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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So we may have found the answer to where you get these big black holes.
And that was one of the big hopes for the James Webb Space Telescope, that it would help us answer the question of where do you get these giant black holes in the cores of galaxies?
Where do they come from?
There shouldn't have been enough time for that many stars to make them.
It seems to be correlated.
Yeah, the bigger the galaxy, the bigger the black hole, yeah.
Well, and I mean, we don't know yet how many... I mean, there are these giant black holes in the middle of galaxies, and then there are smaller black holes caused when massive stars dies.
Our galaxy probably has millions of those.
But the ones in the center of the galaxies are fascinating.
The one in our galaxy... So we're about 25,000 light years away from this guy, so we're safe.
But...
We actually observed stars that are trapped around the black hole that are orbiting the black hole.
This was the first way we found the location of the black hole.
Stars were orbiting kind of like this angry swarm of bees almost in every direction.
And they were orbiting around something you didn't see.
And the mass needed to make all these stars orbit was about 4 million times the mass of the sun.
There was a star called S2 we observed orbiting close to the black hole, kind of like a comet.
It would come in and whip around the black hole and then go back out again.
And an S2 at closest approach, when it whips around the black hole, this is a star, goes nearly 20 million miles an hour as it whips around the black hole.
And then just recently we found another star that actually gets up to over 50 million miles an hour as the black hole whips it around.
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