This Week in Astronomy; The Watlz Among the Stars, Following Gravitational Waves and Missing Black Holes

<v Speaker 1>Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
<v Speaker 1>with our soothing Bedtime Astronomy podcast. Each episode offers a
<v Speaker 1>gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
<v Speaker 1>unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
<v Speaker 1>of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
<v Speaker 1>slumber under the night sky. This week in Astronomy, the
<v Speaker 1>Walls among the Stars, following gravitational waves and revealing missing
<v Speaker 1>black Holes. The Waltz among the Stars. Johann Strauss TWU's
<v Speaker 1>famous waltz the Blue Danube has long been linked in
<v Speaker 1>the public imagination to space travel, largely because of its
<v Speaker 1>iconic use in Stanley Kubrick's nineteen sixty eight sci fi
<v Speaker 1>masterpiece two thousand and one, A Space Odyssey. That cinematic
<v Speaker 1>Association transformed the elegant rhythms of nineteenth century Vienna into
<v Speaker 1>an unofficial anthem for cosmos. However, on the occasion of
<v Speaker 1>Strauss's two hundredth birthday, the Waltz took a literal leap
<v Speaker 1>into space. The European Space Agency ESA celebrated the milestone
<v Speaker 1>with a live broadcast of the Blue Danube sent directly
<v Speaker 1>into the Cosmos. The Vienna Symphony Orchestra performed the piece
<v Speaker 1>in the Austrian Capitol during a concert that was simultaneously
<v Speaker 1>streamed online and screened publicly in locations including Vienna, New
<v Speaker 1>York's Bryant Park and near the ESA antenna in Spain.
<v Speaker 1>According to ESA Director General Joseph Aschbacher, the digitized performance
<v Speaker 1>was transmitted from the thirty five meter satellite dish at
<v Speaker 1>the ESA's Sobrero's ground station in Spain as electromagnetic waves.
<v Speaker 1>This means that the music, steeped in Viennese cultural elegance,
<v Speaker 1>began a real journey across the stars, transcending its metaphorical
<v Speaker 1>link with space to become a part of it. The
<v Speaker 1>choice of this particular waltz was now accident for Norbert Kettner,
<v Speaker 1>director of the Vienna Tourist Board. The Blue Danube has
<v Speaker 1>essentially become an unofficial space anthem, in part due to
<v Speaker 1>its repeated use during various International Space station docking maneuvers.
<v Speaker 1>The composition's timeless and graceful character evokes the floating, weightless
<v Speaker 1>quality associated with outer space, which was also noted by
<v Speaker 1>the Vienna Symphony's director Jan nast He described the music's
<v Speaker 1>airiness as matching the feeling of drifting through space, and
<v Speaker 1>emphasized that music itself is a universal language, capable of
<v Speaker 1>bringing hope and joy to people across cultures and distances.
<v Speaker 1>This particular concert, described as an interstellar concert, aimed to
<v Speaker 1>express that very idea, connecting humanity through beauty and imagination
<v Speaker 1>even across the vast silence of the universe. Beyond its
<v Speaker 1>artistic symbolism, the broadcast of the Blue Danube also served
<v Speaker 1>a more pointed purpose. After this, the signal leaves Earth
<v Speaker 1>via the Spanish satellite Dish. It will travel at the
<v Speaker 1>speed of light toward NASA's Voyager I spacecraft, the most
<v Speaker 1>distant human made object in the universe, reaching it in
<v Speaker 1>approximately twenty three hours and three minutes. From there, the
<v Speaker 1>Waltz will continue its voyage into deep space, chasing Voyager
<v Speaker 1>one and its twin Voyager two. The gesture carries a
<v Speaker 1>sense of poetic justice, as Austria subtly seeks to fill
<v Speaker 1>what some consider a cultural gap in the contents of
<v Speaker 1>the original Golden records aboard the Voyager probes. These records
<v Speaker 1>were designed to introduce alien civilizations to life on Earth,
<v Speaker 1>containing one hundred and fifteen analog encoded images in selections
<v Speaker 1>of music from around the world, although another Austrian composer,
<v Speaker 1>Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was represented by a piece from the
<v Speaker 1>Magic Flute, Johann strausstus Waltz, was notably absent. Now decades later,
<v Speaker 1>the Blue Danube follows the voyagers through the interstellar void
<v Speaker 1>not just as a piece of music, but as a
<v Speaker 1>symbol of human grace, imagination, and the shared dream of
<v Speaker 1>touching the infinite. Following a gravitational wave from beginning to end,
<v Speaker 1>scientists have done something new and impressive. They were able
<v Speaker 1>to follow a gravitational wave all the way from the
<v Speaker 1>farthest pass to the farthest future as it passed by
<v Speaker 1>a black hole. This is the first time anyone has
<v Speaker 1>managed to simulate the full path of a gravitational wave
<v Speaker 1>like this in a single study. Gravitational waves are ripples
<v Speaker 1>in space and time caused by things like black holes.
<v Speaker 1>The scientists wanted to know what exactly happens when these
<v Speaker 1>waves hit something massive like a black hole, how they
<v Speaker 1>are affected, and where they end up. To do this properly,
<v Speaker 1>they needed to track the waves from the place in
<v Speaker 1>space where they originally come from, called the past infinity,
<v Speaker 1>to the place where they finally go called the future infinity,
<v Speaker 1>the far edges of the universe, where light and gravitational
<v Speaker 1>waves can travel forever if nothing gets in their way.
<v Speaker 1>To pull this off, researchers from the University of Otago
<v Speaker 1>and the University of Canterbury used a very advanced kind
<v Speaker 1>of math. They had to deal with the tricky concept
<v Speaker 1>of infinity. In Einstein's theory of general relativity, the space
<v Speaker 1>far away from stars and planets becomes flat and empty.
<v Speaker 1>But to understand what's happening to gravitational waves, the scientists
<v Speaker 1>needed to include these distant infinite areas in their calculations,
<v Speaker 1>something that's very hard to do in normal simulations. Using
<v Speaker 1>special equations that allowed them to squeeze infinity into a
<v Speaker 1>form a computer could work with, they created a custom
<v Speaker 1>program called Coffee. With it, they ran simulations of gravitational
<v Speaker 1>waves of different strengths hitting a kind of simple black
<v Speaker 1>hole known as a Schwartz chilled black hole. What they
<v Speaker 1>found is that space time is extremely When a wave
<v Speaker 1>with low energy hit the black hole, only a small
<v Speaker 1>amount about eight point five percent bounced back and escaped.
<v Speaker 1>Most of the wave's energy was absorbed by the black hole.
<v Speaker 1>Even when the waves had stronger energy, only about twenty
<v Speaker 1>percent managed to get away. To measure how much energy
<v Speaker 1>went in and how much came out, they used two
<v Speaker 1>tools from physics, one that checks whether gravitational waves exist,
<v Speaker 1>called the Bondi news, and another that measures energy called
<v Speaker 1>Bondy energy. These tools helped them confirm that their calculations
<v Speaker 1>made sense and matched what the physics laws say should happen. Interestingly,
<v Speaker 1>even though they sent in simple waves, the black holes
<v Speaker 1>warped space created more complicated wave patterns. It was like
<v Speaker 1>the waves were making new waves as they moved along.
<v Speaker 1>At the end of the journey, when the waves reached
<v Speaker 1>future infinity, they showed a kind of ringing pattern. This
<v Speaker 1>ringing is like the sound of bell makes after being
<v Speaker 1>struck and is a natural behavior of the black hole.
<v Speaker 1>What's more, this ringing didn't change no matter how strong
<v Speaker 1>or weak the wave was showing. It's a fixed feature
<v Speaker 1>of the black hole. This new study matters because it
<v Speaker 1>gives scientists a full picture of how black holes interact
<v Speaker 1>with gravitational waves. How much energy goes in how much
<v Speaker 1>gets absorbed and how much escapes. This kind of research
<v Speaker 1>is important for understanding the data from experiments like Ligo,
<v Speaker 1>which listens for gravitational waves in the universe. Even though
<v Speaker 1>this is a big step forward, the team says their
<v Speaker 1>methods still isn't perfect. Right now. They can't set the
<v Speaker 1>incoming wave exactly at the past infinity point, which would
<v Speaker 1>make their simulations even more accurate, but they're working on it,
<v Speaker 1>and for now, they plan to keep studying the overall
<v Speaker 1>behavior of waves and black holes to learn even more
<v Speaker 1>new clues reveal missing black holes. Black Holes come in
<v Speaker 1>different sizes. Some are small, about five to fifty times
<v Speaker 1>heavier than our sun, and are called stellar mass black holes.
<v Speaker 1>Others are enormous, weighing millions or even billions of times
<v Speaker 1>more than the Sun. These are supermassive black holes, usually
<v Speaker 1>found at the center of galaxies. But there's a third
<v Speaker 1>kind that's harder to find and understand. These are called
<v Speaker 1>intermediate mass black holes, and they sit somewhere in between.
<v Speaker 1>Scientists believe they should exist, but we don't know much
<v Speaker 1>about them yet. That's why they're sometimes called the missing
<v Speaker 1>links in the story of how black holes grow and evolve. Now,
<v Speaker 1>new research is helping to solve this mystery. A team
<v Speaker 1>of scientists led by a professor named Karen Janni has
<v Speaker 1>found new clues. His lab, called the Lunar Labs Initiative
<v Speaker 1>at Vanderbilt University, studied data from powerful instruments on Earth
<v Speaker 1>that listen for gravitational ways. These instruments, called Ligo in
<v Speaker 1>the US and Virgo in Italy, can detect the ripples
<v Speaker 1>in space that happen when black holes crash into each other.
<v Speaker 1>By looking at this data again in a new way,
<v Speaker 1>the team found signals from black hole mergers that were
<v Speaker 1>much heavier than usual, over one hundred times the mass
<v Speaker 1>of the Sun and in some cases up to three
<v Speaker 1>hundred times. These are the most massive black hole mergers
<v Speaker 1>ever detected through gravitational waves. That's important because it gives
<v Speaker 1>solid evidence that intermediate mass black holes do exist. Black
<v Speaker 1>Holes are like ancient fossils in the universe. They carry
<v Speaker 1>the story of how stars lived and died long ago.
<v Speaker 1>These new findings could help us understand what the first
<v Speaker 1>stars in the universe were like and how they helped
<v Speaker 1>form black holes. But studying these mysterious black holes isn't easy.
<v Speaker 1>The instruments on Earth only catch the final moment of
<v Speaker 1>the black holes crashing together, like the splash, but not
<v Speaker 1>the whole dive. So the researchers are also working with
<v Speaker 1>plans for a future space mission called LISA, which will
<v Speaker 1>be launched by the European Space Agency in NASA in
<v Speaker 1>the late twenty thirties. LISA will be a detector floating
<v Speaker 1>in space that can listen to lower sounds and gravitational waves.
<v Speaker 1>It will be able to follow black holes long before
<v Speaker 1>they collide, helping us understand where they come from and
<v Speaker 1>how they grow. In two of their new studies, the
<v Speaker 1>team showed that LISA could track these black holes for
<v Speaker 1>years before they merge. This gives scientists a chance to
<v Speaker 1>learn how these black holes formed and what happens to
<v Speaker 1>them over time. They also studied something called recoil kicks,
<v Speaker 1>which is when the merged black hole gets a kind
<v Speaker 1>of cosmic shove after the collision and moves away through space.
<v Speaker 1>These kinds of detailed stories about black holes will be
<v Speaker 1>easier to see with LISA. Another important part of their
<v Speaker 1>work focused on making sure the signals from these black
<v Speaker 1>holes are real and not just noise. It's like trying
<v Speaker 1>to hear a tiny bell in a thunderstorm. You need
<v Speaker 1>to be sure that what you're hearing is really the bell.
<v Speaker 1>So they used artificial intelligence to clean up the data
<v Speaker 1>and confirm the signals were accurate. This kind of AI
<v Speaker 1>tool will be very helpful in future black hole research.
<v Speaker 1>The scientists believe that learning more about intermediate mass black
<v Speaker 1>holes could be one of the most exciting things we
<v Speaker 1>do with gravitational wave detectors, whether those are on Earth
<v Speaker 1>or in space. Every time we detect one, we get
<v Speaker 1>a little closer to solving the puzzle of where they
<v Speaker 1>come from and why they are so hard to find.
<v Speaker 1>The team also has big plans for the future. They
<v Speaker 1>want to figure out how to detect these black holes
<v Speaker 1>from the Moon. The idea is that detectors placed on
<v Speaker 1>the lunar surface could pick up very low frequency gravitational
<v Speaker 1>waves that Earth detectors can't hear. That would open up
<v Speaker 1>a whole new way to explore the universe. Besides this research,
<v Speaker 1>Professor Yanni is also working with NASA and other science
<v Speaker 1>groups to help decide where human missions should go on
<v Speaker 1>the Moon. He's helping think about the science goals we
<v Speaker 1>could reach by sending people there, especially in fields like space, weather, physics,
<v Speaker 1>and astronomy. Overall, the team sees this as a special
<v Speaker 1>time in history. Not only are we learning amazing things
<v Speaker 1>about black holes, but we're also entering a new eraworre
<v Speaker 1>science and space exploration go hand in hand. They're excited
<v Speaker 1>to help train new students in young scientists whose discoveries
<v Speaker 1>might one day come from the Moon itself. The name
<v Speaker 1>M