Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society.

With me, science journalist Izzy Clark, astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethers and the Society's deputy

director, Dr. Robert Massey. We've had a lot of questions and I've always enjoyed them.

I feel like it's been a while since we've all been on this call. So Becky, Sean O'Rourke has a question about rogue black holes. So before we dive into that, can you actually explain what is a rogue black hole? Yeah, rogue basically means it's wandering interstellar or intergalactic space. So in between stars or in between

galaxies, it's not bound in orbit to anything else, whether that's another star that it might be

orbiting round or a star cluster or even the center of the galaxy. It is just freely roaming. And that

feels like we should do a whole episode on them.

Rogue anything is we should go Rogue one. Supermassive gone rogue. Rogue stars, rogue planets,

rogue black colors. We'll do all them all. Okay. Right. So on to Sean's question,

who says, hey gang, greetings from New Hampshire, USA. Thanks for the engaging content and continued success with the podcast. Well, thank you.

Very nice. Nice part of the world as well, especially at this time of year.

Yeah, definitely. He says, been reading more about rogue black holes. So Sean has sent in a few

questions here, Becky. First one. Is Beetlejuice large enough to produce a black hole when it goes

supernova? Or will its remnant be something of an other type of

byproduct? Unknown really. It's right on the boundary, Beetlejuice, of around about 15 times

heavier than the sun, which is kind of like the boundary of where things lighten that tend to

become neutron stars and things heavier than that tend to become black holes.

So it all sort of depends what happens when Beetlejuice goes supernova and what its exact matters

because we also, we can't measure it that precisely either to know exactly which side of the

boundary it will fall on. And it also depends how heavy its core is as well. And that's really

the crucial thing because if the supernova is very

energetic, so the actual part where the supernova is, it happens because there's no process in the

...