Gravity vs Pressure: The Fight That Makes a Black Hole

Every star you've ever seen is a fight. Gravity pulls it in, Pressure pushes it back out, and the fuel decides how long Pressure can hold. This is how stars die and how black holes are formed, called round by round like a fight night: the Sun, a supergiant 20 times heavier, and a main event star 40 times the Sun. On the way you'll see why a sugar cube of white dwarf weighs more than a car, how a 19 year old on a ship found Gravity's cheat code, how one dying star can outshine a billion Suns, why the first pulsar was nicknamed Little Green Men and why a 1939 paper on collapsing stars went almost unread for decades. Then how big a black hole really is, how we know they're real, and what flew out of the ring. Every number in this video is on screen, and every fact is checked against the sources below. Chapters 0:00 Every star is a fight 0:39 Gravity vs Pressure: the tale of the tape 1:46 Round 1: how the Sun will die 3:02 The 1.4 limit: a voyage in 1930 3:34 Round 2: supergiants and the iron core 4:37 Core collapse and the supernova 5:36 Neutron stars and Little Green Men 6:24 The paper nobody read 6:48 Round 3: how a black hole is made 7:27 How big is a black hole? 8:10 How do we know black holes are real? 9:06 We're made of the leftovers Sources Core heat and pressure, NASA Sun fact sheet: https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary... 170,000 years to get out, NASA: https://science.nasa.gov/sun/facts/ Pressure holds up the weight above it, OpenStax Astronomy: https://openstax.org/books/astronomy-... Pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, NOAA: https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/se... 4 million tons a second, NASA: https://pwg.gsfc.nasa.gov/istp/outrea... The Sun's age and its white dwarf, Stanford Solar Center: https://solar-center.stanford.edu/FAQ... Big stars burn fast, layer by layer, Las Cumbres Observatory: https://lco.global/spacebook/stars/hi... The iron core, its collapse and a billion Suns, Chandra X ray Center: https://chandra.harvard.edu/edu/forma... Core collapse and the bounce, Woosley and Janka 2005: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0601261 Supernovas, NASA Space Place: https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/supernova... Detection of supernova neutrinos, arXiv 2016: https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.02204 Neutrinos ahead of the light in 1987, The Astrophysics Spectator: https://astrophysicsspectator.org/top... White dwarfs, NASA: https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science... A teaspoon of white dwarf, NASA: https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science... Chandrasekhar's voyage, Resonance: https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltex... Chandrasekhar and Eddington, MacTutor: https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk... Chandrasekhar's Nobel, Physics Today: https://physicstoday.aip.org/features... What holds a neutron star up, NuSTAR: https://nustar.caltech.edu/page/neutr... Neutron star sizes and masses, University of Maryland: https://pages.astro.umd.edu/~mcmiller... The heaviest neutron star, Romani et al. 2022: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.05124 The first pulsar, Physics Today: https://physicstoday.aip.org/news/det... Little Green Men, Space.com: https://www.space.com/38916-pulsar-di... How black holes are born, NASA: https://science.nasa.gov/universe/bla... Oppenheimer and Snyder 1939, NASA ADS: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/193... Published September 1, 1939, 3 Quarks Daily: https://3quarksdaily.com/?p=239980 Cygnus X 1, Astronomy: https://www.astronomy.com/science/cyg... The Hawking and Thorne bet, National Academies Press: https://www.nationalacademies.org/rea... The Sun as a black hole, NASA: https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science... Earth as a black hole, PBS NOVA: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article... Black holes don't suck, NASA: https://science.nasa.gov/universe/10-... The first black hole crash we heard, LIGO: https://ligo.org/detections/GW150914/ The first picture of a black hole, ESO: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1907/ Made in stars, SDSS: https://blog.sdss.org/2017/01/09/orig... Gold from neutron star crashes, NASA Gravity, the Sun, Rocket and the neutron star come from QuirkScience's Season 1 Shorts, "The Most Extreme Places in the Universe", and Pressure comes from Season 2, "The Deep Ocean". QuirkScience is made by a small, independent team, for anyone who's curious. #blackholes #space #science