How the Universe Works

We're on a journey to the heart

of the supermassive black hole, M87 star.

Our mission, to investigate one of the most mysterious places

in the universe.

M87 is a great target for us to visit,

because one, it's close, and two, it's active,

it's feeding.

Supermassive black holes are

the engines that power the universe.

Supermassive black holes are a key factor in

the birth, life, and eventual death of galaxies.

And the more we study them,

the more puzzling they become.

They're the master key

to most of the unsolved mysteries in physics.

The physics inside a supermassive black hole are

beyond weird.

They are the final frontier of our understanding.

Your imagination can run wild.

Maybe it's even the source of other universes.

There's only one way to find out,

to go where no one has gone before and journey to the heart

of M87 star.

We speed across M87,

a gigantic galaxy 55 million light-years from Earth.

At its heart lies a supermassive black hole,

M87 star.

It is the first and only black hole

ever photographed.

We want to find out how M87 star grew so large,

what lies inside, and how it controls the galaxy.

5,000 light-years out from the supermassive black hole,

we get our first sign of the danger ahead.

We see giant holes carved out of the galaxy,

starless voids thousands of light-years wide.

As we approach, we can see

that wreckage littered around the vicinity.

It's like entering the lair of the dragon and seeing

the bones of all the explorers who came before you.

What cataclysmic force tore these giant

cavities in the galactic gas clouds?

As we fly next to a brilliant shaft of energy

thousands of light-years from M87 star,

we get a clue.

It's a deadly stream of

radiation shooting out across the galaxy,

a jet.

This jet looks like a searchlight

or a beam from a lighthouse.

You're seeing this monumental thing.

It's screaming out of the black hole,

blasting out radiation.

When I first saw a photo of a jet, I was like, "Whoa!"

Am I like, misreading the scale

of this image? Because there was this

crazy Star Trek like beam just coming out.

In 1918, American astronomer Heber Curtis

described the jets as a curious straight ray.

A century later, observatory images

reveal they pulsate with energy.

The images show knots and clumps in these jets.

They show that it's just not smooth and nice,

that there's been a history of violence inside this jet.

This violent energy pushes

the knots along the beams.

The knots reveal the speed of the jets.

It's like looking at a fast-moving train.

Rail cars of the same color blur into one continuous image.

But different-colored cars stand out against the others.

It's the same with the knots moving along the jets.

So we can figure out how fast the jets are

really moving by looking at knots of material coming out

from near the black hole.

When astronomers measured the speed of two knots,

they got a big surprise.

One is moving at 2.4 times the speed of light,

and the other is moving over six times faster than light.

How could this possibly be?

As weird as the physics around a black hole is,

that's not actually happening, nor is it allowed to happen.

Nothing can actually go faster than the speed of light,

so obviously, we're missing something here.

The knots may seem to break the speed of light,

but the universe is just playing with us.

It's really just a consequence of the fact that

a lot of this jet is pointed toward us,

pointed partially toward the observer on Earth.

That, in a sense, is a sort of optical illusion

that tricks you into thinking it's moving faster.

It's a simple trick of the light,

a bit like the way a spoon in a glass of water looks bent

and distorted.

The impossibly fast speed of the jet

is just an illusion of perspective.

From our perspective, it looks like the whole

thing is moving towards us faster than light.

But really, it's just cruising along very, very fast.

The jets aren't actually breaking the laws of physics.

They're pushing up against it.

They're going at 99.999995% the speed of light.

Imagine the energies necessary

to accelerate this entire jet to that speed.

So what could produce enough energy to blast jets

across the galaxy at close to the speed of light?

There is a clue far ahead.

The jets shoot out from

a tiny, brightly glowing object.

This is where things go nuts.

This is the center of the action.

This is where the real stuff happens.

A ring of super hot gas

and dust whirls around the supermassive black hole.

It's called the accretion disk,

and it shines a billion times brighter than the sun.

If you had a ringside seat next to M87 star,

you would probably be fried very, very fast.

But if you were some, you know, magical being and could survive

anything, and if you had,

you know, million SPF sunscreen and really,

really great sunglasses, what you would see is this

enormously bright vortex of gas swirling this dark void.

This bright vortex spins around

the supermassive black hole,

at over two million miles an hour.

So there's a tremendous amount of friction as

material moving slower and faster rubs against each other.

That's what's heating the disk up,

and that's what's causing it to glow.

Scientists think that the intense energy of

the accretion disk is the source of the jets.

The hot, swirling gas

and dust produces powerful magnetic fields.

As the disk spins, it twists up the magnetic fields

at the poles of the black hole.

Energy builds.

Finally, the magnetic fields can't

contain the energy any longer.

They snap and blast the jets out into he galaxy.

Even many light-ears away on the ship,

we can see this violent release of energy.

It's like the universe's biggest fireworks display.

Two jets streaking out of

M87 star's poles,

one shooting away into the distance,

the other racing past our ship.

We're at a safe distance.

Other things are not.

So when these jets shoot outward from the supermassive

black hole, they don't shoot outward into nothing.

If a jet hits a gas cloud, it annihilates it.

It just punches a hole right through it.

It's like a train going down a snowy track, right?

The gas is like the snow

and the jets are like this freight train plowing across it.

But here,

a freight train traveling at close to the speed of light,

smashing into clouds of gas,

lighting our way to M87 star

as we follow the trail of destruction.

There is evidence of similar destruction across the universe.

In the Cygnus A galaxy, supermassive black hole jets

have caused damage on a colossal scale.

In many ways, Cygnus A is like

a cosmic shooting gallery.

You see this crime scene, this beautiful mess.

So when this jet comes out of the nucleus of Cygnus A,

it's gonna encounter gas clouds.

At that point, shockwaves set up, and this jet just rips

right through this material,

sending shock waves in every direction,

creating absolute chaos.

It's hard to believe how much devastation these jets

can cause... they're punching

a hole in the gas 100,000 light-years wide.

I mean, that's... that's the scale of an entire galaxy.

As we head towards the center of

the M87 galaxy, we enter hostile territory.

The closer to the supermassive black hole we travel,

the more dangerous it gets.

As we approach the central core of M87,

we start to feel it.

But all this energy, all this ferociousness,

is powered by that black hole.

Intense winds start to buffet the ship.

They push away vital gas, quenching star birth.

Could these winds end up killing

the galaxy and M87 star itself?

We're on a mission to explore

the supermassive black hole M87 star.

First, we have to cross the M87 galaxy.

It's 120,000 light-years across,

and it looks like a giant puffball.

M87 is an absolute monster.

It's a giant, elliptical galaxy, and that

means that, as you go from the edges to the interior,

you see a higher and higher density of stars.

This vast galaxy contains several trillion stars.

What's strange is that almost all of them are the same color.

So as you see, you are...

Your sky is covered with countless red points of light