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"Hubble Science"

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"Black Holes // From Myth to Reality"

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One of the Hubble space telescope's 
major achievements was the confirmation  

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that galaxies have in their 
core supermassive black holes.

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At least for a time were kind of a mythical idea,
you know, a mathematical possibility coming from  

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the physics, but it was not clear decades ago 
whether we could actually observe a black hole  

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because kind of by definition black holes 
are not viewable, the light cannot escape.

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So the question is, could you observe effects of 
black holes to determine that they are there?

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Now the way Hubble has detected this is 
by looking not at the black hole which  

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is really impossible to see, what we see 
is material right around the black hole  

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particularly this galaxy called M87 which has 
a spectacular ejected jet which you can see.

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And often we see material orbiting that inner 
black hole, like gas, and orbiting very fast so  

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we can use the instruments on Hubble to 
discern whether material on one side of  

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the black hole is moving away from us and the 
material on the other side is moving toward us  

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as you might expect if the material is orbiting.
Since that time Hubble has followed up with many  

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other galaxies and seen evidence for supermassive 
black holes so we now believe that most  

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and maybe all galaxies have some kind 
of supermassive black hole in the center.

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[ INTENSE MUSIC ]

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People did not dream that that would be true.
It wasn't that long ago that people thought  

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there were no black holes, then we thought well 
we don't imagine how they could exist so there  

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probably aren't any. And now we are forced into 
understanding how come there are so many of them.

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[ INTENSE MUSIC ]