Michelle Thaller

speaker

1,835 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 28 May

Michelle Thaller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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The Joe Rogan Experience · #2506 - Michelle Thaller · 28 May 2026 podcast

But then the bigger ones we know in other galaxies can get up to hundreds, I mean, let's say tens of billions of times the mass of the sun.

And those, the event horizon's about the size of the orbit of Pluto.

The question is, how do you gather 10 billion times the mass of a star together in the beginning?

Black holes, the only thing we know that forms big black holes like that, so a star collapses, a star dies, and this tremendous crush of gravity as the star collapses creates this bottomless pit of gravity called a black hole.

So how do you get that many stars to die?

I mean, in the early universe, how many stars, how many generations of stars had to burn through to actually get that to happen?

And there was nothing that we could figure out.

I mean, how do you make that big of a black hole?

So these little red dots that we're seeing with Webb, and we don't know exactly what these are, but right now the observations are pushing us in a very interesting direction.

They're about a million times the mass of the sun.

And at first we thought, okay, well, are these whole galaxies?

And that was the controversy you alluded to, that how could there be galaxies that far back in time?

We're looking back to a time about 400 million years after the Big Bang.

We're looking so far away.

The light took that long to travel to us.

So we saw these sort of bright objects.

At first we thought they were galaxies, and that was like, whoa, how'd they get there so fast?

But then we took a better look at them, and they don't actually shine in the same light a galaxy would.

And they appear to have the signature of something inside, some of them rotating very fast, very fast.

And what we're wondering is if the first generation of stars, the very first stars that existed, were nothing at all like the stars we have today.

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