will update you on whether time slows down as a result for me personally in line that thesis, the other bit of the thesis. I remember reading that, you know, big gravitational wave background result that was last year. So last year, yeah, the one that was like, you know, using like pulsar timing arrays to find like, you know, gravitational waves, presumably emerging supermassive black holes out there in the universe. You have to take that into account, the fact that like, you know, the other universe was running more slowly back then otherwise. There's so many things you have to take into account for that, like the movement of Earth and the fact that Jupiter pulls on Earth and the sun and all sorts to get the locations right. But you also have to think about time too. So there's many places it comes in. I hope that answered your question, Carl, because I was reading it being like, what do you mean by disrupt and what do you mean by distortion of time? Like, to me, they're the same thing. So I hope we answered your question. And let us know if we have it and we'll come back to it. Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. I can dig myself into a deeper hole. Yes, exactly. It's always good for listeners. Well, on a similar vein, Becky, as our Queen of Black Holes, can you help with this question from Arta, who says, Hi, I love the podcast. I hope you can answer this. How do we expect a gravitational wave to behave when meeting a black hole? Will it just sink in or swirl in like all matter? Or is there a chance that it will go through it? And if so, could we hope to improve our technology so much so to X-ray a black hole? Regards, Arta. Arta, you've hit on a really interesting point here. And it's one that people have been thinking about for a long time. Essentially, what you're asking is, like, do black holes interfere with gravitational waves? So you had this idea of interference of waves, like if you drop two stones in a pond at once, right? And the ripples come out. Yeah, and you see the ripples and they collide and you get like a double height almost. And all they can cancel each other out. And people are thinking about this in terms of like, OK, if you've got two black holes, haven't quite merged yet, but they're just orbiting each other, right? That's a huge change in the sort of warp of space time as they go around each other and they do send out these ripples of gravitational waves, which is what we've detected, we're just talking about with the pulsar timing arrays. And so people are saying, OK, they're going to ripple out. They're going to interfere with each other. Or are they going to interfere with each other? First question. And then also what happens as they go through the other black hole? Now, the key thing here is that like the black hole is causing like a warp in space time itself and also causing the gravitational waves and the gravitational waves and the gravity from the black hole is just according to Einstein's theory of general relativity curvature of space time. So technically what people have found from doing simulations at least of what happens and then also testing it based on LIGO and Virgo observations, which are at least getting there from some of the gravitational wave detections we've made, not quite the detail we'd want just yet to test our sort of simulations and models, is that the gravitational wave just passes straight through the black hole. Like it just carries on. It interferes like with it. So it sort of like adds together in terms of the curvature. Right. And it's quite weird. And so we're hoping. Yes, I'm like, OK. Well, yeah, I'm just listening. I'm just listening. We're hoping that you've heard about this new gravitational wave detector that's coming like next decade that Lisa, right? It's this huge like triangle of lasers in space that orbits the sun like behind it. It sounds like the most ridiculous thing. Like a triangle of lasers in space that's like going to cover this massive distance. Yeah, fine. Cool. Totally. Of course. Yeah. Like whoever's the job it is to currently write like the justifications for that for like get funding. That's incredible. I mean, talk about blue sky. But it like space thinking. I don't know. But anyway, it's had the go ahead, you know, from from I can't remember if it's NASA or East or at least I think it might be both of them. And it's got the go ahead to it. You know, it's getting funding. It's being developed as we speak. And we're hoping with that we'll be able to have the level of detail to test the models of like how this sort of interference of the gravitational wave passing through the black core actually happens. And like I have to say, it's like, can we actually learn something about what's going on beyond the event horizon in terms of like the curvature of space and the gravity? I mean, it's very cool. Yeah, it's like this hurts my head. So yeah. And Robert, Sara Torres has a question about the mains gravity. How will lunar gravity affect the tide if the worst happens and due to climate change, the sea levels rise above 70 meters? Say if the ice caps or glaciers completely melt. Yeah, Sara. So I looked around to look at the different scales here and about 97% of water on Earth is already in the oceans and a little bit of that inland seas and only about 2% is in glaciers. So even if it all melts and that has a pretty terrible impact on very many coastal cities, you know, it's pretty disastrous if the levels right. Yeah, Florida's gone. You know, is what you have to do in terms of. Yeah. Yeah, loads of areas of the Earth, you know, good, I have real problems if that happens. However, it's not a huge change in the volume or the mass of water overall. You know, it's 2% compared to 97%. So it's much, I think, like the small change in the atmosphere from increasing CO2 levels. It has a huge effect on the temperature of the Earth, but it's not a large change in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere overall. You know, the air is still overwhelming nitrogen and oxygen. So the moon pulling on that slightly larger body of water is not massively different. And there are a few exceptions to that. And reading around, there's concerns that in say some Arctic settlements where they have smaller tides in winter because the sea ice locally is locked up more in the water. If that goes, then those places might have to cope with bigger tides and manage that. So I ask you a question. It's not so much, you know, the lunar gravity will remain the same essentially the moon is getting very, very slowly further away from the Earth. But you know, on human lifetime, we don't see any significant changes as a result. But there will be local effects that are problematic. And of course, you know, we don't want all the ice caps and glaciers to melt. It's really, really bad for billions of people are going to be affected badly by this. You know, so physics aside, this is something we really want to avoid. Totally. Well, on that note, that's it for this episode. We'll be back in a few weeks with an episode on strange stars. I feel like that has to come with that music. Strange stars. I know, I need to insert some like weird effects. And of course, if you have any questions about strange stars that you've heard of in the past, you can contact us. It's at supermassivepod on Instagram. If you want to slide in the DMs, as he says, or pod. I need to stop saying that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was looking at it. You know, all fashion email podcaster.res.ac.uk, contribute to that accretion of the supermassive mailbox. And we'll try and cover them in a future episode. But until next time, everybody, happy stargazing. You can expect all of this and more with Southern Down Care Home. 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