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My first love was for the night sky.

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Love is complicated.

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You're looking at a fly-through of the 
Hubble Space Telescope Ultra-Deep Field,

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one of the most distant images
of our universe ever observed.

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Everything you see here is a galaxy,

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comprised of billions of stars each.

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And the the farthest galaxy is 
a trillion, trillion kilometers away.

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As an astrophysicist, I have
the awesome privilege of studying

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some of the most exotic objects 
in our universe.

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The objects that have captivated me 
from first crush throughout my career

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are supermassive, 
hyperactive black holes.

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Weighing one to 10 billion times 
the mass of our own sun,

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these galactic black holes 
are devouring material,

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at a rate of upwards of 
1,000 times more

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than your "average" 
supermassive black hole.

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(Laughter)

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These two characteristics,

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with a few others, make them quasars.

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At the same time, the objects I study

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are producing some of the most
powerful particle streams

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ever observed.

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These narrow streams, called jets,

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are moving at 99.99 percent 
of the speed of light,

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and are pointed directly at the Earth.

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These jetted, Earth-pointed, hyperactive
and supermassive black holes

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are called blazars, or blazing quasars.

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What makes blazars so special
is that they're some of the universe's

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most efficient particle accelerators,

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transporting incredible amounts
of energy throughout a galaxy.

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Here, I'm showing an
artist's conception of a blazar.

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The dinner plate by which 
material falls onto the black hole

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is called the accretion disc,

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shown here in blue.

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Some of that material is slingshotted
around the black hole

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and accelerated to insanely high speeds


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in the jet, shown here in white.

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Although the blazar system is rare,

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the process by which nature
pulls in material via a disk,

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and then flings some of it out via a jet,
is more common.

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We'll eventually zoom out of 
the blazar system

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to show its approximate relationship
to the larger galactic context.

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Beyond the cosmic accounting
of what goes in to what goes out,

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one of the hot topics in 
blazar astrophysics right now

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is where the highest-energy 
jet emission comes from.

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In this image, I'm interested
in where this white blob forms

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and if, as a result, there's any 
relationship between the jet

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and the accretion disc material.

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Clear answers to this question

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were almost completely
inaccessible until 2008,

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when NASA launched a new telescope
that better detects gamma ray light --

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that is, light with energies
a million times higher

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than your standard x-ray scan.

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I simultaneously compare variations
between the gamma ray light data

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and the visible light data from
day to day and year to year,

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to better localize these gamma ray blobs.

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My research shows that in some instances,

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these blobs form much closer
to the black hole

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than we initially thought.

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As we more confidently localize

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where these gamma ray 
blobs are forming,

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we can better understand how jets
are being accelerated,

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and ultimately reveal 
the dynamic processes

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by which some of the most fascinating
objects in our universe are formed.

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This all started as a love story.

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And it still is.

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This love transformed me from 
a curious, stargazing young girl

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to a professional astrophysicist,

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hot on the heels of celestial discovery.

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Who knew that chasing after the universe

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would ground me so deeply
to my mission here on Earth.

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Then again, when do we ever know
where love's first flutter

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will truly take us.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)