How I fell in love with quasars, blazars and our incredible universe

My first love was for the night sky.

Love is complicated.

You're looking at a fly-through of the
Hubble Space Telescope Ultra Deep Field,

one of the most distant images
of our universe ever observed.

Everything you see here is a galaxy,

comprised of billions of stars each.

And the the farthest galaxy is
a trillion trillion kilometers away.

As an astrophysicist, I have the awesome
privilege of studying some of the most

exotic objets in our universe,
the objects that have

captivated me from first crush
throughout my career

are supper massive, hyperactive blackholes.

Weight 1 to 10 billion times the mass
of our own sun,

these galactic black holes are devouring
material, at a rate

of upwards of a thousand times more

than your "average" supermassive black hole.

(Laughter)

These two characteristics,

with a few others, make them quasars.

At the same time, the objects I study

are producing some of the most
powerful particle streams

ever observed.

These narrow streams, called jets,

are moving at 99.99 percent
of the speed of light.

And, are pointed directly at the earth.

These jetted, earth-pointed, hyperactive
and supermassive black holes

are called blazars, or blazing quasars.

But what makes blazars so special
is that they're some of the universe's

most efficient particle accelerators,

transporting incredible amounts
of energy throughout a galaxy.

Here, I'm showing an artist's conception
of a blazar.

The dinner plate by which the material
falls unto the black hole

is called the accretion disk,

shown here in blue.

Some of that mat erial is sling-shotted
around the blackhole

and accelerated to insanely high speeds
in the jet,

shown here in white.

Although the blazer system is rare,

the process by which nature pulls
the material via a disk,

and then flings some of it out via a jet,

is more common.

We'll eventually zoom out of
the blazer system

to show its approximate relationship
to the larger galactic context.

Beyond the cosmic accounting
of what goes in to what goes out,

one of the hot topics in blazar
astrophysics right now

is where the highest energy jet emission
comes from.

In this image, I'm interested in where
this white blob forms

and if, as a result, there's any
relationship between the jet

and the accretion disk material.

Clear answers to this question
were almost completely inaccessible