Tonight on the Future of Everything, we are diving into not one, but millions of black holes, and not just your everyday brain scramblingly big black holes, but super massive black holes, because for the first time, scientists just detected a sound of sorts from deep space. It could rewrite our understanding of the universe. And here it is. No, not this. This looks very cool, but it's actually a graph chart That's it. That's it right there. If I understand this right, this is the scientific version of millions of super massive black holes all chanting as they merge together at the same time and reminding us, little teeny tiny humans that there are way bigger things out in the universe and whatever is happening here on Earth this week. And instrumental in all of this, and this discovery is astrophysicist and researcher Chiara Mingarely, who teaches physics at Yale. Chiara, thank you so very much for joining us. First off, before we get into all of that, can you set the cosmic scene for us? How big are these super massive black holes that we now know collide?

I'm so happy to be here to tell you about supermassive black holes. I mean, what's cooler? So yes, these supermassive black holes are 100 million to a billion, maybe more times the mass of the sun. And if that's not crazy enough, the signal that we found with nanogravs have is not only just one of these supermassive black holes, but is the cosmic merger history of pairs of these black holes. That means that there's two of them that found each other somehow and are starting to slowly merge. And these mergers take 25 million years. They emit gravitational waves, which are ripples in the fabric of space-time itself. They move at the speed of light, and these wavelengths are light-years long. And it took us 15 years to find this first evidence that these supermassive black holes not only merge with each other, but emit these very low frequency gravitational waves.

The way you put it, the Ohm, makes makes you think maybe this is the most beautiful cosmic relationship collision of all time, but it also seems terrifying given the scale, the exoplanets, the Suns that are getting swallowed up. But I do want to brush up on our astronomy here because you made this discovery using pulsars. So take it easy on us. Starting with, how do pulsars work? How did you make this discovery?

Sure. Well, I'm part of a team of over 100 scientists who've been working on this project for over a decade. So it's certainly not my discovery, but it belongs to the whole field. And the way that we did it was by monitoring things called pulsars. So maybe pulsars aren't as scary as black holes, but these pulsars rotate around almost 100 times a second. It has the mass of more than one and a half times the mass of the sun on occasion. And so as they rotate around, they can beam a radio waves towards the Earth. And so it does this so quickly that it's as if you put something that's more massive than the sun, compressed it to the size of Manhattan, and put it in a blender, and then saw flashes of radio waves every time it's spun around. These are really extreme objects. But the reason that we use them to look for gravitational waves is because they're excellent clocks. To find gravitational waves, what we do is that we look for advances in the pulsar pulses, arrival times at the Earth. So the gravitational waves change the distances between objects. And so the pulsars get closer to the Earth and then further away and then closer to the Earth and further away.

And so the pulses, those flashes that they're sending us when they're put into their cosmic blunders, the pulses arrive early, and then they arrive late because they have less distance to travel and then more distance to travel. And this stretching and squashing takes so long that it took us 15 years to find the first evidence that this was happening in our galaxy.

And that is what the ripple of space-time I guess, looks like from our perspective. That is wild, wild stuff.

Exactly. Wow.

I could talk to you for days. I will be haunted by everything you said. My brain short circuited when you talked about the mass of the sun condensed down into Manhattan. I got to go rewind what you said, process that. But, Kiara, thank you so very much for joining us. We can't wait to have you on again with your next discovery. Thank you.

Wonderful. Thank you so much.

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