NEW DISCOVERY About Supermassive Black Holes Explained!

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Astrophysicists have discovered a black hole that for millions of years has been blasting vast particle beams in opposite directions across the sky. And has recently swiveled to point its one of these jets directly at us. Is this an intergalactic death ray of an alien civilization that has suddenly noticed us? Absolutely not, and there’s no danger at all. But it’s a pretty cool phenomenon anyway, and something we’ve never seen before.

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Hosted by Matt O'Dowd
Written by Matt O'Dowd
Post Production by Leonardo Scholzer, Yago Ballarini, Pedro Osinski, Caique Oliveira, Adriano Leal & Stephanie Faria
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
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Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: John Campbell

Spacetime is produced by Kornhaber Brown for PBS Digital Studios.
This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.
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[jamiefravel]

"Absolutely not and there is no danger whatsoever" is exactly what you would say if you were recently replaced by an alien from an intergalactic civilization which recently took notice of us humans.

[Erik-pumj]

Hearing scientists be giddy about their work is great. Hearing a scientist _communicate effectively_ about something that makes them giddy? That's a treat.

[sacasaca]

I recently had a women in physics lecture meet (I'm in high school) and the professor speaking was Prof. Rachel Webster and she brought up this video and encouraged us to have a look at your channel. I was really excited because I binged watched this channel the day before the lecture and I felt so proud as I had already seen this and understood what she was saying.

[dsync]

I swear, every time Matt ends the episode with "SpaceTime" he has the most smug smirk like "Yeah, I did it again. Yeah, I tied it back to the episode. No one can stop me"

[Nethershaw]

The things black holes do with their angular momenta -- being one of the only three measurable properties black holes are thought to have -- break my mind. When two of them collide, the models I've seen show their angular momentum vectors just... _suddenly combine_ into a new one in an instant called a kick, as though it were one gigantic quantum object. I can't imagine something physically doing that, let alone something made of billions of solar masses.

[seanurquhart]

Channels like this are where I go to stay sane in a sea of insanity. I can't stand the media when they get ahold of things like this.

[Pauly]

Love that you guys always immediately dispel any hint of conspiracy theories. ITS NEVER ALIENS is one of my favourite things to say to people who believe unsubstantiated sophistry. You're a legend Matt and you've taught me and millions of others how amazing the universe and our place in it really is. Shout out to the PBS Space Time team as well. x

[jajssblue]

Dang! It's never an intergalactic death ray!

[MrBendybruce]

It always blows my mind when we talk about these cosmological events in the present tense, when in reality We are observing something that happened hundreds of millions of years ago or even longer. Life is so short, and should we not be so grateful to occupy this very special moment in time, when the universe can both observe and be in awe of itself.

[jakebarley]

You can tell Matt is really into narrating this video in terms of his involvement in the field. Love to see it

[MrDino]

For once, I was able to understand everything from start to finish in a PBS Spacetime video.

[wizardpajamas]

I guess I've been watching and learning from this show for long enough that the two proposed answers here were exactly what I expected. Feels pretty good :)

[grizzley]

Love how accessible this channel has been all these years !

But I think you forgot to add captions (not auto captions)

A few of us really need captions

[sorlag]

6:16 Whenever I will have trouble figuring out what to name my future pets I will remind myself of astronomers, the masters of memorable names that just rolls of the tongue beautifully

[spencerthompson]

This show has changed my life for the better thank you all.

[CarlozN]

I just have to add that the visuals for this video was breathtaking. Felicitations to the video editors. Also, Matt’s enthusiasm is contagious! Loved it.

[anderspaulsson]

Quasars are cool and all but there is nothing like a good old supernova💥

[GeoffryGifari]

wow... imagine the amount of energy and torque necessary to rotate an object of that scale, already possessing massive angular momentum

[protocol]

My first thought was it might be the Dzhanibekov effect (Intermediate Axis Theorem) in action at an absurd scale. That's usually a 180 degree flip but it's not instantaneous so it'll trace out an arc, possibly over a fairly long timeperiod. It'd require a very eccentric accretion disk, I should think. Seems unlikely.

[SymphanyinSorrow]

Amazing video as always, but while I know how passionate you obviously are (along with the entire team of course), I really enjoyed you bluntly saying it! Very pleasant.