Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomy 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 cosmic engine.
Speaker 3: Okay, a cosmic engine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but not just any engine. I mean something so
Speaker 2: incomprehensibly powerful that its energy output easily outshines like ten
Speaker 2: thousand of our.
Speaker 3: Own suns, which is already pretty hard to wrap your
Speaker 3: head around.
Speaker 2: It really is. And the craziest part is that the
Speaker 2: object driving this blindingly energetic mechanism is paradoxically completely defined
Speaker 2: by its absolute darkness.
Speaker 3: Right. It remains one of the most compelling paradoxes an astrophysics, honestly.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You have this entity defined by an event horizon, which
Speaker 3: is a boundary where space time is so severely warped
Speaker 3: that the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light itself. Right,
Speaker 3: So nothing gets out exactly Yet the environment immediately surrounding
Speaker 3: that boundary is responsible for producing well some of the
Speaker 3: most violent, brilliant displays of power in the entire cosmos.
Speaker 2: And today we are looking closely at one of those displays.
Speaker 2: We're talking about Signus X one. A clap yeah for
Speaker 2: anyone who follows the history of astronomy, that name carries
Speaker 2: a ton of weight. I mean, this is this system
Speaker 2: that famously prompted a bet between Stephen Hawking and Kip
Speaker 2: Thorn back in nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, nineteen seventy four. Hawking actually bet against
Speaker 3: it being a black hole, mostly as a sort of
Speaker 3: scientific insurance policy.
Speaker 2: Right like, if he was wrong about his life's work,
Speaker 2: at least he'd win a magazine subscription exactly.
Speaker 3: But he eventually conceded because the observational evidence just became
Speaker 3: completely overwhelming.
Speaker 2: So what we're looking at is a binary system. It
Speaker 2: contains the first confirmed black hole humanity ever found, and
Speaker 2: it's locked in this brutal gravitational embrace with a massive
Speaker 2: O type supergene star.
Speaker 3: It's an incredibly extreme enviroren it is.
Speaker 2: But the reason we're talking about it today isn't just
Speaker 2: for the history.
Speaker 3: No, not at all.
Speaker 2: A recent study published in Nature astronomy led by an
Speaker 2: international coalition of scientists and spearheaded by researchers at Curtin University.
Speaker 2: They actually managed to definitively measure the instantaneous power of
Speaker 2: the jets shooting out of this specific black.
Speaker 3: Hole, which is a huge deal. I mean measure and
Speaker 3: jet power dynamically like as it's actually happening. That required
Speaker 3: a complete methodological shift in how we observe high energy
Speaker 3: Phenomena says.
Speaker 2: We've known about these jets for a while, right, Oh yeah.
Speaker 3: Identifying the presence of a jet in the radio spectrum
Speaker 3: is pretty standard procedure at this point, okay, But calculating
Speaker 3: its power output and clocking its velocity in real time
Speaker 3: while it's being actively deflected by stellar weather that is
Speaker 3: a monumental leap in ops astrophysics.
Speaker 2: So let's get into the mechanics of that stellar weather.
Speaker 2: Because I love the term the lead author used for this,
Speaker 2: Doctor Steve Prabu, coined this phenomenon dancing jets. It's a
Speaker 2: great visual, it really is. So we have the black
Speaker 2: hole which is sitting around twenty one solar masses, and
Speaker 2: it's orbiting this supergent star. Yeah, and the environment they're
Speaker 2: sharing is just incredibly.
Speaker 3: Hostile, extremely hostile because.
Speaker 2: The primary force driving the chaos here isn't just gravity, right,
Speaker 2: it's the stellar wind coming off the supergeon.
Speaker 3: Right so O type supergens are massive, They are incredibly
Speaker 3: luminous and extremely hot, and because their luminosity is so intense,
Speaker 3: the radiation pressure pushing outward from the star's core actually
Speaker 3: physically overcomes the star's gravity, particularly in its outer layers.
Speaker 2: So it's literally blowing itself apart.
Speaker 3: With light exactly. It drives what we call a line
Speaker 3: driven wind. The star is essentially shedding millions of times
Speaker 3: more mass than our Sun does with its solar wind.
Speaker 3: It's blasting this constant, dense, high speed stream of plasma
Speaker 3: out into the surrounding space.
Speaker 2: And the black hole is sitting right in the crosshairs
Speaker 2: of that plasma stream, right actively accreting mass from that supergen's.
Speaker 3: Wind, right in the middle of the storm.
Speaker 2: Yes, but wait, let me stop you right there. We
Speaker 2: need to clear something up about the mechanism of these jets,
Speaker 2: because I think it trips a lot of people up. Sure,
Speaker 2: by definition, an event horizon means nothing escapes, not even light. Correct,
Speaker 2: So how on Earth is a black hole forcefully ejecting
Speaker 2: a massive jet of plasma out into space at relativistic speeds.
Speaker 2: If nothing can cross back over the threshold, where is
Speaker 2: this material even coming from?
Speaker 3: That's the key right there. The material in the jet
Speaker 3: never crossed the event horizon. Oh really, yeah, never made
Speaker 3: it inside the jet is generated by the extreme magnetohydrodynamics
Speaker 3: of the accretion disc itself.
Speaker 2: The accretion is being that swirl of material falling in.
Speaker 3: Exactly as the black hole pulls plasma from the supergians
Speaker 3: stellar wind. That material doesn't just fall down. It has
Speaker 3: angular momentum, right, It's spinning, so it spirals inward, forming
Speaker 3: this really dense, flattened disc of superheated plasma around the
Speaker 3: black hole.
Speaker 2: And because that plasma is an ionized gas, it's carrying
Speaker 2: its own magnetic field lines with it as it falls in,
Speaker 2: right it is.
Speaker 3: And as that plasma spirals closer and closer to the
Speaker 3: event horizon, it accelerates to a significant fraction of the
Speaker 3: speed of light. Wow, And the innermost region of that
Speaker 3: disc is subject to extreme frame dragging. We call it
Speaker 3: the lens thiring effect.
Speaker 2: Frame dragging What does that mean?
Speaker 3: It means the rotation of the black hole itself is
Speaker 3: actually pulling the physical fabric of space time around with it.
Speaker 2: That is just mind boggling. Space time itself is twisting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the magnetic field lines threaded through this plasma
Speaker 3: get dragged along, twisted, and tightly wound up by this
Speaker 3: differential rotation.
Speaker 2: So it's kind of like taking a thick rubber band
Speaker 2: and just twisting it relentlessly. The kinetic energy of the
Speaker 2: spinning disc is being converted into magnetic tension.
Speaker 3: That's a perfect way to look at it. And it
Speaker 3: keeps twisting until the tension reaches a breaking point.
Speaker 2: And then what happens.
Speaker 3: The magnetic fields become so tightly coiled that they colimate,
Speaker 3: meaning they form this tight vertical funnel perpendicular to the
Speaker 3: accretion disc. Okay, the extreme tension basically acts like a
Speaker 3: magnetic slingshot. It captures a fraction of the infalling plasma
Speaker 3: just before it crosses the event horizon and violently blasts
Speaker 3: it outward along the rotational axis.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: So the jet is powered by the rotational energy of
Speaker 3: the black hole and the inner accretion disc, not by
Speaker 3: anything escaping from inside the event horizon.
Speaker 2: Okay, that makes so much more sense. So we have
Speaker 2: these highly colimated beams of relativistic plasma shooting out from
Speaker 2: the poles of the black hole. But they aren't shooting
Speaker 2: into a vacuum.
Speaker 3: No, definitely not.
Speaker 2: They're firing directly into that hurricane force stellar wind radiating
Speaker 2: from the supergent star we talked about.
Speaker 3: Which brings us right back to the dancing jets. Yeah,
Speaker 3: doctor Probo's term perfectly captures the fluid die ynamics at
Speaker 3: play here. We are basically watching a high velocity, low
Speaker 3: density plasma jet slamming into a lower velocity but incredibly
Speaker 3: dense stellar wind.
Speaker 2: Okay, let me try an analogy here. Think of a
Speaker 2: high pressure water fountain in a public park.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'm with you.
Speaker 2: If a severe gale rolls through the column of water
Speaker 2: doesn't just shoot straight up, the lateral force of the
Speaker 2: wind intercepts the stream and bends its sideways. If you've
Speaker 2: ever walked past a fountain on a stormy day and
Speaker 2: gotten misted, you've experienced the microversion of signus x one.
Speaker 3: That's exactly it. The wind alters the trajectory of the
Speaker 3: water based on the ratio of their respective forces.
Speaker 2: Right, So in this system. The black hole is the fountain,
Speaker 2: the suburgen's radiation driven plaza is the gale force wind,
Speaker 2: and the jet is the water stream.
Speaker 3: Spot on and as the black hole completes its five
Speaker 3: point six day orbit around the star, the angle of
Speaker 3: that stellar wind hitting the jet is constantly changing.
Speaker 2: So from our perspective on Earth, what does that look like?
Speaker 3: Well, the radio emitting particle in the jet appear to
Speaker 3: sway and bend back and forth, altering their angle depending
Speaker 3: on where the black hole is in its orbital phase.
Speaker 2: That is wild.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the physical structure of the jet is actually deformed
Speaker 3: by the ram pressure of the stellar wind.
Speaker 2: But okay, visualizing a cosmic fountain bending in a stellar
Speaker 2: storm is one thing. Actually observing it from what over
Speaker 2: seven thousand light years away, that's an entirely different problem.
Speaker 3: It is a massive headache observationally.
Speaker 2: Speaking, because our largest single dish radio telescopes, even massive
Speaker 2: ones like the Green Bank Telescope or the Parks Observatory,
Speaker 2: they can't resolve something this small at that distance, can they?
Speaker 3: No, they can't. At that distance. The entire binary system,
Speaker 3: the wind and the jet just blur into a single
Speaker 3: unresolved pixel of radio emission, and.
Speaker 2: You can't just slab a bigger lens on a telescope
Speaker 2: to fix that. Right, it's a physics limitation, right.
Speaker 3: You are constrained by what's called the Rale criterion.
Speaker 2: Okay, hit me with the physics.
Speaker 3: It dictates that you're singular resolution is proportional to the
Speaker 3: wavelength of light you are observing, divided by the diameter
Speaker 3: of your telescope's aperture.
Speaker 2: Okay, So the bigger the wavelength, the bigger the telescope you.
Speaker 3: Need, exactly, and radio waves have very long wavelengths compared
Speaker 3: to visible light, so to get high resolution in the
Speaker 3: radio spectrum, you need an impractically large dish like continent
Speaker 3: sized pretty much. So the only way the researchers could
Speaker 3: resolve the minute deflection angle of this jet was to
Speaker 3: utilize very long baseline interferometry or VLBI. Oh.
Speaker 2: Right, So instead of building a single dish the size
Speaker 2: of a continent, you use multiple existing radio telescopes scattered
Speaker 2: all across the globe.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's a brilliant workaround.
Speaker 2: You observe the exact same target at the exact same time,
Speaker 2: and you use the physical distance between the telescopes, which
Speaker 2: is the baseline as your effective aperture size exactly.
Speaker 3: By linking telescopes across the United States utilizing the very
Speaker 3: long baseline array, they synthesized an Earth sized virtual.
Speaker 2: Telescop That is just incredible.
Speaker 3: But the technical challenge of VLBI is staggering. You aren't
Speaker 3: just pointing dishes at the sky.
Speaker 2: What else goes into it?
Speaker 3: Well, you have to record the incoming radio waves at
Speaker 3: each individual station with incredibly precise time stamps. And I
Speaker 3: mean precise. They use hydrogen maser atomic.
Speaker 2: Clocks, oh wow, just to make sure they know exactly
Speaker 2: when a specific wave hit a specific dish.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: And then you have to physically ship those hard drives
Speaker 3: to a central supercomputer.
Speaker 2: Wait, physically ship them like in the mail.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because the data rates are often way too massive
Speaker 3: to transfer over the internet. So they mail them to
Speaker 3: a central supercomputer called a correlator.
Speaker 2: Okay, so what does the correlator do once it has
Speaker 2: all these hard drives?
Speaker 3: The correlator lines up those atomic timestamps accounting for the
Speaker 3: microsecond differences and when the wavefront hit each telescope on
Speaker 3: Earth and it interferes the signals to reconstruct a high
Speaker 3: resolution image.
Speaker 2: Wow, So they basically stitched together an Earth sized telescope.
Speaker 3: They did, and that synthesized allowed the team to actually
Speaker 3: see the jet structure. They could map the exact vector
Speaker 3: of the jet and measure the precise angle of deflection
Speaker 3: caused by the stellar wind at different points in the orbit.
Speaker 2: And this is where the physics of the measurement becomes
Speaker 2: highly elegant, I think, because it's basically just a conservation
Speaker 2: of momentum problem, isn't it.
Speaker 3: That's exactly what it is.
Speaker 2: Because the researchers already had constraints on the properties of
Speaker 2: the supergent star, so they could calculate the ram pressure
Speaker 2: of the stellar wind, meaning how much lateral force the
Speaker 2: wind was applying to the jet. So if you know
Speaker 2: the force pushing from the side, and you use your
Speaker 2: earth sized interferometer to measure exactly how much the jet bends,
Speaker 2: you can just calculate the momentum flux of the jet
Speaker 2: pushing forward.
Speaker 3: You've got it. The deflection angle gives you the direct
Speaker 3: ratio between the winds power and the jet's power. It
Speaker 3: allowed them to calculate the instantaneous power of the jet. Instantaneous, yes,
Speaker 3: and Professor James Miller Jones, who is is a co
Speaker 3: author from the Curtain Institute of Radio Astronomy. He emphasized
Speaker 3: just how critical this instantaneous measurement is compared to our
Speaker 3: historical methods.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's talk about those historical methods, because usually if
Speaker 2: we wanted to know how powerful a black hole's jet was,
Speaker 2: we had a look at the macroscopic damage it did to.
Speaker 3: Its environment right right the aftermath.
Speaker 2: Like we looked at the massive radio lobes or cavities
Speaker 2: that the jets carved out of the surrounding interstellar medium
Speaker 2: over time.
Speaker 3: Exactly, you measure the volume of the cavity, you estimate
Speaker 3: the pressure of the surrounding gas, and you calculate how
Speaker 3: much mechanical work the jet had to do to push
Speaker 3: all that gas aside.
Speaker 2: But the issue there is that it only gives you
Speaker 2: the time average power the jet over like hundreds of
Speaker 2: thousands or even millions of years.
Speaker 3: Right, It's a huge time scale.
Speaker 2: But let me stop you there, because at timescale discrepancy
Speaker 2: is really interesting. Signus X one has been a creting
Speaker 2: matter and firing these jets for a very long time.
Speaker 2: So if we are trying to understand the broad strokes
Speaker 2: of how this black hole operates. Why is the million
Speaker 2: year average insufficient?
Speaker 3: That's a fair question.
Speaker 2: Like if I want to understand the thrust of a
Speaker 2: commercial jet engine, looking at its total fuel consumption over
Speaker 2: a long flight gives me a pretty good baseline of
Speaker 2: its efficiency, right.
Speaker 3: But that's assuming a steady burn, and a black hole's
Speaker 3: accretion process isn't a steady commercial flight. It is highly variable, chaotic,
Speaker 3: and bursty.
Speaker 2: Oh Okay.
Speaker 3: A better analogy for this engine would be testing the
Speaker 3: thrust dynamics of an experimental scramjet. If you only look
Speaker 3: at the total fuel consumed over its lifetime, you learn
Speaker 3: absolutely nothing about how the engine responds to a sudden
Speaker 3: extreme fluctuation and air density in a specific millisecond.
Speaker 2: Because the accretion disc isn't perfectly smooth, I get it.
Speaker 2: So clumps of dens or plasma are falling toward the
Speaker 2: event horizon, creating sudden spikes in friction and temperature.
Speaker 3: Exactly which manifest as intense rapid flares of X ray emission.
Speaker 3: And we can observe these X ray flas happening in
Speaker 3: real time. But if our only measurement for the jet
Speaker 3: is a million year average, we cannot correlate.
Speaker 2: The two because you're comparing a real time event to
Speaker 2: a million year average.
Speaker 3: Yes, we can't see how a sudden influx of matters
Speaker 3: signaled by an X ray flare translates into a change
Speaker 3: in the jet's power.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: But by utilizing the wind deflection method to calculate instantaneous power,
Speaker 3: the team can finally measure the jets output at the
Speaker 3: exact same moment they observe the X ray emissions from the.
Speaker 2: Infalling matter, so they can dynamically link the fuel intake
Speaker 2: directly to the exhaust output precisely.
Speaker 3: It's a game changer.
Speaker 2: Okay, so they captured the snapshot, they ran the vector
Speaker 2: calculus on the deflection angle. Let's talk about the numbers
Speaker 2: they extracted from this, because.
Speaker 3: They are staggering, they really are.
Speaker 2: The calculated kinetic power of the jets and sickness x
Speaker 2: one is equivalent to the total luminosity of ten thousand sons.
Speaker 3: Yeah, ten thousand sons, and that is just the mechanical
Speaker 3: energy channeled into the jets. It is a highly focused,
Speaker 3: tightly collimated being of plasma carrying the energy equivalent of
Speaker 3: ten thousand main sequence stars.
Speaker 2: That is terrifying, honestly, and the velocity measurement is equally
Speaker 2: impressive because determining the speed of relativistic jets without obvious
Speaker 2: moving clumps or knots I think they call them two
Speaker 2: track has historically been a massive headache.
Speaker 3: It's notoriously difficult.
Speaker 2: But the team determined the jet in signus X one
Speaker 2: is traveling at approximately zero point five c half the
Speaker 2: speed of light.
Speaker 3: Roughly one hundred and fifty thousand kilometers per second.
Speaker 2: Just to put that in perspective for you listening at
Speaker 2: that velocity, the plasma would reach the Moon from Earth
Speaker 2: in just over one second.
Speaker 3: It's fast. And pinning down that velocity allowed the researchers
Speaker 3: to finalize the most crucial calculation of the entire study,
Speaker 3: the accretion efficiency.
Speaker 2: Okay, break that down for us.
Speaker 3: When you calculate the mass accretion rate, meaning how much
Speaker 3: matter is actually plunging toward the black hole, and you
Speaker 3: compare it to the instantaneous power of the jet we
Speaker 3: just talked about, derive what we can refer to as
Speaker 3: the ten percent role.
Speaker 2: The ten percent role.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Doctor Paba's research confirmed that approximately ten percent of
Speaker 3: the rest mass energy of the infalling material is extracted
Speaker 3: and channeled directly into the jets.
Speaker 2: Okay, we definitely need to contextualize that ten percent figure.
Speaker 3: Oh for sure, because it's easy to.
Speaker 2: Look at a ten percent conversion rate and assume the
Speaker 2: engine is highly inefficient. Like if my car only converts
Speaker 2: ten percent of its fuel into forward momentum, the rest
Speaker 2: is mostly wasted as heat.
Speaker 3: That's terrible, right, But in astrophysics it's the exact opposite.
Speaker 3: The conversion of rest mass into energy via black hole
Speaker 3: accretion is actually one of the most ruthlessly efficient processes
Speaker 3: in the universe. Okay, think about nuclear fusion, the process
Speaker 3: powering our Sun and every other star. Fusion converts roughly
Speaker 3: zero point seven percent of its mass into energy.
Speaker 2: Wow, less than one percent, right, But.
Speaker 3: A black hole accretion disc can reach radiative efficiencies of
Speaker 3: up to forty percent, depending on the spin of the
Speaker 3: black hole.
Speaker 2: Forty percent. That's a massive jump.
Speaker 3: It is the sheer gravitational compression friction liberate a huge
Speaker 3: fraction of the plasma's rest mass energy dictated by Einstein's
Speaker 3: EMC two.
Speaker 2: Okay, so out of that total liberated energy, ten percent
Speaker 2: is captured by the magnetic fields and accelerated.
Speaker 3: Into the jet exactly. And because of EMC two, ten
Speaker 3: percent of the yield from an accretion disc represents an
Speaker 3: almost apocalyptic amount of kinetic energy being violently deposited into
Speaker 3: the surrounding interstellar medium.
Speaker 2: Okay, so ten percent is actually a massive cosmic return
Speaker 2: on investment. Oh absolutely, And this specific fraction, this ten
Speaker 2: percent rule, is not just an interesting piece of trivia
Speaker 2: for signus x one. The research emphasizes this heavily. This
Speaker 2: fraction is kind of the lynchpin for modern cosmology, isn't it.
Speaker 3: It really is. When astrophysicists run cosmological simulations to model
Speaker 3: the formation of the universe or the cosmic web and
Speaker 3: the evolution of galaxies, they rely on complex hydrodynamic code,
Speaker 3: and baked into that code for years has been.
Speaker 2: An assumption assumption about this ten percent.
Speaker 3: Yes, they assumed, based on theoretical models of magnetohydrodynamics and
Speaker 3: some indirect observations, that black hole jets carry away roughly
Speaker 3: ten percent of the accretion energy.
Speaker 2: So they just plug that number in.
Speaker 3: They had to. They needed that specific feedback mechanism in
Speaker 3: the simulations to make the virtual galaxies evolve into something
Speaker 3: that actually resembles the real universe.
Speaker 2: We observe what happens If they don't include that ten
Speaker 2: percent energy injection from the central black hole.
Speaker 3: The simulations fail. The virtual galaxies would just keep cooling
Speaker 3: gas and forming stars endlessly. They would grow too massive,
Speaker 3: too quickly. The simulated universe wouldn't match reality at all.
Speaker 2: Wow, So the models literally required that ten percent assumption
Speaker 2: to work.
Speaker 3: They did. But confirming that theoretical value through direct dynamic
Speaker 3: observation of a living black hole system has been incredibly
Speaker 3: elusive until now. Right, the Curtain University led study finally
Speaker 3: provided the observational proof. It anchored our mathematical models to
Speaker 3: empirical reaction.
Speaker 2: And that concept of an anchor point is exactly how
Speaker 2: Professor Miller Jones framed the importance of this discovery.
Speaker 3: It's get a great term for it.
Speaker 2: Because think about it. We're looking at a stellar mass
Speaker 2: black hole here around twenty one solar masses. But the
Speaker 2: black holes at the centers of galaxies supermassive black holes
Speaker 2: or active to lactic nuclei, those are millions or billions
Speaker 2: of solar.
Speaker 3: Masses right, completely different scale.
Speaker 2: But the fundamental physics of the accretion disc magnetic field
Speaker 2: twisting the mechanism launching the jet. It scales invariantly, doesn't.
Speaker 3: It It does. The equations governing general relativity and magnetohydrodynamics
Speaker 3: in these systems do not fundamentally change just because you
Speaker 3: increase the mass parameter.
Speaker 2: So a supermassive black hole operates on the exact same
Speaker 2: blueprint as signus x one exactly.
Speaker 3: Signus x one essentially acts as a cosmological Rosetta stone.
Speaker 2: That's brilliant. We spent decades developing the VLBI techniques, observing
Speaker 2: the X ray flares and mathematically untangling the wind deflection
Speaker 2: of this relatively close twenty one solar mass black hole. Yep,
Speaker 2: And now we finally translated the instantaneous mechanics and confirmed
Speaker 2: the ten percent conversion rule. So now we possess a
Speaker 2: verified translation key that we could apply to the supermassive
Speaker 2: engines driving the evolution of distant galaxies.
Speaker 3: Engines we could never hope to observe with this level
Speaker 3: of localized detail. Yeah, it's critible, and the timing of
Speaker 3: this verification is critical too, because observational radio astronomy is
Speaker 3: on the verge of a massive paradigm.
Speaker 2: Shift you're talking about the SKA.
Speaker 3: Yes, the Square Kilometer Array Observatory. The paper points directly
Speaker 3: toward it. It's currently under construction across Western Australia and
Speaker 3: South Africa.
Speaker 2: And for anyone who hasn't heard of the SKA, it
Speaker 2: isn't just another telescope. It's a generational leap in interferometry.
Speaker 2: We're talking about thousands of dishes in Africa and up
Speaker 2: to a million low frequency dipole antennas in Australia.
Speaker 3: The scale is hard to comprehend. The data processing requirements
Speaker 3: alone will rival the entire global Internet traffic.
Speaker 2: It is just nuts.
Speaker 3: But the sensitivity and resolution of the SKA will allow
Speaker 3: astronomers to detect radio jets from active galactic nuclei across
Speaker 3: millions of distant galaxies peering deep, deep into the universe's pass.
Speaker 2: So we will have this unprecedented catalog of supermassive black
Speaker 2: holes actively feeding and firing jets into their host galaxies exactly.
Speaker 3: But as you know, observing a million jets is just cataloging.
Speaker 2: Right, it's just stamp collecting at that point, right.
Speaker 3: To understand the life cycle of those galaxies, astronomers need
Speaker 3: to know exactly how much mechanical energy those jets are
Speaker 3: dumping into the circumgalactic medium. This is the process of
Speaker 3: agn feedback or stellar feedback.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about that feedback. Because a galaxy's ability to
Speaker 2: form stars is governed by the temperature of its gas reservoirs. Right.
Speaker 3: That's cold, dense molecular clouds collapse under their own gravity
Speaker 3: to ignite nuclear fusion and birth new stars.
Speaker 2: Ok.
Speaker 3: But if the supermassive black hole at the galactic center
Speaker 3: is firing a relativistic jet carrying ten percent of its
Speaker 3: accretion energy into the galaxies halo, the kinetic energy of
Speaker 3: that jet drives massive shock waves through the gas, and
Speaker 3: those shockwaves heat the gas up exactly dramatically, increasing its
Speaker 3: kinetic energy and preventing it from collapsing. It physically quenches
Speaker 3: the galaxy's star formation.
Speaker 2: Wow, it just shuts down the star factory.
Speaker 3: It does. Or, alternatively, under specific density conditions, the compression
Speaker 3: from the bowshock of the jet can actually force gas
Speaker 3: clouds to collapse, triggering a sudden localized starburst.
Speaker 2: So the jet ax is the galaxy's primary thermodynamic regulator.
Speaker 2: It can turn star formation off or force it into overdrive.
Speaker 3: Precisely, you cannot accurately model the life and death of
Speaker 3: a galaxy without quantifying that feedback mechanism.
Speaker 2: But when the SCA comes online and observes the quasar's
Speaker 2: jet a billion light years away, scientists won't need to
Speaker 2: resolve the microscopic fluid dynamics of its local stellar wind
Speaker 2: to understand its power.
Speaker 3: Will they No, they won't, And that's the beauty of
Speaker 3: it because the international team behind this study researchers from Curtain, Oxford,
Speaker 3: the University of Barcelona, the University of Wisconsin Madison, the
Speaker 3: University of Lethridge, and the Institute of Space Science, they
Speaker 3: already did the grueling foundational work on Signus x one.
Speaker 2: So the SCAA astronomers will just be able to observe
Speaker 2: the X ray luminosity of the distant quasar as acretion disk,
Speaker 2: apply the confirmed ten percent rule derived from Signus x one,
Speaker 2: and instantly calculate the thermodynamic impact that jet is having
Speaker 2: on its host galaxy.
Speaker 3: Exactly, we calibrated the instrument we need to decode the
Speaker 3: evolution of the cosmos. It connects the microscopic physics of
Speaker 3: a localized plasma interaction right to the macroscopic structure of
Speaker 3: the cosmic web.
Speaker 2: It's just a phenomenal journey when you step back and
Speaker 2: look at it. We started by looking at a violently
Speaker 2: unstable supergent star shredding its outer layers through radiation pressure
Speaker 2: to create a dense stellar wind. Then we saw how
Speaker 2: an earth sized interferometry network managed to capture the precise
Speaker 2: deflection of a relativistic plasma jet plowing into that wind.
Speaker 3: The dancing jet.
Speaker 2: The dancing jet. Yeah, And through the vector calculus of
Speaker 2: that deflection, the instantaneous power of the black hole was
Speaker 2: finally clogged at ten thousand solar luminosities moving in half
Speaker 2: the speed of.
Speaker 3: Light, which ultimately proved that ten percent of the incredibly
Speaker 3: efficient accretion energy is diverted into the jet. That confirmed
Speaker 3: a fundamental assumption of cosmological modeling and really set the
Speaker 3: baseline for the next era of radio astronomy.
Speaker 2: It fundamentally changes how we view astrophysical chaos. The turbulent,
Speaker 2: violent interaction between a Subersen's wind and a black holes
Speaker 2: jet isn't just noise obscuring the physics.
Speaker 3: Oh, the turbulence itself was the key.
Speaker 2: Exactly the turbulence contain the exact mathematical variable needed to
Speaker 2: understand how galaxies grow and die. And I think that
Speaker 2: leaves us with a really profound, lingering consideration regarding the
Speaker 2: nature of complex systems. Oh. Absolutely, If the localized fluid
Speaker 2: dynamics of a single binary system hold the mathematical constraints
Speaker 2: for the evolution of the entire universe, it raises the
Speaker 2: question what other fundamental constants of reality are currently hiding
Speaker 2: in the plain sight of chaotic localized phenomen just waiting
Speaker 2: for the resolution of our instruments to catch up to
Speaker 2: the math