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The mechanism of collapsing stars falls short of explaining the existence of supermassive black holes—giants that weigh millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun. Astrophysicist Priya Natarajan proposes an alternative: these colossal black holes may form directly from the collapse of swirling galactic dust and gas. She joins Brian Greene to explore this process and discuss the latest observational evidence supporting it.
This program is part of the Big Ideas series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.
The mechanism of collapsing stars falls short of explaining the existence of supermassive black holes—giants that weigh millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun. Astrophysicist Priya Natarajan proposes an alternative: these colossal black holes may form directly from the collapse of swirling galactic dust and gas. She joins Brian Greene to explore this process and discuss the latest observational evidence supporting it.
This program is part of the Big Ideas series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.
Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, and is recognized for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in his field of superstring theory. His books, The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of the Cosmos, and The Hidden Reality, have collectively spent 65 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.
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Priyamvada Natarajan is the Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale. She is an astrophysicist with research interests in cosmology, gravitational lensing, and black …
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