The Physicist Who 'Sees' Into Black Holes

How do supermassive black holes shape the evolution of galaxies? What does an event horizon really look like? Why do black holes emit bursts of energy called ‘relativistic jets’?

In search of answers to these questions, astrophysicist Erin Kara explores black holes by carefully tracking the gas and plasma swirling near their event horizons. To reconstruct the immediate environment, Kara turns to the X-ray light given off by the accretion disk, measuring the timing of photons using a telescope mounted on the International Space Station. This technique — called reverberation mapping — works in a manner similar to how bats ‘see’ using sound echolocation, allowing researchers to infer the structure of the gas and plasma with remarkable resolution.
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Chapters:
00:00 How do supermassive black holes shape our galaxy?
00:59 Blackholes release X-rays as matter falls in
02:00 Using the NICER telescope to capture photons from black holes
02:30 Reverberation mapping technique is like echolocation
04:10 Imaging stellar-mass black holes
04:34 Formation of relativistic jets
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[fios]

Its always nice when a researcher credits their grad students :)

[sbjuice]

It's always a good day when there's a new Quanta video

[josketobben]

Really love how you turned it into music in the end! Makes the topic understandable on so many levels.

[jlady]

I'm currently watching an excellent NOVA PBS documentary on Black Holes. I'm at the part where they talk about the x-rays and jets and got really confused, so this was great to watch and helped me understand a lot more. Thanks, Dr. Kara & Quanta!

[khepri]

Always fun to learn new stuff regarding black holes.

[edwinhuizinga]

An elegant approach to "imaging" accretion disks, elegantly told. Someone really needs to update the wikipedia NICER entry.

[williambreedyk]

Want to see more from her. Great presentation.

[adrianaugustus]

Great work. Looks like resolution is ~10 min or 0.8billion km. Sounds a lot, but accretion disk is itself of the order of ~1000 bn km!

[TheSummoner]

What's the cello track in the beginning called?

[publiusrunesteffensen]

When measuring time differences so close to a massive gravity field, how do you correct for time dilation? I guess the *exact* mass (aka the gravity forces) of the black hole is unknown and also the two measuring points probably have different gravity.

[youlondonunderground]

great science, great video, great presentation

[ralph]

Do you assume that the accretion disk is a uniform disk?

[juandavidgilwiedman]

I like it even more how she tell the story

[trebell]

SAG Astar & the Milky way is a water fall, we are on the river's of time. While I think a black hole would be a Serene sink hole. The event Horizon. the very point where wheel meets track of a coal train on rail track's in a tunnel with the Waight of the World; I imagine the Sound heat & Waight of the very point between wheels & track. but then again. A continuous drip of water in the same tunnel can bend a metre of steel rail track. Crazy. Oh & that single drip. That sound & Echo. Is the same time it would take for two Black holes to collide. Only in a greater Waight heat & Radio wave's.

[treeleupp]

The title is misleading in my opinion.

[oniakuma]

How did the largest black hole form❓ I mean how they can eat so much to grow❓ almost all galaxy’s center had a super massive black hole, but they can’t eat the entire galaxy ❗

[PythonAndy]

I got distracted after they called the inner accretion disk "corona"😅

[OllyWood]

I usually don't make it more than a minute through vocal fry before giving up on the audio but I listened to her all the way through cause this was more interesting than it was hard on the ears.

[javierpalacios]

How lovely. Intelligent woman. Sometimes I wonder if she's still single

[eyefreely]

Black hole sounded like the Doppler Effect to me