How To Capture Black Holes

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Black holes are awesome - but how about black holes being captured by the screaming vortex of a quasar, where they merge and grow like some monstrous version of a solar system. This insane hypothesis is getting closer to reality, according to the papers in today’s space time journal club.

Hosted by Matt O'Dowd Written by Matt O'Dowd Graphics by Leonardo Scholzer & Adriano Leal Directed by: Andrew Kornhaber Executive Producers: Eric Brown & Andrew Kornhaber

End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRl6-nb4iOnsij-vnpAjp0Q

Thanks to LIGO we’ve now seen black hole mergers, but there was some striking surprises. For one thing, many of the merging black holes were too massive to have been formed by the collapse of stellar cores. That is if our understanding of stellar evolution is half as good as we think it is. This led astrophysicists to think about new ways to produce black hole mergers. Here’s the most awesome possibility: what if black hole mergers actually occur in orbit around supermassive black holes, embedded deep in the whirlpools of searing gas that surround some of these monsters? Today on Space Time Journal Club we’ll be looking at a pair of 2019 papers that talk about this possibility. We have Yang et al., which predicts the properties of black holes that merge this way, and McKernan et al. which proposes a way for us to actually test this hypothesis.

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Big Bang: Alexander Tamas David Barnholdt David Nicklas Fabrice Eap John S Juan Benet Morgan Hough

Quasar Christina Oegren Mark Heising Vinnie Falco

Hypernova Chuck Zegar Danton Spivey Donal Botkin Edmund Fokschaner Hank S John Hofmann John Pollock John R. Slavik Jordan Young Joseph Salomone Julian Tyacke Justin Ash Mathew Matthew O'Connor Syed Ansar Timothy McCulloch

Gamma Ray Burst A G Adrian Hatch Adrien Molyneux AlecZero Andreas Nautsch Angela Prigge Bradley Jenkins Brandon labonte Craig Stonaha Dan Warren Daniel Lyons David Bethala DFaulk Eric Kiebler Frederic Simon Geoffrey Short Graydon Goss Greg Smith James Flowers John Funai John Griffith John Robinson Jonathan Nesfeder Josh Thomas Kevin Lee Kevin Warne Kyle Hofer Malte Ubl Michael Conroy Nick Virtue Patrick Sutton Paul Rose Robert Ilardi Scott Gossett Sean Warniaha Sipke Schoorstra Steve Bradshaw Tatiana Vorovchenko Tim Stephani Tonyface Tybie Fitzhugh Yurii Konovaliuk Randall Sylvia