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.

Participant: Priya Natarajan
Moderator: Brian Greene

00:00 Introduction
02:39 History of the concept of black holes
06:30 Formula of the event horizon
07:43 Visualization of a black hole
08:40 Chandrasekhar's contribution of black hole knowledge
10:06 Einstein and the limits of our understanding of black holes
11:50 Oppenheimer and Snyder's work theorizing how a black hole would form
13:32 Penrose's work on gravitational collapse and the spacetime singularity
14:53 Wheeler coining of the term "black hole"
16:00 Ghez's mapping of the shape of space and the motion of stars around black holes
18:00 Alternate ways black holes could form
22:09 Overmassive black hole galaxy (OBG)
23:40 Sequence of formation of black holes
26:54 James Webb Space Telescope's detection of OBG
31:50 Primordial black holes
33:38 Evolution of black holes
34:26 Credits

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