Black Hole Swarms | Space Time

It’s been conjectured that the center of the Milky Way is swarming with tens of thousands of black holes. And now we’ve actually seen them. Get your own Space Time t­-shirt at Tweet at us! @pbsspacetime Email us! pbsspacetime [at] gmail [dot] com Comment on Reddit: Help translate our videos! Previous Episode: Using Stars to See Gravitational Waves This episode of Space Time Journal Club looks at the paper: A density cusp of quiescent X-ray binaries in the central parsec of the Galaxy by Hailey, Mori, Bauer, Berkowitz, Hong & Hord (2018) The core of our galaxy is a wild place. The stars are so densely packed that the night sky would be 500 times brighter. A supermassive black hole, 4 million times the mass of our Sun lurks in the center. It flings nearby stars into extreme slingshot orbits. It consumes anything that gets too close is consumed, burping a blast of X-rays. We know these things because we see them from our comfortable vantage point 28,000 light years out in the galactic disk. But there’s one particularly terrible feature of the core of our galaxy that, until now, has only been has only be hypothesized: The central few light years of the Milky Way is thought to contain a vast swarm of smaller black holes that have rained in from the surrounding galaxy. Hosted by Matt O'Dowd Written by Matt O'Dowd Graphics by Grayson Blackmon Assistant Editing and Sound Design by Mike Petrow and Linda Huang Made by Kornhaber Brown (www.kornhaberbrown.com) Big Bang CoolAsCats David Nicklas Anton Lifshits Joey Redner Fabrice Eap Quasar Tambe Barsbay Mayank M. Mehrota Mars Yentur Mark Rosenthal Dean Fuqua Roman Pinchuk ColeslawPurdie Hypernova Edmund Fokschaner Matthew O’Connor Eugene Lawson Barry Hatfield Martha Hunt Joseph Salomone Chuck Zegar Jordan Young Ratfeast John Hofmann Craig Peterson James Hughes Shannan Catalano Fabian Olesen Kris Fernet Jane Meyers James Flowers Greg Allen TJMadison Denys Ivanov Nick Virtue Alexey Eromenko Nicholas Rose Scott Gossett Mark Vasile Patrick Murray Sultan Alkhulaifi Alex Seto Michal-Peanut Karmi Erik Stein Kevin Warne JJ Bagnell J Rejc Avi Goldfinger John Pettit Florian Stinglmayr Benoit Pagé-Guitard Nathan Leniz Brandon Labonte David Crane Greg Weiss Brandon Cook Daniel Lyons