- I'm sitting in a cafe
with Dr Guillaume Drouart.
He's an astrophysicist, I'm not.
He's French, well, sort of.
I'm Australian, I guess.
Categorising stuff can be hard.
Actually, I'm not in a
cafe, that was in the past.
I'm looking at the notes I'd
made of the conversation,
which read: Radio galaxy,
lobe, plasma, jets of matter, never alone.
My note-taking is appalling.
If only I could go back
in time and start again.
I'm at a cafe with Guillaume.
He's got a cup of black coffee,
and he's telling me about
looking for supermassive black holes.
And not just any supermassive
black holes, the special ones,
the ones with jets
blasting matter into space.
The 0.1% that are
actively shaping galaxies.
He's brought his two-year-old
daughter with him.
She's found sand in the pot plants,
and is throwing it into the air.
Your ordinary stellar black holes form
when massive stars die and collapse.
They're big, five to 10
times the mass of our sun,
or five to 10 million times of the Earth.
In our galaxy alone
there could be millions,
but in comparison to supermassive
black holes they're tiny.
Black holes have had a bad rap,
often depicted as monstrous
destructive forces
that suck up anything nearby,
a huge ultra massive
humongous Dyson vacuum.
We can probably blame
Hollywood for some of this.
We can blame Hollywood for a lot,
but Hollywood is not where stars are made.
Jets from supermassive
black holes help make stars.
They act like thermostats,
and provide the perfect conditions
for controlling star formation.
So galaxies are created by
supermassive black holes,
and there's one at the
centre of every galaxy.
Ours in the Milky Way
is called Sagittarius A,
and it's got a mass about
four million times our sun,
so as supermassives go it's small.
The biggest discovered so far in 2019
in a galaxy called Holm A
is estimated to be 40 billion
times the mass of the sun.
These kind of sizes can
seriously mess with your brain,
and really there's no
way to properly describe
how big this is, but
they're a long way off.
Light takes time to travel.
If you're watching this
on a screen it will take
a couple of nanoseconds for
the light to reach your eyes,
and when it has, what you're
seeing is already in the past.
So distance in space is measured
by how long it takes light to travel.
Now, currently, the furthest
object observed is a galaxy
called GN-z11 detected by
the Hubble Telescope in 2016.
It's 13 billion light
years away, which means
it's taken 13 billion years
for the light to reach us,
which means when we observe it
what we see is 13 billion
years in the past.
It might not even be there anymore.
The further we can look into the universe
the closer we get to seeing the beginning.
The oldest galaxies where it all began.
I think about the importance
we place on origins.
Guillaume's moved a lot,
living in different countries,
different cities, so
where's home now, I ask.
Home is not a place, it's
people, the people you love.
It's like putting on an old pair of shoes.
Guillaume's coffee cup is empty,
and his daughter dips her hands into it,
and tastes the bitter
grounds on her tongue.
She doesn't seem to mind the taste.
In the Murchison region of
WA they're building SKA,
the Square Kilometre Array.
The largest ever radio telescope.
Guillaume says this will
allow us to see as far back
as the first two billion years
of the existence of the universe.
He's hoping to find some
of the oldest black holes,
the ones right at the start.
If we're constantly
getting better telescopes
to see further into the
universe and the past
how far back will we
eventually be able to see?
Not to the beginning it
turns out, there's a limit.
The first few million
years of the universe
there were no stars, nothing
emitting light for us to see,
a completely different plane of existence.
Like the time we might
have been in the womb
when the connections in the brain
haven't formed enough to create memories.
Generally, people can't remember
anything before age two.
So Guillaume's daughter
won't remember any of
this day into the future.
Does your family understand
what you do, I ask.
How do you continue a normal life?
I don't really talk about
it with them, he says.
And if it came to a choice
between studying the universe,
and my family, family is most important.
His daughter is sitting on his lap,
and she's disintegrating
the piece of banana bread
she was eating into a pile
of crumbs on the table,
which seems like an appropriate
ending to our conversation.
We leave the cafe,
but it's plausible that if
someone had the right telescope,
and they'd focused in from
13 billion light years away
they would see Guillaume and I.
We'd be gone, of course.
The cafe would be gone,
as would the street,
and the whole planet,
and probably our galaxy,
but they could still see us.
We travel by light into the future
an ever-onward journey to a singularity,
which is fine as long as you have coffee,
and an old pair of shoes.
