What Is The Most Powerful Thing In The Universe?

there are monsters out there lurking in the dark for centuries astronomers scanned the heavens again and again without ever spying them but behind the familiar stars and nearby calm galaxies of our universe lay something far more vicious far more terrible and far more powerful completely invisible to the human eye you would never see them even on the darkest of nights indeed at first they appeared as nothing but dim distant pin Pricks of strange radio emission but those pin Pricks revealed somet

hing no astronomer could ever have expected something so strange so bizarre that for years nobody even believed that they could exist that there must have been some mistake in our observations thankfully none are nearby for if they were any closer they would flood us our galaxy our solar system our planet with deadly radiation a single one of these monsters can easily pump out over 10 to the power of 40 Jews every second for comparison our sun outputs about 10 to the power of 34 Jews a million t

imes less every year the brightest among them outshine Stars outshine galaxies outshine a thousand galaxies at once some extreme events like the most powerful Supernova can briefly become brighter than these beacons but those events are temporary ephemeral flaring and dimming in a matter of weeks when these monsters awaken they stay powered for millions of years in just a fraction of their lifetime they can easily produce more energy than even the most intense Cosmic explosions and they are hung

ry they feed on anything and are capable of tearing apart entire stars in a single fit of rage producing flashes of radiation and jets of charged particles that shoot out for millions of light years piercing through galaxies and spreading their destruction throughout entire clusters they are the quazars the most powerful engines in the known universe but what drives these engines what powers these lighthouses in the Deep the answer will take us on a journey through some of the most extreme physi

cs in the universe and even provide us with a grim warning for though our galaxy is quiet now it will not stay that way [Music] forever the most distant quazar from us is 13 billion light years away it would take nearly the entire history of the universe to travel to and that's without the universe expanding at the same time space is big and getting bigger and sometimes that can make us feel small better help is our sponsor today they are the world's largest therapy service under 100% online bet

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ect from in-office therapy but with a therapist who is custom picked for you with more scheduling flexibility and at a more affordable price so get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com [Music] hotu and I've also linked them Below in the description thanks to better help for supporting educational content on YouTube at first astronomers had no idea what they were seeing by the 1950s science had grown used to the idea of galaxies outside the Milky Way But even in this expanded cosmological v

iew the belief was that the Universe was relatively small only a few billion light years across at most and that expanded Cosmos seemed relatively simple even boring there were galaxies there were clusters of galaxies there were vast expanses of nothingness for a Time astronomers were able to convince themselves that they were finally starting to figure things out but in the mid 20th century there was a technological Revolution optical telescopes capable of seeing objects inv visible wavelengths

of light were becoming enormous and our ability to use the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum wavelengths of light outside the visible grew along with that and with with these new observations came the realization that the Universe was Far weirder than we could have ever imagined one of the first revolutions was in radio in the 1930s the pioneering engineer Carl jansky solved the problem of how to reduce noise in sensitive radio antenna and discovered the first radio signals coming from deep

space among many bright and obvious sources like Jupiter The Crab Nebula and nearby galaxies astronomers also discovered numerous small faint distant pointlike radio objects these strange objects appeared all over the sky emitted radio waves at a broad range of wavelengths and could not be seen with visible or infrared telescopes the only clue they gave was their position they appeared both within the band of the Milky Way and outside of it since our galaxy is a thin disc this meant that the sou

rces either had to be extremely close like the visible stars of the night sky or extremely far away like the distant galaxies but if they were close we should have been able to see them in Optical wavelengths and if they were extremely far away their intensity in radio wavelengths implied they were the brightest objects in the entire universe understandably many astronomers pushed back against this interpretation not only arguing about their distance but also openly questioning what could possib

ly power something that bright finally a breakthrough came in 1962 by the 1960s astronomers had been able to refine the techniques of radio astronomy to the point they could more precisely measure the location on the sky of these strange sources with these new techniques astronomer seral Hazard and John Bolton found that one radio Source known as 3c273 would undergo occultations of the Moon allowing them to provide an extremely accurate estimate of its position following up on that work the Dutc

h American astronomer Martin Schmid discovered a faint object in the same location in the visible spectrum within that visible light Schmidt found a usual collection of bright spectral lines and dark gaps the Fingerprints of elements and molecules found throughout the cosmos but these lines were not in their usual wavelengths instead they were shifted towards the red end of the Spectrum by nearly 16% to get that kind of red shifting either 3c273 had to be moving away from us at an incredibly fas

t speed or it had to be incredibly far away by this time astronomers had been slowly accepting The Big Bang Theory of the universe The View that the cosmos was once smaller in the past and is continuing to grow in the present day under cosmological expansion light from distant objects red shifts because the space between them and US expands stretching the light out into longer wavelengths and when he interpreted the red shifting of the light from 3c273 Schmidt realized it sat 3.4 billion light y

ears away it was the most distant object by an order of magnitude ever observed in 1966 Time Magazine put Martin Schmidt on its cover comparing the magnitude of his Discovery to those of Galileo saying the 17th century Italian startled scientists and theologians alike the 20th century Dutchman has had an equally jarring effect on his own contemporaries 3c273 was a revelation it is so distant that it appears to us a simp simply a point-like object of incredible luminosity in fact making it anothe

r recordbreaker it was also the brightest known object in astronomy at the time stranger still 3c273 was remarkably compact now knowing the location of the object astronomers dug back through archival photographic plates and found that earlier generations of astronomers had already seen it without recognizing it for what it was year after year 3c273 had shown up but its brightness had varied between annual observations to change brightness within a year an object must be smaller than a light yea

r across because any changes to the object can only propagate at a speed lower than the speed of light So Not only was 3c273 Far brighter and far more distant than any known object it managed to accomplish both these Feats in a volume smaller than our solar system with this technique of M Ming radio sources to visible light objects in place astronomers went on to confirm the distances to dozens of these so-called quasi Stell radio sources the name coming about as early astronomers knew that thes

e objects were not normal stars but had absolutely no clue what they actually could be it was in 1964 that the astrophysicist Hong Yi Chu coined its modern catchier name in the journal physics today so far the clumsily long name quasi Stellar radio sources is used to describe these objects for convenience the abbreviated form quaza will be used throughout this paper and so the quazar was born debate over the true nature of quazars raged for decades within the astronomical Community many astronom

ers believe that the original interpretation was correct that these were incredibly bright incredibly Compact and Incredibly distant objects but they could not explain what powered these extreme objects others continued to argue that these were some sort of exotic star much closer to our own Galaxy that provided such an extreme amount of gravitational pull the light escaping from them would red shift making them appear much more distant than they really were but it wasn't one decisive measuremen

t that cemented the cosmological nature of quazar but rather a gradual buildup of observational pressure which grew handin hand with the acceptance of the Big Bang The Big Bang Theory tells us that the Universe changes with time Not only was it smaller in the past it was also different quazars only appear in the extremely distant Universe indeed the nearest quazar sits over 700 million Li years away since astronomy acts like a time machine with more distant observations revealing the nature of a

younger Universe these observations tell us that quazars were only active in the distant pass and have now gone quiet this idea fits perfectly with the big bang because we expect the universe to change as it evolves with time our Dawning understanding of the age and size of the universe helped paint a portrit of a gigantic ancient Cosmos that could easily accommodate the distances to even the most farflung quaza and so astronomers were left with little choice they had to accept that these stran

ge intense objects were truly far away and truly bizarrely [Music] bright as news of the discovery of quazars worked its way from purely astronomical circles and into the popular imagination public interest skyrocketed with writers using the term to elicit a sense of strangeness and remoteness and if you need a new nursery rhyme to soothe your child you can take the words of legendary physicist George gamov twinkle twinkle quasi star biggest puzzle from afar how unlike the other ones brighter th

an a billion Suns twinkle twinkle quasi star how I wonder what you are meanwhile astronomers discovered more and more quazars including ones that were both unusually bright and oddly dim the very brightest ones got a new name blazar While others weren't emitting any radio waves at all but Were Somehow extremely bright in x-ray radiation and as radio astronomy became more sophisticated astronomers were able to capture smaller finer details the most famous example was signus a one of the brightest

radio objects in the entire Sky initially thought to be an exotic Radio Star when it was was first discovered by the 1950s astronomers realized it was far stranger the central core of signus a was a Galaxy but extending hundreds of thousands of Li years away from that core with two Thin long Jets ending in gigantic bubbles screaming in radio emission all of these strange objects whether loud or quiet in the radio whether relatively nearby or extremely distant shared one thing in common their ca

use were abnormally bright in some cases the nuclei of the galaxies outshone all the hundreds of billions of stars within the galaxies themselves the brightest of these cores indicated an enormous amount of activity of Unknown Origin without knowing the true explanation astronomers conceived of a brand new term to Encompass them all active Galactic nuclei and so what was going on in the cores of these galaxies why were some the most luminous objects in the universe While others were relatively q

uiet what generated the radio emissions and why did some blast out x-ray radiation astronomers had discovered a zoo of active galaxies throughout the cosmos with a dizzying and confusing array of Galactic creatures something must power them something must generate the energies needed to make the brightest of them outshine a thousand galaxies at once something must enable them to be seen from the distant reaches of the far Universe these active Galactic nuclei must have something in common and it

was clear that that something lived in their cause and so to understand what drives these the most powerful engines in the known universe we have to look a little closer to home 25,000 light years away sits a monster we wouldn't know it by looking at it we can't see this monster with our own eyes we can't see it with telescopes but even decades ago we knew that something strange was there when we look out at the sky on a dark clear night we can see the band of the Milky Way the Milky Way is bri

ghtest in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius and it's there that astronomers discovered the core of our galaxy and when radio astronomers began their first hesitant explorations of the sky they also found a bright source of radio emission coming from this point later astronomers building a catalog of radio sources ranked the brightest object in each constellation in alphabetical order and so the bright Source in Sagittarius became known as Sagittarius A still later more detailed obse

rvations revealed an exceptionally bright point-like object buried within the larger Sagittarius a complex because the discovery was exciting and excited States and atoms get labeled with an asterisk the modern name for the object at the very center of the Milky Way was born Sagittarius A star it was the same problem posed by the distant quazars but much closer to home what could possibly power the bright radio emissions coming from the center of our galaxy and so they pushed deeper into the Mae

lstrom and deep within the core of Sagittarius A star astronomers found Stars pin Pricks of light dancing and swirling repeated observations showed that the stars were orbiting around some unseen companion Bound by chains of gravity to something massive and something dark simple calculations of orbital mechanics revealed the mass mass of the central object forcing scientists to acknowledge the existence of an entity weighing over 4 million solar masses debates swirled for decades but eventually

only one plausible answer remained Sagittarius A star was a super massive black [Music] hole black holes are common throughout the Universe most the leftover remnant of a massive star these black holes are usually relatively small weighing only a few times the mass of the Sun but the mysterious object at the center of our galaxy weighed millions of times the mass how could such a giant black hole form and how could it find itself at the center of our galaxy in 2022 all debate on its identity was

put to rest when the Event Horizon telescope unveiled their stunning image of of Sagittarius AAR using a network of telescopes spanning the entire Globe The Event Horizon telescope team spent years carefully combining and correlating their data the result was a blurry low-resolution image of the true nightmare sitting within our Galaxy's heart a fuzzy ring of superheated plasma swirls around an evacuated core of pure Blackness at the very center lies the black hole itself its Event Horizon prev

enting any background light from traveling through it with the immense mass of the super massive black hole distorts gravity to such a degree the light behind the black hole can instead curve up and around the Event Horizon giving us a view behind the monster the black hole itself appears larger than it really is again due to the extreme warping of SpaceTime lines of sight that would normally graze past the edge of the Event Horizon instead wrap around it from our perspective the globe of the bl

ack hole unfolds itself revealing every angle of it in a single image producing what's known as the shadow that extreme gravity capable of bending and distorting light like a funhouse mirror reaches out to the surroundings of the black hole stars that Whip too close to the event horizon risk their Doom if they pass within a critical distance the gravitational forces tear the star apart in a process called a tidal disruption event most of the gas however settles into a distant orbit around the bl

ack hole but 25,000 light years worth of gas and dust sit between us and the center of our galaxy that gas and dust scatters and absorbs most wavelengths of light preventing us from seeing the Sagittarius a complex directly indeed if we could it would be one of the brightest objects in the sky radio waves however pass through the interstellar medium relatively unaffected which is why we only saw the first hints of trouble when we turned our radio observatories towards that constellation but desp

ite the Fearsome radiation pouring out of the gas surrounding it the black hole itself was relatively quiet it was nothing like the distant quazar with their luminosities Millions of Times Higher indeed except for a faint smudge of radio emission from outside our galaxy you wouldn't even know that a super massive black hole was there but still the question was asked could these be related could black holes power the quazar if our galaxy hosted a super massive black hole perhaps others did too as

cosmologists began to understand the Big Bang Theory more fully they realized that structures in the universe had to grow slowly long ago there were only small differences in density across the cosmos with hardly any variations but over the course of hundreds of millions of years those density differences grew at large cosmological scales the only force that really matters is gravity a patch of matter with a slightly higher density will attract its neighbors pulling more matter onto it that wil

l give it an even stronger gravitational pull which will in turn pull even more matter towards it and so on in a never- ended feedback loop that drives small structures to become big ones leading eventually to the first Stars clusters and galaxies all this gravitational action leads to incredibly High densities in the cores of these structures it's simply where matter piles up the most the cores of galaxies host many stars and those stars are much more massive than average they live short lives

and quickly die becoming black holes and packed into such small volumes the black holes quickly merge together their sizes growing out of control becoming super massive the idea that black holes could power quazars was first proposed in 1964 just a year after the identification of the first quazar itself but most astronomers rejected the idea outright after all at the time black holes were considered a wild and probably unphysical hypothesis Einstein's general relativity was certainly a radical

reshaping of our understanding of gravity but that didn't mean that every corner of its mathematical structures had to be replicated in the universe the concept that matter could compress so tightly that no other Force could withand it was outlandish surely some process would stop a dead star from catastrophically collapsing into a point of infinite density but then astronomers came across an intriguing system known today as signus X1 a bright source of X-ray radiation in the constellation signu

s the swan astronomers spent years trying to understand how this star could produce so many x-rays until observations later in 1972 by astronomers Luise Webster Paul murdin and Charles Thomas Bolton revealed that it was not one star but two the x-rays came not from the invisible companion itself but from the swirling plasma surrounding it detailed observations of that plasma allowed astronomers to calculate the mass and more importantly the density of that companion whatever it was it was more c

ompact than any known star and more compact than any Star possibly could be famed astrophysicist Steven Hawking even bet against the possibility of signus X1 containing a black hole saying in his book A Brief History of Time that when we made the bet in 1975 we were 80% certain that signis X1 was a black hole by now 1988 I would say that we are about 95% certain but the BET has yet to be settled 10 years later he finally conceded defeat signus X1 was the first confirmed black hole with black hol

es known to exist everything clicked into place the universe readily created Stellar Mass black holes these black holes could merge and consume material swelling them to epic proportions and these Giants would find themselves in the centers of most if not all galaxies and so observations confirmed that everywhere we looked every Galaxy hosted a super massive black hole we couldn't see them they were and continued to be too far away to allow us to monitor their orbiting Stars directly and for all

the sophistication of of the Event Horizon telescope besides our own Sagittarius A star it has only managed to capture an image of one other Galactic core but astronomers could use the brightness of the quazars themselves as a way to measure the mass of their Central black holes if super massive black holes did power quazars then they could use Doppler shifting to estimate the black holes Mass but for this to work the black holes had to somehow power the quazars how could they do that if black

holes are purely gravitational how could something that only pulls on the surrounding matter produce such fearsome [Music] energies the red claxons blare and a moment later you feel your ship shuddering jolting uncontrollably the stresses on the hull are almost too much threatening their integrity together with the the alerts flashing on your display comes a new ominous warning chime a flood of cosmic rays have struck the ship microscopic particles slipping through the molecular structures and s

traight into the hearts of the crew but you are determined to go on you push your ship forward allowing it to slip into the swirl of plasma in a relativistic frenzy you don't even bother trying to control it anymore as the forces here are so strong so far beyond known physics that there's no choice but to give in to their Mercy the ship is in uncontrolled freefall a quick glance at a side readout reveals what you already suspected the external temperature is reaching millions of degrees with the

internal life support systems beginning to fail gripping the armrest you can do nothing but watch as system after system fails frustrated you swipe away the warnings there's nothing new they can tell you after yet another final Lurch one strong enough to throw you against your restraints to the point of bruising comes a sudden relief silence you bring up the warnings they're clear the temperature outside has plummeted to nearly absolute zero the cosmic rays have vanished the radiation subsided

your ship is still in free fall but stabilized no longer tumbling you activate the external cameras shielding retracts revealing the Optics sending their feed directly to your display and there Dead Ahead you see it or rather you don't the reason you launched this mission to the center of the Galaxy in the first place the black [Music] hole the Deep Hearts within the cores of galaxies are complicated busy places like City centers there are far more stars than average compressed into uncomfortabl

y small volumes like City dwellers crammed into tiny Apartments Street after Street there are also far more aging red giants located here a testament to the ability of the cors of galaxies to produce greater numbers of the most massive stars but within all this brightness and intensity is a dark side astronomers estimate that the core of our own Galaxy hosts tens of thousands of smaller black holes a retinue in service to their m at the center countless Supernova detonations gravitational tidal

interactions and more tear Stars apart their tattered remains scattered Among the close-packed Stars nothing much lasts long in the intensity of the core and among all that chaos sits a thick ring of cold dust a choking ring of smog within the central city it is wide around a thousand Li ear thick and the dust slowly circles around the center it's also a as thick as it is wide forming a gigantic Taurus and is so cold that the molecules and dust within it are neutral if you were to travel through

it you would hardly notice it due to its low density but that Dusty Taurus obscures our view of most Galactic cores as it efficiently absorbs most of the radiation coming from within only when we look from above or below do we get a direct view of the Maelstrom while Karma nonviolent itself that ring of dust signals an important transition point in the galaxy outside the ring you were in the galactic environment the suburbs the physics dominated by all the gravitational and electromagnetic forc

es of the Galaxy at large but within the ring only one thing matters the super massive black hole it is the central Landmark to guide all lost Travelers while even the largest ones take up less than 1% of the total Galactic Mass they are by far the most massive singular objects within a galaxy far enough away from them like our own solar system is away from Sagittarius A star we don't feel or even notice the black hole but within the Taurus of dust the gravity of the black hole takes over within

this region the black holes gravity dictates the motion of every Star every clump of gas and every Speck of dust it's here that some Stars stray dangerously close their orbital motions bringing their speeds up to a few per of the speed of light if they get too close they're torn to shreds their atoms joining the trains of gas on their Dreadful March towards the Event Horizon even closer to the black hole that gas begins to lose control unable to dictate its own motion it gets lost in the crowde

d frenzy funneling to incredible speeds driven by the the extreme gravitational environment it is this process that releases an incredible amount of energy from the simple Act of falling and to get an estimate of the amount of energy released we look at something called The Binding energy to understand binding energy imagine wanting to move a pile of stones sitting at the bottom of a valley to move the pile you must grab each individual Stone and bring it to the top of the ridge every time you d

o this you just overcame the gravitational potential energy of the stone you can estimate how much energy you'll need for the entire task by calculating the potential energy of all the stones now imagine pulling these stones from the bottom of the valley and sending them so far out into space that they never come back now repeat that for every single atom of the earth effectively destroying the entire Earth in the process the amount of energy you would need to obliterate our planet is called The

Binding energy for a black hole imagine dragging a particle from The Event Horizon all the way out to a distance of a few thousand light years fighting against the gravity of the black hole the entire time that is The Binding energy of the particle around the black hole which is equal to the energy released when the particle Falls from that distant orbit into the Event Horizon and for a typical super massive black hole that energy is roughly equal to the rest mass energy of the matter itself th

is process isn't perfect and not all the energy available is released as the particle Falls usually only about 10% of The Binding energy converts into other forms that may not seem like a lot but compare that efficiency to the 0.1% of the rest mass energy released by thermonuclear reactions in the hearts of stars but this process doesn't lead to an uncontrolled release of energy like a bomb instead the release is slower and in stages a steady buildup of excitement as material continues to cram t

owards the black hole as the gas heats up it emits radiation normally radiation only makes things warm but the intensity here is so high that the radiation has a pressure it is so intense that it can push on things imagine the Summer Sun so strong it literally could knock you over the radiation pushes the gas heating it up even more and sending it away from the black hole but with the gas pushed away it can't continue accreting and so the radiation dissipates but eventually the gas cools down ag

ain allowing it to condense towards the black hole and repeat the accretion process this cycle of collapse and inflation acts like the piston in a car engine keeping the flow of gas in check preventing it from suddenly crashing into the black hole all at once and keeping qu rars shining for millions of years yet that is just the beginning for the gravity around super massive black holes does not work alone as any surrounding gas funnels towards the black hole its orbital speed increases by simpl

e conservation of angular momentum an ice skater can pull their arms closer to their body to increase their rotation speed and so can material speed up as it whs closer to the black hole but eventually its inward movement is slowed the rotation supported by cbal acceleration like a planet locked in orbit around a star and so soon enough the loose collection of orbiting gas and dust compresses into a tight thin disc of accretion around the super massive black hole all that infalling and compressi

on heats the gas to incredible temperatures the gravitational potential energy surrounding the black hole converted into heat friction and radiation a simple matter of too much material cramming into too small of a volume the disc glows primarily at ultraviolet wavelength but also across a broad range of the electromagnetic spectrum in addition the disk constantly streams out Showers of high energy particles known as cosmic rays electrons and protons accelerated to nearly the speed of light thos

e microscopic bullets can occasionally strike a Wandering low energy Photon at infrared or visible wavelengths and when that happens the particles transfer their energy to the photons turning them into high energy x-rays the intense heat of the disc causes the cold atoms and molecules to unbind themselves forming an electrically charged plasma the same state of matter as Lightning these rapidly moving electric charges around the black hole create a magnetic field and very quickly it generates th

e conditions needed to power a Dynamo a seemingly infinite supply of energy that can turn a small magnetic field into something devastating initially within the dis the magnetic field lines follow the motion of the gas swirling in Rapid circles around the black hole but the innermost regions of the dis rotate far faster than the outer regions forcing the magnetic field lines to coil up on themselves storing up a tremendous amount of energy the motion of the gas within the disc isn't smooth and s

teady instead it's chaotic and turbulent like a running River with portions of gas clumping and colliding waving back and forth as they swirl in The Firestorm when a clump of this gas drifts away from the disc it pulls on the magnetic field like a bit of string but the difference in rotation from one section of the disc to another twists that Loop of the magnetic field around itself the action of rotation eventually stretches that magnetic field back down into the disc this is a Dynamo at work w

hich turns chaotic turbulent motions in the disc into an increasingly strong magnetic field surrounding the black hole normally magnetic fields don't affect the Motions of matter except in very small ways but as the magnetic forces ratchet up within the accretion disc surrounding the giant black hole they begin to dominate The Motions of material the closer the gas gets to the black hole the more unstable the orbits become and there is a certain special distance known as the innermost stable cir

cular orbit any gas that falls below that orbit is doomed most of the gas Falling Towards the black hole ends its life at the Event Horizon never to be seen again but some gets caught in the twisting and winding Paths of the magnetic field lines their force is so strong that they Channel and guide the gas as it falls but how does this lead to the radar pin Pricks we see in the distant sky that is still a bit of a mystery one hypothesis is called the Blandford szc process named after the two phys

icists who came up with the idea the key to this idea is the fact that the black hole itself is rotating when it does it drag SpaceTime in the region around it like moving a heavy coffee table twists the rug beneath this region called the erosphere forces any object entering into it to rotate along with the black hole this includes magnetic fields the strong magnetic fields within the disc punch in and out of the ergosphere which forces them to twist up on themselves twisting Fields create a tub

e of magnetic energy stretching above and below the black hole While most of the charged partic Les following those magnetic field lines end up plunging below the Event Horizon some just barely scratch the surface accelerated by the extreme magnetic energies within the ergosphere following the lead of the field lines the charged particles race away from the black hole in the form of long thin Jets of radiation Lighthouse beams racing out into the dark this radiation is primarily composed of radi

o waves and it is here that we finally find the or of quazar the particles in the Jets are incredibly powerful accelerating to nearly the speed of light they race out of the galactic core and punch through the Galaxy altoe stretching for up to millions of light years eventually however they lose steam the particles interacting with the intergalactic medium that surrounds every Galaxy when they finally stop they create a high pressure zone of charged particles these bubbles transfer heat all the

way from the innermost regions surrounding the super massive black holes into the volumes of entire clusters of galaxies which can stretch for over a million light years across that is how powerful these systems are not only can they be seen from across the cosmos but they can raise the average temperature of entire galaxy clusters the largest gravitationally bound objects in the universe this picture involving super massive black holes the Ring of dust surrounding them the Ferocious secretion d

isc and the magnetized outflows explains almost every observation of active galaxies if we see the central core of a galaxy face on we see the intense radiation from the accretion disc combined with the strong radio emission from the Jet and we recognize it as a quazer if we happen to be looking directly down the barrel of the jet then we get the most extreme emission and we call it a Blazer it's like Humanity first encountering cats in astronomical observations sometimes they see the whiskers o

r a porw or a swishing tail initially these seem like completely different objects but over time we realize that they're really just different perspectives of the same kind of creature but what of other active galaxies that aren't even loud in the radio spectrum the solution here is that not every Galactic core is active to power a quazar the black hole needs to feed without a supply of new material the entire system shuts down no gravitational collapse no accretion disc no twisting magnetic fie

lds no relativistic Jets no nothing this picture also explains why we see no quazars in the nearby Universe active Galactic nuclei can last for incredibly long times the long longest running quazars can run for over a million years but they require constant streams of new material to feed their fires the early Universe was much smaller than it is today with galaxies much closer together and undergoing frequent mergers with every merger new material Finds Its way to the center of the Galaxy setti

ng off a feeding event a new round of quazar activity but today with the universe much older and far larger Galaxy mergers do not happen often with no new supplies of gas we see no quazars in the local volume of the cosmos indeed our own Galactic core is quiet although Sagittarius A star hosts Stars dust and gas around it it's a relative the empty region compared to the cause of quazars but this was not always the case in 2010 astronomers using the firery gamma race Space Telescope identified tw

o gigantic regions stretching above and below the galactic plane each one over 50,000 Li years across computer simulations revealed what caused them a feeding event several million years ago whether it was a cluster of stars or a Wandering clump of interstellar gas that met its end in the hungry Moore of Sagittarius A star our black hole destroyed it quickly shredding it into an accretion disc around found the Event Horizon and then the same physics went to work the accretion disc energized a po

werful magnetic field which created Jets and launched relativistic particles away from the Galaxy where they still sit [Music] today indeed it seems that every galaxy has gone through at least one active phase spending some of its life cycles a quazar with the central core of the Galaxy barely a few light years across out shining not just its own galaxies but a thousand galaxies combined but despite our growing comprehension of the incredibly energetic forces powering these vast dynamos the quaz

ar we see are still too bright the super massive black holes that serve as their gravitational power sources are also very very big too big and they are not the only issues astronomers continue to discover quazars appearing in the earlier and earlier Universe too early quazar seem impossibly big and impossibly bright existing impossibly early in the history of the cosmos what does this [Music] mean everything about quazars is the very definition of extreme the largest known super massive black h

ole weighs over 66 billion solar masses if you were to place that black hole in our own solar system with its Singularity at the center by the time you reach the orbit of Pluto you would be less than 1% of the way to its Event Horizon we currently know of around 1 million active quazar and suspect that there are at least 10 million more in the observable Universe yet to be seen each one pumping out more energy than a thousand galaxies combined each one a fierce engine of plasma and radiation and

quazars have been with the universe almost since its birth the most distant known quazar named J 0313 d186 was firing when our universe was only 670 million years old that's just 5% of its present age but astrophysicists aren't quite sure how these black holes appeared so early and got so big in the relatively Short age of the cosmos the only way that we know for sure how to make black holes is through the deaths of massive stars so by this Logic the first black holes couldn't exist until the f

irst generation of stars lived and died if those early stars were like the stars of the modern Universe then they left behind black holes no more than a few times the mass of the sun done from there the black holes had to grow and they have two options available merging and accreting matter black holes especially massive ones don't merge all that often at least theoretically initially when two black holes encounter one another interactions with their environments allow them to draw closer togeth

er but eventually all that's left between them is their own gravitational pole as the black holes wind around each other they emit gravitational waves which pulls energy out of the system and allows the black holes to sneak closer together once the black holes within a few light years of each other sufficient gravitational wave emission alone would take longer than the age of the universe and astronomers still don't have a solution to this obstruction calling it the final parek problem yet despi

te this we do know they merge we have detected signature ripples in SpaceTime from merg events with gravitational wave detectors and when we scan the cosmos for super massive black holes we usually find only one residing in each Galactic core despite each Galaxy having suffered multiple merger of vents so although the universe has clearly solved the final Parc problem we don't yet know how however even the most optimistic estimates for Black Hole production and merger rates can't explain the lar

gest and earliest quazars so that leaves accretion to give black holes their exceptional masses but once again we run into a problem the same seesing of radiation and gravitational collapse that keeps quazar illuminated for millions of years prevents large amounts of gas from reaching the black hole quickly this process is known as the Edington limit and while not a hard and fast rule of the universe it does present a challenge if black hole are to reach super massive status they need to find a

clever way around this and somehow shove extra material through the Event Horizon without heating it up to the point that it escapes the vicinity of the black hole compounding this problem is the lack of observational evidence for so-called intermediate Mass black holes these black holes should sit in a mass range well above Stellar Mass black holes which weigh only up to a few dozen times the mass of the Sun and Below super massive black holes which weigh millions or billions of solar masses we

should see these in between Class black holes everywhere representing an intermediate stage of growth between the Stellar mass and super massive black holes but we don't on the other hand the results from gravitational wave detectors suggest that black holes emerging far more often than we had initially assumed in order to get the detection rates that we observe many small black holes had to have merged in the history of the universe meaning that they find each other close their orbits and merg

e quite efficiently in addition those same results suggest that there are many more small black holes than we had initially assumed based on simple Stellar deaths the result is a confusing Tangled mess it is clear our understanding of the growth and evolution of black holes is missing something traditional models of Galaxy and star formation don't seem to be cutting it so perhaps it's time to turn to more exotic [Music] models one possibility is that dark matter itself can directly collapse to f

orm black holes dark matter is the dominant form of matter in the universe making up roughly 80% of the mass of every single Galaxy but in the simplest models of dark matter it doesn't interact with itself and so has difficulty clumping together at small scales when it comes to something like a Galaxy most theorists assume that the dark matter is roughly evenly spread out but in some more complicated models of this mysterious form of matter it is capable of small infrequent interactions with its

elf this would cause it to Clump together rapidly especially in the high density days of the early universe and if enough Dark Matter clumps into a small enough volume quickly enough then its own gravitational weight can take over leading to catastrophic collapse and the formation of a giant black hole a black hole potentially big enough to begin powering quazars before the first Stars had even Arisen another possibility is that our assumptions about star formation don't apply in the early Unive

rse in today's Cosmos Stars can only get so large this is because the nebula that collapse to form them can only grow to a certain size before they begin to efficiently lose their heat and collapse but that efficient cooling depends on the presence of heavier elements to radiate away the energy of the nebula the early Universe however lacked such heavier elements because massive stars have to live and die to enrich the interstellar medium so perhaps Stars hundreds of times more massive than the

sun could have formed when those giant Stars die they would leave behind much larger black holes or perhaps the ution is something even more exotic maybe black holes have been with us since the earliest moments of the Big Bang in this scenario the Exotic conditions and phase transitions of the first few seconds in the history of the universe spawned countless small black holes known as primordial black holes though many observations have ruled out the existence of black holes like these there is

still the possibility of their existence there may not be a lot of them but if enough survived into the age of Galaxy formation they could provide a shortcut to quazar building bypassing the usual rout of star and black hole formation it's these questions and many more that provided motivation to build the James web Space Telescope which is currently probing the first generations of stars galaxies and quazars to appear in the universe regard less of these Mysteries one thing has become clear ga

laxies and their super massive black holes are inextricably linked together and the formation of quazars plays a key role in that relationship and in the early 2000s astronomers made a startling realization it's not just simply a matter of every known Galaxy hosting a super massive black hole at its Center but the properties of that black hole are closely linked to the properties of the the host Galaxy for example the greater the black hole Mass the higher the temperature in the galactic core an

d the higher the Stell of velocity within and the larger the black hole is the more massive the overall Galaxy is and so it appears that super massive black holes don't evolve independently of their host galaxies and turning on and off quazar activity plays a key role in that self-regulating connection if a Galaxy accretes a lot of material either by gravitationally attracting gas and its surroundings or by cannibalizing another galaxy that Galaxy now has a lot of new material to boost star form

ation but a lot of that material winds its way into the core which turns into an accretion disc and launches a jet turning the core of the Galaxy into a quazar all that radiation envelops the black hole's host Galaxy heating the entire contents of its interstellar medium if the gas is too hot start can't form efficiently this means that what would have been a burst of sudden star formation turns into a steady trickle but this is good for the Galaxy too much star formation at once would use up al

l the available reservoirs of gas which would ultimately end star formation too soon but the quazar acts like a break preventing too many stars from forming in a short period of time it seems almost every galaxy has gone through a quazar phase and these galaxies continue to regularly pump pump out to new stars at a predictable efficient rate this quazar back and forth explains the relationship between galaxies and their super massive black holes when the Galaxy grows larger so does the black hol

e and feedback from La quazar keeps star formation in check and this also applies to our own galaxy The Milky Way way Grew From countless merges and cannibalization of smaller galaxies and each one of these interactions could have flooded the Galaxy with so much new material that star formation became uncontrolled using up all the available gas in just a few hundred million years but Sagittarius A star kept us in check preventing stars from forming too quickly indeed it could be that without Sag

ittarius AAR activating as aaza deep in our distant past then our our own son may never have formed and we may never have been here but this happy equilibrium will not last long in 5 billion years our galaxy will begin to merge with our nearest neighbor the Andromeda galaxy our two super massive black holes will find each other and also merge material tattered remnants of stars and nebuli destroyed by the gravitational forces of the merger will find its way into the new core and when it does the

slumbering Giant in the center will reawaken activating its Mighty engines of gravity and magnetic fields and pouring its tirelessly Fierce radiation into the new Galaxy snuffing out any hopes of peace and quiet for ages to come you've been watching the entire history of the universe don't forget to like And subscribe and leave us a comment to tell us what you think thanks for watching and we'll see you next time