Physics in the final frontier

How might we guess people's weights by seeing only their socks? And can we apply this method to black holes? There’s thought to be a supermassive black hole in the centre of every galaxy, but, as we can't directly see them, they can prove somewhat difficult to weigh. By examining the stars and gas around black holes, however, we can make educated guesses as to just how heavy they might be. Along the way, we’ll talk about how astronomers make the best of measuring what we can, and come to the central question: are we weighing black holes wrong?

Compared to some places in the Universe, the Earth is a pretty boring place: it's pretty cold, not very dense and the magnetic fields around us are pretty weak. Scientists are pretty good at understanding how matter behaves on Earth, but we don't really understand how stuff behaves when it's under the extreme conditions found in stars, quasars and near black holes. In my research, we use the World's most powerful lasers to create and study the very high temperatures, densities and electromagnetic fields usually only found in astrophysics here in the lab on Earth.