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 try kind of a thought experiment
Speaker 2: the next time you find yourself outside on a clear night,
Speaker 2: like a truly dark night. Maybe you're out camping away
Speaker 2: from the city lights.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, getting away from the light pollution is key
Speaker 3: for this.
Speaker 2: Right exactly. Yeah, So you're out there, and I want
Speaker 2: you to look up and just locate a patch of
Speaker 2: the sky that appears completely, unequivocally empty, just a black
Speaker 2: void sitting there between the stars of our local galaxy.
Speaker 3: Just absolute nothingness.
Speaker 2: Yeah. But here is the thing. Imagine staring into that
Speaker 2: absolute nothing and realizing that you are not looking at
Speaker 2: empty space at all.
Speaker 3: You're really not.
Speaker 2: No, you are looking directly down the barrel of a
Speaker 2: cosmic monster, basically, this astrophysical engine that is shining, you know,
Speaker 2: trillions of times brighter than.
Speaker 3: Our own sun trillions, which is a number that's just
Speaker 3: it's hard to even wrap your head around it.
Speaker 2: Really is, and it's just so unfathomably distant that by
Speaker 2: the time its light reaches your naked eye. The physical
Speaker 2: laws of the universe, stuff like the inverse square law
Speaker 2: and the actual expansion of space, have reduced this blinding,
Speaker 2: galaxy consuming inferno to absolute invisibility.
Speaker 3: It's completely invisible to us. And you know that realization
Speaker 3: forces a complete recalibration.
Speaker 2: Of your perspective.
Speaker 3: It totally does, Yeah, to realize that the darkest, quietest
Speaker 3: patches of our sky are actually harboring the most violent,
Speaker 3: luminous and just chaotic environments in the entire cosmos.
Speaker 2: It's wild. And that profound dissonance, you know, between what
Speaker 2: we actually see with our eye and what is truly
Speaker 2: out there in the dark, that is the foundation of
Speaker 2: our entire conversation today.
Speaker 3: It's a big one.
Speaker 2: It's massive, yeah, because we are looking at the recent
Speaker 2: discovery of the oldest intrinsically brightest objects ever observed in
Speaker 2: the universe.
Speaker 3: The absolute record breakers.
Speaker 2: Right. But the reason this is sending total shockwaves through
Speaker 2: astrophysics isn't just about logging, you know, a new record
Speaker 2: in some celestial catalogs.
Speaker 3: Some the Yeah, not at all. It's way bigger than that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The sheer existence of these objects actively fractures our
Speaker 2: standard models of cosmology. Like it's a glaring paradox that
Speaker 2: tells us our entire timeline for how the early universe
Speaker 2: formed is either missing a crucial chapter or is just
Speaker 2: fundamentally wrong.
Speaker 3: Fundamentally wrong. Yeah, because the standard cosmological model we use,
Speaker 3: which is called Lambda CDM, it sets very very strict
Speaker 3: speed limits on how fast structures can grow after the Big.
Speaker 2: Bang, okay, speed limits on mass.
Speaker 3: So when you find these massive structures existing at a
Speaker 3: point in time when the universe honestly barely had time
Speaker 3: to cool down, you aren't just finding a new type
Speaker 3: of star or a new galaxy.
Speaker 2: You're finding something that shouldn't be there exactly.
Speaker 3: You are finding an anomaly that threatens to just pull
Speaker 3: the thread on our entire understanding of early structure formation.
Speaker 3: We are literally being forced to ask how something could
Speaker 3: acquire that much mass in a fraction of the time
Speaker 3: that physics says it requires.
Speaker 2: Right, which is just a massive headache for physicists. So
Speaker 2: to understand this paradox. I think they first need to
Speaker 2: dissect the engine itself, right, because we're talking about thirty
Speaker 2: one newly discovered quasars.
Speaker 3: Thirty one of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and for anyone casually following astronomy, I feel like
Speaker 2: the term quasar gets thrown around a lot, and you know,
Speaker 2: it's often used interchangeably with black holes. But they aren't
Speaker 2: actually the same thing, are they.
Speaker 3: No, they really aren't. They're related, but definitely not the same.
Speaker 3: So a quasar, which actually stands for quasi stellar radio source,
Speaker 3: just as a bit of trivia, is the intensely luminous
Speaker 3: region right at the center of an active early galaxy.
Speaker 2: Okay, so it's a region, not an object itself, right.
Speaker 3: And it's powered by a supermassive black hole, But it's
Speaker 3: the activity that actually defines it as a quasar.
Speaker 2: Kidving, So like what the black hole is doing right
Speaker 2: in that.
Speaker 3: Moment, precisely like a dormant super massive black hole. For example, Sagittarius,
Speaker 3: a star right at the center of our own milky Way,
Speaker 3: that is not a quasar.
Speaker 2: Because it's basically on a diet right now.
Speaker 3: It's just sitting there, Yeah, exactly, it's fasting a quasar
Speaker 3: requires an active, just catastrophic influx of material. It is
Speaker 3: a highly specific, very transient phase in galactic evolution.
Speaker 2: I mean, it doesn't last forever.
Speaker 3: Right, it's fleeting on cosmic scales. The black hole is
Speaker 3: gobbling up the surrounding accretion disk of gas, dust, disrupted stars.
Speaker 3: Just an absolute feeding frenzy, an absolute feeding frenzy.
Speaker 2: And the luminosity generated by this process is just staggering.
Speaker 3: Oh it's blinding.
Speaker 2: Yeah, We're talking about a localized region of space outshining
Speaker 2: its entire host galaxy by a th of hundreds or
Speaker 2: even thousands thousands of time.
Speaker 3: Is brighter than billions of stars.
Speaker 2: Combined, which is just wow. But this is the part
Speaker 2: where I feel like the mechanics often get glossed over
Speaker 2: in standard science reporting, because the defining characteristic of a
Speaker 2: black hole is a gravitational well so speed that beyond
Speaker 2: the event horizon, the escape velocity is faster than the
Speaker 2: speed of light.
Speaker 3: Right, nothing gets out, not even light exactly.
Speaker 2: So if the central engine's primary function is to lock
Speaker 2: matter and light away forever from the observable universe, the
Speaker 2: blinding light we see obviously isn't coming from the black hole. Itself.
Speaker 3: Right, The light never actually crosses the event horizon to
Speaker 3: come back to us. It is a product of the
Speaker 3: macroscopic traffic jam sitting just outside.
Speaker 2: Of it, a cosmic traffic jam.
Speaker 3: I like that, Yeah, because as massive quantities of material
Speaker 3: fall toward that deep gravitational well, conservation of angular momentum
Speaker 3: basically prevents it from just dropping straight in.
Speaker 2: Because everything in space is spinning, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, it's all swirling, so it forms this flattened,
Speaker 3: rapidly spinning structure called an accretion disk.
Speaker 2: Okay, an accretion disc, which always makes me think of
Speaker 2: spacecraft re entering Earth's atmosphere.
Speaker 3: Oh that's a really good analogy, actually, yeah.
Speaker 2: Because a lot of people assume the heat of reentry
Speaker 2: comes from the spacecraft rubbing against the air, right, like
Speaker 2: rubbing your hands together to get warm, right, Just basic friction,
Speaker 2: But it's actually ram pressure. The spacecraft is pushing the
Speaker 2: atmospheric gas out of the way faster than the gas
Speaker 2: can physically move, which compresses it. And that intense compression
Speaker 2: is what generates the superheated plasma. So in an accretion disc,
Speaker 2: you have a somewhat similar dynamic, right, This extreme friction
Speaker 2: and compression just scaled up to a galactic terrifying level.
Speaker 3: That re entry analogy captures the thermodynamics perfectly because in
Speaker 3: the accretion disk orbital velocities are higher the closer you
Speaker 3: get to the center, so the inside lanes are moving
Speaker 3: way faster than the outside lanes, just like a racetrack exactly.
Speaker 3: So you have these concentric rings of plasma just shearing
Speaker 3: against one another at significant fractions of the speed of light.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: And this differential rotation creates immense friction. But it is
Speaker 3: even more complex than just physical compression. We are dealing
Speaker 3: with highly magnetized plasma here.
Speaker 2: Okay, magnetized plasma.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so there's this thing called the magneto rotational instability
Speaker 3: or MRI. Not the brain scan, huh No, definitely not
Speaker 3: the brain scan. This MRI creates intense turbulence within the
Speaker 3: plasma and it acts as the main mechanism that actually
Speaker 3: transfers the angular momentum outward, which is what allows the
Speaker 3: mass to finally fall inward.
Speaker 2: Okay, wait, let me make sure I've got this. So
Speaker 2: the magnetic fields are kind of acting like the brakes
Speaker 2: on a car. They transfer the spin energy out which
Speaker 2: slows the matter down enough so it can drop closer
Speaker 2: to the event horizon, and that heats it up to
Speaker 2: hundreds of thousands of degrees in the process.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, the gravitational potential energy of all that infalling
Speaker 3: matter is converted into kinetic energy, and then through that
Speaker 3: viscous sheer and the magnetic turbulence you mentioned, it turns
Speaker 3: into thermal energy.
Speaker 2: Heat, just mind blowing amounts of heat.
Speaker 3: Insane amounts. The plasma gets so unimaginably hot that it
Speaker 3: emits this continuous, screaming barrage of ultraviolet and X ray.
Speaker 2: Radiation, and that light is the quasar.
Speaker 3: That is the quasar. You are literally seeing the death
Speaker 3: knell of the matter right before it crosses the threshold
Speaker 3: and disappears forever.
Speaker 2: Okay, So it's a messy eater at a cosmic buffet,
Speaker 2: and the glowing crumbs around its mouth are what we
Speaker 2: see from Earth.
Speaker 3: That is exactly it. And it is a violent but
Speaker 3: very brief era for the galaxy.
Speaker 2: Brief meaning what a few million.
Speaker 3: Years, yeah, roughly, Because it's not a steady state. The
Speaker 3: black hole basically clears out its immediate neighborhood, right It's
Speaker 3: blasting away a lot of the remaining gas with its
Speaker 3: own intense.
Speaker 2: Radiation pressure, like blowing away the smoke.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And eventually the fuel just runs out, the quasar
Speaker 3: phase ends, the lights turn off, and it leaves a quiet,
Speaker 3: quiescent galaxy behind.
Speaker 2: Just a normal galaxy with a sleeping giant in the middle,
Speaker 2: like our Milky.
Speaker 3: Way exactly, Which is why capturing them in the act
Speaker 3: is essentially an exercise in cosmic archaeology. You have to
Speaker 3: look back to the specific epochs when galaxies were young,
Speaker 3: gas rich, and undergoing these violent mergers that funnel all
Speaker 3: that material right into their centers.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the real core of this new
Speaker 2: data because we know what equas are is now. But
Speaker 2: the significance of this specific discovery by astronomer Damian Yang
Speaker 2: and his international team it lies entirely in when these
Speaker 2: thirty one quasars existed?
Speaker 3: The when is everything here?
Speaker 2: Right? Because in astrophysics, since the speed of light is
Speaker 2: a hard physical constant, looking across vast distances of space
Speaker 2: is functionally identical to looking backward in time.
Speaker 3: It is the ultimate non theoretical time machine. It really is, Yeah,
Speaker 3: because we aren't inferring the past through geological strata or fossils.
Speaker 3: We are directly observing the actual photons that left these
Speaker 3: accretion discs billions of years ago.
Speaker 2: Right, They've just been flying through space this whole time, exactly.
Speaker 3: The delay in the light's arrival provides us with a literal,
Speaker 3: live broadcast of the early.
Speaker 2: Universe, live broadcast, and these specific quasars we're talking about today,
Speaker 2: they are situated at the absolute extreme edge of our
Speaker 2: observational horizon, very edge.
Speaker 1: Like.
Speaker 2: The accepted age of the universe is thirteen point eight
Speaker 2: billion years, and the light from the oldest pair of
Speaker 2: quasars in this newly discovered group of thirty one, it
Speaker 2: dates back to when the universe was roughly six hundred
Speaker 2: and seventy million years old.
Speaker 3: Which is just incredibly early. We really need to contextualize
Speaker 3: that six hundred and seventy million years. That is roughly
Speaker 3: five percent of the current age of the universe.
Speaker 2: Hacent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so for a human life span of say eighty years,
Speaker 3: that is the equivalent of looking at a four year
Speaker 3: old child. Oh wow, Okay, We are observing the cosmos
Speaker 3: in its absolute infancy, an era immediately following the very
Speaker 3: first large scale structural formations.
Speaker 2: A cosmic toggler, and the two absolute farthest objects in
Speaker 2: this data, which actually broke the previous twenty twenty one
Speaker 2: record by about twenty million years. They have these specific
Speaker 2: designations that highlight just how far back we are looking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the catalog names right.
Speaker 2: So we have eucl J one seven two and two
Speaker 2: nine sou nine er two point seventy five plus sixty
Speaker 2: four one zero eighteen point one, which sits at a
Speaker 2: red shift to seven point seven seven.
Speaker 3: Rules right off the tongue, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: Just And the other one is eucl J one two
Speaker 2: five three zero eight point five to five plus seven
Speaker 2: zero five four three two point three, which sits at
Speaker 2: a red shift of seven point six'. Nine but for anyone,
Speaker 2: listening who isn't you, know spending their days looking at
Speaker 2: cosmological data, spreadsheets we should probably unpack why red shift
Speaker 2: is the metric used here rather than just saying thirteen
Speaker 2: point one billion light years.
Speaker 3: Away that's a great point because distance is actually a
Speaker 3: very fluid concept in an expanding.
Speaker 2: Universe, right space itself is.
Speaker 3: Stretchy exactly when that ultraviolet light was first emitted by
Speaker 3: the quasar's accretion disc thirteen point one billion years, ago
Speaker 3: the universe was physically smaller than it is, now and
Speaker 3: as that photon travels through space toward us over billions of,
Speaker 3: years the very metric of space itself is expanding underneath.
Speaker 3: It and this expansion literally stretches the physical wavelength of the.
Speaker 2: Photon so light that started out as highly energetic shirt
Speaker 2: wavelength ultraviolet, radiation it gets stretched out like a cosmic
Speaker 2: slinky as the universe expands while the light is in
Speaker 2: transit like a.
Speaker 3: Slinky, yes by the time it finally reaches our telescopes
Speaker 3: here in The Solar, system that ultraviolet light has been
Speaker 3: stretched so far that it has shifted out of the
Speaker 3: visible spectrum.
Speaker 2: Entirely, wait, really it's not even visible light.
Speaker 3: Anymore, nope it's shifted all the way down into the near.
Speaker 3: Infrared so THAT zz value the red shift number like
Speaker 3: seven point seven to. Seven it's a direct measurement of
Speaker 3: exactly how much that light has been. Stretched oh, okay
Speaker 3: it tells us exactly how much the universe has expanded
Speaker 3: since the moment that photon was, emitted which in turn
Speaker 3: gives us the most precise measurement possible of its age
Speaker 3: and its.
Speaker 2: Distance, Okay so a red shift of seven point seven
Speaker 2: to seven means the wavelength of the light has been
Speaker 2: stretched by a factor of eight point seventy seven compared
Speaker 2: to when it was first. Emitted that is just an
Speaker 2: incredible mathematical. Tool it's. Brilliant we are basically intercepting a
Speaker 2: thirteen billion year old signal that has been physically altered
Speaker 2: by the growth of the universe itself. Exactly and the
Speaker 2: reason astronomers are spending you, know millions of dollars in
Speaker 2: years of telescope time hunting for these specific high red
Speaker 2: shift objects isn't just to set records for The Guinness.
Speaker 3: Book definitely.
Speaker 2: Not, no these quasars exist during a very, specific fiercely
Speaker 2: debated transitional era called The epoch of. Realization, yes The
Speaker 2: epoch of.
Speaker 3: Realization this is perhaps the most, critical poorly understood phase
Speaker 3: in the universe's entire.
Speaker 2: History, okay let's set the stage for. That.
Speaker 3: Sure so to set the, stage about three hundred and
Speaker 3: eighty thousand years after The Big, bang the universe finally
Speaker 3: cooled down enough for protons and electrons to bind together
Speaker 3: and form the first neutral, atoms which was mostly. Hydrogen.
Speaker 3: Okay this process is universally called, recombination.
Speaker 2: Which is honest slightly confusing terminology because it was the
Speaker 2: first time they ever, combined, right not a. Recombination, yeah that.
Speaker 3: Is a classic quirk of astronomical naming. Conventions we're not
Speaker 3: great in naming, things fair, Enough but the result of
Speaker 3: this combination was that the entire universe became filled with
Speaker 3: this pervasive dark fog of neutral hydrogen. Gas there were
Speaker 3: no stars, yet there were no, galaxies.
Speaker 2: Just a giant dark cloud, exactly.
Speaker 3: Just an expanding cooling cloud of primordial. Gas this era
Speaker 3: is very aptly named the cosmic dark, ages.
Speaker 2: Right and because neutral hydrogen is fantastic at absorbing ultraviolet,
Speaker 2: light even if there was a light source in, there
Speaker 2: you wouldn't be able to see it from far away, anyway, Right.
Speaker 3: Exactly the fog was optically, thick it would block.
Speaker 2: Everything but obviously we don't live in a dark fog
Speaker 2: of neutral hydrogen. Today you can see the. Stars the
Speaker 2: universe today is mostly ionized. Plasma so something had to
Speaker 2: happen to clear that massive cosmic, fog.
Speaker 3: Right and that's something was. Gravity gravity slowly went to
Speaker 3: work on the fog very slight density fluctuations in that
Speaker 3: primordial gas began to clump together and collapse under their own.
Speaker 2: Weight forming the first.
Speaker 3: Star, yes it eventually ignited the very first generation of,
Speaker 3: stars which we call population three stars and the earliest infant.
Speaker 3: Galaxies and as these objects lit, up they began pumping out,
Speaker 3: massive massive amounts of ultraviolet.
Speaker 2: Radiation and this is where the actual reionization. Happens oh,
Speaker 2: no we got, it because that ENERGETIC uv radiation blasts,
Speaker 2: out hits the neutral hydrogen atoms in the surrounding, fog
Speaker 2: knocks the electrons away from the protons, again and turns
Speaker 2: the gas back into an ionized.
Speaker 3: Plasma, right and here's the. Key ionized gas is transparent to.
Speaker 2: Light, oh, so.
Speaker 3: These early stars and galaxies were essentially carving out these
Speaker 3: expanding bubbles of transparency within the dark.
Speaker 2: Fog like blowing bubbles in dark, water.
Speaker 3: Exactly until eventually those bubbles expanded so much that they,
Speaker 3: overlapped the fog was entirely burned, away and the universe
Speaker 3: became transparent on a.
Speaker 2: Macroscopic, scale and let there be.
Speaker 3: Light let there be. Light but studying how this, happened
Speaker 3: the exact timeline and mechanics of it is a massive
Speaker 3: observational challenge because.
Speaker 2: You're trying to see through a, fog to watch the fog.
Speaker 3: Clear, precisely you are trying to study a process that
Speaker 3: is obscured by the very fog it is trying to.
Speaker 3: Clear it's incredibly, difficult.
Speaker 2: Which is Where Daming yang's brilliant methodology really comes into,
Speaker 2: play because he describes using these ancient redshift seven quasars as.
Speaker 2: Lighthouses that's a great term for. It, Yeah because a
Speaker 2: quasar is so blindingly, bright its light acts like a
Speaker 2: high power beam cutting straight through whatever neutral fog is
Speaker 2: still left in its path toward.
Speaker 3: Us, Right, so astronomers look at the spectrum of the
Speaker 3: quasar's light when it finally arrives here On. Earth if
Speaker 3: the light passed through a patch of neutral hydrogen on
Speaker 3: its long, journey that hydrogen will absorb very specific wavelengths
Speaker 3: of the, light leaving dark gaps.
Speaker 2: In the, spectrum kind of like a. Barcode exactly like a.
Speaker 3: Barcode the most notable gap is called the Gun peterson
Speaker 3: prof and by reading those, gaps by reading that, barcode
Speaker 3: we can tell exactly where the neutral fog, was how
Speaker 3: thick it, was and at what specific point in time it.
Speaker 2: Existed, okay that is, Genius BUT i do have to
Speaker 2: push back a little bit on the lighthouse analogy, here
Speaker 2: or at least the utility of. It oh how, So,
Speaker 2: well if you are standing on a rocky coast in
Speaker 2: a really thick, fog a lighthouse beam only illuminates the
Speaker 2: narrow column of aera directly cuts through, right just a straight.
Speaker 2: Line you can see the water droplets in that specific. Beam,
Speaker 2: sure but you are still completely blind to the vast
Speaker 2: dark ocean surrounding. It so if aquasar only gives us
Speaker 2: a single pencil thin core sample through the intergalactic, medium
Speaker 2: how can one beam of light possibly tell us about
Speaker 2: the large scale topology of the entire early? Universe are
Speaker 2: the models just assuming the rest of the universe looks
Speaker 2: exactly like that one random core.
Speaker 3: Sample, No and that is a fantastic, point because that
Speaker 3: exact limitation is what plagued all the early real ionization. Studies,
Speaker 3: really so it was a, problem a massive. PROBLEM a
Speaker 3: single sightline is subject to huge cosmic. Variants if your
Speaker 3: one quasar happens to be sitting in an unusually dense
Speaker 3: patch of neutral, gas or maybe in an area that
Speaker 3: cleared out unusually early compared to everywhere.
Speaker 2: Else then your entire model of the universe becomes totally
Speaker 2: skewed by that one single.
Speaker 3: Anomaly, Exactly you cannot extrapolate global cosmology from a single
Speaker 3: skewer through the intergalactic.
Speaker 2: Medium, okay so how does finding thirty one of them
Speaker 2: solve the? Problem does it just give us more?
Speaker 3: Skewers it gives us a statistical. Distribution moving from just
Speaker 3: one or two known quasars at this extreme red shift
Speaker 3: to thirty one is literally the difference between a single
Speaker 3: flashlight beam in a dark forest and a widespread network
Speaker 3: of searchlights all pointing at you from different. Directions.
Speaker 2: Ah, okay so they cross over each. Other.
Speaker 3: Right with thirty one distinct sightlines distributed across completely different
Speaker 3: regions of the, sky astronomers can actually begin THREE d
Speaker 3: tomography of the early.
Speaker 2: Universe tomography like A ct.
Speaker 3: Scan exactly like A ct, scan we can start to
Speaker 3: map where the ionized bubbles, are how large they have
Speaker 3: grown in different, sectors and we can trace the timeline
Speaker 3: of when they finally percolate and merge. Together we move
Speaker 3: from an anecdotal observation to a comprehensive THREE d map
Speaker 3: of the cosmic.
Speaker 2: Fog, wow we are essentially charting the topography of the
Speaker 2: dawn of. Light that's just an incredible achievement for, humanity really.
Speaker 2: Is and here's the massive twist in the narrative for.
Speaker 2: Today while these thirty one lighthouses are exactly the tools
Speaker 2: we need to solve the mystery of the Dark, ages
Speaker 2: the very fact that we can see them at all
Speaker 2: has exposed an entirely, new much more alarming.
Speaker 3: Problem, yeah this is the big.
Speaker 2: One we have mapped the, fog, sure but the lighthouses
Speaker 2: themselves shouldn't physically exist. Yet.
Speaker 3: Right this is what we call the perplexing mystery of,
Speaker 3: mass and, honestly it is the intellectual climax of this
Speaker 3: entire data. Set it is the paradox that is actively
Speaker 3: keeping theoretical astrophysicists awake at.
Speaker 2: Night right, now let's lay out the sheer scale of
Speaker 2: the problem here so everyone understands why this is panic.
Speaker 2: Inducing these newly discovered quasars are powered by super massive black.
Speaker 2: Holes and we aren't talking about stellar mass black holes
Speaker 2: that are you, know a few dozen times the mass
Speaker 2: of our, Son.
Speaker 3: No not at.
Speaker 2: All these black, holes, wait billions of times the mass.
Speaker 3: Of our son billions with A, b and we are
Speaker 3: observing them when the universe is only six hundred and
Speaker 3: seventy million.
Speaker 2: Years, old, which like we said, earlier sounds like a
Speaker 2: long time to a, human but on a cosmic, scale
Speaker 2: it is less than the blink of an. Eye the
Speaker 2: studies co Author Joseph, henowy he summed it up perfectly
Speaker 2: when he, said every step further back in time makes
Speaker 2: the puzzle more. Perplexing it really.
Speaker 3: Does it's a massive.
Speaker 2: Contradiction to put it in. Perspective for you, listening imagine
Speaker 2: walking into a kindergarten classroom to preserve a group of
Speaker 2: five year. Olds, right you expect to see children who
Speaker 2: have grown at a biologically standard, rate.
Speaker 3: Little kids doing little kid.
Speaker 2: Stuff, Right but sitting right there in the middle of
Speaker 2: the reading, circle cross legged on the rug is a fully,
Speaker 2: grown heavily, muscled seven foot tall adult, man.
Speaker 3: Just towering over.
Speaker 2: Everyone it completely breaks your understanding of the biological. Timeline
Speaker 2: you know definitively that a human being cannot accrue that
Speaker 2: much bone density and muscle mass in just five. Years
Speaker 2: the time required simply does not. Exist that is.
Speaker 3: Perfect analogy because the astrophysical equivalent of that timeline. Constraint
Speaker 3: the biological limit of bone growth in your example is
Speaker 3: governed by something called The eddington.
Speaker 2: Limit, okay what is The eddington?
Speaker 3: Limit so black holes do not just consume matter, Instantly
Speaker 3: there is a strict physical speed limit on their, growth
Speaker 3: as matter falls into the black hole and heats up
Speaker 3: in that accretion disc we talked about it emits intense,
Speaker 3: radiation the blinding, light, Right and light actually carries, momentum
Speaker 3: so that outward radiation pressure physically pushes back against the
Speaker 3: inward pull of.
Speaker 2: Gravity oh, so if a black hole tries to eat too,
Speaker 2: fast the light it generates actually blows the food away
Speaker 2: from its.
Speaker 3: Mouth, precisely it chokes on its own. Light The eddington
Speaker 3: limit is the exact balancing point where the inward gravitational
Speaker 3: force equals the outward radiation.
Speaker 2: Pressure, okay so it can't eat any faster than that. Limit.
Speaker 3: Right so if we assume a black hole is feeling
Speaker 3: at its absolute maximum theoretical rate The eddington, limit we
Speaker 3: can calculate its e folding.
Speaker 2: Time which means what.
Speaker 3: Exactly it's roughly how long it takes for a black
Speaker 3: hole to double its. Mass under standard, physics that e
Speaker 3: folding time is about forty five to fifty million, years.
Speaker 2: Okay fifty million years to double in. Size so let's
Speaker 2: run the math on the standard cosmological model with that
Speaker 2: limit in. Mind if the very first star is formed
Speaker 2: around two hundred million years after The Big.
Speaker 3: Bang which is the accepted, timeline, yes.
Speaker 2: And the most massive among those first stars collapse to
Speaker 2: form seed black holes of maybe one hundred solar. Masses
Speaker 2: that means you have about four hundred and seventy million
Speaker 2: years between when they were born and the six hundred
Speaker 2: and seventy million year mark where we're currently observing these
Speaker 2: gi koisars, exactly.
Speaker 3: Which gives you roughly ten e folding times ten chances
Speaker 3: to double in. Size so if you double one hundred
Speaker 3: solar mass black hole ten, times so one hundred goes
Speaker 3: to two hundred and two hundred and four hundred and so,
Speaker 3: on you get roughly one hundred thousand solar.
Speaker 2: Masses But Damian yang's team is observing black holes that
Speaker 2: are billions of solar masses.
Speaker 3: Billions we are off by a factor of ten. Thousand. Wow,
Speaker 3: yeah the math definitively proves that you cannot grow a
Speaker 3: billion solar mass black hole from a stellar remnant in
Speaker 3: four hundred and seventy million. Years using standard decretion, physics
Speaker 3: it is. Impossible it is.
Speaker 2: A profound glaring hole in our understanding of. Physics it
Speaker 2: means one of our foundational assumptions is just straight up.
Speaker 2: Wrong like either they found a way to cheat The
Speaker 2: eddington limit and eat vastly faster than physics should, allow
Speaker 2: or they didn't start as stellar mass.
Speaker 3: Seeds those are exactly the two leading hypotheses that are
Speaker 3: currently tearing the astrophysical community. Apart right, now it's a huge.
Speaker 2: Debate, okay let's look at the first, option Super eddington
Speaker 2: accretion eating faster than the speed.
Speaker 3: Limit Right, so there are theoretical models suggesting that under
Speaker 3: very specific weird, conditions like a highly disorganized chaotic accretion
Speaker 3: flow or what we call a slim, disc the radiation
Speaker 3: can actually get trapped inside.
Speaker 2: The flow so it doesn't push the food away.
Speaker 3: Exactly which allows the black hole to gorge itself way
Speaker 3: faster than the theoretical, limit but sustaining Super eddington accretion
Speaker 3: for hundreds of millions of years continuously without blowing the
Speaker 3: entire host galaxy. Apart that is a severe.
Speaker 2: Stretch it sounds like grasping its straws to make the math. Work.
Speaker 2: Yeah so what about the other, option the heavy sea,
Speaker 2: hypothesis the idea that they didn't start as the corpses
Speaker 2: of stars at, all but were basically born as.
Speaker 3: Giants, yes the direct collapse black hole theory OR. DCBHs
Speaker 3: this theory posits that in the very early universe you
Speaker 3: had these, colossal pristine clouds of hydrogen gas that didn't
Speaker 3: just fragment into thousands of smaller stars like they normally.
Speaker 2: Do, well wouldn't they fragment because of the.
Speaker 3: Intense back ground ultraviolet radiation from other early, stars which
Speaker 3: prevented the gas cloud from cooling down and breaking. Apart so,
Speaker 3: instead the entire massive cloud collapsed under its own gravity
Speaker 3: directly into a black.
Speaker 2: Hole no scar phase at, all just gas cloud straight
Speaker 2: to black.
Speaker 3: Hole, Right and that creates a seed that was already
Speaker 3: ten thousand to one hundred thousand solar masses right from
Speaker 3: the starting.
Speaker 2: Line oh, well if you start the race at the halfway,
Speaker 2: line hitting a billion solar masses by the six hundred
Speaker 2: and seventy million year, mark suddenly becomes mathematically feasible.
Speaker 3: Exactly it solves the timeline.
Speaker 2: Issue but to prove either of these, theories we need observational, data.
Speaker 2: Right we can't just rely on theoretical math and need.
Speaker 2: Ideas we need an instrument capable of finding a needle
Speaker 2: in a universal, haystack which brings us to the actual
Speaker 2: technological marvel that enabled this discovery in the first, place
Speaker 2: The Euclid telescope OH.
Speaker 3: Euclid it is an absolute game changer for. Cosmology it's
Speaker 3: A European Space agency mission launched just recently in twenty twenty,
Speaker 3: three And Damon yang specif secifically CITED euclid as the
Speaker 3: tool that completely transformed this.
Speaker 2: Field how, so what makes it so special compared to
Speaker 2: Say Hubble.
Speaker 3: Well to put its efficiency in, perspective previous quasar hunts
Speaker 3: relied heavily on ground based observatories or very highly targeted space.
Speaker 3: Observations it literally took decades to, slowly painstakingly build a
Speaker 3: catalog of ancient quasars pointing.
Speaker 2: A tiny strotha sky and hoping you see something.
Speaker 3: Exactly BUT, euclid in just two years of, operation has
Speaker 3: essentially doubled the known number of these redshift seven.
Speaker 2: Objects that's. Insane it achieved in twenty four months what
Speaker 2: previously took the entire global astronomical community decades to. Do
Speaker 2: it's a. Powerhouse and the reason it is so incredibly
Speaker 2: effective comes down to where it is parked and how
Speaker 2: it sees the sky right because euclid is not in
Speaker 2: Low earth orbit like The Hubble Space. Telescope it is
Speaker 2: positioned at lagrange point two OR l, two which is
Speaker 2: about one point five million kilometers away From.
Speaker 3: Earth, yes and the orbital mechanics OF l two are
Speaker 3: absolutely vital for infrared.
Speaker 2: Astronomy why is? That why does it need to be
Speaker 2: one point five million kilometers? Away what advantage does that
Speaker 2: specific hovering spot give us over just being In earth's immediate.
Speaker 3: Orbit it's all about. Heat when you are in Low earth,
Speaker 3: orbit you are subjected to a brutal thermal.
Speaker 2: Environment because The earth is.
Speaker 3: Hot The earth is incredibly, bright both in reflected sunlight
Speaker 3: but also in its own thermal infrared. Glow, plus when
Speaker 3: a satellite is in Low earth, orbit it constantly passes
Speaker 3: in and out Of earth's shadow right day, night day,
Speaker 3: night every ninety, minutes.
Speaker 2: Oh meaning it it experiences massive temperature swings.
Speaker 3: Exactly and those temperature swings cause the structural components and
Speaker 3: crucially the mirrors to physically expand and contract over and.
Speaker 2: Over. Uh and you cannot take a deeply, exposed highly
Speaker 2: sensitive image of a very faint infrared source thirteen billion
Speaker 2: light years away if your telescope mirror is physically warping
Speaker 2: because The sun just came.
Speaker 3: Up, exactly it would be a blurry. Mess by placing
Speaker 3: euclid AT l, two it sits in this gravityational sweet
Speaker 3: spot where it orbits The sun at the exact same
Speaker 3: rate as The, earth.
Speaker 2: So it's always in the same spot relative to. Us.
Speaker 3: Right it constantly keeps The, earth The, sun and The
Speaker 3: moon directly behind, it so it employs this massive sunshield
Speaker 3: to block out all that local heat and, light allowing its,
Speaker 3: instruments specifically the near infrared spectrometer and photometer AND isp
Speaker 3: to radiatively cool down to highly stable freezing.
Speaker 2: Temperatures and from that perfectly stable cold vantage, point it
Speaker 2: just gazes outward into the deep cosmos without any.
Speaker 3: Interruptions and what it is doing out there is surveying
Speaker 3: an unprecedented volume of.
Speaker 2: Space, YEAH i saw a graphic from the study mapping
Speaker 2: THE euclid survey against the cosmic. Background if you look
Speaker 2: at an all sky map like the one from The
Speaker 2: Plank mission in twenty, fourteen the dominant feature is this,
Speaker 2: bright glowing horizontal band slicing right across the middle.
Speaker 3: Right which is the plan of our Own Milky way, dollancy.
Speaker 2: And it's packed with, gas dust and, stars which astronomers
Speaker 2: actually refer to as the zone of, avoidance which is
Speaker 2: such a cool, name like A solfai. Movie it totally,
Speaker 2: does but it's called that because looking through The Milky
Speaker 2: way to try and see the deep universe is like
Speaker 2: trying to look at the faint stars while standing directly
Speaker 2: under a glaring street.
Speaker 3: Light you just can't see anything past the. Glare So
Speaker 3: euclid intentionally points away from the galactic. Plane it surveys
Speaker 3: the high galactic. Latitudes the survey footprint sweeps across these
Speaker 3: massive dark swaths of the.
Speaker 2: Deep sky casts a wide, net very wide.
Speaker 3: Net it is designed specifically for wide field. Imaging it
Speaker 3: doesn't have the extreme magnification of something Like James, web
Speaker 3: but it has a massive field of. View it is
Speaker 3: actively looking for the anovelists red, dots the high red
Speaker 3: shift quasars hiding among billions of standard.
Speaker 2: Galaxies so you could cast the, widest most sensitive net
Speaker 2: in astronomical, history and it identifies the thirty one yellow
Speaker 2: and red dots out of a literal sea of background.
Speaker 2: Noise but finding them is only the first half of the,
Speaker 2: operation isn't it just the first? Step, yeah because euclid
Speaker 2: tells us where the impossible monsters are. Hiding but to
Speaker 2: figure out how they grew so massive so, fast we
Speaker 2: have to transition from the scout to the magnifying, glass
Speaker 2: which introduces the next phase of the, investigation relying on
Speaker 2: The James webs based. Telescope oh, yeah.
Speaker 3: The synergy between euclid And James web is what will
Speaker 3: ultimately resolve this entire mass. Paradox as Daming yang, NOTED
Speaker 3: jwst has already begun follow up observations on these newly discovered.
Speaker 3: Quasars the data is literally currently being downloaded and processed
Speaker 3: as we.
Speaker 2: Speak which is so. Exciting so IF euclid is the
Speaker 2: wide angle lens mapping the, Forest James web is the
Speaker 2: microscope examining the cellular structure of a single.
Speaker 3: Leaf that's exactly. IT jadabst possesses unparalleled infrared spectroscopic, capabilities
Speaker 3: specifically with its instruments called integral field.
Speaker 2: Units what are those? Two?
Speaker 3: Well WHEN web points at one of these new, quasars
Speaker 3: it isn't just taking a pretty. Picture it is literally
Speaker 3: dissecting the light pixel by pixel to analyze the chemical,
Speaker 3: composition the velocity of the gas swirling, around and the
Speaker 3: temper of the accretion disk.
Speaker 2: Itself it can actually look at the host galaxy surrounding the,
Speaker 2: quasar right because right now we just see the blazing
Speaker 2: light of the black holes Feeding, frenzy.
Speaker 3: Right the glare hides everything.
Speaker 2: Else but if we want to know if it grew
Speaker 2: via Super eddington accretion or if it started as a
Speaker 2: massive direct collapse, seed we need to see the environment
Speaker 2: it grew up in.
Speaker 3: EXACTLY jwst will allow astronomers to measure the metallicity of
Speaker 3: the gas in that host, galaxy meaning how many heavier
Speaker 3: elements have been forged by early star. Deaths it will
Speaker 3: measure the kinematics the movement of the host galaxy to
Speaker 3: see just how massive the galaxy itself.
Speaker 2: Is are these giant black holes sitting inside equally massive
Speaker 2: giant galaxies or are they vastly outgrowing their, hosts.
Speaker 3: Which is a crucial, question and all of this feeds
Speaker 3: directly Into Joseph henery's ultimate vision for this. Research he
Speaker 3: stated that the goal of compiling all this data is
Speaker 3: to construct a quasar chronicle of the first billion.
Speaker 2: YEARS a quasar chronicle that sounds, epic but what is
Speaker 2: that the chronicle actually look like in? Practice how does
Speaker 2: it solve the?
Speaker 3: Timeline, well a chronicle implies a sequential, narrative, right a
Speaker 3: story with a, beginning, middle and. End right, now we
Speaker 3: only have isolated static. Snapshots we see the giants sitting
Speaker 3: in the kindergarten, class but we don't have its medical
Speaker 3: records or its baby. Pictures we don't know how it got.
Speaker 2: THERE i just know it is there.
Speaker 3: Exactly so the quaser chronicle aims to populate the. Timeline
Speaker 3: if euclid confine quasars not just at six hundred and
Speaker 3: seventy million, years but maybe at five hundred, million four hundred,
Speaker 3: million and three hundred million years after The Big, bang
Speaker 3: we can finally chart a real growth.
Speaker 2: Curve, ah we can see if the mass drops off
Speaker 2: linearly as we go, back which might support the heavy
Speaker 2: seed theory because they started big or if the mass
Speaker 2: drops off, precipitously which might indicate a, sudden violently fast
Speaker 2: period of Super eddington.
Speaker 3: Growth, precisely the chronicle will provide the missing transitional fossils
Speaker 3: of early cosmic. Evolution it will definitively tell us whether
Speaker 3: we just need to slightly tweak the physics of accretion,
Speaker 3: disks or if we need to completely overhaul our entire
Speaker 3: understanding of how matter behaves in the primordial.
Speaker 2: UNIVERSE i, mean we are standing on the precipice of
Speaker 2: a profound paradigm shift. Here the architecture of the, cosmos
Speaker 2: the timeline of its, infancy the mechanics of its most extreme.
Speaker 2: Engines all of it is up for debate right now
Speaker 2: because of thirty one distant red.
Speaker 3: Dots it's thrilling time to be in the, field it really.
Speaker 1: Is.
Speaker 2: YEAH i mean to synthesize the scale of what we
Speaker 2: are witnessing here, today we have decoded the violent frictional
Speaker 2: mechanics of supermassive black holes actively consuming galactic. Material we
Speaker 2: have leveraged the metric expansion of space itself to look
Speaker 2: back thirteen point one billion years in.
Speaker 3: Time using the universe as a.
Speaker 2: Lens, yeah we are utilizing these ancient quasars as cosmic
Speaker 2: lighthouses to perform THREE d tomography on the neutral hydrogen
Speaker 2: fog of the dark, ages mapping the.
Speaker 3: Unmappable.
Speaker 2: Exactly, Yeah yet the very tools we are using to
Speaker 2: map the early universe completely break the mathematical limits of
Speaker 2: how fast masks can, accumulate forcing us to question the
Speaker 2: foundational physics of structure. Formation and it is the unprecedented
Speaker 2: wide field infrared capabilities of The euclid telescope that has
Speaker 2: finally dragged these paradoxes out of the.
Speaker 3: Dark it is the ultimate testament to the scientific. Method,
Speaker 3: honestly we build better, instruments we look, deeper and the
Speaker 3: universe obliges by revealing complexities that prove our existing models
Speaker 3: are totally.
Speaker 2: Inadequate it's a beautifully humbling, realization it really, is which
Speaker 2: brings me back to the thought experiment we started. With,
Speaker 2: today when you look up at that seemingly empty patch
Speaker 2: of night, sky you now know it is hiding ancient
Speaker 2: billion solar mass engines that mathematically shouldn't even.
Speaker 3: Exist they're right, there hiding in plain.
Speaker 2: Sight but it leaves you with a much, deeper far
Speaker 2: more unsettling question to think. About if our fundamental models
Speaker 2: of the universe are missing something as massive as how
Speaker 2: these colossal black holes manage to form in the blink
Speaker 2: of a cosmic, eye what other basic assumption about the
Speaker 2: reality of our universe are completely entirely, Wrong.
Speaker 3: That's the real.
Speaker 2: Question what other impossible structures are hiding out there in the,
Speaker 2: dark just waiting for us to build a telescope powerful
Speaker 2: enough to prove them. Real