Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWhat is the biggest explosion in the universe that mankind has ever witnessed? Find out with Daniel and Jorge.
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Hey, Daniel, I have a physics question for you.
All right, I didn't have a daily banana, but I'm ready.
What makes explosions so awesome?
They are awesome? But is that a physics question?
Yeah?
You know, like in the movies they always show the action here walking away from an explosion in slow motion. It looks really cool. You know, does physics tell us why that is so cool?
Is the reason why it's cool?
Man?
Physics makes things.
Cool, everything except physicists.
I'm pitching a movie where a physicist is the action hero slow motion walking away from the explosion.
It's called lap code Action Hero. You're not going to fund the sequel for.
That one, Kanna reeves. I'm issuing an invitation for a screen test.
They tried that, didn't they? That was that movie where he that's your why's favorite movie Cold Fusion? Yeah, Cold Fusion. Yeah, he's he's an action here and.
So you can happen Cold Fusion two more slow motion explosions.
Does that make you feel funny like to know that your spouse's favorite movie is about a physicist portrayed by Ken Reeves?
No, it makes me feel like she thinks physicists are sexy. I mean I'd rather that than having a physicist be played by Danny de Vito.
Hi am Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics. Hi.
I'm Daniel Whitson. I'm a particle physicist and I don't wear a lab code, but I consider myself a science action hero.
Nice. Do you code in slow motion too?
My code explodes, man, I walk.
Away those people's minds.
Yeah, the explosions are all mental. I blow your mind with my amazing coding.
Well, welcome to our mind explosion of a podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we talk about all the things in the universe that do blow our minds and that are currently blowing the minds of scientists today, and we walk you through them and explain them to you and what we hope is an understandable and maybe even entertaining style.
Yeah, we talk about all the amazing stuff out there that is just sitting there waiting for us to discover it and to tell us about things that we want to know about the universe. But we also talk about the events and all the crazy and wild and sometimes dangerous stuff that happens out there in the cosmos.
That's right, because if you look up at the night sky, you are looking at one of the most amazing shows in the universe. It's not necessarily put on for your enjoyment, but it's a pretty spectacular fireworks display.
You know.
It is true that when you look out into the night sky and you look at all the stars, you think that they look pretty and twinkling, But really what you're looking at is is billions and billions of giant explosions happening all the time.
Yes, it is a very dramatic fireworks display, and it's going on all the time. It's been going on for billions of years, and I like to think of it as like the best view in the universe, because not only is it huge dramatic explosions, bigger than anything we could imagine here on Earth. But you're also looking across billions and billions of miles. It's amazing to me how much of our lives we spend without looking at at the night sky. You go around your daily business, and some people never even look up at the night sky. But there's so much incredible universe out there waiting for us to look at it.
But yeah, we like to talk about fun things that happen and big explosions, and sometimes we like to talk about the biggest things that happen out there in the universe, the biggest, the loudest, the craziest, the smallest, the quietest, the wettest, the driest, the extremes of the universe.
The extremes, Yeah, because they remind us of the scale. Our cozy little life here on Earth is a very narrow slice of the kind of environments that are out there in the universe. And so we want to blow your mind by reminding you that most of the universe is quite different. Most of the universe is much more dramatic than the kind of things we experience here on Earth. And one of the best ways to learn that is to go to the extremes, the coldest, the brightest, the darkest, the hottest.
Yeah, and so everyone loves explosions, of course, and so to the other podcast, we'll be asking a question about what is the big explosion in the universe. We've talked about explosions in this podcast before, you know, like supernovas are big explosions, and nuclear when you blow up a nuclear bomb, what happens? We had an episode about that. But here we're talking about the biggest explosion in the entire universe. Like if you did a survey of everything, that is, what would be the coolest explosion to film in slow motion? And then have Ken Reeves walk slowly away from it precisely or Daniel or Daniel of course, right, have Daniel float away in slow much.
Oh, you know, any lab coat wearing physicists, we are all equally sexy.
Do you wear lap coats, Daniel? Is that for safety or just for because your ac is too high in your office?
I wear lab cooat when I'm going to do a really complicated calculation, you know, just for protection as I break something.
I see, Yeah, because the sweat pouring out of your forehead and the intensity of the typing is just just do you want to protect your clothes?
Yeah, And you know, if you think really hard about something, you're creating very high energy density in your brain which could collapse into a black hole. And you know, I think a lab coat might be good protection there.
Yeah, really to protect you.
Or if my grad student is doing all the thinking, then I need a.
Lab coat to protect myself explode, yes, god.
Yeah, so that's really what I'm worried about. But we are talking today about explosions because there was a recent article crowning a new champion explosion of the universe, and a lot of our listeners wrote in asking us, could you please explain what's going on? How is this possible? What's the deal with this crazy article? Wow?
So this is a like hot off depressus. I mean, the article just came out last week crowning the new biggest explosion in the universe. Yeah, ever seen or did you think this is this?
Is it ever seen?
No?
I think it's very unlikely that we will see the biggest explosion in the universe, or that we have seen it. But it's the biggest explosion that we have ever seen. I mean, the more you look, the more you see extremes, and for this particular category of explosion there is a potential so for even bigger ones.
I guess you kind of maybe don't want to see the biggest explosion in the universe.
You want to see it on a movie screen. Yeah, but you don't want to be there unless you have a really nice lab code that could protect you.
Yeah. But so, as usual, Daniel was curious to see how many people had heard of this discovery or even had thought about what is the biggest explosion in the universe.
So I walked around campus and I asked folks, just after this article came out, what makes the biggest explosions in the universe?
So think about it for a second. If someone asked you what the biggest explosion in the universe was, what would you answer. Here's what people had to say. I think it's a super nova.
Probably when like really big things.
Collide, really big things, like what stars stars?
I guess, yeah, it's just like normal stars doing.
Their thing, or it's when they die, right, or it is that they collapse when they do that.
It's like a star exploding one of the biggest second, think of.
The explosion of a star.
Okay, super ova I think it's the callar something supernova, maybe stars dying.
Like astronautmical, that type of like, I don't think anything man made.
I want to say stars.
Well, it was just reported that the most massive explosion I ever recorded was a black hole they believe, or specifically the cavitation of the walls created by the plasma admitted by the black hole. I can't remember exactly where or at the center of our galaxy or something like that.
Maybe it's a all right, a lot of great guesses. Most people say it's supernovas.
Yep.
Supernovas is a popular one. People have heard of it. The supernova pr team has done a great job, you.
Know, it does. It does have the name super super on it.
You know.
But you know, hypernovas are even bigger, and nobody talks about hypernovas that they kidding Hypernovas. Hypernovas, Yeah, we've talked about on the podcast. They're just like a super big category of supernovas.
He's saying, I forgot, I guess. I guess it's just not as sticky as supernova.
Not a sticky The focus group for supernova's did a better job, yep. Anyway, it was a popular answer. And it makes sense because those are really big explosions.
Some people said nuclear weapons time times too, like if you multiplied a nuclear weapon.
There were a couple of people who said nuclear bombs, and I think they just hadn't really expanded their mind out to the astronomical. They were thinking about the biggest explosions on Earth, even though I asked for the biggest explosions in the universe. So I think those folks sort of had their brains down to Earth.
And someone said black hole merger. Yeah, I'm very intriguing, Yeah, which is actually maybe a little bit close to the actual answer.
It's on the right track for sure.
Those are all good answers. And so we're looking for the biggest explosion in the universe. And so Daniel, let's maybe first talk about, you know, what an explosion means, and what does it mean for something to explode, and how you would how physicis measure these things? Do are you measured by like Bruce Willis's or can of reeves units of can of reeves coolness?
The way to think about an explosion is that it's a very rapid release of energy. When you have a nuclear bomb. What's happening there is that you have a rapid release of energy from the fusion or the fission reaction, so rapid that it creates like a shock wave that then zooms out. Like if you had that whole thing happen much more slowly, it wouldn't be an explosion. It would just like gradually dissipate. It's like if you gradually cranked up the heat of something, that heat would spread up and it wouldn't spread out and it wouldn't necessarily create any destruction. But the reason you have destruction from an explosion that these shockwaves, this sudden release of a huge amount of energy.
So that's the key for everything is leaving one place really quickly. Energy matter.
Yeah, and so the way we measure an explosion is by measuring the energy output. And so we use units of energy, and there's a lot of different kinds of units of energy, so you just got to pick one.
Well, what's the standard physics unit for explosions.
The unit of the use in astronomy is the ERG, which is kind of a funny unit. It sounds sort of like more like a grunt, you know, like.
It gonna sounds like an automatipe media, you know, like, oh, somethody exploded, or it of.
Sounds like an insult, like God, can you believe the silly thing that ERG said? That that can't even calculate the mass of a black hole sounds like a bad physics put down or something.
It's like what nerds call each other to call each other out.
Yeah, but it's actually kind of a cool unit of energy, and I like it because it has a very understandable example, like one erg is about as much energy it would take a fly to do a push up.
Wow, it's that small.
It's pretty small.
Yes, So it's an unit of energy like jewels, or like jewels per second or jewels per area. What's the What am I thinking.
Of jewels is the unit of energy? Jewels per second would be power, that'd be like watts, and jewels per area would be pressure. But we're talking about just energy, and so ERG is a unit and it's pretty small. You're right. For example, if you calculated like how many ergs are in the rolling of a bowling ball, that's about a billion ergs.
So every time I'm bowling, I'm like a putting a billion ergs and like an actual erg because you pull your bag like.
The energy you spend in rolling that bowling ball is the same as if one billion flies simultaneously do one push up. It's a bit of a weird unit because it's so small, and it's really popular in astronomy, where the numbers are really big. So I wonder if, like, astronomers use this unit to make their numbers seem bigger.
I don't think astronomers need to inflate their numbers. You know, they're like, you know, a billion light years just doesn't seem like a lot. Let's go with a billion light seconds.
Yeah. Well, it's weird because the ERG was officially discontinued as a unit. People are like, don't use ERG, it's ridiculous, but astronomers still use it. They just like they ignore that ruling officially from the International Court of Units and I made that up, by the way, and they just keep on using it, so we get really big, ridiculous numbers.
So does it stand for something or they it literally just just a weird word ERG or is it kind of like one of these new millennium you know, text contractions. You know, they're too lazy to write energy, so they just picked the E, the R and the g.
A little bit. It's actually got a nice history. It comes from a Greek word ergon, which is the unit of energy, and it's from like the eighteen hundreds and so it's a bit outdated and it's past its prime, but it still lives on in astronomy.
Okay. So it's like an unit of energy like the jewels or calorie or something like that, and it tells you just kind of how much energy comes out of this explosion or thing exploding in a second or in a time, or just.
The total energy. Yeah, so you'd have to integrate over time. And so for example, if you look at something that's continuous explosion, like our sun, our son is just a constantly exploding fusion bomb, then you can quote the energy like per second. For example, the sun puts out ten to the thirty four ergs per second. So that's a lot of ergs. Person, that's a lot of flies doing a lot of push ups every second.
Man. That is basically ten to the thirty four flies.
Yeah, every second the sun. But then it depends on the time. Right, the Sun is not just one explosion, so it's a constant explosion and it.
Only explodes during the day of course at night it tucks away in terms of.
This is a science podcast, so it's not spread misinformation. And in a year, you know, it'll put out like ten to the forty one ergs.
So that sounds like a lot, but it's sort of a touch on. So the bowling balls one billion ergs the Sun is ten to the thirty four ergs per second. Yeah, so that's how much energy is coming out of this explosion. Yeah.
And then a popular answer of course with supernovas, and it's a great answer because there's a lot of energy put out by a supernova in a very short amount of time. That's like ten to the fifty one ergs. So that's you know, a lot more than an individual star and is a very short amount of.
Time, right, Yeah, it's like five orders of magnitude.
Yeah, it's like ten orders of magnitude compared to one year. And so a supernova puts out about as much energy as our Sun does in its entire lifetime. But the whole thing happens in like billions of years, over billions of years, but the whole thing happens over just you know, days, So it's a pretty incredible explosion if.
You take all of the energy that a sun makes over billions of years and compress it to one instant. That's a supernova.
That's a supernova. And that's why it's dramatic. That's what makes it an explosion, is this release of energy in a very short amount of time. If it just gradually leaked that energy under the universe, it wouldn't be as dramatic. It's all about concentrating that energy in a short period. That's why supernovas are so super.
It's almost like the concentrating a billion suns in one instant.
Yeah, yeah, and that's why they can outshine an entire galaxy for a very short amount of time. They're brilliant. Literally.
But you're saying the supernovas are not the biggest explosions in the universe. So even if you take a billion suns at the same time and exploded them in one instant, that wouldn't give you the big explosion in the universe.
No, So if you put that into your screenplay and expect everybody be impressed, then astronomers would be underwhelmed. It'd be like erg, that's a lot of ergs, but it still don't impress me. No, that is not the biggest explosion in the universe, and not even close. There are much bigger explosions, but it's a little bit counterintuitive because they come from black holes.
Oh yeah, somebody said in the answers that a black hole merger may be the biggest explosion in the universe. So how explode are black hole merger.
They are explodeocious. They release like a thousand times as much energy as supernova.
Wait, so if you take a thousand supernovas put them together, that's one black hole merger.
That's one black hole merger. Now it depends, of course on the mass of the black holes and a little bit in the configuration. But we've only seen a few examples and they were pretty dramatic.
Wow. That's so if a supernova outshines a galaxy, then a black hole merger totally kind of obliterates it.
Right, Yeah, but you have to compare how the energy is being released for a supernova. A lot of the energy released in the visible spectrum, but most of it is actually invisible. A huge fraction of it is in the neutrinos and in other particles that aren't a visible light. So supernova is super duper bright, but most of the energy is not visible. For a black hole merger, almost all the energy goes out in invisible forms like creation of gravitational waves, which you need special devices to even see, so that there are huge releases of energy, but not necessarily bright.
It's like a silent killer.
It's a dark explosion. There's the title of our movie.
We Ever Smelted Tilted, We merged it. Clever smelted merged it.
Oh, you're right. Dark explosion is not a good name for a movie. It is an obvious parts joke there.
But even at one thousand times bigger than a supernova, a black hole merger is still not the biggest explosion in the universe.
It is not.
It is not even close to King of the Mountain or Queen of the Castle.
All right, let's get into what is the biggest explosion in the universe, and let's talk about this recent discovery of them finding it. But first let's take a quick break.
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Okay, Daniel, we were talking about the biggest explosion in the universe, and we're not just talking about mel Gibson's career here. And you told me that supernoas are pretty big. They're like a billions uns exploded at once, But those are nothing compared to black hole mergers, which are a thousand times bigger. And those even are not the biggest explosions in the universe.
Yeah, the biggest explosions in the universe come not from black hole mergers, but from individual super massive black holes and the chaos that they create around them.
That's right, because there are different categories of black hole. So like if two little black holes merge, which I think happens fairly often.
Right, surprisingly often, you get the mergers of black holes, and those black holes can be you know, the masses of a few suns or tens of suns or hundreds of sons, but there are other kinds of black holes, like the kind we see in the center of our galaxy that can have millions and millions of solar masses.
Oh, and those themselves are you're saying, are some of the brightest or biggest explosions in the universe.
Yeah, these are things we do not understand very well. But they are gargantuan, and they're basically king or queen in every category.
They can get pretty crazy massive. So some black holes are you know, thousands or millions of times the mass of our hun.
Yes, and that creates an very intense gravitational field nearby. And so what happens is that the stuff near the black hole gets squeezed and pushed and excited, and you can generate incredible amounts of radiation and also sometimes enormous explosions on the vicinity of the black hole.
Oh I see. So just their very existence and the chaos they produce around them, just from being so crazy massive creates the biggest explosions in the universe, bigger than these black hole mergers and supernoice.
Yeah, and it's not something that we understand very well, Like we keep being surprised we find a huge explosion and we're like, Wow, that's bigger than we thought possible. And then somebody finds one that's ten times bigger and they're like, that's insane, what are you talking about.
Then we're going to see one that's a thousand times bigger, and then.
Yeah, and then will be over. But it's incredible the scale of these things, these objects, the amount of energy that's stored in them, the amount of energy that's radiated out from them. When nobody has a calculation that explains this, nobody can say, here's my black hole simulation, and it describes how these black holes were formed and explains why they radiate and explode so much.
I see, we've seen these crazy explosions from these big black holes, but nobody can actually sort of work it out how that works.
Yeah, nobody can even explain why we have these super massive black holes. If you do simulations of galaxies forming, you don't get black holes this big, and so we don't even understand like what's making these. We'll do a whole other podcast episode about like the weird science behind how these things form. But once you have them, then they do all sorts of crazy stuff, and you know, people out there might be thinking, like, hold on a second, how do black holes explode or how do black holes emit radiation? Because they're black and nothing's for me. Yeah, their holes they're supposed to be sucking stuff in, and and they do. They do suck stuff in. So anything that goes past the event horizon definitely never coming out. We're talking about the stuff in the neighborhood, right. A black hole like this is so powerful that it's going to mess up everything nearby?
Is it kind of like you know those sometimes you go to like a public toilet and you flush it and it's like turbocharged. Do you know what I'm talking about? Like there's just like free loaded or something, and you flush and it's like pluck. Things are sucking down the toilet, but they're also kind of exploding.
I have no idea what you're talking about, but that sounds like a perfect analogy, Yes, especially because black holes do this really weird thing that they have, these jets. There's two main structures around a black hole that people should be familiar with. One is the accretion disc. That's this disc of stuff that's swirling around the black holes like on deck to get sucked in, and people are generally familiar with that, but then shooting out sort of perpendicular to the plane of the accretion disk, like on the north and the South pole, are these enormous jets of matter and radiation that can be like longer than entire galaxies.
Yeah, I think maybe like a good visual is kind of like how you imagine Saturn the planet to have this ring around it. Black holes kind of have a ring of stuff around.
Them too, They have a ring around them, yes, Yeah.
And it's like glowing and it's it's gassy and glowing and wild as well because it's being sucked into the giant toilet.
Yeah, and the jets created this radiation, which is huge. We call those quasars, and we don't understand what's going on there. We think there's some weird thing going on with intense magnetic fields. It's like funneling really high energy particles towards the North pole, so like some sort of reverse Northern Lights effect. And if it's pointed right out Earth, then we call it a We call it a blazar. And those are some of the brightest things in the universe.
Yeah. We had a whole podcast about the brightest things in the universe.
Yeah, But on top of being the brightest things in the universe, the most massive things in the universe, and being a mystery under themselves, they also create ridiculous explosions because quasars are not explosions, they're just like a constant funneling of enormous energy.
Flashlight kind of.
Yeah, they're like a flashlight. But on top of that, these black holes sometimes also create really dramatic explosions.
Really yeah, Like so on the top of the quaser, on top.
Of the quasers, like that wasn't enough, they're also doing stuff on the side, and that comes from things going on in the accretion disc Like you know, there's lumps. Accretion discs aren't totally smooth. You got like, you know, masses and masses of stars in there, whole solar systems, and enormous lumps of rock bigger than you can imagine. And this stuff sometimes smashes into itself or gets torn apart, and so you get really enormous explosions, and again not something that's well understood. Like you see these explosions and it seems like there's more energy in the explosion than it's contained in the entire system there. But how does that even work. It means that there's stuff going on there that we don't yet understand.
I guess. How do you know that it came from somewhere around a black hole? Like if you see a giant explosion, how do you how can you tell that where it came from?
Well, you just look for the center, right, you look for the stuff that it hit, and you sort of point it all back. And so in the case of these explosions, you can see the effect of these explosions on like nearby gas clouds. And for example, you look at a gas cloud, it has like a shell in it. It's like looks like part of a sphere, and you can tell sort of that sphere points back to where so you can reconstruct where the explosion was. You know, it's like if somebody drops their coffee and you look at the spill pattern, you can pretty much tell where the coffee hit. Right, it's the same story.
Oh, I see, and then you track it down to where it came from and you see, oh, there's a giant black hole there precisely, So it must have been an explosion that happened not in the black hole or shooting from the black hole, but just in the chaos around the black hole.
Yeah, because we don't think that black holes emit anything, Like, we don't know what's going on inside a black hole. It's one of the favorite questions people write in about, like what's going on inside a black hole? Does it look like this? Does it look like that? And I always have to write back and say, we have no idea because nobody knows what's going on inside a black hole.
Only Matthew McConaughey knows.
Nobody knows, and so we can only imagine. But if there are dramatic explosions inside the black hole, they're definitely not getting out.
They're not coming out. Oh you could have way crazier stuff happening inside of the black hole, but we would never know.
Yeah. Well, remember we asked that quantum gravity theorist what she thought was going on inside a black hole, and she went off on that hilarious digression. You know, maybe there are whole universes in there doing who knows what, and so that's a deep mystery. She used several ergs of brain power to come up with a creative answer to that question.
Okay, so you're saying the biggest explosions in the universe are not even black holes themselves. There's just the craziness that comes from getting sucked into a giant black hole.
I don't know. Don't try to take the credit away from the black hole like it's doing all the work there. It's gravitational energy is fueling this craziness.
Yeah, but it's happening sort of outside of it, not as part of its existence.
It's definitely passed its event horizon. And that other time we talked about where had the size of black holes and we decided to use the event horizon as the radius. But you know, if all the stuff nearby the event horizon is because of the gravity of the black hole, then I think it gets credit.
I guess I'm saying. You know, if my kids create a little explosion here, I'm not taking credit for that.
If your kids flush your toilet and it splashes onto you, you're gonna blame them for that, though, aren't you.
I'm going to blame it on the toilet manufacturer, not my not me or my kids.
They expect the lawsuits, folks.
And so this is just stuff that's around the black hole smashing into itself or being pulled apart or does it create like a chain reaction? What's actually going on? Like, can kind of collision of things really create something bigger than you know, a thousand black hole mergers?
Well, you are now at the forefront of knowledge because all ideas you just had are basically what's happening inside offices in astrophysics departments around the country. People are asking the same question. Mind, you're being blown by this discovery we just made, and people are like, well, maybe it's this maybe stuff. That's exactly how we start. We're like, I don't know, what are your five top ideas for what this might be? What would that look like? How can we rule those out? Do we know anything about these? And that's how these theories start forming. So we're really the beginning stages of trying to understand what could cause these explosions. Like if we hadn't seen them, nobody would have predicted them.
So this is where we are. We've seen these explosions. We're like, whoa, these things are bigger even that black hole mergers mm hmm. And we've traced them to just super massive black holes or at least the area around them, but we don't know what's going on.
Yeah, we just know there are crazy intense forces there, and this really basic stuff about black holes we don't know, like, for example, do they spin. We think they probably spin sometimes because the stuff falling into them spins, and you know, angular momentum is conserved in our universe and so but we don't know, And that could be an enormous source of energy. Like you look at a black hole, it has huge amount of energy just from the mass it's storing. It could additionally have even more energy from its rotation, and that rotation could be fuel in all sorts of stuff like these magnetic fields and these explosions could come from the black hole spin. But we don't even know if that's a thing.
It's like the toilet itself could be spinning.
Yeah, there could be all sorts of weird stuff. And you know, remember how little we really understand about the fundamental nature of the universe. We've explained a tiny fraction of it. And these are the most intense environments anywhere, so there are definitely secrets to be revealed.
All right, let's get into what this reason discovery was and what they found and what scientists think could be happening in these giant explosions. The first let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel, So take us through the news reports from last week. They think they maybe they found the biggest explosions in the universe ever recorded by humans.
That's right.
There were a lot of articles going around last week talking about the biggest explosion ever found. And I first got wind of it when I got a tweet from somebody who sent me this headline from the Guardian that read biggest cosmic explosion ever detected left huge dent in space. And somebody sent me this and said, what is going on here? This was Mike Kernow, and he asked me to explain that, and so I started reading.
About it that it cost a dent in space, because a.
Dent in space, And you know, I'm not a big fan of a lot of science reporting. It's a hard job and they have to try to communicate scientific stuff to the general audience in way that makes sense, and you and I know that's difficult. But a dent in space, I don't even know what that means.
Maybe this reporter should get a Nobel prize just invented a new physics phenomena.
Yeah, well, you know in one sense, like there are dentin space all over the place, Like every massive object bends space. So you'r dentic space, and I'm dent space.
I'm causing a dent in space right now.
Right, I hope that buffs out, you know, like do you have insurance for those dents?
And my kids are causing a dent in my wallet as well.
So, but there was a really big explosion and it's a really amazing story because it takes place in the center of a galaxy cluster. A galaxy cluster, remember, is a bunch of galaxies all sort of gravitationally bound together. And in that cluster there's also a lot of leftover gas that was used to make the galaxies. Remember, galaxies are gas that's been coalesced by gravity into stars that are burning.
It's a cluster of galaxies, so it's not just like a milky way, it's like a group of milky ways.
Yeah, it's a big group of galaxies and there's a bunch of gas that sort of spread out in between them.
Must be a huge gas cloud.
Yeah, it's a huge gas cloud, you know, bigger than galaxies. Absolutely, it's a massive scale thing. And about twenty sixteen, they were looking at this thing in the X ray, which is a good way to look at the shape of gas clouds because they emit in the X ray, and what they noticed was what looked like a crater. They saw sort of an edge, like a circular edge, and they were like, huh, that looks like sort of the edge of a bubble, almost as if there was a huge explosion.
It looks like a constant gas cloud. But inside of it they saw like an empty space.
Yeah, they saw a big bubble inside the gas cloud. But this is twenty sixteen. They didn't think that was an explosion for one reason is it would have to be ridiculously big, like bigger than any explosion ever. So they were just kind.
Of skeptical, like as big as a galaxy or bigger.
Bigger, like this gas cloud bubble is fifteen times bigger than our galaxy.
A bubble inside of a cloud the size of fifteen milkyway.
Fifteen milky ways, Like, how many key in a reefs do you need to walk away from that explosion?
Just one man, there's only one Ken Reeves. He's gat you can handle it. He can do it.
He's super galactic.
I mean he can handle three John Wick movies just one long fight scene. I'm sure he can handle this.
And so that was twenty sixteen. And you can look at the edge of that bubble and try to find the center of it, and they did, and at the center of it is a galaxy and that galaxy has at its center a super crazy redunculous black hole.
Oh, they looked at the center of the bubble and there's a you can actually see the galaxy in the middle.
You can see the galaxy in the middle because it shines in visible light. And it's called the o fiatus. How do you pronounce this o fiats galaxy ocuss opiucus.
You can actually see a black hole in the galaxy, but it's so far away. That's that's crazy.
Well, you can see the galaxy, and they know that there's a black hole there just sort of by looking at the maths distribution and so you know, most of these black holes have not been directly imaged. Only a few of them have. It's very difficult. You remember that came out last year. But we can infer the asked the black hole without directly imaging it, just by sort of the orbiting speeds and stuff like that.
It's almost like there was an explosion and there was somebody left in the middle of it. But you know, my guess, my question is, wouldn't that galaxy also have blown up? Why didn't that galaxy blow up too? If it pushed away all that guests.
That's a great question. You uhould be an astrophysicist, because that's exactly on the list of questions people are wondering like this. A lot of this story makes sense and it's consistent with a huge explosion, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions.
I think maybe the galaxy just farted and everyone was just like clear the room for fifteen galaxies.
Way, So that was twenty sixteen, and the reason it's making news now is that the skepticism has been sort of overcome because they found a new piece of evidence to support this, like gigantic explosion hypothesis. What did they find, well, they looked inside that bubble and they looked for really high speed electrons. Basically, they looked for the stuff doing the exploding, and they radio emissions consistent with like really really high speed relativistic electrons. And that's what you would expect if there was a huge explosion, that these like electrons would get boosted by those shockwaves.
Fast moving electrons can have kind of like a signature, they give off a special signal.
They do, and you can see those in the radio waves. And so what they've seen is like the crater, and then inside the crater, in the radio waves, they've seen electrons emitting at very high speeds in exactly the shape that fits right into the crater. And so it really looks like you have an edge there, like the edge of a shockwave. And those are the two things you would expect to see if you had an explosion, the stuff doing the explosion and then the sort of the gas being pushed away by those electrons and the shockwave. So that was like a second piece of information that really made it seem like, wow, there was something doing some exploding here. But as you said, that doesn't answer every question. There's still a lot of things about it we don't understand.
So you can see both. You can see like the hole and made in the gas cloud, and you can also see the stuff still coming out of this explosion.
Yeah, precisely. And you can use all that together to measure the energy of this you know, Grandma explosion, the champion of the world.
All right, hit us with the ergs? How many ergs? How many flies are pushing up in this explosion? That's the size of fifty milky ways.
Yeah.
So remember supernova is ten to the fifty one. Black hole mergers are like ten of the fifty four. This thing is like ten to the sixty one or ten to the sixty two IRGs. I don't even know the name for that scientific prefix.
What is it? A million times more than a black hole merger? Which which is itself? You know, a bazilion times more than a supernova.
Yeah, it's something like millions or ten million black hole mergers simultaneously. So this is God, this is the biggest explosion anybody has ever seen. And you know, like I said earlier, this is the big explosion we've seen. We haven't even been looking that long, and so there's definitely more stuff going out on out there. Like if every time we look we see something bigger, that suggests that there's a lot more stuff out there we haven't even seen.
There could be something bigger explosion than.
This, almost certainly, Almost certainly, and especially because we don't understand the mechanism right and we think that all you need are super massive black holes, and we know there's a lot of those out there, and so there's a lot of opportunity for bigger explosions. So there'll probably be a new king, you know, or a new new champion explosion crowned every few years from now on, the.
New king of the ergs.
But like I said, there's a lot of things we don't understand about it. One question is when you raised, is like why is that galaxy still there?
Still there?
Right?
And so they're trying to understand like maybe the explosion happens slightly off center or only went in one direction because they see this only on one side of the black hole but not on the other, like where is the explosion on the other side. It's sort of missing, which.
Is why what do you mean? Like it only exploded to one side, not like a sphere.
We can't see it on the other side, and it might be that it did explode in that side, but it didn't there was gas there to sort of leave this impression, or the explosion was like weirdly asymmetric, which would be really weird because then it would like be a jet it would like push this galaxy through the universe, which would be crazy. Oh wow.
So it sort of exploded towards us kind of, and so we can't tell what's on the other side.
Well, it didn't explode towards us, exploded sort of in an angle that's not exactly towards us and not exactly perpendicular, but in the direction of a big cloud of gas that sort of left a big footprint. On the other side. There either there's not gas there to leave a footprint, or the explosion didn't happen. So we're not quite sure. You know, we don't have evidence. An absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. So we don't really know what's going on on the other side.
Well, I think, I think, Daniel, you can just go ahead and press your alien button. I know you're dying to press the alien button. It's aliens who build a giant galaxy engine and they're moving their galaxy, isn't.
It or you know, blame it on alien physicists. Some alien physicists build a particle collider and it went bad and wow, was there a bad explosion. Doesn't matter how many lab coats they were wearing, they are obliterated.
Oh man, So the big mystery nobody knows what could have cost is or how it could have been so big, and nobody knows why that galaxy is still standing there.
Yeah, but it's exactly the kind of mystery we need to advance science. Whenever we see something out of the extreme, something that tells us what's possible, it makes us think more broadly. But the kind of things that are happening out there, it's exactly what we need to sort of open our minds and push our ideas even further. And so every time we discover something bigger, something heavier, something smaller, it pushes these extremes. And the extremes are really valuable for helping us understand what's possible, because that's going to reveal sort of the fundamental nature of the whole structure.
Gets you to rethink about the rule what you thought were the rules of the.
Universe, yeah, and so people are excited to work on this kind of stuff, you know, and answering questions like why is the galaxy still there? What happened on the other side, why is the explosion still going on? Or are more explosions going to come from this black hole? We don't know, but it makes people excited to monitor other super massive black holes around here. And also people should not be worried because this happened three hundred and ninety million light years away and obviously a long time ago, a long time ago. Yeah, yeah, and so the energy of that enormous explosion dispersed so much that you know, we're not in danger.
All right. So that is especially the new biggest explosion in the universe is what's the name again, ophi Ocus?
Congratulations to the Ophiucus galaxy. And maybe in your press release you shouldn't include some information about how to pronounce your name.
That would help me, that would be helpful. And so, but it's still a giant mystery. It seems. It seems like we are trying to find out, but we may never find out.
Yep. And it just continues the run of black holes sort of maxing out all the categories. They are the most power powerful, They are the brightest, they are the darkest, they make the biggest explosions. They're sort of hogging all the champion categories in sort of the universe extremes.
Until somebody finds hyper black holes, blacker holes, blacker holes.
They seem to break all the rules. They hold secrets of the universe. They're incredible objects, and I hope that one day we get to explore one from a safeist.
Can be somebody listening to this podcast. One of our young listeners might be the one who discover these things, or goes there even.
Yeah, or just cracks open the secret to make black holes work and reveal something incredible about the universe and changes the way we think about our universe and the way we fit into it. I mean, that's the scale of discoveries that's available when it comes to black holes. People will look back in one hundred or two hundred years and be like, Wow, those people understood nothing.
So the next time you look out into the nice sky and see all the amazing things and potentially giant exploding things that are happening out there, I hope you take a minute and you think, erg.
So Congratulations to our new champion, and thank you to all the listeners who wrote in and asked us to talk about this topic. It was a lot of fun.
Thanks for joining us. See you next time.
Before you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one Word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorge dot com. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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