Black holes, wormholes and donut holes!

Brains On! Science podcast for kids

In this fun and educational episode of Brains On!, hosts Molly Bloom and 13-year-old Anwen Winter explore the fascinating worlds of black holes, wormholes, and

Key takeaways

• Black holes form when massive stars collapse into an infinitely small point with extreme density and gravity.
• Light cannot escape a black hole due to its intense gravitational pull, which is why they appear 'black'.

Main topics

• Black holes and their formation
• Wormholes as theoretical space-time shortcuts

Notable quotes

If you took all of Earth and squished it into the size of a sugar cube, it would become a black hole.

Black holes don't suck. They're not like vacuum cleaners. Stuff is just pulled by gravity.

Conclusion

This episode blends science and imagination to make complex astrophysical concepts accessible and

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:31) Lemonada Come on, join us in solving mysteries and having a lot of fun by listening to Snoop and Sniffy on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brains on Universe. You're listening to Brains On, where we are serious about being curious. All right, Mark, let's check this survival kit one more time. Goggles? Yep, a pair for you, Sandon, and a pair for me. Snorkels? Got them. Flashlights? Here. Worm repellent? I really don't think there are actual worms in a space-time wormhole. I said worm repellent. Okay, yes, I have the stuffed bird for scaring away worms. Phew, good. Speaker 1 (1:21) I do not mess with a creature that you can cut in half and it still won't die. That's just wrong. Hey guys, going on a trip? Yeah, we're going to go get donut holes. Uh, I think you're overpacking. What he means is we're going to that new place, Black Hole Donuts. Yeah, you know that commercial. Donut holes so dense, you'll think they're made from collapsed stars. The directions say take Highway 5, exit at Bergamont, and then go through the wormhole to find it. Wait. You have to travel through an actual wormhole? I thought those were just theoretical. Like, maybe they exist, but no one has found one yet. Well, we thought so too, but apparently there's one just off the freeway. We have no idea what it's like to go through it, so we're packing to prepare for anything. Yeah. Look, here's what I know. I need those donut holes. I've seen pictures on the internet, and they look amazing. Speaker 1 (2:13) So if I have to travel through a theoretical portal linking two distant points based on complex equations from Einstein's field equations to get them, then so be it. Now, let's finish this checklist. Roger that, buddy. Bring me back a chocolate one. Oh, and glazed. You got it. Okay, emergency flare. Got it. Good. We'll need that if the worms attack. Cash. Check. No, the site specifically says they don't take checks. No, no, no. I said check to the cat. I can't cash the check. No, no, no. I need you to cash. I can't. I don't have to. Speaker 1 (2:48) You're listening to Brains On. I'm Molly Bloom, and here with me today is 13-year-old Anwen Winter from Duluth, Minnesota. Hi, Anwen. Hello, Molly. Today, we're talking about wormholes and black holes. And donut holes. Apparently. So, Anwen, what do you picture when I say black hole? I picture this, like, black, like, circle that's like... Completely black and then everything is just like swirling around it and it's like all dark but like super cool and it's like reading all this power and like craziness. Yes. So black holes are like these mysterious pits in the universe. Things fall into them and never come out. Not even light can escape. They are totally bananas. Yes. Speaker 1 (3:33) Wormholes are more like tunnels that can take you across the universe. The idea is you'd enter in one place and come out somewhere totally different, maybe on the other side of town or maybe the other side of the galaxy. Wormholes are also totally bananas. Too true. We know black holes exist because we've found some, but we haven't found any wormholes yet. Some scientists think they are possible and are looking for proof. But since we don't know what it's like to go through one, your guess is as good as mine. And you all sent us some pretty amazing guesses. I think traveling through a wormhole is like being squished into a ball and sucked through a tube surrounded by slowly blinking lights. Everything will be rotating and you will be traveling super fast. Everything would be blue, purple, and red. Speaker 1 (4:27) All in different places. I think you would be going faster than the speed of light, like seeing many colored blues passing by you, like every second or two. And you would see a bunch of auroras and rainbows. I think when you're traveling through a wormhole, you see rainbow hula hoops all around you, and it feels like you're going down a giant water slide. At the other side of the rainbow. would be the end of the wormhole. Those colorful wormhole depictions come to us from listeners Connor, Milo, Abe, Amina, Charlotte, Aiden, and Ian. We'll talk more about wormholes later, but first, Anne Nguyen, you wrote in to us with some questions about black holes. Do you remember what they were? Yes, I do. They were, what are black holes? Who discovered them? How did they discover them? And where do things go when they go into a black hole? How did you get interested in black holes? Speaker 1 (5:26) Well, I remember reading a book in like second grade and I was like, wow, these are like stuff of legend. And I was like totally into them and I just read everything I could. And I didn't understand a lot of it, but I still found them quite inspiring. Are you still interested in them? Oh, yeah. Are you interested in space in general or black holes in particular? Both, really. So what is your favorite thing to think about about space? That everything might have like one sentence, like center, everything might be working perfectly together in this. Speaker 1 (5:59) Crazy, like, space-time amazingness sort of thing. I don't know. No, that's amazing. It is really mind-blowing. It's really kind of hard to wrap your mind around, but really fun to think about. Yeah, it's kind of beautiful. Do you know what you want to be when you're an adult? Well, I kind of want to be, like, a space scientist. Like, well, just someone who, like, just observes or looks for something. Or I kind of want to be a professional harpist, which would be kind of awesome. Maybe you could do both. Yeah, maybe I could. You could be an astrophysicist who plays the harp. Yes. You can go on the road, and your tour just happens to go by all of the giant telescopes. That would be awesome. Well, let's see if we can shed some light on black holes. Speaker 1 (6:47) Black holes happen when you have a super huge, mega giant amount of stuff crammed into a super tiny, infinitely small amount of space. We call that stuff mass. You have mass. I have mass. Trees have mass, but black holes have a lot of mass. So I'll tell you my very favorite analogy. Meet Daryl Haggard. She studies black holes at McGill University. If you were to take our whole entire Earth, all of the buildings, all of the people, all of the plants, trees, animals, oceans, and squish the whole thing down into the size of a sugar cube, our Earth would become a black hole. Speaker 1 (7:31) Whoa, that is like one extreme sugar cube. Totally. When something has a lot of mass like this, we say it is very dense. And the cores of black holes are super duper intense. Dense. In fact, many have a mass that is ten times greater than our own sun. Others have the mass of like 100 suns, or 1,000 suns, or more. When something is that dense and has that much mass, you can bet it also has super gravitational powers, which brings us to this question. Hi, I'm Ashton from Tampa, Florida, and my question is, how do black holes trap light? The reason we call it a black hole is that when you make things that compact, even light is like trapped in the gravitational pull of... Speaker 1 (8:28) the black hole. So light can't get out. Light is made of these little packets called photons. And normally those photons fly around as if gravity doesn't affect them. Hey gravity, can't touch this. Ha ha! Came through zip and zip zip. Came through zip and zip. Zip? Hey, I'm stuck. What gives? I can't zip out of this hole. Black holes have supergravity, powerful enough to trap even a photon of light. So we actually don't have any information coming back out of the black hole because the light is sort of trapped in there the same way we're sort of stuck down by gravity to our Earth. Which actually brings up an interesting point. Black holes don't suck. They're not like a vacuum cleaner. You might think they suck. They're often drawn that way with swirls of stuff spiraling around them like water going down a drain. Speaker 1 (9:23) And stuff does swirl around a black hole's edge, like gases. We call that edge the event horizon, by the way. Which is a