March 10, 2020 • 41 mins
What is the biggest explosion in the universe that mankind has ever witnessed? Find out with Daniel and Jorge.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
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 really action here walking away from an explosion
in slow motion and it looks really cool. You know,
does physics tell us why that is so cool? Physics
(00:31):
is the reason why it's cool. Man, Physics makes things
cool everything except physicist. 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
(00:53):
wife's favorite movie? Yeah Fusion. Yeah, he's a he's an
action here and he's a physicist. Basically, can happen cold Fusion?
Two more slow motion explosions? Does that make you feel funny?
Like to know that your spouse is favorite movie is
about a physicist portrayed by Kenny No. It makes me
feel like she thinks physicists are sexy. I mean I'd
(01:14):
rather that than having a physicist be played by Danny
de Vito, Bie am or hand, a cartoonists and the
(01:35):
creator of PhD Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel Whitson. I'm a
particle physicist and I don't wear a lab coat, 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.
(01:55):
I blew your mind with my amazing coding. Well, look
them to our mind. Explosion of a podcast Daniel and
Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio,
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
(02:16):
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,
(02:38):
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 this 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 billion some giant
(03:01):
explosions happening all the time. Yes, it is 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
(03:21):
amazing to me how much of our lives we spend
without looking up 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 happened in
big explosions, and and sometimes we like to talk about
the biggest things that happened out there in the universe,
(03:42):
the biggest, the loudest, the craziest, the smallest, the quietest,
the wettest, the driest, because they remind us of the scale.
Our cozy little life here on Earth is a very
narrow sli ice of the kind of environments that are
out there in the universe. And so we want to
(04:04):
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 we're the best ways to learn that
is to go do 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
(04:32):
the universe. We've talked about explosions in this podcast before,
you know, like supernovas are big explosions in 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
(04:55):
Kenna Rees walks at away from them precisely? Or Daniel
are annual? Of course, Daniel float away. You know any
lab coat wearing physicists, we are all equally sexy. Do
you wear a lab coats, Daniel? Is that for safety
or just for because you're a c is too high
in your office? I wear lab coat when I'm gonna
(05:15):
do a really complicated calculation, you know, just for protection
because I break something, 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 to a black hole. And you know, I think
(05:36):
a lab coat would be good protection there really to
protect you. Or if my grad student is doing all
the thinking, then I need a lab to protect myself.
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
(05:58):
of our listeners wrote in asking us, can 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 the presses. I mean the the article
just came out last week crowning the new biggest explosion
in the universe? Ye 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
(06:19):
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's a potential for
even bigger ones. I guess you kind of maybe don't
want to see the big explosion in the universe. You
want to see it on a movie screen, but you
don't want to be there unless you have a really
nice lab coat that could protect you. Yeah. But so,
(06:42):
as usual, Daniel was curious to see how many people
had heard of this discovery or even have 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. It is so,
and as you what the biggest explosion in the universe was,
(07:03):
what would you answer? Here's what people had to say.
I think it's a supernova, probably when like really big
things collide like stars, stars. I guess, yeah, just like
normal stars doing their thing. It's when they die, right
or is it is that they collapse when they knew that,
like the star exploding one of the biggest I can
think of, explosion of the star supernova. I think it's
(07:26):
just called something supernova. Maybe starts dying like astronomical Yeah,
then 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 are specifically the convitation of the
wall was created by the plasma admitted by the black hole. Um,
(07:47):
I can't remember exactly where or at the center of
our galaxy or something like that. Maybe your mom, so
it's a nuke alright, A lot of great guesses. Most
people say it's supernovas. Yep, supernova is a popular one.
People have heard of it. The supernova pr team has
done a great job, you know, does it does have
their names super super you know. But you know, hypernovas
(08:09):
are even bigger, and nobody talks about hypernovas that 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 supernovas. Not
a sticky The focus group for supernovas did a better job. Yeah, anyway,
(08:31):
it was a popular answer, and it makes sense because
those are really big explosions. Some people said nuclear weapons
times too, like if you multiplied a new weapon. There
were a couple of people who said nuclear bombs, and
I think they just haven'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
(08:51):
in the universe. Um so I think those folks sort
of had their brains down to Earth. And someone said
black black hole merger very intrigued, 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, lets maybe first talk about you know,
(09:12):
what an explosion means and what does it mean for
something to explode, and how you would help is measure
these things that you measured by like Bruce Willis's or
cano reeves units of cano reeves coolness. The way to
think about an explosion is that it's a very rapid
release of energy, like when you have a nuclear bomb.
(09:32):
What's happening there is that you have an 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 happened
much more slowly, it wouldn't be an explosion. Wi 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.
(09:55):
But the reason you have destruction from an explosion that
these shock waves is subd release 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
(10:17):
got to pick one. Well, what's the standard physics unit
for explosions? The unit of the US in astronomy is
the ERG, which is kind of a funny unit. It
sounds sort of like like a grunt, you know, like
it's gonna sounds like an anomotope the media, you know,
like oh, somebody exploded, or it sort of sounds like
an insult, like God, can you believe the silly thing
(10:38):
that ERG said that that can't even calculate the mass
of a black hole. It sounds like a bad physics
put down or something. It's like what nerds called 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
(10:59):
fly to do a push up. Wow, it's that small.
It's pretty small. Yes, So it's a unit of energy
like jewels, or like jewels per second or jewels per area.
What's the what am I thinking? Jewels is a unit
of energy? Jewels per second would be power, the would
be like watts, and jewels per area would be pressure.
But we're talking about just energy, and so ERG is
(11:19):
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 putting a billion
ergs and like an actual because you pull your back,
the energy you spend in rolling that bowling ball is
the same as if one billion flies simultaneously do one
(11:42):
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 ideas just doesn't seem
like a lot. Let's go with a billion light seconds. Yeah, Well,
(12:04):
it's weird because the URG was officially discontinued as a unit.
People 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
(12:27):
weird word, or or is it kind of like one
of these new millennial you know, text contractions. You know
that 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 urgan, which is the unit of energy, and
it's sort of like the eighteen hundreds and so it's
a bit outdated and it's it's past its prime, but
(12:49):
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 kind of how
much energy comes out of this ex osian or thing
exploding in a second or in at a time, or
just the total energy. Yeah, so you have to integrate
over time, and so for example, if you look at
(13:09):
something that's continuous explosion like our son. 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 pers, that's a lot of
flies doing a lot of push ups every second many
that that is basically ten to the thirty four flies
(13:33):
every second. 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 in the day. Of
course at night it tucks away in terms of this
is a science podcast, so that's spread misinformation, um. And
in a year, you know, it will put out like
ten to the forty one ergs. So that sounds like
(13:55):
a lot, but it's sort of a touch on. So
the bowling balls one billion ergs, the Sun is tend
to the thirty four or 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.
(14:18):
So that's you know, a lot more than individual star,
and it 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 billions of years, over billions of years. But the
(14:39):
whole thing happens over just you know, days, So it's
a pretty incredible explosion. If you take all of the
energy that the Sun makes over billions of years and
compressed 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
(15:01):
concentrating that energy in a short period. That's why supernovas
are so super it's almost like big, you know, concentrating
a billion sons 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 supernoives are not the biggest explosions in the universe.
So even if you take a billion sons at the
(15:23):
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
to be impressed, then astronomers would be underwhelmed. It'd be like, er,
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
(15:45):
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 how how exploding our black hole merger? They
are blowdi oscious. They released like a thousand times as
much energy as supernova. Wait, so you take a thousand
(16:07):
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 a supernova
outshines the galaxy, then a black hole merger totally kind
of obliterates it. Right, Yeah, but you have to compare
(16:28):
how the energy is being released. For a supernova, a
lot of the energy is 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 invisible light. So supernova is super duper bright,
but most of the energy is not visible. For a
black hole merger, almost all of the energy comes out
in invisible forms like creation of gravitational waves, which you
(16:51):
need special devices to even see, so that they are
huge releases of energy but not necessarily bright. Take a
silent killer. It's a dark explosion. There's the title of
our movie. Whoever smelled it? Tilted? Whoever smelt it? Oh,
you're right, dark explosion is not a good name for
(17:12):
a movie. It is an obvious part jip there. But
even at a thousand times bigger than a supernova, a
black hole merger is still not the biggest exclusion in
the universe. It is not it's not even close to
King of the Mountain or Queen of the Castle. All right,
let's get into what is the biggest exclusion in the universe,
(17:32):
and let's talk about this recent discovery of them finding it.
But first let's take a quick break. Okay, Daniel, we're
talking about the biggest explosion in the universe, and we're
(17:54):
not just talking about mel Gibson's career here. And you
told me that supernovas are pretty big, like a billion
sons explosion at ones, 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
(18:15):
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 has 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 sons or tens of sons
(18:37):
or hundreds of sons. But there are other kinds of
black holes, like the kind we see in the center
of our galaxy. They 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 gargantulan and they're basically keen or queen in
(19:00):
every category. They can get pretty crazy massive. So some
black holes are you know, thousands or millions of times
the mass of our sun. 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 and excited, and you can generate incredible amounts
(19:21):
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 produced 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
(19:42):
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? And we're gonna
see one that's a thousand times bigger and then and
then we'll be over. But it's it's incredible, the scale
of these things, the massive these objects, the amount of
energy that's stored in them, the amount of energy that's
(20:04):
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
(20:26):
these supermassive 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. You know, people
out there might be thinking, like, hold on a second,
how do black holes explode or how do black holes
(20:47):
emit radiation? Because they're black, nothing's 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. But we're talking
about this 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
(21:09):
those um Sometimes you go to like a public toilet
and you flush it and it's like tourbo charged. Do
you know what I'm talking about? Like there's just like
freeloaded or something, and you flush and it's like everything
things are sucking down the toilet, but they're also kind
of exploding time. I have no idea what you're talking about,
but that sounds like a perfect analogy. Yes, and especially
(21:31):
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 disc like
(21:52):
on the north and the South pole, are these enormous
jets of matter and radiation that can be like longer
than entire gall e sees. Yeah, I think you maybe
like a good visual is kind of like how you
imagine Saturn the planet to have this ring around it.
The 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 gassing and glowing
(22:14):
and wild as well because it's being sucked into the
giant toilet. Yeah, and the jets create 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. Um, And if it's
(22:37):
pointed right at Earth, then we call it a we
call it a blazer. 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 a ridiculous explosions because
quasars are not explosions. They're just like a constant funneling
(22:59):
of enormal energy like a 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
the top on top of the quazer is like that
wasn't enough. They're also doing stuff on the side, and
that comes from things going on in the accretion disk.
Like you know, there's lumps. Accretion discs aren't totally smooth.
(23:22):
You got like, you know, masses and masses of stars
in their 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 and the explosion than is contained in the
(23:44):
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 of the stuff
that it hit, and you sort of pointed all back.
And so in the case of these um explosions, you
(24:05):
can see the effect of these explosions on like nearby
gas clouds. And for example, you look at a gas
cloud and has like a shell in it. It's like
looks like part of a spear, and you can tell
sort of that sphere points points back to where as
you can reconstruct where the explosion was. You know, it's
like if somebody drops their coffee, you look at the
spill pattern, you can pretty much tell where the coffee hit, right,
(24:27):
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 a 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
(24:47):
of the favorite questions people writing in abound, 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
mcconic knows. Nobody knows, and so we can only imagine.
But if there are dramatic explosions inside the black hole,
(25:08):
they're definitely not getting out. They're not coming out. You
could have way crazier stuff happening inside of the black hole,
but we would never know. Yeah, We'll 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 their whole universe is in
there doing who knows what, and so that's a deep mystery.
(25:31):
She used several ers 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, it'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 it's
gravitational energy is fueling this craziness. Yeah, but it's happening
(25:54):
outside of it, not as part of its existence. It's
definitely passed into the horizon. And that other time we
talk 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,
(26:16):
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 gonna blame it
on the toilet manufacturer, not my not me or my kids.
The expect the lawsuits, folks. So 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
(26:37):
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 are
(26:57):
being blown by this discovery we just made, and people 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 at the beginning stages of trying to understand
what could cause these explosions, Like if we hadn't seen them,
(27:17):
nobody would have predicted them. So so this is where
we are. We we've seen these explosions. We're like, whoa,
these things are even that black hole mergers, and we've
traced them to just supermassive 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
(27:37):
there's 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.
(27:57):
It could additionally have even more energy from its rotation,
and that rotation could be fueling 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.
(28:20):
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. First,
let's take a quick break, all right, Daniel, So take
(28:49):
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
(29:12):
ever detected left huge dent in space. And somebody sent
me this and said, what is going on here? This
was Mike Kerr now um, and he asked me to
explain that, And so I started reading about it, that
it caused a dent in space. It caused a dent
in space. And you know, I'm not a big fan
of a lot of science reporting. It's a hard job
(29:35):
and they have to try to communicate scientific stuff to
the general audience and 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 dent in
space all over the place, Like every massive object bends space,
(29:56):
so your dentic space and I'm dentic space 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. Um 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,
(30:19):
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 galaxy, 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
(30:41):
there's a bunch of gas that sort of spread out
in between them. It must be a huge gas cloud.
It's a huge gas cloud, so, you know, bigger than galaxies.
Absolutely it's a massive scale thing. And about two thousand 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.
(31:03):
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 two thousand sixteen. They didn't think that was
an explosion for one reason is it would have to
(31:24):
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 milky milky ways.
Like how many keen in reeves do you need to
walk away from that explosion? Just one man, There's only one.
(31:48):
He's can handle it. He can do it. He's super
galactic I mean he can handle three John Wick movie,
just one fight scene. I'm sure he can handle this.
And so that was two. 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
(32:08):
its center a super crazy, ridunculous 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
invisible light, and it's called the oats how do you
pronounce this galaxy? Opacas? But you can actually see a
(32:28):
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. They're just sort
of by looking at the mass distribution, and so you know,
most of these black holes have not been directly imaged.
Only a few of them have. That's very difficult. You
remember that came out last year. But we can infer
the mass to the black hole without directly imaging it,
(32:49):
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,
I 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 should be asked for physicists, because that's exactly on
the list of questions people are wondering like this. A
(33:10):
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 galasy just farted and
everyone was just like clear the room for fifteen galaxies
um And so that was two thousand and sixteen. And
the reason it's making news now is that the skepticism
has been sort of overcome because they found a new
(33:32):
piece of evidence to support this like gigantic explosion hypothesis.
What did they find, Well, if they looked inside that
bubble and they looked for really high speed electrons, basically
looked for this stuff doing the exploding, and they found
radio emissions consistent with like really really high speed relativistic electrons,
(33:52):
And that's what you would expect if there was a
huge explosion at these like electrons would get boosted by
those shock waves. Fast moving electrons 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
(34:12):
emitting at very high speeds and 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 shock wave. And those are the two things you
would expect to see if you have an explosion, the
stuff doing the explosion, and then the sort of the
gas being pushed away by those electrons and the shock wave.
So that was like a second piece of information that
(34:33):
really made it seem like, wow, there's something doing some
exploding here. But as you said, it 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
(34:56):
the world, all right, hit us with the Earth's how many?
How many flies are pushing up in this explosion? That's
the size of fifty milky ways. Yes, I remember supernovas
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 ergs.
I don't even know the name for that scientific prefix.
(35:19):
What is it? A million times more than a black
hole merger? Which is which is itself? You know, a
bazillion times more than a supernova. Yeah, it's something like
millions or ten million black hole mergers simultaneously. So this
is this is the biggest explosion anybody has ever seen.
And you know, like I said earlier, this is the
(35:39):
biggest explosion we've seen. We haven't even been looking that long,
and so it's definitely more stuff going out on out there.
Like if every time we look we see something bigger,
that suggested 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 you need our
(36:00):
supermassive 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 they'll probably a new king, you know,
a new new champion explosion crownd every few years from
now on the King of the Herds. 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 the right And so they're trying
(36:23):
to understand like maybe the explosion happened 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 what you mean,
like it only exploded it to one side. We can't
see it on the other side. And it might be
(36:44):
that it did explode in that side, but it didn't
there wasn't gas there to sort of leave this impression,
or that the explosion was like weirdly asymmetric, which would
be really weird because then it would like be a
jet he 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,
(37:06):
exploded sort of an angle that's um, not exactly towards
us and not exactly perpendicular, but in the direction of
a big cloud of gas that's 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, um,
and absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. So we
(37:28):
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 Alian 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. It doesn't matter how many
(37:51):
lab coats they were wearing. They are obliterated. Oh man,
So the big mystery nobody knows what could have cost
is or how I could have been so big, and
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
(38:13):
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.
(38:34):
It 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, or why
is the explosion still going on? Or our more explosion
is going to come from this black hole? We don't know,
but it makes people excited to monitor other supermassive black
(38:56):
holes around here. And also people should not be worried
because this happened three 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 Offecially, the new biggest explosion in the
(39:17):
universe is um, what's the name again, opie Ocus. Congratulations
to the Opiecus galaxy. And maybe in your press release
you shouldn't include some information about how to pronounce your name. Yeah,
that would that would be helpful. Um. And so, but
it's still a giant mystery, it seems. It seems like, um,
(39:38):
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 powerful, they are the brightest, they are
the darkest, they make the biggest explosions. They're sort of
hogging all the all the champion categories in sort of
the universe extremes until somebody finds hyper black holes, lacquer holes,
(40:01):
the black holes. They seem to break all the rules.
They hold secrets of the universe, um their incredible objects,
and I hope that one day we get to explore
one from a safe Give me somebody listening to this podcast,
one of our young listeners might be the one who
discovered these things, or goes there even yeah, or just
cracks open the secret to make black holes work and
(40:23):
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 hundred two 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 giants exploding things that are having out there,
(40:46):
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
(41:09):
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 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
Daniel and Jorge That's one Word, or email us at
Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening,
and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from
(41:31):
My Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah.
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 really action here walking away from an explosion
in slow motion and it looks really cool. You know,
does physics tell us why that is so cool? Physics
(00:31):
is the reason why it's cool. Man, Physics makes things
cool everything except physicist. 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
(00:53):
wife's favorite movie? Yeah Fusion. Yeah, he's a he's an
action here and he's a physicist. Basically, can happen cold Fusion?
Two more slow motion explosions? Does that make you feel funny?
Like to know that your spouse is favorite movie is
about a physicist portrayed by Kenny No. It makes me
feel like she thinks physicists are sexy. I mean I'd
(01:14):
rather that than having a physicist be played by Danny
de Vito, Bie am or hand, a cartoonists and the
(01:35):
creator of PhD Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel Whitson. I'm a
particle physicist and I don't wear a lab coat, 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.
(01:55):
I blew your mind with my amazing coding. Well, look
them to our mind. Explosion of a podcast Daniel and
Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio,
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
(02:16):
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,
(02:38):
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 this 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 billion some giant
(03:01):
explosions happening all the time. Yes, it is 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
(03:21):
amazing to me how much of our lives we spend
without looking up 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 happened in
big explosions, and and sometimes we like to talk about
the biggest things that happened out there in the universe,
(03:42):
the biggest, the loudest, the craziest, the smallest, the quietest,
the wettest, the driest, because they remind us of the scale.
Our cozy little life here on Earth is a very
narrow sli ice of the kind of environments that are
out there in the universe. And so we want to
(04:04):
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 we're the best ways to learn that
is to go do 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
(04:32):
the universe. We've talked about explosions in this podcast before,
you know, like supernovas are big explosions in 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
(04:55):
Kenna Rees walks at away from them precisely? Or Daniel
are annual? Of course, Daniel float away. You know any
lab coat wearing physicists, we are all equally sexy. Do
you wear a lab coats, Daniel? Is that for safety
or just for because you're a c is too high
in your office? I wear lab coat when I'm gonna
(05:15):
do a really complicated calculation, you know, just for protection
because I break something, 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 to a black hole. And you know, I think
(05:36):
a lab coat would be good protection there really to
protect you. Or if my grad student is doing all
the thinking, then I need a lab to protect myself.
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
(05:58):
of our listeners wrote in asking us, can 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 the presses. I mean the the article
just came out last week crowning the new biggest explosion
in the universe? Ye 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
(06:19):
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's a potential for
even bigger ones. I guess you kind of maybe don't
want to see the big explosion in the universe. You
want to see it on a movie screen, but you
don't want to be there unless you have a really
nice lab coat that could protect you. Yeah. But so,
(06:42):
as usual, Daniel was curious to see how many people
had heard of this discovery or even have 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. It is so,
and as you what the biggest explosion in the universe was,
(07:03):
what would you answer? Here's what people had to say.
I think it's a supernova, probably when like really big
things collide like stars, stars. I guess, yeah, just like
normal stars doing their thing. It's when they die, right
or is it is that they collapse when they knew that,
like the star exploding one of the biggest I can
think of, explosion of the star supernova. I think it's
(07:26):
just called something supernova. Maybe starts dying like astronomical Yeah,
then 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 are specifically the convitation of the
wall was created by the plasma admitted by the black hole. Um,
(07:47):
I can't remember exactly where or at the center of
our galaxy or something like that. Maybe your mom, so
it's a nuke alright, A lot of great guesses. Most
people say it's supernovas. Yep, supernova is a popular one.
People have heard of it. The supernova pr team has
done a great job, you know, does it does have
their names super super you know. But you know, hypernovas
(08:09):
are even bigger, and nobody talks about hypernovas that 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 supernovas. Not
a sticky The focus group for supernovas did a better job. Yeah, anyway,
(08:31):
it was a popular answer, and it makes sense because
those are really big explosions. Some people said nuclear weapons
times too, like if you multiplied a new weapon. There
were a couple of people who said nuclear bombs, and
I think they just haven'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
(08:51):
in the universe. Um so I think those folks sort
of had their brains down to Earth. And someone said
black black hole merger very intrigued, 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, lets maybe first talk about you know,
(09:12):
what an explosion means and what does it mean for
something to explode, and how you would help is measure
these things that you measured by like Bruce Willis's or
cano reeves units of cano reeves coolness. The way to
think about an explosion is that it's a very rapid
release of energy, like when you have a nuclear bomb.
(09:32):
What's happening there is that you have an 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 happened
much more slowly, it wouldn't be an explosion. Wi 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.
(09:55):
But the reason you have destruction from an explosion that
these shock waves is subd release 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
(10:17):
got to pick one. Well, what's the standard physics unit
for explosions? The unit of the US in astronomy is
the ERG, which is kind of a funny unit. It
sounds sort of like like a grunt, you know, like
it's gonna sounds like an anomotope the media, you know,
like oh, somebody exploded, or it sort of sounds like
an insult, like God, can you believe the silly thing
(10:38):
that ERG said that that can't even calculate the mass
of a black hole. It sounds like a bad physics
put down or something. It's like what nerds called 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
(10:59):
fly to do a push up. Wow, it's that small.
It's pretty small. Yes, So it's a unit of energy
like jewels, or like jewels per second or jewels per area.
What's the what am I thinking? Jewels is a unit
of energy? Jewels per second would be power, the would
be like watts, and jewels per area would be pressure.
But we're talking about just energy, and so ERG is
(11:19):
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 putting a billion
ergs and like an actual because you pull your back,
the energy you spend in rolling that bowling ball is
the same as if one billion flies simultaneously do one
(11:42):
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 ideas just doesn't seem
like a lot. Let's go with a billion light seconds. Yeah, Well,
(12:04):
it's weird because the URG was officially discontinued as a unit.
People 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
(12:27):
weird word, or or is it kind of like one
of these new millennial you know, text contractions. You know
that 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 urgan, which is the unit of energy, and
it's sort of like the eighteen hundreds and so it's
a bit outdated and it's it's past its prime, but
(12:49):
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 kind of how
much energy comes out of this ex osian or thing
exploding in a second or in at a time, or
just the total energy. Yeah, so you have to integrate
over time, and so for example, if you look at
(13:09):
something that's continuous explosion like our son. 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 pers, that's a lot of
flies doing a lot of push ups every second many
that that is basically ten to the thirty four flies
(13:33):
every second. 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 in the day. Of
course at night it tucks away in terms of this
is a science podcast, so that's spread misinformation, um. And
in a year, you know, it will put out like
ten to the forty one ergs. So that sounds like
(13:55):
a lot, but it's sort of a touch on. So
the bowling balls one billion ergs, the Sun is tend
to the thirty four or 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.
(14:18):
So that's you know, a lot more than individual star,
and it 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 billions of years, over billions of years. But the
(14:39):
whole thing happens over just you know, days, So it's
a pretty incredible explosion. If you take all of the
energy that the Sun makes over billions of years and
compressed 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
(15:01):
concentrating that energy in a short period. That's why supernovas
are so super it's almost like big, you know, concentrating
a billion sons 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 supernoives are not the biggest explosions in the universe.
So even if you take a billion sons at the
(15:23):
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
to be impressed, then astronomers would be underwhelmed. It'd be like, er,
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
(15:45):
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 how how exploding our black hole merger? They
are blowdi oscious. They released like a thousand times as
much energy as supernova. Wait, so you take a thousand
(16:07):
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 a supernova
outshines the galaxy, then a black hole merger totally kind
of obliterates it. Right, Yeah, but you have to compare
(16:28):
how the energy is being released. For a supernova, a
lot of the energy is 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 invisible light. So supernova is super duper bright,
but most of the energy is not visible. For a
black hole merger, almost all of the energy comes out
in invisible forms like creation of gravitational waves, which you
(16:51):
need special devices to even see, so that they are
huge releases of energy but not necessarily bright. Take a
silent killer. It's a dark explosion. There's the title of
our movie. Whoever smelled it? Tilted? Whoever smelt it? Oh,
you're right, dark explosion is not a good name for
(17:12):
a movie. It is an obvious part jip there. But
even at a thousand times bigger than a supernova, a
black hole merger is still not the biggest exclusion in
the universe. It is not it's not even close to
King of the Mountain or Queen of the Castle. All right,
let's get into what is the biggest exclusion in the universe,
(17:32):
and let's talk about this recent discovery of them finding it.
But first let's take a quick break. Okay, Daniel, we're
talking about the biggest explosion in the universe, and we're
(17:54):
not just talking about mel Gibson's career here. And you
told me that supernovas are pretty big, like a billion
sons explosion at ones, 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
(18:15):
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 has 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 sons or tens of sons
(18:37):
or hundreds of sons. But there are other kinds of
black holes, like the kind we see in the center
of our galaxy. They 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 gargantulan and they're basically keen or queen in
(19:00):
every category. They can get pretty crazy massive. So some
black holes are you know, thousands or millions of times
the mass of our sun. 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 and excited, and you can generate incredible amounts
(19:21):
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 produced 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
(19:42):
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? And we're gonna
see one that's a thousand times bigger and then and
then we'll be over. But it's it's incredible, the scale
of these things, the massive these objects, the amount of
energy that's stored in them, the amount of energy that's
(20:04):
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
(20:26):
these supermassive 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. You know, people
out there might be thinking, like, hold on a second,
how do black holes explode or how do black holes
(20:47):
emit radiation? Because they're black, nothing's 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. But we're talking
about this 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
(21:09):
those um Sometimes you go to like a public toilet
and you flush it and it's like tourbo charged. Do
you know what I'm talking about? Like there's just like
freeloaded or something, and you flush and it's like everything
things are sucking down the toilet, but they're also kind
of exploding time. I have no idea what you're talking about,
but that sounds like a perfect analogy. Yes, and especially
(21:31):
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 disc like
(21:52):
on the north and the South pole, are these enormous
jets of matter and radiation that can be like longer
than entire gall e sees. Yeah, I think you maybe
like a good visual is kind of like how you
imagine Saturn the planet to have this ring around it.
The 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 gassing and glowing
(22:14):
and wild as well because it's being sucked into the
giant toilet. Yeah, and the jets create 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. Um, And if it's
(22:37):
pointed right at Earth, then we call it a we
call it a blazer. 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 a ridiculous explosions because
quasars are not explosions. They're just like a constant funneling
(22:59):
of enormal energy like a 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
the top on top of the quazer is like that
wasn't enough. They're also doing stuff on the side, and
that comes from things going on in the accretion disk.
Like you know, there's lumps. Accretion discs aren't totally smooth.
(23:22):
You got like, you know, masses and masses of stars
in their 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 and the explosion than is contained in the
(23:44):
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 of the stuff
that it hit, and you sort of pointed all back.
And so in the case of these um explosions, you
(24:05):
can see the effect of these explosions on like nearby
gas clouds. And for example, you look at a gas
cloud and has like a shell in it. It's like
looks like part of a spear, and you can tell
sort of that sphere points points back to where as
you can reconstruct where the explosion was. You know, it's
like if somebody drops their coffee, you look at the
spill pattern, you can pretty much tell where the coffee hit, right,
(24:27):
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 a 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
(24:47):
of the favorite questions people writing in abound, 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
mcconic knows. Nobody knows, and so we can only imagine.
But if there are dramatic explosions inside the black hole,
(25:08):
they're definitely not getting out. They're not coming out. You
could have way crazier stuff happening inside of the black hole,
but we would never know. Yeah, We'll 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 their whole universe is in
there doing who knows what, and so that's a deep mystery.
(25:31):
She used several ers 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, it'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 it's
gravitational energy is fueling this craziness. Yeah, but it's happening
(25:54):
outside of it, not as part of its existence. It's
definitely passed into the horizon. And that other time we
talk 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,
(26:16):
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 gonna blame it
on the toilet manufacturer, not my not me or my kids.
The expect the lawsuits, folks. So 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
(26:37):
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 are
(26:57):
being blown by this discovery we just made, and people 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 at the beginning stages of trying to understand
what could cause these explosions, Like if we hadn't seen them,
(27:17):
nobody would have predicted them. So so this is where
we are. We we've seen these explosions. We're like, whoa,
these things are even that black hole mergers, and we've
traced them to just supermassive 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
(27:37):
there's 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.
(27:57):
It could additionally have even more energy from its rotation,
and that rotation could be fueling 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.
(28:20):
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. First,
let's take a quick break, all right, Daniel, So take
(28:49):
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
(29:12):
ever detected left huge dent in space. And somebody sent
me this and said, what is going on here? This
was Mike Kerr now um, and he asked me to
explain that, And so I started reading about it, that
it caused a dent in space. It caused a dent
in space. And you know, I'm not a big fan
of a lot of science reporting. It's a hard job
(29:35):
and they have to try to communicate scientific stuff to
the general audience and 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 dent in
space all over the place, Like every massive object bends space,
(29:56):
so your dentic space and I'm dentic space 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. Um 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,
(30:19):
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 galaxy, 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
(30:41):
there's a bunch of gas that sort of spread out
in between them. It must be a huge gas cloud.
It's a huge gas cloud, so, you know, bigger than galaxies.
Absolutely it's a massive scale thing. And about two thousand 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.
(31:03):
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 two thousand sixteen. They didn't think that was
an explosion for one reason is it would have to
(31:24):
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 milky milky ways.
Like how many keen in reeves do you need to
walk away from that explosion? Just one man, There's only one.
(31:48):
He's can handle it. He can do it. He's super
galactic I mean he can handle three John Wick movie,
just one fight scene. I'm sure he can handle this.
And so that was two. 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
(32:08):
its center a super crazy, ridunculous 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
invisible light, and it's called the oats how do you
pronounce this galaxy? Opacas? But you can actually see a
(32:28):
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. They're just sort
of by looking at the mass distribution, and so you know,
most of these black holes have not been directly imaged.
Only a few of them have. That's very difficult. You
remember that came out last year. But we can infer
the mass to the black hole without directly imaging it,
(32:49):
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,
I 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 should be asked for physicists, because that's exactly on
the list of questions people are wondering like this. A
(33:10):
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 galasy just farted and
everyone was just like clear the room for fifteen galaxies
um And so that was two thousand and sixteen. And
the reason it's making news now is that the skepticism
has been sort of overcome because they found a new
(33:32):
piece of evidence to support this like gigantic explosion hypothesis.
What did they find, Well, if they looked inside that
bubble and they looked for really high speed electrons, basically
looked for this stuff doing the exploding, and they found
radio emissions consistent with like really really high speed relativistic electrons,
(33:52):
And that's what you would expect if there was a
huge explosion at these like electrons would get boosted by
those shock waves. Fast moving electrons 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
(34:12):
emitting at very high speeds and 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 shock wave. And those are the two things you
would expect to see if you have an explosion, the
stuff doing the explosion, and then the sort of the
gas being pushed away by those electrons and the shock wave.
So that was like a second piece of information that
(34:33):
really made it seem like, wow, there's something doing some
exploding here. But as you said, it 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
(34:56):
the world, all right, hit us with the Earth's how many?
How many flies are pushing up in this explosion? That's
the size of fifty milky ways. Yes, I remember supernovas
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 ergs.
I don't even know the name for that scientific prefix.
(35:19):
What is it? A million times more than a black
hole merger? Which is which is itself? You know, a
bazillion times more than a supernova. Yeah, it's something like
millions or ten million black hole mergers simultaneously. So this
is this is the biggest explosion anybody has ever seen.
And you know, like I said earlier, this is the
(35:39):
biggest explosion we've seen. We haven't even been looking that long,
and so it's definitely more stuff going out on out there.
Like if every time we look we see something bigger,
that suggested 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 you need our
(36:00):
supermassive 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 they'll probably a new king, you know,
a new new champion explosion crownd every few years from
now on the King of the Herds. 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 the right And so they're trying
(36:23):
to understand like maybe the explosion happened 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 what you mean,
like it only exploded it to one side. We can't
see it on the other side. And it might be
(36:44):
that it did explode in that side, but it didn't
there wasn't gas there to sort of leave this impression,
or that the explosion was like weirdly asymmetric, which would
be really weird because then it would like be a
jet he 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,
(37:06):
exploded sort of an angle that's um, not exactly towards
us and not exactly perpendicular, but in the direction of
a big cloud of gas that's 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, um,
and absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. So we
(37:28):
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 Alian 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. It doesn't matter how many
(37:51):
lab coats they were wearing. They are obliterated. Oh man,
So the big mystery nobody knows what could have cost
is or how I could have been so big, and
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
(38:13):
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.
(38:34):
It 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, or why
is the explosion still going on? Or our more explosion
is going to come from this black hole? We don't know,
but it makes people excited to monitor other supermassive black
(38:56):
holes around here. And also people should not be worried
because this happened three 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 Offecially, the new biggest explosion in the
(39:17):
universe is um, what's the name again, opie Ocus. Congratulations
to the Opiecus galaxy. And maybe in your press release
you shouldn't include some information about how to pronounce your name. Yeah,
that would that would be helpful. Um. And so, but
it's still a giant mystery, it seems. It seems like, um,
(39:38):
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 powerful, they are the brightest, they are
the darkest, they make the biggest explosions. They're sort of
hogging all the all the champion categories in sort of
the universe extremes until somebody finds hyper black holes, lacquer holes,
(40:01):
the black holes. They seem to break all the rules.
They hold secrets of the universe, um their incredible objects,
and I hope that one day we get to explore
one from a safe Give me somebody listening to this podcast,
one of our young listeners might be the one who
discovered these things, or goes there even yeah, or just
cracks open the secret to make black holes work and
(40:23):
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 hundred two 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 giants exploding things that are having out there,
(40:46):
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
(41:09):
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 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
Daniel and Jorge That's one Word, or email us at
Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening,
and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from
(41:31):
My Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah.
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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