Astrophysics

May the eighth is Victory Day in Europe for the Second World War.

By the way, ladies and gentlemen, you have just heard the voice of Carlos Hoyos, astrofísico, amigo mío, who comes here from time to time.

He's always very nervous talking about things, [laughs] but it's always interesting.

And he-- De-- A veces hablas de-- atropelladamente, so you need to, uh, calm down.

Yeah.

You know, and things.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm with, uh, Carlos Hoyos, astrofísico, astronomer.

And, uh, we're good friends, and we like to talk about strange subjects sometimes.

That's a good line to move on from.

Story two, published yesterday in Astronomy and Astrophysics, and it's about black holes that are the wrong size.

Anna, what's the rule they're breaking?

The rule is co-evolution.

That shuts down both its own supply and the galaxy's star formation, a thermostat.

So here's the result.

Johannes Büchner at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, with colleagues at Penn State, Illinois, Cal Poly, the Center for Astrophysics, and the Space Telescope Science Institute, went through 140 squared degrees of the eROSITA X-ray survey.

They picked out 200 quasars selected on hard X-rays, which is the honest way to do it because dust can hide a growing black hole at optical wavelengths but not in hard X-rays.

We orbit a star about 26,000 light years from the galactic center that only came into existence about a third of the universe's age ago, about 4.6 billion years ago.

For all the time prior to that Astrophysics was still happening.

Stars were forming.

Galaxies were merging together.