hello and it's great pleasure to welcome all of you in our audience from around the world to the third talk in our second series of the smash hit oxford at home oxford at home as you know is a showcase for some of the best research and thinking that's going on around the university of oxford even while we here in the uk are going through a second rather rigorous lockdown which means that we're mostly confined to our homes rather than our offices for that reason do you remember we are using our own home wifi and if there is the occasional cut out here and there bear with us and we'll be back as soon as we can we're hoping for no cutouts today because we have an absolutely fantastic talk and um i'm going to introduce the speaker to you my name is ron admitter i teach chinese history uh here at the university but my purpose today is to tell you about our speaker today dr becky smithhurst becky is a junior research fellow that's an extremely competitive research position at christchurch one of the more venerable of the colleges of the university harry potter college as it's known to some i have to say and becky's research focuses on how galaxies and their central supermassive black holes evolve together but you may know her better from her immensely popular youtube channel dr becky where she posts weekly videos on unsolved mysteries weird objects in space and other space news and her book space 10 things you should know which i suspect i knew none was also named one of the top books of 2019 by sky at night magazine now we'll turn to her in just a moment just a reminder that you the audience are very very much part of this conversation so whether you're on youtube whether you're on facebook on twitter or any other method perhaps beaming in from some extraterrestrial capacity you can communicate not necessarily in beeps and tweets with us today please send a message through the various chat functions and our coordinators and moderators will bring the best of those in and we'll put them to dr becky after she's given her talk but high time i think to hear about today's talk stargazing from home some tips during these dark january days of how you can adapt some ideas in the pleasure we hope the pleasant uh surrounds of your own street or garden or meadow whatever they may be close to uh to you could i welcome you dr becky smith hurst becky floor is yours thank you very much ronnie yes good morning everybody or good good evening or good afternoon wherever you happen to be thank you for spending your precious time with me today and yes i am going to be talking to you about how you can enjoy the night sky because although yes we do have very dark nights at the minute they're sort of you know people think they're quite depressing during the long sort of winter nights in essence for me as a stargazer that's fantastic because it means i don't have to stay up till 2 a.m to see the night sky i can see it at 6 00 pm just while i'm cooking my dinner at night time for example uh and i think that's always a good plus and just let you know this will be quite a northern hemisphere focus if there are any of you in the southern hemisphere but all the tips i've got for you is beginner stargazers will still be be very very useful um and i know that a lot of you if you are beginner stargazers might feel a little bit lost when you go out in the night sky well that's how i feel when i go to the southern hemisphere i don't recognize anything and i start making up my own constellations and they always end up looking like dinosaurs i see a lot of stegosauruses throughout the night sky um but before we start thinking about things that we can actually see and things we can spot i want to teach you first of all about the first rule of stargazing and the first rule of stargazing is that you need to be somewhere dark you can see more stars once your eyes have adjusted and become dilated like in the picture there on the left hand side um so compare sort of you know when you go to bed and you first switch off the light and the big light or you know your little nightstand light whatever it might be and you can barely see anything in the room but if you wake up in the middle of the night and you open your eyes you can see a lot and that's because your eyes have adjusted to the darkness so if you try and go from say the bright lights of your kitchen to outside in the garden and straight away go from looking at that bright light in your kitchen to trying to see tiny fin bricks of light from the stars that are trillions of miles away your eyes are gonna struggle so i need you to do two things that i either need you to just stand in the dark of your kitchen for five minutes before you go outside and then you will see more stars and it'll be more spectacular when you step out or you need to spend a longer time outside which if you do you need to wrap up warm and everything like that to let your eyes adjust i personally think it's more spectacular to just sort of stand in the dark and hummus onto yourself for five minutes before you head outside um because it is just more spectacular you see more stars whereas if you go out and then let your lights adjust you sort of don't notice that gradual change as more and more stars appear it's not as sort of spectacular um as that first sort of step outside so make sure you uh you you give the night sky enough attention uh to actually be able to enjoy it now quick glance up after looking at your phone screen for example is not going to do much so once we get out there though what are we going to see well i think the first thing that you know the easiest thing that everyone wants to find obviously in the sky is the moon now most people will look at the moon when it's a full moon because full moon can be very spectacular it's very very bright but the thing is that's not actually the best time to look at the full moon because it is so bright there's no contrast there so you actually lose a lot of the detail the best time to look is actually when it's a half moon or a crescent moon because those kind of moons actually have something that we call the terminator so that is the line along the moon where you go from day to night side on the moon it's the shadow cast by the sun while you're receiving light from the sun and where you're not getting any light from the sun and that's where we see all of the detail that shadow casts relief along all of the craters on the moon so if you have binoculars maybe you've done a bit of bird watching in your time or you've bought them for sporting events or something if you have them lying around your house break them out of whatever drawer they've been dumped in and point them at the moon when the moon is half or a crescent moon you will see so so much detail really is truly spectacular i think the first time i ever did that i really did sort of have a shocked intake of breath about how much you can actually see on the surface of the moon plus nights with full moons are actually uh not good for stargazing either because they are so bright so they wash out a lot of the stars you know new moon or a crescent moon is the best because it's darker but also because if it's a crescent moon or a new moon it's not up most of the night anyway and so the night is actually dark because the moon is already set again you can see more stars it'll be more spectacular but the moon can be very useful because it allows us to find other things so if you know the moon is going to be close to something that's interesting then that's the best way to start off as a beginner stargazer you know when someone says oh look for this in the north or the south and you go where on earth is it i'm not entirely sure if i say look for the moon you can find that and then jump from there so having said that i have something for you that's going to be visible tonight and tomorrow night so i've given you two nights just in case you know we never know what the weather's going to do at this time of year especially in the uk in january right but it's clear outside right now so fingers crossed it stays clear as well because the moon tonight and tomorrow is going to be very close to pleiades the star cluster so this is an area where a lot of stars have all formed very close together and so they clump together in this tiny little area of space but you can see it with the naked eye so see if you can pick out the moon either tonight or tomorrow and if you're looking tonight then sort of just go a little bit up from there and if you're looking tomorrow then just go a little bit to the right of there and see how many stars you can actually see in that little area of sky it's um one of these things that has been used throughout history supposedly by many different cultures as an eye test so depending how many stars that you could actually see in that little region of sky uh would suggest you know what you were supposed to be doing with the rest of your life so you know sort of young children would be tested and said you know can you see six or seven or eight stars and those who could see the most would have the best eyesight and and would go on to to work as a hunter or a warrior for those societies for example so if you want to test for your eyes make sure you look at it for in the evening because this is one of these things that's um you know up just after the sun sets and probably sets around about 2 a.m so you've got plenty of time to try and spot this you know amongst the the lockdown schedule of zoom calls and all sorts at the minute so uh have a look for it it looks a little bit like a mini plow so the constellation of the plow that's kind of what it looks like and again if you have binoculars or a telescope it's one of those things that will look absolutely spectacular like you'll be able to see you know between six to eight stars with the naked eye with just your eye but if you get binoculars on it you'll be shocked at not just how many stars appear but also the fact that you can sort of see this gas that's illuminated by the stars as well you can see that it's what we call nebulous this sort of vladimir that means sort of like cloudy uh as well which is is the gas left over from from these stars actually forming so i love this area of sky i love how sort of how much astrophysics is just contained in one such tiny little area speaking of the constellation of the plow though as this little thing looks like i want to talk about the plano because i feel like the plow is a constellation that a lot of people can pick out or at least it's perhaps the first constellation they learn to spot and people especially in the northern hemisphere it's one of those constellations that is very familiar it's very recognizable it's quite big and quite obvious because it is very bright in terms of its stars it's always roughly in the north as well usually people know if they have a south or a north facing garden so hopefully that should help you figure out which way to look from your house or which window from your house to look out of to be able to spot this and one thing i want to point out about constellations while we're here is that although these make very recognizable shapes in the sky and they do appear very close together the stars in them are actually trillions of miles apart they have actually nothing to do with each other so we put together an installation last year at the physics department open day where we hung little ball balls from the ceiling and put lights in them to to show the shape of the plow a very specific location in the room there was one spot on the floor that if you stood there that would be like standing on earth and seeing uh this pattern of the constellation of the plow but you can see that as you then start to move around the room that shape completely disappears because in fact the stars are you know the nearest and the furthest are separated by something like hundreds of light years you know meaning it takes light traveling at 30 million meters per second hundreds of years to travel that distance right so they have absolutely nothing to do with each other these stars they're nowhere near each other in space unlike the pleiades which they all form together in that very condensed area of space it reminds me a little bit of the old channel four adverts those that remember them where there was all those cranes that looked like they were making just a mess in the sky but as you moved around eventually you'd see the big four right that's kind of what constellations are like and i think this video really shows that nicely so once you've found the plow in the sky and you know what you're looking at you're looking at what we appears to us as this nice shape obviously they have nothing to do with each other these stars i want you to look um at one of the stars in the handle of the plow because i think what you'd be able to see is that that star is not actually one star it's two stars and they're called mizo and alco and again if you can pick those two out with your eyes it means you have excellent eyesight and that you're also probably in a very dark sky because the second star is a little bit fake for those of you sort of in in city areas you might struggle but again binoculars break them out and you will be able to spot that and i think that's just a really fun little fact about the plow you know something that is so recognizable to have that sort of be like oh actually that's that's two stars that's really cool zooming out a little bit now but sticking on the plow the plow it can be very very useful for navigating your way around the sky and this is obviously something that's key to sort of taking the steps from becoming a beginner stargazer to maybe someone who's more familiar with the sky if you can sort of wedge your way around the sky from something you do know to something you don't know as well for example so what you can actually do is use the two stars on the edge of the plow so that the pan of the plow to actually navigate up to the north star so if you draw a line between those two stars and then you carry on from there about three times the distance you'll see that very very bright star at the top that is polaris the north star the star that the north pole of earth just happens to point to it's a coincidence that there happens to be a star in that exact direction there isn't a star in the direction of the south pole for example but what it means for us in the northern hemisphere is that all year round it appears that you know other stars in the sky appear to be moving around polaris the north star throughout the night and you can see as well how the plow traces around polaris and so how those those two stars in the panhandle always point at polaris as well so whatever time of night you go out to look you can always find polaris this way and this is why the north star was so important to sailors navigating the ocean throughout history right because as you can see it's the only star that doesn't move it always stays directly above north you can see the cardinal directions at the bottom there in red so that was obviously incredibly useful if you didn't have a compass so when you go out tonight if you can find the plow something recognizable maybe try and use it to navigate to someone where you don't know as well and polaris the north star and find it jumping to a different constellation now another well-known constellation is orion and at this time of the year in the northern sky the winter sky it's spectacular right it rises just after sunset so it's very obvious in the evening sky which is obviously the sky that we see the most and then it sets around midnight again so it's very visible in sort of the visible times that we're actually looking at the sky and most people know it for orion's belt right very easy to spot and again another one that people learn to spot first or very very early on sort of in the days of looking at the sky people might be quite familiar with it as well but ryan's bell is not the whole constellation of orion amazingly enough the belt is actually just one piece of the hunter orion it's supposed to look like a hunter in the sky if i put on sort of the constellation lines you'll see that now you can see sort of got a sword in one hand raised above his head and he's also got a bow and arrow pointing outwards uh in his other hand and then you've got sort of his two shoulders above it and then it is two feet below it and you'll see that on one of his shoulders it's a star called beetlejuice and it looks a little redder in color than the rest of the stars around it now that's not just something on the software i'm using you can actually see that with your naked eye it's one of the sort of first questions that i remember asking my parents when i was younger was why does that star look a different color to the rest and they didn't necessarily know and that massively sparked my curiosity and it's red because it's a red giant star so if the sun was the size of a tennis ball beetlejuice would be the size of the london eye it's huge and the reason it's so huge is because it's nearing the end of its life it's running out of fuel so it's swollen up to try and prevent its collapse or it's supernova at the end of its life and it's thought to be very close to that point it started dimming last year and people got very excited thinking that might be an imminent supernova and if that was to happen we'd be able to even see it in the daytime sky it would you know be bright enough that even despite the sun we'd still be able to see it so people got very excited but then nothing happened um and it's back to its normal brightness now as well so if you can get out tonight and you can spot it you know spot it while you can because we should all keep an eye on this one because we never know uh when it might go supernova and come to the end of its life uh once again if you have binoculars or a telescope look below orion's belt so um you might be treated then to a view of the orion nebula which again is an area of sky where there's lots of stars forming this big region of hydrogen gas that eventually will collapse and be the fuel to make more stars and you can see it's very beautiful color has this pinkish glow that we associate with hydrogen gas and there's lots going on there it's a very beautiful sight to be able to see even if you want to point your smartphone in that direction your smartphone on a 3 or a 10 second exposure that you can do with most smartphones these days on the camera app i should actually pick out that sort of little fuzzy patch underneath orion's belt as well so there's lots going on in and around orion and it's this this huge constellation to explore so if that's what you can recognize you know maybe do a little bit of research and find out what else there is to to view around orion but i want to highlight now something that is one of my favorite sites to see especially in the winter sky and because surrounding orion are some of the six brightest stars in the winter sky and they're known as the winter hexagon or the winter circle so again if we just zoom out a little bit here now so that we can actually see orion the moon and the pleiades again um see mars is visible too see all the lions are already drawing themselves and we start at ryan's belt and we head down to orion's foot on the right and we find that the blue star is called rigel we then go down to sirius up to prescion to pollux across the capella and down to another red star called aldebaran and back to rigel and you'll see that it rings right round the constellation of orion and they're incredibly incredibly bright on the sky so it's something that once you know they're there once you've been able to pick them out it's something that you will definitely be able to see again now if you're struggling with it again on monday night to monday the 25th of jan the moon is gonna be smack bang in the middle of this winter hexagon so it's gonna be an ideal time to look for it and and so it'll make knowing where to look just that bit easier and actually if you're still struggling if you think i'm not gonna be able to pick that out i'm not going to be able to spot that in the sort of southern or southeastern sky and if you have a southern facing garden this is the kind of time to to look for this then download one of these free star chart apps as well um phone apps now if you get your phone you can point it at the sky and it'll tell you exactly what you're looking at uses sort of the technology in your phone to know where you are on the earth and know at which angle you're pointing and you can click on things and it'll tell you what it is that's a good way to get very familiar with what's going on in the sky and just to check that the hexagon you found is necessarily the winter hexagon as it's called because i i guarantee you once you've seen it and once you've found it in the sky you will not be able to stop seeing it it'll be something that just jumps out of you so obviously and it'll almost be easier to see in a light polluted sky because they're so bright the stars that you can see in the background here that are much fainter they'll almost disappear in the light pollution and so it'll be really easily they'll just sort of jump out at you this hexagon to be able to spot tonight and you might even be lucky enough to snap a picture like this by jeff dye that really does reveal everything that's going on in that area of sky when i was talking about with orion being such a chock-full constellation in terms of things to see in the sky but to me seeing the winter hexagon it just becomes such a comforting and familiar sight in the night sky every single winter that despite the the long nights especially in january february you know when you're in that sort of post christmas sort of blues phase it is something that is almost nostalgic in a way and it is very comforting and familiar to me so have a look for it and there and see if you can spot this because i mean at the end of the day that is what the night sky is to me it's you know an old friend that i can come back to all the time that when i look up i both recognize things and i see new things as well you know even though i spend my days as an astrophysicist researching black holes that actually doesn't mean i spend a lot of my time looking at the nights guys there's always always new things to look at whether you're a beginner or whether you're a an old hat at this so i hope i've inspired you to head out on the next clear night wrap up warm especially in winter you'll be surprised at how just standing still you get very very cold and just start seeing what you can find and what you can spot and maybe see if breaking out the smartphone or breaking out the uh you know the big digital camera that you have plonking it somewhere flat on a table where it's nice and still uh and setting it going and just seeing you know what the camera reveals to you in in the night sky of your back garden it's it really is something wonderful and it's great to do with the family as well with the kids uh during lockdown it's definitely something that you can can help you feel more connected uh to not just the world around you but the universe around you as well and if i've wet your whistle a little bit and you want to hear more why not join us next thursday on the oxford physics youtube channel for a live stream of talks more stargazing tips and big q a panels with all of my colleagues from uh the astrophysics department where you can all ask you know ask all of your sort of burning spacey questions to both me and my colleagues and i i hope to see you all there but for now thank you very much becky thank you very much indeed for a fantastic talk which i can tell you has been sending the questions pouring in we'll only have time today to get through a small number of them so cunningly you've got your plug in there at the end and people can pick up the conversation with you on the physics youtube channel but nobody leave us yet because we've still got 10 15 minutes in which we can follow up some of the questions that people have and i think you've not only wetted our appetites but some of us uh of uh of a certain age for older cultural references will be making plans for rigel for sure now and i'm sure the younger ones enjoyed the references to sirius as we're getting a mixture of kind of quite big think questions and um rather specific practical ones becky so i'm going to mix it up a little bit if i if i may as i do that and also throw one or two of my own which have uh have come up but actually let's start with something really practical this is coming on facebook from chris chris asks where are the best places in the uk for stargazing and then i think with a sort of forward look towards a day one day we may be allowed to travel again we're the best places in the world so in the uk any of the national parks obviously some of the best all right so the best stargazing i've ever done is in the lake district i grew up on sort of the south edge of the lake district so that was where i went uh for a lot of family holidays and i've seen the milky way look absolutely spectacular there um but similarly you know any national park across the uk will be the best bet just because it has the darkest skies we do actually have a dark sky park in the uk and that is kielda forest up in northumberland um and they actually have an observatory there that you can visit when travel is allowed again so that might be something that you might wish to plan because they are fantastic there and and they have fantastic trips you can do and sort of organized night sky tours as well um and they also have quite a lot of clear night skies as well being in the northeast because they don't suffer from relief rainfall like the ones of us who grew up in the northwest to do anyway um so clearing the lights up on the northeast as well in terms of the world again it's just wherever you can get that it's incredibly dark the places we put telescopes as professional astronomers are places like um on tops of mountains in the middle of deserts basically because you want somewhere high up and somewhere dry so you're not looking through as much of the atmosphere humidity also gives you a lot of interference with the light as well so places like hawaii and the middle of the chilean desert and south africa and australia and the canary islands and there is like legitimate reasons we obviously put them there it's not just that we can all have fancy holidays but i would say um anywhere that you can get away from like pollution so if you are going to the coast for example for a beach holiday then i would say um you know there might be sort of like hotels or whatever on the front if you can get away from the lights of the hotels a little bit just by walking down the beach for example um again be very careful take lights with you wrap up warm that kind of thing um that's a great thing to do if you're thinking about mountains holidays that's another great place to see this guy but again it's just about getting away from light pollution but don't generally crown mountains mountains uh in the dark boys and girls and uh just a quick fill up on that actually it combines questions from sarah and izzy both coming on facebook as well but i think about the practicalities yeah uh i mean sarah's asking is it necessary to wait for a specific time whereas any time when it's dark okay and the follow-up i think probably a lot of people some you know worry about this from izzy is that i don't have a garden i don't have a telescope is there any possibility of stargazing for the window of my flat in the city where there's lots of light or is it really a bit of a lost cause oh no so um the first question was um sorry remember the first question wait wait wait for specific do you have to wait three times yes no so i mean wait until it is dark so don't look right after sunset because that will still be what we call twilight um so you'll only really be able to see sort of the brightest stars or perhaps venus if you've ever seen a very bright star just after sunset or just before sunrise that's actually venus it's one of the brightest things in the sky um it's all about what's visible then so for example i talked about orion ryan's visible from about you know six o'clock till about midnight at the minute so if you're going out uh in the morning perhaps if or you know 4am 5am perhaps you know work nights something like that orion won't be up but there'll be more to see at that point so it's all a bit of a balance right if you've got something specific in mind then perhaps download one of those little star chart apps i was talking about and check you know if that thing is up at that time that you're going to be looking but otherwise just go out and see what you can what you can see if you're stargazing from a flat or from a house that doesn't have a garden i do that all the time because i don't want to go outside and get cold the key to observing inside is making sure all the lights in that room are clo are off right so you don't want any light that's going to reflect off your window for example and back into your eye because that's again going to ruin your um night vision if you will um you can do that i would also recommend like closing the curtains behind you and sort of like being in front of the curtains and looking out that way that's again another way to stop a lot of reflected light you need to pick a window that's going to be away from street lamps or anything like that if you can't do that i sometimes do this so if there's a street lamp down down there on the road i'll try and block it with my hands and that does go a long way in helping um to to stop that kind of light pollution if you're in the middle of the city it's going to be the brightest things only so for you it's going to be things like planets like jupiter and venus which are very bright they're visible um early morning at the minute so right before sunrise which is not too bad because sunrise is quite late still some half by seven or something like that so if you're up any earlier have a look for that um and then also like the winter hexagon that i talked about the plow orion the main constellations you're still going to be able to see but you're never going to be able to see something like the milky way stretching across the sky that kind of thing no that's fair enough and actually that may answer the questions that's coming from ed jarvis which is any recommendations for a dad with a space obsessed three-year-old well starting in early that's great uh she loves the planets and you mentioned venus is something that in the right circumstances would that be fair to say yes yes so um i mean a three-year-old definitely that's just something where if you are get a little bit more familiar with the sky then you can pick things out for them and then show them and point at them and then there and then they'll get a little bit more from that meteor showers are great for young kids so um there's not that many at the minute that are going to be visible in the evening when kids are going to be awake however in august when a lot of people tend to be on summer holidays anyway and away from away from light pollution the best meteor shower of the year is the pleiades and there's something like a hundred meteors an hour so that's something that you can do with a small kid where you say come on we're gonna lie down here in the garden or on a sun bed because we happen to be on holiday i i call them starbeds because i use them at nighttime too um because they're great for stargazing and we're just gonna look at the sky and wait for meteors to go across and it'll be like oh look at that one look at that one so that's a really good thing to do with it with a young kid um but also just you know feed their curiosity if they ask questions try and answer them the best you can you know don't just say you know i don't know it's one of those things that i i as a kid was also a white child like why this why that why is the sky blue that kind of thing and feeding that is so important at that age and i think you're very lucky ed to have that to share with your daughter just one very quick factual i think you mentioned an app during your talk becky and someone is coming on facebook saying could you just give us the name of that app for the smartphone again there's so many of them that's the thing that i wouldn't want to necessarily there's some you can pay for there's some that are free um have a little search there's a load that turn up see which one you like best it's a type of app rather than a specific app exactly the best ones the best ones to get are the ones that turn your phone screen black and light it up with red and they don't uh ruin your eyesight at the same time and i'd say likewise to the many people who've actually been writing and asking about specific telescopes i think we're not in a position to endorse particular commercial enterprises but in general i think there are lots of good guides uh out there to exactly that question and reminder that if you wanted to go back over any of becky's tips during this this is if you're not if you're watching live now this will then be available indefinitely on youtube as well so you can always go back and pick up some of the notes in the last few minutes becky a few of the sort of questions about the science of it as well that's coming in actually one that's a rather nice question about how the science is done and we've got a couple in here from from russell borden but i'm going to ask this one he mentions patrick moore who many may have known was the most famous astronomer in britain i think for about you know 70 years or something that's not 70 but certainly half a century and he used to say there's a lot that amateur astronomers could add to science or astronomy is that still true could amateurs do anything that would help you know scientists like you yeah 100 actually um not so much in terms of discovery on the sky always but if you are a very keen amateur astronomer in terms of discovering things like supernova things that we call transient that aren't always there in the sky that appear and then might fade that's still something amateurs do but then also we have so many projects online now called citizen science projects um so for example i work with one called galaxy zoo which is a project which gets the public to classify the shapes of galaxies because we got in a position where we had took so many images of the sky that we had about a million images of galaxies that we wanted to know the shapes of whether they were a beautiful spiral or whether they were just a blob um because we wanted to study you know how do galaxies change shape as the universe evolves and we couldn't answer that question without being classified but there's not physically enough of us to look at a million galaxies and that was where we got the public's help with that and that that project is still going it's been going for about 10 years now uh because we don't stop taking pictures of the sky it's kind of our job um and so that's still something we need help with that's galaxyzoo.org and again that's something that even a three-year-old could probably do that can recognize a spiral shape right this is something that we're teaching kids to do from a very young age and that is something where if you get involved you know your name is put on scientific publications as well because that is something you've helped make happen right um that spawned a lot of other scientific projects like that from classifying penguins in the antarctic to translating world war ii diaries um to looking at before and after images of of places that were hit by hurricanes for example puerto rico with hurricane maria a couple years back we sort of marked floods and road blockages things like that they're all under the banner of something called the zooniverse so there's many scientific projects out there that you can get involved with as a sort of a keen amateur or citizen scientist fantastic i think we'll skip past the fascinating question from kwt which is how much does the ticket cost from london heathrow to mars because kwt the answer to that is the ticket is actually quite cheap you'd be surprised but the covid test you need to be able to make sure you don't spread infections to other planets i'm afraid is prohibitively expensive so we'll have to pass that one let me finish my becky by asking a question which is coming for a couple of people but also actually the thing i wanted to ask you about your own fascinating sounding research on black holes i mean it's one of those topics for those of us who get this mercy through the news and kind of popular science press that sort of comes out and then kind of disappears on the surface of it and then suddenly this huge new discovery of some sort emerged about black holes and actually they've been in the news as you know better than i do in the last few weeks and months perhaps more than they had been for a little bit before that could i ask the question this way what's the thing about black holes that we now know from the research that perhaps makes us think about them differently from what we might have thought two or five years ago even what's the most recent and kind of kind of discovery about them um i mean this is the thing about black holes they will forever be the most mysterious object in the universe because we can't get light and information from them so they'll always be something we don't know which excites me to no end um one thing i think we we do know now that we didn't necessarily know a couple years ago was the way black or supermassive black holes anyway grow so we'd always thought that yes okay they can take in material but they're not sort of the endless hoovers that people tend to picture when they think of black poles it's you know they can't just take everything in because you know stuff happily orbits around them so the same way the earth orbits the sun the sun orbits the center of the milky way where there's a supermassive black hole we're not falling into that black hole or anything like that so the black hole was asked to actively take in material and we thought that that was one way that they would grow but the major way they would grow was if they merged with another galaxy that also had a supermassive black hole in the center and so we called this a co-evolution the galaxy in the black hole would grow together and they would get bigger together in fact actually even some of my research recently has shown that that's not the case actually the majority of black hole growth happens just by the black hole actively taking in material from its surroundings um quite calmly actually rather than one of these big violent mergers of two galaxies where gravity tears them apart so that's one thing that's sort of surprised us recently is that they're probably not as vicious and violent as we might have thought and they're a little bit more calmer and controlled so when you're looking into the black of the black hole it's decaf rather than espresso sure yeah becky i know from our question section indeed from you know my fascination with what you've been talking about we could talk for ages but time is against us and we of course have the pleasure of meeting you again on the oxford physics channel and on your own youtube channel of course on many occasions thank you so much to dr becky dr becky smithhurst of christchurch oxford for this fantastic talk and a reminder that you can hear this talk again and all of our previous talks from season one and season two of oxford at home on the website uh just look at the description description beneath the video next week we will be talking uh all being well we're still absolutely confirming it we think it's right on the history of american insurrections so that might or might not be timely as you can imagine with professor nigel bowles and um please keep looking out because it may be the time of that is different to accommodate an american audience in particular because the time zones but it will be the same day uh our usual oxford at home friday thank you our audience around the world for watching thank you dr becky and thank you our fantastic team behind the scenes it's been a pleasure bringing you today's edition of oxford at home