India, April 26 -- Pioneering Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan proved that black holes can be formed by unstable gas. Now she's looking at the invisible universe using new technologies. In popular imagination and in science fiction, black holes are places of intense gravity, kind of like cosmic vacuum cleaners that suck in everything around us. They are formed when stars explode, become supernovae and leave behind deep punctures in the fabric of the universe. They're hard to understand, even for Priyamvada Natarajan, professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University, who has studied the phenomenon for decades. In 2006, Natarajan proposed a radically different idea on how black holes in the early universe are formed. Not by a star exploding, but through a direct collapse of gas. She theorized that gas in the early universe became unstable and funnelled into the centre very fast, kind of like pulling a plug in a bathtub. This bathtub action created massive black holes, as big as 10,000 times the mass of the sun, in a jiffy. In late 2023, two space telescopes proved all her predictions and her theory right. Today, we know about direct collapse black holes and UHZ1, an ancient galaxy which has this, thanks to her. We catch up with her at the Indiaspora 2026 conference in Bengaluru to understand her fascination with invisible space, competition for space telescopes and how artificial intelligence is reshaping her work as an astrophysicist. "We needed to think about another way how black holes form than stars exploding because we were seeing massive black holes a million times the size of the sun in early universe and had no explanation for it, she said. Natarajan added: "My calculations showed that in the early universe, massive black holes could form through a bathtub action where gas becomes unstable and stars start funnelling into the centre very fast. Thanks to sophisticated computers, we were able to build a concrete prediction in 2017 which theorised exactly what the observations of the real universe would look like if this kind of a black hole existed." FULL INTERVIEW ON P4...