JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
All summer long, NPR's Short Wave podcast has been exploring our changing universe and cosmological phenomena, including black holes.
PRIYA NATARAJAN: It's like the point where all known laws of physics break down.
SUMMERS: Priya Natarajan is an astrophysicist at Yale University. She co-developed a theory on the origins of supermassive black holes. Her work was so revolutionary, it earned her a spot on the list of Time's 100 Most Influential People this year. NPR's Emily Kwong brings us her work.
EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: Black holes were first discovered on paper by Einstein through his math equations, which described the universe as a four-dimensional fabric fusing space and time. And the fabric is bumpy, dotted with planets and other kinds of matter.
NATARAJAN: And what matter does - it causes little potholes. And the issue is, you drop mass somewhere, you create a pothole.
KWONG: And Einstein's peers wondered, OK, well, what happens when you have an object whose mass is so compact that the pothole becomes a puncture in the fabric of space-time itself?
NATARAJAN: And so the black hole solution is one of the simplest solutions to these very complex equations.
KWONG: This theory was eventually confirmed in 1964, but it set up another mystery - how do black holes even begin? For a long time, scientists were only sure about one origin - that black holes were created through the collapse of a very massive dying star. That is true, but it didn't fully explain how supermassive black holes came to be.
NATARAJAN: There's just not enough time to grow that much. So we came up with an alternative. We proposed, theoretically, an alternative almost 20 years ago now.
KWONG: In 2006 - Priya and astrophysicist Giuseppe Lodato theorized that a huge cloud of collapsing gas can create the seed of a supermassive black hole.
NATARAJAN: You know, much like the vortex that forms when you pull the plug in your bathtub and the water really rushes in really fast, something similar happens in the early universe, and all of that gas can siphon in very quickly to the center, and it could form a very massive seed.
KWONG: But it was just an idea - until the James Webb Space Telescope captured images from the deepest parts of space. Combined with data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, astrophysicist Akos Bogdan at Harvard found this very distant, very young galaxy called UHZ1, with a supermassive black hole at the center, that began just the way Priya imagined - with a cloud of collapsing gas. After 20 years, her hypothesis finally had cosmological proof.
NATARAJAN: I literally fell off my chair.
KWONG: (Laughter) Yeah.
For Priya, this discovery validated something she's long believed - that black holes are more dynamic than we ever imagined.
NATARAJAN: I think now it is impossible to come up with a deep and clear understanding of how, you know, our universe was structured - how the galaxies formed and grew and evolved over cosmic time without taking black holes into account.
KWONG: They have that main character energy, and Priya Natarajan has long been one of their No. 1 champions.
Emily Kwong, NPR News.
SUMMERS: This story is a part of Short Wave's series, Space Camp, about our changing universe. Check out the podcast to learn more. Special thanks also to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, home of Space Camp.
(SOUNDBITE OF LOLA YOUNG SONG, "CONCEITED") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
