March 30, 2021 • 41 mins
Daniel and Jorge talk about quasars, large groups of quasars and HUGE LARGE groups of quasars!
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Daniel, I've been wondering something about the large Hadron Collider. Oh,
that's right up, my alley. Is it about crazy new particles?
Not quite? Is it about making black holes? I am
concerned about that, but not this time? Alright, shoot, then
what's your question? All right? Why did you call it
the large hadron Collider? Why not the you know, modestly
(00:29):
sized hadron collider, because it's pretty large in that case,
why not the huge hadron Collider or the ginormous hadron Collider.
That's the plan for the next one. Man, you gotta
leave something in the tank for the next time around.
But when does it end? Daniel? Hopefully never. Hi'm Jorgemming,
(01:04):
cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics. Hi. I'm Daniel.
I'm a particle physicist and I hope to do experiments
one day at the very large hadron collider, not just
the huge heatherron collider. Do you plan to retire before
the ginormous hadron Collider? I want to work on the
ludicrously sized hadron Collider. What's the acronym for that one?
(01:26):
I don't know, but the v LHC is an actual thing. Really,
that's like in the official name it really is the
very Large Hadron Collider. The plan is to put it underground.
It's a hundred kilometer radius ring, and that's actually what
it's called. I guess there's a you know, president for that.
There's a very large array in New Mexico right exactly exactly,
so you can just after that, just keep adding varies
(01:48):
to it. I suppose the very very large Hadron Collider,
the super duper large Hadron Collider. But welcome to our
super duper podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a
production of our radiot in which we tackle things which
are very very large and hard to understand and very
very small and hard to grapple with. We talk about
(02:08):
all the incredible and amazing things and our universe, all
the open questions that scientists are puzzling over all the
incredible things that we have learned, and explain all of
them to you, sometimes with a very large banana joke,
because there is a lot out there in the universe
to explore and for us to see. But I guess
the problem is that we are stuck in a small
corner of the milk Way, which isn't a small corner
(02:31):
of the universe, and so we need some pretty big
telescopes and instruments to see what's out there in this
vast cosmos. That's right, we are exploring the universe, but
we're doing it just with our eyeballs. Imagine you wanted
to know what was all over the Earth, but you
were sort of stuck in a lighthouse and all you
could do is look out the window with really powerful
(02:51):
telescopes and trying to see as far as you could.
So that's where we are as a species. We can't
yet travel to the stars, but we can wait for
information from the stars to come here to Earth and
give us clues because there is a lot of information
coming at us from everywhere, right and I meaning the
universe is basically bathing us and information and stories about
what happened and how things came to be and why
(03:14):
things are the way they are. And it's really up
to us to figure out how to decode this information
and how to read it and how to figure out
what it means. Yeah, and it's frustrating to me sometimes
that we're not doing more to capture that information. You know,
to see deep into the universe, you need to look
at really faint signals of far away galaxies, and those
things can't be seen just by your eye. You need
(03:35):
like specialized telescopes, and so far humanity has only built
a few of them, which means that most of the
information about the secrets and the structure of the universe
it's just sort of like landing on Earth and getting
absorbed by, you know, plants and rocks and stuff. I'm
sure the plants are getting some pretty good information about
the universe, probably that maybe they've already figured things out, Daniel,
and we thought to ask them. Oh my god, that
(03:56):
sounds like a really fun science fiction movie where we
discovered that plants are actually a globe sized telescope and
that they're doing their own astronomy. Wow. Well, I thought
you were a couch potato anyways, Daniel, wouldn't that count
as a plant scientists astrophysicists. Well, that means that couch
potatoes are actually doing work right, because they're sitting there
absorbing information from the universe. Yeah, and so I guess
(04:18):
the more we want to look out into the universe,
the bigger the telescope we need, and the more we
want to probe into the particulars of matter and what
everything is made out of. The more powerful and bigger
microscopes you need, yeah, exactly. And as we peer deeper
into the universe with our bigger and bigger telescopes, were
constantly finding new stuff out there, Weird things we can't understand,
(04:41):
things that don't seem to make sense, things that surprise
us about what's out there in the universe. But that's
what exploration is all about. You don't look out into
the universe just to have your ideas confirmed. You look
out there to be surprised, to be shocked, to have
your mind blown by the kinds of crazy stuff that
we see. Yeah, because it seems like we're discovering at
the universe is bigger and bigger and bigger than we expected.
(05:03):
I mean, we initially thought that was just the Earth,
and then the Sun and the Moon and the Solar System,
and now we're up to you know, bubbles of gigantic
galaxy clusters. Things get pretty big out there. Things get
pretty big out there. And one question we ask is
like how big do things get? What is the biggest
thing in the universe? And it feels like every year
(05:25):
astronomy crowns a new biggest thing in the universe. I
feel like that should have like stadium echo sound effects
their biggest thing in the universe. Yeah, and that also
raises the problem of what do you call the new
things when you find out there are bigger things? Because
we call something the big dipper. You know what if
you find a bigger dipper exactly, well you call it
the bigger dipper or the very big dipper. And so
(05:46):
there is apparently a very large thing, possible large thing
out there in the universe, so big that it needs
to adjectives to describe how big it is. It's so
big they named it twice so to be on the podcast,
we'll be talking about out what is the huge Large
(06:07):
Quasar group. You can't even get that name out without
a chuckle. It's ridiculous. Yeah, I mean, I feel like
the most expraneous word there is group. It is the
most boring word in there. Like, if you have huge
large and quasar, why do you need the group? That's
like calling it, you know, the a team group. It
(06:27):
sounds like a consulting firm, doesn't it Which part the
eighteen group or the Huge Large Quasar group? Both both.
We need to optimize the efficiency of this factory somebody
give a call to the Huge Large Quasar Group. They
know what they're doing. I don't know. They sound pretty
expensive to me. I would go for the you know,
modestly sized, economically size quasar group. That sounds good. But
(06:50):
it is the thing out there at the Huge Large
Quasar Group, and it's self self explanatory. But I'm guessing
there are some mysteries and some unknowns about this huge
object in space. Absolutely, there are lots of unknowns, and
there are some really basic ideas about how big things
can get in the universe, and this thing flies in
the face of our concepts of size. It's huge, not
(07:13):
just in size but significance. That's right, It's more than huge.
It's huge large all right. Well, as usually, we were
wondering how many people had heard of this Huge Large
Quazer group, and so Daniel went out there into the
wilds of the Internet to ask people if they knew
what the Huge Large Quazer Group is. So thanks to
everybody who participated, and if you are willing to volunteer
(07:34):
to answer questions about absurdly named astronomical objects in the future,
please write to me two questions at Daniel and Jorge
dot com. So think about it for a second. If
someone ask you what you thought the huge Large Quazer
Group is, what would you say. Here's what people had
to say. I'm gonna go wild here. It's either h
(07:55):
Bent from the eighties, or it is a huge, large
group of quasers somewhere in our universe a total guess,
a very large array of radio telescopes. Maybe the huge
large Quizer group is a group of quaisers that are
somewhere on the outskirts of our galaxy, a big collection
(08:18):
of large objects somewhere in the universe. So I would
say a region of the universe where you could find
a lot of these quasars. I'm guessing this is some
form of quasars that have grouped together or clustered together
somewhere in the universe that we've been able to find. Well,
most likely it's a an area, probably very big, where
(08:42):
you can find a number of quasars that you it's
not common to find. It sounds like it's bigger than
large Quaisar Group. It sounds like it's really huge. Um,
and it sounds like they're getting pretty lazy with the naming.
Man Jorge is gonna have fun with that one. I
bet um. It sounds like it's totally awesome. It sounds
(09:04):
like a group of quasars found that's so awesome that
it earned both huge and large and its title. Well,
first of all, that's an amazing name, and second of all,
I guess it would just be somewhere out in the
observable universe where we've seen a bunch of quasars together
(09:26):
in a relatively small area for which we don't currently
have an explanation. Given the quasars are generally very bright objects,
they could be potentially quite far away and we can
still see them. All right, some pretty fun answers they're
including one that predicted I would have fun with this one,
and I have to say, I having no fun, Daniel.
(09:47):
It's a lot of words to say together, no fun, fun. Well,
I'm having fun with it. I definitely picked this one
just to sort of taunt you about astronomical name. So
this is an actual thing, Like there are papers with
these words in the title, the Huge Large Quasar Group.
It's an actual thing. Is actually a subject of controversy.
People fight about the Huge Large Quasar Group. There are
(10:09):
like dueling presentations about it. Really, Like do they fight
about whether it qualifies as huge, Like, do you fight
over the adjective like, no, it's more like a really large,
or it's more like a ginormous huge. Doesn't capture it now?
Actually what they fight over is the word group the
group or is it more like a you know, a
(10:30):
solo endeavor? Yeah? Is it a band from the eighties
or is it an astronomical object? Right? Right? Do they
actually you know, agree on things or is it more
like a collective? Maybe it's a huge large quasar collective.
It's a co op, right, they grow their own organic veggies.
All right, Well, let's get into what this huge large
quasar group is. And I guess maybe we'll start with
one of the first words there, quasar. Daniel, maybe remind
(10:54):
us what a quasar is. Yeah, My favorite thing about
the Huge large Quasar Group is that every word you
add adds a layer of mystery and intrigue. Right, even
just quasars themselves are fascinating. Quasars are some of the
brightest things in the universe. They are these sources of
radiation that come from the centers of galaxies, and they
(11:15):
were discovered first in the nineteen fifties. But they were
a huge mystery because people found these things in the
sky that were amitting crazy radiation. But then when they
looked in the sky to find out what it was,
they found these objects that were like really really really
far away. And so these things seem to be super
bright and really far away, which meant that they must
(11:36):
be like incredible sources of radiation to be already that
bright when the light gets here to Earth, right, And
how did they know that they weren't that far away?
Can they just be like a nearby star? How did
they tell the difference between this kind of object, like
a bright thing in the sky or a regular star. Well,
it took them decades to figure that out. What they
(11:56):
did is they measured the velocity of these things. So
you measured the red shift, like how fast are these
things moving away from us? And you can do that
by looking at the light spectrum and seeing like, oh,
here's the line we expect from hydrogen or from helium.
How far is it shifted by the Doppler effect? And
that tells you how fast this thing is moving away
from us. And because of Hubble's law, we think that
(12:16):
things that are further away from us are moving faster,
so that helped us place the distance. We say, well,
it's moving away from us really really fast, so it
might be really distant. But there was a lot of skepticism.
People just didn't believe it. It's like it gave them
a number that made no sense, like how could this
thing be billions of light years away and still be
so bright? So they spent a lot of time wondering,
(12:39):
just as you say, is it possible it's actually something
closer that happens to have a high velocity moving away
from us for some other reason. So it took a
long time before people accepted that these things were actually real,
that quasars really were crazy bright sources of light universe.
I guess how did how were they convinced? How did
they figure out that that was what was going on?
(13:00):
Sort of a typical process in science, and that it
took one person who was like crusading for and then
the rest of the community gradually came along as the
story came together. In order to really build confidence in it,
you want like an understanding of the mechanism, like, well,
what's generating all that radiation? You can't just believe that
it's there. You have to have an understanding of the story,
and so in this case, people were wondering, like, what
(13:22):
could be creating so much energy? And then in the seventies,
when the idea of black holes moved from like theoretical
concepts to actually observed objects and things we believed existed
in the universe, then we had a candidate for what
could be providing these crazy amounts of energy needed to
produce that radiation. So when we had the idea that
maybe they were black holes at the centers to these
(13:44):
galaxies and that they were the engine providing the power
and needed for this crazy radiation, that people started to
believe maybe this could be real. I see, and are
there a lot of these in this guy or are
they pretty rare or are they super common? They're actually
both a lot of them in the sky, and they're
pretty rare. Like we know about seven hundred and fifty
thousand quasars out there by now, but it's a very
(14:07):
small fraction. Like most galaxies don't have a quasar. Most
galaxies are not emitting crazy radiation out into the sky. Yeah,
I guess that sounds like a lot, almost a million
of them in the sky, But there are billions and
billions of stars right. Oh, yeah, they're billions and billions
of galaxies out there, trillions of galaxies, and most of
them are not quaisars. But you know, by now, we've
(14:29):
mapped a lot of them and we've found a good
number them. So there's basically a lot of everything in
the universe just because the universe is so big and
so filled with stuff, or maybe they just have small
quasar groups, and it's really fun to think about, like
what's actually happening there. You know, people here that black
holes are the source of quasars, and they might wonder, like,
hold on a second, aren't black holes black, Like they
(14:50):
don't emit anything, right, Well, that's true, but black holes
combined with like a big blob of stuff around them,
can emit a lot of radiation because that's stuff the
accretion disc is getting sucked into wards the black hole,
but doesn't just like get hoovered up instantly. Right, Things
are rotating, they're swirling around the black hole. Takes a
while before they fall in, and before they fall in
(15:12):
they get like bumped against each other and ground against
each other, and so the friction between all the gases
that are swirling into the black hole makes for a
very hot and intense environment, and that's actually what's doing
the quais are ring or the quazing. I'm not sure
what the verb is. Really, all that energy and brightness
that we see billions of light years away, it's all
just from stuff falling into the black hole. Yeah, it's
(15:33):
from the black hole's energy. Remember that the black hole
has massive gravitational power even outside the event horizon. It
squeezes and compresses all these gases that are swirling around it,
and that's where the radiation is produced. So the black
hole's gravitational power is compressing and squeezing these gases, they're
doing the radiating, So it's sort of indirectly from the
black hole. And I see interesting. So really a quasar
(15:56):
is a black hole or I guess would you call
up quays are the stuff around some black hole. Yeah,
the black hole is sort of the engine for the quasar.
It's providing the power, it's doing the thing needed to
generate the radiation. But the quais ourselves, it's not just
the black hole. So you know, I would say the
stuff at the center of the galaxy that's giving off
all this light with the black hole together, that's the
whole quasar. I see, And the name comes from quasi
(16:20):
stars originally, right, Like people thought they were stars, but
they're not quite stars, right, Yeah, we didn't understand what
it was, so originally they were called quasi stellar objects,
and then that was shortened to quasars. All right, let's
get into what a quasar group is. Then I'm gonna
guess it's not a boy band or a accounting consulting firm.
But we'll dig into that and what could be a
(16:42):
huge large quasar group. But first let's take a quick break.
All right, we're talking about the awesome named huge large
quasar group, which is something that might be the biggest
(17:05):
thing in the universe that we've seen, or I think
we see. And so we talked about what a quasar is.
It's a quasi stellar object powered by a black hole
that's giving off a lot of radiation. Now, Daniel, what
is a large quasar group? Right? So a large quasar
group is basically a collection of quasars altogether in a
way that we don't necessarily expect. That is, we see
(17:28):
these things at the center of galaxies, but as we
said earlier, they're not that common, not like every single
galaxy has a quasar in it. And so if you
see like a bunch of quasars near each other, and
then you've gotta wonder, like, what's going on? Is there
some reason why you got more quasars there than anywhere else?
I see, it's like you see a whole bunch of
them together, like in the same neighborhood, or like literally
(17:49):
one top of the other. Now just in the same neighborhood.
The first one was spotted in two when we saw
four quasars really close to each other, not like on
top of each other in one galaxy, but like four
adjacent galaxies, and all of them are quasars. You know,
if it's rare to have a single galaxy have a
quasar in it, that having four neighbors altogether, all the
(18:09):
quasars is pretty strange. Oh, I see, not all galaxies
have a quasar at the center of them. No, exactly,
it's pretty rare to have a quasar, right, And so
to see four of them together neighboring galaxies with quasars
is rare. Is rare, and quasars are not forever. Also,
like the conditions you need to create a quays are
a supermassive black hole and the gas that swirls around
(18:32):
it maybe transient, so like you could have a galaxy
that shines it's a quasar for a while and then doesn't.
So it's sort of like finding four of these things
which are pretty rare, and they're burning at the same time.
So it's like an indication that there might be some
underlying reason as to why there's this group, why there's
this cluster, these rare things happening together. It's like finding
(18:54):
four diamonds next to each other. Single diamond is pretty rare.
Why if you find four, you let there's something extra
diamonded going on around here, right right, it's a large
diamond group. It's a large diamond group exactly. The other
thing to remember is that quasars are sort of a
feature of the earlier universe, Like we're still making quasars,
(19:14):
but not as much as we used to, Like quasars
peaked a while ago. So what do you mean they're
feature of the early universe, Like we're not making them
anymore because we still have black holes in the center
of galaxies. Why don't we see more quasars? And what
happens to them? Do they just turn off? Yeah, so
we don't really understand the mechanism for creating quasars, Like,
remember that we don't also understand supermassive black holes very well,
(19:37):
and so this goes to the question of, like how
galaxies form, how you get this much stuff together to
create these scenarios. So we don't understand how quasars form,
So we don't really know the answer to the question
why do they form more in the early universe then now,
but we see them all really far away, so they
aren't goal like quasars in our neighborhood, which means that
the reason we're seeing them far away is because they're
(19:58):
basically dying out. Are only seeing the ones from the past,
Like the closest quasar to us is about six hundred
million light years away. We think that the peak era
for making quasars in the universe was about ten billion
years ago, and ever since then, like the number of
quasars being produced is smaller and smaller, But we don't
(20:19):
know why. That's just what we see. That's just what
we see. Yeah, and so this is why quasar groups
are really interesting. It's like, well, if they're hard to
make and they're not really being made very much anymore,
what is it that's making them, and how does it
make these groups. It's like a clue that might tell
us about, you know, the structure of the universe in general,
and also what the mechanism is for making these quasars.
(20:40):
I see, it's probably a good thing that there isn't
aquasor next to us, right, because like the Milky we
had a quasar, and we'd be from party toes right
like that much brightness coming from the center of the galaxy.
We'd be fried when we yeah, exactly, we would be
if a quasar were shining right at us. Like. These
things can be a thousand times as bright as an
entire galaxy, so they're pretty intense. Typically, the quasars tend
(21:03):
to shoot off sort of perpendicular to the plane of
the galaxy. To imagine the galaxy is a big disc.
Because the magnetic fields and everything swirling around, they tend
to focus their energy both above and below the disk.
And so if the Milky Way was a quasar, if
we had a big quasar at the heart, it would
probably be shooting off in the space trying other aliens.
Probably not us, Oh, I see, They're not like bright
(21:24):
objects like the sun that shine in all directions. Quasars
are directional that day, like they only shoot light and
radiation in one particular direction. Yeah exactly, and that comes
from the swirl, right. Remember the disc is swirling around
the black hole, and so it's swirling around an axis.
So it's along that axis that all these X rays
and crazy radiation tends to be admitted. I see. So
(21:45):
there may be are probably more quasars in the universe,
they just maybe are not pointing in our direction. Yeah. Absolutely.
And when we estimate, you know, the number of things
in the universe, we try to take that new account.
We try to estimate what fraction of these things could
we see, and we use them when we to me, like,
how many of them are there that we're not seeing necessarily?
All right, So they only happened with supermassive black holes,
(22:06):
not regular black holes. Yeah exactly. You need a really
big black hole to make one of these things. And
it's really interesting that they were made in the early
universe because we have a lot of questions about like
how the structure of the universe was formed. You talked
earlier about how we have galaxies and then clusters of
galaxies and then superclusters of galaxies we sort of weave
(22:27):
together to make this amazing cosmic structure filaments of superclusters
and walls surrounding bubbles, And we'd really like to understand
how that structure was formed and sort of what the
forces at play were. And so we wonder if quasars
are a way to understand that, Like, do they only
occur when there happens to be like a real density
of matter when things like really came together. You've an
(22:49):
extra big scooping of over density from the early universe.
So it might be that like these things are really
helpful probe to show us where there were really dense
spots in the early universe. I see, like maybe you
only get quasars if there's a particular you know, a
set of conditions. And if we can figure out what's
going on in these groups, then that could tell us
(23:10):
about what was going on early in the universe. Yeah,
because we look at the universe and we say, well, well,
this is amazing. I see a supercluster here. Why is
there a supercluster here? Why is there a supercluster here
and not over there? You know, is this really just
come from the quantum fluctuations of the early universe. Is
there something else going on? Could be like look back
to the very history of the early universe and see
(23:31):
this sort of thing play out. I see interesting. And
so a large quasar group is when you see like
four more of them together. So the first one was
discovered eighty two has four quasars clustered together, and that
was the first time anybody had seen that, and people like, WHOA,
that seems pretty weird. And they calculated the probability of
this thing just occurring by chance to being like ten
(23:52):
to the minus seven. One in ten million universes would
have a quasar group like that, just by chance. If
quasars were sort of distributed everywhere evenly. I see, like
from what we know about the distribution and the probability
of getting a quasar to see four of them together
is like a weird throw to die. It's a really
really unusual throw the die. And anytime you see something
(24:15):
weird like that, you wonder, is there something going on?
It's just something that made this quasar group happen right
here is that that the matter was extra dense, and
so you've got like extra big black holes and that's
what's powering these quasars. Or you know, is there something
else going on? You know, there's plenty of room in
understanding the structure of the universe for something new. Right,
(24:36):
we know something about the history and the expansion of
the universe, but there's a lot we also don't know
about what's powering it and what's controlling it, and why
it looks this way and not any other way. Well,
all right, So that was the first group that they found.
And how many of them have they seen so far?
So only a handful of these things. They're pretty rare.
The second one that they found had twenty three quasars
(24:57):
in it is seven, and so that blew people's minds.
They were like, if four quasars together in a group
is shocking, then twenty three together that's like an orchestra,
you know. And so again these are you know, like
twenty some galaxies sort of in the same neighborhood, and
they all have quasars pointing at us. Yeah, twenty three
quasars found in seven, all very close together and with
(25:20):
not consistent with just like you know, random distribution of
quasar I see, and they're all pointing at us, which
is the weird thing, isn't it. Yeah? It suggests that
there's a lot of them over there, right, And so
we're seeing a tiny fraction of things, and so it
suggests like, are there a lots more quasars over there
that we're not seeing? And also like are there lots
more galaxies that we're not seeing? You know? Are we
just seeing the brightest things that are over there? And
(25:42):
it's a very very dense region of space chalk filled
with galaxies and other crazy stuff, you know, it could
be that there's a whole structure of stuff over there
we've never seen before, right, right, And so they think
quasars maybe are related to density of the early universe,
like you know, the desert things are, and we're the
more goals you would have on some more chances for quasars.
(26:02):
Is that the general idea, that's the general idea, but
you know, it's early days and understanding this stuff, so
we're at the stage of like, maybe it works this way,
maybe it works that way, And that's sort of the
general idea. And one supporting piece of evidence is that
when we look out for superclusters, you know, like the
big collections of galaxies that are loosely grouped together by gravity,
(26:23):
we see superclusters at about the same rate as we
see large quasar groups, and so people are like, m
that's interesting. Maybe superclusters are made by large quazar groups,
or maybe large quasar groups are an indication of where
you're later going to get a supercluster. Oh, I see.
It could be the other way around, like you know,
having a lot of quasars in one area somehow, you know,
(26:45):
attracts more things to you. Yeah, or it's just an
indication that there's already a huge density of mass there. Right.
If over density creates large quasar groups, then large quazar
groups could tell you where those dense spots are, and
then later in the formation of the universe they create superclusters.
So large quazar groups happened sort of early on, like
(27:06):
a few billion years after the universe is formed. Superclusters
take a longer time to gather together the race between
gravity and the expansion of the universe. So it could
be that where we're seeing these large quazar groups out
in distant reaches of space, that this actual moment right now,
there may be superclusters of galaxies there, all right, So
then those are the large quazler groups, and now they
(27:28):
found anything even bigger, and so they needed another actective
for these quazar groups, which is the Huge Large Quazer
Group exactly. Now, Daniel, why didn't they just call it
the I don't know, super large or extra large or
you know, venty, but they call it the Huge Large
Quazer Group. You know what they were thinking. Have you
talked to any of them? I have not talked to them.
(27:50):
I imagine that maybe it was just like an honest
moment of excitement, you know, like imagine somebody discovering a
large Quazer group, realizing how big it is and then going,
oh my gosh, it's huge, and then that name just sticking.
It doesn't seem like the kind of name you would,
you know, come up with after a committee meets or anything. Right,
or maybe the lead scientist was named Hugh and which
(28:10):
would be very suspicious in my book. Maybe it's just
been a misunderstanding. He meant to name it Hughes Large
Quizer Group, and now it's called the Huge or make
it's like a Danish name. It's actually like Huga. M hm. Alright,
let's get into what the Huge Large Quazer Group is
and let's talk about how huge it actually is. But
first let's take another quick break. We're talking about the
(28:45):
huge large Quazer group, which is it an actual thing
and an actual name. They called it the huge large
Quazer group because I guess, you know, first we discovered
quazer groups, and then they found bigger ones and called
them large Quazer groups. And then they found I guess,
really big one enough to call it huge, right, Well,
you know, quasars are big. And then they found groups
(29:06):
of quasars and they're like, wow, these groups are surprisingly large,
so they called them large Quaisar groups. And then they
found this large Quaisar group, which is shockingly large. It's
the biggest large Quaisar group we've ever found, and in fact,
it's bigger than anything in the universe is supposed to be.
What do you mean, bigger than anything is supposed to be?
(29:26):
How big are things supposed to be? Yeah, so there's
sort of like a maximum size. We think that things
in the universe should be sort of allowed to be
based on our understanding of the universe and the age
of the universe. Einstein had this idea that the universe
should be basically smooth, that if you zoom out far enough,
you shouldn't be able to notice any difference from place
(29:48):
to place, like everywhere in the universe should be basically
the same if you zoom out far enough, right, But
how does that give you a limit? Well, it tells
you that you shouldn't see really big structures, Like if
you zoom out far and of everything should just be
a wash. It should be like the universe is just
like static. You shouldn't see like really big effects or
you know, large trends or really big objects. So that
(30:11):
gives you a limit to like how big something can be,
so that you can zoom out and really not see
any features anymore. It's like saying, well, the biggest building
in the United States is a certain size, and so
if you zoom out far enough, you shouldn't be able
to make out any buildings anymore. I see it like
zooming out of the US and finding bigger and bigger buildings.
That would be weird. Yeah, exactly. It's like zooming out
(30:32):
and finding a building that stretches from you know, Kansas
to California, and you're like, whoa, that's bigger than any
feature I thought there was, right right, all right, Well,
I guess maybe step us through here. What is this
huge large quas or group and how huge is it?
And I guess the question is why is it considered
a structure in itself? Isn't it just a collection of
cos Yeah, that's a great question. So it was found
(30:54):
in by one of the same researchers that previously discovered
other large quasar groups, so we're sort of an expert
in finding these things. And this one has seventy three
quasars in it. So the previous record was twenty three quasars.
This one just blows it away. It's seventy three quasars
all in a big cluster, and it's like four billion
(31:17):
light years from end to end. It's like the size
of forty thousand milky ways put end to end. Wow,
that's a lot of light years. And so you're saying
in the space of four billion light years, there's seventy
three galaxies in that space that have quasars in them. Yeah, exactly.
And are there other galaxies without quasars or is it like,
(31:39):
you know, only quasars in galaxies there? No, there are
definitely other galaxies there that don't have quasars. But this
is a lot more quasars than you expect per galaxy,
and they're clustered together in this sort of interesting, sort
of blobby shape, and so it looks like a gravitational structure.
It looks like it's sort of held together. But again
that's weird because is we shouldn't have gravitational structures that
(32:03):
are bigger than about a billion and a half light
years across I see. I guess the question is how
do you make the termination that it's in the same
gravitational structure, like there's nothing else around this clump or
blob of stuff. Yeah, it's a great question, and it's
something that people debate a lot, Like when we look
at a supercluster, we asked like, is this thing really
(32:23):
held together gravitationally or is it stuff that just happens
to be near each other? And I think one way
to think about it is like, what is the future
of this object? You know, for example, the universe is
expanding and so space is being created everywhere and pulling
everything apart. But some objects will survive that, like your
body and the solar system, and the reason is that
(32:44):
they are gravitationally held together. They will survive this expansion.
They will still be an object in a billion years.
People don't know, and people argue about whether superclusters are
gravitationally about objects, and what they mean by that is
in a billion years, well listen, still be like this,
or will it be torn apart by dark energy? So
really it's about this battle between gravity and dark energy
(33:07):
and the question about being a gravitationally about object. It's
really is gravity the dominant force? Is it the thing
that's holding it together? Or is it really just going
to get torn apart by dark energy? I see? So
there is sort of a sense that they are going
to stick together in the future. That's why do you
call them a structure? That's the claim. So this guy
discovered it, he called it a large quazar group. He said, look,
(33:28):
how big this is. It's bigger than anything should be.
But it was not universally accepted in the community to
be a large quazar group. There were other people said, well,
what if it's just a random collection of quasars that
aren't sort of like necessarily grouped together into a gravitational structure.
How can they not be like do you think they're
just like ships passing in the night kind of thing?
(33:48):
Or they are too big to be held together by gravity?
What would be the alternative The alternative is that it's
a random chance that they just happened to be there
and they're not held together by gravity. Remember, the reason
we're interested in large quasar groups is because we think
they might be like indicators of over density. We think
they might be a sign that there's an extra stuff
(34:10):
there in the universe and that later that will lead
to interesting structures like superclusters, etcetera, etcetera. But it might
just be Sometimes you get clusters of quasars, like sometimes
you find a bunch of diamonds and they're not connected
to each other. So there's a debate about whether they
are gravitationally bound or not. And that's hard to resolve,
you know. The real way to resolve is to sort
of watch it for a billion years and see what happens.
(34:32):
I see, like, what could happen. They could like you know,
float away, or they could stay clumped together. That's what
you mean, Like if they fall away from each other,
then they weren't really gravitationally bound. Is that the idea? Yeah, exactly.
And that's the way I think about this whole question
of like what is the biggest thing in the universe.
You know, you might wonder like why should the biggest
thing in the universe be a billion and a half
(34:52):
light years across and not two billion or ten billion
or whatever. And it's really again about gravity having time
to build things, Like you start from the very early universe.
Gravity starts to pull stuff together and make stars and
makes galaxies eventually makes galaxy clusters. Each of these things
takes time because gravity is pretty weak and these enormous
masses that play here, but it takes a long time
(35:14):
for gravity to gather this stuff together. And at the
same time, it has an opponent, right, dark energy is
spreading everything out, and you can run a simulation to
the universe and say, what's the biggest thing you would
expect gravity to have formed by now, Like in the future,
the biggest thing in the universe could be bigger, right
if dark energy wasn't playing its game, gravity could make
things that are three, four or five ten billion light
(35:36):
years across. But we don't think it's had time to
make anything that big yet, which is why we think
the biggest thing in the universe should be a billion
and a half light years across. So this thing being
four billion light years across, if it is a real
thing built by gravity. Then we don't know how it
was made interesting, Like it could have been just like
maybe two small groups that just happened to bump into
(35:57):
each other. Is that kind of what you mean, Or
like three groups that just happened to cluster. Yeah, exactly,
They're not necessarily one thing. It could just be like
three smaller things near each other. And so that's the question.
So there were these papers back and forth in astronomy,
people saying, oh, look, we found this big thing and
violates a deep law of the universe, and somebody else saying, no,
I think it's just random, and here's another way to
(36:17):
analyze its statistically that shows that's not actually that unlikely
to find that many quasars. And then another paper in
response that looked at magnesium and there's absorption of magnesium
gas there, which is another indicator of like an over
dense region. And so I think the consensus right now
is that it is a large quasar group. But we
still don't understand how you would make something this big
(36:41):
this early in the universe. I see, and we have
a lot of information about it, right Like you send
me a little picture that she was kind of a
three D map of all these quasars. Like when you
look out there into space and you look it towards
this huge and large cluster, can you actually like tell
individual quasars apart? Yeah, you can map these individual quasars.
They are really really bright. Now they're really far away,
(37:02):
but they're so breath that you can identify them. That
that's how they were discovered in the first place. You know,
they're embedded in many, many other galaxies which are too
faint for us to see sometimes at least without dedicated viewing.
So we can spot these things because there are like
extraordinarily bright lights really really far away, and you can
definitely resolve individual ones. And yeah, they've made this three
(37:24):
D map of them, Like what does it look like?
You know, they're trying to look at this structure and understand,
you know, why is it formed this way not that way?
Is there any pattern in there? Right? Yeah? But generally,
are people pretty sure it's a cluster or what's the
prevalent thinking about it? Is it a random coincidence or
is there an actual you know, structure that was there
from the beginning of time. It's hard to say. You know,
(37:45):
the experimental evidence I think is pretty strong that it's there,
and then it's a thing. I think that most astronomers
believe that it is a group, but that requires something new,
that requires some explanation for how you get something this big.
How do you make a building that's from Kansas to California?
How do you explain this in the existence of this
string of diamonds in the sky. We can't explain why
(38:09):
it's there, but we think that it is there, and
so that's exciting because it tells us that something could
be going on in the early universe that we don't understand.
I see, it's a huge mystery, or at least a
very large one. It's a huge, large mystery, you know.
It's the kind of thing where maybe there's some new
physics that explains how things that are so far away
(38:30):
from each other in the universe that they didn't have
time for light to get between them could somehow be connected.
I could somehow how a correlation between them. So it's
an opportunity for people to sort of go crazy and
think about new ideas to potentially explain the way the
universe was formed and the way it expanded in its
early days. Because I guess it's crazy if it's four
(38:50):
billion light years across, like for one of them to
talk to the other one at least gravitationally or through
light or anything. I mean that's all already like a
third of the life of the universe exactly. And now
we're talking about like forming a structure. You know that
requires a lot of back and forth his paperwork. You know,
these meetings. You can't just get together and call yourself
a large quazer group or a huge one by that matter. Yeah,
(39:13):
I have to say I'm a little bit skeptical. I'm like,
so many three quasars. I mean I was already kind
of used to forty twenty so many threat And if
I would qualify it that as huge, what do you think,
like maybe very large or extra large, but huge, Like,
you know, what if you find a thousand, Now, what
do you call that one the Nega large quasar group.
I don't know. I think you had to be impressed.
(39:34):
We need another digit on that, at least something in
the triple digits to earn the huge monitor exactly. Well,
that's the huge large Quazer group. Another sign that there
are still big mysteries out there, and not just big mysteries.
Huge mysteries out there in the universe, huge structures, huge
objects that we really are still discovering what they're about
and what's causing them. That's right, and we are just
(39:56):
beginning to explore our universe. We are only gathering at
high any fraction of the light that carries with it
evidence for how the universe was made and how it
looks now. Most of that is being ignored, unless you're
counting the plants. And so I hope that as a species,
we can build more and more of these eyeballs that
let us look deep into the distant universe and map
out the structure of our neighborhood and our region and
(40:19):
the rest of the universe, and learned from that how
our universe came to me and maybe something about its future.
In the meantime, I guess we should keep looking out.
Maybe we will find bigger ones, or maybe we will
sort of unlock what this huge structure means and what
it can tell us about how everything begain And maybe
this time we should be prepared for finding something big,
so we come up with a better name for it. Yeah,
(40:41):
we should have started with small, like the small quator group,
Like if you discover four them together, I don't know
you've called it a large one. I guess that's why
the English language has so many words. You can with
bigger adjectives. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that.
Thanks for joining us, see you next time. Thanks for listening,
(41:08):
and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from
my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio Apple Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Hey, Daniel, I've been wondering something about the large Hadron Collider. Oh,
that's right up, my alley. Is it about crazy new particles?
Not quite? Is it about making black holes? I am
concerned about that, but not this time? Alright, shoot, then
what's your question? All right? Why did you call it
the large hadron Collider? Why not the you know, modestly
(00:29):
sized hadron collider, because it's pretty large in that case,
why not the huge hadron Collider or the ginormous hadron Collider.
That's the plan for the next one. Man, you gotta
leave something in the tank for the next time around.
But when does it end? Daniel? Hopefully never. Hi'm Jorgemming,
(01:04):
cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics. Hi. I'm Daniel.
I'm a particle physicist and I hope to do experiments
one day at the very large hadron collider, not just
the huge heatherron collider. Do you plan to retire before
the ginormous hadron Collider? I want to work on the
ludicrously sized hadron Collider. What's the acronym for that one?
(01:26):
I don't know, but the v LHC is an actual thing. Really,
that's like in the official name it really is the
very Large Hadron Collider. The plan is to put it underground.
It's a hundred kilometer radius ring, and that's actually what
it's called. I guess there's a you know, president for that.
There's a very large array in New Mexico right exactly exactly,
so you can just after that, just keep adding varies
(01:48):
to it. I suppose the very very large Hadron Collider,
the super duper large Hadron Collider. But welcome to our
super duper podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a
production of our radiot in which we tackle things which
are very very large and hard to understand and very
very small and hard to grapple with. We talk about
(02:08):
all the incredible and amazing things and our universe, all
the open questions that scientists are puzzling over all the
incredible things that we have learned, and explain all of
them to you, sometimes with a very large banana joke,
because there is a lot out there in the universe
to explore and for us to see. But I guess
the problem is that we are stuck in a small
corner of the milk Way, which isn't a small corner
(02:31):
of the universe, and so we need some pretty big
telescopes and instruments to see what's out there in this
vast cosmos. That's right, we are exploring the universe, but
we're doing it just with our eyeballs. Imagine you wanted
to know what was all over the Earth, but you
were sort of stuck in a lighthouse and all you
could do is look out the window with really powerful
(02:51):
telescopes and trying to see as far as you could.
So that's where we are as a species. We can't
yet travel to the stars, but we can wait for
information from the stars to come here to Earth and
give us clues because there is a lot of information
coming at us from everywhere, right and I meaning the
universe is basically bathing us and information and stories about
what happened and how things came to be and why
(03:14):
things are the way they are. And it's really up
to us to figure out how to decode this information
and how to read it and how to figure out
what it means. Yeah, and it's frustrating to me sometimes
that we're not doing more to capture that information. You know,
to see deep into the universe, you need to look
at really faint signals of far away galaxies, and those
things can't be seen just by your eye. You need
(03:35):
like specialized telescopes, and so far humanity has only built
a few of them, which means that most of the
information about the secrets and the structure of the universe
it's just sort of like landing on Earth and getting
absorbed by, you know, plants and rocks and stuff. I'm
sure the plants are getting some pretty good information about
the universe, probably that maybe they've already figured things out, Daniel,
and we thought to ask them. Oh my god, that
(03:56):
sounds like a really fun science fiction movie where we
discovered that plants are actually a globe sized telescope and
that they're doing their own astronomy. Wow. Well, I thought
you were a couch potato anyways, Daniel, wouldn't that count
as a plant scientists astrophysicists. Well, that means that couch
potatoes are actually doing work right, because they're sitting there
absorbing information from the universe. Yeah, and so I guess
(04:18):
the more we want to look out into the universe,
the bigger the telescope we need, and the more we
want to probe into the particulars of matter and what
everything is made out of. The more powerful and bigger
microscopes you need, yeah, exactly. And as we peer deeper
into the universe with our bigger and bigger telescopes, were
constantly finding new stuff out there, Weird things we can't understand,
(04:41):
things that don't seem to make sense, things that surprise
us about what's out there in the universe. But that's
what exploration is all about. You don't look out into
the universe just to have your ideas confirmed. You look
out there to be surprised, to be shocked, to have
your mind blown by the kinds of crazy stuff that
we see. Yeah, because it seems like we're discovering at
the universe is bigger and bigger and bigger than we expected.
(05:03):
I mean, we initially thought that was just the Earth,
and then the Sun and the Moon and the Solar System,
and now we're up to you know, bubbles of gigantic
galaxy clusters. Things get pretty big out there. Things get
pretty big out there. And one question we ask is
like how big do things get? What is the biggest
thing in the universe? And it feels like every year
(05:25):
astronomy crowns a new biggest thing in the universe. I
feel like that should have like stadium echo sound effects
their biggest thing in the universe. Yeah, and that also
raises the problem of what do you call the new
things when you find out there are bigger things? Because
we call something the big dipper. You know what if
you find a bigger dipper exactly, well you call it
the bigger dipper or the very big dipper. And so
(05:46):
there is apparently a very large thing, possible large thing
out there in the universe, so big that it needs
to adjectives to describe how big it is. It's so
big they named it twice so to be on the podcast,
we'll be talking about out what is the huge Large
(06:07):
Quasar group. You can't even get that name out without
a chuckle. It's ridiculous. Yeah, I mean, I feel like
the most expraneous word there is group. It is the
most boring word in there. Like, if you have huge
large and quasar, why do you need the group? That's
like calling it, you know, the a team group. It
(06:27):
sounds like a consulting firm, doesn't it Which part the
eighteen group or the Huge Large Quasar group? Both both.
We need to optimize the efficiency of this factory somebody
give a call to the Huge Large Quasar Group. They
know what they're doing. I don't know. They sound pretty
expensive to me. I would go for the you know,
modestly sized, economically size quasar group. That sounds good. But
(06:50):
it is the thing out there at the Huge Large
Quasar Group, and it's self self explanatory. But I'm guessing
there are some mysteries and some unknowns about this huge
object in space. Absolutely, there are lots of unknowns, and
there are some really basic ideas about how big things
can get in the universe, and this thing flies in
the face of our concepts of size. It's huge, not
(07:13):
just in size but significance. That's right, It's more than huge.
It's huge large all right. Well, as usually, we were
wondering how many people had heard of this Huge Large
Quazer group, and so Daniel went out there into the
wilds of the Internet to ask people if they knew
what the Huge Large Quazer Group is. So thanks to
everybody who participated, and if you are willing to volunteer
(07:34):
to answer questions about absurdly named astronomical objects in the future,
please write to me two questions at Daniel and Jorge
dot com. So think about it for a second. If
someone ask you what you thought the huge Large Quazer
Group is, what would you say. Here's what people had
to say. I'm gonna go wild here. It's either h
(07:55):
Bent from the eighties, or it is a huge, large
group of quasers somewhere in our universe a total guess,
a very large array of radio telescopes. Maybe the huge
large Quizer group is a group of quaisers that are
somewhere on the outskirts of our galaxy, a big collection
(08:18):
of large objects somewhere in the universe. So I would
say a region of the universe where you could find
a lot of these quasars. I'm guessing this is some
form of quasars that have grouped together or clustered together
somewhere in the universe that we've been able to find. Well,
most likely it's a an area, probably very big, where
(08:42):
you can find a number of quasars that you it's
not common to find. It sounds like it's bigger than
large Quaisar Group. It sounds like it's really huge. Um,
and it sounds like they're getting pretty lazy with the naming.
Man Jorge is gonna have fun with that one. I
bet um. It sounds like it's totally awesome. It sounds
(09:04):
like a group of quasars found that's so awesome that
it earned both huge and large and its title. Well,
first of all, that's an amazing name, and second of all,
I guess it would just be somewhere out in the
observable universe where we've seen a bunch of quasars together
(09:26):
in a relatively small area for which we don't currently
have an explanation. Given the quasars are generally very bright objects,
they could be potentially quite far away and we can
still see them. All right, some pretty fun answers they're
including one that predicted I would have fun with this one,
and I have to say, I having no fun, Daniel.
(09:47):
It's a lot of words to say together, no fun, fun. Well,
I'm having fun with it. I definitely picked this one
just to sort of taunt you about astronomical name. So
this is an actual thing, Like there are papers with
these words in the title, the Huge Large Quasar Group.
It's an actual thing. Is actually a subject of controversy.
People fight about the Huge Large Quasar Group. There are
(10:09):
like dueling presentations about it. Really, Like do they fight
about whether it qualifies as huge, Like, do you fight
over the adjective like, no, it's more like a really large,
or it's more like a ginormous huge. Doesn't capture it now?
Actually what they fight over is the word group the
group or is it more like a you know, a
(10:30):
solo endeavor? Yeah? Is it a band from the eighties
or is it an astronomical object? Right? Right? Do they
actually you know, agree on things or is it more
like a collective? Maybe it's a huge large quasar collective.
It's a co op, right, they grow their own organic veggies.
All right, Well, let's get into what this huge large
quasar group is. And I guess maybe we'll start with
one of the first words there, quasar. Daniel, maybe remind
(10:54):
us what a quasar is. Yeah, My favorite thing about
the Huge large Quasar Group is that every word you
add adds a layer of mystery and intrigue. Right, even
just quasars themselves are fascinating. Quasars are some of the
brightest things in the universe. They are these sources of
radiation that come from the centers of galaxies, and they
(11:15):
were discovered first in the nineteen fifties. But they were
a huge mystery because people found these things in the
sky that were amitting crazy radiation. But then when they
looked in the sky to find out what it was,
they found these objects that were like really really really
far away. And so these things seem to be super
bright and really far away, which meant that they must
(11:36):
be like incredible sources of radiation to be already that
bright when the light gets here to Earth, right, And
how did they know that they weren't that far away?
Can they just be like a nearby star? How did
they tell the difference between this kind of object, like
a bright thing in the sky or a regular star. Well,
it took them decades to figure that out. What they
(11:56):
did is they measured the velocity of these things. So
you measured the red shift, like how fast are these
things moving away from us? And you can do that
by looking at the light spectrum and seeing like, oh,
here's the line we expect from hydrogen or from helium.
How far is it shifted by the Doppler effect? And
that tells you how fast this thing is moving away
from us. And because of Hubble's law, we think that
(12:16):
things that are further away from us are moving faster,
so that helped us place the distance. We say, well,
it's moving away from us really really fast, so it
might be really distant. But there was a lot of skepticism.
People just didn't believe it. It's like it gave them
a number that made no sense, like how could this
thing be billions of light years away and still be
so bright? So they spent a lot of time wondering,
(12:39):
just as you say, is it possible it's actually something
closer that happens to have a high velocity moving away
from us for some other reason. So it took a
long time before people accepted that these things were actually real,
that quasars really were crazy bright sources of light universe.
I guess how did how were they convinced? How did
they figure out that that was what was going on?
(13:00):
Sort of a typical process in science, and that it
took one person who was like crusading for and then
the rest of the community gradually came along as the
story came together. In order to really build confidence in it,
you want like an understanding of the mechanism, like, well,
what's generating all that radiation? You can't just believe that
it's there. You have to have an understanding of the story,
and so in this case, people were wondering, like, what
(13:22):
could be creating so much energy? And then in the seventies,
when the idea of black holes moved from like theoretical
concepts to actually observed objects and things we believed existed
in the universe, then we had a candidate for what
could be providing these crazy amounts of energy needed to
produce that radiation. So when we had the idea that
maybe they were black holes at the centers to these
(13:44):
galaxies and that they were the engine providing the power
and needed for this crazy radiation, that people started to
believe maybe this could be real. I see, and are
there a lot of these in this guy or are
they pretty rare or are they super common? They're actually
both a lot of them in the sky, and they're
pretty rare. Like we know about seven hundred and fifty
thousand quasars out there by now, but it's a very
(14:07):
small fraction. Like most galaxies don't have a quasar. Most
galaxies are not emitting crazy radiation out into the sky. Yeah,
I guess that sounds like a lot, almost a million
of them in the sky, But there are billions and
billions of stars right. Oh, yeah, they're billions and billions
of galaxies out there, trillions of galaxies, and most of
them are not quaisars. But you know, by now, we've
(14:29):
mapped a lot of them and we've found a good
number them. So there's basically a lot of everything in
the universe just because the universe is so big and
so filled with stuff, or maybe they just have small
quasar groups, and it's really fun to think about, like
what's actually happening there. You know, people here that black
holes are the source of quasars, and they might wonder, like,
hold on a second, aren't black holes black, Like they
(14:50):
don't emit anything, right, Well, that's true, but black holes
combined with like a big blob of stuff around them,
can emit a lot of radiation because that's stuff the
accretion disc is getting sucked into wards the black hole,
but doesn't just like get hoovered up instantly. Right, Things
are rotating, they're swirling around the black hole. Takes a
while before they fall in, and before they fall in
(15:12):
they get like bumped against each other and ground against
each other, and so the friction between all the gases
that are swirling into the black hole makes for a
very hot and intense environment, and that's actually what's doing
the quais are ring or the quazing. I'm not sure
what the verb is. Really, all that energy and brightness
that we see billions of light years away, it's all
just from stuff falling into the black hole. Yeah, it's
(15:33):
from the black hole's energy. Remember that the black hole
has massive gravitational power even outside the event horizon. It
squeezes and compresses all these gases that are swirling around it,
and that's where the radiation is produced. So the black
hole's gravitational power is compressing and squeezing these gases, they're
doing the radiating, So it's sort of indirectly from the
black hole. And I see interesting. So really a quasar
(15:56):
is a black hole or I guess would you call
up quays are the stuff around some black hole. Yeah,
the black hole is sort of the engine for the quasar.
It's providing the power, it's doing the thing needed to
generate the radiation. But the quais ourselves, it's not just
the black hole. So you know, I would say the
stuff at the center of the galaxy that's giving off
all this light with the black hole together, that's the
whole quasar. I see, And the name comes from quasi
(16:20):
stars originally, right, Like people thought they were stars, but
they're not quite stars, right, Yeah, we didn't understand what
it was, so originally they were called quasi stellar objects,
and then that was shortened to quasars. All right, let's
get into what a quasar group is. Then I'm gonna
guess it's not a boy band or a accounting consulting firm.
But we'll dig into that and what could be a
(16:42):
huge large quasar group. But first let's take a quick break.
All right, we're talking about the awesome named huge large
quasar group, which is something that might be the biggest
(17:05):
thing in the universe that we've seen, or I think
we see. And so we talked about what a quasar is.
It's a quasi stellar object powered by a black hole
that's giving off a lot of radiation. Now, Daniel, what
is a large quasar group? Right? So a large quasar
group is basically a collection of quasars altogether in a
way that we don't necessarily expect. That is, we see
(17:28):
these things at the center of galaxies, but as we
said earlier, they're not that common, not like every single
galaxy has a quasar in it. And so if you
see like a bunch of quasars near each other, and
then you've gotta wonder, like, what's going on? Is there
some reason why you got more quasars there than anywhere else?
I see, it's like you see a whole bunch of
them together, like in the same neighborhood, or like literally
(17:49):
one top of the other. Now just in the same neighborhood.
The first one was spotted in two when we saw
four quasars really close to each other, not like on
top of each other in one galaxy, but like four
adjacent galaxies, and all of them are quasars. You know,
if it's rare to have a single galaxy have a
quasar in it, that having four neighbors altogether, all the
(18:09):
quasars is pretty strange. Oh, I see, not all galaxies
have a quasar at the center of them. No, exactly,
it's pretty rare to have a quasar, right, And so
to see four of them together neighboring galaxies with quasars
is rare. Is rare, and quasars are not forever. Also,
like the conditions you need to create a quays are
a supermassive black hole and the gas that swirls around
(18:32):
it maybe transient, so like you could have a galaxy
that shines it's a quasar for a while and then doesn't.
So it's sort of like finding four of these things
which are pretty rare, and they're burning at the same time.
So it's like an indication that there might be some
underlying reason as to why there's this group, why there's
this cluster, these rare things happening together. It's like finding
(18:54):
four diamonds next to each other. Single diamond is pretty rare.
Why if you find four, you let there's something extra
diamonded going on around here, right right, it's a large
diamond group. It's a large diamond group exactly. The other
thing to remember is that quasars are sort of a
feature of the earlier universe, Like we're still making quasars,
(19:14):
but not as much as we used to, Like quasars
peaked a while ago. So what do you mean they're
feature of the early universe, Like we're not making them
anymore because we still have black holes in the center
of galaxies. Why don't we see more quasars? And what
happens to them? Do they just turn off? Yeah, so
we don't really understand the mechanism for creating quasars, Like,
remember that we don't also understand supermassive black holes very well,
(19:37):
and so this goes to the question of, like how
galaxies form, how you get this much stuff together to
create these scenarios. So we don't understand how quasars form,
So we don't really know the answer to the question
why do they form more in the early universe then now,
but we see them all really far away, so they
aren't goal like quasars in our neighborhood, which means that
the reason we're seeing them far away is because they're
(19:58):
basically dying out. Are only seeing the ones from the past,
Like the closest quasar to us is about six hundred
million light years away. We think that the peak era
for making quasars in the universe was about ten billion
years ago, and ever since then, like the number of
quasars being produced is smaller and smaller, But we don't
(20:19):
know why. That's just what we see. That's just what
we see. Yeah, and so this is why quasar groups
are really interesting. It's like, well, if they're hard to
make and they're not really being made very much anymore,
what is it that's making them, and how does it
make these groups. It's like a clue that might tell
us about, you know, the structure of the universe in general,
and also what the mechanism is for making these quasars.
(20:40):
I see, it's probably a good thing that there isn't
aquasor next to us, right, because like the Milky we
had a quasar, and we'd be from party toes right
like that much brightness coming from the center of the galaxy.
We'd be fried when we yeah, exactly, we would be
if a quasar were shining right at us. Like. These
things can be a thousand times as bright as an
entire galaxy, so they're pretty intense. Typically, the quasars tend
(21:03):
to shoot off sort of perpendicular to the plane of
the galaxy. To imagine the galaxy is a big disc.
Because the magnetic fields and everything swirling around, they tend
to focus their energy both above and below the disk.
And so if the Milky Way was a quasar, if
we had a big quasar at the heart, it would
probably be shooting off in the space trying other aliens.
Probably not us, Oh, I see, They're not like bright
(21:24):
objects like the sun that shine in all directions. Quasars
are directional that day, like they only shoot light and
radiation in one particular direction. Yeah exactly, and that comes
from the swirl, right. Remember the disc is swirling around
the black hole, and so it's swirling around an axis.
So it's along that axis that all these X rays
and crazy radiation tends to be admitted. I see. So
(21:45):
there may be are probably more quasars in the universe,
they just maybe are not pointing in our direction. Yeah. Absolutely.
And when we estimate, you know, the number of things
in the universe, we try to take that new account.
We try to estimate what fraction of these things could
we see, and we use them when we to me, like,
how many of them are there that we're not seeing necessarily?
All right, So they only happened with supermassive black holes,
(22:06):
not regular black holes. Yeah exactly. You need a really
big black hole to make one of these things. And
it's really interesting that they were made in the early
universe because we have a lot of questions about like
how the structure of the universe was formed. You talked
earlier about how we have galaxies and then clusters of
galaxies and then superclusters of galaxies we sort of weave
(22:27):
together to make this amazing cosmic structure filaments of superclusters
and walls surrounding bubbles, And we'd really like to understand
how that structure was formed and sort of what the
forces at play were. And so we wonder if quasars
are a way to understand that, Like, do they only
occur when there happens to be like a real density
of matter when things like really came together. You've an
(22:49):
extra big scooping of over density from the early universe.
So it might be that like these things are really
helpful probe to show us where there were really dense
spots in the early universe. I see, like maybe you
only get quasars if there's a particular you know, a
set of conditions. And if we can figure out what's
going on in these groups, then that could tell us
(23:10):
about what was going on early in the universe. Yeah,
because we look at the universe and we say, well, well,
this is amazing. I see a supercluster here. Why is
there a supercluster here? Why is there a supercluster here
and not over there? You know, is this really just
come from the quantum fluctuations of the early universe. Is
there something else going on? Could be like look back
to the very history of the early universe and see
(23:31):
this sort of thing play out. I see interesting. And
so a large quasar group is when you see like
four more of them together. So the first one was
discovered eighty two has four quasars clustered together, and that
was the first time anybody had seen that, and people like, WHOA,
that seems pretty weird. And they calculated the probability of
this thing just occurring by chance to being like ten
(23:52):
to the minus seven. One in ten million universes would
have a quasar group like that, just by chance. If
quasars were sort of distributed everywhere evenly. I see, like
from what we know about the distribution and the probability
of getting a quasar to see four of them together
is like a weird throw to die. It's a really
really unusual throw the die. And anytime you see something
(24:15):
weird like that, you wonder, is there something going on?
It's just something that made this quasar group happen right
here is that that the matter was extra dense, and
so you've got like extra big black holes and that's
what's powering these quasars. Or you know, is there something
else going on? You know, there's plenty of room in
understanding the structure of the universe for something new. Right,
(24:36):
we know something about the history and the expansion of
the universe, but there's a lot we also don't know
about what's powering it and what's controlling it, and why
it looks this way and not any other way. Well,
all right, So that was the first group that they found.
And how many of them have they seen so far?
So only a handful of these things. They're pretty rare.
The second one that they found had twenty three quasars
(24:57):
in it is seven, and so that blew people's minds.
They were like, if four quasars together in a group
is shocking, then twenty three together that's like an orchestra,
you know. And so again these are you know, like
twenty some galaxies sort of in the same neighborhood, and
they all have quasars pointing at us. Yeah, twenty three
quasars found in seven, all very close together and with
(25:20):
not consistent with just like you know, random distribution of
quasar I see, and they're all pointing at us, which
is the weird thing, isn't it. Yeah? It suggests that
there's a lot of them over there, right, And so
we're seeing a tiny fraction of things, and so it
suggests like, are there a lots more quasars over there
that we're not seeing? And also like are there lots
more galaxies that we're not seeing? You know? Are we
just seeing the brightest things that are over there? And
(25:42):
it's a very very dense region of space chalk filled
with galaxies and other crazy stuff, you know, it could
be that there's a whole structure of stuff over there
we've never seen before, right, right, And so they think
quasars maybe are related to density of the early universe,
like you know, the desert things are, and we're the
more goals you would have on some more chances for quasars.
(26:02):
Is that the general idea, that's the general idea, but
you know, it's early days and understanding this stuff, so
we're at the stage of like, maybe it works this way,
maybe it works that way, And that's sort of the
general idea. And one supporting piece of evidence is that
when we look out for superclusters, you know, like the
big collections of galaxies that are loosely grouped together by gravity,
(26:23):
we see superclusters at about the same rate as we
see large quasar groups, and so people are like, m
that's interesting. Maybe superclusters are made by large quazar groups,
or maybe large quasar groups are an indication of where
you're later going to get a supercluster. Oh, I see.
It could be the other way around, like you know,
having a lot of quasars in one area somehow, you know,
(26:45):
attracts more things to you. Yeah, or it's just an
indication that there's already a huge density of mass there. Right.
If over density creates large quasar groups, then large quazar
groups could tell you where those dense spots are, and
then later in the formation of the universe they create superclusters.
So large quazar groups happened sort of early on, like
(27:06):
a few billion years after the universe is formed. Superclusters
take a longer time to gather together the race between
gravity and the expansion of the universe. So it could
be that where we're seeing these large quazar groups out
in distant reaches of space, that this actual moment right now,
there may be superclusters of galaxies there, all right, So
then those are the large quazler groups, and now they
(27:28):
found anything even bigger, and so they needed another actective
for these quazar groups, which is the Huge Large Quazer
Group exactly. Now, Daniel, why didn't they just call it
the I don't know, super large or extra large or
you know, venty, but they call it the Huge Large
Quazer Group. You know what they were thinking. Have you
talked to any of them? I have not talked to them.
(27:50):
I imagine that maybe it was just like an honest
moment of excitement, you know, like imagine somebody discovering a
large Quazer group, realizing how big it is and then going,
oh my gosh, it's huge, and then that name just sticking.
It doesn't seem like the kind of name you would,
you know, come up with after a committee meets or anything. Right,
or maybe the lead scientist was named Hugh and which
(28:10):
would be very suspicious in my book. Maybe it's just
been a misunderstanding. He meant to name it Hughes Large
Quizer Group, and now it's called the Huge or make
it's like a Danish name. It's actually like Huga. M hm. Alright,
let's get into what the Huge Large Quazer Group is
and let's talk about how huge it actually is. But
first let's take another quick break. We're talking about the
(28:45):
huge large Quazer group, which is it an actual thing
and an actual name. They called it the huge large
Quazer group because I guess, you know, first we discovered
quazer groups, and then they found bigger ones and called
them large Quazer groups. And then they found I guess,
really big one enough to call it huge, right, Well,
you know, quasars are big. And then they found groups
(29:06):
of quasars and they're like, wow, these groups are surprisingly large,
so they called them large Quaisar groups. And then they
found this large Quaisar group, which is shockingly large. It's
the biggest large Quaisar group we've ever found, and in fact,
it's bigger than anything in the universe is supposed to be.
What do you mean, bigger than anything is supposed to be?
(29:26):
How big are things supposed to be? Yeah, so there's
sort of like a maximum size. We think that things
in the universe should be sort of allowed to be
based on our understanding of the universe and the age
of the universe. Einstein had this idea that the universe
should be basically smooth, that if you zoom out far enough,
you shouldn't be able to notice any difference from place
(29:48):
to place, like everywhere in the universe should be basically
the same if you zoom out far enough, right, But
how does that give you a limit? Well, it tells
you that you shouldn't see really big structures, Like if
you zoom out far and of everything should just be
a wash. It should be like the universe is just
like static. You shouldn't see like really big effects or
you know, large trends or really big objects. So that
(30:11):
gives you a limit to like how big something can be,
so that you can zoom out and really not see
any features anymore. It's like saying, well, the biggest building
in the United States is a certain size, and so
if you zoom out far enough, you shouldn't be able
to make out any buildings anymore. I see it like
zooming out of the US and finding bigger and bigger buildings.
That would be weird. Yeah, exactly. It's like zooming out
(30:32):
and finding a building that stretches from you know, Kansas
to California, and you're like, whoa, that's bigger than any
feature I thought there was, right right, all right, Well,
I guess maybe step us through here. What is this
huge large quas or group and how huge is it?
And I guess the question is why is it considered
a structure in itself? Isn't it just a collection of
cos Yeah, that's a great question. So it was found
(30:54):
in by one of the same researchers that previously discovered
other large quasar groups, so we're sort of an expert
in finding these things. And this one has seventy three
quasars in it. So the previous record was twenty three quasars.
This one just blows it away. It's seventy three quasars
all in a big cluster, and it's like four billion
(31:17):
light years from end to end. It's like the size
of forty thousand milky ways put end to end. Wow,
that's a lot of light years. And so you're saying
in the space of four billion light years, there's seventy
three galaxies in that space that have quasars in them. Yeah, exactly.
And are there other galaxies without quasars or is it like,
(31:39):
you know, only quasars in galaxies there? No, there are
definitely other galaxies there that don't have quasars. But this
is a lot more quasars than you expect per galaxy,
and they're clustered together in this sort of interesting, sort
of blobby shape, and so it looks like a gravitational structure.
It looks like it's sort of held together. But again
that's weird because is we shouldn't have gravitational structures that
(32:03):
are bigger than about a billion and a half light
years across I see. I guess the question is how
do you make the termination that it's in the same
gravitational structure, like there's nothing else around this clump or
blob of stuff. Yeah, it's a great question, and it's
something that people debate a lot, Like when we look
at a supercluster, we asked like, is this thing really
(32:23):
held together gravitationally or is it stuff that just happens
to be near each other? And I think one way
to think about it is like, what is the future
of this object? You know, for example, the universe is
expanding and so space is being created everywhere and pulling
everything apart. But some objects will survive that, like your
body and the solar system, and the reason is that
(32:44):
they are gravitationally held together. They will survive this expansion.
They will still be an object in a billion years.
People don't know, and people argue about whether superclusters are
gravitationally about objects, and what they mean by that is
in a billion years, well listen, still be like this,
or will it be torn apart by dark energy? So
really it's about this battle between gravity and dark energy
(33:07):
and the question about being a gravitationally about object. It's
really is gravity the dominant force? Is it the thing
that's holding it together? Or is it really just going
to get torn apart by dark energy? I see? So
there is sort of a sense that they are going
to stick together in the future. That's why do you
call them a structure? That's the claim. So this guy
discovered it, he called it a large quazar group. He said, look,
(33:28):
how big this is. It's bigger than anything should be.
But it was not universally accepted in the community to
be a large quazar group. There were other people said, well,
what if it's just a random collection of quasars that
aren't sort of like necessarily grouped together into a gravitational structure.
How can they not be like do you think they're
just like ships passing in the night kind of thing?
(33:48):
Or they are too big to be held together by gravity?
What would be the alternative The alternative is that it's
a random chance that they just happened to be there
and they're not held together by gravity. Remember, the reason
we're interested in large quasar groups is because we think
they might be like indicators of over density. We think
they might be a sign that there's an extra stuff
(34:10):
there in the universe and that later that will lead
to interesting structures like superclusters, etcetera, etcetera. But it might
just be Sometimes you get clusters of quasars, like sometimes
you find a bunch of diamonds and they're not connected
to each other. So there's a debate about whether they
are gravitationally bound or not. And that's hard to resolve,
you know. The real way to resolve is to sort
of watch it for a billion years and see what happens.
(34:32):
I see, like, what could happen. They could like you know,
float away, or they could stay clumped together. That's what
you mean, Like if they fall away from each other,
then they weren't really gravitationally bound. Is that the idea? Yeah, exactly.
And that's the way I think about this whole question
of like what is the biggest thing in the universe.
You know, you might wonder like why should the biggest
thing in the universe be a billion and a half
(34:52):
light years across and not two billion or ten billion
or whatever. And it's really again about gravity having time
to build things, Like you start from the very early universe.
Gravity starts to pull stuff together and make stars and
makes galaxies eventually makes galaxy clusters. Each of these things
takes time because gravity is pretty weak and these enormous
masses that play here, but it takes a long time
(35:14):
for gravity to gather this stuff together. And at the
same time, it has an opponent, right, dark energy is
spreading everything out, and you can run a simulation to
the universe and say, what's the biggest thing you would
expect gravity to have formed by now, Like in the future,
the biggest thing in the universe could be bigger, right
if dark energy wasn't playing its game, gravity could make
things that are three, four or five ten billion light
(35:36):
years across. But we don't think it's had time to
make anything that big yet, which is why we think
the biggest thing in the universe should be a billion
and a half light years across. So this thing being
four billion light years across, if it is a real
thing built by gravity. Then we don't know how it
was made interesting, Like it could have been just like
maybe two small groups that just happened to bump into
(35:57):
each other. Is that kind of what you mean, Or
like three groups that just happened to cluster. Yeah, exactly,
They're not necessarily one thing. It could just be like
three smaller things near each other. And so that's the question.
So there were these papers back and forth in astronomy,
people saying, oh, look, we found this big thing and
violates a deep law of the universe, and somebody else saying, no,
I think it's just random, and here's another way to
(36:17):
analyze its statistically that shows that's not actually that unlikely
to find that many quasars. And then another paper in
response that looked at magnesium and there's absorption of magnesium
gas there, which is another indicator of like an over
dense region. And so I think the consensus right now
is that it is a large quasar group. But we
still don't understand how you would make something this big
(36:41):
this early in the universe. I see, and we have
a lot of information about it, right Like you send
me a little picture that she was kind of a
three D map of all these quasars. Like when you
look out there into space and you look it towards
this huge and large cluster, can you actually like tell
individual quasars apart? Yeah, you can map these individual quasars.
They are really really bright. Now they're really far away,
(37:02):
but they're so breath that you can identify them. That
that's how they were discovered in the first place. You know,
they're embedded in many, many other galaxies which are too
faint for us to see sometimes at least without dedicated viewing.
So we can spot these things because there are like
extraordinarily bright lights really really far away, and you can
definitely resolve individual ones. And yeah, they've made this three
(37:24):
D map of them, Like what does it look like?
You know, they're trying to look at this structure and understand,
you know, why is it formed this way not that way?
Is there any pattern in there? Right? Yeah? But generally,
are people pretty sure it's a cluster or what's the
prevalent thinking about it? Is it a random coincidence or
is there an actual you know, structure that was there
from the beginning of time. It's hard to say. You know,
(37:45):
the experimental evidence I think is pretty strong that it's there,
and then it's a thing. I think that most astronomers
believe that it is a group, but that requires something new,
that requires some explanation for how you get something this big.
How do you make a building that's from Kansas to California?
How do you explain this in the existence of this
string of diamonds in the sky. We can't explain why
(38:09):
it's there, but we think that it is there, and
so that's exciting because it tells us that something could
be going on in the early universe that we don't understand.
I see, it's a huge mystery, or at least a
very large one. It's a huge, large mystery, you know.
It's the kind of thing where maybe there's some new
physics that explains how things that are so far away
(38:30):
from each other in the universe that they didn't have
time for light to get between them could somehow be connected.
I could somehow how a correlation between them. So it's
an opportunity for people to sort of go crazy and
think about new ideas to potentially explain the way the
universe was formed and the way it expanded in its
early days. Because I guess it's crazy if it's four
(38:50):
billion light years across, like for one of them to
talk to the other one at least gravitationally or through
light or anything. I mean that's all already like a
third of the life of the universe exactly. And now
we're talking about like forming a structure. You know that
requires a lot of back and forth his paperwork. You know,
these meetings. You can't just get together and call yourself
a large quazer group or a huge one by that matter. Yeah,
(39:13):
I have to say I'm a little bit skeptical. I'm like,
so many three quasars. I mean I was already kind
of used to forty twenty so many threat And if
I would qualify it that as huge, what do you think,
like maybe very large or extra large, but huge, Like,
you know, what if you find a thousand, Now, what
do you call that one the Nega large quasar group.
I don't know. I think you had to be impressed.
(39:34):
We need another digit on that, at least something in
the triple digits to earn the huge monitor exactly. Well,
that's the huge large Quazer group. Another sign that there
are still big mysteries out there, and not just big mysteries.
Huge mysteries out there in the universe, huge structures, huge
objects that we really are still discovering what they're about
and what's causing them. That's right, and we are just
(39:56):
beginning to explore our universe. We are only gathering at
high any fraction of the light that carries with it
evidence for how the universe was made and how it
looks now. Most of that is being ignored, unless you're
counting the plants. And so I hope that as a species,
we can build more and more of these eyeballs that
let us look deep into the distant universe and map
out the structure of our neighborhood and our region and
(40:19):
the rest of the universe, and learned from that how
our universe came to me and maybe something about its future.
In the meantime, I guess we should keep looking out.
Maybe we will find bigger ones, or maybe we will
sort of unlock what this huge structure means and what
it can tell us about how everything begain And maybe
this time we should be prepared for finding something big,
so we come up with a better name for it. Yeah,
(40:41):
we should have started with small, like the small quator group,
Like if you discover four them together, I don't know
you've called it a large one. I guess that's why
the English language has so many words. You can with
bigger adjectives. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that.
Thanks for joining us, see you next time. Thanks for listening,
(41:08):
and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from
my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio Apple Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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