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[Music]
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the study of extreme physics
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brought us the bomb
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it has taken us inside the violent
death of a star
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and now it has brought us face to face
with the most destructive force in
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nature a super massive black hole
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how large how powerful can these
monsters get
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and what can they tell us about the
extremes of time
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and space
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[Music]
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the year was 1990. [Music] hope for
a new age of scientific
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discovery rose into orbit aboard the
hubble space telescope [Music]
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a technical flaw in its optics requiring astronauts
to fly up to repair it would delay but not stop
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this new age from dawning
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in 1994 astronomers pointed the newly
repaired hubble at one of its most
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important targets a giant elliptical galaxy
50 million light years from earth called
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m87
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pushing deep into m87s core they glimpsed
a powerful jet of super
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hot gas extending 5 000 light years into space
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with hubble's remarkable resolving power
astronomers measured the speed of the gas racing
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around the center they concluded
the gravitational source
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driving these motions is a black hole
weighing in at 6.6
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billion times the mass of our sun news
of m87 joined a flood of
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discoveries beaming down from hubble's instruments
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the public was captivated by strange and majestic
shapes captured from mysterious realms far
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beyond earth
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to scientists hubble was part of a quickly
expanding arsenal of observing tools
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a growing fleet of space observatories scanned the
light of distant objects across the entire electromagnetic
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spectrum [Music]
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on the ground a new generation of giant telescopes
with precision mirrors and dynamic
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optics allowed observers to look deep into the universe [Music]
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astronomers used to long nights of painstaking
camera exposures were now a wash in data streaming in
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from distant corners of the cosmos [Music]
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a new vision of the universe emerged one
defined by vast energy releases
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titanic collisions [Music]
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mysterious new forces [Music] and
nature's strangest phenomenon
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the black hole
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once thought of as mere curiosities black
holes have taken center stage in our
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understanding of the universe and how it came to be
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a black hole begins its life in the
brilliant light of a dying star
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within the folds of our galaxy the energy
let loose by supernovae stirs the
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celestial mix
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shock waves from these explosions
cause gas to condense then ignite
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[Music] stars are born sometimes hundreds at a
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time [Music]
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intense stellar winds from these newborn stars
sculpt majestic castles of gas
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the great nebulae long admired by
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astronomers
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yet for the giant stars that set this process
in motion the consequences are grim
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back in the mid 1800s mariners plied southern
seas by the light of a brilliant star
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just off the plane of the galaxy in
the constellation karina
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for over a decade it was the second
brightest star in the sky
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astronomers have been studying it
intensively ever since
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the star named ada carine had undergone
what's now known as the great eruption
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an outburst that expelled two luminous
lobes of gas that stretched some 12 trillion
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kilometers from end to end [Music]
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[Music]
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astronomers recently found that ada carinae
is actually two giant stars closely orbiting one
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another to explain the extreme turbulence of
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this scene scientists modeled the fierce hot
winds roaring out of these two companions
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[Music] the orbital motions of the two stars
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allowed them to peg the larger one at
90 times the mass of the sun
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eta carinae is a supernova waiting to happen
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in time it will cease with convulsions
then collapse and
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explode throughout history our understanding of
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space has been shaped by a handful of supernovae
visible to the naked eye some
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archaeologists believe this drawing depicts a
supernova spotted by north american stargazers
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in the year 1054. the same event was also recorded in
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china korea and the middle east
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in europe supernova sightings help dispel the
prevailing belief that the heavens are static and
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unchanging the astronomer tycho brahe
saw one in the year 1572
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i was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability
of the thing he wrote that i began to doubt the faith
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of my own eyes
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in modern times astronomers have intensively
studied the remnants of the 1054
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explosion the famous crab nebula
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[Music] waves of radiation roaring out of the
explosion have etched circular patterns in the
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surrounding gas seen here in radio
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infrared [Music]
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optical ultraviolet and x-ray light
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you can see signs of a jet shooting
out of the central region
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this energy is coming from a tiny spinning
object in the center the size of a city
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this neutron star is not made of any elements
but subatomic particles packed by
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gravity into an ultra dense sphere [Music]
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physicists think of it as a single huge atom
it's roughly equivalent to packing
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mount everest into a sugar cube
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yet some dying stars meet a fate
that is stranger still
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in 1796 pierre simon the marquis de la place
imagined a breed of dark stars so heavy
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their gravity prevented any light from escaping
[Music] this idea a head scratcher fell out of
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favor for more than a century
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isaac newton had described gravity as a force
of attraction between two masses
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early in the 20th century albert einstein's
equations showed that gravity is actually the
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distortion of space-time by massive objects
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thus a planet or star or even a galaxy
creates a gravitational well that will
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bend the path of other objects or
even beams of light
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as the physicist john archibald wheeler later
put it space-time tells matter how to move
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matter tells space-time how to curve
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in 1919 the now famous eddington expeditions
set out to test this wild idea during a
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solar eclipse [Music] their data showed
that the sun's gravity
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bent the path of starlight just
as einstein had predicted
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but also hiding in einstein's equations
was a very strange prospect that
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recalled pierre simon's speculation if
an object is dense enough it will
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bend a beam of light back onto itself
causing that light to disappear
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physicist carl schwarzfield director of
the astrophysical observatory in potsdam germany
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took this idea to its logical conclusion
working as an artillery lieutenant on
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the battlefront of world war one he stole
moments to pour over einstein's new theory
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as you see he wrote to einstein the war treated me
kindly enough in spite of the heavy gunfire to allow
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me to get away from it all and take
this walk in the land of your ideas
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schwarzeeld realized that objects could become
so dense their mass would be packed into an
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infinitesimal point a singularity
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he calculated that these odd creations
must be bounded by a larger spherical region
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beyond which no light can escape
the so-called event horizon
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but how could such objects actually exist
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in 1939 einstein himself wrote a paper that
sought to prove that these strange objects
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were impossible but just a few months later physicist
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j robert oppenheimer and his graduate students
published their own paper on the subject
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taking a fresh look at the mathematics of collapsing
stars they show that if the parent star is
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sufficiently massive the force of the
collapse will literally crush its core
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down to a point an infinitely dense
infinitely curved speck of pure
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gravitational energy
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oppenheimer went off to spearhead
the design of the atomic bomb
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having laid the foundations of the
modern science of black holes
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the atomic age brought a whole new
focus on the study of extreme physics
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the bomb was terrifying proof as einstein
conjectured that a small amount of mass could
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convert to a huge amount of energy
researchers studied the enormous forces
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released when atoms are split apart in
chain reactions at the heart of
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atomic and thermonuclear bombs
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using advanced new computers developed to model
and forecast these explosions astrophysicists
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began probing the mechanisms at work deep
inside stars where lighter elements
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burn and fuse into heavier ones they saw
how this can eventually lead
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large stars to collapse and explode
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this grim product of star death entered
the popular imagination in 1967
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when physicist john wheeler
called it a black hole
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[Music]
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astronomers were already at work
looking for these monsters
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in 1964 a sounding rocket recorded a
high-energy x-ray source in the southern
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constellation of cygnus [Music] later
satellites recorded a pulsing
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rhythm in its light punctuated by
outlandish bursts of energy [Music]
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after pinpointing its exact location ground-based
observatories detected a giant star
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that could not by itself emit x-rays
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astronomers deduced that cygnus x1 is
a star with an unseen companion one
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that is eating it alive enveloped in
a halo of glowing gas
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streaming in from the star that
partner weighs in at 15 times the
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mass of our sun the first confirmed black hole
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[Music]
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this computer simulation shows how a
black hole makes its presence known
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matter spiraling into the abyss forms
what's called an accretion disc
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the spinning motion generates powerful magnetic
fields that whip up a hurricane of particles
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and propel them from the poles
at nearly the speed of light [Music]
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if you were to fall into a star-sized black
hole the pull of its gravity rises so sharply
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you'd be stretched out until just your atoms
remained what physicist stephen hawking once
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called spaghettification [Music]
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stellar evolution models suggest there could be
as many as a billion black holes in our milky way alone
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yet they are dwarfed by a far larger and
far more powerful presence lurking in the very
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core of the galaxy
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[Music] the first hints of this presence came in
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1932. the bell telephone company was concerned
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about static interfering with what it saw
as a revolutionary new technology
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long-distance radio communications
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the company tasked the radio astronomer
karl jansky with finding the sources
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using this ungainly radio receiver jansky
methodically scanned the airwaves
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he traced most of the static to thunderstorms
some nearby and others far away
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then on september 16 1932 he picked
up a rumble that he could not
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explain this particular noise appeared when the
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antenna was pointed at the constellation sagittarius
toward the center of the galaxy
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it returned every 23 hours and 56 minutes
exactly one earth day in relation to the
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stars [Music] word of jjansky's findings got out
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he assured the public it was not
aliens seeking contact [Music]
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but it would take another 30 years for
astronomers to find out what it was
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in the 1960s advanced radio telescopes
began picking up signals from distant
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space not knowing just what they were observers called them
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quasi-stellar radio sources quasars for short
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[Music] these bright bluish beacons emitted
far greater energy than a star
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one cosmic engine was driving them
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radio astronomers found that some featured brilliant
extensions originating in the centers of galaxies
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and reaching millions of light years into space
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looking at their light spectra researchers realized
that these were actually jets of super hot gas speeding
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away at hundreds of thousands of kilometers each second
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could such a feature finally explain jansky's findings
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it would take a new generation of giant
telescopes to reveal the answer [Music]
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just as the hubble space telescope began its
sensational run several new observatories were
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christened on the mountains in hawaii
in the north and the andes
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mountains in the south [Music]
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two rival teams of astronomers each zeroed
in on the galactic center to see what was
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[Music]
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there
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[Music]
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these teams each undertook a multi-decade effort
to track a population of stars that seem
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to orbit a concentrated source of energetic
emission called sagittarius a star
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finally in the spring of 2002 a star labeled
s2 swooped in close accelerating to a
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remarkable 18 million kilometers per hour
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[Music] if its path near sagittarius
a star proved erratic
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astronomers would know the galactic center
was packed with multiple massive objects
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instead its path was smooth
they concluded that s2 and its
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companions must be orbiting a single object weighing
several million times the mass of our sun
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a supermassive black hole
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this effort more than two and a half decades after
it began was recognized with the nobel prize in
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physics since that discovery astrophysicists
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have been feeding additional observation data
into their supercomputers to better understand
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how clouds of gas flow around and
into the monster and how its immense
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gravity drives the motions of stars
at the center of our galaxy
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[Music] the star s2 will inevitably return to
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the black hole the pull of gravity
will cause its orbit
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to shrink pulling it ever closer
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astronomers recently caught a glimpse
of what would then happen
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a survey telescope in the andes mountains
recorded the sudden brightening of a galaxy
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in distant space astronomers at
the european southern observatory
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turned their telescopes toward the source [Music]
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the light had come from a galaxy 215 million
light years away astronomers tracked the
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event through to its ultimate demise six months later
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they deduced that a star had wandered a
little too close to a supermassive black hole
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the giant began to tear it apart turning
the star into a river of hot gas
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fueling a high-energy jet bright
enough to be detected from earth
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astronomers have long nurtured the hope
of seeing a black hole directly
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to understand its properties and
how it disrupts the space around it
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in recent years an international group of
astronomers has been working on just such an
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audacious goal like the eddington expeditions a century
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before these scientists hope to test einstein's theories
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only this time in the most extreme laboratory
the universe has to offer a black hole
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the idea was to adapt a technique
developed over 60 years ago
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called long baseline interferometry [Music]
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by synchronizing radio telescopes all around our
planet a team of 400 scientists and engineers
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created a much larger virtual telescope
with an aperture the diameter of earth
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itself it has a resolution equivalent to
being able to read a newspaper in paris
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while sitting in new york
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they call it the event horizon telescope
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their goal to capture the first
ever image of a black hole
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their target the monster at the center of m87
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probing deep into m87s luminous core
the astronomers struck a delicate
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balance between filtering out interstellar
dust and finding the outlines
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of their quarry at a radio wavelength of
about one millimeter all the dust and gas
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obscuring the monster faded away
leaving this ghostly silhouette
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a black hole an object that cannot
by its very nature be seen
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the event horizon telescope relies on a tool
that has transformed the study of the universe
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to make sense of the vast amount of data captured
by the many receivers researchers developed a series of
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computer simulations visualizing
the complexity of the scene
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here are some of the results the
dark nucleus is the event horizon
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a shadow left when the object's immense
gravity slows all light to a stop
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the singularity the black hole itself
is hiding in the shadows
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the visible ring marks the spinning accretion disk
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it's brighter on one side because the gas there
is spiraling towards the telescope its
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photons piling up the light from material moving away
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becomes dimmer as its wavelength stretches toward
the red part of the electromagnetic spectrum
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from a slightly more distant perspective you
can see how a portion of the inflowing matter
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is flung out in a fiery pulsating jet
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m87 is a black hole of truly cosmic proportions
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it has been bulking up for billions of years
on a steady diet of gas dust planets
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and stars but it's not the only billion solar mass
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black hole out there or even the largest
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[Music] the coma cluster is a dense grouping of
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galaxies 321 million light years from earth
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its center is occupied by a colossal elliptical
galaxy cataloged as ngc 4889
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it harbors a black hole estimated to be 21
billion times the mass of the sun
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j2157 is even larger
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at 34 billion times the mass of the sun
this ultra massive black hole is 8 000
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times larger than the one at our milky way's core
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the largest black hole yet spotted ton 618
may weigh as much as 66 billion
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of our suns it drives a super luminous quasar
shining 140 trillion times brighter than
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our star [Music] theoretically there
is no limit to how
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large a black hole can grow all it takes
is time and the right circumstances
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the building boom of ever larger telescope
mirrors has given astronomers a whole new
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vantage point on the life cycle
of ultramassive black holes
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here in the high northern deserts of chile they have been
combing the early universe for dim clues of black holes on
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the rise out in the southern constellation of leo
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they spotted the most distant quasar yet observed just 770
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million years after the big bang [Music]
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the red dot is light energized by a black hole
estimated at two billion times the mass
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of the sun how did it form and what impact will it
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have on its surroundings
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to find out scientists have launched a major
international effort to simulate the early evolution of the
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universe
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the action starts a few million years after
the big bang gravity begins to draw hydrogen gas into
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large halos and from there into concentrations
dense enough for stars to form
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as some stars die they give rise to
black holes these primordial monsters
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feed on in-rushing gas growing
ever larger while blasting their
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environments with fierce winds and jets [Music]
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the scene shifts to visible light as the universe
reaches its halfway point two galaxies
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are beginning to form each with a central
region densely packed with stars
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gravity begins to draw the two
into a cosmic embrace [Music]
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the black holes at their centers will
inevitably meet and merge the end result
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a galaxy similar to our own with a super
massive black hole hidden deep in its core
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we now move to a much larger scale
the action starts 500 million years
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after the big bang matter coalesces
in a spider web pattern
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of filaments and dense knots
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amid the formation of countless stars
several larger galaxies develop
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as they merge so do the black holes in their cores [Music]
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a still larger view tracks the impact these supermassive
black holes have on the surrounding universe
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you can see bubbles rising quickly from the largest
galaxies these are waves of super hot gas pushed
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out by winds and jets powered by growing black holes
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such outbursts seed the universe with elements
generated by large stars and supernovae
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elements that would one day come
together in stars and planets like our own
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[Music] by pushing outward huge volumes of gas
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these hot bubbles slow the growth of their host
galaxies while promoting the formation of smaller
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galaxies like our milky way
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[Music] quasars and the black hole jets powering
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them are among the most energetic phenomenon known [Music]
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this one spotted by the hubble space telescope in the
early universe emits light 600 trillion times brighter
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than our sun [Music]
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and yet that hardly begins to describe the
power unleashed when two supermassive black
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holes collide
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to find out what that will look like from earth scientists
have simulated the moment just before two supermassive
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black holes merge magnetic and gravitational forces heat
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up the gas the pair is enveloped in ultraviolet
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light super hot plasma flowing around
and into the black holes
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glows in x-ray light
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[Music]
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the intense gravity of the pair distorts
and bends space time creating a lens
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albert einstein hinted that the energy of
such a collision goes far beyond the emission of
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high-energy light his equations predicted
that when massive bodies like black holes
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accelerate or whip around each other they would
disturb the normally smooth fabric of space-time
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[Music] a series of powerful gravitational waves
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would move outward like ripples on a pond
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by the time these waves travel the breadth of the universe
to reach us their energy will have nearly dissipated
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[Music]
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and yet scientists believe they have detected them
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at the laser interferometry gravitational wave
observatory known as ligo they have assembled
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precision high-powered lasers and
some of the most perfect large-scale
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vacuum chambers ever created
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the idea is that as a gravitational wave
passes it will stretch and squeeze the distance
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between mirrors placed at the ends
of four kilometer long tubes
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this distortion of space-time measured
by lasers is incredibly subtle a thousand
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times smaller than the nucleus of an atom
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this ambitious undertaking decades in
the making finally bore fruit in 2015.
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the instruments at ligo and its european counterpart
each recorded a signal consistent with
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the merger of two black holes of 29 and 36 solar masses
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[Music] scientists calculate that the collision
converted the mass of up to three suns
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to pure energy in the form of gravitational waves
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ligo's founders would win the nobel
prize for physics in 2017
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this simulation shows the pattern of gravitational
waves that the pair would have emitted in the final
moments of the merger and
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just after as the object spiral together the energy
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carried by each successive wave rises for
the briefest of moments to a hundred
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billion trillion times the power of our sun [Music]
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collisions like this are extremely
rare but the universe is very large
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as their sensitivity improves ligo and similar
instruments will detect more and more such
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reverberations in space-time
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remarkably even this does not begin to describe the power
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held within a black hole
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[Music]
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imagine a spaceship in the distant future
on a rendezvous with a supermassive
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black hole [Music]
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because of the object's immense size the stretching
force is small allowing the ship to survive as it falls
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through the event horizon but not for long
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as the ship spirals down it hits a wall of
energy what scientists describe as the inner
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horizon [Music]
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at a black hole's event horizon matter
accelerates to the speed of light
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it is then whipped around so fast that some of
it gets flung back out and into a collision with
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inflowing matter
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at the inner horizon the energy rises so sharply
it may well reach nature's limit
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equivalent perhaps to the big bang [Applause]
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itself [Music]
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fortunately for us gravity walls off such extremes
behind the event horizon of black holes
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[Music]
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waiting long enough trillions upon trillions of years
to a time when theory says all matter
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and energy will likely fall inside black holes
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[Music] gravity may well draw the entire
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universe inside a single ultimate black hole
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some theories suggest that it could erupt
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in a flurry of matter and anti-matter
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[Music] in gases that cool and coalesce into stars
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[Music] explosions that give rise to black holes
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[Music] galaxies that envelope and nurture them
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while giving birth to solar systems like ours
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[Music] and so here we sit on a planet that is
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an infinitesimally small by-product of the universe at large
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our imaginations though are unbounded
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as we contemplate the strange and powerful
forces that have shaped all we see
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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so
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