Why Spinning Planets Drag Space Around With Them

Описание: If you’d like to share these slow nights with other curious listeners, there’s a small, warm community on Patreon where we talk through each episode and wonder about what comes next.
👉   / thesleepyphysicist1  

Frame dragging is the strange prediction of general relativity that a spinning planet drags the space around it, and tonight we follow that faint tug from Earth outward to dead stars and black holes. It starts with Newton’s spinning bucket and the old question of what “not rotating” is measured against, then moves to the mirrored LAGEOS and LARES satellites that caught Earth’s twist as a drift of about two metres a year. Along the way there’s a white dwarf with a two-minute day dragging a pulsar’s whole orbit around, the Sun’s tiny pull on Mercury, and the slow eleven-year nod of a jet in the galaxy M87. It’s a long, quiet walk through gravity’s magnetic side, made for listening in the dark.

Timestamps
0:00 The Bucket That Knew It Was Spinning
7:16 A Letter Addressed to Mach
13:31 Inside the Hollow Shell
19:11 What Lense and Thirring Saw
25:16 Gravity Has a Magnetic Side
32:55 A White Dwarf With a Short Day
39:19 150 Kilometres in Twenty Years
44:46 Two Ways a Gyroscope Leans
51:21 Fading With the Cube of Distance
56:27 Mirrors Thrown Into Orbit
1:02:09 Subtracting a Lumpy Earth
1:08:47 The Few-Percent Years
1:13:23 LARES 2, Forty Years Late
1:20:00 Who Checks the Error Bars?
1:25:24 The Sun’s Faint Twist on Mercury
1:31:20 Jupiter Kept Its Secret
1:36:22 When a Disk Arrives Tilted
1:42:38 A Wobble Every Four Seconds
1:47:53 Jets That Swing in Minutes
1:52:17 M87’s Eleven-Year Nod
1:57:30 The Star That Made a Disk Wobble
2:03:59 Did Two Black Holes Really Precess?
2:09:42 Listening for It Underground
2:15:02 Gödel’s Turning Universe
2:20:02 Back to the Bucket