to stare into the void of a black hole tumble through space before disappearing forever within it it's the prospect of catching that unique moment that explains the current excitement what happens to matter once it's been swallowed we will never know but it's what a black hole does as it feeds that holds the true surprise it would prove to be the key to revealing what black holes really are and their hidden role at the heart of [Music] galaxies as gas continues to spiral in towards the Event Horizon gravity climbs to staggering extremes gas molecules are forced

into a Whirlpool as they line up to be devoured powered by the black hole friction between gas particles in this Cosmic waiting line produces the densest hottest most electrically charged environment to be found anywhere in the universe friction between different parts of the gas cause it to heat up and it's very much like when the Apollo Rockets return to the Earth and travel through the Earth's atmosphere as they plow through the Earth's atmosphere they heat up because of the friction between the satellite and the atmosphere of the earth and what we know is that the

hotter something gets the brighter it gets the more light it emits under the intense gravitational fields at the entrance to the black hole the dense superheated disc of matter waiting to be swallowed begins to shine like a sun but a sun like no other [Music] that fundamental fact is one of the great surprises about black holes you know by their very name you would think that black holes would be these dark objects that wouldn't produce any light and that's true if you just have a black hole sitting by itself alone it doesn't produce any light

but in nature we have gas spiraling into black holes and that turns out to produce the most efficient sources of life and the brightest sources of light that we know of in the universe so this is the answer to the great quazar mystery quazars are nothing less than feeding super massive black holes it was exactly what Donald Linden Bell had first predicted behind every quazer is a black hop and it took a long time for even astronomers to accept this because it's it's quite a concept that there are these engines out there that fit a

variety of different situations and produce some of the most energetic phenomena we see in the universe today the black hole at the center of our galaxy is dark the super bright quazar phase having ended many billions of years ago when the fuel that fires violent emissions was completely [Music] [Music] consumed but now with the approaching gas cloud and the prospect of feeding the black hole should get brighter exactly how much is pretty hard to tell we know roughly the amount of mass if you dump that amount of mass very quickly onto the black hole it'll

be a huge event I mean it the galactic uh Center black hole would flare up by orders of magnitude a feeding binge on this scale is considered a low probability what astronomers considered to be more probable is that the black hole could take snack-sized nibbles out of the gas cloud it probably will take quite a while let's say 10 years and so this whole event will then stretched out and therefore at any given time a little less spectacular but we will see I think we probably will see these effects and so the world's most powerful

telescopes will be keenly trained on our galactic center as the predictions of astronomers are put to the test in the fiery ordeal of actual [Music] events as we begin to understand the behavior of feeding black holes at the heart of galaxies an unexpected new story is also emerging a story that reaches right out to our own solar system and surprisingly touches us here on planet Earth far from being violent agents of Destruction it seems instead black holes might actually be benign Architects which have played a part in the creation of galaxies stars and even of

life itself one of the first scientists to begin to see black holes in this different way was Dr John [Music] magorian he was fascinated by the mysterious relationship between super massive black holes and the galaxies around them [Music] the key breakthrough in his work came with the availability of detailed images of remote galaxies produced by the new Hubble Space Telescope one way of thinking about this is to imagine that galaxies are like miniature light bulbs out in space and so with earlier telescopes uh you could see that there was a light bulb there but then

with newer telescopes such as the Hubble then you're able to look in more detail at exactly what was going on in inside the D bulbs you maybe could make out details of the filaments of the the wires inside and so on with these highresolution images astronomers could compare the size of galaxies to the size of the black hole at their centers was there any connection between the two what magorian discovered was completely unexpected the relationship that we found was essentially that the bigger the Galaxy the bigger the black hole that's in his broadest terms if

you want to be a bit more precise about it we find that the mass of the black hole was very strongly related to the mass of the surounding Galaxy there's a nice linear relationship between these two with the mass of the black hole being around about half a percent of the mass of the host [Music] Galaxy the relationship magorian had discovered between galaxies and the tiny black holes at their Center seemed so strange and odd the magorian and his colleagues thought that they had made him aake it was like suggesting that something as Tiny as

a coin could control something as massive as the [Music] earth when we discovered this correlation between Black Hole Mass and Galaxy Mass we were surprised but then that was immediately followed by nervousness the nervousness then started to give way to possible mild Elation that we discovered something new and fundamental that correlation is now known as the magorian relationship and it did indeed point to something profound this was incredibly important because it really meant that there was something linking these tiny super mive black holes in the center of galaxies with the whole galaxy itself it meant

that somehow their whole history had been intertwined that the growth of the galaxies and the growth of the black holes was somehow related