Ep. 781: Awakening Black Holes

Astronomy Cast

Natural Sciences, Science, Astronomy

4.8 • 3.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2026

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Astronomy Cast Ep. 781: Awakening Black Holes By Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay Streamed live on Feb 2, 2026. One long standing mystery in astronomy were the quasars. Incomprehensible energy blasting out of a point-like source, billions of light years away. We now know these are actively feeding supermassive black holes, which can turn off and on in a startlingly short period of time. Today: When black holes awaken! Our Universe is filled with sleeping monsters. And sometimes, whether we want it or not, they wake up hungry. In this episode, we take a look at the science behind how and why black holes of all sizes can go from nothing to the triggers of massive high-energy power release. This show is supported through people like you on Patreon.com/AstronomyCast In this episode, we'd like to thank: Burry Gowen, Eric Lee, Jeanette Wink, Michael Purcell, Andrew Poelstra, David, David Rossetter, Ed, Gerhard Schwarzer, Jason Kwong, Joe McTee, Sergey Manouilov, Siggi Kemmler, Sergio Sancevero Image credit: LOFAR/Pan-STARRS/S. Kumari et al.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm
0:02.0	Oh Thank you. I'm Astronomycast, Episode 781, When Black Holes awaken. Welcome to Astronomycast, our weekly fact-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I'm Priser Kane. I'm the publisher of the universe today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosm Quest. Hey, Pamela. How you doing?
1:11.7	I am cold. This winter?
1:14.1	Yeah.
1:14.6	Like, it's so cold that even the squirrels are struggling with the ice.
1:19.3	I saw a squirrel fall out of the tree yesterday.
1:22.3	It was the funniest thing.
1:23.9	There's just this plop in the snow and then the walk of shame that the squirrel had to make. Or it jumped it, you know, it was new. This was the fast way down. There was no. There was no jump involved. Yeah. So, so, yeah, how are you doing with this winter of Arcticness? Warm. Are you kidding? We haven't, we've barely seen below freezing. We're having 10 Celsius days right now here in Western Canada.
1:47.0	Yeah, one minus 10 Celsius. Yeah, I could be growing oranges. I could have orange trees. We are,
1:52.6	we are truly the Florida of Canada at this point. But I want to shout out and encourage people
1:59.3	to check with something that you do, Pamela.
2:00.9	And I gave you a shout out in my most recent space bites.
2:04.8	And I'm going to do it again here now,
2:07.6	which is that, you know,
2:09.5	for those of you think that Pamela is merely a PhD astronomer
2:13.6	who runs the very successful Cosmo Quest
2:16.1	and is a wonderful narrator, she is also a very established and skilled news presenter.
2:24.9	And that is because she does a weekly show called Escape Velocity, Space News, on the Cosmo Quest channel on Twitch or I don't know where you do this.
2:33.9	It's also on YouTube. It's also on YouTube. Yeah. And it's so good. And you're writing it and
2:38.6	you're presenting it and you're putting up graphics and you know what you're talking about.
2:41.8	And so as we live in this world with so much AI slop filling the channels and people
2:48.0	are looking for genuine human voices.
	...

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