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Hey, Wowzer fans, Mindy here.
And before we start the show, I gotta let you know that this November, with a special new episode featuring our friends at Circle Round and Terrestrials on Radiolab for Kids,
And don't miss when Elmo from Sesame Street stops by Wow in the World to make us all belly laugh on November 24th.
Oh, but that's not all, Reg.
On December 1st, we are sharing our 250th episode of Wow in the World with all of you.
We think this one is going to be music to your ears.
Literally.
Did I mention it's a musical?
And if you're a member of the World Organization of Wowzers...
Oh boy, do I have a surprise for you.
You can listen to our 250th episode early with me and other members from around the world on Saturday, November 22nd, at 7 pm.
Eastern.
That's right, we are throwing another listening party.
Join us as we dance along to our new songs.
React to the episode with other members in the chat and more.
Grownups.
If you want your wowzer to join this members-only listening party, you can sign up to become a member today at Tinkercastcom.
Slash wow.
Already a member?
Well, you can find the link and password to join the event when you sign in at Tinkercastcom.
Slash wow.
That's it.
It's going to be a November to remember.
But for now, let's get on with the show.
Woo! ready you ready timer set okay buddy count me down okay how'd I do whole 30 seconds?
We're never gonna win the annual NPR hot dog eating competition if we keep going at this rate.
Alright, you know what?
Let's do it again.
Ready?
3, 2, 1, go!
Coming!
Coming!
Good morning, Guy Ross.
Oh, hey Mindy, I was just, uh, what's going on in here?
What do you mean?
What do I mean?
Mindy, you're in entire gingerbread kitchen is filled with hot dogs.
Well, not just hot dogs, Guy Raz.
I mean, we've got veggie dogs, turkey dogs, tofurkey dogs, tofu dogs, wiener dogs.
I've even got a hound dog back there.
What?
But why, Mindy?
Why do you have so many hot dogs?
Well, Reggie and I are training for the annual NPR hot dog eating competition and Hot dog eating competition.
Yeah.
Grandma G-Force has held the title for the last 12 years, but she can't make it this year because she's got her improv class that night.
I see.
So Reggie's trying to get me up to speed on the Ancient art of speed eating.
So, how's it going?
Well, to be honest, not great.
I mean, no matter how soggy I make these buns, hoping the dogs will slip down faster, my body just wants to barf everything back up.
Well, maybe you just need a good coach.
Or maybe I should just listen to everyone's advice and leave it for the professional, competitive eaters.
Wait, did you just say coach?
Uh, well... Guy Raz, are you a former competitive eater? eater turned coach?
No, no, not me, Mindy.
Then who?
Well, I'm talking about the biggest, the hungriest, the most ferocious eater in the universe.
Is it a hippo?
You mean a hungry, hungry hippo?
Yeah.
No.
Although, Mindy, hippos do eat around 40 kilograms or 88 pounds of food every day.
88 pounds?
That's like 200 cheeseburgers a day.
Mindy, the champion eater I'm thinking of is even bigger, much, much bigger.
Oh, like, uh, like an elephant?
No, wait, a polar bear.
Nope, a blue whale.
Those things are massive.
I'm talking about something even bigger, Mindy.
Well, what's bigger than a blue whale?
Mindy, I'm talking about a ginormous galactic guzzler.
Galactic?
Oh!
I know what you're talking about, Guy Raz.
You're talking about a black hole.
That's right.
And you can forget about cheeseburgers, because these bad boys, they eat up entire stars for breakfast.
Man, you're right, Guy Raz.
I mean, who better to learn about the ancient art of competitive eating than a galactic giant who's been doing it for billions of years?
Exactly.
Well, what are we doing standing around here for?
Come on, get your buns in gear.
We gotta get going.
Uh, get going where?
To the black hole.
Wait, we're actually gonna visit a black hole?
Yeah.
Well, I was thinking we might just go to your gingerbread library and read about black holes in a safe place.
Oh, yeah.
So about that, um, it's not a library at the moment.
Huh?
I temporarily turned it into a ball pit room.
Only the balls are actually made out of water balloons.
It's a mess!
What?
Besides, Why would we want to read about black holes when we have a fully almost functional time machine that could literally take us anywhere in time and space?
Well, you know, Mindy, books can also transport you to far off places and to distant times.
Yeah, books kind of are the best, but they're not nearly as much fun to drive.
Well, you don't drive books.
Not with that attitude, you don't.
Okay, fine.
Let's go visit a black hole.
Yes!
To the time machine!
Or as I like to call it, the wow machine.
Okay, now let me just open this door here.
Okay, after you.
Oh, and be careful, Guy-Rise, there might still be ma- Mayonnaise on the ground.
Here, let me help you up.
Oof.
Mindy, why is there mayonnaise all over the floor?
Well, I only just gave the time machine a fresh coat this morning.
You were smothering the time machine in mayonnaise?
Uh, yeah.
Why?
Well, for one, I didn't want to get it all over my sandwich.
Plus, it helps us slip the time machine through the space-time continuum more easily.
Less friction that way.
Uh, right.
Okay, now just follow my lead, Guy Raz, and just slide through the mayonnaise from floor...
Foot to foot like you're ice skating.
Just like me, okay?
Here we go.
Okay.
And swish and swish and swish and swish.
And come on, I'm almost there, Guy Raz.
And swish and swish and swish.
Whoa.
There we go.
Whoa.
Nice finish, Guy Raz.
Hop in, buddy.
All righty.
Wait, wipe your feet on the mat.
We're not savages.
Oh, it's fine.
I've got my time-traveling slippers on already.
Wait, your time-traveling slippers?
Alright, let me just get these shoes off.
Okay, let me just plug in the coordinates.
By the way, which black hole are we going to, Mindy?
Huh, you know what?
I have no idea.
Well, there are a lot we could choose from.
Yeah, I didn't even think about that.
Well yeah, because black holes come in all shapes and sizes, and how heavy they are determines what kind of black hole it Wait.
So there are small, medium and large black holes.
That's right.
And they all have special names.
Like what?
Well, the smallest black holes we know of are called primordial black holes.
And scientists believe that these black holes are as small as a single atom.
Oh, and atoms are those tiny... tiny building blocks that make up everything, including us.
Everything.
And these kinds of black holes are basically as small as it gets.
But remember, Mindy, black holes are really, really heavy.
And these primordial black holes, despite being the size of a single atom, can weigh as much as a mountain.
A hole as heavy as a mountain.
OK, so what's next?
Well, next up are medium-sized black holes.
And they're called stellar black holes.
And they're the most common type of black hole in the universe.
So how big are they?
Well, Mindy, these black holes are about 10 miles or 18 kilometers wide.
Wow, that's like 176 football fields wide.
Yeah, so pretty big, but still much smaller than, say, a city.
Yeah, it might be smaller than a city, but if a single atom can be as heavy as a mountain, then how heavy are these black holes?
Well, these black holes can weigh up to 20 times as much as our own sun.
Wow.
But that's not even as As big as it gets, Mindy.
We still haven't talked about supermassive black holes.
Supermassive black holes?
Yeah, and I guess the name kind of gives it away, but these black holes are... Supermassive!
They're about as big as our entire solar system.
And typically, they weigh about four million times as much as our sun, Mindy.
I mean, isn't that mind-blowing?
Oh, sorry.
That was the sound of my mind blowing.
Anywho, you were saying?
These supermassive black holes are usually found at the center of most galaxies, and due to their enormous gravity... Because the heavier something is, the more gravity it has.
Exactly.
Because of their gravity, they cause all the other stars in that galaxy to orbit or circle around it.
Oh, so like how the Earth's gravity causes the moon to orbit around us.
That's exactly right, but just on a much, much...
So does that mean that the galaxy that we're in also has a supermassive black hole at the center?
Correctamundo, Mindy.
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole right at the center of our galaxy called Sagittarius A.
Hmm, that's interesting because I'm a Sagittarius.
Uh, Mindy?
But I wouldn't describe myself as having a Type A personality.
Mindy, this has nothing to do with your horoscope.
Really?
You sure about that?
Uh, no.
Anywho, so Sagittarius A, which coincidentally... Has nothing to do with your star sign.
Ahem. is just a hop, skip, and a 25,640 light year jump away.
Well, it sounds like the place to be.
I guess you should lock those coordinates into the machine.
Aye, aye, Captain.
Is that an eye patch?
No.
All right, buckle your seatbelt.
Here we go! to admit it, Mindy, but you were right.
This interstellar trip was smooth as butter.
Um, I think you mean smooth as mayonnaise.
I can't believe it's not butter.
Believe it, Guy Raz.
All right, let me just open up the blinds here so we can see the black hole with our own eyeballs.
These things always get jammed.
The strings are all messed up.
I can't get these things to open evenly We shouldn't have put mini blinds in this thing.
Whoa.
What?
Mindy, what was that?
I think the time machine is somehow still moving.
I think the gravity from the black hole is dragging us in.
OK.
OK, don't panic.
Quickly, Mindy, before we get stretched out like a piece of spaghetti.
Think, um, wait, I know.
Hang on one second.
I need to go grab something from downstairs.
Downstairs?
Wait.
Be right back.
This time machine has two floors?
Hurry, Mindy, hurry!
Coming!
Step, step, step, step.
Mindy, what is that?
Oh, so this?
It's a cosmic anchor.
I got it years ago at that garage sale that Reggie had and I never thought I'd have a use for it up until now.
What?
Can you, um, open up...
Uh, sure.
Just gonna throw it up in there.
All right, now close the hatch.
That should do it.
Are you sure that thing's gonna hold us, Mindy?
Yes, of course I'm not sure, Guy Raz.
But this should keep us in one place long enough for us to see this black hole in action.
Uh, great.
Whoa, look at that circle of swirling light, Guy Raz.
I thought black holes were meant to be, well...
Well, they are, Mindy.
That circle of light you're seeing is the leftover gas and dust from a star that it's just eaten.
Whoa, that's so wow.
As a black hole consumes a star, it rips it apart and all the material spins and spins around the outside before it finally plunges into the black holes eventually.
Event horizon?
That's right.
The event horizon is the center of the black hole and the point at which the star disappears.
Oh, I got it.
It's like when you drain your bathtub and then all of that dirt and water finally just disappears down the drain.
Exactly.
And that leftover stardust that circles around the outside of the event horizon is called an accretion disk.
Accretion disk.
Yeah, I'm just going to call it Bob, for simplicity's sake.
So as all of this gas and other material from the star spins around the black hole, it keeps getting faster and faster and really, really hot because of friction.
And friction is the heat that gets made when you rub two things together really, really fast.
Yeah, like how you rub your hands together when it's cold outside to heat your hands up.
OK, but how does this heat get all bright?
Well, some of that heat energy gets converted or changed into other types of energy like X-ray energy and light energy.
And this energy can travel for trillions and trillions of miles across the universe, where it can then be picked up by our satellites and radio telescopes back on Earth.
Oh, yes.
And Guy Raz, scientists actually have a special name for this.
They do?
Yep.
They call it a quasi-stellar or a quasar for short.
And quasars are the brightest objects in the entire universe.
That makes total sense Mindy, because from Earth, these super bright objects, even though they're millions of miles away well, they often look like stars in the night sky.
Wow, and so that's what we're looking at right now?
That's right.
I can't believe we're the first people to ever see a black hole.
What do you mean?
Well, because black holes don't reflect any light back into space, it's almost impossible for us to see them back on Earth.
They just get lost in the background.
Kind of like when you had that black cat parade in the middle of the night.
Yes, exactly like that.
You could hear them, but you couldn't see them against the black night sky.
So if scientists have never actually seen a black hole before, how do they even know there was one at the center of our own galaxy?
Well, the same way they find any black hole.
They just watch how the stars around it move.
Huh?
Remember how you said that black holes, especially supermassive black holes, are really, really heavy.
Yeah.
Well, because of that, they have a lot.
Of gravity.
Meaning that other objects orbit or circle it.
Kind of like how Earth and the other planets orbit the sun because of the sun's gravity.
Yeah, so what scientists look for are stars that seem to be orbiting a dark spot in space.
Huh, so they're not seeing the black hole itself.
They're just seeing how that black hole's gravity is affecting the stars around it?
You got it.
You want to see this bad boy suck up a star?
Suck up a star?
Mindy, you know that can take hundreds of millions of years, right?
I mean, I have to be in bed by 8 p.m.
I know, I know.
You need your beauty rest.
But lucky for you, we are in a time machine.
All I have to do is push a couple of buttons here.
Um.
Pull a few levers.
Oh, wow.
Crank a few knobs.
Okay.
And we can just fast forward this whole ride.
Wow, look at that, Mindy.
That star is approaching the black hole.
And it's about to get slurped up like a piece of spaghetti.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
What was that?
Jed, can we back it up a notch?
Sure.
Roz, did that black hole just burp?
Well, kind of.
I think what we just saw was the black hole ejecting some of that stardust back into the universe.
And it didn't even say excuse me.
Well, it doesn't happen that often, Mindy.
Only once every hundred million years or so.
Well, that Still no excuse for bad manners.
Well, in the grand scheme of things Mindy, these little cosmic burps are happening all the time, all around us.
In fact, earlier this year, scientists from the University of Colorado well, they saw a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy.
Burp not once, but twice.
Really?
Where?
In a galaxy about 800 million light years away called SDSS J1354+.
Man, they couldn't have come up with a catchier name for it?
Oh, they have one.
They call it J1354 for short.
Right.
So how did these scientists see the black hole Burke?
Well, they did it using two very special telescopes.
The Hubble Space Telescope.
Oh, I know Hubble.
It floats in orbit around the Earth and it's used to take pictures of distant galaxies.
That's right.
They also used another telescope called the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
And that telescope can detect some of the energy given off by those galaxies, quasars we talked about before.
Oh yeah, the light and X-ray energy that these supermassive black holes give off when they're sucking up stars.
Right.
And when these researchers pointed their telescopes toward this quasar, they saw two bubbles of gas coming from the black hole.
One had traveled about 3000 light years away from the center of the black hole and the other had moved out about 30000 light years from the black hole.
So what does that mean?
Well, from all this information, the researchers were able to calculate, based on how far each of these gas bubbles had traveled, that these two burps had happened about 100000 years apart.
Wait, 100,000 years apart?
Guy Raz, you just said that these burps happen every 100 million years or so.
So how come these two happen so close together?
Well, the scientists think it's because sometime in J1354's history it collided with another galaxy.
Which means that there was a lot more material floating around in space.
And a lot more for the black hole to chew through.
Exactly.
Well, maybe that's the secret, Guy Raz.
The secret to what, Mindy?
The secret to winning the NPR hot dog eating contest.
Uh Maybe, just maybe, if I burp my way through it, I'll be able to keep old Grandma G-Force's unbeaten streak going.
I'm not sure that's how it works, Mindy.
Well, there's only one way to find out.
Not in the time machine, Mindy.
We can't even open a window in here.
Sorry, Guy Raz.
I'm just warming up my belch bone.
Belch bone?
Ah, yeah.
I'd give that one a ten.
Let's get out of here.
Burp!
Burp, burp, burp, burp.
What?
I can do that at the same time.
Mindy.
Excuse me, Guy Raz.
I'm ready for takeoff.
Let me just plug in the dates.
And here we go.
Oh, landed.
All right, now let me look out the window here.
Looks like we made it just in time, Guy Raz.
Look at all those buns.
Mindy.
Hot dog buns, Guy Raz.
Come on.
Oh, my, my, my, my.
Welcome, welcome.
Welcome, everyone, to the annual NPR Hot Dog Eating Contest.
At this time.
We're going to ask that all participants, all contestants, please report to the stage, as we are about to begin.
Jeez Louise, Guy Raz.
We have a time machine.
You couldn't have in a couple of extra minutes for me to warm up?
Sorry, Mindy, but you better hurry up before you get disqualified quick.
Ira Glass already has all his hot sauces ready.
Act one, it's a dog-eat-dog world.
One dog is a hot dog, and the other dog is me, Ira.
Get up on stage, Mindy!
Okay, okay, I think I got this.
Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run!
Hi, my name is Mindy, and I'm here for the competition, and my grandma is G-Force.
Thank you for just pulling out the chair here, sitting down, taking a deep breath.
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, please start your metabolic engines.
Okay, this one's for you, Grandma G-Force.
Three, two, one, begin.
Come on, Wendy, you can do it.
We'll be right back.
Grownups, this message is for you.
Hey, grownups.
It's Mindy and Guy Raz here from WOW in the World.
Mindy and I have some brand new WOW in the World toys out in the world just in time for the holidays.
Made for the kids who love science and for the ones who don't yet.
From our 100 experiments, that WOW kit to the telescope and astronomy kit.
Our Wow in the World toys help your wowzer learn about their world through play.
Plus, you can hear exclusive audio content from me and Guy Raz to help your wowzer discover even more wows.
Grownups.
Give the gift of wow and wonder this holiday season with our latest Wow in the World toys designed with your curious wowzer in mind.
You can shop our Wow in the World toys at Tinkercast.com slash toys.
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Hi, thanks for calling Wow in the World.
After the beep, get ready to record.
I'm Queen Guyroz.
I'm Sylvie and I'm 9.
And I'm Issa and I'm 11.
And we're from Flagstaff, Arizona.
Our Wow in the World is that black holes are actually invisible.
Because if they were black, That would mean that light would be bouncing off them.
But light can't escape black holes.
We love your show!
Hi, Mindy.
Hi, Guy Raz.
My name is Nora, and I'm from San Jose, California.
My wow in the world is when people were traveling west because they wanted a better life and covered wagons.
There is still the track today, and we call it the Oregon Trail.
That's my wow in the world, and I really, really love your show.
Hi, my name is and I live in the U.S.
Virgin Islands.
I am 10 years old.
My wow is that last September, we had two Category 5 hurricanes in 12 days.
Bye, Mindy and Guy Ross.
I love your show.
Hi, my name is Elsie.
I'm 7 years old.
I live in Santa Barbara, California.
My wow is that pigeon moms produce milk for their young, except they're not mammals.
They're birds.
Hi, my name is Gulliver and my hometown is Homer, Alaska, USA.
And my wow in the world is that robots are a real thing right now.
Hi, my name is Josh and I live in Santa Clara, California.
My wow in the world is that tomatoes were considered poisonous until the 1870s.
Bye, I love your show.
My name is Sophia from Edmonds, Washington, and I am five and a half years old.
My bond in the world is that a wood tree frog from Alaska can freeze, stop its heart and thaw and hop away in the spring.
Bye, Mindy.
Bye, Guy Raz.
I love your show.
We love your show.
Hey, everyone.
Thank you so much for joining us this week on Wow in the World.
And if you want to keep the conversation going, check out some of the questions we posted on this episode at our website, wowintheworldcom.
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Hello.
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