Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge talk about quasars, large groups of quasars and HUGE LARGE groups of quasars!
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Hey, Daniel, I've been wondering something about the large hadron collider.
Ooh, that's right up, my alli. Is it about crazy new particles?
Yeah? Not quite.
Is it about making black holes?
I am concerned about that, but not this time?
All right? Shoot, then what's your question?
All right? Why did you call it the large hadron collider? Why not the you know, modestly sized hadron collider, because it's pretty large in that case, why not the huge hadron collider or the ginormous padron collider.
That's the plan for the next one. Man, you got to leave something in the tank for the next time around.
But when does it end? Daniel?
Hopefully never.
Hi.
I'm Jorham and cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics.
Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I hope to do experiments one day at the very large hadron collider.
Mmm.
Not just the huge hedron collider? Or do you plan to retire before the ginormous Hadron collider.
I want to work on the ludicrously sized Hadron collider.
What's the acronym for that one?
I don't know, But the v LHC is an actual thing.
Really, that's like in the official name.
It really is the very large Hadron Collider. The plan is to put it underground. It's one hundred kilometer radius ring and that's actually what it's called.
I guess there's a precedent for that. There's a very large array in New Mexico.
Right, yeah, exactly exactly, so you could just after that just keep adding varies to it. I suppose the very very large A drunk collider.
The super duper large Hadron collider. But welcome to our super Duper podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we tackle things which are very very large and hard to understand and very very small and hard to grapple with. We talk about all the incredible and amazing things in our universe, all the open questions that scientists are puzzling over all the incredible things that we have learned, and explain all of them to you, sometimes with a very large banana.
Joke, because there is a lot out there in the universe to explore and for us to see. But I guess the problem is that we are stuck in a small corner of the milk Away, which is in a small corner of the universe, and so we need some pretty big telescopes and instruments to see what's out there in this vast cosmos.
That's right, we are exploring the universe, but we're doing it just with our eyeballs. Imagine you wanted to know what was all over the Earth, but you were sort of stuck in a lighthouse and all you could do is look out the window with really powerful telescopes and try to see as far as you could. So that's where we are as a species. We can't yet travel to the stars, but we can wait for information from the stars to come here to Earth and give us clues.
Because there is a lot of information coming at us from everywhere, right, And I mean, the universe is basically bathing us in information and stories about what happened and how things came to be and why things are the way they are. And it's really up to us to figure out how to decode this information and how to read it and how to figure out what it means.
Yeah, and it's frustrating to me sometimes that we're not doing more to capture that information. You know, to see deep into the universe, you need to look at really faint signals of far away galaxies, and those things can't be seen just by your eye. You need like specialized telescopes, and so far humanity's only built a few of them, which means that most of the information about the secrets and the structure of the universe it's just sort of like landing on Earth and getting absorbed by know, plants and rocks and stuff.
I'm sure the plants are getting some pretty good information about the universe, probably that maybe they've already figured things out, Daniel, we thought to ask them.
Oh my god, that sounds like a really fun science fiction movie where we discovered that plants are actually a globe sized telescope and that they're doing their own astronomy.
Wow.
Well, I thought you were a couch potato anyways, Daniel, wouldn't that count as a plant scientist astrophysicist?
Well, that means that couch potatoes are actually doing work, right, because they're sitting there absorbing information from the universe.
Yeah, And so I guess the more we want to look out into the universe, the bigger the telescope we need, and the more we want to probe into the particulars of matter and what everything is made out of, the more powerful and bigger microscopes you need.
Yeah, exactly. And as we peer deeper into the universe with our bigger and bigger telescopes, we're constantly finding new stuff out there, Weird things we can't understand, things that don't seem to make sense, things that surprise us about what's out there in the universe. But that's what exploration is all about. You don't look out into the universe just to have your ideas confirmed. You look out there to be surprised, to be shocked, to have your mind blown by the kinds of crazy stuff that we see.
Yeah, because it seems that we're discovering at the universe is bigger and bigger and bigger than we expected. I mean, we initially thought there was just the Earth, and then the Sun and the Moon and the Solar System, and now we're up to you know, bubbles of gigantic galaxy clusters. Things get pretty big out there.
Things get pretty big out there. And one question we ask is like how big do things get? What is the biggest thing in the universe? And it feels like every year astronomy crowns a new biggest thing in the universe. I feel like that should have like stadium echo sound effects. There biggest thing in the universe.
Yeah, and that also raises the problem of what do you call the new things when you find out there are bigger things? Because we call something the big dipper. You know, what if you find a bigger.
Dipper exactly, well you call it the bigger Dipper or the very big Dipper.
And so there is apparently a very large thing, possible large thing out there in the universe, so big that it needs too adjectives to describe how big it is.
It's so big they named it twice.
So today on the podcast we'll be talking about what is the huge large quasar group.
You can't even get that name out without a chuckle. It's ridiculous.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like the most extraneous word there is group.
It's the most boring word in there.
Like, if you have huge, large and quasar, why do you need the group that's not calling it? You know, the eighteen group.
It sounds like a consulting firm, doesn't it.
Which part of the eighteen group or the Huge Large Quasar Group.
Both both. We need to optimize the efficiency of this factory. Somebody give a call to the Huge Large Quasar Group. They know what they're doing.
I don't know. They sound pretty expensive to me. I would go for the you know, modestly sized size quaser group.
That sounds good.
But it is a thing out there at the Huge Large Quasar Group, and it's sounds self explanatory. But I'm guessing there are some mysteries and some unknowns about this huge object in space.
Absolutely, there are lots of unknowns, and there are some really basic ideas about how big things can get in the universe. And this thing flies in the face of our concepts of size.
It's huge, not just in size but significance.
That's right, It's more than huge. It's huge large all right.
Well, as usual, we were wondering how many people I had heard of this Huge Large Quasar group, and so Daniel went out there into the wilds of the Internet to ask people if they knew what the Huge Large Quasar Group is.
So thanks to everybody, who participated and if you are willing to volunteer to answer questions about absurdly named astronomical objects in the future, please write to me two questions at Danielandhorge dot com.
So think about it for a second. If someone asked you what you thought the huge large Quazer group is, what would you say. Here's the people had to say.
I'm gonna go wild here. It's either a band from the eighties, or it is a huge large group of quasers somewhere in our universe.
A total guess, a very large array of radio telescopes. Maybe a huge large quazer group is a group of.
Quasers that are somewhere on the outskirts of our.
Galaxy, a big collection of large objects somewhere in the universe, or i would say region of the universe where you could find a lot of these quasars.
I'm guessing this is some form of quasars that have grouped together or clustered together somewhere in the universe that we've been able to find.
Well, most likely it's an area, probably very big, where you can find a number of quasairs that you it's not common to find.
It sounds like it's bigger than large Koaisar group.
It sounds like it's really huge. I mean, it sounds like they're getting pretty.
Lazy with it, aiming man Jorge is gonna have fun with that one. I bet it sounds like it's totally awesome. It sounds like a group of quasars found that's so awesome that it earned both huge and large in its title.
Well, first of all, that's an amazing name, and second of all, I guess it would just be somewhere out in the observable universe where we've seen a bunch of quasars together in a relatively small area for which we don't currently have an explanation. Given the koasars are generally very bright objects, they could be potentially quite far away and we can still see them.
All right.
Some pretty fun answers there, including one that predicted I would have fun with this one, and I have to say, having no fund it's a lot of words to say.
Together, no fund, zero fun. Well, I'm having fun with it. I definitely picked this one just to sort of taunt to you about astronomical name.
So this is an actual thing, Like there are papers with these words in the title. The huge, Large Quasar group.
It's an actual thing. It's actually a subject of controversy. People fight about the Huge Large Quasar Group. There are like dueling presentations about it.
Really, Like do they fight about whether it qualifies as huge? Like do you fight over the adjective like, no, it's more like a really large or it's more like a ginormous huge. Doesn't capture it now?
Actually what they fight over is the word group.
Yeah? Is a group or is it more like a you know, a solo endeavor?
Yeah? Is it a band from the eighties? Or is it an astronomical object?
Right?
Right? Do they actually you know, agree on things or is it more like a collective? Maybe it's a huge and large quasar collective.
It's a co op, right, they grow their own organic veggies.
All right, Well, let's get into what this huge large Quaser group is. And I guess maybe we'll start with one of the first words there, quasar. Daniel, maybe remind us what a quasar is.
Yeah, My favorite thing about the Huge Large Quasar Group is that every word you add adds a layer of mystery and intrigue. Right, even just quasars themselves are fascinating. Quasars are some of the brightest things in the universe. They are these sources of radiation that come from the centers of galaxies, and they were discovered first in the nineteen fifties. But they were a huge mystery because people found these things in the sky that were emitting crazy radiation. But then when they looked in the sky to find out what it was, they found these objects that were like really really really far away. And so these things seem to be super bright and really far away, which meant that they must be like incredible sources of radiation to be already that bright when the light gets here to Earth.
Right, And how did they know that they were that far away? It just be like a nearby star. How did they tell the difference between this kind of object, like a bright thing in the sky or a regular star.
Well, it took them decades to figure that out. What they did is they measured the velocity of these things. So you measure the red shift, like how fast are these things moving away from us? And you do that by looking at the light spectrum and seeing like, oh, here's the line we expect from hydrogen or from helium, how far is it's shifted by the Doppler effect, and that tells you how fast this thing is moving away from us. And because of Hubble's law, we think that things that are further away from us are moving faster. So that helped us place the distance. We say, well, it's moving away from us really really fast, so it might be really distant. But there was a lot of skepticism. People just didn't believe it. It's like it gave them a number that made no sense, like how could this thing be billions of light years away and still be so bright? So they spend a lot of time wondering, just as you say, is it possible it's actually something closer that happens to have a high velocity moving away from us for some other reason. So it took a long time before people accepted that these things were actually real. The Koisars really were crazy bright sources of light universe.
I guess how were they convinced? How did they figure out that that was what was going on?
It was sort of a typical process in science, and that it took one person who was like crusading for it, and then the rest of the community gradually came along as the story came together in order to really build confidence in it. You want like an understanding of the mechanism, like, well, what's generating all that radiation. You can't just like believe that it's there. You have to have an understanding of the story. And so in this case, people were wondering, like, what could be creating so much energy? And then in the seventies, when the idea of black holes moved from like theoretical concepts to actually observed objects and things we believed existed in the universe, then we had a candidate for what could be providing these crazy amounts of energy needed to produce that radiation. So when we had the idea that maybe they were black holes, that the centers to these galaxies, and that they were the engines providing a power needed for this crazy radiation, that people started to believe maybe this could be real.
I see, and are there a lot of these in the sky or are they pretty rare or are they super common?
They're actually both a lot of them in the sky, and they're pretty rare, Like we know of about seven hundred and fifty thousand quasars out there by now, but it's a very small fraction, like most galaxies don't have a quasar. Most galaxies are not emitting crazy radiation out into the sky.
Yeah, I guess that sounds like a lot, almost a million of them in the sky. But there are billions and billions of stars, right.
Oh, yeah, there are billions and billions of galaxies out There are trillions of galaxies, and most of them are not quoasars. But you know, by now, we've mapped a lot of them and we've found a good number of them. So there's basically a lot of everything in the universe just because the universe is so big and so filled with stuff.
Or maybe they just have small koasar groups.
And it's really fun to think about, like what's actually happening there. You know, people hear that black hole are the source of quasars, and they might wonder, like, hold on a second, aren't black hole black Like they don't emit anything? Right, Well, that's true, but black holes combined with like a big blob of stuff around them can emit a lot of radiation because that stuff, the accretion disk, is getting sucked in towards the black hole. But it doesn't just like get hoovered up instantly.
Right.
Things are rotating, they're swirling around the black hole takes a while before they fall in, and before they fall in, they get like bumped against each other and ground against each other. And so the friction between all the gases that are swirling into the black hole makes for a very hot and intense environment. And that's actually what's doing the quasaring or the quasing. I'm not sure where the verb is.
Really, all that energy and brightness that we see billions of light years away, it's all just from stuff falling into the black hole.
Yeah, it's from the black hole's energy. Remember that the black hole has massive gravitational power even outside the event horizon. It squeezes and compresses all these gases that are swirling around it, and that's where the radiation is produced. So the black hole's gravitational power is compressing and squeezing these gases, they're doing the radiating. So it's sort of indirectly from the black hole.
I see. Interesting. So, really, a quasar is a black hole or I guess would you call it quasar the stuff around the some black holes.
Yeah, the black hole is sort of the engine for the quasar. It's providing the power, it's doing the thing needed to generate the radiation. But the quasar itself is not just the black hole. So you know, I would say the stuff at the center of the galaxy that's giving off all this light with the black hole together, that's the whole quasar I see.
And the name comes from quasi stars originally, right, like people thought they were stars, but they're not quite.
Stars, right, Yeah, we didn't understand what it was, so originally they were called quasi stellar objects, and then that was shortened to quasars.
All right, let's get into what a quasar group is.
Then.
I'm going to guess it's not a boy band or a accounting consulting firm, but we'll dig into that and what could be a huge, large quasar group. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about the awesomely named huge Large Quasar group, which is something that might be the biggest thing in the universe that we've seen or think we see. And so we talked about what a quasar is. It's a quasi stellar object powered by a black hole that's giving off a lot of radiation. Now, Daniel, what is a large quasar group?
Right, So, a large quasar group is basically a collection of quasars all together in a way that we don't necessarily expect. That is, we see these things at the center of galaxies, but as we said earlier, they're not that common, not like every single galaxy has a quasar in it. And so if you see like a bunch of quasars near each other, then you got to wonder, like, what's going on? Is there some reason why you got more quasars there than anywhere else I see.
It's like you see a whole bunch of them together, like in the same neighborhood, or like literally one top of the other, now.
Just in the same neighborhood. The first one was spotted in nineteen eighty two when we saw four quasars really close to each other, not like on top of each other in one galaxy, but like four adjacent galaxies and all of them are quasars. You know, if it's rare to have a single galaxy have a quasar in it, that having four neighbors all together, all the quasars, is pretty strange.
Oh, I see, not all galaxies have a quasar at the center of them.
Know exactly, it's pretty rare to have a quoisar.
Right, and so to see four of them together neighboring galaxies with quasars is rare.
Is rare, and quoasars are not forever. Also, like the conditions you need to create a quasar a supermassive black hole, and the gas that swirls around it may be transient, so like you could have a galaxy that shines it's a quasar for a while and then doesn't. So it's sort of like finding four of these things which are pretty rare, and they're burning at the same time. So it's like an indication that there might be some underlying reason as to why there's this group, why there's this cluster these rare things happening together. It's like finding four diamonds next to each other. Single diamond is pretty rare. Why if you find four, you're like, there's something extra diamondy going on around here.
Right, right, it's a large diamond group.
It's a large diamond group exactly. The other thing to remember is that quasars are sort of a feature of the earlier universe, Like we're still making quasars, but not as much as we used to, Like quasars peaked a while.
Ago, So what do you mean they're feature of the early universe, Like, we're not making them anymore because we still have black holes in the center of galaxies. Why don't we see more quasars? And what happens to them? Do they just turn off?
Yeah, So we don't really understand the mechanism for creating quasars, Like remember that we don't also understand super massive black holes very well. And so this goes to the question of like how galaxies form, how you get this much stuff together to create these scenarios. So we don't understand how kuoasars form. So we don't really know the answer to the question why do they form more in the early Universe than now, but we see them all really far away. So there aren't really like quasars in our neighborhood, which means that the reason we're seeing them far away is because they're basically dying out. We're only seeing the ones from the past. Like the closest quasar to us is about six hundred million light years away. We think that the peak era for making quasars in the universe was about ten billion years ago, and ever since then, like the number of quasars being produced is smaller and smaller.
But we don't know why. That's just what we see.
That's just what we see. Yeah, and so this is why quasar groups are really interesting. It's like, well, if they're hard to make and they're not really being made very much anymore, what is it that's making them and how does it make these groups? It's like a clue that might tell us about, you know, the structure of the universe in general, and also what the mechanism is for making these quasars.
I see, it's probably a good thing that there isn't aquasar next to us, right, because like if the Milky Way had a quasar, we'd be partly toast right, like that much brightness coming from the center of the galaxy. We'd be fried, wouldn't.
We Yeah, exactly, we would be if a quasar was shining right at us. Like, these things can be a thousand times as bright as an entire galaxy, so they're pretty intense.
Now.
Typically, the quasars tend to shoot off sort of perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy. To imagine the galaxy is a big disc. Because the magnetic fields and everything's swirling around, they tend to focus their energy both above and below the disc. And so if the Milky Way was a quasar, if we had a big koasar at the heart, it'll probably be shooting off into space, frying other aliens. Probably not us, Oh.
I see. They're not like bright objects like the sun that shine in all directions. Quasars are directional that they like, they only shoot light and radiation in one particular direction.
Yeah, exactly, And that comes from the swirl right. Remember, the disc is swirling around the black hole, and so it's swirling around an axis, So it's along that axis that all these X rays and crazy radiation tends to be emitted.
I see. So there maybe are probably more quasars in the universe. They just maybe are not pointing in our direction.
Yeah, absolutely, And when we estimate the number of things in the universe, we try to take that into account. We try to estimate what fraction of these things could we see, and we use them when we estimate, like how many of them are there that we're not seeing necessarily, all.
Right, So they only happen with super massive black holes, not regular black holes.
Yeah, exactly. You need a really big black hole to make one of these things. And it's really interesting that they were made in the early universe because we have a lot of students about like how the structure of the universe was formed. You talked earlier about how we have galaxies and then clusters of galaxies and then superclusters of galaxies we'd sort of weave together to make this amazing cosmic structure filaments of superclusters and walls surrounding bubbles, and we'd really like to understand how that structure was formed and sort of what the forces at play were. And so we wonder if quasars are a way to understand that, Like do they only occur when there happens to be like a real density of matter, when things like really came together. You got an extra big scooping of over density from the early universe. So it might be that, like these things are a really helpful probe to show us where there were really dense spots in the early universe.
Well, I see, like maybe you only get quasars if there's a particular you know, set of conditions, And if we can figure out what's going on in these groups, then that could tell us about what was going on early in the universe.
Yeah, because we look at the universe and we say, well, well, this is amazing. I see a super cluster here. Why is there a supercluster here? Why is there a supercluster here and not over there? You know, is this really just come from the quantum fluctuations of the early universe? Is there something else going on? Could we like look back to the very history of the early universe and see this sort of thing play out?
I see interesting? And So a large quasar group is when you see like four more of them together.
So the first one was discovered in eighty two. It has four quoasars clustered together, and that was the first time anybody had seen that, and people were like, whoa that seems pretty weird, and they calculated the probability of this thing just occurring by chance to being like ten to the minus seven, Like one in ten million universes would have a quasar group like that, just by chance, if the koasars were sort of distributed everywhere evenly.
Mmm.
I see, like, from what we know about the distribution and the probability of getting a quasar to see four of them together is like a weird throw to die.
It's a really really unusual throw to die. And anytime you see something weird like that, you want or is there something going on? It's just something that made this quasar group happen right here? Is it that the matter was extra dense and so you got like extra big black holes and that's what's powering these quasars? Or you know, is there something else going on? You know, there's plenty of room in understanding the structure of the universe for something new. Right, we know something about the history and the expansion of the universe, but there's a lot we also don't know about what's powering it and what's controlling it and why it looks this way and not any other way.
Wow, All right, So that was the first group that they found, and how many of them have they seen so far?
So only a handful of these things, they're pretty rare. The second one that they found had twenty three quasars and it this is in nineteen eighty seven, and so that blew people's minds. They were like, if four quoasars together in a group is shocking, then twenty three together that's like an orchestra, you know.
And so again, these are you know, like twenty some galaxies sort of in the same neighborhood and they all have quasars pointing at us.
Yeah, twenty three quasars found in nineteen eighty seven, all very close together, and we have not consistent with just like you know, random distribution of quasars.
I see, and they're all pointing at us, Which is the weird thing, isn't it.
Yeah, it suggests that there's a lot of them over there, right, So we're seeing a tiny fraction of things, and so it suggests like, are there lots more quasars over there that we're not seeing? And also like are there lots more galaxies that we're not seeing?
You know?
Are we just seeing the brightest things that are over there, and it's a very very dense region of space, chalk filled the galaxies and other crazy stuff. You know, it could be that there's a whole structure of stuff over there we've never seen before.
Right, right, And so they think quasars maybe are related to density of the early universe, like you know, the desert things are and were the more black holes you would have, and so more chances for quasars. Is that the general idea.
That's the general idea. But you know, it's early days and understanding this stuff, so we're at the stage of like, hmm, maybe it works this way, maybe it works that way, And that's sort of the general idea. And one supporting piece of evidence is that when we look out for superclusters, you know, like the big collections of galaxies that are loosely grouped together by gravity, we see superclusters at about the same rate as we see large quasar groups. And so people are like, hmm, that's interesting. Maybe superclusters are made by large quasar groups, or maybe large quasar groups are an indication of where you're later going to get a supercluster.
Oh, I see, it could be the other way around, like you know, having a lot of quasars in one area somehow, you know, attracts more things to you.
Yeah, or it's just an indication that there's already a huge density of mass there. Right If over density creates large quasar groups, then large quasar groups could tell you where those dense spots are. And then later in the formation of the universe they create superclusters. So large quasar groups happen sort of early on, like a few billion years after the universe is formed. Superclusters take a longer time to gather together to race between gravity and the expansion of the universe. So it could be that where we're seeing these large quasar groups out in distant reaches of space at this actual moment right now, there may be superclusters of galaxies there.
Wow. All right, so then those are the large quasar groups. And now they found something even bigger, and so they needed another actective for these quasar groups, which is the huge large quasar group exactly now, Daniel, why didn't they just call it the I don't know, super large or extra large or you know, VENTI, But they call it the Huge Large Quasar Group. Do you know what they were thinking? Have you talked to any of them.
I've not talked to them. I imagine that maybe it was just like an honest moment of excitement, you know, like imagine somebody discovering a large quasar group, realizing how big it is, and then going, oh my gosh, it's huge, and then that name just sticking. It doesn't seem like the kind of name you would, you know, come up with after a committee meets or anything.
Right, Or maybe the lead scientist was named Hugh and which would be very suspicious in my book.
Maybe it's just been a misunderstanding. He meant to name it huge whose large quasar group? And now it's called the Huge.
Right, Or it's like a Danish name, it's like cuga. All right, let's get into what the Huge Large Quasar Group is, and let's talk about how huge it actually is. But first let's take another quick break.
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All right, we're talking about the huge large Quaser group, which is it an actual thing and an actual name. They call it the huge large Quasar group because I guess you know, first we discovered quasar groups, and then they found bigger ones and call them large koasar groups. And then they found I guess a really big one enough to call it huge.
Right, Well, you know, quasars are big, and then they found groups of quasars and they're like, wow, these groups are surprisingly large, so they called them large koasar groups. And then they found this large Koasar group, which is shockingly large. It's the biggest large quoasar group we've ever found, and in fact, it's bigger than anything in the universe is supposed to be.
What do you mean, bigger than anything is supposed to be? How big are things supposed to be?
Yeah, so there's sort of like a maximum size. We think that things in the universe should be sort of allowed to be based on our understanding of the universe and the age of the universe. Einstein had this idea that the universe should be basically smooth, that if you zoom out far enough, you shouldn't be able to notice any difference from place to place, Like everywhere in the universe should be basically the same if you zoom out far enough.
Right, But how does that give you a limit?
Well, it tells you that you shouldn't see really big structures, Like if you zoom out far enough, everything should just be a wash. It should be like the universe is just like static. You shouldn't see like really big effects or you know, large trends or really big objects. So that gives you a limit to like how big something can be, so that you can zoom out and really not see any features anymore. It's like saying, well, the biggest building in the United States is a certain size, and so if you zoom out far enough, you shouldn't be able to make out any buildings anymore.
Oh, I see, be like zooming out of the US and finding bigger and bigger buildings that'll be weird.
Yeah, exactly. It's like zooming out and finding a building that stretches from you know, Kansas to California, and you're like, whoa, that's bigger than any feature I thought there was.
Right right? All right, Well, I guess maybe step us through here. What is this huge large qaser group and how huge is it? And I guess the question is why is it considered a structure in itself? Isn't it just a collection of koisars?
Yeah, that's a great question. So it was found in twenty thirteen by one of the same researchers that previously discovered other large quasar groups. So we sort of an expert in finding these things. And this one has seventy three quasars in it. So the previous record was twenty three quasars. This one just blows it away. It's seventy three quasars all in a big cluster, and it's like four billion light years from end to end. It's like the size of forty thousand milky ways put end to end.
Wow, that's a lot of light years. And so you're saying in the space of four billion light years, there's seventy three galaxies in that space that have quasars in them.
Yeah, exactly, I see.
And are there other galaxies without quasars or is it, like you know, only quasars in galaxies there.
No, there are definitely other galaxies there that don't have quasars, But this is a lot more quasars than you expect per galaxy. And they're clustered together in this sort of interesting, sort of blobby shape, and so it looks like a gravitational structure. Looks like it's sort of held together. But again that's weird because we shouldn't have gravitational structures that are bigger than about a billion and a half light years across.
I see. I guess the question is how do you make the termination that it's in the same gravitational structure, like there's nothing else around this clump or blob of stuff.
Yeah, it's a great question, and it's something that people debate a lot, Like when we look at a supercluster, we ask like is this thing really held together gravitationally or is it stuff that just happens to be near each other? And I think one way to think about it is like what is the future of this object? You know, for example, the universe is expanding and so space is being created everywhere and pulling everything apart. But some objects will survive that, like your body and the solar system, and the reason is that they are gravitationally held together. They will survive this expansion. They will still be an object in a billion years. People don't know, and people argue about whether superclusters are gravitationally bout objects, and what they mean by that is in a billion years, will this thing still be like this or will it be torn apart by dark energy? So really it's about this battle between gravity and dark energy. The question about being a gravitationally about object is really is gravity the dominant force? Is it the thing that's holding it together? Or is it really just going to get torn apart by dark energy?
Mmm?
I see. So there is sort of a sense that they are going to stick together in the future. That's why you call them a structure.
That's the claim. So this guy discovered it, he called it a large quasar group. He said, look, how big this is. It's bigger than anything should be. But it was not universally accepted in the community to be a large quasar group. There were other people said, well, what if it's just a random collection of quasars that aren't sort of like necessarily grouped together into a gravitational structure.
How can they not be Like, do you think they're just like ships passing in the night kind of thing, or they are too big to be held together by gravity.
What would be the alternative, Yeah, the alternative is that it's a random chance that they just happen to be there and they're not held together by gravity. Remember, the reason we're interested in large quasar groups is because we think they might be like indicators of over density. We think they might be a sign that there's an extra stuff there in the universe and that later that will lead to interesting structures like superclusters, et cetera, et cetera. But it might just be Sometimes you get clusters of quasars, like sometimes you find a bunch of diamonds and they're not connected to each other. So there's a debate about whether they are gravitationally bound or not, and that's hard to resolve, you know. The real way to resolve is to sort of watch it for a billion years and see what happens.
I see, like, what could happen. They could like you know, float away, or they could stay clumped together. That's what you mean, Like if they fall away from each other, then they weren't really gravitationally bound. Is that the idea?
Yeah, exactly, And that's the way I think about this whole question of like what is the biggest thing in the universe. You know, you might wonder like why should the biggest thing in the universe be a billion and a half light years across and not two billion or ten billion or whatever. And it's really again about gravity having time to build things. Like you start from the very early universe. Gravity starts to pull stuff together and make stars, It makes galaxies, eventually makes galaxy clusters. Each of these things takes time because gravity is pretty weak and the enormous masses at play here, but it takes a long time for gravity to gather this stuff together. And at the same time, it has an opponent, right, dark energy is spreading everything out, and you can run a simulation of the universe and say, what's the biggest thing you would expect gravity to have formed by now? Like in the future, the biggest thing in the universe could be bigger. Right if dark energy wasn't playing its game, gravity could make things that are three, four or five ten billion light years across. But we don't think it's had time to make anything that big yet, which is why we think the biggest thing in the universe should be a billion and a half light years across. So this thing being four billion light years across, if it is a real thing built by gravity, then we don't know how it.
Was made interesting, Like it could have been just like maybe two small groups that just happened to bump into each other. Is that kind of what you mean, Or like three groups that just happened to cluster.
Yeah, exactly, They're not necessarily one thing. It could just be like three smaller things near each other. And so that's the question. So there were these papers back and forth in astronomy, people saying, oh, look, we found this big thing and violates a deep law of the universe, and somebody else saying, no, I think it's just random. Here's another way to analyze it statistically that shows that it's not actually that unlikely to find that many quasars. And then another paper in response that looked at magnesium and there's absorption of magnesium gas there, which is another indicator of like an overdense region. And so I think the consensus right now is that it is a large quasar group, but we still don't understand how you would make something this big this early in the universe.
I see, and we have a lot of information about it, right, Like you sent you a little picture that shows kind of a three D map of all of these quasars. Like when you look out there into space and you look it towards this huge, large cluster, can you actually like tell individual quas are as apart?
Yeah, you can map these individual quasars. They are really really bright. Now they're really far away, but they're so bright that you can identify them. That's how they were discovered in the first place. You know, they're embedded in many, many other galaxies which are too faint for us to see sometimes at least without dedicated viewing. So we can spot these things because there are like extraordinarily bright lights really really far away, and you can definitely resolve individual ones. And yeah, they've made this three D map of them, Like what does it look like? You know, they're trying to look at this structure and understand, you know, why is it formed this way not that way? Is there any pattern in there?
Right? Yeah? But generally are people pretty sure it's a cluster or what's the prevailing thinking about it is? It a random coincidence or is there an actual, you know, structure that was there from the beginning of time.
It's hard to say. You know, the experimental evidence I think is pretty strong that it's there, and then it's a thing. I think that most astronomers believe that it is a group. But that requires something new. The requires some explanation for how you get something this big. How do you make a building that's from Kansas to California? How do you explain this in the existence of this string of diamonds in the sky. We can't explain why it's there, but we think that it is there, and so that's exciting because it tells us that something could be going on in the early universe that we don't understand.
Mm I see. It's a huge mystery, or at least a very large one.
It's a huge, large mystery. You know. It's the kind of thing where maybe there's some new physics that explains how things that are so far away from each other in the universe that they didn't have time for light to get between them could somehow be connected, right, could somehow have a correlation between them. So it's an opportunity for people to sort of go crazy and think about new ideas to potentially explain the way the universe was formed and the way it expanded in its early days.
Yeah, yeah, because I guess it's crazy if it's four billion light years across, like for one of them to talk to the other one at least gravitationally or through light or anything. I mean, that's home already like a third of the life of the universe exactly.
And now we're talking about like forming a structure. You know, that requires a lot of back and forth. There's paperwork, you know, there's meetings. You can't just get together and call yourself a large quasar.
Group, yeah, or a huge one by that matter. Yeah, I have to say I'm a little bit skeptical. I'm like, seventy three quasars. I mean I was already kind of used to forty twenty seventy three. I don't know if I would qualify that is huge. What do you think, like maybe very large or extra large, but huge? Like, you know, what if you find a thousand, Now, what are you gonna call that one.
The mega large quasar group? I don't know. I think you have to be impressed. We need another digit on that at least something in the triple digits.
To earn the huge monitor exactly. Well, that's the Huge Large Quasar Group, another sign that there are still big mysteries out there, and not just big mysteries, huge mysteries out there in the universe, huge structures, huge objects that we really are still discovering what they're about and what's causing them.
That's right, and we are beginning to explore our universe. We are only gathering a tiny fraction of the light that carries with it evidence for how the universe was made and how it looks now. Most of that is being ignored unless you're counting the plants. And so I hope that as a species, we can build more and more of these eyeballs that let us look deep into the distant universe and map out the structure of our neighborhood and our region and the rest of the universe, and learn from that how our universe came to be and maybe something about its future.
In the meantime, I guess we should keep looking out. Maybe we will find bigger ones, or maybe we will sort of unlock what this huge structure means and what it can tell us about how everything began.
And maybe this time we should be prepared for finding something big, so we come up with a better name for it.
Yeah, we should have started with small, like the small quator group. Like if you discover forum together, I don't know you called it a large one. I guess that's why the English language has so many words. You can always help with bigger adjectives. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, see you next time.
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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