 
 
Patrolling space like a century the satellite telescopes Swift is on constant lookout for cosmic disasters
When it finds one
Down on earth word spreads quickly
Every few days the satellite spots of violent eruption in deep space
Sending dozens of stargazers scrambling
Whether they're seasoned pros or high school amateurs their goal is the same got a camera focus mode
Then we're going to move the dog Casey to catch a glimpse of a star in its final death throes
Going supernova
And leaving in its wake the strangest phenomenon in the cosmos
a black hole
Nothing survives
encounters with black holes the black hole wins
It wins every time
When something falls into a black hole, it's essentially gone from our universe
They rip stuff apart and eat them and then they burp and they're ready for the next
course
and now evidence of something even more ominous a
new kind of black hole of
unfathomable size and power
That's a big galaxy and right down at the Senate
We think there's probably a black hole that's got a mass now that approaches a billion suns
Today scientists are finding black holes are bigger
Stronger and more destructive than they ever imagined
It creates energy fields that would fry any life in its vicinity. Not only do they consume everything that comes near
You stick your fingers out of it. You ain't getting it back
But their power may reach across galaxies and beyond
The uterus really have to be made with these things in it
We'd like to think they're far far away. But what if in our own cosmic backyard?
There lurks the monster of the Milky Way right now on Nova
Under funding for Nova is provided by the following
This is Justin -
As he pours over a set of x-rays Bryan McNamara struggles to diagnose a complicated ailment - no
So that's pretty strange but his patient isn't a person or any earthly creature
It's a cluster of galaxies two and a half billion light-years away
But a giant blast of energy spewing from the center
This is the most powerful explosion in the universe since the Big Bang to
Put this on sort of an earth scale. It's equivalent to about a trillion trillion trillion
Atomic explosions and so it's an enormous amount of energy
What could produce such awesome power?
Whatever it is, it seems to live at the very core of galaxies
And many believe our own galaxy the Milky Way is not immune harboring a powerful secret at its heart
What could lie at the center of the Milky Way
One of the pioneering explorers of our galaxy is Eric Beckman
He's been trying to unlock the mysteries of the galactic center for more than 40 years
But first he had to find it
Back, then people weren't even sure where the sender was. There was some vague
Understanding there was a radio source called Sagittarius a a very strong radio source
But there was even debate whether that was really the center or not
Examining other distant galaxies astronomers knew that the center is usually the brightest spot tightly packed with stars
But when they tried to pinpoint the center of our own galaxy the Milky Way they ran into a problem
The central stars were shrouded by cosmic dust
There is so much dust between us in the galactic center. It is completely opaque
You do not see the stars in the galactic center the most powerful telescopes cannot see it
But there are other kinds of light that can pass through like infrared a
Form of light and heat invisible to the naked eye that travels in slightly longer waves
Infrared radiation gets through the dust because it's
Wavelengths are longer and the dust just kind of rides on the infrared wave
in the 1960s Beckman belonged to a Caltech team that bought an infrared detector from a military contractor and
Attached it to the end of a telescope
It was in August of
1966 I was up at Mount Wilson
It was a beautiful night on the small 24 inch telescope and as we were looking with the infrared detector
we were seeing more and more stars a
Simple chart recorded the infrared light of stars
Stars that until then had remained hidden behind a veil of dust and debris
This is a signal in the infrared and each star
gives you more signal and we were building up as we were getting closer to seven more and more stars and
We were actually seeing through the dust for the first time and then tendo peak
And then back down again
and I knew immediately that that
Was the center of our Milky Way and that I was the first person to actually see the star in the core of our galaxy
Located the heart of the Milky Way from our perspective an inconspicuous speck near the constellation, Sagittarius
Where as a giant spiraling disk of hundreds of billions of stars a
hundred thousand light-years from end to end
Our Sun about halfway out from the center sits in the peaceful suburbs
But at the galaxy's core the neighborhood gets more exciting and dangerous
There's a lot of gas. There's a lot of dust. This is absolutely the most crowded place in our galaxy
From eros we can see two thousand stars with the naked eye
If you went to the galactic center, there would be millions of stars filling the sky
It's the big time it's where the show really goes on in the galaxy
And so if you go there
You're very much aware of being a tiny little mouse in Times Square and somebody's liable to step on you
For years scientists suspected that a powerful force dominated this galactic Times Square
It had to come from an unimaginably massive object
Some thought it had to be a black hole
An object so strange it's hard to describe
What's a black hole? It's a region of space
It's a point of infinite density we don't know how to wrap our brains around that
If you fall in you never come out it's not the point of no-return
It's the sphere of no return. Now you throw in a hungry beast in the middle of it all this is mom's just
Mysterious thing and if you can imagine taking a bowling ball, but I don't know II think that's not true
You have something you drop it off the top of a building you're falling in to the deepest. Well, you can possibly imagine
Physicists have just as hard a time as anybody else
Understanding this sort of thing
It's a black hole
There's no other phrase we can possibly use to describe it
The current idea of this bizarre creature comes from a radical view of space time and gravity
Welcome to the universe according to Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein had this crazy idea that space and time were curved and
it was the curvature of space that
Gave the appearance of gravity
We tend to think of space as rigid and stable
But Einstein proposed that space and time are woven together in a flexible fabric
Massive objects like the Sun
Actually bend and warp the fabric of space-time
creating troughs that smaller objects can fall into
What actually happens is matter warps space-time so the very space the three-dimensional space that we walk through
Works lightly every works in on me ever so slightly, but because we're not very massive. It's so minuscule that we don't sense it
If an object is massive enough like the earth
It will warp space-time so we can sense it and fall towards it. That's gravity
But what happens if an object is much much more massive than the earth or the Sun
In theory, it could warp the fabric so much who would create an actual hole in space-time
Once something fell in it couldn't escape not even light itself
So imagine a place where the gravity is so strong turning on a flashlight
The light would go up and it would never leave
It would curve and come back down. Just the way a toss the ball on earth
It's not traveling fast enough. It goes up curves and comes back down space itself is falling inside the black hole
It's rather like a river falling over a waterfall
It's like that except it's space itself is falling over the cliff
This place where the space starts moving faster than light
So the light which is trying to get out it's rather like a kayaker trying to make their way up stream on a river
That's going too fast. They get dragged down to the center of the black hole
Gravity becomes a riptide the closer you get the stronger the current
Eventually you reach the event horizon the point of no return
Deep inside whatever goes in is lost in a point of infinite density
The matter goes inside the surface of the black hole shrinks down to the very center
where it gets destroyed in a region of infinite warped space and time and it's gone and so
It seems are the laws of physics
At the center of a black hole all equations break down
Even for physicists what happens deep inside a black hole is a mystery
We're in want of a new idea about how to explain what matter does at the center of a black hole
We're need of a new law physics
Einstein himself concluded black holes were too strange to be real
Albert never really liked the idea of black holes. He thought they were anathema. This was something that nature should avoid
The places where space and time became infinitely twisted up
He thought no Nature shouldn't allow that
Black holes are certainly odd beasts in the universe
They were thought to be peculiar. So peculiar as to perhaps not even
Really exist in the real world simply because your equations show that they can't exist doesn't require that the real universe has them
But over the years suspicions roads
Stars were found behaving strangely
orbiting invisible objects
moving faster than expected
Even though a black hole emits no light
Is completely invisible
We know exactly what effect a black hole is gonna have on its environment on the stars in its vicinity on the gas
That wanders a little too close. So will we ever see a black hole?
No
But that's not what's important here. What's important here is
We can see
It's pawprint
Suspicious that an enormous black hole was dominating the center of the Milky Way eric beckylyn was eager to find its paw print
But even with infrared technology
when Becklund pointed the most powerful telescopes on earth at his target all he saw was this
Just a blur
the biggest obstacle that we had
was the
Turbulence in the our own Earth's atmosphere was blurring the images
even when the sky is clear the
Gases in Earth's atmosphere are always on the move distorting distant objects
To bring his view of the galactic center into focus Declan would need help
So he appealed to Andrea Ghez an expert in dealing with the atmospheric blur
The problems of the Earth's atmosphere is very much like a problem of looking for a penny at the bottom of a river that's moving
Where the water is moving by very quickly that motion of the water
distorts your image of the penny
Just like the motion of the air in our atmosphere distorts our images of astronomical objects
The guys agreed to take on the quest
To search for signs of a black hole at the center of the Milky Way
A decade ago you couldn't look at the center of our galaxy with high resolution. So you couldn't distinguish stars from one another
Gaze was able to correct the blurring effects of the atmosphere
With a revolutionary new technology called adaptive optics
So this little animation shows you the benefit of adaptive optics
You see the stars without adaptive optics you turn the adaptive optics on and all of a sudden you see stars and in
Particular you see stars near the center of the galaxy without adaptive optics
you would only see one big blob and
Those stars are in fact the most important for us to track we track all of them
But these are the ones that are the key to the problem
Thanks to the new technology the team could peer into the heart of the Milky Way with amazing precision
Our view to the center of the galaxy is
Absolutely superb and our ability to position stars at the centre of the galaxy is like somebody in Los Angeles
Seeing somebody in New York be able to move their finger like this. Okay, just two centimetres
That's the precision with which we can measure something that is
26,000 light-years away from us. It's the U was clear guess could start the hunt
If there were a black hole at the center of the galaxy, it's paw print would be found in the rapid orbits of nearby stars
The conclusive experiment to be done that really demonstrated
There was a black hole is to follow the orbits of individual stars in the galactic center
Very very accurately and with the highest precision possible
When an object like a star approaches another more massive object the pull of gravity will make the star speed up
If it's orbiting close to a massive black hole the star should accelerate to enormous speed and
Then whip around the black hole like a slingshot
Okay, so we have the black hole here the more massive it is the more Polaris
Or Polaris as it gets close to the black hole of faster it goes and we are measuring the speed of these stars
That's the key to getting the masses measuring the speed of those stars
This is our rib
And that centre of our galaxy
There's a large cluster of stars that are orbiting the center of our galaxy and by measuring the motion of stars and in particular
their orbits
We can figure out whether or not there's a central black hole that environment in there. It's a crowded party
Guys set out to monitor the partygoers attract every movement of the central stars
Basically the way this experiment works is you take an image
you see where all the stars are and then you come back sometime later and you take another image and
You look to see if they've moved and so the the second time we took an image
We knew we were golden those stars had clearly moved
This one moved to here as we moved to here this one move to here and so on
As guests continued to track the Stars she found some making dramatic hairpin turns
I've made a huge jump into over here
All the way around that's moving on order 10 million miles per hour. So it's just speeding away
Other astronomers clock the stars with similar results
Not only were the stars accelerating to phenomenal speeds their orbits were perfectly smooth
Des knew that they had to be circling a single massive object
Most black holes are thought to be about ten times more massive than our Sun but the object at the centre of the Milky Way
Was roughly three million times as massive
Ferguson Becklund that could mean only one thing
All other physical explanations of
What was at the very center were gone. The only thing left was a black hole not
Only was this black hole supermassive it was millions of miles wide
Astronomers around the world admitted the evidence was impressive
I have to say when I first saw Andrea's video
I was stunned
When I saw that star come out of the left side of the frame and goes zipping around and go shooting off into the other
End of the frame and it moved around a point in space and nothing was there
That we could with our instruments effectively travel to the center of the galaxy
26,000 light-years away and collect the evidence for such an incredible object, which was really an amazing achievement
It seemed undeniable a
giant black hole and at the center of our Milky Way
But how could such a monstrosity come to be?
One idea is that black holes are born out of the death throes of enormous stars
Like a red supergiant a star ten times more massive than our own son
Deep inside temperatures soar above a billion degrees
Helium and carbon fuse into heavier elements oxygen silicon sulfur
Eventually the nuclear reaction creates iron and the core stops burning
Then the star implodes under its own immense gravity and goes supernova
What's left is a heavy core of subatomic particles a neutron star
Only about ten miles across but of incredible density
In fact, it's so dense that a teaspoonful of neutron star matter would weigh about a billion tons
If the neutron star is heavy enough 3 times more massive than our Sun or more the implosion will continue
Eventually, the gravitational pressure will be so large that the neutrons themselves will be crushed and there'll be nothing left to stop the collapse
Many researchers believe that the Milky Way is littered with small black holes the dark dense remains of dead stars
There must be millions and millions of black holes
Zipping around our galaxy as we speak, but we don't see them in general because they're dead. They're corpses and
There's nothing there to light them up
They might be invisible
But to a visitor these small black holes may be 10 miles in diameter
Would be especially deadly
one of the scenarios that always gets me thinking is
death by black hole
Approaching a black hole the gravity is so strong and space is so warped. It distorts the light all around it
If it's a small black hole than soon you'll be distorted to
by tremendous tidal forces of gravity
The tidal force is the difference between the gravity your head and your feet
the gravity at your feet if that causes a black hole is a little bit stronger than the gravity of your head and you feel
That as something is tearing you apart
Stretching you from head to toe the tidal forces
unrelentingly getting stronger as they exceed the
molecular forces that bind your flesh as you snap into two pieces and those two pieces snap into another two pieces and
Ultimately all cool items apart. You will be as we say spaghettified
And so you end up moving through space-time like toothpaste through a tube
And if I pick a way to go that's how I'd want to go
It's got to be better than just getting buried. I mean, come on now a
Supermassive black hole a million times wider might at first seem more inviting
Since it has a larger event horizon the pull of gravity is more spread out
But you go to a supermassive black hole. The tidal forces are a weak enough that you can fall
not only through the event horizon but deep down into the interior of the black hole, so
With a good spaceship you might be able to cross the event horizon into the black hole itself
Now thanks to a computer simulation based on Einsteins own equations we can see exactly what such a trip would look like
The supermassive black hole is surrounded by swirling light beams a superheated gas rushes into orbit at high speed
Light and matter are suspended by centrifugal force and then inevitably fall victim to the relentless pull of gravity
At last you cross the event horizon the point where nothing can escape
So, let's imagine that we fall through the event horizon
That's this place where space is moving faster than light. We fall deeper down inside the black Hall
But don't expect the black hole to be black
Deep within there's an inner horizon a logjam of trapped light and energy
At a certain moment as we hit the inner horizon business infinitely bright blinding flash
And that's what the stuff that's been waiting there trying to get out is it held there at the in horizon
Unfortunately, you wouldn't have long to enjoy the view
It would vaporize you
Roast you vaporize you mama lies you
Almost certainly. If you fell into a real black hole you would simply unfortunately die
Science fiction displays a bit more optimism
But the 1979 movie the black hole
Space travelers do indeed fear this massive object. I will travel where no man has dared to go
Into the black hole
Why that's crazy
Cuckoo is a Swiss clock
But even more cuckoo the heroes actually survived their descent into the beast
In where they're treated to a heavenly experience
Popular culture has cast black holes as the freaks of the universe
And the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way weighing in at three million times the mass of the Sun
Seems especially monstrous
But is it unique?
To find out astronomers are probing distant galaxies to see if our giant black hole is one of a kind or
nothing special
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is taking a census of the big galaxies within a billion light years
For every patch of sky a steel plate is created each hole represents an entire galaxy within our view
Fiber optic sensors are plugged in
Each measures the distinctive spectrum of light emanating from a galaxy's core and
Can detect signs of hot gas swirling into a black hole you
Can see the results
circled in red
Virtually every major galaxy bears the signature of a supermassive black hole
I
Was pretty amazing
Before that we thought yeah, maybe a large number of galaxies have black holes in them
But every galaxy has a black hole. That was something very interesting the closer
We looked to the Centers of galaxies the more we find these black holes and the inventory is rising high
So any idea for the formation of a galaxy will now have to include some
Explanation for how you get a black hole in its center
So, how did every big galaxy in the universe end up with a giant black hole in the middle
To understand we have to go back to the very beginning
The Big Bang
Got the big bang handing you your birth ingredients your hydrogen your Helium your
Your traces of some other elements so it's kind of like this this soup you put it together and stir it
The main stir for the soup is gravity drawing together wisps of hot primordial gases
Over time the clouds of hydrogen gas cooled down and grow more and more dense
Until some coalesce into the first stars
These are giants hundreds of times bigger than our Sun
They burn out quickly and dramatically
In the flash of a supernova
What's left at the core is a black hole
Perhaps the black hole becomes the seed from which the galaxy sprouts
the gravitational seed that is used as an attractive force to
Accumulate the rest of what we would today then call the greater galaxy
Possibly seeded by black holes the infant galaxies dance an orbit one another as gravity pulls them closer
So our Milky Way galaxy as this time-lapse simulation shows was not born in one single event
Instead it was built over billions of years from a swarm of smaller galaxies smashing together merging
But if another galaxy comes too close
They will each feel each other's gravity. And in that collision, what started out as a stately ballet of stellar orbits
Moving around the center of their galaxy has now become this
Maelstrom
There's no other way to say it
Galactic cannibalism, that's what they're doing. They're
dining on their neighbours eating entire galaxies
Well for every galaxy you eat if that galaxy has a black hole in its center. It's going to eat the black hole
The black hole will work its way down to the center above the large galaxy
Making the center of the galaxy bigger as well as the galaxy itself
It's just that simple the big galaxies get bigger. The little ones get
Galactic cannibalism is how galaxies grow and with them the black holes at their centers merge and grow bigger
But what does the presence of such a monster mean for the life of a galaxy
Brian McNamara believes, he's found the answer and it isn't pretty
That's it right there
We got it
That's it okay so you Mack Namara studies the life cycles of the universe's biggest structures
Galaxy clusters. There it is. That's the galaxy so that's what we've been looking for
This is the giant central galaxy in a galaxy cluster
And each one of these little dots here on the screen is a is a giant galaxy as big as our Milky Way
Maybe even a little bit bigger and they're all bound together by their own mutual gravity. So they're all
Buzzing around this giant galaxy like bees buzzing around a hive
180 180 McNamara probes his galaxies with multiple tools
Optical telescopes radio receivers
Even x-rays, there we go
Check that out
X-ray images reveal a vast cloud of hot gas for the whole cluster across hundreds of thousands of light-years
There's an atmosphere of gas
that pervades the entire galaxy cluster and it's an atmosphere like our atmosphere except that it's far less dense and it's and it's
much much hotter
but when McNamara looked at x-rays of the gas around certain clusters
He saw that vast clumps of it appeared to be missing. I
Was blown away I'll never forget the moment
We got the observations and lo and behold these two giant cavities showed up in the x-ray emission
the size of the cavities was astounding
That's two hundred thousand six hundred thousand light-years from end to end
So between that cavity here in this cavity here, we could stuff 600 milky way's in there. It's just astonishing
The energy involved is huge
Something powerful had pushed the gas away across vast regions of the universe
McNamara traced the power source to the center of a giant galaxy
a supermassive black hole
So we could see the beam coming out of the black hole and ending up in these big cavities
But how can a black hole a creature famous for devouring everything within its grasp spew energy across the universe
The answer lies in the way matter Falls toward the black hole it turns out nothing goes straight in
As matter falls in
What we know now is that it spirals around in a disk. Ok very much the way when water goes down the drain
It doesn't just go straight down the drain
Just as water spirals down a drain in a whirlpool
Matter and light spiral at high speed into a black hole
And the speeds that matter can can achieve around that black hole approach the speed of light and when matter travels at that speed it
gets a tremendous amount of energy matter of falling into a black hole is a
Lot of stuff trying to get into a very small place and so it's like trying to fill a dog dish with fire hose
Most isn't going to get it
the black hole chokes on the influx and
The high speed whirlpool of matter produces a powerful magnetic field
Coiling around the black hole and shooting the energy outward
These enormous Jets of energy hundreds of millions of times the power of the Sun can blast right out of the galaxy
There's no question that the black holes at the Centers of galaxies have a profound influence on their surrounding
They send out these huge Jets
moving at almost the speed of light and those Jets can send shockwaves into the surrounding medium and
Change their surroundings completely. They have a dramatic influence
Not only can they blast away huge quantities of gas
But they may even sterilize the galaxy so new stars can't form
The supermassive black holes at the center may be responsible for limiting the size of galaxies and principal galaxies can grow
to very very large sizes and what we see in the universe is that they don't
and we think that the supermassive black holes at the center may be the culprit they may be responsible for
Preventing runaway growth of galaxies
We usually think of black holes is God's dumpster, but they really are actors on the galactic stage
If supermassive black holes can wreak so much havoc what's to stop our own monster of the Milky Way from wiping us all out
It all depends on the monsters diet
Most of the time a black hole isn't eating it fasts more than it feasts
But when a black hole feasts it can have a tremendous effect on the surrounding galaxy
The more black holes chow down the more matter and energy will blast outwards
One of the key differences between galaxies with supermassive black holes is whether or not their black holes are lit up
Because they're basically binging on a lot of material in its surroundings
For years our black holes seem to be fasting and the Milky Way was peaceful
But in 1999 the Chandra Space Telescope detected a powerful signal from the galactic center
station 3 for Chandra see
an explosion near the event horizon is
This the beginning of a black hole binge
For trackers of the galactic center. The blast is a wake-up call
There was a piece of news every mark of a fact for all of us was for
Many years how inactive - black hole was and all a sudden. So well, there's an object there, which wasn't there before
Reinhard genzel have been watching the galactic center for nearly two decades
Like Andrea Ghez, he's been tracking the orbits of stars
Helping to prove the existence of a black hole at the heart of the Milky Way
Now both ganzel and gaze will shift their focus and try to measure the black hole's appetite
One of the big mysteries about the black hole the center of the galaxy is what we see a mission matter
Falling onto the black hole or rather the black hole eating up its surroundings
Denzel and gays are joining a worldwide effort
Chandra in orbit will take x-ray pictures of the galactic center
At the same time five major observatories on the ground will probe the black hole all trying to count calories
Denzel head south to Chile while Gaz and Beckman climb a mountain top in Hawaii
Telescope time is precious. There's no room for mistakes
When you're there
It's an incredible rush and you're very much on for the few nights
That you're there hoping the weather cooperates hoping at the the instant record crates
Okay, let's see if there's something there
Madeline we're ready to go the teams have five short nights to find out how much the black hole is eating
By measuring the energy that flares out zoom in a little bit more. Alright, so first night
Doesn't look like we've got any flares Chandra headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts
The first night turns up only noise
for more chances skies
Knight to Chile has problems
We have to redo the acquisition over even if there are flares the Chilean telescope can't see them the correction was
let's still yeah unstable a
Patch of humidity is confusing the computers
The crucial adaptive optics aren't working and everything's a blur it's extreme
Well, okay now we have a problem if they ate meat the myth the main mirror they ate me Tamara seems sweetie farm
In Hawaii, it's not much better for gays and her team
The galactic center is playing hide and seek behind overcast skies
Friday with clouds it looked better just a moment ago. So it looked like it looked like we were just
Ready to go, but now it's looking like yep
The Hawaiian forecast predicts even more clouds tomorrow
The team is getting anxious
Finally on night 3 the German team's luck changes
Very correct right. It's really very very
chilly, they spot an outburst at
Best fair event that I saw here on this run definitely
A new point of light appears in the star field one that wasn't there before
Very nice, very nice here. We can clearly see a region between those two sources where there is no other object
And here we have the same region the same two sources and now in between we see an additional source
so this is the flaring state of
Sagittarius a star
JPL comm jandreau, see
When the chandra team downloads their data from space they see it -
The x-rays show a spike that coincides with the Germans flash of light
Denzel checks in with the Hawaiian team, but they're in the wrong timezone
Newsroom our colleagues, of course telling us that there are a few few hours further west. So the Sun hasn't even set here
The galactic center hasn't risen above the hawaiian horizon and gas has missed the flare
This part kills me waiting
But next guess finally gets he's looking for
Image a whole lot better
Really so in fact, we can see flurry activity where we think we're seeing Matt or fall into the black hole and
Just a few minutes later. It was absolutely gone
This now you see it now. You don't flash of light is an explosion of energy
Produced when matter rushes toward the black hole and some escapes
we were taking measurements and
You didn't see anything from the black hole. All you saw was a star then BAM. It was there and bright and 15 minutes
Later, it was gone
so that was our moment to make the measurement and it was extremely exciting to know that we had to actually be able to
Catch it
The teams are thrilled to capture a handful of flares at the heart of the Milky Way, but they're just snacks
Nothing compared to the giant jet seen in distant galaxies
What's more they're looking like rare events
There's simply not enough matter near our black hole to provide a large continuing feast
It seems at least for now the Giants plate is empty
our black hole had a
Wild teenage life. I'm pretty sure of that it all Jets it through law that matter out
It had a grand old time and now it's decayed into the old folks home
But what would it take for the monster of the Milky Way to come out of retirement?
Could explosive Jets of energy blast across our galaxy in the future
Tantalizing clues are turning up in a coldest place on earth a
Smithsonian team is tuning into high-frequency radio signals from the galactic center
The best reception is at the South Pole
Not as nice as a Wyatt, but the date is worth it
There's some of the gasps falling in toward the black hole in Atlantic Center
Reading the radio signal Anthony stark detects just small amounts of gas feeding the black hole
Nothing too serious but farther out about 400 light years from the galactic center
he can see signs of something much more alarming a
Vast ring of matter is gradually growing bigger
this storage ring then builds up until
It coagulates into a single gigantic cloud of about 30 million solar masses
When the ring reaches a tipping point it will condense into a giant cloud
Triggering a dramatic starburst event a storm of stars forming and dying quickly
What's left of the gas cloud will spiral down into the grasp of the black hole
Which then rapidly spirals in and feeds the black hole in the Atlantic Center making the Milky Way inactive galaxy
When the feasting starts the fireworks will be seen across the Milky Way
But don't bother marking your calendar dinner time isn't scheduled for at least 10 million years
The Milky Way will survive its black holes upcoming feast
But it isn't likely to survive the threat further down the road
Galactic cannibalism
Our galaxy the Milky Way is not immune from these colliding galaxy scenarios we've got neighbors
Two million light-years away our closest neighbor the Andromeda
Galaxy is charging tortoise at almost seven hundred thousand miles per hour
We're falling towards each other and one day we will collide
Knowing the galaxy's dimensions and the laws of gravity
What our simulations show is what could happen?
Basically in a quite a few billion years from now when the two galaxies will actually approach each other and merge
The merger will take more than two billion years while the galaxies circle and entwine
Imagine what that might look like from another galaxy
You'll see two grand beautiful spiral galaxies moving towards each other slowly losing their shape
To see new
Avenues where stars and gas can funnel down towards this newly formed Center
Feeding this reborn monster. The collision will send a blizzard of stars and gas in all directions
Some will shoot toward the crowded core of the new galaxy spurring massive explosions
In the process of merging there will be a very strong starburst event
Occurring at the time of the merger as all of the gas is being funneled towards the center
Amid the turmoil
Chances are our little solar system will either witness a spectacular show
Or be flung out of the galaxy into the voids of space
The Milky Way will be destroyed
But what about the black hole at its center?
most likely it will merge with Andromeda's a
monster 50 times larger
Stars and galaxies may come and go
The supermassive black holes just get bigger
Once considered freaks of the cosmos
Black holes are coming into their own
Claiming their place center stage
in a violent changing universe
As we forge ahead in trying to understand how
We came into being and how all of the matter got put down in the universe
We can't leave black holes out of the picture because it seems they play a fundamental role on very very large scales
Black holes not only wreak havoc upon the landscape in which they're embedded. They actively shape the landscape
So black holes are the kind of the spice of the universe
Black holes are a major player in the evolution of the things that light up our night sky
They are incense the secret shadows behind the walls of the galaxy
