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Ask a Spaceman!

AaS! 177: How Do Black Holes Affect Their Galaxies?

Ask a Spaceman!

Paul M. Sutter

Astrophysics, Science, Cosmos, Holes, Black, Astronomy, Natural Sciences, Universe, Cosmology, Space, Physics

4.8853 Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2022

⏱️ 33 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How do giant black holes shut off star formation? How do they turn it back on? Which came first, the black hole or the galaxy? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.

Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

We all carry a dark secret.

0:16.5

It's inside of us, every day.

0:21.8

It's behind everything we say, everything we do.

0:24.7

It's a part of us, even when we don't want to admit it, even when we pretend it's not even there.

0:34.0

I have a dark secret.

0:36.7

For me, it's that I like singing along to Ariana Grande songs.

0:41.3

I can't get rid of it. I can't change it. I can't put it away. This dark shadow, it's a part of me.

0:49.3

And what goes for us goes for the universe as well, and every galaxy has its own dark secret.

0:57.0

We call these secrets supermassive black holes.

1:03.4

We believe that every single galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole.

1:09.5

By volume, these black holes aren't very big, typically no larger than a solar

1:14.9

system, but by mass these black holes are the single largest objects inside of each galaxy. How big are

1:23.0

they? Well, the smallest of the supermassive black holes are at least a million times more massive than the

1:29.0

sun, and the largest reach to hundreds of billions of times more massive than the sun. But even

1:36.9

then, as giant as they are, they hold less than 1% of all the mass of an entire galaxy.

1:45.2

And by volume, a typical galaxy is about a billion times larger.

1:51.0

Galaxies are huge.

1:53.3

Galaxies are beyond the scale of human comprehension already.

1:57.3

We're not even talking about cosmology.

1:59.4

We're not even talking about the universe. Just a single galaxy is far larger and far more complex than we could even imagine.

2:09.4

And yes, black holes are the single largest thing, but if you took the biggest skyscraper out of New York City, you would still have New York City.

2:19.5

Life would go on. The skyline would be a little bit different, but nothing major would change.

...

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