Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomi 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: Imagine looking into a kindergarten classroom. You'd expect to see
Speaker 2: you four year olds playing with blocks, figuring out basic shapes,
Speaker 2: just sort.
Speaker 3: Of napping, spilling juice.
Speaker 2: Right exactly, just starting to piece the world together. But instead,
Speaker 2: sitting right there in one of those tiny plastic chairs
Speaker 2: is a fully grown, fifty.
Speaker 3: Year old adult wearing a tailored suit.
Speaker 2: Wearing a tailored suit, doing complex calculator. I mean, it
Speaker 2: makes absolute no sense, right, The timeline is just completely broken.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that adult simply hasn't had the time to.
Speaker 2: Grow up in that exactly, and that feeling of just
Speaker 2: complete paradigm breaking confusion. That is exactly what astrophysicists experienced recently.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, when the James Webb Space Telescope stared into
Speaker 2: the deepest, oldest reaches of the universe.
Speaker 3: It is honestly the ultimate cosmic anachronism. Yeah, we're looking
Speaker 3: at a stage in the universe's history where everything should
Speaker 3: be in its infancy, right, you know, small gas clouds,
Speaker 3: the very first rudimentary star is just just beginning to ignite,
Speaker 3: small structures starting to merge together. Babies, just babies. Yeah,
Speaker 3: But sitting right there in the middle of this cosmic
Speaker 3: kindergarten is an absolute monster, a super massive black hole.
Speaker 2: It's wild. And to really understand why this discovery is
Speaker 2: keeping cosmologists awake at night, we kind of have to
Speaker 2: look at the classical.
Speaker 3: Rules of the universe, right, the established playbook.
Speaker 2: Right, because the model we've all accepted for decades, it's
Speaker 2: built on a very simple, very logical sequence of events
Speaker 2: starts small. You have to right in the beginning, you
Speaker 2: have giant clouds of gas. Gravity pulls that gas together
Speaker 2: until it ignites, and boom, you get a star.
Speaker 3: Right, And a massive star burns, furiously runs out of
Speaker 3: nuclear fuel, and eventually, well, it collapses under its own
Speaker 3: immense weight, and.
Speaker 2: That collapse creates a stellar mass black.
Speaker 3: Hole right exactly, the dead remnant of a single star.
Speaker 2: Just a small baby black hole. And from there, the
Speaker 2: classical model says, this little black hole starts to feed.
Speaker 2: It pulls in surrounding gas as well as rogue planets.
Speaker 2: Maybe it merges with another small black hole in nearby.
Speaker 3: It's a slow process of accretion.
Speaker 2: Accretion, right. But here's the critical part for you listening.
Speaker 2: There is a hard physical speed limit on how fast
Speaker 2: a black hole can actually eat, isn't there?
Speaker 3: Yes, the Eddington limit. And this is a crucial piece
Speaker 3: of the physics puzzle that makes this new discovery just
Speaker 3: so baffling.
Speaker 2: Like that down for us.
Speaker 3: So, when gas falls into a black hole, it doesn't
Speaker 3: just drop straight in. It swirls around, you know, like
Speaker 3: water circling a drain.
Speaker 2: Right, forming that accretion disk exactly.
Speaker 3: And as all that material rubs together, it do the
Speaker 3: speed of light. The friction heats the gas up to
Speaker 3: millions of degrees oh wow. Yeah, and that causes it
Speaker 3: to emit massive amounts of radiation, just blinding light and heat.
Speaker 2: And that radiation pushes outward, doesn't it Precisely, The outward
Speaker 2: pressure of the radiation pushes against the inward pull.
Speaker 3: Of the black hole's gravity.
Speaker 2: It's a tug of war exactly.
Speaker 3: So if a black hole tries to eat too much
Speaker 3: too fast, the radiation pressure becomes so intense that it
Speaker 3: actually blows the surrounding food away.
Speaker 2: Wait, so it stars itself.
Speaker 3: It starves itself. So because of this Eddington limit, a
Speaker 3: black hole can only grow at a strictly regulated, very
Speaker 3: incremental pace.
Speaker 2: Okay, So to go from a single dead star to
Speaker 2: a super massive black hole with the mass of millions
Speaker 2: of suns.
Speaker 3: You need billions of years of slow, steady.
Speaker 2: Feeding billions, which means the galaxy, you know, the stars,
Speaker 2: the gas, the whole food source has to exist first.
Speaker 3: Right, the stars are the bricks. You need generations of them, living, dying,
Speaker 3: and feeding the center to slowly build this supermassive skyscraper.
Speaker 2: But the James Web Space Telescope just found a skyscraper
Speaker 2: that exists before the bricks were ever even manufactured.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's mind bending. The object we are looking
Speaker 3: at is officially cataloged as a bell two seven four
Speaker 3: four QSO one.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's pause on that name for a second. QSO one.
Speaker 2: I know astronomers love their acronyms, but what does QSO
Speaker 2: actually stand for? And like, why does it matter here?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: So, QSO stands for quasi stellar object, which is the
Speaker 3: formal term for what we more commonly call a quasar moiser. Yeah,
Speaker 3: when astronomers first discovered these things back in the mid
Speaker 3: twentieth century, they looked through their telescopes and saw what
Speaker 3: looked like ordinary single stars, just a little pin pricks
Speaker 3: of light exactly. But when they analyzed the light, the
Speaker 3: energy output was impossibly high for a single star, so
Speaker 3: they called them quasi stellar.
Speaker 2: Quasi stellar, so they weren't stars.
Speaker 3: At all, not at all. It took years to realize
Speaker 3: that these were actually the intensely glowing accretion disks of
Speaker 3: supermassive black hole at.
Speaker 2: The centers of distant galaxies.
Speaker 3: Yes, feeding so voraciously that they outshine the hundreds of
Speaker 3: billions of stars in their host galaxy combined.
Speaker 2: That is just terriff. So when we talk about QSO one,
Speaker 2: we are talking about an actively feeding, brilliantly bright black hole, right.
Speaker 3: And it's often referred to in the research as little
Speaker 3: red dot.
Speaker 2: Little red dot, which sounds cute but perfectly describes how
Speaker 2: it appears on the James Web imaging sensors.
Speaker 3: It does, But that simple visual description really belies an
Speaker 3: astonishing reality.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's look at the timeline. QSO one existed just
Speaker 2: seven hundred million years after the Big Bang. Now, if
Speaker 2: you're listening to this, you probably know the universe is
Speaker 2: roughly thirteen point eight billion years old, give or take. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so let's map that onto a human life span to
Speaker 2: make it visceral. If the universe is an eighty year
Speaker 2: old person today, we are looking at a snapshot from
Speaker 2: when that person was just four years old, a toddler,
Speaker 2: a toddler, and at that toddler stage, the light from
Speaker 2: this object began its journey.
Speaker 3: Right. It has been traveling through the expanding vacuum of
Speaker 3: space for over thirteen billion years just to hit the
Speaker 3: golden mirrors of our.
Speaker 2: Telescope, which is crazy to think about.
Speaker 3: And because the universe is expanding, the space between us
Speaker 3: and QSO one has been literally stretching the entire time
Speaker 3: that light.
Speaker 2: Was in transit, right, which is exactly why we need
Speaker 2: James Webb in the first place. Isn't it like Hubble
Speaker 2: couldn't have spotted this?
Speaker 3: No, Hubble is an incredibly powerful optical and ultra violet telescope. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but think about what happens when you stretch a light wave,
Speaker 3: it changes color exactly as the universe expands. It grabs
Speaker 3: the visible light emitted by QSO one thirteen billion years ago,
Speaker 3: and stretches the wavelength.
Speaker 2: So by the time it reaches us, that wave.
Speaker 3: Has been stretched out of the visible spectrum entirely and
Speaker 3: into the infrared. It's called cosmological red shift.
Speaker 2: Redshift, so the light literally becomes redder and then completely invisible.
Speaker 2: To humanize, right, and.
Speaker 3: James Web was specifically engineered with near infrared and mid
Speaker 3: infrared sensors to capture this exact kind of ancient stretched light.
Speaker 2: Okay, so Web spots this infrared little red dot. But
Speaker 2: the physical size of this thing is what really caught
Speaker 2: my attention.
Speaker 3: Oh it's tiny.
Speaker 2: It's only thirteen hundred light years across for anyone trying
Speaker 2: to visualize that. You know, our own Milky Way galaxy
Speaker 2: is about one hundred thousand light years from edge to edge. Right, so,
Speaker 2: QSO one is barely more than one percent the size
Speaker 2: of our galaxy.
Speaker 3: It is incredibly compact.
Speaker 2: But wait, if you're listening to this and running the
Speaker 2: mental math, a massive red flag should be going up
Speaker 2: right now. It should because if something is only thirteen
Speaker 2: hundred light years wide and it is located thirteen billion
Speaker 2: light years away. Yeah, it shouldn't just be a dot. No,
Speaker 2: it should be sub microscopic. I mean it should be
Speaker 2: entirely invisible even to James web The resolution required to
Speaker 2: see any internal structure of an object that small at
Speaker 2: that distance, it borders on science fiction, it really does.
Speaker 2: How are we not just seeing a single blurry pixel.
Speaker 3: Well, that skepticism is entirely warranted. I mean, if we
Speaker 3: were just pointing James Webb in an empty patch of
Speaker 3: space and zooming in, we would not be able to
Speaker 3: resolve the details of QSO one.
Speaker 2: The optics just wouldn't allow it.
Speaker 3: The geometry of the optics simply wouldn't allow it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: we're only able to study this object because we had
Speaker 3: help from one of the most bizarre and powerful phenomenon.
Speaker 2: Physics, gravitational lensing.
Speaker 3: Exactly in this case, Nature provided us with a giant
Speaker 3: magnifying glass called ABLE twenty seven forty four, also known
Speaker 3: as Pandora's.
Speaker 2: Cluster Caandora's cluster. It's like a massive pile up of
Speaker 2: multiple galaxy clusters. But how does a cluster of galaxies
Speaker 2: act as a magnifying glass. We're obviously not talking about
Speaker 2: glass lenses here.
Speaker 3: No, we have to step into Einstein's general theory of
Speaker 3: relativity for this.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's do it.
Speaker 3: So. Einstein revolutionized our understanding of gravity by showing that
Speaker 3: it isn't just you know, a magnetic like pull between
Speaker 3: objects mass actually bends the fabric of space and time itself.
Speaker 2: Right. Classic analogy is the bowling ball on a trampoline.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the heavy ball creates a deep dip in the fabric,
Speaker 3: and if you roll a marble nearby, its path curves
Speaker 3: down into the dip.
Speaker 2: The trampoline analogy is great for picturing the dip. But
Speaker 2: and correct me if I'm wrong. Light doesn't roll. Light
Speaker 2: always travels in a perfectly straight line. That's a fundamental
Speaker 2: rule of the universe.
Speaker 3: Well, light does travel in a straight line, But what
Speaker 3: happens when the space it's traveling through is curved. Imagine
Speaker 3: drawing a straight line on a flat piece of paper.
Speaker 3: Now crumple that paper or wrap it around a sphere.
Speaker 2: The line you drew is still straight relative to the
Speaker 2: surface of the paper.
Speaker 3: Exactly, but in three dimensional space it's bending and curving
Speaker 3: along with the paper.
Speaker 2: Okay, that makes sense. So the light from our little
Speaker 2: red dot QSO one is speeding toward Earth, but sitting
Speaker 2: directly between us and QSO one is Pandora's cluster.
Speaker 3: And Pidora's cluster contains the mass of trillions of stars,
Speaker 3: massive amounts of gas, and just vast halos of dark matter.
Speaker 3: It is a gravitational heavyweight.
Speaker 2: So that's a huge bowling ball on the trampoline.
Speaker 3: Huge. It warps the space around it so severely that
Speaker 3: when the light from QSO one approaches, it's forced to
Speaker 3: travel through this warped curved space. The cluster essentially pinches
Speaker 3: the light paths together, focusing them toward us, just like.
Speaker 2: A literal magnifying glass focuses sunlight exactly like that, it
Speaker 2: concentrates the light, making QSO one appear much brighter and
Speaker 2: larger than it actually is.
Speaker 3: But gravitational lenses are not polished glass. They are lumpy, chaotic,
Speaker 3: and uneven. Because the mass in a galaxy cluster isn't
Speaker 3: distributed perfectly right, it's clumpy, very clumpy, and this leads
Speaker 3: to a fascinating side effect. The light from QSO one
Speaker 3: doesn't just take one curved path around the cluster. It
Speaker 3: takes multiple paths. Wait, really, yeah, some light goes left
Speaker 3: around a particularly dense pocket of dark matter, some light
Speaker 3: goes right, some goes over the top.
Speaker 2: And because space is warped differently on the left side
Speaker 2: than the right side, those paths are different lengths.
Speaker 3: Exactly. Yeah, the light taking the left path might arrive
Speaker 3: at Earth years before the light taking the right path.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: And from our perspective on Earth, looking back at the cluster,
Speaker 3: we don't just see one magnified, little red dot. We
Speaker 3: see three distinct, separate images of QSO one smeared across
Speaker 3: different parts of the sky.
Speaker 2: See. I have to play the skeptic again here, seeing
Speaker 2: three distorted smeared copies of a galaxy scattered around a cluster.
Speaker 2: That sounds like an absolute nightmare for a data scientist.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's incredibly complex.
Speaker 2: It's literally a funhouse mirror. If you look at yourself
Speaker 2: in a funhouse mirror, your head is huge, your legs
Speaker 2: are tiny, your waist is warped. You can't use that
Speaker 2: reflection to accurately measure your height or your weight. Right, So,
Speaker 2: if QUSO one is distorted by this cosmic funhouse mirror,
Speaker 2: how can we possibly trust any measurements we take of it.
Speaker 3: Well, that is the paradox of gravitational lensing. The spatial image,
Speaker 3: you know, the physical shape we see on the screen
Speaker 3: is absolutely distorted. If we tried to measure its exact
Speaker 3: physical boundaries based purely on the picture, we'd be completely wrong.
Speaker 3: But we aren't just taking photographs. You're taking spectra. And
Speaker 3: while the funhouse mirror changes the shape of the image,
Speaker 3: it does not change the fundamental properties of the light itself.
Speaker 2: Oh I see, Yeah.
Speaker 3: The wavelengths of light, the chemical fingerprints embedded in that light,
Speaker 3: the velocity signatures, those remain pristine.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the funhouse mirror might stretch my face, but
Speaker 2: it doesn't change the color of my.
Speaker 3: Eyes precisely, and more importantly, the magnification effect, the sheer
Speaker 3: brightening of the object, is what gives us enough raw photons,
Speaker 3: enough actual light particles to feed into our most advanced instruments.
Speaker 2: So we need the distortion we do.
Speaker 3: Without the funhouse mirror, the light from qso one would
Speaker 3: just be too faint to analyze. The distortion is the
Speaker 3: price of admission for the magnification.
Speaker 2: And the instrument that paid that price of admission The
Speaker 2: one that actually decoded this light is the Near Infrared spectrograph.
Speaker 3: On James Web Yes, the nir.
Speaker 2: SPEC, specifically using something called an integral field unit or IFU.
Speaker 2: I think it's worth taking a moment to explain how
Speaker 2: this piece of technology works, because it's really the key
Speaker 2: to this entire discovery. This isn't just a camera.
Speaker 3: No, not at all. A standard camera gives you a
Speaker 3: two dimensional picture. You see a glowing dot and you
Speaker 3: can measure how bright it is and maybe it's general color.
Speaker 3: A sectograph, on the other hand, takes the light from
Speaker 3: a single point and passes it through a prism or
Speaker 3: a diffraction grating, splitting it into a rainbow.
Speaker 2: Just like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album.
Speaker 3: Cover, exactly like that. And when you look at that rainbow,
Speaker 3: you see dark bands or bright lines at very specific colors.
Speaker 3: Those lines are chemical fingerprints.
Speaker 2: Fingerprints.
Speaker 3: Yeah, every element in the universe, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, absorbs
Speaker 3: and in its light at incredibly specific, unique wavelengths. By
Speaker 3: looking at the bar code of lines in the spectrum,
Speaker 3: we know exactly what an object is made of without
Speaker 3: ever having to go there.
Speaker 2: But the integral field unit, the IFU takes this a
Speaker 2: step further, doesn't. It doesn't just take one spectrum of
Speaker 2: the whole object.
Speaker 3: No, the IFU is an engineering morvel. It takes the
Speaker 3: image page of QSO one and slices it up into
Speaker 3: a grid of hundreds of tiny individual pixels, and then
Speaker 3: it takes complete separate spectrum for every single one of
Speaker 3: those pixels simultaneously.
Speaker 2: Wait simultaneously. So instead of just saying this whole dot
Speaker 2: is made of hydrogen, the if you can say the
Speaker 2: top left corner has this chemical makeup, the bottom right
Speaker 2: has this makeup, and the center has this make up.
Speaker 3: Precisely, it's a three D data cube. You get an
Speaker 3: X and y axis for the picture and the Z
Speaker 3: axis for the chemistry of every microscopic piece of the picture.
Speaker 3: That is unbelievable, And chemistry isn't all the spectrum tells us.
Speaker 3: The spectrum also reveals motion. And this is how the researchers,
Speaker 3: led by scientists like Igness George Papalis and cosen wal Marcantini,
Speaker 3: this is how they achieved the impossible.
Speaker 2: They directly wighed the black hole.
Speaker 3: They did.
Speaker 2: Okay, we mentioned earlier that we measure motion using the
Speaker 2: Doppler effect. Let's make sure the mechanics of that are
Speaker 2: crystal clear for everyone listening.
Speaker 3: Sure, most people experience the Doppler effect with sound. You
Speaker 3: know you hear an ambulance come down the street towards you.
Speaker 3: As it moves towards you, it's chasing its own sound waves,
Speaker 3: compressing them. Compress sound waves mean a higher pitch.
Speaker 2: But the moment it passes you.
Speaker 3: Exactly the moment it passes you and drives away, the
Speaker 3: sound waves are stretched out and the pitch drops instantly OO.
Speaker 2: And light does the exact same thing, because light is
Speaker 2: a wave.
Speaker 3: Yes, if a cloud of glowing hydrogen gas in QSO
Speaker 3: one is moving toward Earth, its light waves are compressed
Speaker 3: in the spectrum of light. Shorter compressed waves shift toward
Speaker 3: the blue end of the.
Speaker 2: Rainbow, which we call blue shift right.
Speaker 3: And if the gas is moving away from us, the
Speaker 3: waves stretch out and shift toward the red end of
Speaker 3: the spectrum red shift.
Speaker 2: So. Using the IFU, the researchers looked at the cloud
Speaker 2: of hydrogen gas swirling around the center of QSO one.
Speaker 2: Because it's swirling, one side of the gas cloud is
Speaker 2: naturally coming toward us as it rotates and the other
Speaker 2: side is moving away exactly the if you allowed them
Speaker 2: to look at the left pixel and see a blue shift,
Speaker 2: and look at the right pixel and see a yes.
Speaker 3: And by measuring exactly how blue or how red the
Speaker 3: light was, they could calculate the exact velocity of the gas.
Speaker 2: They mapped the speed of a gas cloud thirteen billion
Speaker 2: light years away, And the.
Speaker 3: Map they generated is the smoking gun that destroyed the
Speaker 3: classical model. Why because when they plotted the velocity of
Speaker 3: the gas against its distance from the exact center of
Speaker 3: the object, they didn't just see a random, swirling mess.
Speaker 3: They saw a highly structured, mathematically perfect curve known as Kepplearian.
Speaker 2: Motion Giplarian motion, named after Johannes Kepler, the astronomer who
Speaker 2: figured out the laws of planetary motion in our own
Speaker 2: solar system in the seventeenth century. Let's visualize this, because
Speaker 2: it is the absolute crux of the argument. Think of
Speaker 2: how our solar system operates. Mercury is the closest planet
Speaker 2: to the Sun. It whips around the Sun at blazing
Speaker 2: speeds gray fast. Venus is further out, and it moves slower.
Speaker 2: Earth is further still, moving slower than Venus by the
Speaker 2: time you get out to Neptune, it is practically crawling
Speaker 2: along its orbit. Compared to Mercury. The speed drops off
Speaker 2: in a very specific steep curve the further way you get.
Speaker 3: And why does it drop off like that, Because gravity
Speaker 3: follows an inverse square law. The gravitational pull of the
Speaker 3: Sun weakens drastically as you move outward. But the only
Speaker 3: reason we see this clean, predictable curve in the Solar
Speaker 3: system is because the mass of the Solar system is
Speaker 3: not spread out over ninety nine point eight percent of
Speaker 3: all the mass in our entire solar system is concentrated
Speaker 3: in a single, incredibly dense central point, the Sun. The Sun.
Speaker 2: I like to picture it like a tether ball pole
Speaker 2: on a playground. You have a heavy, solid metal pole
Speaker 2: in the center and a ball attached to a string.
Speaker 2: When you hit the ball, it swings around the pole
Speaker 2: in a tight predictable arc. The tension is clear, the
Speaker 2: anchor is clear.
Speaker 3: That's a great analogy.
Speaker 2: The mass is in the middle and the gas or
Speaker 2: the ball simply responds to that central mass.
Speaker 3: And that is exactly what the IFU data showed in
Speaker 3: QSO one. The hydrogen gas closest to the center was
Speaker 3: moving at blistering speeds thousands of colometers per second.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: And as they measure the gas further out, the velocity
Speaker 3: dropped on a perfect Cuplearrian curve. The tether ball pole
Speaker 3: was there.
Speaker 2: But what if it wasn't a black hole? I mean,
Speaker 2: what if QSO one was just a really dense cluster
Speaker 2: of stars, like a normal galaxy in the making.
Speaker 3: Well, if QSO one was a normal, mature galaxy packed
Speaker 3: with stars, the mass would be distributed, it wouldn't be
Speaker 3: a tetherball pole. Okay, Imagine instead that the mass was
Speaker 3: a massive, chaotic swarm of bees. If you throw a
Speaker 3: ball through the swarm of bees, there was no single
Speaker 3: central anchor pulling on it. It gets pulled a little
Speaker 3: to the left by this clump of bees, a little
Speaker 3: to the right by that clump.
Speaker 2: So the rotation wouldn't be smooth like if you look
Speaker 2: at the rotation curve of a normal galaxy like the
Speaker 2: Milky Way, it does not drop off steeply at the edges. Right,
Speaker 2: the stars at the outer edge of our galaxy are
Speaker 2: moving surprisingly fast. That flat rotation curve is actually how
Speaker 2: we discovered dark matter, right, because there was invisible mass
Speaker 2: spread through the galaxy, pulling on the outer stars exactly.
Speaker 3: A distributed mass creates a flat or chaotic rotation curve.
Speaker 3: A concentrated mass creates a Coplearian curve. And the data
Speaker 3: from QSO one was undeniably keplarium.
Speaker 2: So it's concentrated.
Speaker 3: Yes, the gas was governed entirely by the simple laws
Speaker 3: of gravity acting on a single dominant central mass.
Speaker 2: Which meant the team could do something unprecedented. By knowing
Speaker 2: the velocity of the gas in its distance from the center,
Speaker 2: they could use basic Newtonian physics to calculate exactly how
Speaker 2: much mass was required to force the gas to move
Speaker 2: that fast.
Speaker 3: They didn't have to guess, they didn't have to extrapolate
Speaker 3: from modern black holes. They directly weighed the invisible anchor, and.
Speaker 2: The number they derived was staggering.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, fifty million times the mass of our sun.
Speaker 2: Fifty million solar masses. I mean, just let that sink
Speaker 2: in for a second. Just seven hundred million years after
Speaker 2: the Big Bang, an object with the weight of fifty
Speaker 2: million suns is sitting in the center of this tiny,
Speaker 2: thirteen hundred light year wide spe of space. It's massive,
Speaker 2: but as immense as that number is the sheer mass.
Speaker 2: Isn't what breaks the models, is it? The real shock
Speaker 2: comes when you compare that fifty million to the rest
Speaker 2: of the object.
Speaker 3: Right, This brings us to a terrifying revelation about the
Speaker 3: structure of QSO one. We can calculate the mass of
Speaker 3: the black hole from the gas velocity. We can also
Speaker 3: estimate the mass of the entire system, the gas, the
Speaker 3: potential dark matter, any faint stars that might be there.
Speaker 2: Based on the total light and dynamic motion exactly.
Speaker 3: And when the researchers compared the two, they found that
Speaker 3: the black hole makes up at least two thirds of
Speaker 3: the entire mass of the object, sixty six percent at least.
Speaker 3: It could be even higher.
Speaker 2: The black hole is two thirds of the hole. To
Speaker 2: understand why that is so utterly bizarre, we have to
Speaker 2: look at our own neighborhood. Let's look at the Milky Way.
Speaker 2: We have a super massive black hole at the center
Speaker 2: of our galaxy, Sagittarius a star, it's a beast. It's
Speaker 2: about four million times the mass of our Sun. But
Speaker 2: the Milky Way galaxy as a whole, including the hundreds
Speaker 2: of billions of starfre the sprawling spiral arms of gas.
Speaker 2: The massive halo of dark matter. The Milky Way weighs
Speaker 2: something on the order of a trillion solar masses.
Speaker 3: Which means mathematically, Sagittarius a star makes up roughly points
Speaker 3: zero zero zero four percent of the Milky Way's total mass.
Speaker 3: That's nothing. In the modern universe. A super massive black hole,
Speaker 3: as terrifying and powerful as it is, is basically a
Speaker 3: rounding error when you weigh the entire host galaxy.
Speaker 2: It's a tiny anger in a vast ocean of stars.
Speaker 2: Even in the most extreme giant elliptical galaxies we see today,
Speaker 2: the central black hole might make up maybe one percent
Speaker 2: of the host's mass if that, but in QSO one
Speaker 2: it is sixty six percent. The proportions are just flipped.
Speaker 2: It's a lopsided universe.
Speaker 3: That is the perfect way to phrase it. This isn't
Speaker 3: the galaxy that happens to have a black hole in
Speaker 3: the center. This is a massive black hole that just
Speaker 3: happens to have a faint, wispy halo of gas clinging
Speaker 3: to it.
Speaker 2: It's essentially a naked supermassive black hole. Pretty Much the
Speaker 2: environment is completely and utterly dominated by this singular gravitational monster,
Speaker 2: and This profound imbalance is the first major blow to
Speaker 2: the classical theory, because if the black hole is built
Speaker 2: from the remnants of dead stars, where are the rest
Speaker 2: of the stars exactly?
Speaker 3: A stellar population large enough to produce enough dead seeds
Speaker 3: to merge into a fifty million solar mass black hole
Speaker 3: should still be there orbiting around it. The galaxy should
Speaker 3: outweigh the black hole by orders of magnitude.
Speaker 2: And the mystery deepens when we turn our attention back
Speaker 2: to that wispy halo of gas. The IFU didn't just
Speaker 2: measure the velocity of gas, it measured the chemistry. If
Speaker 2: there was a massive population of stars that lived, died,
Speaker 2: and fed this black hole, there should be chemical evidence
Speaker 2: left behind in the surrounding gas.
Speaker 3: And here we need to talk about metallicity. The term
Speaker 3: metal in astrophysics is frankly confusing for anyone who took
Speaker 3: high school chemistry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember being so confused by this at first.
Speaker 3: It's an amusing quirk of the field. To a chemist,
Speaker 3: a metal is a specific type of element with metallic bonds,
Speaker 3: like iron, copper, or gold. Oxygen is certainly not a metal.
Speaker 3: Neon is a noble gas, not a metal, but to
Speaker 3: an astronomer, the periodic table is much much simpler. There
Speaker 3: was hydrogen, there is helium, and absolutely everything else on
Speaker 3: the periodic table is thrown into a single bucket labeled.
Speaker 2: Metals, which seems lazy honestly, why do they do that?
Speaker 3: Because of the Big Bang. In the first few minutes
Speaker 3: after the universe was born, the energy was so intense
Speaker 3: that subatomic particles fused together to create the very first atoms. Okay,
Speaker 3: but the universe was expanding and cooling rapidly. By the
Speaker 3: time things cooled down enough for fusion to stop, the
Speaker 3: universe had only managed to forge two elements, hydrogen and helium,
Speaker 3: With just a microscopic dusting of lithium. That was it.
Speaker 3: That was it. The entire universe was a pristine, chemically
Speaker 3: boring cloud of hydrogen and helium.
Speaker 2: So the primordial universe had zero metals, no oxygen, no carbon,
Speaker 2: no iron, no.
Speaker 3: Silicon exactly, So where did all the complex elements come from?
Speaker 3: Did the carbon in our DNA, or the calcium in
Speaker 3: our bones, or the oxygen in our atmosphere originate?
Speaker 2: It were forged inside stars?
Speaker 3: It refords Inside stars.
Speaker 2: A star is fundamentally a nuclear fusion reactor. The crushing
Speaker 2: gravity of the star pushes inward, squeezing hydrogen atoms together
Speaker 2: so tightly that they fuse into helium. This releases energy,
Speaker 2: which pushes outward, keeping the star stable.
Speaker 3: But eventually a massive star runs out of hydrogen in
Speaker 3: its core. Gravity starts to win, crushing the core even tighter,
Speaker 3: raising the temperature even higher. And then what Now it's
Speaker 3: hot enough to take that helium and fuse it into carbon.
Speaker 3: Then the carbon fuses into oxygen, then neon, silicon, all
Speaker 3: the way up to iron. The star becomes an onion,
Speaker 3: with layers of progressively heavier elements being forged in the
Speaker 3: crushing heat of the core.
Speaker 2: But those elements are locked inside the star. How do
Speaker 2: they get out into the gas clouds of the galaxy.
Speaker 3: When a massive star reaches iron, the fusion process stops
Speaker 3: releasing energy. It actually absorbs energy. Oh that's bad, very bad.
Speaker 3: The outward pressure disappears, and in a fraction of a second,
Speaker 3: the entire star collapses inward. The core rebounds in an
Speaker 3: unimaginably violent explosion called a supernova boom boom. That explosion
Speaker 3: tears the star apart, violently, scattering all those newly forged
Speaker 3: heavy elements, the metals out into the surrounding interstellar gas.
Speaker 2: It pollutes the environment with heavy elements, its stellar debris.
Speaker 3: Yes, so when astronomers look at a gas cloud in
Speaker 3: our modern Milky Way, they see a high metallicity. They
Speaker 3: see lots of oxygen, carbon, and iron mixed in with
Speaker 3: the hydrogen. That high metallicity tells them that countless generations
Speaker 3: of stars have lived, burned, and exploded in this neighborhood
Speaker 3: over billions of years. The gas is rich with the
Speaker 3: ashes of dead stars.
Speaker 2: Which brings us back to the little red dot. The
Speaker 2: James Webb Space Telescope looked at the spectrum of the
Speaker 2: gas swirling around this fifty million solar mass black hole.
Speaker 2: It did If the classical model is right and this
Speaker 2: black hole was built from the collapsing remnant of massive stars,
Speaker 2: the surrounding gas should be choked with the heavy elements
Speaker 2: blown off by all those supernovas.
Speaker 3: But the data showed almost nothing. Nothing. The composition maps
Speaker 3: revealed that the gas in QSO one is almost entirely
Speaker 3: pure hydrogen and helium. The metallicity is incredibly low. To
Speaker 3: put a number on it, the gas around QSO one
Speaker 3: has less than point five percent of the metallicity we
Speaker 3: see in our own.
Speaker 2: Sun less than half a percent. It's virtually pristine.
Speaker 3: It is one of the most chemically unpolluted galactic environments
Speaker 3: ever measured. The complete lack of heavy elements is the
Speaker 3: definitive smoking gun.
Speaker 2: Let's put the puzzle pieces together here, because the picture
Speaker 2: it creates is undeniable. Puzzle Piece one, we have a
Speaker 2: colossal black hole, weighed directly by tracking the Caplearian motion
Speaker 2: of the gas. Puzzle piece two. The mass ratio is
Speaker 2: completely lopsided. The black hole dominates the environment, meaning there's
Speaker 2: no massive galaxy of stars hiding in the dark exactly.
Speaker 2: Puzzle piece three. The gas that is there is pristine
Speaker 2: hydrogen and helium, proving that no massive generations of stars
Speaker 2: have lived and died here to create stellar debris.
Speaker 3: The conclusion is inescapable. The black hole did not form
Speaker 3: from stars.
Speaker 2: The bricks do not exist, yet the skyscraper is standing.
Speaker 3: Yes, the classical model of gradual accretion based growth from
Speaker 3: stellar seeds simply cannot explain this object.
Speaker 2: So if it didn't come from dead stars, and it
Speaker 2: couldn't have grown slowly over billions of year because of
Speaker 2: the Eddington limit we talked about earlier. We are left
Speaker 2: with a massive void in our understanding. We really are
Speaker 2: How does a fifty million solar mass monster just pop
Speaker 2: into existence seven hundred million years after the universe begins.
Speaker 3: Well, this discovery has forced astrophysicists to dusk off theoretical
Speaker 3: models that until now were largely considered mathematical curiosities fringe theories. Basically, yeah,
Speaker 3: if you can't build a black hole slowly, you have
Speaker 3: to build it fast. You have to bypass the star
Speaker 3: phase entirely. The data strongly points to one of two
Speaker 3: primary mechanisms, primordial black holes or direct collapse black holes.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's take these one by one because we are
Speaker 2: moving into the realm of extreme theoretical physics here. Definitely
Speaker 2: primordial black holes. The name suggests they were there at
Speaker 2: the very beginning. How early are we talking.
Speaker 3: We are talking about the first literal fractions of a
Speaker 3: second after the Big Bang. This mechanism doesn't require gas,
Speaker 3: clouds or stars. It requires the sheer chaotic density of
Speaker 3: the infant universe.
Speaker 2: Okay, picture the universe just microseconds after it popped into existence.
Speaker 2: It isn't a vast empty vacuum. Yet it's incredibly hot,
Speaker 2: incredibly dense, and incredibly small. All the energy and matter
Speaker 2: that will ever exist is crammed into a microscopic space.
Speaker 3: And in that ultra dense state, the distribution of matter
Speaker 3: wasn't perfectly smooth because of quantum mechanics. There were microscopic fluctuations.
Speaker 3: Some tiny microscopic patches of space were just slightly denser
Speaker 3: than the patches next.
Speaker 2: To them, quantum fluctuations like the static on an old
Speaker 2: television screen.
Speaker 3: Yes, And as the universe underwent inflation, a period of
Speaker 3: unimaginably rapid expansion in the first fraction of a second,
Speaker 3: those microscopic quantum fluctuations were stretched out to macroscopic sizes.
Speaker 3: Who suddenly you have regions of the universe that are
Speaker 3: significantly bentser than others.
Speaker 2: And because the universe was still so compressed, that extra
Speaker 2: density was enough to tip the scales. Gravity took hold
Speaker 2: of those dense pockets and crushed them instantly.
Speaker 3: Completely bypassing the need for matter to cool down form
Speaker 3: gas clouds and ignited to stars. The sheer ambient pressure
Speaker 3: of the early universe crushed these pockets directly into black holes.
Speaker 3: That's wild These are often referred to as heavy seeds.
Speaker 3: They didn't start with the mass of one star. They
Speaker 3: could have been born with a mass of thousands or
Speaker 3: even millions of suns right out of.
Speaker 2: The gate, born big. They never had a childhood. They
Speaker 2: just appeared as massive gravitational sinkholes in the fabric of
Speaker 2: the young universe. That is mind blowing, it is. But
Speaker 2: there's a second option on the table, the direct collapse
Speaker 2: black hole. This happens a little it later in the timeline,
Speaker 2: right when the universe has actually cooled down enough to
Speaker 2: form massive clouds of hydrogen gas.
Speaker 3: Yes, but to understand how a massive cloud directly collapses
Speaker 3: into a black hole without forming stars, first we have
Speaker 3: to understand why clouds usually form stars in the first place. Okay,
Speaker 3: it's a thermodynamic battle between gravity and heat.
Speaker 2: Let's break that down. You have a massive cloud of
Speaker 2: primordial hydrogen gas floating in the early universe, millions of
Speaker 2: times the mass of the Sun. Gravity is constantly pulling
Speaker 2: all that gas inward, trying to crush it into a
Speaker 2: single point.
Speaker 3: But as gravity pulls the gas inward, the gas compresses,
Speaker 3: and basic physics tells us that when you can press
Speaker 3: a gas it heats up.
Speaker 2: Think of a bicycle pump. When you push the plunger
Speaker 2: down and compress the air, the metal barrel of the
Speaker 2: pump gets physically hot in your hands.
Speaker 3: Exactly so as the giant gas cloud collapses, it gets
Speaker 3: intensely hot. The heat generates thermal pressure, which pushes outward,
Speaker 3: resisting gravity.
Speaker 2: It bounces out right.
Speaker 3: If the cloud stays hot, it cannot collapse further. It
Speaker 3: becomes stable.
Speaker 2: So how does a star ever form? If the heat
Speaker 2: stops the collapse, you just have a hot cloud forever.
Speaker 3: In order for gravity to win, the cloud has to
Speaker 3: get rid of that heat. It has to tool down.
Speaker 3: It does this by radiating energy out into space. In
Speaker 3: the modern universe, the heavy elements, the dust and metals,
Speaker 3: act as incredible cooling agents.
Speaker 2: Oh interesting.
Speaker 3: They absorb the kinetic energy of the gas and radiated
Speaker 3: away is infrared light. Once the cloud cools down, the
Speaker 3: thermal pressure drops, Gravity takes over again, and the giant
Speaker 3: cloud shatters and fragments into thousands of smaller, denser clumps.
Speaker 2: And each of those smaller clumps continues to collapse until
Speaker 2: the pressure ignites nuclear fusion, and boom, you get a
Speaker 2: cluster of stars.
Speaker 3: That is the normal path. But in the primordial universe,
Speaker 3: as we established, there are no heavy elements to act
Speaker 3: as coolants.
Speaker 2: No metals.
Speaker 3: The only thing the cloud can use to cool itself
Speaker 3: is molecular hydrogen two hydrogen atoms bonded together. Molecular hydrogen
Speaker 3: is a very inefficient coolant, but it does work slowly.
Speaker 3: It radiates heat away, allowing the cloud to fragment and
Speaker 3: form the very first generation of stars.
Speaker 2: Okay, so if the cloud fragments into stars, we don't
Speaker 2: get our fifty million solar mass black hole. How do
Speaker 2: we stop the fragmentation? How do we get the direct collapse?
Speaker 3: We have to destroy the coolant. Oh, imagine a scenario
Speaker 3: where one of these massive million solar mass gas clouds
Speaker 3: is sitting in space, but nearby, maybe relatively close in
Speaker 3: cosmic terms. A different gas cloud did successfully fragment and
Speaker 3: form a massive cluster of the very first ultra bright,
Speaker 3: super hot early stars.
Speaker 2: Those early stars would be blasting the surrounding space with
Speaker 2: intense ultraviolet.
Speaker 3: Radiation, intense blistering UV light, and that UV light slams
Speaker 3: into our pristine gas cloud. The radiation is so energetic
Speaker 3: that it physically breaks the molecularhydrogen bonds apart.
Speaker 2: It tears them apart.
Speaker 3: It splits the molecules back into single hydrogen atoms. It
Speaker 3: destroys the coolant precisely. Without molecular hydrogen, the massive cloud
Speaker 3: cannot cool down. Because it cannot cool down, it cannot
Speaker 3: fragment into smaller cumps. It stays as one massive, monolithic cloud,
Speaker 3: but it is still accumulating mass. More and more gas
Speaker 3: is drawn in. The cloud gets heavier and heavier and heavier.
Speaker 2: But the heat is still pushing back. It's a standoff.
Speaker 3: It is a standoff until it reaches a critical breaking point.
Speaker 3: The mass of the cloud crosses a threshold where the
Speaker 3: gravitational pull simply overwhelms the thermal pressure entirely. And then,
Speaker 3: because it couldn't fragment, the entire million solar mass cloud
Speaker 3: violently collapses all at once. It doesn't stop at the starface.
Speaker 3: It crushes itself with such overwhelming force that it collapses
Speaker 3: straight into a supermassive black hole direct collapse.
Speaker 2: It skips the middle man. It goes from a cloud
Speaker 2: of gas straight to a cosmic monster in one catastrophic event.
Speaker 3: In either scenario, whether it was a primordial heavy seed
Speaker 3: born from the quantum foam of the Big Bang, or
Speaker 3: a massive gas cloud directly collapsing under the glare of
Speaker 3: neighboring stars. The conclusion is the same.
Speaker 2: They were born big.
Speaker 3: These super massive black holes were born massive. They didn't
Speaker 3: grow up over billions of years. They arrived on the
Speaker 3: scene already fully formed.
Speaker 2: And what's truly profound to me is that the researchers
Speaker 2: looking at QSO one, they don't think this is a
Speaker 2: freak anomaly. The James Web Space Telescope is finding more
Speaker 2: of these little red dots scattered across the early universe.
Speaker 3: Yes, quite a few of them.
Speaker 2: If this is a common occurrence, if this is a
Speaker 2: standard feature of the early cosmos, it completely flips our
Speaker 2: understanding of how galaxies are built.
Speaker 3: It really does. For a century, we assume the galaxies
Speaker 3: formed first, the vast clouds of gas fragmented into stars.
Speaker 3: The stars merged, they died, and eventually, over immense stretches
Speaker 3: of time, a black hole formed in the center as
Speaker 3: a byproduct of the galaxy's evolution.
Speaker 2: The galaxy built the black hole.
Speaker 3: The galaxy built the black hole. But the data from
Speaker 3: QSO one tells us the exact opposite.
Speaker 2: The black hole forms first.
Speaker 3: It is born massive, either as a heavy seed or
Speaker 3: a direct collapse. It sits there a naked gravitational anchor
Speaker 3: in the dark, and because it is so massive, its
Speaker 3: immense gravity begins to draw in the surrounding gas from
Speaker 3: the intergalactic medium. It pulls the raw materials.
Speaker 2: Toward itself, and as that gas falls inward, swirling around
Speaker 2: the black hole, it eventually cools and fragments in the
Speaker 2: outer reaches of the halo, finally forming the stars. The
Speaker 2: black hole acts as the heavy gravitational anchor that forces
Speaker 2: the galaxy to assemble around it. The black hole builds
Speaker 2: the galaxy.
Speaker 3: It's incredible. Think back to the years before James Web launched,
Speaker 3: when astronomers were looking at distant early quasars with less
Speaker 3: powerful telescopes. They saw the blinding light of these feeding monsters,
Speaker 3: and they used indirect measurements to estimate their mass.
Speaker 2: Oh I remember this.
Speaker 3: And when those indirect measurements suggested black holes weighing billions
Speaker 3: of solar masses existing just a few hundred million years
Speaker 3: after the Big Bang, MANI theorists push back.
Speaker 2: There was intense skepticism.
Speaker 3: Right huge skepticism. The classical model said it was impossible,
Speaker 3: so the assumption was that the measurements were wrong. Theorists
Speaker 3: argued that because we were extrapolating data from modern local
Speaker 3: black holes and applying it to the early universe, we
Speaker 3: must be overestimating their mass.
Speaker 2: That makes sense.
Speaker 3: They assume the physics of feeding or the way light
Speaker 3: escape the accretion disk must be fundamentally different in the
Speaker 3: infant universe, creating an illusion of massive weight.
Speaker 2: But the Caplearian motion data the tether Ball test proves
Speaker 2: that those early astronomers weren't crazy.
Speaker 3: No, they weren't.
Speaker 2: The indirect measurements weren't an illusion. We weighed the anchor
Speaker 2: directly using pure gravity and velocity, and the massive weight
Speaker 2: is real. It is a total vindication of the observations,
Speaker 2: but it requires the complete destruction of the theoretical model.
Speaker 3: It is the ultimate triumph of observational astronomy. When the
Speaker 3: data fundamentally contradicts the established theory, you don't throw out
Speaker 3: the data, you throw out the theory. The universe is
Speaker 3: telling us how it works, and we just have to listen.
Speaker 2: It is a phenomenal story of scientific discovery. Let's take
Speaker 2: a step back and look at the sheer scope of
Speaker 2: what we've unpacked today. We started with a fundamental paradox,
Speaker 2: a chicken and egg problem about the origins of the
Speaker 2: largest structures in the cosmos. We zoomed in on a
Speaker 2: tiny speck of light, a little red dot that existed
Speaker 2: when the universe was just a toddler a mirror seven
Speaker 2: hundred million years old.
Speaker 3: We saw how the immense gravity of Pandora's cluster warped
Speaker 3: the very fabric of space, acting as a cosmic funhouse mirror.
Speaker 3: To magnify that ancient light and send it across thirteen
Speaker 3: billion light years to our mirrors.
Speaker 2: And by slicing that magnified light into a three D
Speaker 2: data cube, capturing the red shift and blue shift of
Speaker 2: glowing hydrogen, scientists mapped the perfect predictable couplarian rotation of
Speaker 2: gas swirling around.
Speaker 3: An invisible center the Tetherbol test.
Speaker 2: They used the tether Boll test to directly weigh an
Speaker 2: object from the dawn of time, revealing a fifty million
Speaker 2: solar mass titan.
Speaker 3: A titan that completely dominates its environment, making up over
Speaker 3: two thirds of the total mass, surrounded by pristine gas
Speaker 3: that shows absolutely no tra of the heavy elements that
Speaker 3: would indicate a history of dying stars.
Speaker 2: It is a skyscraper built without bricks. It proves that
Speaker 2: in the extreme conditions of the infant universe, black holes
Speaker 2: were born massive entirely bypassing the slow gradual evolution we
Speaker 2: see today.
Speaker 3: We didn't just find a weird object. We watched a
Speaker 3: foundational pillar of classical cosmology crumble.
Speaker 2: It forces us to rethink the sequence of events that
Speaker 2: led to our own existence, which leaves us with a profound,
Speaker 2: almost unsettling question for you to mull over, one that
Speaker 2: the scientific community will be wrestling with for decades.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a big one.
Speaker 2: If supermassive black holes formed first born from the quantum
Speaker 2: foam of the Big Bang or the sudden catastrophic collapse
Speaker 2: of primeval gas clouds, and if they acted as the
Speaker 2: fundamental anchors that pulled the surrounding universe together to.
Speaker 3: Forge stars, does that mean every galaxy we see, including
Speaker 3: our own Milky Way, the very galaxy that houses our
Speaker 3: Solar System, our planet
Speaker 2: And us, is everything around us just the beautiful, glittering
Speaker 2: aftermath of a primordial monster born in the first chaotic
Speaker 2: seconds of time.