JWST investigates "failed supernova" - did it form a black hole?
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- čas přidán 17. 05. 2024
- Back in 2009 a star flared in brightness and then completely disappeared. The best explanation we had at the time was that the star had skipped supernova entirely and collapsed straight down into a black hole. But now the James Webb Space Telescope has taken a look and found something there in infrared light that doesn't seem to have changed brightness at all. So what else could it be? And why does this cause so many problems for explaining the "red supergiant problem"?
Beasor et al. (2023; JWST investigates N6946-BH1) - arxiv.org/pdf/2309.16121.pdf
Gerke, Kochanek & Stanek (2015; N6946-BH1 first "failed supernova" black hole candidate found in HST data) - arxiv.org/pdf/1411.1761.pdf
Georgy et al. (2012; yellow supergiants as progenitors?) - arxiv.org/pdf/1111.7003.pdf
Beasor & Davies (2016; dusty red supergiants in hiding?) - arxiv.org/pdf/1608.03895.pdf
00:00 - Introduction
01:18 - The Red Supergiant Problem
04:52 - What has JWST found observing N6946-BH1?
06:49 - If it's not a "failed supernova" black hole - what else could it be?
09:18 - Follow up JWST observations are planned
09:57 - Bloopers
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
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👩🏽💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
drbecky.uk.com
rebeccasmethurst.co.uk - Věda a technologie
"Don't name it until you know what it is folks" I LOL'd on that one!
You consistently provide information to questions that I had zero inkling would ever be raised in an astronomical setting, yet still exist. Granted, it's not my primary field of study, but it's definitely something I think about more than a little. I'm so hungry for knowledge and so grateful you're here to grace us all with it.
Dimed out .learnt something new x
Spot on!
Thank you very much.
Yes I agree.
I'm only a few seconds into the video, but I'd particularly like to thank you for laying out at the very start what you're going to talk about, with those chapter titles on screen like that. None of the clickbait nonsense, just getting down to information, facts, supporting evidence, research, and proper, well-informed conclusions.
Almost like, y'know, science or something.....
Petrov could learn from her... Lots!
I find the whole dust problem a bit obscure. 😂
"The red supergiant problem" will be the title of the next Clifford remake.
The red supergiant solution
The way Dr. Becky always says "But" is worth more then all the energy in the Universe alone.
"BASH"
Many stars have disappeared over many year of observation. The problem is more than a few doesn't fit supernova models. One thing that is certain is the universe is a mysterious place the unexplainable is common. It's certainly not boring.
These get posted right as I’m getting in my car to start my work week. It’s my favorite thing to wait for all week! I love watching your videos right before I walk into work, it truly makes my day! We will miss you while on your break, but it is much deserved! Have a fun and safe vacation! We’ll be here when you get back ❤
Yaaay she's back for the weeklies! One of the best times of the week is getting that notification from dr.becky on youtube!❤
Thanks for bringing these rather dry but important papers to life and giving them context. Very much appreciated.
Just a ponder regarding the Super giants.
Years ago I was associated with a project regarding coal seams igniting at depth.
I've forgotten much of the research now but I do recall one key finding which was that up to a certain depth the seam gas would ignite and then expansion would occur, then the reverse would occur where expansion would occur before ignition. Wonder if a similar change in physics occurs on a much grander sale?
Should clarify that the by-products that were generated differed significantly.
Thank you for your analysis, Dr. I saw an earlier story about this within the last day or so, and I appreciate your timely response. Always enjoyable and informative.
Consider we are seeing what happened almost 200,000 years ago today
I just did a presentation about this paper to my grad student friends a few weeks ago! So cool to be seeing you talk about it!
Thank you for the clear explanation. I’m always so happy when I can follow the logic of your presentation although I have no physics background whatsoever. It shows how well you understand the material that you can bring us along that way.
Physics is all about reality, a good Physicist should be able to explain anything so that us simple souls embedded in Reality can understand. Dr Becky is par excellence.
You perfectly said what I was thinking :)
Agreed.
You do a great job of laying out complicated concepts and information in a logical, easy to follow way. All your videos are excellent, but this one was particularly well-organized.
Thank you for your channel. You are as entertaining as you are informative.
Keep up the great work.
"It's not just a problem, it's a super giant problem" Is probably one of my favourite quotes now. Only slightly behind "Space is hard, words are harder" (Which would go excellently on a t-shirt)
love the bloopers and your hair is beautiful today. I like how JWST is creating mystery as fast as it answers questions. Thanks Dr. Becky.
Near the start of the video where you made the comparison with Betelgeuse I thought to myself it would be sooo disappointing if Betelgeuse was the type of red supergiant star that collapsed directly into a black hole. No bang, no flash, just a pop in some future LIGO observation. Astronomers would still be excited though having this happen in our "back yard", where it could be examined in greater detail.
And when are you going to join the Sky at Night team? Your style of explaining these phenomena would fit right in.
I became fascinated in astronomy while visiting the Museum of Natural History in New York City at age ten. Not nearly as adept as you, I went on into a psychology career. Thank you so much for your great knowledge and your dazzling enthusiasm, Dr. Becky Smethurst. You share it in a way that amateurs like me and youngsters can begin to understand or at least appreciate it. I just purchased your book, "A Brief History of Black Holes: And Why Nearly Everything You Know About Them Is Wrong," on Audible. I can hardly wait to start it. Albert Einstein is a great hero of mine and now so are you! I"m so happy I found you here.
Off topic, but I've never seen it commented on. I really appreciate that when you show a paper you add thumbnails of the lead author or authors -- a nice bit of egoboo for them.
Thank you Dr. Your videos are always so informative.
I love your bloopers. You have a great sense of humor.
Thanks for highlighting and explaining things I am not even aware of. Just love your channel, learn so much thanks as always.
Very good episode, really enjoyed it, very informative. Bit disappointed that the 2009 event probably didn't skip the supernova, keep us posted on this one.
Fascinating! Thanks, dr. Becky! 😊
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Great job, and your enthusiasm and humour is so engaging. Cheers from the Pacific West Coast of Canada.
Very informative, as always. I'm curious why more studies don't get the spectrum data you mentioned would be more informative. I've heard you say this often, that you need spectra to answer a question. Does this require a lot more telescope time? I'd be curious to hear a discussion of trade-offs researchers face when choosing the instrument and observation types they choose. Seems like those spectra are central to many questions so I'm unclear why more studies don't gather those data in the first proposal. Thanks.
I think it's down to limited time available with JWST, and an image take 12 hours.
i think she explained it before that spectral data takes way more time to collect. and time is everything when it comes to jwst.
That and gaining spectra data requires using a separate instrument, doesn't it?
@@AnnoyingNewslettersthat's what I'm thinking. Spectroscopy gear is different from infrared gear, is it not?
Great video, thank you for this. Also appreciate your humorous post-video clips!
Great stuff. Thank you. More please!
The "three objects" looked like possibly more than that but somehow shrunk to two by the time the "common envelope" hypothesis was explained. But seems that that also needs to be explained.
ps: please keep up your great work; its always enjoyable to watch and learn from you.
I was just looking at a fantastic year-old video about Red Supergiant Stars yesterday!
Aliens: "we finally completed our Dyson's Sphere.."
Fantastic format and content!
Dr. Becky,
You had me so excited. I actually giggled and outloud startled my kids with "THAT IS SO FREAKING AWESOME" when you said the star had skipped exploding and just became a black hole.
HOW DARE YOU make it even cooler with the thought 2 Stars collided and Combined. HOW DARE YOU!!!
Thank you for another great video Dr. Becky 👌😊🇬🇧😊🇯🇲😊🇺🇸
Stellar work. Keep it up.
A perfect vid Dr. Becky S. I imagine there are quite a lot of us with amateur interest in astrophysics who get quite a lot more out of this kind of vid than the 'night sky news' vids. I respect what you're doing with those, but these are personally, what I'm here for.
Ok that was a SUPER fascinating video, I’ve been playing a ton of Outer Wilds recently, so that’s jumpstarted my love for astrophysics/space stuff.
I like how the more information we get, the more questions we have. Thank you for your explanations and the chart showing how tiny and insignificant this small blue marble really is in the scope of the universe.
This is my first stumble onto your channel, and I am departing this evening as a new subscriber.
What a lovely change to listen to someone who understands what they are saying, and says it in such a clear and lucid manner while holding our interest.
I shall be delving into your archives 🥸
Yay!
More Dr.Becky!
Thank you, Dr. Becky!
Once again JWST pulling it’s weight. 😉
Always a joy with your vids. 👍🏻
Great content as always.
NOW I have a nodding acquaintance of the red giant problem. Thank you. I became interested in your channel your shorts. (not clothing, but rapid-fire clips.) I appreciate your translations of highly technical information into a more common language of the of the terminally curious. (BTW, where were all of you expositors in the 1960s when I was first learning physics with a slide rule, and a book of logarithms?)
Oh, yeah - been waiting for Dr. Becky's take on this news! ❤❤
At first I was wondering whether the 'Red Supergiant Problem' was going to turn out to be the really big ones eventually just cooling and dimming all the way into the infrared, but the common envelope merger makes a lot of sense. Wonderful explanation of the issues, the observations and the implications as always.
Your bloopers are great. More singing, please.
Pretty good impression of Atkinson's "pop" sound there at the end! :)
Another amazing, well explained video Dr B! Really love how you use amazing story telling skills to guide the viewer thought the video! You rock!
Great video, Dr. Becky...👍
new episode YES!
The JWST is the gift that keeps on giving 💫
Love the bloopers 😊
😂 great clips. Keep up the awesome shows.
The "Calvin and Hobbes" cartoon alternate name for the Big Bang - the "Horrendous Space Kablooie"
On your wall is some yellow decorative thing I keep mistaking it for dust on my phones screen lol. Great video keep up the good work
Wow. More on Common Envelope Stars, please. Learned something new!
Becky, thanks for sharing, educating and entertaining. You went a bit Sean Connery at 3:07 with "Red Shupergiant problem" 😂🙂❤
Love the bloopers. People!
Dust leaving the star would initially produce its own brilliant light, due to its temperature.
As the dust cools and spreads, it would stop emitting visible light and would block visible light from the star.
Certainly fits!
The BH in N6946-BH1 now stands for Bad Hunch.
I love your sense of humor.
It brings things into perspective when even supernovas can fail !
You’re a bada$$ nerd. Thanks for sharing your knowledge in such a smart way so we, common people, can get it.
Another great video. Love me a good stellar mystery.
ok but didn't they find 3 ir sources? so a trinary or maybe a super-jovian or brown dwarf located as well
thanks for the information dr becky. looking forward to more discoveries
Yep, I'm thinking another possibility is not a stellar-stellar merger, a merger/collision involving jovian or brown dwarf objects in the system. I remember what was suspected to be a different example of that causing a brightness flare and tons of dust and debris that then dimmed visible light.
No I thought it was 3 visible light objects, which likely means at that time we looked, we happened to see through the dust cloud in three seperate areas where it was thinner, to see the large common envelope star underneath.
I love how every video ends with us praying for a spectra lol
"Spectra" is the plural of "spectrum." One spectrum, two spectra.
We no longer pray for rain like the ancients once did. Now we pray for Spectra
The NGST has really increased our level of fidelity
Great video 😮
Awesome video 👍....
Wonderful video as always! Thanks so much! I don't understand one thing though: what explains the 3 different objects that were detected with NIRCam? The progenitor star didn't split apart into multiple, did it? Are they stars in front of the progenitor star from our perspective that we're simply blotted out by it's light that are now visible because it's dimmer?
Likely what was seen was the single object, covered by dust in a way that allowed light to shine our from three seperate points. So like a random chance observation and at that time we happened to look when the dust shroud happened to have three seperate holes in it we could see through...
It's not just a problem it's a super, giant problem! That's my favorite takeaway this time.
Great video! Apart from the excellent science, Beasor is one of my favorite Mario characters.
That was interesting and I couldn't help noticing Dr Becky's hair. Beautiful. First time I ever really noticed.
Another video with something I had never heard of before - a Common Envelope Star. This is part of the reason I try to get whatever you do as soon as possible. So presumably the dust cloud around the merged star will be rich in the heavier elements?
Now to show a bit of my literary obsession with space: When you started talking about the discovery of this "not correct to label it BH - " star, my mind immediately leapt to the start of the Peter F Hamilton "Pandora's Star" SciFi.
I am amazed by the refinement of research thanks to the use of mightier technology.
OMG!!! JWST is the most amazing thing we’ve ever created!!
Peter again on the question on the beginning of the universe. It says that after inflation, temperature was in the billions of degrees. What it's that inflated. Into what space did it inflate, cause if the was nothing , space was not there to inflate into.
Glad to see books available on audible.
Even in the bloopers I learned that BH1 is for "black hole 1". Even bloopers are informative!
Such a great example of the scientific method in use.
Thank you 😊
It would suck to be a failed supernova...especially with JWST watching...c'est la vie
Nice Rowan Atkison impression.
the acting is more than what that star shows us
envel-oweP!
Dear Becky you are very pleasant the way you are reporting
Love this
I still find it amazing that by inspecting the light, and splitting it into different wavelengths, we can find out what elements there are millions of light years away.
LOL thanks, now I can only hear Rowan saying "EnvelOP!!". "PEtrol PUmP!"
The first proposal for what this star could have become, sounds a bit like the "Unnova" that I used to see on astronomy programs, normally alongside things like Vampire Stars. The unnova was a massive star (A or B, i think) that collapsed into a black hole, causing any planets to freeze...though the program didn't mention an explosion - I think the lack of an explosion was *why* it was called the unnova.
Hi Dr Becky, like,buen tema.😊
We need an hour long of bloopers...
Red Matter. Same thing happened to Vulcan in 2012.
Very interesting.
Just waiting for the next bone to turn up in the desert kind of thing.
Thank you.
I have a request for a topic to address on your channel.
It involves the malleability of space itself which does, in fact, STRONGLY imply a lack of time symmetry I'm the universe. Example: If you consider a billiard table that has changing geometry over time and perform 100 cue shots while filming each one you wouldn't have to label each film taken because you could figure out in which order they were taken based on your knowledge of the tables changing geometry over time. So, the table could start flat and warps over time and then each film of the different cue shots would look different from all the others. In other words, time symmetry would be broken. What all this means is that the malleability of space STRONGLY implies a lack of time symmetry across the universe - obviously this will be most noticeable around a black hole or a wormhole (if, in fact, they exist). Anyway, all of that challenges the principle of conservation of energy because it shows that there is NOT an "arrow" of time - that time is NOT a constant. And, even IF we had a godlike perspective from outside the universe from which we could observe and tally up all the energy in the universe it would be irrelevant to us because from that perspective you wouldn't take into account the kinetic energies of the galaxies and that omission would be significant because the motion of galaxies relative to each other contributes to the overall energy of the universe FROM OUR PERSPECTIVE (notice I capitalized "from our perspective").
Further, defining "gravitational energy" in the framework of general relativity AND in a way that applies to the universe as a whole is usually rather ambiguous. So, you see how we may well be QUITE mistaken about this whole 'dark energy' thing?
Could you address this in a video, please?
I wonder if it could have been some kind of collision? Maybe a rogue planet or something impacting the star, thus creating a massive cloud of dust and debris? Thanks for the video!
I might be wrong (not an astronomer) but idt a rogue planet crashing into a star would really cause much. it'd be like a fly crashing into a skyscraper
Thanks!