June 13, 2019 • 37 mins
EXTREME UNIVERSE! (Hint: It's not the sun)
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Daniel, you have a pretty wild family, right, Well,
we don't go to raves or anything, if that's what
you mean. I mean you guys like you guys like
the wilderness, right, You go camping a lot. That's true.
We are big fans of camping. We do car camping,
we do backpacking. We even even rented an RV and
driven around Iceland. So yeah, we like to get out
(00:29):
there in the wild US too. We also like to
go camping, and I think mostly good because we just
like being out in nature. You know. I like the campfire,
and really I like being under the stars. I love
how you can see so many more stars at night
when you're camping. Hi, I'm Poor. Hey, I'm a cartoonists
(01:01):
and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm
a particle physicist and an avid amateur camper and also
a physicist. Right you sort of you're an avid physicist
as well. I am an avid physicist. During the day,
I smash particles together at nearly the speed of light
underground in Geneva to try to figure out what is
the universe made out of? What is the smallest particle?
(01:22):
How how do forces actually work? Can we make new
kinds of matter in the laboratory, all sorts of fun stuff.
I like ripping things apart and understanding them from the
ground up. And just to be clear, you are not
right now in a basement in Geneva, right, I can
either confirm nor deny that. Actually I see you may
or may not be in your Swiss bunker. That's right. Well, hey,
quantum Mechanically, I may or may not be anywhere. Right.
(01:43):
I could be sitting in your living room right next
to you right now. You may or may not be.
That's right. I may or may not be by the
end of this podcast. Who knows right? Life? Life is uncertain,
crazy universe, sorry, this crazy, beautiful universe that we live
in where we can't really understand anything. But this is
our podcast in which we try to help you understand everything,
(02:04):
and in particularly we try to take topics and tear
them apart so that you can understand them. That's right.
Welcome to Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production
of iheartrad You. That's right. And every week on this
program we take a topic that we think people are
interested in, something where everybody wants to know the answer,
but maybe it seems a little bit out of reach technically,
or it seems a little bit hard to dig into
(02:25):
and your Google searching is not quite sufficient, and we
try to break it down for you and get you
to somewhere where you can understand it and maybe laugh
along the way. That's right, And today on the podcast
we are going to tackle another subject in our extreme
Universe series, Extreme Universe, Extreme Universe exactly. I'm queuing some
(02:45):
heavy metal guitar riffs in the background there because heavy
metal is so in right now? Are we are we
dating ourselves? It was a little bit too much. Bill
and Ted. Bill and Ted are coming back. Have you
not heard? It's like Bill and Ted escaped the Seniors
Senior Citizen Home or something. I think Kenna Reeves can
pull it off. Maybe we should have an episode on
(03:06):
why Kanu Reeves does not seem to age. He's sort
of like plateaued around forty five. I know, he's like
fifty something and he's a he's a good looking guy.
Him and Paul Rudd, I think is just sort of
hit some plateau. Maybe it's like Hollywood cryogenic freezing or something,
or maybe they've been replaced by robots. Anybody figure that out,
maybe their time travelers. We should have them as guests
on the show. Hey, Kanu, if you happen to be
(03:28):
listening to this episode, come on the show, explain it
all to us. And if you're Paul rudd Um you're
also invited. You can explain kna Reeves to us. You
guys all know each other, right, I'm sure they're hanging
out together listening to our podcast. Well, um, so this
is part of our series of Extremes of the Universe.
So we've had episodes about the biggest thing in the universe,
the emptiest place in the universe. Well, on today's episode,
(03:52):
we will be talking about what is the brightest thing
in the universe, Like the shiniest right, like the one
that would totally most blind you if you stared at
it without any sunglasses. That's right, the sparkliest thing in
the universe, the most glitter covered thing in the universe. Now,
(04:14):
I love our Extreme Universe series because I like that
it reminds me and hope everybody out there listening that
where we live in the universe is unusual. It's it's
not the most anything you know, and that there's whatever
you're thinking about whether it's temperature or brightness or size.
There's always something out there to dwarf everything you thought
you knew. And that's sort of the larger lesson of astronomy,
(04:36):
you know, is that the universe is vast and crazy
and there's always something out there to surprise you. And
so I love this Extreme Universe series because it shows
us how small we are or how dark we are,
or how cold we are, or how slow we are
in the context of the whole universe. Yeah, it's fun
to think that, Um, we're kind of in the middle, right,
(04:57):
We're not, you know, there are they're extremes, and both
directions where we stand right, like, we're not the hottest
or the cold is the brightest or the darkest. You know,
are you saying we're just right like Goldilocks in her porridge?
We are? We are all Goldilocks. That's true. I mean,
I wouldn't want to live in a brighter place or
a darker place, or a hotter place or a colder place.
That's why you're in California, right, That's right. That's why
(05:19):
I'm in southern California where it's nice weather every single day. Um,
but it's cool to learn about it, you know, I
like learning like where is the tallest mountain in the
Solar System? Or where is the hottest spot on Earth?
And these sort of things. It's it's just fun to
know what what's the scale? You know? Oh, man, I
want to listen to those podcasts. Yeah, And I also
want to remind people that tonight today we're gonna be
talking about what is the brightest thing in the universe,
(05:40):
and specifically we're talking about things that emit light, But
there are other ways to see the universe. Right. We
see a little bit of the universe, a tiny fraction
of it that gives off light that just makes itself
visible to us. But there's a huge amount of stuff
going on in the universe that's invisible to us. So
the brightest things in the universe are not even though
necessarily the most active things in the universe, they're just
(06:02):
the things that admit the most light, the most photons, right,
because you could have something that's more powerful or more
energetic that's admitting other kinds of stuff. Yeah, But of
course light is important to us. You know, we're a
visual species. We look at each other, we draw, you know,
it's an important part of how we live, and so
of course it's sort of the beginning of how we
(06:23):
explore space. We just turn our eyes skyword and look,
and then we develop techniques to look deeper and deeper
into space. But the cool thing is that recently astronomy
has developed sort of other kinds of eyes, like other
ways to look at the universe that are not with
light but with like particles or with gravitational waves, and
sort of it's sort of cool to think about humanity
(06:44):
opening different new kinds of eyes and seeing different pictures
of the universe, because every different way you have to
look at the universe gives you a different picture because
different things admit different kinds of radiation, and so it's
it's just it's amazing to think about all the things
we will learn once we developed more and more ways
to look at the universe. So anyway, so today we're
tackling the brightest thing in the universe. So the thing
(07:05):
that gives the most photons per um per I don't
know for what, per per area, per for looking at it,
per per second. We'll talk about some things that give
off sustained flows of photons and other things that are
very brief. They give off just a photons very briefly,
bit of very very bright. But I think we'll be
(07:26):
talking about things that give off the most photons sort
of at a certain distance. You know, that's a good
way to measure brightness. But as a hand and then
as a little bit of a spoiler, will say that
it is not the sun. If you're thinking that maybe
the brightest thing was the sun, um, you're a bit
far off. And as usual, I was curious, what do
people think is the brightest thing in the universe? What
do people have in their minds? And so I ran
(07:47):
around campus at UC Irvine and I asked, folks, what
do you think is the brightest thing in the universe?
Are you hoping some of your students would say you,
Professor Daniel, you are the brightest thing, just like with
what is the hottest thing the universe? I wasn't explicitly
digging for compliments, but I guess I was secretly hoping
maybe somebody would give me one. You have sort of
(08:07):
a response prepared to meaning what me. That's right, Well,
those of you listening, take a second to think about it.
If someone asked you on the street, what is the
brightest thing in the universe. What do you think you
would answer? Here's what people had to say to my eyes.
The brightest thing I have ever stand is the sun.
The sun, the sun, a neutron star, stars, because that's
probably what I'm most familiar with. I don't know, maybe
(08:29):
like a supernova. I'm surprised how many people said the sun. Well,
I think all of these people would have benefited from
your hint that it's not the sun, because as you heard,
they mostly went for the Sun. Maybe it's the brightest
thing in their universe technically right, Yeah, well, you know,
it's the brightest thing you observe mostly. I mean that's
not even actually true, but it's the brightest thing sort
out there in the sky. Yeah, I mean sort of
(08:52):
technically right. I mean it's like they're observable universe. We
all have our little observable universe. What do you mean,
do you think people have their own universe? Is like
my universe? Your universe is no. I guess what I
mean is like they're not observable, like if you have
your physicist with a billion dollar telescope, but you know,
just from what they can see with their eyes. So
this is the thing about brightness right, is that Remember
that brightness falls with distance. You know, some object is
(09:16):
giving off light and that means it's shooting off photons, right,
But as the distance grows from that object, you have
the same number of photons, but they're spread out over
a larger area. Right. And think about a sphere that
surrounds the sun or whatever else is giving off light.
The size of this that sphere, the surface of that
sphere grows with the radius square because the formula for
(09:39):
the surface of a sphere goes like radius squared, and
so the same number of photons cover that sphere. So
as you get further and further away, the parent brightness falls, right,
and it falls like one over distance squared for that
same reason, because the same number of photons are getting
spread over that distance. To the point is something can
be super duper bright, but if it's far away, it
(10:00):
won't feel as bright to you. So, yeah, you can
have a laser pointer that's that feels brighter than the sun, right,
and it would probably hurt. So just we're clear, we're
not advocating that you shoot any light into your eyes.
But why do you think a lot of people said
the sun. Do you think they actually think that's the
brightest thing in the entire universe or the brightest thing
(10:20):
you know. Do you think maybe they were just not
expanding their horizons in your answer, I think there's a
lot of that. I noticed that trend that when I
ask people about something, they tend to think about in
the solar system and not to think more broadly. And
sometimes I'll go to them like they don't know a
thing bigger the whole universe. But and I did that
a couple of times here, but people were still like, no,
the sun. Maybe it's a bit of local pride. You're like, yeah,
(10:43):
our sun is awesome, man, It's so good. It's like
the way people want to believe that their local sports
team is the best. You know, we got the best son.
That's right, our hometown sun is the best son. I
think we all sort of do that. Like if I
ask you, hey, Daniel, how's it going, you don't think
well right now? In alpha centri there say right, you
sort of you assume that I'm asking about you and
(11:03):
your day. Yeah, I mean everybody has a sort of
a locust like a neighborhood they think about um. But
also I think people are just not sure you know
what else is out there and how how different is it?
I was I was imagining that the people might think
that the Sun is not the biggest star, the craziest star,
and they would say, at least you know some other
star out there. And we had we had one guy
who said like a supernova um or a neutron star
(11:26):
or something like that. So maybe they thought, you meant,
what's the brightest thing we can see from earth? Yeah,
that's a good point. That's a good point. Maybe that's
what they thought, and in which case they would be
mostly right. I mean, if you take away all sort
of earth bound lasers, they could fry your eyeballs. It's
true that the sun is the brightest thing you can
see from the earth. So good job, Jorge just got
(11:46):
you guys all extra credit. Good except you already marked
them and sneered at them. Probably I did not sneer anybody.
Thank you very much. I'm eternally grateful that, you see,
students are willing to answer are my questions. I was
just walking around today, in fact, and not a single
person said no to answering my questions. So continued A
(12:06):
plus plus to you, see, I students for being open
to answering crazy questions without any warning from a stranger. Well,
this is a perfect point to take a break. But
(12:28):
you do have a pretty interesting table here that you
sent me, which gives us the brightness of things relative
to the sun. Yeah, because the brightness of things depends
on your distance. I think it's more interesting to answer
the question what is the absolute brightest thing in the universe,
not what is the brightest thing in our sky? Right,
(12:49):
because there could be something super duper bright, but then
it's really far away and it seems dim. But we're interested,
like what is that thing that's making all those photons?
So I thought less define things in terms of their
brightness relative to the sun. And then let's imagine that
we're the same distance from that thing that we are
from the Sun. So we call that an astronomical unit.
It's about ninety three million miles. It's the distance between
(13:11):
the Sun and the Earth. Well, I was thinking that
maybe a good way to think about it is that,
you know, like if you stood outside right now and
it's daylight and you looked at the sun, you would
see the sun. But now if you swap the Sun
with something else, this is this table tells you how
bright that thing would be. Right, That seems like a
totally practical experiment. Yeah, I'm going to delete the Sun
(13:32):
and instantly transport some other crazy object there, and then
I'm gonna look at it. Yeah, you just swapped it out,
So about the sun for something else, and this would
tell this table will tell you how bright that thing is. Yeah,
I'm imagining you have some like app on your phone
where you're like select you know what you'd like at
the center of your solar system, and it's got like
a menu or something, and you're like, m M, let
me replace our sun with a supernova and see what
(13:53):
that feels like. Anything is possible with quantum physics, right,
that's right, let's disrupt quantum physics with this app. So
let's do the exercise. So, now let's say, um, what's um,
what's something that else is bright? Like, let's say we
swapped out the moon for the Sun. How bright would
the moon be? Well, it would be zero because the
moon doesn't give off any light, right, So the moon
(14:14):
actually just reflects light from the from the Sun. Right, Um,
So that if you had no sun and you just
put the moon there, then the whole whole solar system
would be darker zero. All right, But let's say you
wanted to upgrade the Sun, and you're like, let's look
around for the sort of a bigger star, and like,
one example of a bigger star is one of them.
It's called serious A, and it's a pretty serious star.
(14:36):
It doesn't like to make jokes. But if you took
that star and you put it in place of our Sun,
it would be almost thirty times brighter. So wait, what
is this start to like a nearby star or the
one of the brightest stars that we know about. It's
one of the brightest stars in our sky, which is
what I why I picked it. And it's bright mostly
because it's it's sort of nearby. It's not it's not
(14:56):
that bright on its own, as you can tell, it's
only thirty times brighter than our sun. But it's a
cool star because it's part of a binary star system,
which means they're two stars orbiting each other. So that's
why they're serious A. It refers to which one which
one it is. If you look up in the night
sky from Earth, it's one of the brightest stars in
the sky. And so if you if you did the
Jorge exercise and you teleported that star to the center
(15:19):
of our solar system, then you know our days would
be thirty times brighter. You would need SPF something like that. Yeah,
it would be It would be pretty serious. I mean,
I don't know, you know, if life could survive because
the temperature with skyrocket and everything, we get fried. So
not something I recommend. And you know, or you can
(15:39):
think about it another way, like if we replace the
Sun with serious A, then the Earth would have to
be further from the Sun in order to have the
same temperature. Uh, we would have to be thirty times
further away sort of, Well, it have to be square
root of thirty. If you're five times further from the Sun,
then the brightness is one over twenty five, right, So yes,
(16:02):
you have to be like five or five and a
half AU from serious A to have the same amount
of solar activity. And that's what we do. You know,
when we find other star systems and planets around them,
we ask for that star, where is the goldilocks zone?
Where is the habitable zone, the zone where a planet
would have about the same amount of brightness from the
(16:22):
their star as we do from our Sun. And that
depends of course, on the brightness of that star. Well,
that is definitely a serious distance, that's right. But it
turns out the serious is not even really that impressive.
There's a star in than the constellation Orion, for example,
and I'm not even sure how to pronounce it. I
think it's called rigel or rigel Um. And this is
a pretty serious star, right, And if you put this
(16:45):
star in our solar system, it would be thirty three
thousand times brighter than our sun. So Sirius, which was
a much brighter start thirty times, is nothing compared to
this one. Right, This one's thirty three thousand times brighter
than the Sun. That's right, It's easy. It's a sort
of bluish white star. And the other other interesting thing
about it is that the brightness varies a little bit,
(17:06):
like there's something going on inside this star that makes
it like burn hotter sometimes or burned less, burned colder
other times. It's a massive blue super giant and it's
just spewing out photons thirty three thousand times more than
our current sun, which is pretty bright, yeah, exactly, but
it's it's just much bigger, you know. It's one of
these massive super giants. Which means it got more stuff, right,
(17:28):
So it's denser and hotter in the middle, and it's
just this it's a bigger fire burning. You know, like
if you're having a little camp fire and the guys
um one camp side over have like bought ten times
as much firewood and having a big bonfire than Yeah,
there's just gonna be more photons coming out of their
fire than yours because they've got more stuff. In the
same way, this star just has more fuel, so it's
(17:49):
burning more fuel at the same time. It's like a
quantity thing. It's not like there's different you know, physics
going on inside of it. It's just it's just there's
more stuff burning. Yeah, exactly, it's just a bigger pile
of fuel that that that got set on fire. Well,
thirty three thousand sounds pretty bright, brighter than the sun.
It sounds pretty bright. But that's that's not even like
we're not even halfway through the table, right, That's right. Um,
(18:12):
there's another star it's called this one has an awesome name,
Zeta Scorpi. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that correctly, but
it's a hyper giant star in the constellation Scorpius and
this one burns two hundred thousand times brighter than our sun,
So you need two hundred thousand suns just to match
this one star, that's right, exactly. That's incredible to think
(18:35):
of two hundred thousand of our stars of our sun.
That's right or um if you if Earth was orbiting
this thing, then you'd have to be you know, the
square root of two hundred thousand times farther away. That's
like four hundred and fifty times as far away from
this star as Earth is from the Sun in order
to not get fried. Does that mean that sun, that
(18:55):
star is two hundred times heavier also like more massive
or is it just some sort of no, it's actually
that that's fascinating question. It's actually only about thirty five
times more massive than the Sun. What, but it's burning
two hundred thousand times brighter. Yeah, And you know these
suns also have different life cycles, right, and they burn
(19:16):
colder or hotter, or more brighter or or dimmer at
different points in their life cycles, so that couldn't be
part of it. But also when you get a you
get a start that that much bigger, there can be
different physics going on inside. But it's pretty awesome, and
that's why they call it a hyper giant. Plus, it
has a pretty cool name, Zeta Scorpi. Yeah, it is
pretty cool. Um, but even that's not so impressive compared
(19:38):
to the reigning champion of the universe. Right, is it
also a star? It is? Well in terms of stars, right,
we'll get um. In terms of stars, this is the
brightest star in the universe. But it doesn't have a
very cool name. You know, the other ones Serious and Scorpii,
those are pretty cool. This one is called wait for it,
(19:59):
are on six three a one. That's a cool name.
You know. If this was like a Star Wars character,
you know, you can make it work. Wait, I think
I swapped it even I think it's our one three
six a one. Is that still cool? Yeah? I know
that's it's not that one's not as cool. Um this
one comes in. I think their friends just calm our
(20:20):
one our one. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Actually, um Our
one is actually the name of the cafeteria at CERN,
also short for restaurant one, So people are always saying, hey,
I meet you at our one, and and and is
the food also bright and shiny and hot? Um? Yeah,
I don't think the restaurant's cern is famous for its food. Yeah,
that's not the that's not the most impressive thing about
(20:41):
that restaurant. I think the view is better. You can
see them on Blanc. You can see also it's of
the Alps. It's a gorgeous place to eat lunch. But
I hear it's pretty cool because they cooked the food
like where the particles collide, right, isn't that how they
heat up the food? They just they just dip it
down into the ground. Yeah, they're like, hey, the meat
is getting cold, crank up the excel or it or no.
But back to our star are one. It's a three
(21:03):
hundred times as massive as the sun, but it's eight
point five million times brighter than our sun. Wait, so
let me just wrap my head. You would need three
hundred thousands of our sons just to match the size
of it and the weight. But then it's eight million,
three hundred, three hundred sons, not three hundred thousand or
three hundred sons three hundred sons. But it burns eight
(21:27):
point five million times as bright eight million times, so
you would need eight million of our sons just to
match the brightness of this one star. Yeah, it's ridiculous.
I mean, it's like it boggles on mine. I mean,
our son already is super bright. Right, We're glad we're
ninety million miles away from it, and still it can
burn your eyeballs, right, Just that's an incredibly bright source
(21:48):
of light. And then to imagine something eight million times
it can burn eight million eyeballs much more easily. It's
it's hard to get your head around that. And it's
like a sustained fire, right, It's like a it's just
always burning at eight million times better than the sun. Yeah, exactly.
It's not like an explosion or like a supernova. It's
just like it's just like a something that's just burning
(22:09):
super bright. It just keeps going. Yeah, and it's you know,
it's illuminating space all around it. Um. One thing is
it's pretty dangerous, right, because you get too close, you're
gonna get fried. On the other hand, it's like making
things visible. You know, if you were near that solar system,
you could see all sorts of interesting stuff. The rocks
and the planets and all all the stuff around it
are are shining brightly because of that star. But you
(22:29):
need to be pretty far away just just to be
near it, Yeah exactly. You couldn't get too close. Exactly.
It's pretty dangerous thing to visit. So any of you
guys planning to visit are one three six A one.
You know, pack some protection. That's bring eight eight and
a half million bottles of some block. That's right, exactly.
You have to be like three thousand times the distance
(22:52):
from the Earth to the Sun in order to have
the same amount of solar energy. So that's the brightest
star that we know about in the universe, like that
the draining record holder. Yeah, that's right, that's the brightest
star that's been observed. And where is it. It's in
a neighboring galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud. So
this is like a big cluster of stuff out there,
(23:13):
and it's a hundred and sixty three light thousand light
years away, so it's in another galaxy. So it's not
even in our galaxy. Yeah, no, it's not even in
our galaxy. Yeah exactly. So the Milky Way is outstripped
by this other star. And you know, this is fascinating stuff,
and I think from a science point of view, and
you're always interested in the extremes because you're wondering like
what is the hottest or the brightest thing, because we're
(23:34):
trying to understand how these stars work, right, we have
like models for what's going on inside them, and then
they make predictions and they always go out there and
then they discover something that's like twice as crazy or
twice as bright as anything they understood, and it makes
us tweak those models to understand what else could be
happening in those stars to produce so many photons. So
the extremes are really valuable, um scientifically because they show
(23:55):
us like the boundary of what can happen um. And
so these are just stars that we're talking about right now,
right now, right, there are even brighter things in the universe.
Right there's other kinds of things that are brighter than
the brightest stars in the universe. That's right. These stars
are crazy bright. You know, our son is pretty bright.
These other ones totally a strip it. But when it
comes to the record holders, so the brightest things in
(24:18):
the universe, these things are pretty dim alright. So let's
let's get into those things. But first let's take a
quick break. All Right, we're talking about the brightest things
(24:38):
in the universe, and we don't just mean like your kids, Daniel,
which I'm sure very bright and good looking and and
good looking, and they have a great dad apparently. Yeah,
I'd like to meet him someday. My kids are basically
look like my wife. I mean, it's sort of funny
because I have dark eyes and dark hair, and my
(25:01):
wife is Scandinavian, so she has like blue eyes and
blonde hair. And interestingly, our kids both came out blonde
with light colored eyes, So genetics, I don't know, explaining
to me, maybe she just cloned herself in the lab.
She is a biologist. This sounds like a game of
thrown situation. I'm not sure what you're implying over there. Um,
(25:24):
I prefer I'm just saying the results seemed Yes, that's true. Yes,
it's it's been a mystery for a while. Um anyway,
But there are brighter things in the universe than even
the stars and even my family or yours. So we
left it at the brightest star that we know about
in the entire universe, which is our one three six
(25:45):
something something a one, which was eight and a half
million times brighter than our sun, which is mind boggling,
which is amazing. But there's are things that are even
much more brighter than that. Right, that's right, And sort
of counterintuitively, these are things that'sociated with black holes. Right,
black holes you think of immediately it's like, oh, that's
super dark. If you'd ask me what's the darkest thing
(26:05):
in the universe, you'd say black holes. But remember black
holes themselves don't give off much lighter or much radiation.
They're pretty dark, but they're very powerful. They're incredibly strong
sources of gravity, and the things that have not yet
fallen into the black hole, those things can go off
and give off a lot of light. Okay, so the
brightest things in the universe then are paradoxically black holes.
(26:30):
Is that what you're saying? No, not even the brightest,
but some of the bright but brighter than stars. And
so what happens is that, you remember, the black holes
have these things around them, the stuff that has not
yet fallen in. Right. It's like, you know, the toilet
is still flushing, and these things are swirling around about
to go inside, and because of the incredible gravitational energy
of the black hole, it's creating a lot of stress
(26:51):
and strain on this gas and this dust, and so
it ends up emitting a huge amount of radiation. We
cover this in another podcast episode. It's called these are
things are called quasars, and they're so bright in the
night sky that for a long time people didn't even
understand what they could be because they're incredibly bright and
incredibly far away. So people did the math and they're like,
what if it's that bright already and it's super far away,
(27:14):
that means if you got close to it, it would
be mind bogglingly bright. So for a while, people didn't
even believe it until they found other ways to prove
that these things really were happening. Yeah, we talked about
that in an episode. I think the episode was titled
Strange Stars, right, Yeah, exactly the strangest craziest things in
the universe. Yeah, and so we talked about quasars and blazers,
(27:36):
which um sounds like they're popular in the eighties. Exactly,
shoulder pads. What is the biggest shoulder pad in the universe.
That's the whole podcast episode right there. And so if
you're curious about how what they are and how they work,
please check out that podcast. But but I don't think
in that podcast we talked about how actually bright they
are like in comparison to other things. Yeah, exactly, Well,
(27:57):
it's ridiculous. It's hard to even wrap your mind around
these things. Um, these quasars. For example, one of the
brightest quasars we've ever found has a sexy name of
three C two seven three. It's four trillion times brighter
than our son. Like, if you put that thing in
the center of our solar system, we would get fried. Well,
first of all, who names these things? They were all
(28:19):
waiting for you, man, everybody's heard that you're good at
naming things. They actually get to like three hundred and
seventy three of these, and so this one just happened
to be the number of two seventy three. Yeah. You know,
there's just so many things out there you can't name
them all. You just got to give them numbers. Um.
But you know, sometimes one of them gets special and
then he gets a name. And I don't even know
how that works, but this one should deserve a name.
(28:40):
I mean, it's the brightest quasar in the universe, right,
give it a name like Thour or something like Daniel's kids.
That's right. I'd like to I'd like to nomin I'd
like to name this quasar after my own kids. I'm
sure that would fly. No, no, not after your kids.
Just Daniel, Daniel, that sounds like a reference to karate
(29:01):
kid um. But this thing is, I mean, four trillion
times brighter than our son is hard to understand. Remember,
there's like a hundred or two hundred billion stars in
the Milky Way, right, which means that this thing is
brighter than all the stars in the Milky Way by
like a factor of a hundred. And just to be clear,
four trillion means four thousand billion, right, that's right, that's right,
or four million million, not just a million times brighter
(29:23):
than our sun, but like four million and then a
million times over again. Yeah, exactly. And you know at
this point it's basically infinity. I mean, in my head,
I can't understand the difference between trillions and quadrillions and whatever.
It's just all big number insanity. It's just crazy. It's insanity.
It's intensity intensities, man. And so that's a quasar, Right's
giving off a huge amount of radiation super bright. It's
(29:46):
not a star, but it is in the same sense,
sort of in a similar category because it's a huge
amount of gas that's being compressed in generating radiation, but
it's not technically a star. But then remember that some
of these quasars, some of these quasars we call them
blaze ours, because they also emit a beam, right, and
the beam is sort of perpendicular to the plane of
the galaxy. Remember, a lot of these galaxies are sort
(30:08):
of flat, they're swirling disks and the black holes at
the center of it, and blaze oars our galaxies that
emit these huge jets of radiation sort of perpendicular to
the flat plane of the galaxy out from the center, right,
And so that it's you're saying, it's um their energy
and their light is sort of focus, it's concentrating. It's
not just like a light bulb shining in all directions.
(30:29):
Some of these things sort of focus their um light
in a particular kind of beam. Yeah, exactly, it's collimated,
and we don't really even understand the physics of that,
Like how do you take all this radiation and bend
it into one direction. People think it's maybe crazy magnetic fields,
but you know, it's a huge amount of stuff we
don't understand about what's going on in the center of galaxies.
(30:50):
But sometimes one of these beams happens to be pointed
right at us, you know, just by chance. And there's
a lot of galaxies and a lot of quasars, and
they're pointing a lot of different directions, and so one
of these blazers is going to be shining right at us.
And because of some relativistic physics, when it's shining right
at you, the intensity is even higher. And so um,
you can look for um, which blaze are is the
(31:11):
brightest from our point of view, right being pointed at us.
And so there's a blazer. It's name is three CE
four five four point three, right, what a sexy name?
And what is the point three? I don't know what
the point three comes around the third? You know, like
this is the grandson, grandson of the real grand Pappy Blazer.
(31:35):
I don't know. I don't know. I cannot give any
accounting for how they name these things. Um, but this thing,
this monster, is three hundred trillion times brighter than our sun.
You would need three hundred trillion pairs of sunglasses, just
not so that you don't burn your eye out. That's right.
You could get three hundred trillion sunburns in one day
(31:58):
and one millis I can probably exactly. Yeah. Um, so
we're glad that these things are pretty far away because
they're ridiculously bright. I mean, the intensity of light is
just incredible, you know, and so there's there's stuff going
out there in the universe which is insane, you know,
which would fry us and destroy us. Also, you know,
it makes me think about like our energy problems, Like
we're trying to squeeze a little bits out of energy
(32:19):
out of like liquid stored underground, but the amount of
energy that's out there in the universe it's just being
like you know, shot out into space and wasted is incredible. Um.
You know, the scale of our problems are really tiny
in comparison to the stuff that's happening out there. And
so that's that's the king in terms of constant brightness,
Like that blazer is going and it's not going to
(32:40):
stop anytime soon. It's just pumping out photons constantly, at
at the rate that makes our sun look pathetic. Now,
is that still brighter than pointing at least or pointer
in my eye? Or that's still pretty bright? Yeah? I
mean it would be hard to get a laser pointer
that's three trillion times as bright as the sun. So
(33:02):
that would be the brightest, constantly shining thing in the universe.
You're saying, that's right, But sometimes there's a crazy event
in the universe and even that gets out shown by
something else. So you know, sometimes stars go supernova. Right,
this is when they reached the end of their life
and they decided it's not worth it anymore. You know,
I'm done, I want to check out. And they have
(33:24):
this massive explosion where they basically use most of the
rest of their fuel in a very brief moment, and
they can outshine entire galaxies, they can outshine sets of galaxies,
they can even outshine blaze ours. And so there's one
and then they emit these huge things they called gamma
ray bursts. We had a whole podcast episode about them,
these brief pulses of gamma rays. Remember gamma rays are
(33:45):
just light, right, just very high energy light, and so
and so we keep track of these gamma rays and
these gamma ray bursts, and one of them came by,
and this is gamma ray burst zero eight zero three
one nine B right, not to be confused with one
nine A. It's much demercust or ce right, which was
pathetic as a as a sequel. But this one is
(34:07):
the brightest sort of emission we've ever seen ever in
the universe. And this one is twenty two quadrillion times
brighter than our sun. Wow, that sounds like a lot.
How much is how much is a quadrillion? How much
is a quadrillion? He says as he types that into Google.
There's like ten thousand times brighter than the brightest blazer
in the universe. Kind of something something along with that magnetude,
(34:29):
right exactly. But the key is that it didn't last
very long, right, It's a it's a very short burst.
You know, we're talking about things that last seconds. So
it's a pretty dramatic way to go out. You know,
it's some nice fireworks and for a few moments you
outshine the otherwise brightest thing in the universe by a
huge factor. Right, So that's really like your your moment
(34:49):
of fame in the universe. But then it fades. Right,
So you know, if you want the brightest thing ever
is gamma ray burst. If you want something consistency, you
know that's going to win the marathon rather than the sprint,
then then you want to go for blaze rs I
guess it depends on what you mean by brightest, right.
It could be it depends on the time scale. Yeah,
it's an integrated brightness or momentary brightness, right? Or who
(35:10):
can shine the brightest thing into je's eyeball? Right? Yeah,
let's not give our listeners any suggestions here how many
um laser pointers can be shined into an eyeball? At
the same time, there's a whole podcast episode. I'm sure. Yeah,
let's send it to Bill Knight. He knows the answer
to every question. So what is it called g r B?
Is it just some sort of physics GRB stands for
(35:31):
gamma ray burst? Oh, I see, Or it could be
green red blues. That what you're thinking. No, I was.
I was confused for a second. I thought it was
like r GB. No RBG No, that's the Supreme Court justice,
just like what Ruth Baylor Gisbury is the brightest thing
in the universe. She may be the brightest thing on
(35:52):
the Supreme Court. Yeah she is. Actually, she's a She's
a star for sure. All right. So that was a
two were of brightness in the universe, the brightest things
in the entire unit. We went from zero brightness, which
is a black hole to the brightest things that we
know about as human beings. Right, that's right. And so
(36:12):
next time you're out there camping and you're looking up
at the night sky, I remember that there is crazy
stuff out there that's pumping out photons at levels we
could hardly imagine. Most of it seems dim because it's
far away, or because you can't see it because your
neighbor's portlight. But if you got too close, it would
definitely fry you. But you know what to say, It's
better to light one blazer than to curse the darkness.
(36:33):
Who says that you? I think it's my grandmother. Your
grandmother has a lot of funny things. I'd like to
meet this lady. All right, Well, thank you for joining us.
I hope you found that discussion illuminating and shining. I
hope we turned a light on in your mind but
didn't fry your eyeballs with it or your ears. But
(36:54):
thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.
Tune in next time. Thanks very much, and don't forget
if you have a question about what we said, or
you have a suggestion for a topic you'd like to
hear us breakdown please send it to us at feedback
at Daniel and Jorge dot com. If you still have
(37:17):
a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop
us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You
can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel
and Jorge That's one Word, or email us at feedback
at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and
remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a
production of I Heart Radio. From more podcast from my
(37:39):
Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, Daniel, you have a pretty wild family, right, Well,
we don't go to raves or anything, if that's what
you mean. I mean you guys like you guys like
the wilderness, right, You go camping a lot. That's true.
We are big fans of camping. We do car camping,
we do backpacking. We even even rented an RV and
driven around Iceland. So yeah, we like to get out
(00:29):
there in the wild US too. We also like to
go camping, and I think mostly good because we just
like being out in nature. You know. I like the campfire,
and really I like being under the stars. I love
how you can see so many more stars at night
when you're camping. Hi, I'm Poor. Hey, I'm a cartoonists
(01:01):
and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm
a particle physicist and an avid amateur camper and also
a physicist. Right you sort of you're an avid physicist
as well. I am an avid physicist. During the day,
I smash particles together at nearly the speed of light
underground in Geneva to try to figure out what is
the universe made out of? What is the smallest particle?
(01:22):
How how do forces actually work? Can we make new
kinds of matter in the laboratory, all sorts of fun stuff.
I like ripping things apart and understanding them from the
ground up. And just to be clear, you are not
right now in a basement in Geneva, right, I can
either confirm nor deny that. Actually I see you may
or may not be in your Swiss bunker. That's right. Well, hey,
quantum Mechanically, I may or may not be anywhere. Right.
(01:43):
I could be sitting in your living room right next
to you right now. You may or may not be.
That's right. I may or may not be by the
end of this podcast. Who knows right? Life? Life is uncertain,
crazy universe, sorry, this crazy, beautiful universe that we live
in where we can't really understand anything. But this is
our podcast in which we try to help you understand everything,
(02:04):
and in particularly we try to take topics and tear
them apart so that you can understand them. That's right.
Welcome to Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production
of iheartrad You. That's right. And every week on this
program we take a topic that we think people are
interested in, something where everybody wants to know the answer,
but maybe it seems a little bit out of reach technically,
or it seems a little bit hard to dig into
(02:25):
and your Google searching is not quite sufficient, and we
try to break it down for you and get you
to somewhere where you can understand it and maybe laugh
along the way. That's right, And today on the podcast
we are going to tackle another subject in our extreme
Universe series, Extreme Universe, Extreme Universe exactly. I'm queuing some
(02:45):
heavy metal guitar riffs in the background there because heavy
metal is so in right now? Are we are we
dating ourselves? It was a little bit too much. Bill
and Ted. Bill and Ted are coming back. Have you
not heard? It's like Bill and Ted escaped the Seniors
Senior Citizen Home or something. I think Kenna Reeves can
pull it off. Maybe we should have an episode on
(03:06):
why Kanu Reeves does not seem to age. He's sort
of like plateaued around forty five. I know, he's like
fifty something and he's a he's a good looking guy.
Him and Paul Rudd, I think is just sort of
hit some plateau. Maybe it's like Hollywood cryogenic freezing or something,
or maybe they've been replaced by robots. Anybody figure that out,
maybe their time travelers. We should have them as guests
on the show. Hey, Kanu, if you happen to be
(03:28):
listening to this episode, come on the show, explain it
all to us. And if you're Paul rudd Um you're
also invited. You can explain kna Reeves to us. You
guys all know each other, right, I'm sure they're hanging
out together listening to our podcast. Well, um, so this
is part of our series of Extremes of the Universe.
So we've had episodes about the biggest thing in the universe,
the emptiest place in the universe. Well, on today's episode,
(03:52):
we will be talking about what is the brightest thing
in the universe, Like the shiniest right, like the one
that would totally most blind you if you stared at
it without any sunglasses. That's right, the sparkliest thing in
the universe, the most glitter covered thing in the universe. Now,
(04:14):
I love our Extreme Universe series because I like that
it reminds me and hope everybody out there listening that
where we live in the universe is unusual. It's it's
not the most anything you know, and that there's whatever
you're thinking about whether it's temperature or brightness or size.
There's always something out there to dwarf everything you thought
you knew. And that's sort of the larger lesson of astronomy,
(04:36):
you know, is that the universe is vast and crazy
and there's always something out there to surprise you. And
so I love this Extreme Universe series because it shows
us how small we are or how dark we are,
or how cold we are, or how slow we are
in the context of the whole universe. Yeah, it's fun
to think that, Um, we're kind of in the middle, right,
(04:57):
We're not, you know, there are they're extremes, and both
directions where we stand right, like, we're not the hottest
or the cold is the brightest or the darkest. You know,
are you saying we're just right like Goldilocks in her porridge?
We are? We are all Goldilocks. That's true. I mean,
I wouldn't want to live in a brighter place or
a darker place, or a hotter place or a colder place.
That's why you're in California, right, That's right. That's why
(05:19):
I'm in southern California where it's nice weather every single day. Um,
but it's cool to learn about it, you know, I
like learning like where is the tallest mountain in the
Solar System? Or where is the hottest spot on Earth?
And these sort of things. It's it's just fun to
know what what's the scale? You know? Oh, man, I
want to listen to those podcasts. Yeah, And I also
want to remind people that tonight today we're gonna be
talking about what is the brightest thing in the universe,
(05:40):
and specifically we're talking about things that emit light, But
there are other ways to see the universe. Right. We
see a little bit of the universe, a tiny fraction
of it that gives off light that just makes itself
visible to us. But there's a huge amount of stuff
going on in the universe that's invisible to us. So
the brightest things in the universe are not even though
necessarily the most active things in the universe, they're just
(06:02):
the things that admit the most light, the most photons, right,
because you could have something that's more powerful or more
energetic that's admitting other kinds of stuff. Yeah, But of
course light is important to us. You know, we're a
visual species. We look at each other, we draw, you know,
it's an important part of how we live, and so
of course it's sort of the beginning of how we
(06:23):
explore space. We just turn our eyes skyword and look,
and then we develop techniques to look deeper and deeper
into space. But the cool thing is that recently astronomy
has developed sort of other kinds of eyes, like other
ways to look at the universe that are not with
light but with like particles or with gravitational waves, and
sort of it's sort of cool to think about humanity
(06:44):
opening different new kinds of eyes and seeing different pictures
of the universe, because every different way you have to
look at the universe gives you a different picture because
different things admit different kinds of radiation, and so it's
it's just it's amazing to think about all the things
we will learn once we developed more and more ways
to look at the universe. So anyway, so today we're
tackling the brightest thing in the universe. So the thing
(07:05):
that gives the most photons per um per I don't
know for what, per per area, per for looking at it,
per per second. We'll talk about some things that give
off sustained flows of photons and other things that are
very brief. They give off just a photons very briefly,
bit of very very bright. But I think we'll be
(07:26):
talking about things that give off the most photons sort
of at a certain distance. You know, that's a good
way to measure brightness. But as a hand and then
as a little bit of a spoiler, will say that
it is not the sun. If you're thinking that maybe
the brightest thing was the sun, um, you're a bit
far off. And as usual, I was curious, what do
people think is the brightest thing in the universe? What
do people have in their minds? And so I ran
(07:47):
around campus at UC Irvine and I asked, folks, what
do you think is the brightest thing in the universe?
Are you hoping some of your students would say you,
Professor Daniel, you are the brightest thing, just like with
what is the hottest thing the universe? I wasn't explicitly
digging for compliments, but I guess I was secretly hoping
maybe somebody would give me one. You have sort of
(08:07):
a response prepared to meaning what me. That's right, Well,
those of you listening, take a second to think about it.
If someone asked you on the street, what is the
brightest thing in the universe. What do you think you
would answer? Here's what people had to say to my eyes.
The brightest thing I have ever stand is the sun.
The sun, the sun, a neutron star, stars, because that's
probably what I'm most familiar with. I don't know, maybe
(08:29):
like a supernova. I'm surprised how many people said the sun. Well,
I think all of these people would have benefited from
your hint that it's not the sun, because as you heard,
they mostly went for the Sun. Maybe it's the brightest
thing in their universe technically right, Yeah, well, you know,
it's the brightest thing you observe mostly. I mean that's
not even actually true, but it's the brightest thing sort
out there in the sky. Yeah, I mean sort of
(08:52):
technically right. I mean it's like they're observable universe. We
all have our little observable universe. What do you mean,
do you think people have their own universe? Is like
my universe? Your universe is no. I guess what I
mean is like they're not observable, like if you have
your physicist with a billion dollar telescope, but you know,
just from what they can see with their eyes. So
this is the thing about brightness right, is that Remember
that brightness falls with distance. You know, some object is
(09:16):
giving off light and that means it's shooting off photons, right,
But as the distance grows from that object, you have
the same number of photons, but they're spread out over
a larger area. Right. And think about a sphere that
surrounds the sun or whatever else is giving off light.
The size of this that sphere, the surface of that
sphere grows with the radius square because the formula for
(09:39):
the surface of a sphere goes like radius squared, and
so the same number of photons cover that sphere. So
as you get further and further away, the parent brightness falls, right,
and it falls like one over distance squared for that
same reason, because the same number of photons are getting
spread over that distance. To the point is something can
be super duper bright, but if it's far away, it
(10:00):
won't feel as bright to you. So, yeah, you can
have a laser pointer that's that feels brighter than the sun, right,
and it would probably hurt. So just we're clear, we're
not advocating that you shoot any light into your eyes.
But why do you think a lot of people said
the sun. Do you think they actually think that's the
brightest thing in the entire universe or the brightest thing
(10:20):
you know. Do you think maybe they were just not
expanding their horizons in your answer, I think there's a
lot of that. I noticed that trend that when I
ask people about something, they tend to think about in
the solar system and not to think more broadly. And
sometimes I'll go to them like they don't know a
thing bigger the whole universe. But and I did that
a couple of times here, but people were still like, no,
the sun. Maybe it's a bit of local pride. You're like, yeah,
(10:43):
our sun is awesome, man, It's so good. It's like
the way people want to believe that their local sports
team is the best. You know, we got the best son.
That's right, our hometown sun is the best son. I
think we all sort of do that. Like if I
ask you, hey, Daniel, how's it going, you don't think
well right now? In alpha centri there say right, you
sort of you assume that I'm asking about you and
(11:03):
your day. Yeah, I mean everybody has a sort of
a locust like a neighborhood they think about um. But
also I think people are just not sure you know
what else is out there and how how different is it?
I was I was imagining that the people might think
that the Sun is not the biggest star, the craziest star,
and they would say, at least you know some other
star out there. And we had we had one guy
who said like a supernova um or a neutron star
(11:26):
or something like that. So maybe they thought, you meant,
what's the brightest thing we can see from earth? Yeah,
that's a good point. That's a good point. Maybe that's
what they thought, and in which case they would be
mostly right. I mean, if you take away all sort
of earth bound lasers, they could fry your eyeballs. It's
true that the sun is the brightest thing you can
see from the earth. So good job, Jorge just got
(11:46):
you guys all extra credit. Good except you already marked
them and sneered at them. Probably I did not sneer anybody.
Thank you very much. I'm eternally grateful that, you see,
students are willing to answer are my questions. I was
just walking around today, in fact, and not a single
person said no to answering my questions. So continued A
(12:06):
plus plus to you, see, I students for being open
to answering crazy questions without any warning from a stranger. Well,
this is a perfect point to take a break. But
(12:28):
you do have a pretty interesting table here that you
sent me, which gives us the brightness of things relative
to the sun. Yeah, because the brightness of things depends
on your distance. I think it's more interesting to answer
the question what is the absolute brightest thing in the universe,
not what is the brightest thing in our sky? Right,
(12:49):
because there could be something super duper bright, but then
it's really far away and it seems dim. But we're interested,
like what is that thing that's making all those photons?
So I thought less define things in terms of their
brightness relative to the sun. And then let's imagine that
we're the same distance from that thing that we are
from the Sun. So we call that an astronomical unit.
It's about ninety three million miles. It's the distance between
(13:11):
the Sun and the Earth. Well, I was thinking that
maybe a good way to think about it is that,
you know, like if you stood outside right now and
it's daylight and you looked at the sun, you would
see the sun. But now if you swap the Sun
with something else, this is this table tells you how
bright that thing would be. Right, That seems like a
totally practical experiment. Yeah, I'm going to delete the Sun
(13:32):
and instantly transport some other crazy object there, and then
I'm gonna look at it. Yeah, you just swapped it out,
So about the sun for something else, and this would
tell this table will tell you how bright that thing is. Yeah,
I'm imagining you have some like app on your phone
where you're like select you know what you'd like at
the center of your solar system, and it's got like
a menu or something, and you're like, m M, let
me replace our sun with a supernova and see what
(13:53):
that feels like. Anything is possible with quantum physics, right,
that's right, let's disrupt quantum physics with this app. So
let's do the exercise. So, now let's say, um, what's um,
what's something that else is bright? Like, let's say we
swapped out the moon for the Sun. How bright would
the moon be? Well, it would be zero because the
moon doesn't give off any light, right, So the moon
(14:14):
actually just reflects light from the from the Sun. Right, Um,
So that if you had no sun and you just
put the moon there, then the whole whole solar system
would be darker zero. All right, But let's say you
wanted to upgrade the Sun, and you're like, let's look
around for the sort of a bigger star, and like,
one example of a bigger star is one of them.
It's called serious A, and it's a pretty serious star.
(14:36):
It doesn't like to make jokes. But if you took
that star and you put it in place of our Sun,
it would be almost thirty times brighter. So wait, what
is this start to like a nearby star or the
one of the brightest stars that we know about. It's
one of the brightest stars in our sky, which is
what I why I picked it. And it's bright mostly
because it's it's sort of nearby. It's not it's not
(14:56):
that bright on its own, as you can tell, it's
only thirty times brighter than our sun. But it's a
cool star because it's part of a binary star system,
which means they're two stars orbiting each other. So that's
why they're serious A. It refers to which one which
one it is. If you look up in the night
sky from Earth, it's one of the brightest stars in
the sky. And so if you if you did the
Jorge exercise and you teleported that star to the center
(15:19):
of our solar system, then you know our days would
be thirty times brighter. You would need SPF something like that. Yeah,
it would be It would be pretty serious. I mean,
I don't know, you know, if life could survive because
the temperature with skyrocket and everything, we get fried. So
not something I recommend. And you know, or you can
(15:39):
think about it another way, like if we replace the
Sun with serious A, then the Earth would have to
be further from the Sun in order to have the
same temperature. Uh, we would have to be thirty times
further away sort of, Well, it have to be square
root of thirty. If you're five times further from the Sun,
then the brightness is one over twenty five, right, So yes,
(16:02):
you have to be like five or five and a
half AU from serious A to have the same amount
of solar activity. And that's what we do. You know,
when we find other star systems and planets around them,
we ask for that star, where is the goldilocks zone?
Where is the habitable zone, the zone where a planet
would have about the same amount of brightness from the
(16:22):
their star as we do from our Sun. And that
depends of course, on the brightness of that star. Well,
that is definitely a serious distance, that's right. But it
turns out the serious is not even really that impressive.
There's a star in than the constellation Orion, for example,
and I'm not even sure how to pronounce it. I
think it's called rigel or rigel Um. And this is
a pretty serious star, right, And if you put this
(16:45):
star in our solar system, it would be thirty three
thousand times brighter than our sun. So Sirius, which was
a much brighter start thirty times, is nothing compared to
this one. Right, This one's thirty three thousand times brighter
than the Sun. That's right, It's easy. It's a sort
of bluish white star. And the other other interesting thing
about it is that the brightness varies a little bit,
(17:06):
like there's something going on inside this star that makes
it like burn hotter sometimes or burned less, burned colder
other times. It's a massive blue super giant and it's
just spewing out photons thirty three thousand times more than
our current sun, which is pretty bright, yeah, exactly, but
it's it's just much bigger, you know. It's one of
these massive super giants. Which means it got more stuff, right,
(17:28):
So it's denser and hotter in the middle, and it's
just this it's a bigger fire burning. You know, like
if you're having a little camp fire and the guys
um one camp side over have like bought ten times
as much firewood and having a big bonfire than Yeah,
there's just gonna be more photons coming out of their
fire than yours because they've got more stuff. In the
same way, this star just has more fuel, so it's
(17:49):
burning more fuel at the same time. It's like a
quantity thing. It's not like there's different you know, physics
going on inside of it. It's just it's just there's
more stuff burning. Yeah, exactly, it's just a bigger pile
of fuel that that that got set on fire. Well,
thirty three thousand sounds pretty bright, brighter than the sun.
It sounds pretty bright. But that's that's not even like
we're not even halfway through the table, right, That's right. Um,
(18:12):
there's another star it's called this one has an awesome name,
Zeta Scorpi. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that correctly, but
it's a hyper giant star in the constellation Scorpius and
this one burns two hundred thousand times brighter than our sun,
So you need two hundred thousand suns just to match
this one star, that's right, exactly. That's incredible to think
(18:35):
of two hundred thousand of our stars of our sun.
That's right or um if you if Earth was orbiting
this thing, then you'd have to be you know, the
square root of two hundred thousand times farther away. That's
like four hundred and fifty times as far away from
this star as Earth is from the Sun in order
to not get fried. Does that mean that sun, that
(18:55):
star is two hundred times heavier also like more massive
or is it just some sort of no, it's actually
that that's fascinating question. It's actually only about thirty five
times more massive than the Sun. What, but it's burning
two hundred thousand times brighter. Yeah, And you know these
suns also have different life cycles, right, and they burn
(19:16):
colder or hotter, or more brighter or or dimmer at
different points in their life cycles, so that couldn't be
part of it. But also when you get a you
get a start that that much bigger, there can be
different physics going on inside. But it's pretty awesome, and
that's why they call it a hyper giant. Plus, it
has a pretty cool name, Zeta Scorpi. Yeah, it is
pretty cool. Um, but even that's not so impressive compared
(19:38):
to the reigning champion of the universe. Right, is it
also a star? It is? Well in terms of stars, right,
we'll get um. In terms of stars, this is the
brightest star in the universe. But it doesn't have a
very cool name. You know, the other ones Serious and Scorpii,
those are pretty cool. This one is called wait for it,
(19:59):
are on six three a one. That's a cool name.
You know. If this was like a Star Wars character,
you know, you can make it work. Wait, I think
I swapped it even I think it's our one three
six a one. Is that still cool? Yeah? I know
that's it's not that one's not as cool. Um this
one comes in. I think their friends just calm our
(20:20):
one our one. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Actually, um Our
one is actually the name of the cafeteria at CERN,
also short for restaurant one, So people are always saying, hey,
I meet you at our one, and and and is
the food also bright and shiny and hot? Um? Yeah,
I don't think the restaurant's cern is famous for its food. Yeah,
that's not the that's not the most impressive thing about
(20:41):
that restaurant. I think the view is better. You can
see them on Blanc. You can see also it's of
the Alps. It's a gorgeous place to eat lunch. But
I hear it's pretty cool because they cooked the food
like where the particles collide, right, isn't that how they
heat up the food? They just they just dip it
down into the ground. Yeah, they're like, hey, the meat
is getting cold, crank up the excel or it or no.
But back to our star are one. It's a three
(21:03):
hundred times as massive as the sun, but it's eight
point five million times brighter than our sun. Wait, so
let me just wrap my head. You would need three
hundred thousands of our sons just to match the size
of it and the weight. But then it's eight million,
three hundred, three hundred sons, not three hundred thousand or
three hundred sons three hundred sons. But it burns eight
(21:27):
point five million times as bright eight million times, so
you would need eight million of our sons just to
match the brightness of this one star. Yeah, it's ridiculous.
I mean, it's like it boggles on mine. I mean,
our son already is super bright. Right, We're glad we're
ninety million miles away from it, and still it can
burn your eyeballs, right, Just that's an incredibly bright source
(21:48):
of light. And then to imagine something eight million times
it can burn eight million eyeballs much more easily. It's
it's hard to get your head around that. And it's
like a sustained fire, right, It's like a it's just
always burning at eight million times better than the sun. Yeah, exactly.
It's not like an explosion or like a supernova. It's
just like it's just like a something that's just burning
(22:09):
super bright. It just keeps going. Yeah, and it's you know,
it's illuminating space all around it. Um. One thing is
it's pretty dangerous, right, because you get too close, you're
gonna get fried. On the other hand, it's like making
things visible. You know, if you were near that solar system,
you could see all sorts of interesting stuff. The rocks
and the planets and all all the stuff around it
are are shining brightly because of that star. But you
(22:29):
need to be pretty far away just just to be
near it, Yeah exactly. You couldn't get too close. Exactly.
It's pretty dangerous thing to visit. So any of you
guys planning to visit are one three six A one.
You know, pack some protection. That's bring eight eight and
a half million bottles of some block. That's right, exactly.
You have to be like three thousand times the distance
(22:52):
from the Earth to the Sun in order to have
the same amount of solar energy. So that's the brightest
star that we know about in the universe, like that
the draining record holder. Yeah, that's right, that's the brightest
star that's been observed. And where is it. It's in
a neighboring galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud. So
this is like a big cluster of stuff out there,
(23:13):
and it's a hundred and sixty three light thousand light
years away, so it's in another galaxy. So it's not
even in our galaxy. Yeah, no, it's not even in
our galaxy. Yeah exactly. So the Milky Way is outstripped
by this other star. And you know, this is fascinating stuff,
and I think from a science point of view, and
you're always interested in the extremes because you're wondering like
what is the hottest or the brightest thing, because we're
(23:34):
trying to understand how these stars work, right, we have
like models for what's going on inside them, and then
they make predictions and they always go out there and
then they discover something that's like twice as crazy or
twice as bright as anything they understood, and it makes
us tweak those models to understand what else could be
happening in those stars to produce so many photons. So
the extremes are really valuable, um scientifically because they show
(23:55):
us like the boundary of what can happen um. And
so these are just stars that we're talking about right now,
right now, right, there are even brighter things in the universe.
Right there's other kinds of things that are brighter than
the brightest stars in the universe. That's right. These stars
are crazy bright. You know, our son is pretty bright.
These other ones totally a strip it. But when it
comes to the record holders, so the brightest things in
(24:18):
the universe, these things are pretty dim alright. So let's
let's get into those things. But first let's take a
quick break. All Right, we're talking about the brightest things
(24:38):
in the universe, and we don't just mean like your kids, Daniel,
which I'm sure very bright and good looking and and
good looking, and they have a great dad apparently. Yeah,
I'd like to meet him someday. My kids are basically
look like my wife. I mean, it's sort of funny
because I have dark eyes and dark hair, and my
(25:01):
wife is Scandinavian, so she has like blue eyes and
blonde hair. And interestingly, our kids both came out blonde
with light colored eyes, So genetics, I don't know, explaining
to me, maybe she just cloned herself in the lab.
She is a biologist. This sounds like a game of
thrown situation. I'm not sure what you're implying over there. Um,
(25:24):
I prefer I'm just saying the results seemed Yes, that's true. Yes,
it's it's been a mystery for a while. Um anyway,
But there are brighter things in the universe than even
the stars and even my family or yours. So we
left it at the brightest star that we know about
in the entire universe, which is our one three six
(25:45):
something something a one, which was eight and a half
million times brighter than our sun, which is mind boggling,
which is amazing. But there's are things that are even
much more brighter than that. Right, that's right, And sort
of counterintuitively, these are things that'sociated with black holes. Right,
black holes you think of immediately it's like, oh, that's
super dark. If you'd ask me what's the darkest thing
(26:05):
in the universe, you'd say black holes. But remember black
holes themselves don't give off much lighter or much radiation.
They're pretty dark, but they're very powerful. They're incredibly strong
sources of gravity, and the things that have not yet
fallen into the black hole, those things can go off
and give off a lot of light. Okay, so the
brightest things in the universe then are paradoxically black holes.
(26:30):
Is that what you're saying? No, not even the brightest,
but some of the bright but brighter than stars. And
so what happens is that, you remember, the black holes
have these things around them, the stuff that has not
yet fallen in. Right. It's like, you know, the toilet
is still flushing, and these things are swirling around about
to go inside, and because of the incredible gravitational energy
of the black hole, it's creating a lot of stress
(26:51):
and strain on this gas and this dust, and so
it ends up emitting a huge amount of radiation. We
cover this in another podcast episode. It's called these are
things are called quasars, and they're so bright in the
night sky that for a long time people didn't even
understand what they could be because they're incredibly bright and
incredibly far away. So people did the math and they're like,
what if it's that bright already and it's super far away,
(27:14):
that means if you got close to it, it would
be mind bogglingly bright. So for a while, people didn't
even believe it until they found other ways to prove
that these things really were happening. Yeah, we talked about
that in an episode. I think the episode was titled
Strange Stars, right, Yeah, exactly the strangest craziest things in
the universe. Yeah, and so we talked about quasars and blazers,
(27:36):
which um sounds like they're popular in the eighties. Exactly,
shoulder pads. What is the biggest shoulder pad in the universe.
That's the whole podcast episode right there. And so if
you're curious about how what they are and how they work,
please check out that podcast. But but I don't think
in that podcast we talked about how actually bright they
are like in comparison to other things. Yeah, exactly, Well,
(27:57):
it's ridiculous. It's hard to even wrap your mind around
these things. Um, these quasars. For example, one of the
brightest quasars we've ever found has a sexy name of
three C two seven three. It's four trillion times brighter
than our son. Like, if you put that thing in
the center of our solar system, we would get fried. Well,
first of all, who names these things? They were all
(28:19):
waiting for you, man, everybody's heard that you're good at
naming things. They actually get to like three hundred and
seventy three of these, and so this one just happened
to be the number of two seventy three. Yeah. You know,
there's just so many things out there you can't name
them all. You just got to give them numbers. Um.
But you know, sometimes one of them gets special and
then he gets a name. And I don't even know
how that works, but this one should deserve a name.
(28:40):
I mean, it's the brightest quasar in the universe, right,
give it a name like Thour or something like Daniel's kids.
That's right. I'd like to I'd like to nomin I'd
like to name this quasar after my own kids. I'm
sure that would fly. No, no, not after your kids.
Just Daniel, Daniel, that sounds like a reference to karate
(29:01):
kid um. But this thing is, I mean, four trillion
times brighter than our son is hard to understand. Remember,
there's like a hundred or two hundred billion stars in
the Milky Way, right, which means that this thing is
brighter than all the stars in the Milky Way by
like a factor of a hundred. And just to be clear,
four trillion means four thousand billion, right, that's right, that's right,
or four million million, not just a million times brighter
(29:23):
than our sun, but like four million and then a
million times over again. Yeah, exactly. And you know at
this point it's basically infinity. I mean, in my head,
I can't understand the difference between trillions and quadrillions and whatever.
It's just all big number insanity. It's just crazy. It's insanity.
It's intensity intensities, man. And so that's a quasar, Right's
giving off a huge amount of radiation super bright. It's
(29:46):
not a star, but it is in the same sense,
sort of in a similar category because it's a huge
amount of gas that's being compressed in generating radiation, but
it's not technically a star. But then remember that some
of these quasars, some of these quasars we call them
blaze ours, because they also emit a beam, right, and
the beam is sort of perpendicular to the plane of
the galaxy. Remember, a lot of these galaxies are sort
(30:08):
of flat, they're swirling disks and the black holes at
the center of it, and blaze oars our galaxies that
emit these huge jets of radiation sort of perpendicular to
the flat plane of the galaxy out from the center, right,
And so that it's you're saying, it's um their energy
and their light is sort of focus, it's concentrating. It's
not just like a light bulb shining in all directions.
(30:29):
Some of these things sort of focus their um light
in a particular kind of beam. Yeah, exactly, it's collimated,
and we don't really even understand the physics of that,
Like how do you take all this radiation and bend
it into one direction. People think it's maybe crazy magnetic fields,
but you know, it's a huge amount of stuff we
don't understand about what's going on in the center of galaxies.
(30:50):
But sometimes one of these beams happens to be pointed
right at us, you know, just by chance. And there's
a lot of galaxies and a lot of quasars, and
they're pointing a lot of different directions, and so one
of these blazers is going to be shining right at us.
And because of some relativistic physics, when it's shining right
at you, the intensity is even higher. And so um,
you can look for um, which blaze are is the
(31:11):
brightest from our point of view, right being pointed at us.
And so there's a blazer. It's name is three CE
four five four point three, right, what a sexy name?
And what is the point three? I don't know what
the point three comes around the third? You know, like
this is the grandson, grandson of the real grand Pappy Blazer.
(31:35):
I don't know. I don't know. I cannot give any
accounting for how they name these things. Um, but this thing,
this monster, is three hundred trillion times brighter than our sun.
You would need three hundred trillion pairs of sunglasses, just
not so that you don't burn your eye out. That's right.
You could get three hundred trillion sunburns in one day
(31:58):
and one millis I can probably exactly. Yeah. Um, so
we're glad that these things are pretty far away because
they're ridiculously bright. I mean, the intensity of light is
just incredible, you know, and so there's there's stuff going
out there in the universe which is insane, you know,
which would fry us and destroy us. Also, you know,
it makes me think about like our energy problems, Like
we're trying to squeeze a little bits out of energy
(32:19):
out of like liquid stored underground, but the amount of
energy that's out there in the universe it's just being
like you know, shot out into space and wasted is incredible. Um.
You know, the scale of our problems are really tiny
in comparison to the stuff that's happening out there. And
so that's that's the king in terms of constant brightness,
Like that blazer is going and it's not going to
(32:40):
stop anytime soon. It's just pumping out photons constantly, at
at the rate that makes our sun look pathetic. Now,
is that still brighter than pointing at least or pointer
in my eye? Or that's still pretty bright? Yeah? I
mean it would be hard to get a laser pointer
that's three trillion times as bright as the sun. So
(33:02):
that would be the brightest, constantly shining thing in the universe.
You're saying, that's right, But sometimes there's a crazy event
in the universe and even that gets out shown by
something else. So you know, sometimes stars go supernova. Right,
this is when they reached the end of their life
and they decided it's not worth it anymore. You know,
I'm done, I want to check out. And they have
(33:24):
this massive explosion where they basically use most of the
rest of their fuel in a very brief moment, and
they can outshine entire galaxies, they can outshine sets of galaxies,
they can even outshine blaze ours. And so there's one
and then they emit these huge things they called gamma
ray bursts. We had a whole podcast episode about them,
these brief pulses of gamma rays. Remember gamma rays are
(33:45):
just light, right, just very high energy light, and so
and so we keep track of these gamma rays and
these gamma ray bursts, and one of them came by,
and this is gamma ray burst zero eight zero three
one nine B right, not to be confused with one
nine A. It's much demercust or ce right, which was
pathetic as a as a sequel. But this one is
(34:07):
the brightest sort of emission we've ever seen ever in
the universe. And this one is twenty two quadrillion times
brighter than our sun. Wow, that sounds like a lot.
How much is how much is a quadrillion? How much
is a quadrillion? He says as he types that into Google.
There's like ten thousand times brighter than the brightest blazer
in the universe. Kind of something something along with that magnetude,
(34:29):
right exactly. But the key is that it didn't last
very long, right, It's a it's a very short burst.
You know, we're talking about things that last seconds. So
it's a pretty dramatic way to go out. You know,
it's some nice fireworks and for a few moments you
outshine the otherwise brightest thing in the universe by a
huge factor. Right, So that's really like your your moment
(34:49):
of fame in the universe. But then it fades. Right,
So you know, if you want the brightest thing ever
is gamma ray burst. If you want something consistency, you
know that's going to win the marathon rather than the sprint,
then then you want to go for blaze rs I
guess it depends on what you mean by brightest, right.
It could be it depends on the time scale. Yeah,
it's an integrated brightness or momentary brightness, right? Or who
(35:10):
can shine the brightest thing into je's eyeball? Right? Yeah,
let's not give our listeners any suggestions here how many
um laser pointers can be shined into an eyeball? At
the same time, there's a whole podcast episode. I'm sure. Yeah,
let's send it to Bill Knight. He knows the answer
to every question. So what is it called g r B?
Is it just some sort of physics GRB stands for
(35:31):
gamma ray burst? Oh, I see, Or it could be
green red blues. That what you're thinking. No, I was.
I was confused for a second. I thought it was
like r GB. No RBG No, that's the Supreme Court justice,
just like what Ruth Baylor Gisbury is the brightest thing
in the universe. She may be the brightest thing on
(35:52):
the Supreme Court. Yeah she is. Actually, she's a She's
a star for sure. All right. So that was a
two were of brightness in the universe, the brightest things
in the entire unit. We went from zero brightness, which
is a black hole to the brightest things that we
know about as human beings. Right, that's right. And so
(36:12):
next time you're out there camping and you're looking up
at the night sky, I remember that there is crazy
stuff out there that's pumping out photons at levels we
could hardly imagine. Most of it seems dim because it's
far away, or because you can't see it because your
neighbor's portlight. But if you got too close, it would
definitely fry you. But you know what to say, It's
better to light one blazer than to curse the darkness.
(36:33):
Who says that you? I think it's my grandmother. Your
grandmother has a lot of funny things. I'd like to
meet this lady. All right, Well, thank you for joining us.
I hope you found that discussion illuminating and shining. I
hope we turned a light on in your mind but
didn't fry your eyeballs with it or your ears. But
(36:54):
thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.
Tune in next time. Thanks very much, and don't forget
if you have a question about what we said, or
you have a suggestion for a topic you'd like to
hear us breakdown please send it to us at feedback
at Daniel and Jorge dot com. If you still have
(37:17):
a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop
us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You
can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel
and Jorge That's one Word, or email us at feedback
at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and
remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a
production of I Heart Radio. From more podcast from my
(37:39):
Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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