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

The universe was denser.

There was probably more of this stuff called dark matter that had gravity pulling everything together.

So maybe at that time, there were cores of huge amounts of gas that collapsed together.

Instead of forming a star, the core basically collapsed into a black hole immediately.

And it started pulling in material, and all this sort of hot stuff formed what they call a pseudo-star.

There's all this atmosphere of hot gas being heated up by the black hole in the middle.

As the gas spirals in towards the black hole, it gets hotter and hotter.

So instead of a nuclear fusion core of a star, you have a black hole heating everything up on the inside, accumulating all this mass.

And are we looking at, for the first time, the seeds of these giant black holes?

that instead of there being, you know, the first thing was stars, the way we think of stars, was the first thing, huge amounts of gas and dust collapsing into black holes and heating up sort of a pseudo-star around it, millions of times the mass of the sun.

And then in a dense area like the heart of a galaxy, these things then start to combine.

Over time, gravity pulls them together, and you build bigger and bigger black holes.

So once again, we don't know yet that these objects are.

But at the moment, it's one of the best explanations we have.

And it fits the data quite well.

So, you know, we will keep observing these things.

We will keep finding new ones.

One of the big questions has been why don't they give off more X-rays?

Because if there's matter streaming down a black hole, it should give off very high radiation like X-rays.

And then just in the last couple of months, there's some observations coming out where we're finding some of these are indeed X-ray sources.

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