PUBLIC TALK: Things you think you know about Black Holes, but don't!

Once powerful radio telescopes became available in the 1950‘s it was realised that the sky was full of objects emitting very intense radio waves but with no known associated optical counterparts. Because of the way that their intensities were changing rapidly they had to be very small and so they were called quasi-stellar radio sources, or Quasars. In 1962 it was shown that they are inside distant galaxies and therefore that the energy being emitted is truly enormous.

Professor Kerr is a New Zealand mathematician who is most famous for his exact solution to Einstein’s General Relativity field equation for a rotating massive object, which is applicable to the creation of Black Holes. Once powerful radio telescopes became available in the 1950‘s it was realised that the sky was full of objects emitting very intense radio waves but with no known associated optical counterparts. Because of the way that their intensities were changing rapidly, they had to be very small and so they were called quasi-stellar radio sources, or Quasars. In 1962 it was shown that they are inside distant galaxies and therefore that the energy being emitted is truly enormous. 3:30pm, Friday the 4th of June, 2010 Ross Lecture Theatre, UWA At that time the astronomers ignored this paper completely but it is now believed that there is a supermassive black hole inside the center of most if not all galaxies and that the most violent events in the universe are associated with accretion disks around these or with the collapse of massive stars to neutron stars (Super-Novae) or even black holes (GRBs). In this talk I will tell the story of the discovery of this solution and of its application to these colossal events.