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The John Batchelor Show

HOTEL MARS: DORMANT BLACK HOLES AWAKEN. MEGHAN MASTERSON, MIT; DAVID LIVINGSTON, SPACESHOW.COM

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

Arts, News, Society & Culture, Books

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

HOTEL MARS: DORMANT BLACK HOLES AWAKEN. MEGHAN MASTERSON, MIT; DAVID LIVINGSTON, SPACESHOW.COM
https://www.space.mit.edu/news/astronomers-discover-star-shredding-black-holes-hiding-in-dusty-galaxies/

1960

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is CBS, I on the World.

0:06.4

I'm John Batson, Hotel Mars.

0:08.1

Episode N.

0:09.6

David Livingson, Dr. Space himself, is here as my colleague and co-host and co-pilot.

0:15.4

And we're going to the universe, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope,

0:20.7

as interpreted by our James Webb

0:24.6

Whisperer of the moment, Megan Masterson. Megan is the lead author of the revelations we're

0:31.4

about to discuss to do with black holes in the universe. She is a graduate student at MIT's

0:36.7

Kaville Institute for Astrophysics and Space

0:39.0

Research. Megan, congratulations. Immediately, this looks like important news about the black

0:46.9

holes in the universe that we don't know about or that we don't see. What is the James Webb Space

0:52.5

Telescope allowed you to discover that is so fresh we're still

0:57.9

dealing with, hey, we didn't know they could do that? What black holes? Where, Megan, good evening

1:04.2

to you. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, so what we're talking about today,

1:09.6

what we've discovered are these events

1:12.4

called tidal disruption events, which are basically what happens as a star in the nucleus of a galaxy,

1:19.5

gets thrown onto an unfortunate orbit around a supermassive black hole and the extreme tidal forces

1:25.8

of the black hole akin to the sorts of the same title forces

1:30.3

here between the moon and the earth ripped the star apart to shreds, producing a temporary

1:37.3

flare of emission as that material is gobbled down by the black hole. And so these title disruption events,

1:46.0

or TDE's, have been theoretically, they were first theorized in the 1970s, 1980s, first discovered

1:55.2

in the 1990s in the X-ray with X-ray wavelengths. But today, what James Webb is doing is allowing us to

...

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