The Origin of the Supermassive Black Hole

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In the early universe, there was not enough time to grow from a few times the mass of the sun within that short span of time. So we propose this idea of direct collapse black holes. These are black holes that form from gas that collapses very rapidly. You don't have to cycle the gas through a star. And then you leave a little wimpy black hole. It all works out really nicely. The aquasars that you see are really bright, are very rare. But it turns out that there are places in the universe this can happen,. because in the sequence of how galaxies and stars form, you first form a huge disc of gas, and then thet d cool

There is so much we don’t know about our universe. But our curiosity about the unknown shouldn’t blind us to the incredible progress we have made in cosmology over the last century. We know the universe is big, expanding, and accelerating. Modern cosmologists are using unprecedentedly precise datasets to uncover more details about the evolution and structure of galaxies and the distribution and nature of dark matter. Priya Natarajan is a cosmologist working at the interface of data, theory, and simulation. We talk about the state of modern cosmology, and how tools like gravitational lensing are providing us with detailed views of what’s happening in the distant universe.

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Priya Natarajan received her Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Cambridge. She is currently professor of astronomy at Yale University, the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professor at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen, and an honorary professor for life at the University of Delhi, India. She is an Affiliate at the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University and an Associate Member of the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and other publications. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the India Abroad Foundation’s “Face of the Future” Award, and an India Empire NRI award for Achievement in the Sciences. She is the author of Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos.

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