Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseEXTREME UNIVERSE! (Hint: It's not the sun)
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Hey Daniel, you have a pretty wild family, right.
Well, we don't go to raves or anything. If that's what you mean.
I mean you guys like you guys like the wilderness, right? Do you go camping a lot?
That's true, We are big fans of camping. We do car camping, We do backpacking. We even rented an RV and driven around Iceland. So yeah, we like to get out there in the wild US too.
We also like to go camping, and I think mostly good because we just like being out of nature, you know.
I like the campfire, and really I like being under the stars. I love how you can see so many more stars at night when you're camping.
Hi am Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and an avid amateur camper.
And also a physicist. Right, you're an avid physicist as well.
I am an avid physicist. During the day, I smash particles together at nearly the speed of light underground in Geneva to try to figure out what is the universe made out of? What is the smallest particle? How do forces actually work? Can we make new kinds of matter in the laboratory? All sorts of fun stuff. I like ripping things apart and understanding them from the ground up.
And just to be clear, you are not right now in a basement in Geneva, Right.
I can either confirm nor deny that actually.
I see you may or may not be in your Swiss bunker.
That's right. Well, hey, quantum mechanically, I may or may not be anywhere, right. I could be sitting in your living room right next to you right now.
You may or may not be.
That's right. I may or may not be by the end of this podcast. Who knows right? Life? Life is uncertain? Right? This crazy, beautiful universe that we live in where we can't really understand anything. But this is our podcast in which we try to help you understand everything, and in particularly we try to take topics and tear them apart so that you can understand them.
That's right. Welcome to Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
That's right. And every week on this program, we take a topic that we think people are interested in, something where everybody wants to know the answer, but maybe it seems a little bit out of reach technically, or it seems a little bit hard to dig into and your Google searching is not quite sufficient, and we try to break it down for you and get you to somewhere where you can understand it and maybe laugh along the way.
That's right. And today on the podcast, we are going to tackle another subject in our extreme universe series, Extreme.
Universe, Extreme Universe exactly. I'm cueuing some heavy metal guitar riffs in the background there.
Right because heavy metal is so in right now?
Oh, are we dating ourselves? There was a little bit too much Bill and Ted.
Bill and Ted are coming back. Have you not heard?
It's like Bill and Ted escaped the senior in your Citizen Home or something.
I think Canna Reeves can pull it off.
Maybe we should have an episode on why Canna Reeves does not seem to age. He's sort of like plateaued around forty five.
I know, he's like fifty something and he's a good looking guy.
Him and Paul Rudd, I think is just sort of hit some plateau. Maybe it's like Hollywood cryogenic freezing or something. Or maybe they've been replaced by robots. Anybody figure that out.
Maybe they're time travelers.
We should have them as guests on the show. Hey, Kenu, if you happen to be listening to this episode, come on the show. Explain it all to us.
And if you're Paul Rudd you're also invited.
You can explain Canna Reeves to us. You guys, all know each other, right, I'm sure they're hanging out together listening to our podcast.
Well, so this is part of our series of Extremes of the Universe. So we've had episodes about the biggest thing in the universe, the emptiest place in the universe. Well, on today's episode, we'll be talking about what is the brightest thing in the universe, right, like the one that would totally most blind you if you stared at it without any sunglasses.
That's right, the sparkliest thing in the universe, the most glitter covered thing in the universe. Now, I love our Extreme Universe series because I like that it reminds me and I hope everybody out there listening that where we live in the universe is unusual. It's it's not the most anything you know, and that there's whatever you're thinking about, whether it's temperature or brightness or size, there's always something out there to dwarf everything you thought you knew. And that's sort of the larger lesson of astronomy, you know, is that the universe is vast and crazy and there's always something out there to surprise you. And so I love this Extreme Universe series because it shows us how small we are or how dark we are, or how cold we are, or how slow we are in the context of the whole universe.
Yeah, it's fun to think that we're kind of in the middle, right, We're not, you know, there is there are extremes in both directions where we stand right, Like, we're not the hottest or the coldest, the brightest or the darkest.
You know, are you saying we're just right like Goldilocks in her porridge?
We are? We are all Goldilocks.
That's true. I mean I wouldn't want to live in a brighter place or a darker place, or a hotter place or a colder place.
That's why you're in California, right.
That's right. That's why I'm in southern California where it's nice weather every single day. But it's cool to learn about it, you know. I like learning like where is the tallest mountain in the Solar System? Or where is the hottest spot on Earth? These sort of things. It's just fun to know what's the scale, you know?
Oh man, I want to listen to those podcasts.
Yeah, And I also want to remind people that tonight today we're gonna be talking about what is the brightest thing in the universe, and specifically we're talking about things that emit light. But there are other ways to see the universe. Right. We see a little bit of the universe, a tiny fraction of it that gives off light that makes itself visible to us. But there's a huge amount of stuff going on in the universe that's invisible to us. So the brightest things in the universe are not even the necessarily the most active things in the universe. They're just things that emit the most light.
The most photons, right, because you could have something that's more powerful or more energetic that's emitting other kinds of stuff.
Yeah, but of course light is important to us. You know, we're a visual species. We look at each other, we draw, you know, it's an important part of how we live, and so of course it's sort of the beginning of how we explore space. We just turn our eyes skyward and look, and then we develop techniques to look deeper and deeper into space. But the cool thing is that recently astronomy has developed sort of other kinds of eyes, like other ways to look at the universe that are not with light, but with like particles or with gravitational waves and sort of it's sort of cool to think about humanity opening different new kinds of eyes and seeing different pictures of the universe, because every different way you have to look at the universe gives you a different picture because different things emit different kinds of radiation, and so it's just it's amazing to think about all the things we will learn once we've developed more and more ways to look at the universe.
So anyway, so today we're tackling the brightest thing in the universe. So the thing that gives the most photons per per I don't know for what, per per area, per per looking at it, per per second.
We'll talk about some things that give off sustained flows of photons and other things that are very brief they give off just to photons very briefly, but are very very very bright. But I think we'll be talking about things that give off the most photons sort of at a certain distance. You know, that's a good way to measure brightness.
But as a hint and as a little bit of a spoiler, we'll say that it is not the sun. If you were thinking that maybe the brightest thing was the sun, you're a bit.
Far off, and as usual, I was curious, what do people think is the brightest thing in the universe? What do people have in their minds? And so I ran around campus at UC Irvine and I asked, folks, what do you think is the brightest thing in the universe?
Were you hoping some of your students would say you, Professor Daniel, you are the brightest thing.
Just like with what is the hottest thing in the universe. I wasn't explicitly digging for compliments, but I guess I was secretly hoping maybe somebody would give me one.
You had sort of a response prepared to be mean, what means that's right? Well, those of you listening, take a second to think about it. If someone asks you on the street, what is the brightest thing in the universe, what do you think you would answer? Here's what people had to say.
To my eyes, The brightest thing I have ever seen is the sun.
The sun?
The sun a new trunser stars, because that's probably what I'm most familiar with.
I don't know, maybe like a supernova.
I'm surprised how many people said the sun.
Well, I think all these people would have benefited from your hint that it's not the sun, because as you heard, they mostly went for the sun.
Maybe it's the brightest thing in their universe technically, right, Yeah.
Well you know it's the brightest thing you observe mostly. I mean that's not even actually true, but it's the brightest thing sort of out there in the sky.
Yeah, I mean sort of technically right. I mean it's like their observable universe. We all have our little observable universe.
What do you mean do you think people have their own universes like my universe? Your universe is no.
I guess what I mean is like they're not observable, like if you have your physicist with a billion dollar telescope, but you know just from what they can see with their eyes.
So this is the thing about brightness, right, is that remember that brightness falls with distance. You know, some object is giving off light, and that means it's shooting off photons, right, But as the distance grows from that object, you have the same number of photons, but they're spread out over a larger area.
Right.
And think about a sphere that surrounds the sun or whatever else is giving off light. The size of that sphere, the surface of that sphere grows with the radius square because the formula for the surface of a sphere goes like radius squared, and so the same number of photons cover that sphere. So as you get further and further away, the parent brightness falls right, and it falls like one over distance squared for that same reason because the same number of photons are getting spread over that distance. So the point is something can be super dup or bright, but if it's far away, it won't feel as bright to you. So yeah, you can have a laser pointer that feels brighter than the.
Sun, right, and it would probably hurt. So Jess a Workler, We're not advocating that you shoot any light into your eyes. But why do you think a lot of people said the sun. Do you think they actually think that's the brightest thing in the entire universe or the brightest thing you know? Do you think maybe they were just not expanding their horizons in your answer.
I think there's a lot of that. I noticed that trend that when I ask people about something, they tend to think about in the Solar system and not to think more broadly. And sometimes I'll go to them like don no, no, thing bigger the whole universe. But and I did that a couple of times here, but people were still like, no, the sun. Maybe it's a bit of local pride. They're like, yeah, our sun is awesome, man, it's so good. It's like the way people want to believe that their local sports team is the best. You know, we got the best sun. That's all right, Our hometown son is the best sun.
I think we all sort of do that. Like if I ask you, hey, Daniel, how's it going, you don't think well, right now in Alpha Centauri, there's a right you sort of you see that I'm asking you about you and your day.
Yeah, I mean everybody has a sort of a locust like a neighborhood they think about. But also I think people are just not sure, you know, what else is out there and how different is it. I was imagining though, that people might think that the sun is not the biggest star, the craziest star, and they would say, at least you know, some other star out there. And we had one guy who said, like a supernova or a neutron star or something like that.
So maybe they thought, you meant, what's the brightest thing we can see from earth.
Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. Maybe that's what they thought, and in which case they would be mostly right. I mean, if you take away all sort of earth bound lasers that could fry your eyeballs, it's true that the sun is the brightest thing you can see from the earth. So good job, Orgey just got you guys all extra credit.
Oh good, except you already marked them and sneered at them.
Probably I did not sneer at anybody, Thank you very much. I'm eternally grateful that UCI students are willing to answer my questions. I was just walking around today, in fact, and now a single person said no to answering my questions, so continued. A plus plus to UCI students for being open to answering crazy questions without any warning from a stranger.
Well, this is a perfect point to take a break.
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But you do have a pretty interesting table here that you sent me which gives us the brightness of things relative to the Sun.
Yeah, because the brightness of things depends on your distance. I think it's more interesting to answer the question what is the absolute brightest thing in the universe, not what is the brightest thing in our sky? Right, because there could be something super duper bright, but then it's really far away and it seems dim. But we're interested, like, what is that thing that's making all those photons? So I thought, let's define things in terms of their brightness relative to the Sun. And then let's imagine that we're the same distance from that thing that we are from the Sun. So we call that an astronomical unit. It's about ninety three million miles. It's the distance between the Sun and the Earth.
Well, I was thinking that maybe a good way to think about it is that, you know, like if you stood outside right now and it's daylight and you looked at the sun, you would see the Sun. But now if you swap the Sun with something else, this table tells you how bright that thing would be.
Right, that seems like a totally practical experiment. Yeah, I'm going to delete the Sun and instantly transports some other crazy object there, and then I'm gonna look at it.
Yeah, you just swapped it out. Swap out the Sun for something else, and this would this table would tell you how bright that thing is. Yeah.
I'm imagining you have some like app on your phone where you're like select you know what you'd like at the center of your solar system, and it's got like a menu or something, and you're like, hmmm, let me replace our sun with a supernova and see what that feels like.
Anything is possible with quantum physics.
Right, that's right, let's disrupt quantum physics with this app.
So let's do the exercise. So, now let's say what's something that else is bright? Like, let's say we swapped out the moon for the Sun. How bright would the moon be?
Well, it would be zero because the moon doesn't give off any light, right, so the moon actually just reflects light from the Sun. Right. So the if you had no sun and you just put the moon there, then the whole solar system would be dark zero. All right, Well, let's say you wanted to upgrade the Sun and you're like, let's look around for the sort of a bigger star, and like, one example of a big your star is one of them. It's called serious A, and it's a pretty serious star. It doesn't like to make jokes. But if you took that star and you put it in place of our Sun, it would be almost thirty times brighter.
So wait, what is this star. It's like a nearby star or the one of the brightest stars that we know about.
It's one of the brightest stars in our sky, which is why I picked it. And it's bright mostly because it's it's sort of nearby. It's not that bright on its own, as you can tell, it's only thirty times brighter than our sun. But it's a cool star because it's part of a binary star system, which means they're two stars orbiting each other. So that's why the serious A it refers to which one which one it is. If you look up in the night sky from Earth, it's one of the brightest stars in the sky. And so if you if you did the whorege exercise, and you teleported that star to the center of our solar system, then you know our days would be thirty times brighter.
You would need SPF eighteen hundred something like that.
Yeah, it'd be pretty serious. I mean, I don't know even know if life could serve because the temperature would skyrocket and everything we get fried. So not something I recommend. And you know, or you can think about it another way, like if we replace the Sun with serious A, then the Earth would have to be further from the Sun in order to have the same temperature.
Would have to be thirty times further away sort of.
Well, it have to be square root of thirty. If you're five times further from the Sun, then the brightness is one over twenty five, right, So yeah, so you'd have to be like five or five and a half au from serious A to have the same amount of solar activity. And that's what we do. You know, when we find other star systems and planets around them, we ask for that star, where is the Goldilocks zone? Where is the habitable zone, the zone where a planet would have about the same amount of brightness from their star as we do from our Sun. And that depends, of course, on the brightness of that star.
Well, that is definitely a serious distance.
That's right. But it turns out the serious is not even really that impressive. There's a star in the constellation Orion, for example, and I'm not even sure how to pronounce it. I think it's called Rigel or Rigel, And this is a pretty serious star, right, And if you put this star in our solar system, it would be thirty three thousand times brighter than our sun.
So Sirius, which was a much brighter star thirty times, is nothing compared to this one. Right. This one's thirty three thousand times brighter than the Sun.
That's right. It's crazy. It's a sort of a bluish white star. And the other interesting thing about it is that the brightness varies a little bit, like this something going on inside this star that makes it like burn hotter sometimes or burn less, burn colder other times. It's a massive blue super giant.
And it's just spewing out photons thirty three thousand times more than our current son, which is pretty bright.
Yeah, exactly, but it's just much bigger, you know. It's one of these massive super giants, which means it got more stuff, right, so it's denser and hotter in the middle, and it's just this bigger fire burning. You know, like if you're having a little campfire and the guys one campsite over have like bought ten times as much firewood and having a big bonfire, then yeah, there's just gonna be more photons coming out of their fire than yours because they got more stuff. In the same way, this star just has more fuel, so it's burning more fuel at the same time.
It's like a quantity thing. It's not like there's different you know, physics going on inside of it. It's just there's more stuff burning.
Yeah, exactly, it's just a bigger pile of fuel that got set on fire.
Well, thirty three thousand sounds pretty bright, brighter than the sun. It sounds pretty bright. But that's not even like we're not even a halfway through the table, right.
That's right. There's another star. It's called This one has an awesome name, Zeta Scorpi. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that correctly, but it's a hyper giant star in the constellation Scorpius. And this one burns two hundred thousand times brighter than our sun.
So you would need two hundred thousand suns just to match this one star.
That's right, exactly.
That's incredible to think of two hundred thousand of our stars of our sun.
That's right. Or if Earth was orbiting this thing, then you'd have to be you know, the square root of two hundred thousand times farther away. That's like four hundred and fifty times as far away from this star as Earth is from the Sun in order to not get fried.
Does that mean that sun that star is two hundred times heavier also like more massive or is it just some sort.
Of No, it's actually that's fascinating question. It's actually only about thirty five times more massive than the Sun.
What, but it's burning two hundred thousand times brighter.
Yeah, And you know these suns also have different life cycles, right, and they burn colder or hotter, or more brighter or dimmer at different points in their life cycles, So that could be part of it. But also when you get a star that's that much bigger, there can be different physics going on inside. But it's pretty awesome and that's why they call it a hyper giant.
Plus pre cool name Zeta scorp Yeah.
It is pretty cool. But even that's not so impressive compared to the reigning champion of the universe.
All right, is it also a star?
It is, well in terms of stars, right, we'll get in terms of stars, this is the brightest star in the universe. But it doesn't have a very cool name. You know. The other one's serious and scorpii. Those are pretty cool. This one is called wait for it, R one six three A one.
That's a cool name. You know, if this was like a Star Wars character, you know, you could make it work.
Wait, I think I swapped it even. I think it's R one three six a one. Is that still cool?
M yeah, I know that's that One's not as cool.
This one comes in.
I think their friends just call them R one R one.
Yeah, that's pretty cool. Actually R one is actually the name of the cafeteria at Cern also sure for restaurant one, So people are always saying, hey, I'm met you at R one.
And is the food also bright and shiny and hot?
Yeah?
I don't think the restaurant at Stern is famous for its food. Yeah, that's not the That's not the most impressive thing about that restaurant. I think the view is better. You can see them on Blanc. You can see all sorts of the Alps. It's a gorgeous place to eat lunch.
But I hear it's pretty cool because they cook the food like where the particles collide, Right, isn't that how they heat up the food? They just they just dip it down into the ground.
Yeah, they're like, hey, the meat's getting cold, crank up the accelerator. No, but back to our star R one. It's three hundred times as massive as the sun, but it's eight point five million times brighter than our sun.
Wait, so let me just wrap my head. You would need three hundred thousand of our sons just to match the size of it and the weight. But then it's eight million.
No, three hundred, three hundred sons, not three hundred thousand, oh, three hundred sons, three hundred sons. But it burns eight point five million times as bright.
Eight million times. So you would need eight million of our suns just to match the brightness of this one star.
Yeah, it's ridiculous. I mean, it's like it boggles the mind. I mean, our sun already is super bright. Right, We're glad we're ninety million miles away from it, and still it can burn your eyeballs, right, Just that's an incredibly bright source of light. And then to imagine something eight million times, it can burn eight million eyeballs much more easily. It's hard to get your head around that.
And it's like a sustained fire, right, It's a it's just always burning at eight million times better than the sun.
Yeah, exactly.
It's not like an explosion or like a supernova. It's just like it's just like a something that's just burning super bright.
It just keeps going. Yeah, and it's you know, it's illuminating space all around it. One thing is it's pretty dangerous, right because you get too close, you're gonna get fried. On the other hand, it's like making things visible. You know, if you were near that solar system, you could see all sorts of interesting stuff. The rocks and the planets and all all the stuff around it are shining brightly because of that star.
But you would need to be pretty far away, just just near it.
Yeah, exactly, you couldn't get too close. Exactly. It's pretty dangerous thing to visit. So any of you guys planning to visit are one three six A one You know, pack some protection.
That's it. Bring eight and a half million bottles of some block.
That's right. Exactly. You have to be like three thousand times the distance from the Earth to the Sun in order to have the same amount of solar energy.
So that's the brightest star that we know about in the universe. Like, that's the raining record holder.
Yeah, that's right, that's the brightest star that's been observed.
Wow, And where is it.
It's in a neighboring galaxy known as the Large Megallinic Cloud. So this is like a big cluster of stuff out there, and it's a one hundred and sixty three light thousand light years away.
So it's in another galaxy. So it's not even in our galaxy.
Yeah. No, it's not even in our galaxy. Yeah exactly. So the Milky Way is outstripped by this other star. And you know, this is fascinating stuff. And I think from a science point of view, you're always interested in the extremes because you're wondering, like what is the hottest or the brightest thing. Because we're trying to understand how these stars work. Right, we have like models for what's going on inside them, and then they make predictions, and they always go out there and then they discover something that's like twice as crazy or twice as bright as anything they understood, and it makes us tweak those models to understand what else could be happening in those stars to produce so many photons. So the extremes are really valuable scientifically because they show us like the boundary of what can happen.
And so these are just stars that we're talking about, right net, right now, right, there are even brighter things in the universe. Right, there's other kinds of things that are brighter than the brightest stars in the universe.
That's right, These stars are crazy bright. I know our sun is pretty bright, these other ones totally outstrip it. But when it comes to the record holders, so the brightest things in the universe, these things are pretty dim all right.
So let's get into those things. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All Right, we're talking about the brightest things in the universe, and we don't just mean like your kids, Daniel, which I'm sure very bright and good looking and good looking, and they have a great dad apparently.
Yeah, I'd like to meet him someday. Oh, my kids are basically look like my wife. I mean, it's sort of funny because I have dark eyes and dark hair, and my wife is Scandinavian, so she has like blue eyes and blonde hair. And interestingly our kids both came out blonde with light colored eyes. So genetics, I don't know, explain it to me. Maybe she just cloned herself in the lab. She is a biolot.
This sounds like a Game of Throne situation.
I'm not sure what you're implying over there.
I prefer I'm just saying the results.
Yes that's true. Yes, it's it's been a mystery for a while anyway, But there are brighter things in the universe than even the stars and even my family or yours.
So we left it at the brightest star that we know about in the entire universe, which is R one three six something something A one, which was eight and a half million times brighter than our sun. Which is mind boggling, which is amazing. But there are things that are even much more brighter than that.
Right, that's right, And sort of counterintuitively, these are things associated with black holes. Right, black holes you think of immediately, it's like, oh, that's super dark. If you'd ask me what's the darkest thing in the universe, you'd say black holes. But remember, black holes themselves don't give off much lighter or much radiation. They're pretty dark, but they're very powerful. They're incredibly strong sources of gravity, and the things that have not yet fallen into the black hole, those things can go up and give off a lot of light.
Okay, so the brightest things in the universe than are paradoxically black holes.
Is that what you're saying, No, not even the brightest, but some of the brighter but brighter than stars. And so what happens is that you remember, the black holes have these things around them, the stuff that has not yet fallen in. Right. It's like, you know, the toilet is still flushing, and these things are swirling around about to go inside, and because of the incredible gravitational energy of the black hole, it's creating a lot of stress and strain on this gas and this dust, and so it ends up emitting a huge amount of radiation. We cover this in another podcast episode. It's called These things are called quasars, and they're so bright in the night sky that for a long time people didn't even understand what they could be because they're incredibly bright and incredibly far away. So people did the math and they're like, what if it's that bright already and it's super far away, that means if you got close to it, be mind bogglingly bright. So for a while people didn't even believe it, right until they found other ways to prove that these things really were happening.
So, yeah, we talked about that in an episode. I think the episode was titled Strange Stars.
Right, yeah, exactly the strangest, craziest things in the universe.
Yeah, yeah, And so we talked about quasars and blazars, which sound like they're popular in the.
Eighties, exactly, shoulder pads. What is the biggest shoulder pad in the universe. That's the whole podcast episode right there.
And so if you're curious about how what they are and how they work, please check out that podcast. But I don't think In that podcast, we talked about how actually bright they are like in comparison to other things.
Yeah, exactly, Well, it's ridiculous. It's hard to even wrap your mind around these things. These quasars. For example, one of the brightest quasars we've ever found has a sexy name of three C two seventy three. It's four trillion times brighter than our sun. Like, if you put that thing in the cider of our solar system, we would get fried.
Well, first of all, who names these things?
They were all waiting for you, man, everybody's heard that you're good at naming things.
They actually get to like three hundred and seventy three of these, and so this one just happened to be the number two hundred and seventy three.
Yeah.
You know, there's just so many things out there you can't name them all. You just got to give them numbers. But you know, sometimes one of them gets special and then it gets a name. And I don't even know how that works, but this one should deserve a name. I mean, it's the brightest quasar in the universe, right, give it a name like thor or.
Something like Daniel's kids.
That's right. I'd like to nomine I'd like to name this quasar after my own kids. I'm sure that would fly.
No, No, not after your kids, just Daniels.
Daniel Son. That sounds like a reference to Karate Kid. But this thing is, I mean, four trillion times brighter than our son is hard to understand. Remember there's like one hundred or two hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, right, which means that this thing is brighter than all the stars in the Milky Way by like a factor of a hundred.
And just to be clear, four trillion means four thousand billion, right.
That's right, that's right, or four million million.
Not just a million times brighter than our sun, but like four million and then a million times over again.
Yeah, exactly. And you know, at this point it's basically infinity. I mean, in my head, I can't understand the difference between trillions and quadrillions and whatever. It's just all big number insanity.
It's just crazy.
It's insanity. It's intensity intensities, man. And so that's a quasar, right, It's giving off a huge amount of radiation, super bright. It's not a star, but it is in the same sense, sort of in a similar category. Because it's a huge amount of gas that's being compressed and generating radiation, but it's not technically a star. But then remember that some of these quasars, some of these quasars we call them blazars, because they also emit a beam, right, and the beam is sort of perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy. Remember, a lot of these galaxies are sort of flat, they're swirling discs and the black holes at the center of it, and blazars are galaxies that emit these huge jets of radiation sort of perpendicular to the flat plane of the galaxy out from the center, right.
And so it's you're saying, it's their energy, and their light is sort of focused, it's concentrated. It's not just like a light bulb shining in all directions. Some of these things sort of focus their light in a particular kind of beam.
Yeah, exactly, it's collimated, and we don't really even understand the physics of that, Like how do you take all this radiation and bend it into one direction? People think it's might maybe crazy magnetic fields, but you know, there's a huge amount of stuff we don't understand about what's going on. In the center of galaxies. But sometimes one of these beams happens to be pointed right at us, you know, just by chance. And there's a lot of galaxies and a lot of quasars, and they're pointing a lot of different directions, and so one of these blazars is going to be shining right at us. And because of some relativistic physics, when it's shining right at you, the intensity is even higher. And so you can look for which blaze are is the brightest from our point of view, right with being pointed at us. And so the blazer it's name is three C four five four point three. All right, I want a sexy name.
And what is the point three?
I don't know what the point three comes from?
The third you know, like.
This is the grandson grandson of the real grand Pappy Blazer. I don't know. I don't know. I cannot give any accounting for how they name these things. But this thing, this monster, is three hundred trillion times brighter than our sun.
You would need three hundred trillion pairs of sunglasses, just not so that you don't burn your eye out.
That's right. You could get three hundred trillion sunburns in one.
Day and one millisecond probably exactly.
Yeah, So we're glad that these things are pretty far away because they're ridiculously bright. I mean, the intensity of light is just incredible, you know, and so there's stuff going out there in the universe which is insane, you know, which would fry us and destroy us. Also, you know, it makes me think about like our inner problems, like we're trying to squeeze a little bits out of energy out of like liquid stored underground. But the amount of energy that's out there in the universe it's just being like you know, shot out into space and wasted, is incredible. You know. The scale of our problems are really tiny in comparison to the stuff that's happening out there. And so that's that's the king in terms of constant brightness, Like that blazer is going and it's not going to stop anytime soon. It's just pumping out photons constantly, at at a rate that makes our sun look pathetic.
Now, is that still brighter than pointing a laser pointer at my eye?
Or that's still pretty bright? Yeah, I mean it'd be hard to get a laser pointer that's three hundred trillion times as bright as the sun.
So that would be the brightest, constantly shining thing in the universe.
You're saying, that's right, But sometimes there's a crazy event in the universe and even that gets out shown by something else. So you know, sometimes stars go supernova. Right, this is when they reached the end of their life and they decided it's not worth it anymore. You know, I'm done, I want to check out. And they have this massive explosion where they basically use most of the rest of their fuel in a very brief moment, and they can outshine entire galaxies, they can outshine sets of galaxies, they can even outshine blazars. And so there's one and then they emit these huge things they called gamma ray bursts. We had a whole podcast episode about them, these these brief pulses of gamma rays. Remember gamma rays are just light, right, just very high energy light, and so and so we keep track of these gamma rays and these gamma ray bursts, and one of them came by, and this is gamma ray burst zero eight zero three one nine B right now, to be confused with one nine A. It's much dimmer custod C or C right, which was pathetic as a sequel. But this one is the brightest sort of emission we've ever seen ever in the universe. And this one is twenty two quadrillion times brighter than our sun.
Wow, that sounds like a lot. How much is how much is a quadrillion?
How much is a quadrillion? He says as he types it into Google.
There's like ten thousand times brighter than the brightest blazer in the universe. Kind of something something along with that magnitude.
Right, exactly. But the key is that it didn't last very long. Right, it's a very short burst. You know, we're talking about things that last seconds. So it's a pretty dramatic way to go out. You know, it's some nice fireworks, and for a few moments you outshine the otherwise brightest thing in the universe by a huge factor. Right, So that's really like your moment of fame in the universe. But then it fades. Right. So you know, if you want the brightest thing ever is gamma ray burst. If you want something consistency, you know that's going to win the marathon rather than the sprint, then you want to go for blazars.
I guess it depends on what you mean by brightest, right, It could be it depends on the timescale.
Yeah, it's an integrated brightness or momentary brightness, right? Or who can shine the brightest thing into Jorges eyeball? Right?
Yeah, let's not give our listeners any suggest how.
Many laser pointers can we shine into an eyeball? At the same time, there's a whole podcast episode.
I'm sure. Yeah, let's send it to Bill Night.
He knows the answer to every question.
So why is it called GRB? Is it just some sort of physics.
GRB stands for gamma ray burst?
Oh, I see, or it.
Could be green red blues. What you were thinking?
No, I was. I was confused for a second. I thought it was like RGB no RBG.
No, wait, that's the Supreme Court justice.
Just like what Ruth Bayler givesbur He's the brightest thing in the.
Universe, so may be the brightest thing on the Supreme Court.
Yeah she is. Actually she's a She's a star for sure. All right. So that was a tour of brightness in the universe, the brightest things in the entire unit. We went from zero brighton is which is a black hole to the brightest things that we know about as human beings.
Right, that's right. And so next time you're out there camping and you're looking up to the night sky, I remember that there is crazy stuff out there that's pumping out photons at levels we could hardly imagine. Most of it seems dim because it's far away, or because you can't see it because your neighbor's porch light. But if you got too close, it would definitely fry you.
But you know what to say, It's better to light one blazer than the curse the darkness? Who says that you? I think it's my grandmother.
Your grandmother has a lot of funny sayings. I'd like to meet this lady.
All right, Well, thank you for joining us. I hope you found that discussion illuminating and shining.
I hope we turned a light on in your mind but.
Didn't fry fry your eyeballs with it or your ears. But thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.
Tune in next time. Thanks very much, and don't forget if you have a question about what we said, or you have a suggestion for a topic you'd like to hear us break down, please send it to us at feedback at Danielandjorge dot com. If 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. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's last sustainability to learn more.
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