Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: I want you to picture a UFO, just you know,
Speaker 2: take a second and picture it in your mind. Right now.
Speaker 3: You're probably imagining a silver saucer exactly.
Speaker 2: Like a saucer hovering over some deserted highway in.
Speaker 3: Nevada, maybe some flashing neon lights, a humming tractor beam.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the classic Little Green Men stepping out of a ramp.
Speaker 2: But we are actually redefining that acronym today for this
Speaker 2: deep dive.
Speaker 3: It's a phenomenal rebranding, honestly, it really is.
Speaker 2: We are taking the idea of a UFO, stripping away
Speaker 2: all those sci fi tropes and replacing it with something
Speaker 2: infinitely more terrifying.
Speaker 3: And I mean infinitely more fascinating too. We are trading
Speaker 3: flying saucers for ultrafast.
Speaker 2: Outflows, ultrafast outflows, so we aren't talking about aliens visiting Earth.
Speaker 2: We are talking about a mechanism so incomprehensibly powerful that
Speaker 2: it could literally shut down the birth of stars across
Speaker 2: an entire galaxy.
Speaker 3: Right, It's a cosmic event that basically dictates the life
Speaker 3: and death of the universe's most massive structures and.
Speaker 2: Our destination for this exploration. The place we're looking at
Speaker 2: today is a hyper luminous quasar sitting deep in the
Speaker 2: universe's past.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it has this catalog designation that sounds a bit
Speaker 3: like a secret code.
Speaker 2: Any saha is thirteen LASH thirteen. It sounds like a
Speaker 2: license plate, but it's actually the key to a massive
Speaker 2: astronomical mystery.
Speaker 3: Well, when we look at WISH thirteen, we are essentially
Speaker 3: looking at the cosmos as it was billions of years ago.
Speaker 3: It's during this period of extreme galactic.
Speaker 2: Construction, right, But what we find there challenges a lot
Speaker 2: of basic assumptions we have about the universe. It really does,
Speaker 2: and that brings us to the core mystery we are
Speaker 2: unpacking for you today, Because think about it. When you
Speaker 2: think of a super massive black hole, the immediate image is, well,
Speaker 2: the ultimate cosmic vacuum cleaner, an.
Speaker 3: Object famous for consuming absolutely everything that crosses its event
Speaker 3: horizon exactly.
Speaker 2: Not even light escapes. So how does an object define
Speaker 2: entirely by its ability to eat everything end up blasting
Speaker 2: away enough matter to shape the evolution of its host galaxy.
Speaker 3: It's completely counterintuitive.
Speaker 2: It is how does the ultimate consumer become the ultimate disruptor?
Speaker 3: That exact paradox is at the heart of modern astrophysics.
Speaker 3: We are looking at the very mechanics of cosmic regulation here,
Speaker 3: and the goal is to explore how astronomers are actually
Speaker 3: managing to decode these invisible winds winds of plasma. Yeah,
Speaker 3: winds of plasma moving at a significant fraction of the
Speaker 3: speed of light. And you know what the structure of
Speaker 3: those winds tells us about the delicate balance of power
Speaker 3: in the universe.
Speaker 2: So let's set the scene. We're looking at this luminous
Speaker 2: quasar WISSH thirteen, and the data places it at a
Speaker 2: redshift of three point two ninety four.
Speaker 3: Which is a very specific, very important number.
Speaker 2: Right now, for anyone listening who tracks early universe astronomy,
Speaker 2: you know that specific number drops it right smack in
Speaker 2: the middle of an era known as cosmic noon.
Speaker 3: We are talking roughly one point six to three point
Speaker 3: five billion years after the Big Bang.
Speaker 2: Let's pause on that redshift number for a second, because
Speaker 2: the mechanics of how we even know when this is
Speaker 2: happening is just it's fascinating.
Speaker 3: To me, it really is. Redshift isn't just a distance
Speaker 3: marker on a cosmic highway. It's actually a measure of
Speaker 3: how much the universe has stretched while the light was
Speaker 3: in transit. Yeah, when the black hole at the center
Speaker 3: of Wish thirteen emitted this X ray light, those photons
Speaker 3: began a journey across the universe towards us. But the
Speaker 3: universe isn't static.
Speaker 2: Space time is actively expanded exactly.
Speaker 3: Space time is stretching.
Speaker 2: So as the space between that quasar and our telescope wretches,
Speaker 2: the actual waves of light are being physically stretched out
Speaker 2: along with it.
Speaker 3: They are the literal wavelengths get longer.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: So if you have a highly energetic, tightly packed X
Speaker 3: ray wave and you stretch it out over a journey
Speaker 3: of ten billion years, it's wavelength shifts toward the red
Speaker 3: end of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Speaker 2: In shredshift, right, a.
Speaker 3: Red shift of three point two ninety four means the
Speaker 3: universe has expanded by more than a factor of four
Speaker 3: since that light left the Koisar.
Speaker 2: That's I mean, that's almost hard to wrap your head around.
Speaker 3: It is, so we aren't just looking far away. We
Speaker 3: are looking at an incredibly specific, chaotic epoch in the
Speaker 3: history of everything.
Speaker 2: Cosmic Noon. I always think of that era as like
Speaker 2: the Roaring twenties of the cosmos.
Speaker 3: That's a really apt description. If you map out the
Speaker 3: star formation history of the universe, Cosmic Noon is.
Speaker 2: The absolute peak everyone was partying.
Speaker 3: Basically, Yeah, galaxies were colliding constantly, Colossal reservoirs of cold
Speaker 3: gas were flowing along these giant cosmic filaments, and.
Speaker 2: At the centers of these developing galaxies, super massive bla
Speaker 2: black holes were feasting.
Speaker 3: Gorging themselves. Really, the environment was dense and incredibly violent.
Speaker 2: And the black hole at the center of Toyoa Ssh
Speaker 2: thirteen is a monster even by those standards. Oh. Absolutely,
Speaker 2: we are talking about a central mass of roughly two
Speaker 2: billion solar masses two billion.
Speaker 3: Two billion times the weight of our Sun.
Speaker 2: Because we are in cosmic Noon, surrounded by all this
Speaker 2: raw material, this specific black hole is feeding at an
Speaker 2: exceptional rate.
Speaker 3: But here's where the mechanics of black holes always trip people.
Speaker 2: Up a little bit, right, because we talk about a
Speaker 2: black hole feeding, but observationally what we actually see is
Speaker 2: its shining exactly and Wickly SSH thirteen isn't just shining,
Speaker 2: It is shining about three times brighter than astronomers would
Speaker 2: normally expect for a black hole. This staggering size.
Speaker 3: Which forces us to look really closely at the physics
Speaker 3: of the accretion disc, the.
Speaker 2: Disc and materials swirling around it.
Speaker 3: Right, The black hole itself, the singularity past the event horizon,
Speaker 3: emits no light. It's invisible black, yes, But the environment
Speaker 3: immediately surrounding it is the brightest continuous light source in
Speaker 3: the universe.
Speaker 2: Because when a black hole's gravity pulls in massive amounts
Speaker 2: of gas and dust, that material doesn't just fall straight down,
Speaker 2: does it.
Speaker 3: No, It has angular momentum.
Speaker 2: Like water circling a drain.
Speaker 3: Exactly. It's swirling inward, forming a flattened disk, but it's
Speaker 3: not a gentle swirl.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: The material in the inner regions of that accretion disk
Speaker 3: is orbiting much much faster than the material on the outer.
Speaker 2: Edges because it's closer to the gravity source.
Speaker 3: Right, and this differential rotation creates immense friction. You have
Speaker 3: billions of tons of gas crowding together, shearing against itself. Wow,
Speaker 3: and it's moving at speeds approaching the speed of light, and.
Speaker 2: Friction generates heat. But we aren't talking about rubbing your
Speaker 2: hands together on a cold day, not at all. We
Speaker 2: are talking about thermal energy so intense that it literally
Speaker 2: breaks the bonds of atoms.
Speaker 3: The temperature sore into the millions, even ten of millions
Speaker 3: of degrees.
Speaker 2: That's unimaginable.
Speaker 3: It is the gas is completely ionized into a plasma,
Speaker 3: and that superheated plasma radiates intense energy, predominantly in X
Speaker 3: rays and ultraviolet light.
Speaker 2: Okay, so when we measure the luminosity of w ISS thirteen,
Speaker 2: we are basically measuring this frantic, superheated traffic jam of.
Speaker 3: Matter, exactly matter desperately trying to squeeze through the bottleneck
Speaker 3: of the event horizon.
Speaker 2: It's like a messi eater at a buffet trying to
Speaker 2: shove so much food in their mouth that it's just
Speaker 2: flying everywhere, generating all this energy just outside the event horizon.
Speaker 3: That's a great way to picture it.
Speaker 2: But wait, if this supermassive black hole has two billion
Speaker 2: solar masses. Its gravitational pole is almost unfathomable, and it's
Speaker 2: surrounded by this all you can eat buffet of galactic gas.
Speaker 2: If it's gravity's that strong, why doesn't it just swallow
Speaker 2: the entire host galaxy?
Speaker 3: That's the big question.
Speaker 2: What stops this from turning into a runaway scenario where
Speaker 2: the black hole just consumes everything until there's nothing left
Speaker 2: but the black hole itself.
Speaker 3: Well, that very question plagued theoretical physicists for years. Yeah,
Speaker 3: if you just run the raw math on gravity and
Speaker 3: gas density in the early universe, galaxies should have grown
Speaker 3: much larger than.
Speaker 2: They actually are because there was so much material exactly.
Speaker 3: And black holes should have eaten vastly more material. There
Speaker 3: had to be a mechanism that halted.
Speaker 2: The growth, something that chokes off the food supply, right.
Speaker 3: And that brings us back to the ultrafast outflows the UFOs.
Speaker 2: The universe's thermostat exactly. Okay, let's look at how this
Speaker 2: thermistat actually functions for you listening, Because the survival of
Speaker 2: the entire galaxy depends on it, How does blowing gas
Speaker 2: away act as a regulatory system?
Speaker 3: It relies on a critical feedback loop, and it all
Speaker 3: comes down to the thermal state of the galaxy's gas
Speaker 3: to temperature.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: To build a galaxy, you need to form stars. To
Speaker 3: form a star, you need a massive, dense cloud of
Speaker 3: molecular gas. But here is the absolute strictest rule of
Speaker 3: star formation. That gas must be incredibly cold.
Speaker 2: This is when those rules that feel so counterintuitive. We
Speaker 2: associate stars with immense heat and fusion, but their actual
Speaker 2: birth requires freezing temperatures.
Speaker 3: Yes, and that's because of the constant battle between gravity
Speaker 3: and thermal pressure.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: If a cloud of gas is hot, the individual particles
Speaker 3: are highly energetic. They are vibrating, colliding, pushing outwards like steam,
Speaker 3: expanding exactly that outward thermal pressure easily overpowers the inward
Speaker 3: pull of gravity. The cloud simply expands and dissipates.
Speaker 2: It won't collapse, so gravity needs an unfair advantage to win.
Speaker 3: Precisely, the gas must tool down to just a few
Speaker 3: degrees above absolute zero, which is freezing beyond freezing. And
Speaker 3: when the gas is that sluggish, the thermal pressure drops
Speaker 3: to near.
Speaker 2: Zero and gravity takes over.
Speaker 3: Right, Gravity takes over, pulling the cloud together until the
Speaker 3: core becomes dense enough to ignite nuclear fusion.
Speaker 2: So cold gas equals star formation.
Speaker 3: And hot gas equals a dead galaxy.
Speaker 2: Wow. Okay, Now let's introduce the black holes killer wind
Speaker 2: the eu UFO.
Speaker 3: So the black hole is gorging itself, the accretion disc
Speaker 3: is blazing hot, and the intense radiation, pressure and magnetic
Speaker 3: fields generated in that disc actually start driving material outward.
Speaker 2: It's like the black hole is feeding so aggressively that
Speaker 2: it pushes its own food away exactly.
Speaker 3: And when these winds achieve velocities exceeding ten percent of
Speaker 3: the speed of light, they become ultrafast outflows.
Speaker 2: And these winds aren't just empty space, right, They carry
Speaker 2: unimaginably huge amounts of kinetic energy.
Speaker 3: Immense kinetic energy. When a wind moving at a fraction
Speaker 3: of light speeds slams into the surrounding ambient gas of
Speaker 3: the host galaxy, the collision is catastrophic.
Speaker 2: I can imagine.
Speaker 3: It creates massive shock waves. It acts like a cosmic
Speaker 3: blow torch, transferring all that kinetic energy into thermal energy.
Speaker 2: Oh. I see, So the ambient gas in the galaxy
Speaker 2: is suddenly heated up to millions of degrees.
Speaker 3: Right, And because the gas is now superheated, the thermal pressure.
Speaker 2: Spikes, and gravity loses the battle exactly.
Speaker 3: The gas it can't collapse into molecular clouds, which means
Speaker 3: it can't form stars.
Speaker 2: So the UFO effectively quenches the galaxy.
Speaker 3: It does if the wind is powerful enough and sustained
Speaker 3: over a long enough period, it will either heat the
Speaker 3: gas so thoroughly that star formation permanently shuts down, or
Speaker 3: it will literally sweep the gas entirely out of the
Speaker 3: galaxy's gravitational well, just blowing it into intergalactic.
Speaker 2: Space, just emptying the cupboards. Think about the philosophical implication
Speaker 2: of that for a second. The deep. If you are
Speaker 2: listening to this, you likely grew up learning that black
Speaker 2: holes are the ultimate symbol of destruction.
Speaker 3: The greater rasers of the universe.
Speaker 2: Right. They are the void that crushes matter out of existence.
Speaker 2: But functionally, within the mechanics of a galaxy, the black
Speaker 2: hole is the regulator it is. It dictates the life
Speaker 2: cycle of stars, It regulates its own massive growth by
Speaker 2: violently blowing its food source away, and in doing so,
Speaker 2: it freezes the host galaxy's ability to grow any further.
Speaker 3: It's an incredibly elegant, albeit violent symmetry elegantly violin. I
Speaker 3: like that because without these relativistic winds, galaxies during cosmic
Speaker 3: noon might have just converted all their available gas into
Speaker 3: stars in one massive, uncontrolled burst.
Speaker 2: And black holes would have swelled to impossible proportions.
Speaker 3: Right, the universe would look fundamentally different today.
Speaker 2: So it really is a thermostat. The galaxy gets too hot,
Speaker 2: meaning the central black hole is feeding too rapidly, and
Speaker 2: the system triggers a cooling mechanism, Except the cooling mechanism
Speaker 2: is a lethal gale of highly ionized plasma that shuts
Speaker 2: down the factory entirely.
Speaker 3: A self correcting system operating on a scale of hundreds
Speaker 3: of thousands of white years.
Speaker 2: Okay, the mechanical logic of the thermostat makes perfect sense.
Speaker 2: The black hole eats, the disc gets chaotic, radiation pressure
Speaker 2: drives the winds outward. The kinetic energy shocks the host
Speaker 2: galaxies gas, it heats up, star formation dies.
Speaker 3: That's the sequence.
Speaker 2: But here is where my mind starts to bend. And
Speaker 2: I know anyone listening who understand that the vast fastness
Speaker 2: of space is probably wondering the exact same thing.
Speaker 3: How do we actually see it.
Speaker 2: Yes, WISSH thirteen is at redshift three point twenty ninety four.
Speaker 2: We're looking across billions of light years of empty space
Speaker 2: to see a wind made of transparent gas. How on
Speaker 2: Earth do you observe an invisible wind moving away from
Speaker 2: a tiny pinprick of light from the dawn of the universe.
Speaker 3: That observational challenge is. It's immense.
Speaker 2: It sounds impossible.
Speaker 3: Historically, if astronomers wanted to study anything in that level
Speaker 3: of detail at high redshift, they had to rely on
Speaker 3: a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.
Speaker 2: Ah, gravitational lensing. That's one of those concepts that feels
Speaker 2: like magic but is just pure, unadulterated general relativity exactly.
Speaker 3: General relativity tells us that massive objects warp the actual
Speaker 3: fabric of space time around.
Speaker 2: Them like a bowling bowl on a trampoline.
Speaker 3: Right, So, imagine ys H thirteen sitting out in the
Speaker 3: distant universe pumping out its light. Now, imagine there happens
Speaker 3: to be another massive galaxy sitting directly in the lane
Speaker 3: of sight between Earth and YSH thirteen, the foreground object. Yes,
Speaker 3: as the light from YSH thirteen travels toward us, it
Speaker 3: encounters the warped space time created by the gravity of
Speaker 3: that foreground galaxy. Ok, the light follows the curvature of
Speaker 3: space bending around the foreground object.
Speaker 2: So the gravity of the foreground galaxy acts exactly like
Speaker 2: a giant glass lens.
Speaker 3: It does. It focuses the distant light, magnifying the background quasar,
Speaker 3: making it appear significantly brighter and larger than its intrinsic luminosity.
Speaker 2: So if you're trying to measure something incredibly faint and
Speaker 2: difficult to resolve, like a wind of plaza rushing off
Speaker 2: an accretion disc, a cosmic magnifying glass sounds like the
Speaker 2: perfect tool, you would think, so, right, Why wouldn't astronomers
Speaker 2: just use lensed quasars to study UFOs?
Speaker 3: Because a gravitational lens is not a perfectly ground, pristine,
Speaker 3: optical lens manufactured in a clean room laboratory.
Speaker 2: Oh right.
Speaker 3: It is a messy, chaotic galaxy. It is composed of
Speaker 3: billions of stars, vast clouds of swirling gas, and complex
Speaker 3: halos of invisible dark matter.
Speaker 2: So the lens itself is full of smudges and structural flaws.
Speaker 3: That's a really great way to think of it. When
Speaker 3: you bend light through a galaxy's gravity, you inevitably.
Speaker 2: Distort the data because it's uneven.
Speaker 3: Exactly, the magnification is rarely uniform across the entire image.
Speaker 3: The lens can create multiple distorted mirrored images of the
Speaker 3: exact same background quasar.
Speaker 2: Like a funhouse mirror, exactly like that.
Speaker 3: Furthermore, individual stars within the foreground galaxy can cause microlensing events.
Speaker 2: What does that do?
Speaker 3: Those temporarily spike the brightness of specific regions of the
Speaker 3: accretion disk, throwing off all the calculations.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: So, if your goal is to precisely measure the velocity
Speaker 3: of the structure and the mass of a wind launching
Speaker 3: off the innermost stable circular orbit of a black hole.
Speaker 2: Which requires insane precision, right.
Speaker 3: The distortions introduced by the lens can easily trick you.
Speaker 3: You might vastly overestimate the power of the wind or
Speaker 3: misinterpret its geometry entirely.
Speaker 2: So if we can't use a magnifying glass because it
Speaker 2: smears the image encrupts the data, how are astronomers actually
Speaker 2: getting a clean look at these systems?
Speaker 3: That exact problem led a team of researchers, specifically spearheaded
Speaker 3: by Georgio Lenzuzi at IF Bologna to launch a highly
Speaker 3: ambitious observational campaign called the Wish Metal Program.
Speaker 2: The Wish Will Program, and their strategy was basically to
Speaker 2: do this the hard.
Speaker 3: Way, precisely. It is a multi year heritage program utilizing
Speaker 3: the XMM Newton Space Observatory. Okay, their goal was to
Speaker 3: target fifteen hyperluminous completely non lensed quasars at cosmic noon.
Speaker 2: And HSSH thirteen was the very first target in this campaign.
Speaker 3: Yes, they decided to forego the magnification boost entirely. Instead,
Speaker 3: they relied purely on the extreme intrinsic brightness of these
Speaker 3: specific quasars, combined with long, incredibly patient observations using our
Speaker 3: most sensitive X ray detectors.
Speaker 2: This requires a massive amount of telescope time, right, hundreds
Speaker 2: of hours they point the XMS Newton and eventually they
Speaker 2: pull in the nust Star telescope as well at this tiny,
Speaker 2: unmagnified pinprick of X ray lighte Right, But if they
Speaker 2: aren't using a lens to physically resolve the shape of
Speaker 2: the wind, what is the telescope actually recording? Yeah, we
Speaker 2: aren't just taking a long exposure photograph.
Speaker 3: Right, Now, a photograph wouldn't tell us anything about the
Speaker 3: velocity or the composition of the gas. To decode a UFO,
Speaker 3: you have to take a spectrum. You have to read
Speaker 3: the cosmic fingerprints.
Speaker 2: If you are listening to this and wondering how we
Speaker 2: know what stars are made of or how fast galaxies
Speaker 2: are moving across the universe, spectroscopy is the answer.
Speaker 3: It is the absolute heavy lifter of astrophysics.
Speaker 2: It really is. Yeah, but let's dive into X ray
Speaker 2: spectroscopy specifically, because the mechanics here are wild.
Speaker 3: They really are. At its core, a spectrum is a
Speaker 3: barcode of light, a bar code.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: If you pass visible white light through a glass prism,
Speaker 3: it disperses into a continuous rainbow.
Speaker 2: Like pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon cover exactly.
Speaker 3: X ray spectroscopy does the exact same thing, just at
Speaker 3: vastly higher energy levels. Okay, the superheated accretion disk around
Speaker 3: WISH thirteen is acting like a cosmic light bulb, pumping
Speaker 3: out a smooth, continuous continuum of X.
Speaker 2: Ray energies a blazing rainbow of lethal radiation.
Speaker 3: But between that brilliantly glowing disk and the XMM Newton
Speaker 3: telescope orbiting Earth.
Speaker 2: There is the wind, the ultrafaft outflow.
Speaker 3: Yes, this wind is composed of plasma. As the X
Speaker 3: rays from the disc travel outward, they must pass through
Speaker 3: this outflowing wind.
Speaker 2: And when they do, the atoms in the wind interact
Speaker 2: with the light.
Speaker 3: They do specifically they absorb very specific, highly targeted energies
Speaker 3: of X rays.
Speaker 2: So when the light finally arise at our detectors here
Speaker 2: on Earth, the continuum isn't smooth anymore. The barcode is
Speaker 2: missing specific lines.
Speaker 3: We call these missing lines absorption features or absorption troughs.
Speaker 3: The specific energy that is subtracted from the spectrum tells
Speaker 3: us exactly what elements the wind is composed of.
Speaker 2: Because every element has a unique signature.
Speaker 3: It's a fundamental rule quantum mechanics. Every element on the
Speaker 3: periodic table absorbs a unique, irrefutable signature of light based
Speaker 3: on its electron configuration.
Speaker 2: Okay, but if you're listening to this and trying to
Speaker 2: picture the environment right next to a supermassive black hole,
Speaker 2: you might see a flaw in that logic. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: the accretion disc is generating tens of millions of degrees
Speaker 2: of heat. It is blasting out enough X ray radiation
Speaker 2: to outshine an entire galaxy. True, wouldn't normal atoms just
Speaker 2: be completely vaporized? How does an atom hold on to
Speaker 2: its structure tightly enough to absorb a specific wavelength of
Speaker 2: light without just being ripped to shreds by the radiation.
Speaker 3: That is a brilliant point, and it's the key to
Speaker 3: why X ray spectroscpy is so vital.
Speaker 2: Here, because normal atoms wouldn't survive.
Speaker 3: You are right, Normal neutral atoms cannot survive in that inferno.
Speaker 3: The radiation completely strips their electrons away, turning them into
Speaker 3: a featureless soup of protons and electrons.
Speaker 2: And a featureless soup doesn't leave clear spectral lines exactly.
Speaker 3: But there is one very specific element we look for
Speaker 3: that can survive iron iron.
Speaker 2: But not normal iron. We are talking about highly ionized iron.
Speaker 3: Yes, iron is a relatively heavy element. It's nucleus has
Speaker 3: a strong positive.
Speaker 2: Charge, so it holds on tight right.
Speaker 3: In the extreme environment near the black hole, the intense
Speaker 3: heat and radiation violently strip away almost all of the
Speaker 3: iron atoms electrons, almost all but the innermost electrons, the
Speaker 3: ones closest to the nucleus. In what we call the
Speaker 3: k shell are bound so tightly that they managed to
Speaker 3: survive the inferno.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: We are looking for iron atoms that have been stripped
Speaker 3: of twenty four or even twenty five of their twenty
Speaker 3: six electrons.
Speaker 2: So it's basically just a naked iron nucleus holding on
Speaker 2: to its last one or two electrons for dear life exactly.
Speaker 3: Astronomers refer to these as helium like or hydrogen like iron.
Speaker 2: Because they only have two or one electron left, mimicking
Speaker 2: the structure of those lighter elements.
Speaker 3: You got it. And when an X ray photon of
Speaker 3: the exact right energy hit, it's one of those highly
Speaker 3: ionized iron atoms. The remaining electron absorbs the photon and
Speaker 3: jumps to a higher energy state.
Speaker 2: Leaving a gap in the light.
Speaker 3: This leaves a massive, unmistakable dip in the X ray
Speaker 3: spectrum at a very specific energy level, typically around six
Speaker 3: point seven to six point nine kilo electron volts in
Speaker 3: a laboratory setting.
Speaker 2: So Jorio Linzizi's team looks at the new XMM Newton
Speaker 2: data from October twenty twenty four. They combine it with
Speaker 2: archival data from twenty seventeen to boost the signal to
Speaker 2: noise ratio, and they look at the spectrum.
Speaker 3: And they find it.
Speaker 2: They see the unmistakable missing iron bar code. They have
Speaker 2: absolute proof that a cloud of highly ionized iron plasma
Speaker 2: is sitting between us and the black hole.
Speaker 3: But proving the gas is there is only half the battle, right.
Speaker 2: How do they know it's a win? How do they
Speaker 2: prove it's actively moving.
Speaker 3: Because the bar code is in the wrong place, so
Speaker 3: it's shifted. To understand why, we have to look at
Speaker 3: the Doppler effect.
Speaker 2: You know how that a textbook analogy for the Doppler
Speaker 2: effect is always the ambulance siren driving past you. Let's
Speaker 2: ditch that, because we're talking about relativistic speeds in a
Speaker 2: cosmic hurricane. Imagine you were driving your car down a
Speaker 2: highway directly into a massive, heavy rain storm.
Speaker 3: Okay, I like where this is going.
Speaker 2: If you are parked, the rain is hitting your windshield
Speaker 2: at a steady, consistent rate. But if you slam on
Speaker 2: the gas and drive it one hundred miles an hour
Speaker 2: directly into the storm, the rain starts hitting your windshield
Speaker 2: much faster and much harder because you're moving into it.
Speaker 2: The frequency of the impacts increases dramatically simply because of
Speaker 2: your forward motion into the rain.
Speaker 3: That is an excellent way to visualize it. The light
Speaker 3: waves from the accretion disk are the rain. Okay, If
Speaker 3: the iron gas in the UFO was just sitting still,
Speaker 3: hovering above the disc, it would absorb the X rays
Speaker 3: at the standard expected energy.
Speaker 2: That's six point seven kilo electron volt.
Speaker 3: Mark you mentioned exactly. But the iron gas isn't sitting still.
Speaker 3: It is rocketing away from the black hole directly toward
Speaker 3: Earth at a massive fraction of the speed of light.
Speaker 3: It is driving directly into the incoming.
Speaker 2: X ray photons, driving into the rainstorm.
Speaker 3: Therefore, from the perspective of the moving iron atoms, the
Speaker 3: incoming extra waves are compressed.
Speaker 2: Because they're slamming into them.
Speaker 3: The impacts are happening at a higher frequency. The light
Speaker 3: is shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum, meaning
Speaker 3: it shifts to a higher energy state.
Speaker 2: This is blue shift.
Speaker 3: This is blue shift.
Speaker 2: So when the astronomers look at the spectrum, the iron
Speaker 2: absorption dip isn't at six point seven. It's pushed way
Speaker 2: up the energy scale.
Speaker 3: Precisely, and the amount of that blue shift is governed
Speaker 3: by strict mathematical laws. By measuring exactly how far the
Speaker 3: barcode has shifted up the energy scale, astronomers can calculate
Speaker 3: the exact velocity of the gas. The spectrum acts as
Speaker 3: a cosmic radar gun.
Speaker 2: The precision of that is staggering. You look at a
Speaker 2: missing line of light, measure how far off center it is,
Speaker 2: and suddenly you know the speed of a wind located
Speaker 2: billions of light years away.
Speaker 3: It's one of the great triumphs of astrophysics.
Speaker 2: So what did the radar gun say? How fast is
Speaker 2: the killer wind in Wissah thirteen actually moving?
Speaker 3: This is where the discovery elevated from an interesting observation
Speaker 3: to a truly groundbreaking find. When the team ran the
Speaker 3: spectral modeling to fit the data, they didn't just find
Speaker 3: one blue shifted trough. Wait, the data clearly revealed two
Speaker 3: distinct absorption features. They found two completely different speeds originating
Speaker 3: from the same system.
Speaker 2: Wait, two speeds a dual velocity wind from a single
Speaker 2: black hole.
Speaker 3: Yes, the sophisticated modeling of the X ray spectrum isolated
Speaker 3: two distinct velocity components of the exact same ultrafast outflow.
Speaker 2: Okay, so what are the speeds.
Speaker 3: One component of the wind is traveling at roughly ten
Speaker 3: percent the speed of light about zero point one C.
Speaker 2: Just to anchor that for a second, Yeah, ten percent
Speaker 2: the speed of light is about thirty thousand kilometers per second. Right,
Speaker 2: you could travel from New York to Tokyo in less
Speaker 2: than half a second. That speed alone is cataclysmic.
Speaker 3: It is a phenomenal velocity. But the second absorption component
Speaker 3: they isolated is travel ing at approximately thirty percent the
Speaker 3: speed of light.
Speaker 2: Thirty percent point three c ninety thousand kilometers per second.
Speaker 2: There is no earthly analogy that can adequately convey that
Speaker 2: kind of kinetic energy. It is terrifying speed, yeah, it is.
Speaker 3: But what makes the system even more fascinating is when
Speaker 3: the team cross referenced the temporal data.
Speaker 2: Temporal meaning the timing of the observations.
Speaker 3: Right. Remember they have two sets of observations, the older
Speaker 3: archival data from twenty seventeen and the fresh data from
Speaker 3: October twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: Right, So what changes over seven years?
Speaker 3: The slower win the component moving at ten percent the
Speaker 3: speed of light was clearly present in both the twenty
Speaker 3: seventeen data and the twenty twenty four data.
Speaker 2: So it's always there.
Speaker 3: That consistency tells us it is a persistent, long lived
Speaker 3: feature of the accretion system. It's a steady, unrelenting gale.
Speaker 2: Okay, But what about the faster wind.
Speaker 3: The faster win, the one rocketing outward at thirty percent
Speaker 3: the speed of light only appeared in the twenty twenty
Speaker 3: four data. Really, its signature was completely absent in twenty.
Speaker 2: Seventeen, so it just turned on.
Speaker 3: It indicates that this extreme high velocity wind is not persistent.
Speaker 3: It is launched in volatile, short lived episodes. It's a
Speaker 3: gust right flares up dramatically and then shuts down or dissipates.
Speaker 3: And when you analyze these two pieces of evidence together,
Speaker 3: a steady, slower wind accompanied by an episodic, volatile, faster wind,
Speaker 3: it provides spectacular observational support for theoretical.
Speaker 2: Models models of what what we call a stratified outflows,
Speaker 2: A spratified outflow, A layered wind.
Speaker 3: Yes, a wind that possesses a distinct, complex anatomical structure.
Speaker 3: Astronomers often describe it as having a spine and a sheath.
Speaker 2: A spine and a sheath. I make sure I'm visualizing
Speaker 2: the geometry of this correctly. Okay, think of a wildly
Speaker 2: rushing river, or even the exhaust of a high performance
Speaker 2: jet engine. If you look at a fast moving river,
Speaker 2: the water right in the dead center, the deepest channel,
Speaker 2: moves violently and incredibly quickly. It's chaotic. That's the spine.
Speaker 2: But the water closer to the riverbanks, where there's more
Speaker 2: drag and less direct pressure, moves slower and much more consistently.
Speaker 2: That's the sheath.
Speaker 3: That analogy maps remarkably well to the physics of the
Speaker 3: accretion disc. Yeah, the geometry of the black hole's wind
Speaker 3: operates on very similar principles, although it is governed by
Speaker 3: extreme gravity and twisted magnetic fields rather than riverbanks. Sure,
Speaker 3: the spine of the wind, that episodic component moving at
Speaker 3: thirty percent light speed, is launched from the innermost most
Speaker 3: extreme regions of the accretion disc.
Speaker 2: Right on the pressives of the event horizon, the deepest
Speaker 2: part of the gravitational.
Speaker 3: River, the region known as the is goo, the innermost
Speaker 3: stable circular orbit ice goo. The gravitational and magnetic forces
Speaker 3: there are at their absolute maximum, which provides the immense
Speaker 3: energy required to propel the plasma to such terrifying.
Speaker 2: Velocity, but because it's so extreme, it's unstable.
Speaker 3: Exactly, because that inner region is so tightly packed, radiation
Speaker 3: dominated and chaotic, the launching mechanism is inherently unstable. It
Speaker 3: builds up pressure, bursts outward in an extreme episode, and
Speaker 3: then temporarily exhausts.
Speaker 2: Itself, which perfectly explains why the telescope only caught it
Speaker 2: in the twenty twenty four observation.
Speaker 3: Exactly. Meanwhile, the sheet, the component moving at ten percent
Speaker 3: light speed, originates further out on the accretion.
Speaker 2: Disk, where things are slightly calmer.
Speaker 3: Right, the gravitational and radiation forces there are still immense
Speaker 3: easily powerful enough to drive a relativistic wind, but the
Speaker 3: environment is wider and slightly.
Speaker 2: Less extreme, making it more reliable.
Speaker 3: This allows for a more stable launching mechanism, creating a steadier,
Speaker 3: more persistent outer layer of the outflow.
Speaker 2: That structural reality is what truly blows my mind. When
Speaker 2: you initially think of a black hole blasting out gas,
Speaker 2: you picture an explosion like a bomb, right, a chaotic
Speaker 2: spherical bomb going off. But it's not a bomb. It's
Speaker 2: highly organized.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 2: It is a structured, multi lane highway of plasma where
Speaker 2: the fast lane is flashing on and off with exclusive violence,
Speaker 2: and the slower lanes maintain a steady, unrelenting storm.
Speaker 3: The term organized chaos has never been more appropriate. Yeah,
Speaker 3: The sheer physical forces required to maintain a stratified wind
Speaker 3: structure moving at relativistic speeds fighting against the gravity of
Speaker 3: a two billion solar mass black hole is staggering to contemplate.
Speaker 2: So understanding this layered structure paints an incredible vivid picture
Speaker 2: of the immediate environment just outside the event horizon. It
Speaker 2: does but to bring this back to the big picture.
Speaker 2: To truly understand how this wind acts as the cosmic
Speaker 2: thermostat that regulates the galaxy, we have to look at
Speaker 2: the volume. The mass right velocity's one variable, but how
Speaker 2: much physical matter is actually being hurled out into the
Speaker 2: host galaxy.
Speaker 3: The mass ejection rate is where the true catastrophic scale
Speaker 3: of this phenomenon hits You hit me. By analyzing the
Speaker 3: depth of the absorption troughs, estimating the density of the plasma,
Speaker 3: and calculating its distance from the ionizing source, the team
Speaker 3: was able to determine the mass outflow rate.
Speaker 2: They calculated how much stuff is blowing away.
Speaker 3: They calculated the amount of material being expelled by these
Speaker 3: two components combined.
Speaker 2: That's the number.
Speaker 3: Together the spine and the sheath are ejecting a combined
Speaker 3: total of roughly forty five solar masses of material every single.
Speaker 2: Year wait forty five.
Speaker 3: Specifically, it breaks down to about twenty one solar masses
Speaker 3: per year from one velocity component and twenty four from
Speaker 3: the other.
Speaker 2: Forty five solar masses a year. Let's really lean into that.
Speaker 3: It's huge.
Speaker 2: We were used to talking about solar masses when we
Speaker 2: were weighing static objects. A star cluster is one hundred
Speaker 2: solar masses, a black hole is a billion solar masses.
Speaker 2: But seeing that number as a flow rate, as an
Speaker 2: ejection rate, that's terrifying. Yeah, every single atom of hydrogen
Speaker 2: and helium that makes up our million mile wide sun
Speaker 2: that is one solar mass.
Speaker 3: Now multiply that by forty five and set the time
Speaker 3: frame to a single Earth year.
Speaker 2: It's like imagining a cosmic cannon loading up our entire
Speaker 2: Sun and firing it out into the void at up
Speaker 2: to thirty percent the speed of light, just boom, and
Speaker 2: then reloading and firing it forty four more times before
Speaker 2: the year is out.
Speaker 3: The sheer kinetic energy carried by that volume of mass
Speaker 3: moving at those speeds makes the UFO in Wyosish thirteen
Speaker 3: one of the most massive and powerful ever discovered. Unbelievable,
Speaker 3: and because it was identified without the aid of a
Speaker 3: gravitational lens, the data is exceptionally.
Speaker 2: Clean right, no smudge magnifying glass.
Speaker 3: It currently stands as the highest redshift UFO detected from
Speaker 3: a non lensed quasar. It gives us a pristine, uncorrupted
Speaker 3: look at a galactic monster operating at the absolute peak
Speaker 3: of its power during cosmic noon.
Speaker 2: But here is where the story gets really interesting for me,
Speaker 2: and it touches on something deeply fundamental about how the
Speaker 2: universe works.
Speaker 3: The scaling relations.
Speaker 2: Yes, you have this massive chaotic system in the early
Speaker 2: universe throwing out forty five sons a year. Yet the
Speaker 2: observations found that these winds follow the exact same scaling
Speaker 2: relations observed in active galaxies that are much closer to
Speaker 2: us in the modern universe.
Speaker 3: Yes, and from a physics standpoint, that might be the
Speaker 3: most profound takeaway of the entire observation. Really, in astrophysics
Speaker 3: we rely heavily on scaling relations. These are empirical mathematical
Speaker 3: relationships that describe how different properties of a system correlate
Speaker 3: with one another across different scales.
Speaker 2: There are rules to how these things operate exactly.
Speaker 3: For instance, in the local modern universe, which we observe
Speaker 3: at low red shifts, astronomers have established a strict mathematical
Speaker 3: relationship between the kinetic power of black hole's wind and
Speaker 3: the mass and total luminosity of the black hole driving it.
Speaker 2: There is a predictable universal rule book for how black
Speaker 2: hole feedback operates.
Speaker 3: If the black hole weighs x and shines at y,
Speaker 3: the wind will have z amount of kinetic power.
Speaker 2: Got it?
Speaker 3: Now? If you consider the environment of the early universe
Speaker 3: during cosmic noon, it was wildly different than the local
Speaker 3: universe today.
Speaker 2: Oh right, Because everything was denser.
Speaker 3: The gas density was far higher, galaxies were physically smaller
Speaker 3: and closer together, mergers were constant. The raw material of
Speaker 3: a billable for accretion was vastly more plentiful.
Speaker 2: It was the Roaring twenties exactly.
Speaker 3: You might reasonably expect the physics of accretion and wind
Speaker 3: launching to behave differently in such an extreme chaotic epoch.
Speaker 2: Right, If I can use a biology analogy here, finding
Speaker 2: that these scaling relations hold true at redshift three point
Speaker 2: two ninety four is like a paleontologist digging up a massive, terrifying,
Speaker 2: ten foot tall dinosaur from a completely different era of
Speaker 2: Earth's history okay, and discovering that its metabolic rate, its
Speaker 2: blood pressure, and its cellular biology follow the exact same
Speaker 2: mathematical rules as a modern pigeon walking around Central Park.
Speaker 3: That perfectly captures the revelation. The environment is drastically different.
Speaker 3: The epoch is billions of years in the past, the
Speaker 3: sheer scale of the energy output is magnitudes higher, but
Speaker 3: the fundamental physics, the underlying engine driving the phenomenon, has
Speaker 3: not changed.
Speaker 2: It's the same engine.
Speaker 3: The rules of physics governing how super massive black holes
Speaker 3: regulate their environments have remained firmly intact for over ten
Speaker 3: billion years.
Speaker 2: That is deeply comforting in a weird way. Comforting. Yeah.
Speaker 2: As violent and chaotic as the universe appears, the underlying
Speaker 2: math holds firm. The laws of nature are consistent.
Speaker 3: They are very consistent.
Speaker 2: So knowing that these universal rules apply even to the
Speaker 2: most extreme monsters at the dawn of time, and knowing
Speaker 2: that we can successfully measure them without relying on gravitational lenses.
Speaker 2: Where do stronomeries go from here?
Speaker 3: Well, the successful observation of WSSH thirteen is a powerful
Speaker 3: proof of concept.
Speaker 2: It shows we can do it.
Speaker 3: It proves that we have the methodology to decode these
Speaker 3: high redshift systems cleanly. Looking to the future, the astrophysics
Speaker 3: community is incredibly focused on the next generation of space telescopes.
Speaker 3: Like what specifically the planned New Athena X ray observatory.
Speaker 2: Tell me about New Athena, How does it improve on
Speaker 2: what XMM Newton is already doing.
Speaker 3: New Athena is designed to be a massive leap forward
Speaker 3: in both collecting area and spectral resolution.
Speaker 2: It's just a bigger, better I.
Speaker 3: Essentially, it will utilize advanced microcalorimeters that can measure the
Speaker 3: energy of incoming X ray photons with unprecedented precision.
Speaker 2: So the barcode gets clearer.
Speaker 3: Exactly if XMM Newton allowed us to detect the broad
Speaker 3: dips of the iron absorption trough, New Athena will allow
Speaker 3: us to see the fine structure within that trough. It
Speaker 3: is specifically designed to identify and characterize these winds in
Speaker 3: distant quasars at a much faster rate.
Speaker 2: That's exciting.
Speaker 3: If the WISH Wolf Fuel program and WISH thirteen represent
Speaker 3: the artisanal, painstaking proof of concept, new Athena will be
Speaker 3: the factory.
Speaker 2: Just churning out data.
Speaker 3: It will allow us to map out the cosmic thermostat
Speaker 3: across hundreds or thousands of galaxies during cosmic noon.
Speaker 2: Which opens up an entirely new era of understanding how
Speaker 2: the universe evolved from a chaotic soup of gas into
Speaker 2: the structured, stable galaxies we see today really does. Let's
Speaker 2: synthesize this journey for you listening. We started by looking
Speaker 2: at a supermassive black hole, an object defined in the
Speaker 2: public consciousness by its voracious appetite and inescapable gravity, the
Speaker 2: vacuum cleaner, right. But what the data shows us is
Speaker 2: that black holes are not just cosmic vacuum cleaners. Because
Speaker 2: they eat so aggressively, because the differential rotation in their
Speaker 2: accretion disks generates such blinding millions of degrees heat, they
Speaker 2: actually create these stratified multi lane highways of highly ionized
Speaker 2: iron plasma.
Speaker 3: The ultrafast outflows layered winds moving at ten percent and
Speaker 3: thirty percent the speed of light, right, And.
Speaker 2: These winds carry so much mass, firing forty five sons
Speaker 2: worth of material a year into deep space, and so
Speaker 2: much immense kinetic energy that they violently shock and heat
Speaker 2: up the ambient gas of the entire host galaxy.
Speaker 3: They strip away the cold gas supply necessary to make
Speaker 3: new stars.
Speaker 2: They act as the ultimate cosmic thermostats, dictating whether a
Speaker 2: host galaxy thrives and continues to grow or is violently
Speaker 2: quenched and left to slowly fade.
Speaker 3: The ultimate destroyer is functionally the galaxy's regulator.
Speaker 2: It is the essential feedback loop that shapes the entire cosmos.
Speaker 3: Without it, we wouldn't be here.
Speaker 2: And that leaves us with a final thought, tom all over,
Speaker 2: something that builds on the mechanics we've explored today. Okay,
Speaker 2: if you're listening to this, you're currently located in the
Speaker 2: Milky Way, a stable, beautiful spiral galaxy our home. But
Speaker 2: if supermassive black holes inherently limit the size and starmaking
Speaker 2: ability of their host galaxies by literally blowing the building
Speaker 2: materials away, does this mean the universe has a strict,
Speaker 2: mathematically enforced maximum sized limit for any civilization's home galaxy?
Speaker 3: That is a fascinating extrapolation of the thermostat model.
Speaker 2: Think about it. We look up at the night sky
Speaker 2: and see a galaxy that had been stable for billions
Speaker 2: of years. But are we only living in a stable
Speaker 2: environment because long ago the super massive black hole at
Speaker 2: the center of the Milky Way woke up, lashed out,
Speaker 2: and violently blew away the excess gas before the galaxy
Speaker 2: could tear itself apart with uncontrolled massive starbursts.
Speaker 3: It's very possible.
Speaker 2: Are we living in a cosmos where nature's ultimate destructive force,
Speaker 2: a mechanism that can hurl forty five suns a year
Speaker 2: at relativistic speeds, is the exact and perhaps only reason
Speaker 2: our galaxy is stable enough for biological life to exist
Speaker 2: at all.
Speaker 3: It is a profound realization. The extreme violence that prevents
Speaker 3: a galaxy from growing infinitely is likely the exact regulatory
Speaker 3: mechanism that ensures its long term survival instability.
Speaker 2: The ultimate destroyer acting as the ultimate preserver, a cosmic thermostat,
Speaker 2: keeping the house just stable enough for us to live
Speaker 2: in it.
Speaker 3: That's beautifully put.
Speaker 2: Just something to think about the next time you look
Speaker 2: up at the nice guy