# The Black Hole Star: A Bizarre New Object in the Early Universe

An episode of [Bedtime Astronomy](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1736397134), 2 Sep 2026, 17 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/74222903/bhstarp.mp3

The James Webb Space Telescope may have identified a bizarre cosmic object known as a black hole star—a compact, extremely luminous structure containing a massive black hole surrounded by a dense hydrogen envelope. The discovery could explain the mysterious “little red dots” seen in the early universe and offer new clues about how the first black holes and galaxies formed. Thank you for listening to Bedtime Astronomy — your guide to the cosmos. New episodes on space exploration, NASA missions & the latest astronomy breakthroughs. This episode includes AI-generated content.

## Transcript

[0:03] Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
[0:07] Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
[0:12] Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
[0:16] Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
[0:20] Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
[0:22] Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
[0:26] Speaker 2: So imagine you're just looking up at the night sky, right,
[0:29] Speaker 2: You're scanning the darkness, and you spot what looks like, well,
[0:32] Speaker 2: a totally typical star, just a.
[0:34] Speaker 3: Single brilliant point of light exactly.
[0:38] Speaker 2: But then you actually analyze the data, you run the math,
[0:41] Speaker 2: and you realize you are looking at a physical impossibility.
[0:45] Speaker 3: Right, because the number is just they just do not
[0:47] Speaker 3: make sense.
[0:48] Speaker 2: They don't. This tiny star like object is somehow generating
[0:54] Speaker 2: like one hundred billion times more energy than any star
[0:57] Speaker 2: physically could. Yeah, it fundamentally breaks the known laws of thermodynamics.
[1:01] Speaker 3: It's the kind of mathematical contradiction that honestly makes astrophysicists
[1:05] Speaker 3: question their own instruments. I mean, you have an object
[1:08] Speaker 3: confined to a relatively tiny space producing a volume of
[1:12] Speaker 3: energy that entirely defies the basic mechanics of how stars operate.
[1:15] Speaker 2: It simply should not exist.
[1:17] Speaker 3: It shouldn't and yet it's sitting right there in our
[1:19] Speaker 3: telescope data.
[1:20] Speaker 2: Which is just wild. So today we are unpacking this
[1:23] Speaker 2: groundbreaking discovery that is honestly currently forcing the astronomical community
[1:28] Speaker 2: to rewrite the textbooks.
[1:30] Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a huge deal.
[1:31] Speaker 2: We're looking at this massive breakthrough from a team of
[1:34] Speaker 2: researchers at MIT, specifically Rohan and Naid, Robert Simcoe, and
[1:39] Speaker 2: Wendy Son, and they found an object so strange, so paradoxical,
[1:44] Speaker 2: that they had to invent a brand new classification.
[1:47] Speaker 3: For it, black hole star.
[1:48] Speaker 2: The black hole star. It sounds like sci fi. We
[1:51] Speaker 2: are going to explore exactly what this monster is, the
[1:55] Speaker 2: quantum mechanics of how it was hiding in the very
[1:58] Speaker 2: early universe, and how it might actually solve one of
[2:00] Speaker 2: the most heavily debated mysteries in modern astronomy.
[2:03] Speaker 3: Right, and to really set the stage for this, you
[2:05] Speaker 3: have to go back to the dawn of the cosmos. Yeah,
[2:07] Speaker 3: the MIT team was using the James Web Space Telescope
[2:10] Speaker 3: the JWST to peer deep into the.
[2:13] Speaker 2: Past, like incredibly deep.
[2:14] Speaker 3: Yeah, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang,
[2:17] Speaker 3: so in cosmic terms, the universe was, you know, barely
[2:20] Speaker 3: out of its infancy. And they were running this highly
[2:23] Speaker 3: targeted survey called Mirage or Miracle or mom for short.
[2:27] Speaker 2: I love that name, by the way, The name of
[2:29] Speaker 2: that survey really captures the tension of early universe astronomy
[2:33] Speaker 2: right now. It really does, because the JWST keeps capturing
[2:36] Speaker 2: images of what appeared to be incredibly massive ultra break
[2:41] Speaker 2: galaxies forming way earlier than standard cosmological models say they should, right,
[2:47] Speaker 2: So finding a genuine massive galaxy at that stage at
[2:50] Speaker 2: the universe's evolution would be the miracle.
[2:53] Speaker 3: But the team suspected that some of those miracles were
[2:55] Speaker 3: actually a mirage. Like they theorized that certain points of
[2:59] Speaker 3: light might be something else entirely just masquerading as massive
[3:03] Speaker 3: early galaxies. Oh okay, So they come through these deep
[3:06] Speaker 3: field images basically just searching for anomalies, and.
[3:09] Speaker 2: That search led them to a single dot, just one
[3:12] Speaker 2: little dot, amidst a literal sea of distance celestial bodies.
[3:15] Speaker 2: This one dot stood out because it was incredibly bright
[3:19] Speaker 2: and it was glaringly unusually red.
[3:21] Speaker 3: Yeah, and when they isolated the light from this dot
[3:23] Speaker 3: and calculated the actual physical dimensions of the object emitting it.
[3:28] Speaker 3: The numbers were just baffling. The object was roughly the
[3:30] Speaker 3: size of our solar system, which.
[3:32] Speaker 2: I mean sounds ammens from a human perspective. Oh sure,
[3:35] Speaker 2: But on a cosmic scale, a single solar system is
[3:37] Speaker 2: basically a speck of dust compared to the size of
[3:39] Speaker 2: a galaxy exactly.
[3:41] Speaker 3: So the anomaly was how much power was radiating from
[3:44] Speaker 3: that tiny speck. A solar system sized object was outputting
[3:48] Speaker 3: energy levels one hundred billion times greater than nuclear fusion
[3:52] Speaker 3: could possibly account for.
[3:54] Speaker 2: And we have to remember what nuclear fusion actually is, right,
[3:57] Speaker 2: It's the engine of all normal stars, including our Sun.
[4:01] Speaker 2: Deep in a star's core, you have this immense pressure
[4:04] Speaker 2: in feet forcing hydrogen atoms to smash together, creating helium
[4:09] Speaker 2: and releasing a very specific amount of energy.
[4:12] Speaker 3: But fusion has strict mathematical boundaries totally.
[4:15] Speaker 2: A star's energy output is hard limited by its mass
[4:18] Speaker 2: and the efficiency of that atomic collision. You cannot just
[4:20] Speaker 2: squeeze one hundred billion times more energy out of a
[4:23] Speaker 2: standard fusion reaction. The math hits a hard wall.
[4:26] Speaker 3: It's kind of like It's akin to finding a standard
[4:28] Speaker 3: handheld AA flashlight that is somehow projecting the continuous energy
[4:32] Speaker 3: of a commercial nuclear power plant.
[4:34] Speaker 2: That is a perfect analogy. The sheer output is just
[4:37] Speaker 2: incompatible with the mechanism, but figuring out why it didn't
[4:41] Speaker 2: just vaporize itself meant they had to look much closer
[4:44] Speaker 2: at the light it was emitting. Because if an object
[4:47] Speaker 2: that relatively small is radiating that much brute force energy,
[4:51] Speaker 2: why isn't the force of its own radiation blowing it
[4:54] Speaker 2: apart completely? Right?
[4:55] Speaker 3: A flashlight outputting a nuclear blast would instantly.
[4:58] Speaker 2: Detonate exactly, It would just be gone, And.
[5:00] Speaker 3: That paradox is the exact puzzle the MIT team faced.
[5:04] Speaker 3: The energy output completely ruled out a star, but the
[5:07] Speaker 3: physical structure of the object ruled out it being a
[5:09] Speaker 3: standard galaxy. Right, So the secret to how this object
[5:12] Speaker 3: survives without detonating was actually hidden within the specific color
[5:16] Speaker 3: of the light it was throwing across the universe.
[5:18] Speaker 2: Because the object appeared incredibly red, and in traditional astronomy,
[5:22] Speaker 2: when a telescope spots a very red object, the immediate
[5:25] Speaker 2: assumption is cosmic dust.
[5:27] Speaker 3: Yep Robert Simcoe, one of the MIT researchers actually compared
[5:31] Speaker 3: it to a very terrestrial phenomenon.
[5:33] Speaker 2: Oh the smoke thing.
[5:34] Speaker 3: Yeah, when thick wildfire smoke from Canada drifted over Boston
[5:38] Speaker 3: a while back, the sky in the sun looked this
[5:40] Speaker 3: piercing dark red, right I remember that. Well, the exact
[5:44] Speaker 3: same optical filtering happens in deep space. Clouds of cosmic dust,
[5:48] Speaker 3: which are essentially soot and complex molecules, act as a veil.
[5:53] Speaker 3: As light passes through that veil, the shorter blue wavelengths
[5:57] Speaker 3: of light are scattered away. Uh okay, only no longer
[6:00] Speaker 3: red wavelengths managed to actually penetrate the dust and reach
[6:04] Speaker 3: our telescopes.
[6:05] Speaker 2: So the initial hypothesis was pretty straightforward. Then it's just
[6:08] Speaker 2: a bright, active object hidden behind a really thick wall
[6:11] Speaker 2: of cosmic soot.
[6:12] Speaker 3: That was the thought. But the instruments on the JWST
[6:16] Speaker 3: are not just taking pictures, you know, they are capturing
[6:19] Speaker 3: the spectrum of light, breaking it down to read the
[6:22] Speaker 3: chemical barcode of whatever emitted.
[6:24] Speaker 2: Is right, it's not just a camera exactly.
[6:26] Speaker 3: And that data proved this was absolutely not a mirage
[6:29] Speaker 3: caused by dust.
[6:30] Speaker 2: The dust hypothesis fell apart.
[6:31] Speaker 3: Completely completely cosmic dust leaves very specific chemical signatures in
[6:36] Speaker 3: the light spectrum, and those signatures were completely absent zero dust.
[6:40] Speaker 2: Wow. So instead of the gentle scattering caused by soot,
[6:44] Speaker 2: the team observed this violent, abrupt anomaly in the light
[6:49] Speaker 2: known as a bomber break. Let's break down what a
[6:51] Speaker 2: bomber break actually is, because this isn't just a simple
[6:54] Speaker 2: dimming of light. It's a highly specific quantum event.
[6:58] Speaker 3: Right, it really is, so at my microscopic level, a
[7:01] Speaker 3: bomber break is driven by the behavior of hydrogen atoms.
[7:04] Speaker 3: You know, a hydrogen atom has a single electron orbiting
[7:07] Speaker 3: its nucleus, right, Well, that electron can only occupy very
[7:11] Speaker 3: specific fixed energy levels or orbits. When a photon of
[7:16] Speaker 3: light hits the atom. If that photon possesses exactly the
[7:19] Speaker 3: right amount of energy, the electron will absorb it to
[7:21] Speaker 3: jump to a higher orbit.
[7:23] Speaker 2: So the photon is effectively swallowed.
[7:24] Speaker 3: Whole swallowed and totally erased from the beam of light
[7:27] Speaker 3: traveling toward our telescope.
[7:29] Speaker 2: Wow.
[7:29] Speaker 3: And when you have an incredibly dense cloud of hydrogen gas,
[7:33] Speaker 3: it absorbs massive amounts of light at these specific wavelengths.
[7:36] Speaker 3: So on a spectrum graph, the light is incredibly bright,
[7:39] Speaker 3: and then suddenly it just drops.
[7:40] Speaker 2: Off a cliff, and that sudden cliff is the bomber
[7:42] Speaker 2: break exactly.
[7:44] Speaker 3: We see these breaks in the atmospheres of certain dense
[7:47] Speaker 3: stars like Vega, for example.
[7:49] Speaker 2: But the break the team found in this object wasn't
[7:51] Speaker 2: just a standard dip Rohan Naidu noted, it was the
[7:54] Speaker 2: deepest bomber break ever observed in the history of astronomy. Ever,
[7:58] Speaker 2: the drop off was so extreme it immediately ruled out
[8:01] Speaker 2: an ordinary stellar atmosphere. The sheer volume of light being
[8:05] Speaker 2: swallowed meant the hydrogen gas doing the absorbing was unbelievably.
[8:09] Speaker 3: Dense, and building on that anomaly, the light that did
[8:12] Speaker 3: make it through this dense gas was incredibly pure, pure
[8:16] Speaker 3: in what sense well. In astrophysics, any element heavier than
[8:19] Speaker 3: hydrogen or helium is broadly categorized as a metal. Standard
[8:23] Speaker 3: stars and the dust clouds around them are just full
[8:26] Speaker 3: of metals forged over billions of years. Okay, right, But
[8:29] Speaker 3: the light from this object contained almost zero metallic signatures.
[8:32] Speaker 3: It was pristine raw hydrogen and helium, which perfectly aligns
[8:37] Speaker 3: with the composition of the very early universe before heavy
[8:40] Speaker 3: elements had time to form.
[8:41] Speaker 2: So imagine putting on a pair of high tech, impenetrable
[8:44] Speaker 2: sunglasses that don't just dim the light, but aggressively and
[8:47] Speaker 2: flawlessly block out a highly specific wavelength of energy, leaving
[8:52] Speaker 2: everything else blindingly bright. Oh that's good, right, And the
[8:55] Speaker 2: sunglasses in this scenario are entirely made of pure, tightly
[8:58] Speaker 2: packed hydrogen as atoms.
[9:00] Speaker 3: Yes, and that extreme density forces a totally new physical
[9:04] Speaker 3: model for hydrogen gas to absorb that much light and
[9:07] Speaker 3: create a bomber break that deep. It cannot be a loose,
[9:10] Speaker 3: wispy cloud floating in space.
[9:12] Speaker 2: It has to be compacted.
[9:13] Speaker 3: It has to act like a solid physical sponge, densely
[9:17] Speaker 3: packed around whatever is generating the light.
[9:19] Speaker 2: So the team was basically left staring at a completely
[9:22] Speaker 2: unprecedented structure. They had an incredibly dense balloon of pure
[9:26] Speaker 2: hydrogen gas about the size of our solar system, right,
[9:29] Speaker 2: and something inside that balloon was generating an impossible amount
[9:32] Speaker 2: of light without using nuclear fusion. So to solve the
[9:35] Speaker 2: engine problem, they turned to supercomputer simulations.
[9:38] Speaker 3: They did they needed to mathematically build different cosmic engines
[9:42] Speaker 3: to see what could simultaneously produce that immense energy create
[9:45] Speaker 3: the deepest bomber break ever recorded and emit pure metal
[9:49] Speaker 3: free light all at the same time exactly, and they
[9:51] Speaker 3: knew fusion was off the table. The math of the
[9:54] Speaker 3: universe left only one potential mechanism capable of outputting that
[9:58] Speaker 3: kind of sustained unfathomed power.
[10:00] Speaker 2: An active accreting supermassive black hole.
[10:04] Speaker 3: The simulations confirmed it flawlessly. The engine powering this anomaly
[10:08] Speaker 3: wasn't a star at all. It was a black hole
[10:11] Speaker 3: roughly one hundred thousand times the mass of our Sun,
[10:14] Speaker 3: sitting directly in the center of that dense hydrogen balloon. Unbelievable,
[10:18] Speaker 3: and they officially designated it mom BH Star one. The
[10:23] Speaker 3: acronym stands for the mirage or Miracle Survey and black
[10:27] Speaker 3: hole Star one.
[10:28] Speaker 2: So the physical structure here is like a massive cosmic
[10:31] Speaker 2: Russian nesting doll.
[10:32] Speaker 3: Oh.
[10:32] Speaker 2: Definitely at the very center you have the supermassive black hole.
[10:36] Speaker 2: Surrounding it is the accretion disc, which is this swirling
[10:40] Speaker 2: vortex of gas being ripped apart by the black hole's gravity,
[10:43] Speaker 2: heating up to millions of degrees through sheer friction and
[10:46] Speaker 2: just blasting out X rays and ultraviolet light and encapsulating
[10:50] Speaker 2: all of that is the thick solar system sized envelope
[10:53] Speaker 2: of pure hydrogen gas.
[10:55] Speaker 3: Exactly so, the intense light from the accretion disc blasts
[10:58] Speaker 3: outward and hits that dense wall of highydrogen. The tightly
[11:01] Speaker 3: packed atoms swallow the specific wavelengths, creating the extreme Balmer break.
[11:05] Speaker 1: We talked about.
[11:05] Speaker 3: Okay, I see it, and the light that actually survives
[11:08] Speaker 3: the journey through the envelope emerges incredibly bright, pure, and
[11:13] Speaker 3: intensely red.
[11:15] Speaker 2: It is a brilliant, elegant mechanism, it is. But I
[11:18] Speaker 2: mean it brings us right back to the physical paradox
[11:20] Speaker 2: we brought up earlier.
[11:21] Speaker 3: The gravity is shae.
[11:22] Speaker 1: Yes.
[11:22] Speaker 2: If you have a black hole with the mass of
[11:25] Speaker 2: one hundred thousand suns sitting directly inside a dense cloud
[11:29] Speaker 2: of gas, gravity is an incredibly.
[11:32] Speaker 3: Greedy force, very greedy.
[11:34] Speaker 2: Why doesn't the black hole just instantly consume its own disguise?
[11:37] Speaker 2: It is sitting right in the middle of its food source.
[11:40] Speaker 3: You are hitting on the fundamental tension that keeps this
[11:43] Speaker 3: entire object from collapsing. It relies on a mechanism called
[11:47] Speaker 3: the Eddington limit.
[11:48] Speaker 2: Okay, what is that?
[11:49] Speaker 3: So gravity is relentlessly pulling the hydrogen envelope inward. Right,
[11:54] Speaker 3: But remember that impossible energy output we discuss.
[11:57] Speaker 2: Yeah, the nuclear flashlight.
[11:58] Speaker 3: Right. The friction from the accretion disc is firing out
[12:01] Speaker 3: an unfathomable amount of light. And while light doesn't.
[12:05] Speaker 2: Have mass, it does have momentum.
[12:07] Speaker 3: Precisely, when a trillion trillion photons slam into the dense
[12:12] Speaker 3: hydrogen atoms of the envelope, they physically push against it.
[12:16] Speaker 3: This outward force is called radiation pressure. Wow, the engine
[12:20] Speaker 3: is so monstrously powerful that the outward push of the
[12:23] Speaker 3: blinding light perfectly counterbalances the inward pull of the black
[12:27] Speaker 3: hole's gravity. It creates this violent temporary equilibrium.
[12:31] Speaker 2: So the engine is so intense it physically holds up
[12:33] Speaker 2: its own disguise. It is pushing its food source away
[12:37] Speaker 2: just enough to prevent the entire balloon from instantly collapsing
[12:40] Speaker 2: into the singularity.
[12:41] Speaker 3: Exactly, And that delicate balance, that tug of war between
[12:45] Speaker 3: gravity and radiation pressure, is what makes mombihtar one more
[12:49] Speaker 3: than just a bizarre anomaly.
[12:50] Speaker 2: It's a missing link.
[12:51] Speaker 3: Yes, Understanding the physics of this single object actually acts
[12:54] Speaker 3: as the rosetta stone for a much wider debate that
[12:57] Speaker 3: has divided astronomers since JWST first.
[13:00] Speaker 2: On ah the mystery of the litera dots.
[13:02] Speaker 3: Yes, the little red dot, because.
[13:03] Speaker 2: When you look at the deepest images of the early
[13:06] Speaker 2: universe captured by JWST, the background is completely littered with
[13:10] Speaker 2: these tiny, unexplained red smudges. They're just everywhere in the cosmic.
[13:13] Speaker 3: Dawn, and the scientific community has been arguing about their
[13:17] Speaker 3: nature for years now. I mean, some argue they were
[13:20] Speaker 3: just ultra dense early galaxies obscured by typical.
[13:24] Speaker 2: Dust the smoke theory again right.
[13:26] Speaker 3: Others theorized they were an unknown type of supernova, but
[13:30] Speaker 3: the data was always just too blurry to confirm anything.
[13:33] Speaker 2: And the temporal aspect is what makes them so baffling,
[13:36] Speaker 2: right right, because these little red dots are ubiquitous in
[13:39] Speaker 2: the very early universe, but as we look closer to
[13:42] Speaker 2: home at the modern universe, they are completely gone.
[13:45] Speaker 3: They just vanished.
[13:46] Speaker 2: Right. So how does mombihstar one help solve this?
[13:50] Speaker 3: It's the key because of its sheer luminosity, it is
[13:53] Speaker 3: significantly brighter than the other red dots, so much so
[13:56] Speaker 3: that it completely outshines the early galaxy forming around it.
[13:59] Speaker 3: Oh I see, So astronomers were finally able to look
[14:02] Speaker 3: at pure, unadulterated light from one of these objects without
[14:05] Speaker 3: the surrounding starlight muddying the data.
[14:08] Speaker 2: They finally had a clean fingerprint exactly.
[14:10] Speaker 3: And when Rohan and I do in the team compared
[14:12] Speaker 3: the clean spectrum of the black hole star to the
[14:15] Speaker 3: blurry data of the thousands of little red.
[14:17] Speaker 2: Dots, the signatures matched.
[14:18] Speaker 3: They matched perfectly.
[14:20] Speaker 2: Oh wow, So the implications of that match shift the
[14:23] Speaker 2: entire paradigm completely.
[14:25] Speaker 3: The team now suspects that nearly every single little red
[14:28] Speaker 3: dot scene in the early universe is actually a super
[14:32] Speaker 3: massive black hole wearing a massive hydrogen star as a disguise.
[14:36] Speaker 2: That is just mind bending. The universe wasn't just hiding
[14:39] Speaker 2: one of these monsters, It was literally teeming with them teaming.
[14:42] Speaker 2: But okay, if black hole stars populated the entire dawn
[14:47] Speaker 2: of the cosmos, where did they all go? Did the
[14:50] Speaker 2: black holes eventually consume the hydrogen envelopes once the radiation
[14:53] Speaker 2: pressure dropped, or did the envelope simply blow away, leading
[14:57] Speaker 2: invisible wandering black holes in the dark.
[14:59] Speaker 3: That's the big question. No, it moves our understanding from
[15:02] Speaker 3: just a quirky categorization to a foundational stepping stone in
[15:06] Speaker 3: cosmic evolution. It suggests that this wasn't just an anomaly,
[15:10] Speaker 3: but a mandatory phase of life that countless early galaxies
[15:13] Speaker 3: actually had to endure.
[15:15] Speaker 2: It fundamentally reshapes how we view the timeline of the cosmos.
[15:18] Speaker 2: I mean, we started with what looked like a typical
[15:20] Speaker 2: telescope glitch, yeah, smugs. That was a little too red
[15:22] Speaker 2: and mathematically impossible. But by tracing the quantum mechanics of
[15:26] Speaker 2: the Balmer break and uncovering the violent equilibrium of radiation
[15:30] Speaker 2: pressure versus gravity, we find a brand new classification of
[15:34] Speaker 2: celestial body.
[15:36] Speaker 3: We uncovered a universe that basically refuses to adhere to
[15:39] Speaker 3: our neat historical categories. I mean, a star is powered
[15:43] Speaker 3: by fusion, a black hole consumes light, but in the
[15:47] Speaker 3: extreme density of the early universe, those distinct concepts just
[15:51] Speaker 3: blurred into a hybrid engine.
[15:53] Speaker 2: It really is a testament to the fact that astrophysics
[15:55] Speaker 2: is a living discipline. The rules are actively being rewritten
[15:59] Speaker 2: by the instruments we build to look deeper into the dark.
[16:02] Speaker 3: They are, and the mystery of their disappearance leaves us
[16:04] Speaker 3: with perhaps the most profound question of all.
[16:07] Speaker 2: Right, I want you to consider this as a final thought.
[16:10] Speaker 2: We know that almost every modern galaxy, including our own
[16:13] Speaker 2: Milky Way, is anchored by a supermassive black hole at
[16:15] Speaker 2: its dead center right, and for decades astronomers has struggled
[16:19] Speaker 2: to explain how those central black holes got so impossibly
[16:22] Speaker 2: huge in the time available since the Big Bang.
[16:25] Speaker 3: The map didn't add up there either exactly.
[16:28] Speaker 2: So what if the black hole stars didn't vanish at all?
[16:32] Speaker 2: What if those heavy black hole hearts gorging themselves while
[16:35] Speaker 2: hidden inside dense balloons of hydrogen were the original seeds.
[16:39] Speaker 2: It makes so much sense, it really does. The lingering
[16:43] Speaker 2: ghost of a black hole wrapped in a star might
[16:45] Speaker 2: be the very anchor holding our own galaxy together today.

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them.