Blazing Black Holes Put on a Show

Guest: J. Ward Moody, PhD, Professor of Astronomy, Brigham Young University  Black holes are one of the great mysteries in astronomy because they absorb the light around them, so scientists can’t see them. But younger black holes swallow stars in a messier fashion, which leads to a lot of light in a disk spinning around the black hole and, sometimes, shooting straight out of the center. One particularly rare version of this is called a “blazar” and in late 2016 one flared up in a really big way. An international team of astronomers, including BYU professor J. Ward Moody, caught it in their telescopes and have just published a paper attempting to explain what happened.