Television à la carte

I don’t have much time for television. Seldom more than 2-3 hours per week, most or all of it on PBS Wisconsin. I usually watch Washington Week, Here and Now (Wisconsin news), and Amanpour & Company each Friday evening, and quite a few of the Nova episodes.

Once or twice most Friday and Saturday evenings, we’ll flip through the broadcast television channels we are able to receive from Madison some 39 miles to the east, and if we’re unusually lucky we’ll happen upon something worth watching. Usually not. And then there’s the damned commercials. I’m sure wherever you are you’ll find as I do that at any given moment, most of the television stations (except for PBS) are airing commercials. Ugh!

When we travel and stay at a motel, we often flip through the cable channels they offer, and once again seldom find anything worth watching (except, perhaps, for PBS and C-SPAN), even though there are dozens and dozens of channels. Here, too, at any given moment, most of the cable channels (except for PBS and C-SPAN) are airing commercials.

I have an aversion to advertising of any kind, and will go to great lengths to avoid watching anything that is interrupted by commercials during the program. Some of you might not be old enough to remember that when cable television first came out, a big selling point was that by abandoning free broadcast television and paying for cable TV, you could watch programs free of advertising. Well, we know how long that lasted. The number of commercials we have to endure has increased dramatically since the “golden age of television” in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

In my opinion, almost all of the television stations offered on both broadcast TV and cable are garbage. I have not subscribed to cable TV since the early 1980s, and have never been a satellite TV subscriber.

The only way I would ever subscribe to any kind of television service (cable, satellite, or internet) is if I they gave customers the ability to pick and pay for only the channels you want. Television à la carte, in other words. And the list to choose from should be huge, including multiple PBS channels, documentary film channels, reputable news channels, foreign English-language channels (or at least with English subtitles), classic movie channels, and, yes, NASA TV. And, please get rid of the advertising except—if need be—in between programs. I would pay extra for this option.

I am also frustrated by not being able to watch many newly-released documentaries (or documentary series) without subscribing to a service. Why should I subscribe to a service when all I want to do is watch one program? Why not charge $12 (or whatever) for each program a person wants to watch?

There is a case to be made for “flipping through the channels” and happening upon a documentary, movie, or television program of interest that you might not discover otherwise, but until some company offers television à la carte with a wide selection, my local PBS station is going to get all of my television dollars. I am delighted that—with the advent of digital television—we now have four PBS Wisconsin television stations to choose from!

I will never pay to watch programs, documentaries, or movies that are interrupted by commercials. Period.

Black Hole Conundrums

Last night I re-watched the excellent two-hour PBS NOVA special Black Hole Apocalypse, and this time I jotted a few questions down.

  • Has Gaia DR2 improved our knowledge of the distance to the O-star black hole binary system Cygnus X-1 (6000 ly) and the mass of the black hole (15M)?
  • Are there any known pulsar black hole binary systems?
  • Could LIGO (and now Virgo in Italy) detect a stellar-mass black hole infalling into a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy or another galaxy?
  • Do supermassive black holes play a role in galaxy formation?  If so, how does a supermassive black hole interact with dark matter?
  • Wouldn’t material infalling into a black hole undergo extreme time dilation and from our vantage point take millions or even billions of years to cross the event horizon?  If so, don’t all black holes—even supermassive ones—form from rapid catastrophic events such as core-collapse supernovae and black hole collisions?

Gaia DR2 (Gaia Data Release 2) has indeed measured the distance to the Cygnus X-1 system.  The “normal” star component of Cygnus X-1 (SIMBAD gives spectral type O9.7Iabpvar) is the 8.9-magnitude star HDE 226868.  Gaia DR2 shows a parallax of 0.42176139325365936 ± 0.032117130282281664 mas (not sure why they show so many digits!).

The distance to an object in parsecs is just the reciprocal of the parallax angle in arcseconds, but since the parallax angle is given in milliarcseconds, we must divide parallax into 1000.  This gives us a best-estimate distance of 2,371 parsecs or 7,733 light years.  Adding and subtracting the uncertainty to the parallax value and then doing the arithmetic above gives us a distance range of 2,203 to 2,566 parsecs or 7,186 to 8,371 light years.  (To get light years directly, just divide the parallax in millarcseconds into 3261.564.)

This is 20% to 40% further than the distance to Cygnus X-1 given in the NOVA program, and looking at the source for that distance (Reid et al. 2011) we find that the Gaia DR2 distance (7,186-8,371 ly) is outside the range given by Reid’s VLBA radio trigonometric parallax distance of 5,708-6,458 ly.  It remains to be seen what effect the Gaia DR2 distance, if correct, will have on the estimate of the mass of the black hole.

The estimate of the mass of the black hole in Cygnus X-1 is calculated using modeling which requires as one of its input parameters the distance to the system.  This distance is used to determine the size of the companion star which then constrains the scale of the binary system.  Because the Cygnus X-1 system is not an eclipsing binary, nor does the companion star fill its Roche equipotential lobe, traditional methods of determining the size of the companion star cannot be used.  However, once we use the distance to the system to determine the distance between the black hole and the companion star, as well as the orbital velocity of the companion star, we can determine the mass of the black hole.

Now, moving along to the next question, have any pulsar black-hole binary systems been discovered yet?  The answer is no, not yet, but the hunt is on because  such a discovery would provide us with an exquisite laboratory for black hole physics and gravity.  Something to look forward to!

Could LIGO ( and Virgo) detect a stellar-mass black hole infalling into a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy or another galaxy?  No.  That would require a space-based system gravitational wave detector such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA)—see “Extreme mass ratio inspirals” in the diagram below.

http://gwplotter.com/

The above diagram illustrates that gravitational waves come in different frequencies depending on the astrophysical process that creates them.  Ground-based detectors such as LIGO and Virgo detect “high” frequency gravitational waves (on the order of 100 Hz) resulting from the mergers of stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars.  To detect the mergers of more massive objects will require space-based gravitational wave observatories (millihertz band) or pulsar timing arrays (nanohertz band) in the case of  supermassive black holes binaries within merging galaxies.  The future of gravitational wave astronomy looks very bright, indeed!

Do supermassive black holes play a role in galaxy formation?  Probably.  We are not yet able to explain how supermassive black holes form, especially so soon after the Big Bang.  Does dark matter play a major role?  Probably.  The formation of supermassive black holes, their interaction with dark matter, and their role in galaxy formation are all active topics or current research.  Stay tuned.

To succinctly restate my final and most perplexing question, “How can anything ever fall into a black hole as seen from  an outside observer?”  A lot of people have asked this question.  Here’s the best answer I have been able to find, from Ben Crowell:

The conceptual key here is that time dilation is not something that happens to the infalling matter.  Gravitational time dilation, like special-relativistic time dilation, is not a physical process but a difference between observers.  When we say that there is infinite time dilation at the event horizon we don’t mean that something dramatic happens there.  Instead we mean that something dramatic appears to happen according to an observer infinitely far away.  An observer in a spacesuit who falls through the event horizon doesn’t experience anything special there, sees her own wristwatch continue to run normally, and does not take infinite time on her own clock to get to the horizon and pass on through.  Once she passes through the horizon, she only takes a finite amount of clock time to reach the singularity and be annihilated.  (In fact, this ending of observers’ world-lines after a finite amount of their own clock time, called geodesic incompleteness, is a common way of defining the concept of a singularity.)

When we say that a distant observer never sees matter hit the event horizon, the word “sees” implies receiving an optical signal.  It’s then obvious as a matter of definition that the observer never “sees” this happen, because the definition of a horizon is that it’s the boundary of a region from which we can never see a signal.

People who are bothered by these issues often acknowledge the external unobservability of matter passing through the horizon, and then want to pass from this to questions like, “Does that mean the black hole never really forms?” This presupposes that a distant observer has a uniquely defined notion of simultaneity that applies to a region of space stretching from their own position to the interior of the black hole, so that they can say what’s going on inside the black hole “now.”  But the notion of simultaneity in GR is even more limited than its counterpart in SR.  Not only is simultaneity in GR observer-dependent, as in SR, but it is also local rather than global.

References
K. Liu, R. P. Eatough, N. Wex, M. Kramer; Pulsar–black hole binaries: prospects for new gravity tests with future radio telescopes, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 445, Issue 3, 11 December 2014, Pages 3115–3132, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stu1913

Mingarelli, Chiara & Joseph W. Lazio, T & Sesana, Alberto & E. Greene, Jenny & A. Ellis, Justin & Ma, Chung-Pei & Croft, Steve & Burke-Spolaor, Sarah & Taylor, Stephen. (2017). The Local Nanohertz Gravitational-Wave Landscape From Supermassive Black Hole Binaries. Nature Astronomy. 1. 10.1038/s41550-017-0299-6.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-017-0299-6
https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.03491

Jerome A. Orosz et al 2011 ApJ 742 84
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/742/2/84/meta

Mark J. Reid et al 2011 ApJ 742 83
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/742/2/83/meta

Brian C. Seymour, Kent Yagi, Testing General Relativity with Black Hole-Pulsar Binaries (2018)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.00080

J. Ziółkowski; Determination of the masses of the components of the HDE 226868/Cyg X-1 binary system, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, Volume 440, Issue 1, 1 May 2014, Pages L61–L65, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnrasl/slu002

Einstein, Brahms, and Exoplanets

What do Albert Einstein, Johannes Brahms, and exoplanets have in common?  They are all great courses provided by The Great Courses.

Call me old fashioned, but I love a great lecture presented by an expert in the field.  What a wonderful way to get introduced to a new subject, or refamiliarize yourself with an old subject, or deepen your knowledge about a subject with which you are already familiar.

I recently finished watching the magnificent course “Albert Einstein: Physicist, Philosopher, Humanitarian” by Don Howard, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, former Director of Notre Dame’s Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science, and a Fellow of the University of Notre Dame’s Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values.

I have taken an interest in Einstein since I first encountered relativity in my early teens, and of course being a physics major in college I became much more familiar with Einstein’s remarkable scientific contributions.  But this course surprised and delighted me with many details about Einstein himself.  Howard obviously has a much deeper understanding of Einstein the person than most physicists do, and his enthusiasm for his subject comes through in every lecture.  I doubt you will find a more thorough treatment of Einstein anywhere short of reading a biography.  Recommended!

As luck would have it, while I was nearing the end of this course, Time came out with an updated reissue of its special edition, “Albert Einstein: The Enduring Legacy of a Modern Genius”.  Great photographs, great text.  Well worth every penny!


Robert Greenberg is music historian-in-residence with San Francisco Performances and has produced a lot of high-quality music courses for The Great Courses.  I am in the process of watching all of them (yes, really, they’re that good!).  Recently, I finished his course on Johannes Brahms, who is probably my all-time favorite composer.

The music of Brahms is well known by many, but how much do you know about Johannes Brahms the person, and the events of his life?  This course is the perfect introduction to those subjects, as well as his extraordinary compositions.

It is amazing to me that no one has yet made a feature-length film about the life of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897).  A historically accurate dramatic portrayal could easily become one of the most significant musical film biographies ever made.  Brahms was one of the greatest composers who ever lived, and he had an interesting life—there is much material to draw upon for the making of this movie.  Greenberg’s course is a great place to begin, and I would also recommend the definitive biography, “Brahms: His Life and Work” by Karl Geiringer.


You’ve just got to love The Great Courses.  This is what television could have been.  PBS is the only thing that even comes close.  I recently completed “The Search for Exoplanets: What Astronomers Know” presented by Joshua Winn, now Professor of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University.  Not since Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson have I been this excited about an astronomy presenter.  Josh Winn presents his exoplanets course with enthusiasm, precision, and a delivery that really draws you in to the subject.  I hope we see much more of him in the future.