- 20 hours ago
Astronomers have identified a rare rogue black hole moving through the Milky Way without a companion star. Invisible to traditional telescopes, it revealed itself through gravitational microlensing, bending the light of a distant star. Traveling at high speed across our galaxy, this isolated object challenges previous assumptions about how black holes form and move. Scientists continue to study extreme cosmic objects that race through space, reshape galaxies, and push the limits of modern astrophysics. Animation is created by Bright Side.
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00:00You're traveling through space, trying to get through an especially rough patch.
00:05You gotta dodge asteroids, space debris, wandering black holes.
00:09Now, it's not an episode of a sci-fi series, at least not completely.
00:14For the first time ever, astronomers have found a black hole that's completely alone,
00:18drifting through space, with no stars or planets nearby.
00:23This black hole is about 5,000 light-years away from us in our own Milky Way galaxy.
00:30Do we need to look for a hero with superpowers to save Earth?
00:34First things first, a black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much
00:40that nothing, not even light, can get out of this region.
00:44The gravity is so strong there because a huge amount of matter is squeezed into a tiny space.
00:51Supermassive black holes, hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of our sun,
00:56are often found at the centers of galaxies.
01:00Most of them stay put or move at a very, very slow pace.
01:05But the newly discovered black hole is much weirder than anything we've seen before.
01:10First of all, it tries to avoid commitment.
01:12It's lonely, with no companion star or home galaxy.
01:16An even stranger thing is that it's zooming through space at a speed of 31 miles per second.
01:23What might be the reason for this speedy cosmic journey?
01:27Let's look at the following imaginary scenario.
01:30One day, a really massive star exploded in a supernova.
01:34It was the very star that formed our black hole.
01:37The resulting blast gave the new black hole a massive kick and sent it flying through the galaxy,
01:42starting its unbelievable voyage.
01:45Now, it's only one of a few possible explanations, but it sounds quite plausible.
01:51I bet you can't help but think,
01:53what if this wandering black hole decides to visit our solar system?
01:57Are we doomed?
01:59Scientists tell you to relax and breathe out.
02:02This black hole is very far away, and your chances of ever encountering it are infinitesimal, if any.
02:09Plus, this black hole is totally quiet and dark at the moment.
02:13One day, it might wake up and start glowing.
02:16It'll happen if it begins to eat something.
02:20In the near future, powerful new telescopes may find many more wandering black holes like this one.
02:27Usually, black holes are super hard to find because they don't give off any light.
02:33You can only detect them when they're eating nearby matter.
02:37That makes them glow brightly.
02:40Or when they have a companion star.
02:43In this case, it moves in a strange way, which gives away the presence of a black hole.
02:50But this newly discovered black hole is lonely, totally by itself.
02:54There's no glowing, no companion star moving hectically.
02:59So, how did scientists spot our cosmic wanderer?
03:02They used something called gravitational microlensing.
03:07That's when the black hole's gravity bends and magnifies the light from a star located behind it.
03:13Kind of like using a magnifying glass, hence the name.
03:17This method allowed scientists to detect the black hole, even though it was completely dark.
03:23All in all, black holes are fascinating things.
03:26And some of them are truly unique.
03:28Like these biggest black holes ever found.
03:32You see, almost every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center.
03:37They're huge, with masses millions to billions of times bigger than our sun.
03:44One of those is called TUN-618.
03:47It's a really huge and powerful black hole that's part of something called a quasar.
03:53A super bright spot in space emitting incredible amounts of energy.
03:58TUN-618 is very, very far away.
04:02About 18.2 billion light years from Earth.
04:05And it's 40 billion times heavier than our sun.
04:11There are also black holes that feed on their own kind.
04:15Black holes are known for devouring anything that gets too close.
04:19And this anything can include not only stars and gas, but also other black holes.
04:26Scientists witnessed a ginormous black hole at the heart of one galaxy being swallowed by an even larger black hole
04:33in another galaxy.
04:34It was the first time we detected such an event.
04:38The discovery was made using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
04:43One black hole weighs about 30 million times the mass of the sun,
04:47while the other has at least 1 million times the mass of the sun.
04:52Then, there is a bullet-shooting black hole.
04:55Apparently, black holes don't just swallow matter.
04:58They can also shoot it out.
05:01For example, astronomers studied one relatively small black hole,
05:05which is about 28,000 light years from Earth and weighs between 5 to 10 times the mass of the
05:11sun.
05:11And they saw how this black hole pulled matter off a companion star
05:15and then blasted some of it out in the form of huge bullets of gas.
05:21These bullets are super fast.
05:23They move at nearly a quarter the speed of light.
05:27Some black holes spin incredibly fast, twisting space around them at extreme speeds.
05:33One example is a black hole located in the constellation Aguila, about 35,000 light years from Earth.
05:40This black hole spins at a staggering speed of more than 950 times per second.
05:46If you could place an object on the edge of this black hole's event horizon,
05:50it would spin around the black hole at 333 million miles per hour.
05:56That's nearly half the speed of light.
05:59The smallest black hole discovered so far has been nicknamed the unicorn.
06:05Located 1,500 light years away from Earth, it's around 3 times the mass of our sun.
06:10This makes it very close to the smallest possible size for a stable black hole.
06:16While black holes themselves are far away and difficult to study directly,
06:22scientists find new clever ways to study their properties right here on Earth.
06:26They've been able to recreate certain features of black holes in the lab.
06:31For example, black holes have a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, including light,
06:38can escape once it crosses the event horizon.
06:41To understand this better, researchers have created an artificial event horizon using fiber optics.
06:48They've also been able to simulate Hawking radiation,
06:52the kind that likely escapes black holes, by setting up experiments in the lab.
06:57These lab-created mini black holes help scientists understand the mysterious properties of real black holes.
07:06There are several types of black holes, and each of them is born in its own unique way.
07:13Primordial black holes are believed to have formed right after the Big Bang, when the universe was very young.
07:20Stellar black holes form when a massive star collapses in on itself.
07:25This causes a supernova, where the outer layers of the star explode into space, and the core turns into a
07:32black hole.
07:34As for supermassive black holes, they're thought to have formed alongside the galaxies they're in.
07:40The size of the black hole is usually related to the size and mass of the galaxy.
07:47Despite what many believe, black holes don't roam the universe randomly, looking to swallow planets.
07:52They obey gravity like anything else in space.
07:55So, for a black hole to affect Earth, it would have to be very close,
07:59much closer than any black hole is to us right now.
08:04Even if a black hole, the same mass as the Sun, replaced our Sun, Earth wouldn't fall into it.
08:10The black hole would still have the same gravity as the Sun,
08:13and Earth would continue orbiting it, just like it orbits the Sun today.
08:17It would get much colder, though, so we wouldn't survive such a replacement in any case.
08:22But don't worry, our Sun will never turn into a black hole.
08:26It doesn't have enough mass to do so.
08:28Instead, in about 5 billion years, when the Sun reaches the end of its life,
08:34it will become a red giant star.
08:37After using up its fuel, it will shed its outer layers,
08:40creating a glowing ring of gas called a planetary nebula.
08:45What's left will be a cooling white dwarf star.
08:50Now, imagine something so powerful that it could rip the atoms of your body apart in a fraction of a
08:56second.
08:57Ow!
08:57This something is soundlessly dashing through space,
09:01not extinct, not alive, stuck in between.
09:04If this terrifying monster were moving towards Earth, we'd be doomed.
09:08So, is it?
09:11Astronomers have found a fast and powerful space object
09:14zooming through our home Milky Way galaxy at over 110,000 miles per hour,
09:19as faster than any rocket we've ever made.
09:22This bizarre space object got its name of a zombie star.
09:26All because it's the leftover part of a star that passed away a long time ago, but is still moving.
09:33This zombie star is a kind of an object called a magnetar.
09:38A super small, super heavy ball, about the size of a city, but heavier than the Sun.
09:44That makes it one of the densest objects in space.
09:46Only black holes are denser.
09:48Hey, let's not forget about me, huh?
09:51Magnetars also have an incredibly strong magnetic field.
09:54The one our zombie guy has is 100 trillion times stronger than Earth's.
10:00That's so strong that if the magnetar came close to Earth,
10:04it could wipe out every credit card on the planet just from its magnetism.
10:08And we couldn't shop anymore.
10:09Plus, if a person got too close to a magnetar, like 600 miles or so,
10:15it could pull their very atoms apart.
10:17And they couldn't shop anymore.
10:19Luckily, this magnetar is very far away and not coming near us.
10:24When it was first discovered, it was about 15,000 light years away from Earth.
10:29That's a huge distance.
10:30So you don't get to worry about your atoms being disconnected yet.
10:35Astronomers first spotted the zombie magnetar in 2008.
10:38And since only about 30 magnetars are known in our galaxy,
10:42it was a lucky and rare find.
10:45Scientists used space telescopes like Hubble and Gaia to watch it over time.
10:50That's how they discovered it was moving much faster than they thought.
10:53Now, astronomers are trying to figure out how this zombie star got such a big kick.
10:59At first, they thought that, like most magnetars,
11:02this one was born when a giant star exploded in a supernova
11:06and the leftover core became a super-dense neutron star.
11:10According to their theory, it could have happened near something called
11:13supernova remnant HB9.
11:15That would make sense since most magnetars are created this way.
11:19But when they tracked its movement,
11:21they found that the zombie star was moving too fast
11:24and going in the wrong direction to have come from HB9.
11:28They traced its path thousands of years into the past
11:31and still couldn't find any exploding star or star cluster it could have come from.
11:36This means scientists now have one more mystery on their hands.
11:40Where did this zombie star come from and how was it made?
11:45One explanation is that it came from a white dwarf,
11:48which is the leftover core of a smaller star like our Sun after it runs out of fuel.
11:53Now, normally, when white dwarfs explode, they're destroyed completely.
11:57But in rare situations, instead of blowing apart,
12:00a white dwarf might collapse into itself and turn into a neutron star.
12:05This neutron star could then become a magnetar.
12:09This unusual way of forming a magnetar also gives clues about another mystery,
12:14fast radio bursts, or FRBs.
12:17These are very quick and powerful flashes of radio energy from deep space.
12:21Some FRBs come from galaxies that are so old,
12:25there shouldn't be any exploding stars left.
12:28But if magnetars can be born from collapsing white dwarfs,
12:32that might explain how those FRBs are still happening.
12:35In any case, learning how magnetars form could help us explain
12:39many strange and powerful events we see across the universe.
12:43But so far, the investigation is still on,
12:46and no answers have been found yet.
12:49Zombie stars wandering across the universe isn't the only mystery we haven't solved yet.
12:54At one point, you might come across one of them while traveling through the cosmos.
12:58It looks like… nothing.
13:00At a distance of 700 million light-years away from Earth,
13:04there's a hole, a blank void that has very few galaxies.
13:08This is a roughly spherical region about 330 million light-years across.
13:13Our home Milky Way galaxy could fit there thousands of times over.
13:17It's the mysterious Bodhi's void in the constellation of Bodhi's.
13:22Yeah, makes sense.
13:23You see, galaxies look like a giant web.
13:27Most of them are parts of long structures called filaments.
13:30Those wind through the cosmos, and when they meet,
13:34they form regions with a high concentration of galaxies.
13:37These regions are what we know as galaxy clusters.
13:40But between these clusters and threads,
13:43there are huge, empty voids that hardly contain any galaxies.
13:48Such voids make up almost 80% of the observable universe.
13:52And most of them are huge, from 30 to 300 million light-years wide.
13:57The Bodhi's void is one of the most massive ones.
14:00It has even earned the title of super-void.
14:04Astronomers think it might be the result of a few smaller voids merging.
14:08But what could have caused such giant empty areas to appear in the first place?
14:13The reason might lie in the origin of the universe.
14:17In its early days – I wasn't around then –
14:20all the matter in the universe was packed together quite tightly.
14:24Astronomers even thought it was something like a uniform soup.
14:27But soon, random quantum fluctuations started disturbing this matter.
14:32Some areas became denser, and their gravitational pull became stronger.
14:36They began stealing matter from less dense regions.
14:39This made such areas even denser, and they kept attracting more and more matter.
14:44At the same time, smaller clumps of matter started drifting further away from the center,
14:49forming galaxies.
14:51If you visited a star cluster called Palomar 5,
14:55you'd forget all about voids and super-voids and even zombie stars.
14:59Instead, you'd need to concentrate on surviving,
15:02since the region is hiding a swarm of over 100 black holes right in the middle.
15:07And those black holes aren't just sitting there.
15:09They're at work, shaping the cluster non-stop.
15:13Palomar 5 is a group of stars located about 80,000 light-years away from us.
15:18Normally, clusters like this are dense and tightly packed,
15:21with stars all bunched up together.
15:23But Palomar 5 is different.
15:25It's spread out and has a huge tail of stars,
15:28stretching across 30,000 light-years.
15:31This beautiful tail is called a tidal stream.
15:34It's like the stars are spilling out of the cluster,
15:37creating a long river of light.
15:39Tidal streams like this are rare and hard to study.
15:43Globular clusters like this one are super old.
15:46Some are almost as old as the universe itself.
15:49But Palomar 5 also stands out,
15:51because it's the only cluster we know about
15:54that still has a tidal stream attached to it.
15:57And the black holes inside the cluster might be to blame.
16:00They're pulling on the stars in the cluster,
16:03messing with their orbits,
16:04and slingshotting them right out of the cluster.
16:06Or would that be slingshooting?
16:08I don't know.
16:10Anyway, these stars are what make up the tidal stream.
16:13Over time, more and more stars get flung out.
16:16Palomar 5 has way more black holes than expected.
16:20About 20% of the cluster's mass is made up of black holes.
16:24Over 100 of them.
16:25Each about 20 times the mass of our Sun.
16:27Of course, Palomar 5 isn't going to last forever.
16:31In about 1 billion years, the cluster will completely fall apart.
16:36By then, all the stars will have been gone,
16:38leaving behind just the black holes.
16:41And these black holes will orbit the Milky Way,
16:43like a ghostly remnant of a cluster that used to be there.
16:47Even though this cluster is creepy enough,
16:50there's something even more eerie you can see in space.
16:55One of the most unusual ones is probably NGC 2392,
17:01located 5,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Gemini.
17:06It was discovered more than 200 years ago,
17:08and became popular because of its unusual appearance.
17:11It's basically a disk of material with a ring of comet-shaped objects.
17:16The tails of these objects stream away from the star at the center of the nebula.
17:21The bizarre orange streaks in the outer part of the cloud
17:24stretch light-years away in all directions.
17:27The middle resembles a ball of twine,
17:29but in reality, it's a bubble of material blown into space
17:33by the wind of high-speed material produced by the central star.
17:37Wow.
17:39That's it for today.
17:40So hey, if you pacified your curiosity,
17:43then give the video a like and share it with your friends.
17:45Or if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the bright side.
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