Astrum Space - We Found the Fastest Matter in the Universe

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

A compilation of ‪Astrum videos exploring the fastest speeds in the universe. We’ll investigate the universe’s most extreme particle accelerators: the most powerful particle jets in the universe, black holes ejecting matter at almost the speed of light, and the brightest explosion of all time. ▀▀▀▀▀▀Astrum's newsletter has launched! Want to know what's happening in space? Sign up here: ⁠https://astrumspace.kit.com⁠A huge thanks to our Patreons who help make these videos possible. Sign-up here: ⁠https://bit.ly/4aiJZNF

From Earth, the night sky appears ethereal, peaceful. It's so far removed from human civilization. You'd be forgiven for thinking we're immune to anything going on up there. But that couldn't be further from the truth. We are under attack. Cosmic rays are bombarding us from every direction. Tiny particles that collide with our planet's atmosphere, setting off a chain reaction of ionization that can render our satellites

and other electronic machinery, useless. But where do they come from? For hundreds of years, astrophysicists have searched in vain to find the origin of these elusive attackers with little success. Even the type of source has evaded their searches. But now, thanks to a whole new field of research, we're starting to find answers. Not only do we now know what to look for, but they are proving new research. more powerful than we ever imagined. What in the cosmos is possibly capable of producing a quadrillion

electron volts of energy. I'm Alex McCauldin and you're watching Astrom. Join me as we follow the trail of cosmic rays, leading us right to the limits of physics as we know it. We'll see how scientists detect the highest energy particles in the universe and meet a new class of astronomical objects whose extreme behavior until recently seemed like the stuff of science fiction. The Milky Way is full of energy, but our eyes can only detect a tiny fraction of it. Beyond the spectrum of visible light, charged particles can give off higher energy radiation in the form of x-rays and gamma rays, creating a mess of energetic fingerprints throughout space. Astronomers can forensically decode these cosmic clues,

to understand the flow of energy through our galaxy. But among these charged particles, there is one group in particular that remains clouded in mystery. Back in 1912, the Austrian physicist Victor Hess made a historic air balloon ascent up to 5,300 meters, where he could measure the rate of ionization in the upper atmosphere, or how quickly atoms and molecules are becoming charged. He expected to find that, it decreased at higher altitudes, confirming the prevailing theories at the time. However, this was not to be. Unexpectedly, Hess recorded a rate of ionization that reached three times higher than at sea level.

This led to the realization that the ionizing radiation he had dedicated his career to studying came not from Earth, but from space. He had discovered cosmic rays. and they did not come in peace. Earth is under constant barrage from them. These high-energy particles, mostly protons, travel at nearly the speed of light and collide with our planet's atmosphere, sending a shower of secondary particles down onto its surface. These attacks can do some serious damage.

The secondary particles produced in cosmic ray showers, the likes of muons, neutrons, electrons, positrons, and gamma rays can interact with living organisms, contributing to genetic mutations and radiation damage. And when cosmic rays interact with satellites or other orbiting electronics, they can trigger about of ionization that can cause the circuits to degrade or even fail catastrophically. And they are not only a nuisance to our best space equipment. Cosmic rays have meddled with our best scientists too. For more than 100 years, the question of where cosmic rays come from has been one of the major

unsolved mysteries in high-energy astrophysics. Their physical properties make them almost impossible to track. Magnetic fields bend their path before we can locate their origin, and they break down into a shower of particles before we can learn their identity. These challenges are laid bare when scientists try to measure the cosmic ray spectrum. If you plot the number of incoming high-energy particles as a function of their energy, you notice a distinct steepening point known as the knee, beyond which the really high-energy cosmic rays above four petter electron volts are much less common.

At first, some scientists assumed that this knee must mark the boundary between cosmic rays coming from inside our Milky Way and those coming from beyond. Others simply didn't know, but just as scientists were about to accept defeat, one observatory stepped in to revolutionize the search for the sneaky interlopers. The large, high-altitude air shower observatory is a ground-based observatory located nearly 4,500 meters above sea level in the mountains of Sichuan province, China. It has one main objective to find the land. the highest energy particles in the universe.

The chief scientist on this mission is Professor Zeng Kau, who gave Astrum an exclusive interview about Lassau's work. He said, to make good measurements for the knee of the cosmic ray spectrum, you need two things. The detector must be big enough, and it must be able to identify the original particle from the air shower it creates. rays become more rare the higher the energy. For the highest energy particles, less than than one per square kilometer per century is expected to hit Earth. To combat this issue, you need detectors spanning a whole lot more than a square kilometer,

which is why a lasso covers an area at the size of 190 football fields. As for identifying the particles, I mentioned that the cosmic rays produce a shower of secondary particles when they collide with the atmosphere. And this is what scientists use. They must essentially piece the debris together to work out whether the original particle was a proton, a helium nucleus, or something heavier. This is a tricky process, as you need to make sure you catch all the fallout. But Lassau is one of the most well-equipped observatories to tackle the challenge.

It has at least three types of interconnected detectors in an array to capture the shower and then identify the original cosmic ray particle. This unparalleled ability pretty quickly led to the team's first big discovery. Professor Kow said, At the time, we only had around half of Lassau built. We put it into operation for around half a year and suddenly found that there were so many gamma rays. By 2021, Lassau had detected gamma-ray photons with energies exceeding one peta-electron

volt, or one quadrillion electron volts, and one at 1.4 quadrillion electron volts, making it the highest energy photon ever observed. For context, that's nearly 150 times more energy than the fastest protons accelerated by the Large Hadron Collider. Now, the laws of energy conservation tell us that hetter electron volt particles don't just appear out of nowhere. That colossal amount of energy has to be transferred to the particles from a source. Scientists had been theorizing about such a source for decades, but Lassau's finding proved its

existence once and for all. The Peveratron. Pevatrons are any source capable of accelerating particles to a peter electron volt of energy, and their existence promised to revolutionize the hunt for cosmic rays. But how do we find them? Luckily, Lassau wasn't finished. Gamma rays are useful because they are neutral in terms of their charge, so they can travel in straight lines throughout the universe without being bent by magnetic fields.

This added a new dimension to Lassau's work. It could trace back to where the gamma rays had come from. Mapping these traces across the sky, scientists identified 12 distinct sources capable of producing ultra-high energy gamma rays, several of which showed signs of accelerating particles to a quadrillion electron volts. There was a catch, though. Lassau may have identified the general direction of these gamma-ray sources, but scientists had no idea how far away they were.

Twelve lines of sight stretching out endlessly into space isn't exactly a narrow search field. Except scientists knew something else about these gamma rays that would tighten the net. The universe has been full of photons since the Big Bang, and these photons are very cold with low energies. Gamma rays at ultra-high energies are very likely to collide with these background photons, and when they do, they vanish. This means that gamma rays simply can't travel vast distances through space, so if lasso was detecting them here on Earth, then they couldn't have traveled very far.

In fact, there is no way that these 12 high-energy sources could be extra-galactic. They must be inside our Milky Way. Not only did this tell scientists that the knee, the bend in the graph we saw earlier, had nothing to do with cosmic rays coming from outside the Milky Way, but it brought the search for them much closer to home. The race was on. The first ever All-Electric 2026 Subaru Trail Seeker is the EV for the Trail Obsessed. with up to 444 kilometers on a full charge and DC fast charging from 10 to 80% in about 30 minutes in ideal conditions.

Plus, ample ground clearance and symmetrical all-wheel drive make the 2026 trail seeker the most capable EV Subaru has ever built. Test drive it at your local Subaru dealer or visit Subaru.ca. Want to talk ETS with the people behind them? Join me, Etienne Jean-Cabouchard on the upside ticker talk. into what's moving markets with timely analysis, trends, and answers to ETF questions you've actually been thinking about. Hit play on the upside ticker talk and elevate your ETF investing IQ. Now, before Lassau's work, astrophysicists had developed theories about the production of cosmic rays and which type of source could be responsible. After all, space is a weird and wonderful

place, home to several unusual objects displaying extreme behavior. But we're not going to, Which of these oddities were capable of producing the highest energy particles? And how? For the past 70 years, a popular idea was that supernova remnants played a key role in producing cosmic rays. They certainly have enough energy for it. In fact, calculations show that if they converted just 10 to 20% of their kinetic energy into accelerated particles, supernova remnants could supply most of the cosmic rays we

see in our galaxy. See, when a star goes supernova, it drives material out into interstellar space, forming a collisionless shockwave just ahead of it, where there is a sharp change in density, magnetic fields, and pressure. When a particle hits this shock wave, it gets bounced back and forth across the shock front, gaining energy each time. can propagate here for some time, up to thousands of years, and the longer they spend there, the higher the energy can become. This process is known as diffusive shock acceleration, or

the thermi mechanism. But although supernova remnants can accelerate particles in this way, reaching petter electron volt energies may still be tricky. Theoretical models suggest that supernova remnants are only capable of accelerating particles to these extremes during the first 100 years of their life, and all the supernova remnants we know of are much older. However, there might be one scenario where supernova remnants can act as a source for ultra-high energy gamma rays. If they gain enough energy to overpower the magnetic forces that confine them, some accelerated particles may escape the supernova remnant and get trapped in nearby giant molecular clouds. Here, they can interact with the supernovaeuvre remnants. Here, they can interact with

the dense gas and produce gamma rays with energies up to one quadrillion electron volts, even if the supernova remnant itself is no longer capable of petter electron vault acceleration. So supernova remnants show some potential as cosmic ray produces. Up to six of the 12 lasso candidates could be associated with them, but they're not the main type of source we should be looking at. That's another source capable of creating even higher energies. Pulsars. We've covered pulsars on the channel before, so feel free to check out some of the previous

videos for more information. But as a quick recap, pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars created in supernova explosions. We have now detected over 1,500 pulsars. But how could they create such high power gamma rays? Well, they're already proven to be capable of accelerating electrons and positrons, since the dense and highly magnetized structure rotates to produce powerful electric fields. These electric fields can strip electrons from the star's surface, forming a wind of particles

that expands outwards at rapid speeds. And once this wind reaches the surrounding material, like the gas or dust from a nebula, it suddenly slows down, forming a termination shock. At this shock point, the particles are accelerated to extremely high energies. You can think of it like water flowing in a stream. Normally the flow is smooth, but if you place an obstacle in the way, some water will spill out, and this water will be flowing much faster. The lasso team believe that more than 30% of the candidate Peveratrons they detected could

be associated with pulsars, making them a key player in the search for cosmic rays. The final type of cosmic ray source came as a bit of a surprise to scientists. If we take another look at the spectrum and zoom into the knee shape, you see not a smooth line, but a hump. In other words, an anomaly. The properties of these cosmic rays didn't fit with them coming from a known source like a supernova remnant or a pulsar, which meant they must have been created by another type of source.

This required scientists to think outside the box, and repose some other, less traditional ways that particles could be accelerated. And with that, they recognized what could be described as nature's ultimate particle accelerators, black holes. The idea that black holes could produce high-energy particles had been discussed way back in 2009, named the Banyardos Silk West Effect after the scientists who came up with it. It describes a phenomenon where if two particles move towards a black hole and collide near the event horizon, they could reach near unlimited energies.

However, this theory was thought to be effectively useless, since the particles would no doubt be sucked into the black hole and lost forever. That was until more recent years, when newer models revealed that a fraction of the particles would more likely be ejected back out into space. of the black hole, these particles could travel through space as another than cosmic rays. Now, we've discussed some of the theory behind cosmic rays and where they come from, but it begs the question, what have we actually found? The main thing to understand about this search is that it's really hard.

Lassau may have identified 12 candidate hevatrons in our galaxy, but finding the actual object responsible is a whole other task. That aside, the search is still ongoing, and a few sources have been found. So without further ado, let's take a look. One of the first objects pinned down may be familiar to you, the Crab Nebula. Known as Messier 1, it's a supernova remnant found around 6,500 light years away in the constellation Taurus. Although stunning to look at, Messier 1 is not just a pretty face.

It's capable of accelerating electrons to a quadrillion electron volts of energy. And as one of the best studied objects in the known universe, observing Messier 1 gives astronomers a good insight into how nature's particle accelerators work. In the gamma ray domain, Messier 1 shows some extreme variability. It produces intense flares which can last anywhere between a few hours to a few days, and And with our new understanding of pevatrons, scientists realized that these flares were the photons resulting from some serious electron acceleration. Exactly how this happens has been debated.

It could be DSA at the boundary between the particle wind and the medium surrounding the pulsar, energy released by magnetic field lines breaking and reconnecting, or a more complex mechanism within the particle wind itself. For context, electrons at high energies transfer part of their energy to background photons, boosting them to gamma rays that scientists can detect. However, accelerating electrons is really difficult because they lose energy very quickly. To produce gamma rays with energies of a quadrillion electron volts, the electrons themselves must have had several times that energy.

This proves that messier one is undoubtedly a pevatron, and an impressive one at that. However, this has only been proven for electrons, making Messier 1, what scientists call a leptonic accelerator. But pevatrons are capable of accelerating any charged particle. And if you remember, cosmic rays are mostly protons. So it's these pevatrons, otherwise known as hadronic accelerators, that scientists are most keen to find. I mentioned that Lassau detected a photon at 1.4 peterelectron volts.

highest energy photon ever observed. With such mind-blowing energy, scientists were keen to see where it came from, which led them to our next candidate, the Cygnus region. The Cygnus constellation is one of the most recognizable in the northern sky, spelling more than 800 square degrees or 4,000 full moons. And it was here that scientists found some seriously interesting stuff. Lasso found lots of peters. electron vault photons inside the Cygnus cocoon, a huge super bubble which surrounds a region of massive star formation. Inside the bubble is a massive young star cluster known as the Cygnus OB2 association. This is a very active place and the many young, massive stars

can create a strong wind which accelerates particles. Cygnus OB2 is found nearly 5,000 lighters from Earth, and it lines up pretty well with some of the gamma rays observed by lasso. But as I mentioned, these gamma rays only indicate the general direction of a pevatron, not its distance, so scientists can often struggle to identify the origin of a signal among several possible sources, and in the case of Cygnus, there are plenty of energetic objects to choose from. In a similar direction to OB2, but further away, there is an X-ray binary known as a as Cygnus X3. It consists of a donor star and a compact object, likely a black hole or neutron star.

The donor is a wolf-ray-a star, meaning it is extremely hot and massive, and it feeds material into the compact object through strong stellar winds. This, combined with the compact object, which releases powerful jets of plasma, creates the perfect conditions for particle acceleration. At first it seemed impossible to tell which system Lassau was detecting Peta Electron Volt signals from, but on taking a closer look at the signal itself, scientists noticed something unique. There was a temporal feature of the signals, a pattern that repeated every 4.8 hours, seen

not just in the gamma rays, but in the X-rays and the infrared radiation too. But where was the pattern coming from? On further investigation, scientists realized the truth. Every 4.8 hours, the black hole of Cygnus X3 orbits its massive donor star. Suddenly, scientists could be certain the gamma rays were coming from Cygnus X3, and that they had found another pevatron. Cygnus X3 was a particularly intriguing object. For one thing, the highest energy photons from this object already measured 3.7 peta-electron

volts. And since photons are radiated by accelerated protons, the energy of the proton must be several times larger. What that suggests is that Cygnus X-3 is not just a pevatron, but a superpevatron, capable of accelerating protons to at least 10 petrater electron volts. had a whistle-stop tour of some of the most exciting pevatrons we've found, so far. But what does the future hold for this ultra-powered search? And where will it take us?

Hunting 12 candidate pevatron seemed hard enough, but since Lassau's first finding, that number has boomed. Lassow published the first global catalogue of galactic pevatrons in 2023, detailing 43 ultra-high-energy gamma-ray sources. But now, two years later, and with continued monitoring from observatories around the world, the number of sources has risen to more than 75. With so many candidate Pevatrons hiding in our Milky Way, we need to seriously rethink our perception of the galaxy and what it's capable of.

Many thought that the Milky Way was a relatively peaceful place, since it lacks the massive black holes typical of galaxies with violent, energetic pasts. However, Lassau's work has proven this to be an outdated assumption, and is changing the landscape of our non-thermal universe, starting with our own cosmic home. It's definitely an exciting time to be hunting cosmic rays. Lassau is collaborating with several other observatories detecting high-energy gamma rays around the world, including the US, Germany, Namibia, and Spain. This international network has fostered an open and collaborative approach to their experiments,

sharing data and corroborating evidence. Their goal is to build up a comprehensive spectrum of photons across different energies, as well as measuring x-rays and gamma rays above Earth's atmosphere. I want to give a huge thanks to Professor Kao for his expertise on the world of high-energy astrophysics, As I'm sure you'll agree, studying Pevertrons is a dynamic and rapidly developing field, and observatories like Lassau are on the front line. Their work so far has transformed our galaxy from a tranquil place to a violent, energetic mess, filled with particle accelerators more powerful than anything we can build here on Earth.

We may still be under attack from cosmic rays, but now we're ready to chase them back to their hiding places. In October 2022, a brilliant flash pierced the cosmos, brighter and more intense than anything human civilization had ever seen. And that's not an exaggeration. The strength of the blast blinded our gamma-ray detectors the world over and unleashed more energy in a matter of seconds than our sun will emit over its entire 9 billion-year lifespan. Over the 18 months that followed, it became the

most widely studied gamma-ray burst in history, creatively dubbed the boat for the brightest of all time. As researchers began to decipher its cause, their findings unraveled one mystery after another. Scientists have been cataloging gamma-ray burst for decades, but this one was closer, brighter, and unexplainably devoid of some key signatures you'd expect to see. It also raises some far-reaching questions about our standard model, the possibility of a dark matter particle, and how heavy elements like gold are made. I'm Alex McColgan, and you're watching Astrum.

Join me today as we dive into the mystery of the biggest and brightest gamma-ray burst of all time. What caused such a colossal explosion? How is it different from other gamma-ray bursts before it? what can it teach us about our understanding of the universe and the particles that constituted. The first ever all-electric 2026 Subaru Trail Seeker is the EV for the Trail Obsessed, with up to 444 kilometers on a full charge and DC fast charging from 10 to 80% in about 30 minutes in ideal conditions. Plus, ample ground clearance and symmetrical all-wheel drive

make the 2026 Trail Seeker the most capable EV Subaru has ever built. Test drive it at your local Subaru dealer or visit Subaru.ca. Gamma ray bursts are brief, intense flashes of high-energy gamma radiation lasting from milliseconds to several minutes. The first of its kind was detected in 1967, when American satellites designed for detecting covert Soviet nuclear testing picked up an unusual pattern of electromagnetic energy. Since then, gamma-ray bursts have been of tremendous interest. to the cosmological community, as they allow scientists to study states of matter and physics

that are not reproducible on Earth. Essentially, they provide researchers with a glimpse of how stars are formed and evolve across the whole timeline of the universe. There are two different kinds of gamma-ray bursts. Short gamma-ray bursts last less than two seconds and are attributed to either the collision of two neutron stars, or the merger of a neutron star and a black hole. They can be followed by a kilonova, an emission of bright light resulting from the radioactive decay of chemical elements. This decay creates even heavier elements, an important feature of novi, which we'll discuss more later.

Anything lasting longer than two seconds is classed as a long gamma ray burst. These are thought to be caused by the explosive deaths of massive stars and their subsequent supernovae. The collapse core may form either a neutron star or a black hole. These typically occur close to the edges of the observable universe because they are characteristic of low metallicity stars which formed when there were less heavy elements around. When we see one of these, we are witnessing events from billions of years ago. In the case of both long and short gamma-ray bursts, the newly formed black hole blasts out jets in opposing directions, containing part of the world.

particles accelerated close to the speed of light. When these particles interact with surrounding matter, they emit the gamma rays we detect. So what made the boat so special? Let's start by analyzing some of its key characteristics. Firstly, the boat lasted 10 whole minutes and was detectable for 10 hours after the fact. It occurred in the Sagittite constellation only 2 billion light years away, which is much closer than other gamma-ray bursts we've detected until now. In fact, such a bright explosion so close to Earth is thought to be a one in 10,000-year

event, meaning the last time one happened, humans had barely started farming. As is the case with other long gamma-ray bursts, we know a collapsing and exploding star was behind it, but this is where things start to get fuzzy. A supernova alone isn't enough to explain the magnitude of the gamma rays emitted. The boat was a whopping 70 times stronger than any other gamma-ray burst detected. Initially, the theory was that this must be the supernova of a ginormous star, the likes of which we rarely see. However, upon closer inspection of the afterglow, scientists found that the supernova behind the boat was shockingly ordinary. To get a clearer picture, astronomers pointed the James Webb Space Telescope in the boat's direction.

Webb's near-infrared spectrograph revealed that the supernova behind the boat was actually pretty average. It wasn't nearly as bright as you'd expect, given the gamma-ray burst that accompanied it. So what could have caused such a flash? One idea is that we simply perceive the flash as bigger and brighter because of Earth's relative position to the blast. Imagine a flashlight shining in the dark, diffuse and soft. It lights the path one to two meters ahead of you. Now imagine capturing all that light and focusing it into a singular laser beam. You wouldn't illuminate the path as widely, but it would reach hundreds of meters into the distance.

And if Earth was in the direct path of that laser, it would register a super bright reading. That doesn't mean the laser released more energy than the flashlight, it just means the way it was concentrated and then detected resulted in higher reading. The same concept can be applied to these gamma-ray bursts. If a massive star is spinning super fast when it collapses, then the shape and structure of the near light-speed jets it emits will be more narrow and focused, and therefore brighter. In fact, the jets seen from the boat are some of the narrowest we've ever seen. But not only were these particle jets brighter than expected, scientists also detected

way more of them going faster than expected. They travelled with such fervour that after 2 billion years traversing the cosmos, they arrived here and momentarily disrupted the Earth's atmosphere. Sitting just 50 to 1,000 kilometers above the surface of our planet, Earth's ionosphere is rich in electrically charged particles. When the boat struck, it left a mark comparable to that of a major solar flare, pushing the ionosphere down into lower altitudes. If photons from an explosion, 2 billion light years away, can have this kind of effect on our planet,

I don't really want to think about what happens if something like that in our neighbourhood explodes. The large high-altitude air shower observatory in Dowicheng County, China, managed to capture data on tens of thousands of photons over the course of the initial blast and into the afterglow. This is a quantity unlike anything seen before in gamma ray astronomy. In fact, it's so far out of pocket that some astrophysicists think that they might be pointing towards something missing from our models. According to our current understanding, it's very unlikely these super high-energy photons

are travelling for two billion years. cosmic microwave background radiation, interactions with intergalactic dust, or redshifting caused by the expansion of the universe are all factors that can interfere with a photon's trajectory. One hypothesis put forward is that photons convert themselves into a hypothetical particle called an axiom, and then convert back into gamma rays upon reaching our galaxy's magnetic field. Axions are thought to be an ultra-light particle responsible for. dark matter. Their existence is currently purely hypothetical. We have no evidence for them, and even if we did, they would lie outside the standard model of particle physics. We don't

have time to delve into detail in today's video, but let me know if you'd enjoy a separate video on this in the comments. Okay, so far we've established that boat was caused by a massive star collapsing and turning into a black hole, which incidentally is known as a collapsar. Aside from generating a long gamma ray burst, collapsars are also known for generating something else. Gold. Wait, wait, how is gold connected to gamma rays? Good question.

To understand that, let's take a minute to discuss how elements are made. The core of a star is a super high pressure environment, some 200 billion times higher than the atmospheric pressure on Earth. In these conditions, nuclear fusion reactions create heavier elements out of lighter ones. For example, one helium atom comes from fusing four hydrogen atoms together. Elements 2 through 26 on the periodic table, that's helium to iron, are made this way, for a process known as stellar nucleosynthesis. However, once you get to iron, it isn't energetically favourable to continue making bigger and bigger elements this way.

So, how do we account for the rest of the periodic table? Where do these heavier elements like gold come from? At the moment, we know two different ways these elements are formed. The first was recently confirmed by the James Webb Space Telescope. When two ultra-dense neutron stars collide, they emit an immense amount of neutron particles. Surrounding material captures these neutrons, making their atoms temporarily unstable. In order to stabilize, the neutrons undergo radioactive decay into protons, creating new, heavier elements.

This process is known as rapid neutron capture, or R-processed nucleosynthesis. Some calculations suggest one neutron star collision can produce up to three Earth masses worth of heavy elements. However, this explanation alone isn't sufficient to account for all the heavy elements in the universe. star collisions are rare, and take a long time to happen in the order of billions of years. On top of that, observations of very old stars show that heavy elements were already present in parts of the universe well before most binary neutron stars would have had a chance to collide.

So how do you explain that? There must be another source of heavy elements in the cosmos, which brings us back to our boat. is another theory that collapse stars like the boat could be another source of our process nuclear synthesis. In their dying stages, massive stars like the one that cause the boat are surrounded by layers of exploding gas. These explosions leave disks of matter swirling around the resulting infant black hole. As the black hole begins devouring the surrounding material, it can only ingests so much at a time. What it cannot manage is swept away in a

neutron-dense wind. Here, the same R-processed nucleosynthesis occurs, forming heavier elements like gold, silver, and platinum. This seems promising, but unfortunately, even factoring in these kinds of supernovae isn't enough to account for the abundance of gold in the universe. To make matters worse, analysis of the boat spectrum didn't show any traces of heavy elements, raising questions about the validity of this collapse are gold-making theory. Some scientists suggest the boat's host galaxy might have something to do with the lack of heavy elements in the explosion. Upon modeling the host galaxy spectrum, researchers discovered it has the lowest metallicity of all previous host galaxies where gamma-ray bursts were detected.

In other words, maybe the environment didn't have the right building blocks to make heavier elements. How do we know how much gold should be out there in the first place? How do scientists predict something like the relative abundance of elements in the universe? There are two main methods of calculating this, the spectroscopy of stellar photosphere and meteorite analysis. By analyzing the absorption lines in the spectra of stars, astronomers can determine the relative abundances of elements in the photosphere of those stars. The composition of meteorites, remnants of an early solar system, are analyzed in parallel to determine the relative abundances of elements.

Meteorites are especially useful for measuring the abundances of volatile elements like hydrogen, helium, and noble gases that are unrepresented in stellar photospheres. The results of both of these methods are usually congruent, indicating we're probably doing something right. But this is physics, so of course, nothing. nothing is so cut and dry. One famous exception to this rule is lithium. According to the standard Big Bang nuclear synthesis theory, the early universe should have produced about three times more lithium 7 than is currently observed. The plot thickens when we consider its isotope, lithium 6, where we observe 1,000 times more

than our predictions can account for. This discrepancy is known as the lithium problem, and remains unsolved, presented to the a significant challenge to the standard cosmological model. It highlights the importance of understanding the processes that shape the relative abundances of elements in the universe, and suggest that our current understanding of nucleosynthesis might be incomplete. Just because Bote didn't yield gold as expected doesn't mean we should discard these kinds of extreme gamma-ray bursts as places where heavy elements could be made.

Observations of nearby stars have provided strong evidence for an early R process. that enrich the universe with heavy elements. But the boat findings cannot be ignored, as they suggest there may be alternative, currently unknown processes responsible for this elemental enrichment of our cosmos. The results may call into question our entire model of understanding

regarding collapsars and their role in creating heavy elements. This discovery is much bigger than just the boat, or gamma rays. It's about the literal building blocks of our universe as we know it. Where do our different atoms come from? And why do they exist in the proportions they do? How much of our model is accurate and how much is missing?

What role does dark matter play in all of this? We need more time and research before we know for sure, but the boat is a great example of how new findings keep our understanding of physics ever evolving, just like the universe itself. When the James Webb Space Telescope finally saw the edges of the universe, we knew we had a problem. Webb was able to resolve light emitted from stars 13 billion years ago, helping us to peer back in time to some of the universe's earliest moments. But what we saw was not a sparsely populated proto-universe, where matter was only just starting to coalesce into the first time.

tiny, intermittent galaxies here and there. The early universe was a bustling place. It had galaxies. Too many of them. They were too bright. And the black holes we started to spot in their hearts had grown too big, too quickly. Some began to proclaim that our models were wrong

and cosmology was in crisis. And while some of these problems have begun to alleviate as better data came in, other problems simply became more prominent. But in a strange twist, one of the most resilient mysteries in all of this might be about to unravel, thanks to a black hole with an impossibly big appetite. Its name is Lid 568, and we've just seen it breaking the Eddington limit. Consuming matter faster than it should be able to. and it might just be the key to everything. The first ever all-electric 26 Subaru Trail Seeker

is the EV for the Trail Obsessed, with up to 444 kilometers on a full charge and DC fast charging from 10 to 80% in about 30 minutes in ideal conditions. Plus, ample ground clearance and symmetrical all-wheel drive make the 26 Trail Seeker the most capable EV Subaru has ever built. Test drive it at your local Subaru dealer or visit Subaru.ca.

I'm Alex McCulligan and you're watching Astrum. Join me today as we explore Lid 568, the Eddington Limit, and its groundbreaking implications on cosmology. A black hole breaking physics, by now I really shouldn't be surprised. It takes time to cook up a galaxy. Interstellic gas and dust need time to subtly come together under gravity until a critical mass is reached and stars begin to ignite. These stars live and die, and from their deaths, new stars are formed.

This too takes time. Cosmologists have observed our universe and, based on what they saw, created models for how old our universe is and how quickly galaxies form, which is why the James Webb Space Telescope data caused such a crisis. Things were not as the models predicted. Fortunately, some of those problems proved solvable in the months after the data was released. For example, the brightness of the galaxies we could see through Webb. This brightness implied that there were far too many stars present in those galaxies.

So many stars should have taken much longer to form. And yet, there they were. Fuzzy red dots at the edge of Webb's resolution. However, scientists at the University of Texas studying Webb's Cosmic Evolution early-release survey realized there could be another explanation for all that excess light. And counterintuitively, that explanation was black holes. If we work under the assumption that there were massive black holes in these galaxies rapidly consuming cosmic gas, then the intense friction given off by these hungry Leviathans, as they ate, created an excess of light in their accretion disks.

This explains why galaxies overall seemed brighter and were throwing off our estimates. Once you add these shining black holes, you don't need so many stars. The mass of each problematic galaxy dropped, and everything fell back interline with the cosmological model. Problem solved. This reinforced how important black holes are to our understanding of the early universe, which was in and of itself a problem because the black holes themselves broke our models too. In particular, cosmologists struggled with a thorny question of how they'd come to be. For small black holes, known as stellar black holes, there was no issue. Stellar black holes have masses a few to a hundred times that of our sun, and we understand very well how they

are formed. They are the collapsed remnants of a sufficiently massive star, and there would have been time for such black holes to form in the early universe. But scientists were struggling with the supermassive black holes, with masses, tens of thousands to billions of times that of our sun, which tend to lurk at the central point of galilee. And due to something called the Eddington limit, there just shouldn't have been time for these kinds of black holes to have formed where and when Webb saw them. And yet, there they were, and they were numerous. Stellar black holes can grow as time goes on, provided you funnel more mass into them.

But how quickly? In 1920, an English astronomer and physicist called Arthur Eddington formulated the idea that there was a limit to how quickly either a star or a black hole could grow. This was because photons carry momentum, a tiny amount, true, but enough to exert a push. This is what pushes solar sails on certain hypothetical spaceship designs, that tiny amount of momentum imparted by photons. If the mass to enter into a star, it has to push against a constant stream of photons that are radiating outward. And at a certain level of brightness, not even gravity is strong enough to pull against the flow.

This is called the Eddington limit. And stars that brush against its boundaries, such as Volfriere stars, bright stars at least 20 times more massive than the sun, emanating powerful stellar winds, are just the slightest nudge away from blow throwing themselves apart. For black holes, you might think this would be less of a problem. Isn't the whole point of black holes that they don't radiate any light? But their accretion disks are a different story. As we discussed earlier, accretion disks around supermassive black holes can be incredibly

bright, particularly around supermassive black holes, sometimes dwarfing the brightness of the stars in the galaxy they reside in. With brightness comes resistance to gravity, and black holes have to obey the Eddington limit too. So even though, given enough time amass, stellar black holes could theoretically grow into supermassive black holes, it doesn't seem plausible that this actually explains all the supermassive black holes we see in the early universe. Simulations have been run, and although it is technically possible to grow a stellar black hole

into a supermassive black hole in that time frame, it would require those black holes to be feeding at near the Eddington limit non-stop since their birth, which just doesn't happen. Black holes in real life often run out of mass nearby and need to wait to run into more, or for more to come to them. To further complicate the matter, we're not completely sure that supermassive black holes are the grown-up version of stellar black holes in the first place. Although it seems like common sense to assume so, scientists have been confused at the lack of the intermediate stage of black holes observable in our universe.

To be frank, they've not cited any, at least none for sure. Supermassive black holes are common at the center of galaxies, and there are thought to be 100 million stellar black holes in our Milky Way alone, based on the number we've seen. intermediate black holes are suspiciously lacking, with only a handful of potential candidates. You would think we'd see a lot more. Struggling for certainty, scientists began to hypothesize that supermassive black holes were instead born in some other way. Many cosmologists have been exploring the idea that because everything was much closer together in the early universe, things might have been dense enough that

interstellar dust itself could conceivably have collapsed to form a black hole directly, skipping the star step altogether. If this is true, and there is some evidence to support the theory, then perhaps supermassive black holes were once capable of simply being born that size, or near it, right from the offset, even if such a thing is no longer possible in our more spread out universe today. But this is by no means certain. But then Lid 568 came onto the scene, and the pendulum swung the other way again. Lid 568 is a very distant black hole between 12.1 and 12.3 billion light years away. It's so far away from us that we can't see it at all using visible light. The expansion of the universe has red-shifted it all into infrared ranges.

But even its infrared emissions were too dim to be picked up by heavy hitters like Hubble alone. It took the Chandra Cosmos Legacy Survey's combined telescopes and the incredible resolution of the James Webb Space Telescope to see it at all. Even then, Lid 568's whole galaxy is a little more than a faint, red and compound. packed dot. But the light emissions from this red dot are revealing. X-rays given off by Lid 568's accretion disc reveal that it was actively consuming matter in its galaxy's heart in a way that no one expected. You see, Lid 568 crucially breaks the Eddington limit.

And not just by a little, it's 40 times over the accretion speed limit. It's well on its way to having its license revoked. How is this possible? It turns out that breaking the Eddington limit is, in fact, possible, but only for short bursts, or in sneaky ways. For example, jets can help you get around the Eddington limit. If all your photons are being blasted off in a single concentrated direction, all the other directions can eat to their heart's content, with no photon feedback.

getting in the way of a good meal. There are other possibilities. While Eddington's limit says that once the brightness of the accretion disc becomes too high, all the black hole's food will be blown away, there is a period of time before this happens where a greedy black hole can snatch at the escaping matter and potentially enter Super Eddington territory. Like an over-eager diner, it might pay for it later. But for a short burst, that level of accretion can occur.

If this is true, it might just explain how supermassive black holes in the early universe came to exist, and certainly LID 568 exists, and is the clearest example to date of a black hole accreting this quickly. That demands our consideration, much like the impossible supermassive black holes themselves. They are there. It's now our job to attempt to understand how that's possible. So mysteries remain. If Lid 568 is a creasing matter past the Eddington limit, it proves such a thing as possible.

But what of the other strange things Webb saw? Where are the intermediate black holes that stellar black holes ought to grow into, on their way to becoming supermassive? Why are there so many galaxies in the early universe more than our models should allow? Do direct collapse black holes, ones form from the cosmic dust itself with no stellar intervening step really exist. Our models might be on the right track, but something is missing or incomplete. Black holes exert a phenomenal influence on our universe, and there are secrets surrounding them

that they guard jealously. But as powerful as the James Webb Space Telescope is, it has not allowed us to crack this mystery. Not yet. But then, perhaps we ought to be pacing ourselves. Thanks to our telescopes, we have seen billions of trillions of stars, and that's a lot of data. Acrete too much information all at once, and it might prove difficult to absorb it all. So says Enington, and his rule is never to be broken, except of course when it is. We often think of black holes as destroyers. They suck everything within their reach into them and give nothing back. They are the end, the final destruction of the universe.

And yet, what if I said to you that they might actually prove to be our salvation? Black holes might provide the answer to travelling faster than the speed of light and solving the energy crisis in ways we couldn't have even imagined until recently. And as by now I have come to expect, they do so by messing with the fabric of reality itself, and by completely countering my expectations of physics. Perhaps we have been thinking about black holes all wrong. I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum. me again for the fifth video in my series about black holes, where once again my mind has

been blown by the incredible potential and implications of these very real objects in our universe. I've talked before about the formation of black holes in this series, including aspects about their event horizons, how they are created, and how they might possibly end. But to understand how a black hole ignores the usual limitations on faster than light travel, and does so in a way that you can benefit from it without having to go inside a black hole's event horizon, and how it produces near-limitless energy at the same time, then we are going to have to understand more about the features of black holes than we've covered so far. So a quick recap, what is a black hole?

In its simplest form, a black hole is an object in space that is so massive and so dense that the gravity it creates is too powerful for anything to escape it. We are familiar with the iconic black spherical zone that surrounds a black hole, this is the black hole's event horizon. This sphere is the demarcation point between escapable gravity and inescapable gravity. Because the gravitational pull increases the closer you get to a black hole, once you go beyond the event horizon, nothing, not even light, can travel fast enough to get away again. Beyond that though, it's actually quite difficult to say much about a black hole.

black holes features at all. Precisely because of the event horizon, we cannot see what the inside of a black hole looks like. In fact, there are only three things we can say about black holes with any degree of certainty. They have mass, they have charge, and they have angular momentum. You might wonder how we know these things about black holes, given that no light can leave them to tell us about them. The key to these three characteristics is that all three of them represent ascental of them.

specs of the black hole that can be felt outside the black hole's event horizon. Charge, for instance, works the same way around a black hole as it does around any other charged object. That is to say, if a black hole is charged, then it will attract objects that have different charge to it, and repel objects that share its charge. Think of it like a giant magnet, pushing and pulling on the universe around it. Scientists can track objects that approach a black hole, and by seeing how quickly certain objects known to have a charge move towards it, scientists can predict the charge of the black hole itself. Into playing with this is mass.

The mass of a black hole can also be felt outside the sphere of the event horizon. In fact, it is the main creator of the event horizon in the first place. This is because mass creates gravity and does so in a linear fashion in accordance with the same principles you might find in Gauss's law, a theorem about electromagnetism, albeit with a gravitational analog. So, it's possible, too, to calculate the mass of an object by seeing how far away objects are before they start to accelerate towards it, and how quickly they accelerate. Although obviously, you need to factor in charge at the same time, or your results might

get skewed. When you're a mid-sized business, you need every competitive advantage you can get. Like an AI solution that works for you, not against you. SAP Grow is built with AI embedded at its core, working across every system, and it's ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow, AI Cloud ERP for any size business. Finally, angular momentum or spin.

It is possible to detect the spin of a large mass object, and we are going to dive into the how in just a bit. For now, let's just a good. accept it as a given, and recognise that black holes are certainly very high mass objects. There are varying sizes of black holes in existence. The smallest, known as micro-black holes, have a mass that's comparable to that of our moon, or 7.35 times 10 to the power 22 kilograms. They fit all this into a space that's just 0.2 millimeters in diameter, which is incredible.

It really gives you a sense of how dense a black hole can be, something thinner in size than a human hair, packing the mass of the moon. And that's just the smallest ones. Stellar black holes have a mass equal to 10 times our sun, and have a diameter equal to 60 kilometers. Intermediate black holes are the mass of 1,000 suns, and fit all of that into a diameter of 2,000 kilometers, which is still much smaller than the Earth. It is the largest black holes that really dwarf us, with masses between 100,000 to 10 billion

times the mass of the sun, and sizes ranging from 0.001 to 400 astronomical units, an astronomical unit being the distance from the Earth to the Sun. But other than those three features, there are, in theory, no other differences between them. If you put two black holes in the same room and made sure they had the same mass, charge and spin, it would be impossible to tell them apart. However, these three features are enough to have some interesting effects on the area of space outside a black hole. Travelling inside a black hole is impossible. Space and time break down past the event horizon, but we think we know a few things that must exist inside one.

Beating in the heart of a black hole, there is thought to lie the singularity. In truth, this actually is the black hole. When we were discussing diameters earlier, that is just the diameter of the event horizon. Again, we are not certain what a black hole actually looks like, because light can never escape it. In a space that is infinitely small, there is a point where all the mass of the black hole is packed, so that it is infinitely dense. For the simplest models of black holes, the ones that do not spin, this is a single point.

In a rotating black hole, this is more like a little spinning ring, otherwise it would be difficult to define spin for a point that has no volume. Our current physics get very strange around such a black hole. If ideal paths are travelled around this point, it becomes mathematically possible to do some very strange things, like meet up with your own past. disturbing implications for causality and gets into time travel paradoxes like the grandfather paradox. So that probably only shows for certain that our ideas about singularities are not quite right yet. Because the singularity is so small, it'll take the successful merging of quantum theory

and general relativity theory to properly explain what is going on inside a black hole, and we have not yet managed to do this. It may one day turn out that singularities do not exist in the hearts of black hole, holes at all, but this is the extent of our knowledge so far. Well, whatever it is that lies inside a black hole, it powers our faster than light engine, because like most objects in the universe, it spins. And oh, does it spin? As we travel out from the center of the black hole, we pass through the event horizon with little fanfare.

The event horizon actually cannot be detected locally, although a person outside the black hole might watch you slow down to a complete stop as you travel through it. From your perspective, it actually might seem like time is flowing normally. Normally, that is, until the universe outside the black hole runs its course in an instant because time outside the black hole is travelling so fast compared to you. This is the essence of relativity, and we talk about it in another of my videos which you can look at here. In fact, the only evidence you might have that you've passed the

event horizon at all is because of something that exists just outside it, the photon sphere. In a zone just outside the event horizon, there exists a point in space where if a photon enters it at just the right angle, it will enter a perfect orbit around the black hole in much the same way the moon perfectly orbits the earth. This infinitesimally thin zone is known as the photon sphere, and given the number of photons that have flown past black holes in all the millions of years they have existed, it is probably filled with photons. It is quite possible that you would be instantly fried as you pass through this point. However, it is just outside here that we find the zone that interests us, the ergosphere.

This is the zone around a black hole where we can most easily detect its spin, and this is because, in this zone, it is impossible. for us not to move. You see, mass affects space. We see this in the curving effect of gravity on the travel of objects through that region of space. However, it might be more accurate to say that mass drags on the space around it. As it moves through space, it brings a little bit of that space along with it for the ride, and when an object as massive as a black hole spins, there is an effect known as frame dragging. To put its Simply, reality around the black hole begins to spin in a whirlpool that cannot be fought

against. Much like a real whirlpool, anything caught within the ergosphere is spun around the black hole, because the frame of reference it sits in is being pulled. Sort of like how a person moves because they are standing on a moving walkway. The greater the spin of the massive object, the faster this happens, and in the ergosphere, This can occur at a speed so fast that by the event horizon, space is moving faster than the speed of light. You would need to travel faster than the speed of light in the opposite direction just to

stay at a relative standstill from the point of view of the outside observer, which of course you cannot do. But isn't this against the laws of physics? Doesn't Einstein say that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light? The answer to that is yes. The black holes have found an interesting loophole. You see, this rule only applies locally. Right where you are, in your frame of reference, nothing can go faster than the speed of light.

But thanks to relativity, it is possible for frames of reference to move away from each other so fast that objects in them appear to be breaking this light barrier from your point of view. But if you move next to them and enter their frame of reference, they would seem to slow down, would start obeying the laws of physics again. It's a really weird effect, but frame-dragging is an actual thing. It is by measuring frame-dragging that scientists can learn the spin of a black hole. However, according to a man called Roger Penrose, there may even be a way of exploiting it. If you were to send a rocket into this section of the ergosphere, the rocket would speed up due to being caught in the whirlpool of reality. Once it had gained enough speed, it could

then fire a propellant in such a direction that it pushed itself out of the whirlpool again, but now travelling at a much faster speed. This method, named the Penrose process, could hypothetically net you energy equal to about 20% of the mass of your rocket. Now, that might not sound like much, but remember, according to Einstein's E equals MC squared, your 20% mass would produce energy equal to itself times by 299,792,458 squared. That's a lot of energy. So to harness this colossal kinetic energy, all you would need to do is travel to the nearest black hole, which is roughly 3,000 light years from us, and enter its ergosphere, with a rocket

capable of surviving the intense gravitational forces there. Ideally, you would need to find one that was not surrounded by an accretion disc, because those get up to temperatures of millions of degrees, as they are swung around at near light speeds and melt from solids down to gas and plasma. But you get the idea. Easy. Okay, maybe this is a little impractical for us. But the implications for faster than light travel that black holes demonstrate through frame

dragging might just offer us the key to one day beat the light barrier for real. Not by going faster than light ourselves, but by somehow convincing the frame of reference we are in to travel at those faster speeds, just like they do around a black hole. Of course, if this requires the energy of a black hole to accomplish, we might be out of luck for now, but it's an incredible glimpse into what is possible, and scientists are already looking into the power of frame-dragging for future travel. But maybe that's a topic for another video. Either way, this all just highlights once again how our universe really is very different

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