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Black holes are awesome - but how about black holes being captured by the screaming vortex of a quasar, where they merge and grow like some monstrous version of a solar system. This insane hypothesis is getting closer to reality, according to the papers in today’s space time journal club.

Hosted by Matt O'Dowd
Written by Matt O'Dowd
Graphics by Leonardo Scholzer & Adriano Leal
Directed by: Andrew Kornhaber
Executive Producers: Eric Brown & Andrew Kornhaber

End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRl6-nb4iOnsij-vnpAjp0Q

Thanks to LIGO we’ve now seen black hole mergers, but there was some striking surprises. For one thing, many of the merging black holes were too massive to have been formed by the collapse of stellar cores. That is if our understanding of stellar evolution is half as good as we think it is. This led astrophysicists to think about new ways to produce black hole mergers. Here’s the most awesome possibility: what if black hole mergers actually occur in orbit around supermassive black holes, embedded deep in the whirlpools of searing gas that surround some of these monsters? Today on Space Time Journal Club we’ll be looking at a pair of 2019 papers that talk about this possibility. We have Yang et al., which predicts the properties of black holes that merge this way, and McKernan et al. which proposes a way for us to actually test this hypothesis.

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Big Bang:
Alexander Tamas
David Barnholdt
David Nicklas
Fabrice Eap
John S
Juan Benet
Morgan Hough

Quasar
Christina Oegren
Mark Heising
Vinnie Falco

Hypernova
Chuck Zegar
Danton Spivey
Donal Botkin
Edmund Fokschaner
Hank S
John Hofmann
John Pollock
John R. Slavik
Jordan Young
Joseph Salomone
Julian Tyacke
Justin Ash
Mathew
Matthew O'Connor
Syed Ansar
Timothy McCulloch

Gamma Ray Burst
A G
Adrian Hatch
Adrien Molyneux
AlecZero
Andreas Nautsch
Angela Prigge
Bradley Jenkins
Brandon labonte
Craig Stonaha
Dan Warren
Daniel Lyons
David Bethala
DFaulk
Eric Kiebler
Frederic Simon
Geoffrey Short
Graydon Goss
Greg Smith
James Flowers
John Funai
John Griffith
John Robinson
Jonathan Nesfeder
Josh Thomas
Kevin Lee
Kevin Warne
Kyle Hofer
Malte Ubl
Michael Conroy
Nick Virtue
Patrick Sutton
Paul Rose
Robert Ilardi
Scott Gossett
Sean Warniaha
Sipke Schoorstra
Steve Bradshaw
Tatiana Vorovchenko
Tim Stephani
Tonyface
Tybie Fitzhugh
Yurii Konovaliuk
Randall Sylvia