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

4.8 • 853 Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2022

⏱️ 33 minutes

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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

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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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