# Three Supermassive Black Holes Found Inside One Ancient Galaxy

An episode of [Bedtime Astronomy](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1736397134), 1 Sep 2026, 36 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/74144885/threeblackp.mp3

Astronomers have discovered three supermassive black holes inside a single ancient galaxy, J0148-4214, seen as it existed more than 12.5 billion years ago. Two lie near the galactic center and may eventually merge, while a third sits farther out. The discovery provides new clues about how galaxies and black holes grew rapidly in the early universe and could help scientists predict future gravitational-wave events. 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.
[0:27] Speaker 2: Right now, this exact moment you are listening to this,
[0:29] Speaker 2: photons of light are raining down onto the mirrors of
[0:32] Speaker 2: telescopes out in space and you know on Earth too, right,
[0:35] Speaker 2: And those photons they actually began their journey before our
[0:40] Speaker 2: planet even existed.
[0:41] Speaker 3: Oh, absolutely long before.
[0:43] Speaker 2: Yeah, you've been traveling through the vacuum for something like
[0:44] Speaker 2: twelve point five billion years.
[0:46] Speaker 3: Which is just a staggering amount of time to even
[0:48] Speaker 3: try to conceptualize it really is.
[0:51] Speaker 2: Yeah, and tucked inside that ancient just completely stretched out
[0:55] Speaker 2: light is what you could basically call a cosmic crime scene.
[0:58] Speaker 2: I like that phrasing is actively breaking our models of
[1:02] Speaker 2: early astrophysics. We aren't just looking at, you know, a
[1:05] Speaker 2: primordial galaxy here.
[1:06] Speaker 3: Right, We are looking at a very specific system called
[1:09] Speaker 3: Jay zero one four eight four two one four.
[1:11] Speaker 2: Yeah, and this galaxy is hiding not one, but three
[1:14] Speaker 2: actively accreting super massive black holes, all operating simultaneously.
[1:19] Speaker 3: Which is completely unprecedented. I mean, finding one active galactic
[1:22] Speaker 3: nucleus at that red shift a red shift of z
[1:25] Speaker 3: equals five point zero two, which puts us right at
[1:28] Speaker 3: the edge of the epoch of realization. That is a
[1:30] Speaker 3: tremendous data point all on its own. But finding three
[1:34] Speaker 3: and finding them dynamically interacting within a single, very early
[1:38] Speaker 3: stage galactic halo. It fundamentally rewrites the timeline of how
[1:44] Speaker 3: massive structure is assembled. Is everything it does because for
[1:48] Speaker 3: decades we've kind of operated under the assumption of this
[1:51] Speaker 3: steady localized coevolution you know, between host galaxies and their
[1:55] Speaker 3: central black.
[1:56] Speaker 2: Holes, right, they grow together exactly.
[1:58] Speaker 3: But this system basically shatters that assumption entirely.
[2:01] Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this because the sheer scale of the
[2:05] Speaker 2: timeline is well, it's what makes the physics here so
[2:09] Speaker 2: deeply problematic for our models.
[2:11] Speaker 3: Yeah, the timing is the real issue.
[2:13] Speaker 2: We are looking at a snapshot taking just one point
[2:15] Speaker 2: two billion years after the Big Bank, so the universe
[2:19] Speaker 2: was barely out of its infancy relatively speaking. Anyway, Oh
[2:22] Speaker 2: very much so. Yeah, Yet we have these three absolute
[2:25] Speaker 2: titans sitting in an environment that really shouldn't have had
[2:28] Speaker 2: the time or frankly, the stability to grow them to
[2:30] Speaker 2: that size.
[2:31] Speaker 3: No, it shouldn't have.
[2:32] Speaker 2: But before we get into the heavyweights themselves, I think
[2:35] Speaker 2: we have to talk about how we can even trust
[2:37] Speaker 2: the time stamp on this light. Good point, because you
[2:40] Speaker 2: mentioned a red shift of z equals five point zero two. Now,
[2:44] Speaker 2: for anyone following cosmology, redshift is the standard yard stick.
[2:48] Speaker 3: It is.
[2:48] Speaker 2: Yeah, but at these extreme distances, the geometry of space
[2:53] Speaker 2: gets well, it gets a bit complicated, right.
[2:55] Speaker 3: It does, yes, because we are dealing with the actual
[2:58] Speaker 3: metric expansion of space itself. Here. If we connect this
[3:02] Speaker 3: to the bigger picture. At z equals five point zero two,
[3:06] Speaker 3: we aren't just measuring a standard Doppler shift.
[3:08] Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not like the overused ambulance siren analogy, right Exactly.
[3:12] Speaker 3: The light isn't getting redder simply because the galaxy is
[3:15] Speaker 3: moving away from us through static space.
[3:17] Speaker 2: Because the ambulance isn't driving down a fixed road. The
[3:20] Speaker 2: road itself is stretching while the sound is trying to travel.
[3:22] Speaker 2: That's it, exactly, I've always pictured it kind of like
[3:25] Speaker 2: taking a deflated balloon and you draw a plific sign
[3:28] Speaker 2: wave on it with a marker, right, and then you
[3:30] Speaker 2: blow the balloon up. The ink of the wave physically
[3:32] Speaker 2: stretches out the peaks and the troughs. They literally get
[3:35] Speaker 2: further apart, so the wavelength increases purely because the surface
[3:38] Speaker 2: is expanding.
[3:39] Speaker 3: That is a much more accurate framework to use. Definitely,
[3:43] Speaker 3: the photons emitted by the accretion disks in Jay zero
[3:47] Speaker 3: one four eight four to two one city, they were
[3:49] Speaker 3: originally emitted in the ultraviolet and optical bands high energy,
[3:53] Speaker 3: very high energy. But over twelve point five billion years,
[3:57] Speaker 3: the cosmological scale factor of the universe has increased dramatically.
[4:00] Speaker 2: So the fabric is stretching exactly.
[4:03] Speaker 3: The fabric of space time has stretched those photons by
[4:05] Speaker 3: a factor of roughly six, so it pushes that high
[4:08] Speaker 3: energy UV light all the way down into the infrared spectrum.
[4:12] Speaker 2: And that's what hits the detectors on the James Web
[4:14] Speaker 2: Space telescope precisely. But I mean, here's where I have
[4:17] Speaker 2: to push back a little bit on the certainty of
[4:19] Speaker 2: that twelve point five billion year measurement. Okay, go ahead,
[4:22] Speaker 2: because if the universe is this chaotic, turbulent fluid of
[4:25] Speaker 2: dark matter and gas, right it is, yes, and everything
[4:28] Speaker 2: is caught in these immense local gravitational currents. How do
[4:31] Speaker 2: we confidently separate the cosmological expansion from the galaxy's own
[4:36] Speaker 2: peculiar velocity? Like, how do we know this galaxy isn't
[4:39] Speaker 2: just caught in some massive local cluster flow that's greatly
[4:43] Speaker 2: exaggerating its apparent velocity and throwing our whole timeline off.
[4:47] Speaker 3: It's a really vital distinction to make. Peculiar velocity, which
[4:51] Speaker 3: is the localized movement of a galaxy falling toward a
[4:53] Speaker 3: local mass concentration, that can absolutely contaminate redshift.
[4:58] Speaker 2: Measurements, right, especially in our localhborhood.
[5:00] Speaker 3: Exactly in the nearby local universe. It's a huge factor.
[5:04] Speaker 3: But at z equals five to zero two, the cosmological
[5:08] Speaker 3: expansion is so overwhelmingly dominant that peculative velocities basically become
[5:13] Speaker 3: a rounding error. Oh really, Yeah, The hubble flow at
[5:16] Speaker 3: that distance dictates a recession velocity that is an enormous
[5:19] Speaker 3: fraction of the speed.
[5:20] Speaker 2: Of light, so it dwarfs any local movement.
[5:22] Speaker 3: It completely dwarfs it even if J zero one four
[5:25] Speaker 3: eight four to two one four is gravitationally plunging toward
[5:28] Speaker 3: a local massive dark matter halo at say one thousand
[5:31] Speaker 3: kilometers per.
[5:32] Speaker 2: Second, which is incredibly fast.
[5:33] Speaker 3: It is, but it barely registers against the cosmological red shift.
[5:37] Speaker 3: And furthermore, we aren't just relying on photometry or broad
[5:40] Speaker 3: color bands here to guess the distance.
[5:42] Speaker 2: Right, we have spectroscopy.
[5:43] Speaker 3: We are locking onto precise spectroscopic emission lines.
[5:47] Speaker 2: You're talking about the Lineman alphabrek and this specific atomic
[5:50] Speaker 2: transition precisely.
[5:52] Speaker 3: We are measuring the exact quantum mechanical transitions of hydrogen
[5:56] Speaker 3: and oxygen atoms, the fingerprints, the atomic fingerprints. Yes, we
[6:00] Speaker 3: know the rest frame wavelength of a hydrogen OFFHA line
[6:03] Speaker 3: with subnanometer precision.
[6:04] Speaker 2: So we know exactly what it should look like in
[6:06] Speaker 2: a lab.
[6:07] Speaker 3: Right, And when we look at JAY zero one four
[6:10] Speaker 3: eight four two one four, we see that exact highly
[6:13] Speaker 3: complex spectral fingerprint shifted perfectly in unison.
[6:17] Speaker 2: Oh wow, so there's no ambiguity none.
[6:19] Speaker 3: It confirms beyond any doubt the comoving distance, and this
[6:23] Speaker 3: firmly places the galaxy right at the tail end. Of
[6:25] Speaker 3: the epoch of reionization, which was.
[6:27] Speaker 2: That period when the neutral hydrogen fog of the primordial
[6:31] Speaker 2: universe was just being burned.
[6:32] Speaker 3: Away, Yes, by the intense ultraviolet radiation from the very
[6:35] Speaker 3: first generations of stars and quasars.
[6:38] Speaker 2: Which paints a picture of a violently active universe. I mean,
[6:41] Speaker 2: the gas densities are much higher than merger rates between
[6:44] Speaker 2: dark matter halos are way more and the metallicity of
[6:47] Speaker 2: the gas is incredibly low. So we have this turbulent
[6:51] Speaker 2: ancient arena.
[6:52] Speaker 3: Basically, that's a good way to describe it.
[6:54] Speaker 2: So let's look at the heavyweights actually operating inside it.
[6:57] Speaker 2: We have this central pair of supermassive black holes, right,
[7:00] Speaker 2: the binary pair one is sitting it roughly eighty million
[7:04] Speaker 2: solar masses.
[7:05] Speaker 3: A true giant for that era.
[7:07] Speaker 2: And its binary companion is at point six million solar masses,
[7:12] Speaker 2: and they are separated by a projected distance of just
[7:15] Speaker 2: six hundred and twenty light years.
[7:17] Speaker 3: Just to put that in perspective for you, six hundred
[7:19] Speaker 3: and twenty light years is roughly the distance from Earth
[7:22] Speaker 3: to the star Beetlejuice.
[7:24] Speaker 2: Wait, really that's nothing.
[7:26] Speaker 3: In the context of galactic dynamics. That is incredibly compact.
[7:29] Speaker 3: It's practically next door.
[7:30] Speaker 2: Like because galaxies are hundreds of thousands of light years.
[7:33] Speaker 3: Across exactly, So these two are effectively sharing the exact
[7:36] Speaker 3: same nuclear region, deeply embedded in a massive gravitational potential wealth.
[7:41] Speaker 2: The masses are the real shock here, not just in isolation,
[7:44] Speaker 2: but in context with the galaxy itself, right, because the
[7:46] Speaker 2: data shows the total stellar mass at this host galaxy
[7:50] Speaker 2: is about one point three billion solar masses. So let's
[7:53] Speaker 2: look at the math on that for a second. If
[7:55] Speaker 2: you take an eighty million solar mass black hole and
[7:59] Speaker 2: drop it into a one point three billion solar mass galaxy,
[8:02] Speaker 2: it breaks the models. It breaks the M Sigma relation completely.
[8:06] Speaker 2: I mean, in the local universe, super massive black holes
[8:08] Speaker 2: are typically what about zero point one percent maybe point
[8:11] Speaker 2: two percent of their host galaxies bulge mass.
[8:16] Speaker 3: Generally, Yes, it's a very tight correlation.
[8:18] Speaker 2: But this thing is pushing six percent. It's completely dominating
[8:21] Speaker 2: the system.
[8:22] Speaker 3: It is a profound violation of the local scaling relations. Yeah,
[8:26] Speaker 3: the M Sigma relation, which is that tight correlation between
[8:29] Speaker 3: the mass of a supermassive black hole and the velocity
[8:32] Speaker 3: dispersion of the stars in the host galaxy. It implies
[8:36] Speaker 3: a highly regulated coevolution.
[8:38] Speaker 2: They keep each other in check, exactly.
[8:40] Speaker 3: In modern galaxies. Agn feedback which is the massive amount
[8:44] Speaker 3: of energy pumped out by the accreting black hole. It
[8:47] Speaker 3: regulates star formation, It pushes the gas out right, it
[8:50] Speaker 3: blows the cold star forming gas away when the black
[8:52] Speaker 3: hole gets too big, so it effectively starves itself and
[8:55] Speaker 3: halts the galaxy's growth.
[8:57] Speaker 2: In tandem, a perfect balancing act.
[8:59] Speaker 3: But in JZ one four eight four to two one
[9:01] Speaker 3: three that feedback loop clearly hasn't stabilized at all.
[9:05] Speaker 2: The black hole seems to have basically won the race,
[9:08] Speaker 2: or rather, I guess it got a massive headstart.
[9:10] Speaker 3: It certainly did.
[9:11] Speaker 2: It brings up that classic chicken and egg problem of cosmology. Right, yes,
[9:15] Speaker 2: what forms first the galaxy or the supermansive black hole?
[9:18] Speaker 3: Right?
[9:18] Speaker 2: In this object heavily implies that in the early universe,
[9:22] Speaker 2: black hole growth can vastly outpace the assembly of the
[9:25] Speaker 2: stellar mass.
[9:26] Speaker 3: It outpaces it by orders of magnitude, and that leads
[9:30] Speaker 3: to the impending dynamic catastrophe of the binary pair.
[9:33] Speaker 2: Right, because they're so close.
[9:35] Speaker 3: Because they are only six hundred and twenty light years apart,
[9:38] Speaker 3: they are gravitationally bound to each other, okay, and they
[9:40] Speaker 3: are interacting with the dense stellar and gaseous environment of
[9:44] Speaker 3: that galactic core through a process called dynamical friction.
[9:48] Speaker 2: Where they plow through the.
[9:49] Speaker 3: Stars exactly as the black holes plow through this sea
[9:52] Speaker 3: of stars and gas, they shed orbital angular momentum, a
[9:56] Speaker 3: gravitational wake forms right.
[9:58] Speaker 2: Behind them, like a boat moving through water.
[10:00] Speaker 3: Yes, exactly like that, and that wake acts as a
[10:03] Speaker 3: literal drag force, pulling them into a tighter and tighter
[10:07] Speaker 3: inward spiral over time.
[10:09] Speaker 2: Here's where it gets really interesting, though, because doesn't that
[10:13] Speaker 2: bring up the final parsek problem.
[10:15] Speaker 3: It absolutely does, yes.
[10:17] Speaker 2: Because dynamical friction works great when they are hundreds of
[10:21] Speaker 2: light years apart and moving through a really thick field
[10:24] Speaker 2: of stars, But as they get incredibly close, like within
[10:27] Speaker 2: a parsec, which is about three light years, they end
[10:30] Speaker 2: up basically slingshotting all the nearby stars out of the
[10:34] Speaker 2: system entirely.
[10:35] Speaker 3: Yes, they clear out their entire neighborhood.
[10:37] Speaker 2: So they kick all the stars away, and once the
[10:39] Speaker 2: gas and stars are gone, there's no more friction to
[10:43] Speaker 2: shed angular momentum, so they should technically just stall out
[10:46] Speaker 2: and orbit each other forever. How do they actually bridge
[10:50] Speaker 2: that final gap to merge?
[10:52] Speaker 3: Well, that has been one of the most persistent theoretical
[10:54] Speaker 3: bottlenecks in astrophysics for a long time. The final parsek
[10:58] Speaker 3: problem suggests that these buy should stall out indefinitely, but
[11:01] Speaker 3: they don't.
[11:02] Speaker 2: No.
[11:03] Speaker 3: However, nature clearly finds a way because we see the
[11:06] Speaker 3: gravitational wave signatures of mergers today.
[11:09] Speaker 2: Right, so we know it happens.
[11:10] Speaker 3: We know it happens. And in a gas rich, highly
[11:13] Speaker 3: turbulent environment like Jay zero one four eight four to
[11:16] Speaker 3: two one two, the final parsec problem is likely mitigated
[11:20] Speaker 3: by a massive circumbinary.
[11:22] Speaker 2: Gas disc Okay, so instead of stars providing the friction,
[11:26] Speaker 2: the gas itself is viscous enough to drag.
[11:28] Speaker 3: Them down exactly. The sheer density of the cold gas
[11:31] Speaker 3: in these red shift five galaxies provides a continuous viscous torque.
[11:35] Speaker 2: It's like orbiting in syrup very much so.
[11:37] Speaker 3: The binary torks the gas, the guys towrks the binary,
[11:40] Speaker 3: and it drains their angular momentum very rapidly.
[11:43] Speaker 2: Wow.
[11:43] Speaker 3: The researchers actually estimate this specific pair will cross that
[11:46] Speaker 3: final parsec and completely merge in less than a few
[11:49] Speaker 3: hundred million years from the exact moment the light.
[11:52] Speaker 2: Left them, which is a blink of an eye in
[11:54] Speaker 2: cosmic terms, it really is. But I mean, to even
[11:57] Speaker 2: get to this stage, to have an eighty million solar
[12:00] Speaker 2: mass objects just sitting there a billion years after the
[12:02] Speaker 2: Big Bang, it requires a growth rate that just totally
[12:05] Speaker 2: defies standard physics.
[12:06] Speaker 3: It pushes the boundaries of everything we know.
[12:08] Speaker 2: And this brings us to the smaller companion, the point
[12:12] Speaker 2: six million solar mass black hole, because looking at the data,
[12:17] Speaker 2: this smaller companion is actually the one doing the heavy
[12:20] Speaker 2: lifting in terms of accretion.
[12:22] Speaker 3: Surprisingly, yes, in fact.
[12:24] Speaker 2: It's accreting at a super Eddington rate. And I want
[12:26] Speaker 2: to dive deep into the mechanics of this. Because the
[12:29] Speaker 2: Eddington limit is supposed to be the absolute speed limit for.
[12:32] Speaker 3: Black hole growth, right, it is the point of hydrostatic
[12:35] Speaker 3: equilibrium for spherical accretion. Explain that equilibrium, well, the Eddington
[12:39] Speaker 3: limit balances the inward gravitational force of the black hole
[12:43] Speaker 3: against the outward momentum of radiation. Okay, so as matter
[12:47] Speaker 3: falls in, it converts its gravitational potential energy into immense
[12:51] Speaker 3: heat and radiation. Those outgoing photons physically carry momentum, they
[12:56] Speaker 3: push back exactly through a process called Thompson scattering. Those
[13:00] Speaker 3: outward photons collide with the free electrons in the infalling
[13:03] Speaker 3: ionized gas, imparting an outward physical push.
[13:06] Speaker 2: So that's the radiation pressure.
[13:07] Speaker 3: That is radiation pressure, yes, right.
[13:10] Speaker 2: And if gravity is essentially a function of mass, and
[13:12] Speaker 2: the radiation pressure scales with the accretion rate, there comes
[13:16] Speaker 2: a strict limit where the radiation literally blasts the food
[13:19] Speaker 2: source away.
[13:20] Speaker 3: It checks itself off.
[13:21] Speaker 2: Right. But wait, if radiation pressure scales with mass, shouldn't
[13:25] Speaker 2: the eighty million solar mass giant be the one hitting
[13:28] Speaker 2: the Eddington limit first? You would think so because it
[13:30] Speaker 2: has more gravity to pull in more gas, which should
[13:33] Speaker 2: create more radiation. So why is the point six million
[13:36] Speaker 2: mass black hole the one breaking the limit?
[13:39] Speaker 3: That is a brilliant observation. Actually, the Eddington luminosity limit
[13:43] Speaker 3: actually scales linearly with the mass of the black hole. Okay,
[13:46] Speaker 3: so a larger black hole has a naturally higher Eddington limit.
[13:50] Speaker 3: You can eat far more total mass per year than
[13:52] Speaker 3: a small one before it starts choking itself. Right, But
[13:55] Speaker 3: we measure accretion relative to the object's specific capacity, which
[13:59] Speaker 3: is what we call the Eddingon ratio.
[14:01] Speaker 2: Ah.
[14:01] Speaker 3: I see, so the eighty million solar mass black hole
[14:04] Speaker 3: is in a highly sub Eddington state. It might be
[14:08] Speaker 3: accreting a larger absolute volume of gas, but relative to
[14:11] Speaker 3: its massive capacity, it's barely snacking.
[14:14] Speaker 2: It's just picking at its plate.
[14:15] Speaker 3: Right. The point six million solar mass black hole, however,
[14:19] Speaker 3: is being absolutely inundated with gas, far exceeding its own,
[14:23] Speaker 3: much smaller theoretical limit.
[14:25] Speaker 2: It's gorge feeding.
[14:26] Speaker 3: Yes, it has an Eddington ratio greater than one.
[14:30] Speaker 2: So how is it doing that without blowing the gas away?
[14:33] Speaker 2: I mean, how do you break a fundamental limit of physics?
[14:36] Speaker 3: What's fascinating here is you break it by breaking the
[14:39] Speaker 3: assumption of spherical symmetry. Okay, the classic Eddington limit assumes
[14:43] Speaker 3: gas is falling in uniformly from all directions, like a
[14:47] Speaker 3: perfect sphere, and that the radiation is escaping uniformly in all.
[14:51] Speaker 2: Directions, which is never true in reality.
[14:53] Speaker 3: Exactly, in reality, the infalling gas has angular momentum. It spins,
[14:58] Speaker 3: and because it spins, it forms a Latin deccretion.
[15:00] Speaker 2: Disc right, like a whirlpool.
[15:02] Speaker 3: Yes, and to actually break the Eddington limit, you transition
[15:06] Speaker 3: into what astrophysicists call a slim disc or an invection
[15:09] Speaker 3: dominated accretion flow.
[15:11] Speaker 2: Advection okay, meaning the energy is being carried along with
[15:13] Speaker 2: the fluid flow rather than radiating outward exactly right.
[15:17] Speaker 3: In a super Eddington slim disc, the optical depth of
[15:20] Speaker 3: the infalling gas becomes so incredibly high, meaning it is
[15:24] Speaker 3: so dense and opaque that the photons generated by the
[15:27] Speaker 3: friction simply cannot diffuse out fast enough.
[15:30] Speaker 2: They're trapped.
[15:31] Speaker 3: The diffusion time of the photon is actually longer than
[15:34] Speaker 3: the time it takes for the gas to cross the
[15:36] Speaker 3: event horizon.
[15:37] Speaker 2: Wait really, so the radiation is physically trapped in the
[15:40] Speaker 2: flow and gets swallowed by the black hole before it
[15:43] Speaker 2: can even exert that outward pressure.
[15:45] Speaker 3: Yes, the accretion disc effectively becomes a photon trap.
[15:49] Speaker 2: That is just wild. The black hole is literally eating
[15:51] Speaker 2: the light that's trying to push the food away.
[15:53] Speaker 3: It is an incredible mechanism. And furthermore, the radiation that
[15:57] Speaker 3: does manage to escape doesn't go out.
[15:59] Speaker 2: Sphere because the disc is in the way, right.
[16:02] Speaker 3: It gets funneled out through the paths of least resistance,
[16:05] Speaker 3: which are the poles of the disc. This creates massive,
[16:09] Speaker 3: highly colimated jets shooting up and down.
[16:11] Speaker 2: Well, the gas keeps pouring in from the sides.
[16:14] Speaker 3: Exactly along the equatorial plane. So this anisotropic emission allows
[16:19] Speaker 3: the black hole to completely bypass the spherical Eddington limit
[16:24] Speaker 3: and just gorge itself.
[16:26] Speaker 2: And this totally solves the timeline problem we were talking
[16:28] Speaker 2: about earlier.
[16:29] Speaker 3: It absolutely does.
[16:30] Speaker 2: Because for years, you know, we've debated how you get
[16:33] Speaker 2: an eighty million solar mass black hole at z equals
[16:35] Speaker 2: five or a billion solar mass quasar at z equal seven.
[16:39] Speaker 3: Right, The mass just didn't make sense.
[16:41] Speaker 2: If they started as pop thousand stellar remnants, which are
[16:44] Speaker 2: just what one hundred solar masses from the very first
[16:46] Speaker 2: stars roughly, yes, and if they grew with the strict
[16:49] Speaker 2: Eddington limit. There literally hasn't been enough time since the
[16:51] Speaker 2: Big Bang for them to get that big. The math
[16:54] Speaker 2: just frankly didn't work.
[16:56] Speaker 3: No, it didn't.
[16:56] Speaker 2: We had to invent theories like direct collapse black holes,
[16:59] Speaker 2: where these massive pristine gas clouds collapse straight into ten
[17:03] Speaker 2: thousand solar mass seeds just to give them a head start.
[17:06] Speaker 3: Which is true, and direct collapse black holes are still
[17:08] Speaker 3: a very viable and frankly likely necessary pathway for the
[17:13] Speaker 3: absolute most massive quasars. But observing the super Eddington accretion
[17:18] Speaker 3: in the zero point six million solar mass object, it
[17:21] Speaker 3: proves that episodic extreme growth spurts are actively happening in
[17:25] Speaker 3: the early universe.
[17:26] Speaker 2: They can just hit the gas pedal exactly.
[17:29] Speaker 3: The timeline problem is largely resolved when you realize these
[17:32] Speaker 3: objects don't respect the theoretical speed limit all the time.
[17:36] Speaker 3: They undergo periods of chaotic super Eddington gorging, and this
[17:40] Speaker 3: is likely triggered by violent mergers driving massive amounts of
[17:43] Speaker 3: cold gas directly into the nuclear region completely bypassing the
[17:47] Speaker 3: usual angular momentum barriers, which brings.
[17:50] Speaker 2: Us nicely to the violent merger aspect. And the third
[17:53] Speaker 2: player in this system the outcast, right, because finding a
[17:56] Speaker 2: super Eddington binary in the center, I mean that is
[17:59] Speaker 2: a career defining discovery on its own, absolutely, But the
[18:01] Speaker 2: system has a third supermassive black hole, a two million
[18:05] Speaker 2: solar mass object sitting fifty five hundred light years away
[18:09] Speaker 2: from the center. Yeah, it's a complete outcast just sitting
[18:12] Speaker 2: out there in the galactic suburbs.
[18:13] Speaker 3: And the presence of this off nucleus agent arguably the
[18:16] Speaker 3: most intriguing dynamic piece of the entire puzzle. Yes, because
[18:20] Speaker 3: a two million solar mass object does not simply form
[18:24] Speaker 3: in the low density outskirts of a galactic halo.
[18:27] Speaker 2: It needs a core to grow, It has to.
[18:29] Speaker 3: Be formed in a very deep gravitational potential. Well, so
[18:32] Speaker 3: its presence at a fifty five hundred light year offset
[18:36] Speaker 3: requires a kinetic explanation. It had to.
[18:38] Speaker 2: Be moved, it got pushed. And there are a few
[18:41] Speaker 2: ways to interpret this, right. The most mundane, well, if
[18:45] Speaker 2: you can call anything happening a billion years after the
[18:48] Speaker 2: Big Bang.
[18:49] Speaker 3: Monday, right, highly relative term.
[18:51] Speaker 2: The most mundane explanation is that it's a minor merger
[18:53] Speaker 2: remnant like J zero one four eight four two one
[18:57] Speaker 2: four swallowed a smaller satellite galaxy. Yes, and what we
[19:00] Speaker 2: are seeing is just the naked core of that satellite
[19:03] Speaker 2: slowly migrating inward via dynamical friction to eventually join this
[19:07] Speaker 2: central binary.
[19:08] Speaker 3: And that is the most statistically probable scenario in a
[19:11] Speaker 3: hierarchical universe model.
[19:12] Speaker 2: It's just a triple system assembly in progress, exactly.
[19:15] Speaker 3: Yeah, But the kinematic data allows for a much more
[19:18] Speaker 3: extreme interpretation, which is the gravitational recoil kick.
[19:21] Speaker 2: Okay, this is the physics that absolutely blew my mind
[19:24] Speaker 2: when I was looking to fit. It's incredible the idea
[19:26] Speaker 2: that a two million solar mass black hole could be
[19:29] Speaker 2: physically ejected from the center of its own galaxy. Explain
[19:32] Speaker 2: the mechanics of how gravitational waves can act as a
[19:35] Speaker 2: localized thruster, because that sounds like science fiction.
[19:39] Speaker 3: It really does, but it relies on the actual asymmetry
[19:42] Speaker 3: of spacetime curvature during a merger. Okay, when two supermassive
[19:47] Speaker 3: black holes spiral toward each other, they radiate massive amounts
[19:51] Speaker 3: of orbital energy as gravitational.
[19:53] Speaker 2: Waves ripples in space time.
[19:55] Speaker 3: Yes. Now, if the two black holes are perfectly identical
[19:58] Speaker 3: in mass, and they have zero s or their spins
[20:01] Speaker 3: are perfectly aligned.
[20:02] Speaker 2: With each other, the waves are even.
[20:03] Speaker 3: The gravitational waves are emitted symmetrically in all directions, so
[20:07] Speaker 3: when they finally merge, the newly formed object just sits
[20:10] Speaker 3: perfectly still right in the center of the potential.
[20:13] Speaker 2: Well, but nature is never perfectly symmetrical exactly.
[20:17] Speaker 3: Nature is messy if the masses are unequal, or more importantly,
[20:21] Speaker 3: if their spin axes are misaligned, say they are pointing
[20:24] Speaker 3: in completely different directions. The gravitational wave emission becomes highly anisotropic,
[20:29] Speaker 3: highly uneven. As they execute their final few orbits, moving
[20:33] Speaker 3: at a very significant fraction of the speed of light,
[20:36] Speaker 3: the space time geometry gets incredibly complex. I can imagine
[20:39] Speaker 3: and the waves emitted in one direction literally carry away
[20:43] Speaker 3: more linear momentum than the waves emitted in the opposite direction, and.
[20:47] Speaker 2: Conservation of linear momentum dictates that if momentum goes one
[20:51] Speaker 2: way in the waves, the physical mass has to go
[20:54] Speaker 2: the other way.
[20:54] Speaker 3: Exactly right. It's like a rocket exhaust.
[20:57] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[20:57] Speaker 3: At the exact moment of the final plunned when the
[21:00] Speaker 3: two event horizons fuse into one, the newly formed black
[21:03] Speaker 3: hole receives a massive kinetic kick in the direct opposite
[21:07] Speaker 3: direction of the strongest wave.
[21:08] Speaker 2: Emission, a physical push from space time.
[21:10] Speaker 3: Yes, and depending on the specific spin configurations, particularly in
[21:15] Speaker 3: what astrophysicists call the super kit configurations, where the spins
[21:18] Speaker 3: are anti lined and lie flat in the orbital plane,
[21:21] Speaker 3: this recoil velocity can be staggering.
[21:23] Speaker 2: How fast are we talking?
[21:24] Speaker 3: It can reach up to five thousand kilometers per second.
[21:27] Speaker 2: Five thousand kilometers per second. Let's think about the escape
[21:30] Speaker 2: velocity of a typical galaxy. It's z equals five for
[21:34] Speaker 2: a second. The dark manner halo of a galaxy like
[21:37] Speaker 2: Jay zero one four eight four to two one twenty
[21:39] Speaker 2: is deep. But is it deep enough to hold onto
[21:42] Speaker 2: something moving that fast?
[21:43] Speaker 3: That's the big question.
[21:44] Speaker 2: If a black hole gets a five thousand kilometers per
[21:47] Speaker 2: second kick, does it just punch right through the interstellar
[21:50] Speaker 2: medium and fly out into the intergalactic void forever?
[21:53] Speaker 3: It absolutely can. The escape velocity of a host halo
[21:56] Speaker 3: at that red shift might only be say five to
[22:00] Speaker 3: one thousand kilometers per second, depending on how the mass.
[22:02] Speaker 2: Is distributed, so five thousand would easily break it.
[22:05] Speaker 3: A high end superkick would easily exceed the escape velocity.
[22:09] Speaker 3: The black hole would become a rogue wandering the intergalactic
[22:12] Speaker 3: medium entirely stripped of its host galaxy.
[22:15] Speaker 2: It's a rogue, supermassive black hole in the dark.
[22:17] Speaker 3: Yes. However, most kicks are much more moderate, usually in
[22:20] Speaker 3: the range of a few hundred kilometers per second.
[22:23] Speaker 2: Which would perfectly explain what we're seeing here with the outcast.
[22:25] Speaker 2: It would if it received a moderate kick, say eight
[22:28] Speaker 2: hundred kilometers per second. It would get blasted out of
[22:31] Speaker 2: the core, travel out to fifty five hundred light years,
[22:34] Speaker 2: slowing down the whole time as it fights the gravity
[22:38] Speaker 2: of the galaxy, pulling it.
[22:39] Speaker 3: Back right, losing kinetic energy.
[22:41] Speaker 2: Until it hits its turnaround point.
[22:42] Speaker 3: Exactly. It behaves exactly like a ball thrown straight up
[22:46] Speaker 3: into the air. We might be observing this outcast right
[22:49] Speaker 3: at its Pappa center, its absolute maximum distance, before it
[22:53] Speaker 3: begins the slow, millions of years long process of falling
[22:58] Speaker 3: back toward the center a dynamical friction.
[23:01] Speaker 2: Wow.
[23:01] Speaker 3: And if this outcast is indeed a recoiled black hole,
[23:05] Speaker 3: it means the central eighty million solar mass minary we
[23:08] Speaker 3: see now isn't the first merger this galaxy has experienced.
[23:11] Speaker 2: It's just the latest one.
[23:12] Speaker 3: Yes, it means this galaxy is a serial merger environment,
[23:16] Speaker 3: rapidly and violently assembling its central mass through repeated collisions.
[23:20] Speaker 2: Okay, we've talked about the physics, the super eagan decreation,
[23:22] Speaker 2: the gravitational kicks, but this brings up what I think
[23:25] Speaker 2: is the most pressing observational question.
[23:27] Speaker 3: Okay, how did we see it?
[23:28] Speaker 2: Yeah? Because twelve point five billion light years is a
[23:31] Speaker 2: profound distance. It is, and due to the diffraction limit
[23:34] Speaker 2: of optics, even a massive telescope can't resolve a six
[23:37] Speaker 2: hundred and twenty light year separation at that distance. That's
[23:40] Speaker 2: correct to a standard telescope. This entire galaxy, the eighty
[23:44] Speaker 2: million mass giant, the overeater next to it, and even
[23:47] Speaker 2: the outcast fifty five hundred light years away, they should
[23:50] Speaker 2: all just blur together into a single unresolved.
[23:53] Speaker 3: Pixel, just a glowing blob.
[23:55] Speaker 2: Right, So how did the astronomers actually untangle this blur?
[23:58] Speaker 2: Improve there were three distinct massive objects.
[24:02] Speaker 3: Well, this is really a masterclass in Macha interferometry and
[24:04] Speaker 3: integral field spectroscopy, okay, and it is entirely reliant on
[24:08] Speaker 3: the architecture of the James Webb Space Telescope, specifically an
[24:12] Speaker 3: instrument called the ni rspec ifs the resolution problem you
[24:16] Speaker 3: mention is dictated by the really criterion. Even with JWST's
[24:20] Speaker 3: massive six point five meter primary mirror looking at a
[24:23] Speaker 3: wavelength of three to five microns, the spatial resolution is
[24:26] Speaker 3: roughly point one arcseconds.
[24:28] Speaker 2: And what does that translate to in physical distance? At
[24:30] Speaker 2: z equals five at.
[24:31] Speaker 3: Zquals five point one arcseconds. Corresponds to about two thousand
[24:34] Speaker 3: light years.
[24:35] Speaker 2: So the central binary, which is separated by only six
[24:37] Speaker 2: hundred and twenty light years, is fundamentally below the diffraction
[24:41] Speaker 2: limit of the telescope. Yes, they are physically impossible to
[24:45] Speaker 2: see as two distinct points of light.
[24:48] Speaker 3: They are physically impossible to resolve spatially, but they are
[24:51] Speaker 3: not impossible to resolve kinematically ah by how they move exactly.
[24:56] Speaker 3: This is where spectro astrometry comes in ni RESPECTI doesn't
[25:00] Speaker 3: just take a simple picture. It is an integral field spectrograph.
[25:04] Speaker 2: What does it mean practically?
[25:05] Speaker 3: It means it uses an image slicer to divide the
[25:08] Speaker 3: focal plane into hundreds of individual spatial pixels, which we
[25:12] Speaker 3: call spaxles. That sounds okay, And for every single spaxole
[25:16] Speaker 3: it records a full high resolution spectrum of light.
[25:19] Speaker 2: Right, So instead a one bar code of light for
[25:21] Speaker 2: the whole galaxy, you have a grid of hundreds of
[25:23] Speaker 2: distinct bar codes exactly. But if the central two black
[25:26] Speaker 2: holes are so close that they fall into the exact
[25:28] Speaker 2: same spaxle, how do you separate their barcodes?
[25:31] Speaker 3: You separate them by looking at the Doppler broadening of
[25:34] Speaker 3: the broadline region gas.
[25:36] Speaker 2: Okay, break that down for me.
[25:37] Speaker 3: Around an actively accreting black hole, there are dense clouds
[25:41] Speaker 3: of gas moving at phenomenal velocities caught in the gravity. Well,
[25:46] Speaker 3: we're talking thousands of kilometers per.
[25:48] Speaker 2: Second whipping around.
[25:49] Speaker 3: Yes, this high velocity movement causes the emission lines like
[25:54] Speaker 3: the hydrogen alpha line to become extremely broad due to
[25:57] Speaker 3: the Doppler effect, because.
[25:58] Speaker 2: Some gases moving towards us and some as moving.
[26:01] Speaker 3: Away exactly Now, the key is subpixel centroting. By analyzing
[26:07] Speaker 3: the precise mathematical shape of that broad emission line, researchers
[26:11] Speaker 3: can measure incredibly minute spatial offsets in the light's origin
[26:15] Speaker 3: as a strict function of its velocity.
[26:17] Speaker 2: Okay, I think I get it. It's like analyzing a
[26:19] Speaker 2: recording of acquire.
[26:20] Speaker 3: Oh, that's a good way to look at it.
[26:22] Speaker 2: If you have two tenors standing right next to each other,
[26:24] Speaker 2: and you are just too far away to see them separately,
[26:27] Speaker 2: you can't visually distinguish them. But if you have advanced
[26:30] Speaker 2: audio software that analyzes the acoustic waveform, and one tenor
[26:34] Speaker 2: has a slightly different vibrato or a slightly different velocity
[26:37] Speaker 2: to their vocal cord movement. Yes, the software can untangle
[26:40] Speaker 2: the combined waveform and say, mathematically, this complex sound requires
[26:47] Speaker 2: two distinct point sources separated by exactly this microscopic distance
[26:52] Speaker 2: to produce this specific interference pattern.
[26:55] Speaker 3: That is an exceptional analogy. That is exactly what they're
[26:58] Speaker 3: doing with light. They analyze the spectral profile and find
[27:01] Speaker 3: that a single Gaussian curve simply cannot fit the data.
[27:05] Speaker 2: The curve is lopsided, The.
[27:06] Speaker 3: Emission line profile is asymmetrical and highly complex, requiring two
[27:10] Speaker 3: distinct kinematic.
[27:11] Speaker 2: Components, two engines, two.
[27:13] Speaker 3: Distinct gravitational anchors whipping the gas around at different velocities
[27:17] Speaker 3: and located at a slightly different spatial centroid within that
[27:20] Speaker 3: single pixel. Wow, And by applying the virial theorem to
[27:23] Speaker 3: the velocity dispersion of that broad line gas, they don't
[27:26] Speaker 3: just locate the black holes, they can actually wave them.
[27:29] Speaker 2: That is how we get the eighty million point six
[27:31] Speaker 2: million solar mass calculations precisely. And then for the third one,
[27:35] Speaker 2: the outcast, they look fifty five hundred light years away,
[27:38] Speaker 2: which is actually far enough to be spatially resolved into
[27:40] Speaker 2: a totally different spaxla on the grid.
[27:42] Speaker 3: Right, It sits in its own pixel, and.
[27:44] Speaker 2: They find a completely separate set of broad emission lines there.
[27:47] Speaker 2: It's just phenomenal detective work to extrapolate kinematics from a
[27:53] Speaker 2: blurred pixel and reconstruct a multi body dynamic system at
[27:57] Speaker 2: the edge of the observable universe.
[27:59] Speaker 3: Its staggering, and without the incredible infrared sensitivity and spatial
[28:03] Speaker 3: mapping capabilities of JWST, this system would have been entirely misclassified.
[28:08] Speaker 2: People wouldn't have even known.
[28:10] Speaker 3: No previous observations with older instruments, likely would have seen
[28:13] Speaker 3: the massive hydrogen emission, assumed it was a single, highly
[28:17] Speaker 3: active quasar and just moved on.
[28:19] Speaker 2: Just logged it as one big black hole.
[28:21] Speaker 3: Exactly. The revelation that these singular hyper luminous objects in
[28:25] Speaker 3: the early universe might actually be unresolved binaries or even
[28:28] Speaker 3: triple systems. It fundamentally alters our entire census of black
[28:32] Speaker 3: hole demographics.
[28:33] Speaker 2: Which forces us to zune out and really look at
[28:36] Speaker 2: the big picture here. Because Jay zero one four eight
[28:39] Speaker 2: four two one four isn't just a quirky anomaly. It's
[28:42] Speaker 2: a representative sample of a crucial epoch in hierarchical structure formation.
[28:47] Speaker 3: It is the standard model in action.
[28:49] Speaker 2: The standard cosmological model LAMB to CDM dictates that large
[28:52] Speaker 2: structures form from the bottom.
[28:54] Speaker 3: Up right small dark matter halo's collapse, they merge to
[28:58] Speaker 3: form bigger halo. Those merge to form galaxies and so on.
[29:02] Speaker 2: Yes, and the early universe was a highly collitionional environment,
[29:05] Speaker 2: very crowded. The mean free path between galaxies was much shorter,
[29:10] Speaker 2: So this discovery provides direct empirical evidence that these galactic
[29:15] Speaker 2: mergers were highly efficient at funneling central black holes right
[29:19] Speaker 2: into the dense nuclear regions.
[29:21] Speaker 3: They didn't just stall out in the halo. They sank
[29:23] Speaker 3: rapidly to the center and formed tight binaries.
[29:26] Speaker 2: And this has massive, massive implications for gravitational wave astronomy.
[29:31] Speaker 3: It changes the Foe tast completely.
[29:33] Speaker 2: Because if the early universe is just packed with these
[29:35] Speaker 2: super massive binaries rapidly spiraling toward each other, that means
[29:38] Speaker 2: the fabric of space time back then must have been
[29:41] Speaker 2: absolutely churning with low frequency gravitational waves.
[29:44] Speaker 3: It implies a stochastic gravitational wave background that is much
[29:48] Speaker 3: much louder than previously modeled.
[29:50] Speaker 2: Ground based interferometers like Lego and Virgo. They detect the
[29:54] Speaker 2: high frequency chirps of stellar mass black holes merging right.
[29:57] Speaker 3: Yes, objects that are maybe thirty or fifty solar masses.
[30:00] Speaker 3: They chirp very.
[30:01] Speaker 2: Fast but super massive black holes operating in the millions
[30:05] Speaker 2: or billions of solar masses. They merge at incredibly low
[30:09] Speaker 2: frequencies like in the nanoverts to millihertz range.
[30:11] Speaker 3: Very slow, very deep waves, frequencies that take years to
[30:15] Speaker 3: complete a single.
[30:16] Speaker 2: Oscillation, which is why we use pulsar timing arrays to
[30:19] Speaker 2: look for them. And the Nanograph collaboration recently announced the
[30:23] Speaker 2: first evidence of this stochastic background. Yes, they did a
[30:26] Speaker 2: low hum of gravitational waves permeating the universe, detected by
[30:31] Speaker 2: monitoring the minute timing deviations of pulsars all across the
[30:34] Speaker 2: Milky Way exactly.
[30:36] Speaker 3: The background home detected by nanograph is the combined unresolved
[30:39] Speaker 3: coorus of millions of super massive black hole binaries exactly
[30:43] Speaker 3: like the one we are seeing in JAY zero one
[30:45] Speaker 3: four eight four to two one time.
[30:47] Speaker 2: All slowly spiraling together across cosmic time.
[30:50] Speaker 3: Exactly and looking forward the lays emission the laser interferometer
[30:54] Speaker 3: space antenna, it will be specifically sensitive to the millihertz
[30:57] Speaker 3: gravitational waves produced by systems precisely in this mass.
[31:01] Speaker 2: Range the one hundred and five to one hundred and
[31:03] Speaker 2: seven solar mass range.
[31:04] Speaker 3: Yes during their final inspiral and merger.
[31:06] Speaker 2: So in a way, JWST is essentially providing the electromagnetic
[31:10] Speaker 2: scouting report for Lisa. That's a great way to put it.
[31:12] Speaker 3: It's mapping the locations and the merger rates of these
[31:15] Speaker 3: binaries right now, so that when Lisa flies in the
[31:18] Speaker 3: twenty thirties, we know exactly what the expected event rate
[31:22] Speaker 3: should be. We will literally be able to watch them
[31:24] Speaker 3: electromagnetically and feel them gravitationally at the.
[31:27] Speaker 2: Same time multi messenger astronomy at the highest redshift. It
[31:30] Speaker 2: will allow us to test general relativity in the strong
[31:34] Speaker 2: field regime in an era where the universe was structurally
[31:37] Speaker 2: distinct from today.
[31:39] Speaker 3: So what does this all mean for us? Because it
[31:41] Speaker 3: grounds the whole discussion rate When we talk about z
[31:43] Speaker 3: equals five and eighty million solar masses and invection dominated accretion.
[31:47] Speaker 2: Flows, it can feel a bit like abstract mathematics.
[31:50] Speaker 3: It feels very far away, but what we are actually
[31:53] Speaker 3: looking at is the brutal adolescence of our own cosmic environment. Right,
[31:57] Speaker 3: the Milky Way has a four million solar mass black
[32:00] Speaker 3: hole at its center. Sagittary say, and we know our
[32:03] Speaker 3: galaxy didn't form an isolation.
[32:04] Speaker 2: Far from it.
[32:05] Speaker 3: It formed through violent mergers. The guy Enceladus merger, the
[32:09] Speaker 3: Sagittari's dwarf galaxy collisions, the physical processes operating in Jay
[32:13] Speaker 3: zero one four eight four two one two, the dynamical friction,
[32:17] Speaker 3: the super Eddington gas flows, the potential gravitational kicks. These
[32:21] Speaker 3: are the exact same mechanisms that dictated the assembly of.
[32:24] Speaker 2: Our local group, the same exact physics.
[32:26] Speaker 3: By studying this extreme chaotic system, we are basically reverse
[32:29] Speaker 3: engineering the stability of our current cosmic epoch.
[32:32] Speaker 2: We're seeing how the sausage gets made.
[32:34] Speaker 3: We are seeing how the building blocks were forged in
[32:36] Speaker 3: the crucible of the realization epoch, eventually cooling and settling
[32:40] Speaker 3: to allow for the stable disk dominated galaxies capable of
[32:44] Speaker 3: supporting prolonged stellar lifespans and planetary formation like ours.
[32:49] Speaker 2: Okay, we have covered an immense amount of astrophysics today.
[32:52] Speaker 2: We traveled back twelve point five billion years, navigating the
[32:56] Speaker 2: actual expanding metric of space to arrive at a universe
[32:59] Speaker 2: actively clearing its primordial fog. We zoomed into a single
[33:02] Speaker 2: galactic potential well and found a staggering m sigma violation,
[33:07] Speaker 2: an eighty million solar mass giant and a point six
[33:10] Speaker 2: million mass companion locked in a tight six hundred and
[33:13] Speaker 2: twenty light year orbital dance.
[33:14] Speaker 3: A deadly dance.
[33:15] Speaker 2: We explored how that smaller companion is actively breaking the
[33:19] Speaker 2: Eddington limit, trapping its own radiation in a slim disc
[33:23] Speaker 2: to undergo super Eddington accretion, thereby solving the cosmological timeline
[33:27] Speaker 2: problem for early mass assembly. Yes, we tracked a two
[33:31] Speaker 2: million solar mass outcast to the galactic edge, exploring the
[33:35] Speaker 2: mind bending relativistic physics of asymmetric gravitational wave recoil kicks
[33:40] Speaker 2: My favorite part, and we broke down the sheer genius
[33:42] Speaker 2: of spectro astrometry using subpixel centroiting of broad emission lines
[33:47] Speaker 2: to literally see the invisible.
[33:49] Speaker 3: It is a triumph of both observational engineering and theoretical modeling.
[33:53] Speaker 3: But you know there is a final, rather sobering physical
[33:56] Speaker 3: reality to consider regarding all this. Late we've been analyzed, Okay,
[34:00] Speaker 3: what's that? We have been discussing the orbital dynamics of
[34:03] Speaker 3: that central binary, noting that the viscous drag of the
[34:06] Speaker 3: circumbinary gas disc will likely drive them to merge within
[34:10] Speaker 3: a few hundred million years.
[34:11] Speaker 2: Right, the final parsec is being crossed as they torque
[34:13] Speaker 2: the gas.
[34:14] Speaker 3: But we must remember the delay of the light cone.
[34:16] Speaker 3: We are observing them as they were at z equals
[34:19] Speaker 3: five point zero two.
[34:20] Speaker 2: Right, twelve point five billion years ago.
[34:22] Speaker 3: That few hundred million year countdown expired roughly twelve billion
[34:27] Speaker 3: years ago in co moving time. Wow, the violent space
[34:31] Speaker 3: time rupturing collision of those two supermassive black holes is
[34:34] Speaker 3: not impending. It is ancient history.
[34:37] Speaker 2: It's already done.
[34:38] Speaker 3: It occurred billions of years before the solar nebula that
[34:41] Speaker 3: eventually formed Earth even began to collapse.
[34:43] Speaker 2: So the gravitational waves from that specific merger, they have
[34:48] Speaker 2: already washed through our local space. They pass right through us.
[34:51] Speaker 3: Yes, the galaxy Jay zero one four eight four two
[34:54] Speaker 3: one four as we see it today in our current
[34:57] Speaker 3: timeframe no longer exists in that state. Over the intervening
[35:00] Speaker 3: twelve billion years, it has likely undergone dozens of major mergers.
[35:04] Speaker 3: It may reside today at the center of a massive
[35:07] Speaker 3: quiescent galaxy cluster, it's super massive black hole, having grown
[35:11] Speaker 3: to tens of billions of solar masses, completely silent. It's
[35:15] Speaker 3: cold gas, utterly depleted.
[35:17] Speaker 2: We are studying the ghosts of a dynamical system exactly.
[35:20] Speaker 2: That is the ultimate paradox of observational cosmology, isn't it.
[35:24] Speaker 2: You're looking at the definitive, absolute truth of what happened,
[35:27] Speaker 2: but it's entirely decoupled from what is happening now. It
[35:30] Speaker 2: really forces you to consider the comoving volume of the universe.
[35:34] Speaker 2: If we look out twelve point five billion light years
[35:38] Speaker 2: and see a merger that already happened, what unimaginable hyper
[35:43] Speaker 2: energetic events are occurring right now at that exact coordinate
[35:47] Speaker 2: in the universe.
[35:48] Speaker 3: We have no idea.
[35:49] Speaker 2: Events that are radiating light in gravitational waves today at
[35:52] Speaker 2: this very second that won't reach whatever is left of
[35:55] Speaker 2: Earth for another twelve billion years. There is an entirely distinct,
[36:00] Speaker 2: modernized version of the universe operating simultaneously with us, and
[36:04] Speaker 2: we are fundamentally isolated from it by the speed of light.
[36:07] Speaker 3: We are forever trapped inside our past light cone. Basically
[36:10] Speaker 3: watching a documentary of universe that has long since moved on.
[36:13] Speaker 2: Well, the history isn't buried. It's hurtling toward us at
[36:15] Speaker 2: three hundred thousand kilometers a second. We just have to
[36:18] Speaker 2: build the mirrors precise enough to catch it. Thank you
[36:20] Speaker 2: so much for pulling up a chair and exploring the
[36:22] Speaker 2: mechanics of the early universe with us. Keep questioning the
[36:25] Speaker 2: physics and keep your eyes on the sky.

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