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How I fell in love with quasars, blazars and our incredible universe

1,646,736 views | Jedidah Isler • TED2015

Jedidah Isler first fell in love with the night sky as a little girl. Now she's an astrophysicist who studies supermassive hyperactive black holes. In a charming talk, she takes us trillions of kilometers from Earth to introduce us to objects that can be 1 to 10 billion times the mass of the sun — and which shoot powerful jet streams of particles in our direction.

Jedidah Isler first fell in love with the night sky as a little girl. Now she's an astrophysicist who studies supermassive hyperactive black holes. In a charming talk, she takes us trillions of kilometers from Earth to introduce us to objects that can be 1 to 10 billion times the mass of the sun — and which shoot powerful jet streams of particles in our direction.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

About the speaker

Jedidah Isler

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Jedidah Isler studies blazars — supermassive hyperactive black holes that emit powerful jet streams. They are the universe’s most efficient particle accelerators, transferring energy throughout galaxies.

Fulvio Melia | Princeton University Press, 2009 | Book

High-Energy Astrophysics

I recommend this book for a comprehensive look at the high-energy universe. It is a great resource for understanding exotic objects like quasars, blazars, pulsars and more.

European Space Agency | Explore

Black holes, quasars and active galaxies

For much more reading on supermassive black holes, and how we infer that every galaxy likely has one at its core, check out this site from the Space Telescope Science Institute. It’s only fitting that we honor the Hubble Space Telescope on its 25th anniversary by remembering that it helped us first understand the ubiquity of galactic, supermassive black holes.

Luis Ho et al. | in Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Paul Murdin (Editor) Institute of Physics Publishing, 2001 | Article

Supermassive Black Holes in Active Galactic Nuclei

This is an informative reference about supermassive black holes.

Juhan Frank et al. | Cambridge University Press, 2002 | Book

Accretion Power in Astrophysics

This is a definitive text about accretion physics.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.