What was the brightest explosion ever seen?

Daniel and Jorge look right into the beam of incredible astronomical explosions.

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (02:05):
Hey, Orge, you work with a lot of scientists. Who
is the brightest one you've ever interviewed?

Speaker 4 (02:11):
Well, I have made a lot of Nobel Prize winners.
They're all pretty humble, but yeah, generally they're pretty uh
sharp at that level, you know, Beams of light or
shooting out of their eyes. They have an ore of genius.

Speaker 1 (02:24):
So do you think when you're talking to a scientists
you can predict if they're going to be a future
Nobel Prize winner?

Speaker 4 (02:28):
If I could, that would be awesome. I could probably
make a lot of money that way. Aren't there betting
pools for Nobel Prize winners?

Speaker 1 (02:36):
If there are, you probably qualify as insider information.

Speaker 4 (02:39):
Well, good thing, I'm not a betting person. Hi am
Jorhemaker Tudas and the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe.

Speaker 1 (02:59):
Hi Daniel, I'm a particle physicist, a professor at you
see Irvine, and I actually do have a tiny slice
of a Nobel Prize.

Speaker 4 (03:06):
Ooh, what does that mean? Like they shaved off a
piece of the metal or something.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
No, I'm one of a large group of collective winners
of the Nobel Prize.

Speaker 4 (03:15):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
Several years ago they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to
the European Union, and that's back when Britain was a member.
And I'm a citizen of the UK, so I'm not
sure if i lost it during Brexit, but I was
briefly one five hundred millionth of a Nobel Prize winner.

Speaker 4 (03:32):
Oh, I see you and all Europeans have won the
Nobel Prize. Well, technically you're not a part of Europe,
so yeah, I think you did lose it.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
I used to round that up to one Nobel Prize.
Now I guess I got to round it down to zero.

Speaker 4 (03:45):
Zero. Yeah, I think you could have rounded it down
to zero before. You know, one fortieth million probably maybe
count to zero.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
Well to me, one five hundred millionth was pretty different
from zero, but I take your point.

Speaker 4 (04:01):
But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jora Explain
the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
In which we think everybody deserves a prize for their
curiosity about the universe. We're here to stimulate that curiosity,
to encourage it, and to go with you on the
journey of exploration of understanding the universe. We think, we hope,
we believe that the universe out there can be understood
and deserves to be understood, and that everything that scientists
have figured out so far and that they're puzzling over

(04:29):
currently deserves to be explained to you.

Speaker 4 (04:32):
That's right. We're here to illuminate the darkest corners of
science and take you on a trip to the bright
future of our understanding of how things work and why
things are the way they are.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
We want to understand everything here on Earth, how water flows,
how mountains form the history of life, but we also
want to understand our vast cosmos, what's happening in the
dark deep reaches of space. How did the universe get
to look the way that it does. What are the
most powerful forces on galaxies and stars and galactic clusters

(05:03):
out there shaping the entire structure of space, time, and
the universe. And to do that we have to look
out into the night sky and gather messages that are
coming here from the rest of the universe.

Speaker 4 (05:14):
Yeah, because the cosmos is vast and mostly dark, with
lots of empty space, But there are some bright spots
out there making the universe visible to us and giving
us information about what's out there in the farthest reaches
of existence.

Speaker 1 (05:28):
Though very few humans have actually left the surface of
the Earth for significant periods of time and entered even
our space neighborhood, we have a pretty good understanding of
what's going on in the rest of our galaxy, the
structure of galaxies beyond that, and all of that comes
from gathering that information that's beamed to us from the
rest of the universe. Imagine if instead the universe was

(05:51):
totally dark, we would have no idea what was out there.
We're grateful that at least some little fraction of it
is shining brightly and letting us know, oh what it's
up to.

Speaker 4 (06:01):
Yeah, there are things happening all over the universe creating light,
blasting it out into the universe, but some of them
are maybe a little bit stronger than others.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
That's right. We have a whole series of episodes about
the darkest things in the universe, dark matter, and the
mysteries of the missing gravity. But today in the podcast,
we're going to go in exactly the opposite direction.

Speaker 4 (06:22):
So to On the podcast, we'll be tackling the question
what was the brightest explosion ever seen?

Speaker 1 (06:33):
And was it that moment when Jorge finally understood particle physics? Boom,
mind a blown as it happened. I'm anticipating it, man,
we're building up to it.

Speaker 4 (06:43):
Has that even happened for you?

Speaker 1 (06:47):
You know, there's that old quote, if you think you
understand quantum field theory, then you don't understand quantum field theory.
So it's a matter of degrees, I think.

Speaker 4 (06:54):
Yeah, yeah, it's a dimmer setting a light bulb of
quantum physics. But yeah, there are explosions happening all over
the universe, and some of them are incredibly bright, and
some of them are less bright. But maybe we haven't
seen all of them. Maybe there are some that we
have managed to see out there.

Speaker 1 (07:11):
Something that's wonderful about exploring the universe is being shocked
by the scale of it. Learning how deep the history
of time is, not thousands of years, not millions of years,
but billions of years, Learning how large the universe is,
how many billions of light years across stuff has spread out.
These enormous scales that shock our understanding also serve to

(07:34):
give us a better context for our existence. Turns out
the Earth and the Milky Way are a tiny little
speck of dust in the vast cosmos. But there are
other dimensions to be shocked. In the sun you think
is quite bright, it turns out the universe gets much much,
much brighter than that.

Speaker 4 (07:50):
Yeah, the universe never sees this to make us all
feel tiny and insignificant and short lived compared to the
scale of the cosmos. And its existence. As you said,
there are things that maybe would even shock of physicists
about how bright they are.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
Absolutely, and today we're going to be learning about the
brightest of all time what physicists called the boat the
boat boat.

Speaker 4 (08:14):
The biggest of all time, the brightest of.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
All time, not the banana East of all time.

Speaker 5 (08:18):
The.

Speaker 4 (08:22):
Amazing of all time. So, as usual, we were wondering
how many people out there had thought about this question
about what is the brightest explosion ever seen in the universe.
So Daniel went out there as usual to ask people
this question.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
Thanks very much to everybody who plays for this segment
of the podcast, and if you'd like to hear your
voice for future episodes, please don't be shy. We would
love to add you to our group. Write to me
two questions at Danielanjorge dot com to volunteer, or send
me questions, or send me ideas or pictures of your cats. Whatever.
We love to hear from listeners.

Speaker 4 (08:57):
And today, Daniel, what are our players playing for?

Speaker 1 (09:01):
They're playing for the recognition of having their voice on
the podcast. Their friends and relatives.

Speaker 4 (09:08):
Will all be jealous, They'll be brightly jealous.

Speaker 1 (09:12):
They're playing for the biggest banana of all time.

Speaker 4 (09:15):
So think about it for a second. What do you
think is the brightest explosion ever seen? Here's what people
had to say.

Speaker 5 (09:22):
I am going to say that is a supernova explosion,
either that or the source of whatever gamma ray bursts are.

Speaker 6 (09:34):
The biggest explosion ever seen would have to be the
Big Bang, although there was nobody around to see it.
We can still see the cosmic microwave background radiation, so
we still can see it. But that's not really bright anymore.

Speaker 1 (09:49):
So I don't know.

Speaker 6 (09:52):
You got me in a quandary here, So it's probably
a supernova.

Speaker 7 (09:56):
I would imagine the Big Bang was pretty bright, maybe
gamma ray burse but maybe something to do with merging
black holes or merging neutron stars. I guess bright doesn't
necessarily have to be in our visible spectrum.

Speaker 4 (10:14):
All right, A couple of answers. Kind of a trick
answers here. The Big Bang was maybe the biggest explosion.
Can't argue with that.

Speaker 1 (10:21):
You can't actually argue with that. I don't think of
the Big Bang as an explosion. I think of it
as an expansion.

Speaker 4 (10:27):
Oh, I see, you're gonna use grammar to disqualify their answer.

Speaker 1 (10:31):
I know, words meanings, words having meanings are so annoying.

Speaker 4 (10:36):
I know it should just all be bath right, But
I mean, you do call it the Big Bang? I
mean yourself are saying it's a bang.

Speaker 1 (10:46):
Well, you know there's that famous story about how the
Big Bang was not named by anybody who actually believed
in the Big Bang, but by proponents of the steady
state theory.

Speaker 4 (10:56):
Physicis still call it the Big Bang?

Speaker 1 (10:57):
Right, they do still call it the Big Bang?

Speaker 4 (11:00):
Yes, absolutely, they don't call it the Big Stretch or
the Big Expansion.

Speaker 1 (11:04):
I think we should call it the Big Stretch. I
think that's a much better name. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (11:07):
Absolutely, Maybe we should amend the title of this episode
to what was the biggest explosion besides the Big Bang?

Speaker 1 (11:18):
The brightest explosion? Though? Yeah, good question. I'm not sure
how you measure the brightness of the Big Bang.

Speaker 4 (11:25):
Now, the way we phrased this question, what was the
brightest explosion ever seen? Are we only counting the ones
that we've seen or that we think happened, or is
that the same?

Speaker 1 (11:34):
Well, we're only going to talk about the ones that
we've seen. But as soon as you've seen something extraordinarily bright,
it means that there's something out there capable of making
very very bright explosions, and it's very unlikely you've seen
the brightest one. So it's like discovering a unicorn. You figure, ooh,
there are probably other unicorns in the forest, maybe even

(11:54):
with longer horns. So we could only talk about the
brightest one we've seen. That suggests that there are very
likely even brighter explosions out there we haven't seen.

Speaker 4 (12:03):
But that's an assumption, right, I mean, there could just
be one unicorn out there in the universe.

Speaker 1 (12:07):
Oh absolutely, it's a statistical statement. But yes, as soon
as you discover one unicorn, you figure, like, well, probably
had parents, maybe it had siblings. You know, there are
probably other unicorns out there, but it could be the
sole unicorn, you know, created by a random collection of
quantum fluctuations. That's also a possibility, even if it's unlikely.

Speaker 4 (12:27):
It could be the unicorn of unicorn spotting.

Speaker 1 (12:30):
Yeah, we could sell it for a billion dollars. That
should be our startup. My start idea is, give me
a billion dollars, I will make you a unicorn, and
then it'll be a unicorn startup.

Speaker 4 (12:39):
You would only make one unicorn otherwise, it's not worth much.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
Yeah, but if you only have one, you can set
the price, right. I Mean, I'm not an economist.

Speaker 4 (12:47):
But I think that's how economy worries. Sure, well, that's
our problem.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
We're selling shares in our unicorns, folks, Unicorn singular.

Speaker 4 (12:56):
But anyways, it's an interesting question. Well, what's the brightest
explosion ever seen? And so Daniel steps through, what are
some things that can cause explosions in the universe?

Speaker 1 (13:06):
Well, first, I think it's useful to think about brightness, Like,
what do we mean by brightness? Obviously, you're very bright,
All of our listeners are very bright, our children are
very bright. But when we talk about brightness in an
astronomical setting, what we mean is like how many photons
are arriving from it to Earth. And it used to
be that astronomy only really dealt with photons. We had

(13:27):
telescopes that could see photons. We used our eyeballs. These days, though,
we have other devices like particle detectors and gravitational wave
detectors that can see other kinds of messengers from astronomical events.

Speaker 4 (13:41):
Now, would brightness and photons be the best way to
measure the energy of an explosion like could there be
an explosion that maybe you know, throws up part other
kinds of particles more than photons or neutrinos or something
like that that might have more energy but be less bright,
or there's like a pretty good indication of the energy.

Speaker 1 (14:01):
No, different astronomical events have a different fraction their energy
produced in photons, in neutrinos, or in gravitational waves. So
the best way to do astronomy they call these days
multi messenger astronomy, where you're looking for photons and you're
looking for particles, and you're looking for gravitational waves. It's
the best way to get a handle on what happened.
For example, when we look at neutrons star collisions, you

(14:23):
can sometimes see a gravitational wave and also see light
from the collision. But sometimes like supernova can release huge
amounts of energy just in neutrinos, because when the neutrinos
are produced in the supernova, they're not reabsorbed, they just
fly right out because the supernova itself, though it's super dense,
is also transparent to those neutrinos, whereas photons get reabsorbed.

(14:46):
So definitely there are things that are brighter in neutrinos
than in photons, so that makes it very, very complicated.
I think today, let's just focus on the photons.

Speaker 4 (14:55):
Okay, let's just focus on the photons, because my eyeballs
can't see neutrinos yet.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
You'd have to have eyeballs the size of swimming pools.

Speaker 4 (15:04):
Oh, Daniel, that's very flattering. Thank you. You say my
eyes are endless pools of of chlorinated water. Yeah, of
physics detection technology.

Speaker 1 (15:15):
Yes, you're like an anime character with big eyes.

Speaker 4 (15:18):
Yeah, yeah, there you go.

Speaker 1 (15:19):
And the other issue with brightness is that it depends
a little bit on where you are. Like you could
have a really bright source, but it's really really far away,
and so it appears quite dim. Like when quasars were
first discovered, they were quite bright in the sky, and
then we discovered, oh my gosh, they're also super dup
far away, which means at their source they're extraordinarily bright.

(15:39):
So what astronomers typically do is define brightness by how
bright something would seem if you were one AU away
from it, If you were like the distance the Earth
is from the Sun away from that object, how bright
would it be.

Speaker 4 (15:52):
That's what an AU is, right, It's like an Earth
distance from the Sun.

Speaker 1 (15:55):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 (15:56):
All right, so step us through, like how bright are
things in the night sky?

Speaker 1 (16:00):
Yeah, so if you define the Sun as brightness of one,
then you can look at things like some of the
biggest stars that are out there, Like the biggest brightest
star ever discovered. It's three hundred and fifteen solar masses.
It's got the amazing name of R one three six
a one, and it's eight point three million times brighter

(16:21):
than the Sun. Like if you took that star, what, Yeah,
you took that star and put it in our solar
system and looked up at the sky, it would be
eight point three million times as intense as the Sun.

Speaker 4 (16:33):
Wow, you would need eight point three layers of sunblock
just to walk out into the Sun.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
Eight point three million, Yes, it's ex million, Yes, exactly.
So that's the brightest star in the universe already. That
gives you a sense of like, Wow, this stuff in
our neighborhood not really that bright. When we're talking about
like Hall of Fame brightness.

Speaker 4 (16:54):
Wouldn't this star be huge or is it still a
small star?

Speaker 1 (16:57):
No, it's very large. It's right up on the edge
of the biggest star you can have around three hundred
and fifteen solar masses. Because bigger stars have a higher
temperature at their core, so they burn hotter and faster,
they don't last very long typically, and they also produce
an enormous amount of radiation which pulls the star apart.
Stars are actually a delicate balance between the radiation pressure

(17:20):
from fusion and the gravitational pressure inwards from all of
that mass. So it's sort of incredible that so many
stars are stable for millions and billions of years. These
guys essentially tear themselves apart. Anything bigger than that can't
really last very long. So this is the brightest star
I ever seen.

Speaker 4 (17:37):
Could you even stand at one AU away from the star?
Would you be inside the star?

Speaker 1 (17:41):
You wouldn't be inside the actual edge of the star.
Its radius is like forty three times the radius of
the Sun. So it's much much denser than our sun.
But it's nowhere near an au for example.

Speaker 4 (17:55):
And why is it brighter? Is it just the more
dense so there's more fusion going on.

Speaker 1 (18:00):
Yeah, fusion is very nonlinear, and so because you have
so much more mass and it's more dense, then it's
much hotter. The pressure and temperature at the core is
much greater. And remember that while there's fusion happening at
the core of our star, it's still pretty inefficient, Like
most of the hydrogen in the star is not fusing,
because fusion is a hard thing to make happen. You
got these two protons, you're trying to squeeze them together.

(18:22):
There are electromagnetic forces are trying to push them apart.
Most of the time in the Sun, protons don't fuse.
But the higher the temperature and the higher the pressure,
the more often you do get fusion happening. And so
the fusion is just much more efficient at the heart
of this star, which heats the whole thing up and
makes it brighter.

Speaker 4 (18:39):
WHOA, but you said they don't last pretty long.

Speaker 1 (18:42):
Yeah, these stars last for like millions of years, whereas
smaller stars like hours less billions and red dwarfs can
last even longer, maybe even up to trillions of years.
We're not sure because the universe is kind of young
compared to the expected lifetime of some of these stars.

Speaker 4 (18:59):
Now, is that as bright it gets out there in space?

Speaker 1 (19:01):
That's not even close to how bright things get. That's
the brightest star we've seen. But stars are not bright
compared to like the radiation emission at the hearts of galaxies.
Big galaxies have big black holes at their centers, and
their enormous gravity creates a lot of high temperature and
high pressure in the accretion disk around the black hole.

(19:21):
So the black hole, of course is black. Maybe this
hawking radiation, but that would be very, very dim. But
because it has so much gravitational energy, there's a big
swirling mass of stuff around the black hole, and that
is so hot it's emitting a lot of radiation. That
radiation then gets guided by the magnetic field of the
black hole up and down the poles, sort of the

(19:43):
same way that like the Aurora borealis guides charged particles
to the north pole and the south pole. Here, the
magnetic field of the quasar creates two beams of particles
when shooting up the north pole and when shooting down
the south pole. And that's what a quasar is. That's
also called an active galactic nucleus WHOA.

Speaker 4 (20:01):
So it creates a jet of particles or light for both.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
If you look at pictures of galaxies with jets, these
jets can be enormous. They can be even much longer
than the galaxy itself. The power of the hearts of
these galaxies is really incredible. And there's an enormous amount
of photons also emitted here because this is just like
hot particles, and hot particles emit photons.

Speaker 4 (20:22):
Because I guess it can't guide the photons to the
North pole and South poles, but it guides other particles,
and in those particles are what emit the brightness the light.

Speaker 1 (20:30):
Yeah, exactly. And anytime you have charge particles changing direction,
like an electron flies to a magnetic field and bends,
how does it bend, It has to bend by emitting
a photon. So you have accelerating charged particles, you're going
to get lots and lots of photons, like in the
particle colliders like the Large Hadron Collider or the Large
Electron positron Collider. One of the biggest challenges is that

(20:50):
these particles are bending with magnets and constantly losing energy
to radiation, and so that's why you get so many photons.

Speaker 4 (20:58):
All right, I have more questions about this quasar and
about maybe what could be even brighter than a quasar,
So let's set the dimmer too high on those questions.
But first, let's take a quick break.

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Speaker 4 (25:05):
All right, we're talking about the brightest explosion ever seen.
And Dan, you were saying, a quasar has many times
more brightness than the brightest star that we know about.

Speaker 1 (25:15):
Yeah, quasars in the sky are like bafflingly bright. It
was a huge mystery for a long time before we
even knew that there were black holes at the hearts
of galaxies. People saw these sources in the sky and
they calculated the distance and then they were like, oh,
my gosh, it's already brightened the sky and it's super
duper far away because quasars tend to be formed in
the early universe and not recently, so all the quasars

(25:38):
we see are like really far across the universe. And
so you do that calculation, you discover that, like, wow,
quasars are trillions of times brighter than the Sun. Trillions trillions. Yeah,
there's one called three C two seven threes, the brightest
quasar we know officially, and it's four trillion times brighter
than the Sun. Like, if you were one a you

(26:00):
away from it, it would be equivalent to having four trillion suns.

Speaker 4 (26:04):
But only if you're one au at the north or
south poles.

Speaker 1 (26:07):
Right, Yes, exactly, if you're at the horizontal or you're
a little bit tilted away from it, then it's less bright.

Speaker 4 (26:12):
Now does that technically count as an explosion?

Speaker 5 (26:14):
Though?

Speaker 1 (26:15):
I don't think it counts as an explosion because it's constant,
but it is super duper bright, and.

Speaker 4 (26:19):
It's super directed too, right, Like you said, it's not
like it's not an explosion going in all directions. It's
like more like a laser.

Speaker 1 (26:26):
Yeah, it's more like a laser, like a pencil beam,
which is actually really useful, and we can use these
quasars not just to understand the early universe, but also
to understand what's between us and the quasars. There's lots
of studies where people examine the light from quasars and
they use as a probe of all like the material
between us and the quasar, for example, the dark matter
density and the gravitational lensing that happens along the way.

(26:49):
They're really useful. Sometimes a quaser can get even brighter
due to relativistic effects. These quasars are called blazars. If
the quasar is moving towards us, then its light is
enhanced by relativistic effects and it can seem even brighter
than a quasar.

Speaker 4 (27:05):
Wait, a blazar is a quasar that's moving towards us.
It's not just a quasar with a nice jacket on.
Is that what you mean? Like, it's a quasar moving
towards us.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
Well, a blazar is a quasar, it's not doesn't have
to be just moving towards us, but it's pointed like
directly at the Earth. We can see these quasars even
if they're not directly at us, because we can see
their jets and the light emitted. But if they are
actually pointed directly at us, then we call them a blazar.

Speaker 4 (27:30):
Wait, that's the only difference is that it's pointing at us.

Speaker 1 (27:33):
Yeah, blazars are quasars that are basically pointing right at
the Earth.

Speaker 4 (27:37):
And you need a whole new name for that.

Speaker 1 (27:40):
Well, you know, it's historical. People see these things in
the sky. They don't always understand the connections between them.
It's like, why do we even have constellations? You could say, hey,
now we know that like stars and constellations, some of
them are super close and some of them are across
the galaxy. Why don't we group them together? It's historical.
You know, people have called that ursa minor for a
long time, so we're gonna keep doing it.

Speaker 4 (28:00):
So blazar, then, is a quasar that's pointing at us.

Speaker 5 (28:03):
Now?

Speaker 4 (28:03):
Is it brighter than four trillion times brighter than the sun.

Speaker 1 (28:07):
Yeah, the brightest blazar is three hundred trillion times brighter
than the sun. So we're talking about a factor of
one hundred boost when a quasar is pointed right at us.

Speaker 4 (28:17):
So this is if we're one au at the north
and south pole of a quasar, it's three hundred trillion
times more brighter than the sun. But if we're not
in the north and south pole, you're saying it's more
like four trillion times.

Speaker 1 (28:28):
Yeah, exactly, And so not recommended to do any sunbathing
on the north or south pole of a.

Speaker 4 (28:34):
Blazar unless you have three hundred trillion layers of sunblock.

Speaker 1 (28:40):
Also known as like three light years of lead, still
might not be enough.

Speaker 4 (28:43):
Now that sounds pretty intense. But if we're counting beams,
I wonder like, is it brighter than the brightest laser
we've made here on Earth.

Speaker 1 (28:50):
It's much brighter than the brightest laser. Yes, I mean
if you were one AU from the brightest laser, you
would not think it's very bright. Even a laser is
pretty colimated. It's going to spread out, and an au
is a large distance.

Speaker 4 (29:02):
But in terms of intensity per you know area, is
it as intense or more intense?

Speaker 1 (29:08):
These blazars are much more intense than any source on
Earth at one AU. Yes, but these are constant things, right,
blazer is key pumping out, so I don't know if
it really counts as explosions. And the brightest thing in
the universe is actually not something that's constant.

Speaker 4 (29:24):
So then we are disqualifying quasars and blazers from being
the boats.

Speaker 1 (29:28):
We don't even need to disqualify them. They don't even qualify.

Speaker 4 (29:32):
We're seeking their chances of being the boat.

Speaker 1 (29:35):
Yeah, we're going to torpedo them. But even if we didn't,
they still wouldn't qualify because the brightest thing in the
universe is an explosion, and it's also much brighter than
the most constant thing in the universe, which are blazers.

Speaker 4 (29:47):
WHOA all right, what are these things that are brighter
than a blazer? Is it a dinner jacket? R?

Speaker 1 (29:54):
I don't know if it's white tie or black time?

Speaker 6 (29:56):
Right?

Speaker 1 (29:56):
Which is brighter?

Speaker 10 (29:57):
Right?

Speaker 4 (29:58):
It's a glittery disco jackets.

Speaker 1 (30:01):
Ooh, sparkle tie. Yeah. The brightest explosion in the universe,
and also the brightest thing we've ever seen is a
gamma ray burst. These are sort of mysterious and enormous
bursts of gamma rays. Gamma rays are just very high
energy photons that we see sometimes in the night sky.

Speaker 4 (30:19):
Well, meaning like we have gamma ray antenna and gamma
rays are just a kind of light, right, like it's
a high frequency light.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
Yeah, Gamma rays are very very high energy. You know,
Photons exist all across the electromagnetic spectrum. Some of them
we call in the visible range. Some are very long
wavelength and infrared or radio waves. But these are just
artificial divisions. Above the visible we have ultraviolet and then
X rays and then gamma rays. But again these are
just like historic dotted lines we've put on the electromagnetic spectrum.

(30:48):
There's nothing above gamma rays. So gamma rays include everything
above X rays and then out to infinite energy.

Speaker 4 (30:54):
Whoa. So we have these antennas out there on Earth
like in the tech gamma rays and sometimes we get
these birds coming from space like these huge kind of
waves of gamma rays.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
Yeah, exactly. And it's fascinating history because this is something
that really benefits from the Cold War. Like in the
second half of last century, the United States military was
really curious whether the Soviet Union was doing atmospheric nuclear
testings before it was ruled out. So they built satellites
and all sorts of technology to try to detect nuclear testing,

(31:25):
and sure they found some, I guess, but they also
spotted these weird bursts in the sky of gamma rays
that they didn't understand that were not coming from below,
they were coming from above. That's how gamma ray bursts
were first discovered. I love when we spend money on
the military we accidentally end up doing science.

Speaker 4 (31:42):
Are you making a case for more military spending.

Speaker 1 (31:47):
I don't think military spending is a very efficient way
to do science. I'm just grateful when sometimes that money
turns out to be useful for science as well.

Speaker 4 (31:55):
See, I see, it's a win. It's a win for everyone.

Speaker 1 (31:59):
Yeah, I'll take it. I mean, the military budget totally
dwarfs the SIGNS budget. But anyway, that's a topic for
another time.

Speaker 4 (32:06):
How bright are these gamma ray bursts?

Speaker 1 (32:07):
Some of them are crazy, crazy bright. Like we've seen
gamma ray bursts that are a million trillion times brighter
than the sun, like a quadrillion times brighter than the sun.

Speaker 4 (32:19):
So yeah, in terms of how brid we think they
are at the source you're on Earth. We don't get
a million trillion times more gamma rays than the sun.

Speaker 1 (32:29):
Yes, that's right. We were all killed several years ago
due to gamma ray burst. We're just now catching up. No,
this is at the source absolutely. Fortunately for us, they're
quite distant, so when they get here on Earth, there's
a few very high energy gamma rays. But we're not
all fried.

Speaker 4 (32:44):
But so, how do we know how far they are?
Like we're just getting a blip on our antennas, Like,
how do we know, like how far away they came from?

Speaker 1 (32:51):
Yeah, it's a good question. We're not exactly sure because
for many of them, you look in the night sky
where they came from, and there's like nothing there. It's
not like you can point to say, oh, it came
from this star that went supernova, or it came from
that galaxy. Like you look at the sky, you're like, oh,
here's a huge source of gamma rays. There's nothing in
the night sky there that we can see. It must
mean that there's something extraordinarily distant. So there's a lot

(33:13):
of uncertainty on the inherent brightness of these things.

Speaker 4 (33:16):
A huge amount of uncertainty, right, Like it could be
something closed that's dim, or it'd be something really far
that's super duper bright. How do you tell the difference, Well.

Speaker 1 (33:23):
It's definitely not something close and dim. Right, If it
was something close, we would see it. Because these things
are very very bright. It could be something close that's
dim most of the time and occasionally bright. But yet
there is uncertainty on the distance to these.

Speaker 4 (33:36):
Things, meaning like the range goes from sixty what to
a million trillion times brighter than the Sun.

Speaker 1 (33:42):
Yeah, we don't know exactly how far there are. All
of the gamma ray bursts that we've seen have originated
from outside the Milky Way galaxy, which means that they're
very far away, but there's a huge range there, right,
there could be a neighboring galaxy that could be a
very very distant galaxy at the edge of the universe.

Speaker 4 (33:59):
And we think they came from outside the Milky Way
because when we pinpoint where they came from, we don't
see anything that we think is in the Milky Way.

Speaker 1 (34:06):
Yeah, exactly, And we think these things are extraordinarily bright,
and any gamma ray burst in the Milky Way that's
actually pointed towards Earth will probably fry the Earth. And
there are some theories about how like some mass extinctions
might have occurred due to gamma ray bursts in the
Milky Way, for example. But yeah, these things we think
are extraordinarily bright. I mean, it's hard to get your
mind around these numbers. It's easier if you express it,

(34:28):
like in terms of how much energy the Sun puts out.
So for example, our Sun in its entire lifetime will
put out as much energy as is in one of
these gamma ray bursts for one second, So like a
second of gamma ray bursts is ten billion years of
the sun.

Speaker 4 (34:44):
Whoa we think, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:46):
We think there is definitely a lot of uncertainty here.

Speaker 4 (34:48):
I mean it sounds like a huge amount of unsertainty, right,
How do we know how far away it is?

Speaker 1 (34:51):
Yeah, we don't know. We consist sort of like lower
limits because we know the nearest neighborhood and we can
tell that there's nothing there that's generating these things. You know,
there's a lot of fuzziness in some general arguments there.
But you take these numbers definitely with a big grain
of salt.

Speaker 4 (35:06):
And you said it was a mystery for a long time,
meaning that we still don't know what makes these bursts.

Speaker 1 (35:12):
We still don't really understand it. Yeah, we have some theories.
It turns out the gamma ray bursts come in two categories,
is like shorter ones and longer ones. The shorter ones
last for like seconds or tens of seconds, and the
longer ones last for like minutes. So that seems like
probably there are two different things going on there, and
there are theories. The leading theory is that short gamma

(35:33):
ray bursts might come from merging neutron stars, like we
talked about. You know, Neutron stars are these very dense
objects that the end of life of large stars, not
so big that they become a black hole and not
so small they become a white dwarf, but having enough
mass to become very dense neutron stars. And often these
stars are in binary systems and then at the end
of their life they're orbiting and eventually collapse and fall

(35:56):
into each other. And these are incredibly powerful events. They
generate gravitational waves, they generate the conditions needed to make
like gold and platinum and all the heavy nuclei in
the universe, just like supernova, and also generate very high
energy gamma rays.

Speaker 4 (36:12):
Would they also generate regular light like visible light, or
would they maybe only generate gamma rays, and that's why
we don't see them with the naked eye.

Speaker 1 (36:21):
Yeah, we definitely see neutron star collisions, and we've seen some.
We've also correlated some with gravitational waves. But you know,
there's lots of different varieties of these things, different masses
of neutron stars, and the collision themselves can happen in
lots of different ways. So we've seen neutron star collisions
that haven't caused huge gamma ray bursts, but there's a
speculation that sometimes neutron star collisions might cause these incredibly

(36:44):
bright gamma ray bursts, but it's not something we understand
very well. Even the heart of a single neutron star
is not something we understand. Like, what is the state
of matter under these incredible densities? Is it a cork
gluon plasma? Is it some other state of matter? Is
it nuclear pasta all episode about this question, or really
just the very beginning of the ability to think about

(37:04):
these things coherently. And then take two neutron stars that
are swirling around each other and the dynamics of that
and the relativity. It's really just sort of beyond our
ability to calculate in a robust manner, and so there's
a lot of sort of theoretical questions about whether those
even could cause gamma ray.

Speaker 4 (37:20):
Bursts, meaning they might not even be bright enough, or
they might not be enough to generate the kinds of
bursts we think we're seeing.

Speaker 1 (37:28):
Yeah, it's the leading theory, but it's definitely far from proven.

Speaker 4 (37:32):
All right, let's digain more into what could be causing
these gamma y bursts, and then we'll get to the
boat the brightest of all time. But first, let's take
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Speaker 4 (40:33):
All right, we're hopping on a boat here, Daniel, trying
to find the brightest of all time, the brightest explosion
of all time.

Speaker 1 (40:40):
Right, yes, exactly.

Speaker 4 (40:42):
It's the biggest exploding boat.

Speaker 1 (40:46):
Yeah, and it's really wonderful. I love the experience of
just being overwhelmed by stuff that happens in the universe.
Really stretches your mind even try to conceive of these
incredible events. You know, it makes everything that happens here
on Earth just seem incomes quench.

Speaker 4 (41:00):
Yeah. I mean for it to have been so bright
that even though it's super duper duper far away, we're
still seeing it here on Earth. It's pretty amazing, right,
I mean, I'm sure the rest of the universe is
also seen it.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
Yeah exactly. And unless this is the unicorn of unicorns,
it means it's probably even brighter stuff out there that
we're missing.

Speaker 4 (41:18):
Oh, maybe it is a unicorn making this.

Speaker 1 (41:22):
Yeah. Maybe it's the collision of two unicorns when they
cross their horns. Maybe that's what happens.

Speaker 4 (41:27):
Yeah, yeah, Or it's a unicorn farting.

Speaker 1 (41:31):
Let's keep it clean for the families out there.

Speaker 4 (41:35):
It's something wrong with farts. Everybody farts, even unicorns.

Speaker 1 (41:39):
This is not a fart podcast, folks. We're talking about
bright explosions, not stinky ones.

Speaker 4 (41:44):
But you did say these things are really far away.

Speaker 1 (41:49):
They are mind blowingly far away exactly. So we have
the short Cama ray bursts that are probably emerging neutron stars,
and then we have these longer Cama ray bursts, which
just means that we see photons for longer, like a
last four minutes instead of seconds. And the leading theory
here is supernova collapse that when supernova's collapse sometimes they

(42:10):
create these very bright bursts of photons, not always like
we see supernovas that don't cause gamma ray bursts, but
sometimes we think like there's a jet of matter ejected
from the supernova, Like the collapse isn't completely symmetric, and
this jet of matter sort of like a blazar or
a quasar, can accelerate particles and generate enormous bursts of

(42:31):
very very intense light.

Speaker 4 (42:33):
M Does that mean we have to disqualify supernova from
our category here because a burst is not sort of
going in all directions.

Speaker 1 (42:41):
No, I think it's fine. I don't think there's a
reason to disqualify it just because it's focused. You know,
I think it's still it's bright and it's an explosion,
so yeah, I think it qualifies as one of the
brightest explosions.

Speaker 4 (42:53):
It's more of a float, like the focused, focusedly bright
of all time. All right, So those are leading theories,
but we're not sure. It seems you're saying maybe even
a supernova or emerging neutron stars might not be powerful
enough to generate the kinds of gamma ray burst we're seeing.

Speaker 1 (43:12):
Yeah, exactly. And you know, this is the exciting edge
of astronomy when we see stuff in the night sky
we can't quite explain. We're not sure if it's like
a weird, extreme version of something we've already seen, or
if it's something totally new kind of thing out there
in the universe we've never considered. And that's definitely happened, right,
I think about the first time we discovered supernova or

(43:34):
black holes or quasars, all these things. We're discoveries of
something new out there in the universe, a whole new
category of things the universe can do. So we don't
really know if gamma ray bursts represent that or if
they represent like the extreme edge of some kind of
thing we're familiar with.

Speaker 4 (43:50):
Yeah, it's pretty exciting. So is that then the brightest
thing we've seen explode out there in the universe.

Speaker 1 (43:56):
So the brightest thing we've ever seen in the universe
is a gamma ray burst, and it's one that just
happened last year. Like the record was set in October
twenty twenty three.

Speaker 4 (44:06):
Ooh, was there a celebration? Was Thickinness World Record official
there at the telescope.

Speaker 1 (44:15):
I think that everybody was too stunned, Like this is
something just crazy bright, brighter than anything we've ever seen
by like a big factor. This is one hundred times
brighter than any other gamma ray burst we've ever seen,
which remember is already like quadrillions of times brighter than
the sun.

Speaker 4 (44:32):
Wow, that's incredible. But then do we know how far
away this one was? Like maybe it was dimmer than
the ones before, it was just closer.

Speaker 1 (44:41):
They think this one might just be closer. They actually
have a candidate to where it might have come from,
which is a galaxy only two and a half billion
light years from Earth, and so it might be why
it seemed brighter here, and it seemed like the jet
might be like pointed right at us. That's sort of
one theory for why this one was so bright. But
you know, we have this telescope orbiting the Earth. It's

(45:02):
called the Fermi Lat and it's excellent and finding gamma
rays really high energy photons. It's kind of like a
particle detector in space. So I think it's pretty cool.
Like photons enter the telescope and it's not like a
telescope like Hubble where you have lenses and optics. Instead,
it converts the photon into electron and positron then attracts
those particles. So it's sort of like a very high

(45:23):
energy particle detector. And this thing was totally overwhelmed, Like
it was just flooded with higher energy photons than it
had ever seen before.

Speaker 4 (45:32):
Wow, Like it maxed out the sensor.

Speaker 1 (45:34):
Yes, exactly, it saturated that eyeball in space. It was
totally overwhelmed, and not just our sensors, like the ionosphere,
this part of the atmosphere of the Earth. The whole
thing swelled up for several hours. This is the kind
of thing that happens when like we get a big
solar flare, like when the sun burps out an enormous
number of particles towards the Earth that the ionosphere responds.

(45:56):
But this is something that happened like billions of light
years away and it's still made the Earth like a
little swollen and inflamed.

Speaker 4 (46:04):
WHOA, Now, how do we know where it came from?

Speaker 1 (46:07):
We don't know exactly, but there's sort of a candidate
galaxy in that direction to people think maybe it came
from there. But you know, this is all very speculative.
You can't really tell me.

Speaker 4 (46:15):
Like, how do we triangulate where it came from?

Speaker 1 (46:17):
Oh, we can measure the direction of these photons, Like
Fermilat is a detector, and so we can see the
trajectory of the particles that come from the photon. So
we can reconstruct the direction of these photons.

Speaker 4 (46:29):
What do you mean we can see the direction? How
do we do that?

Speaker 1 (46:32):
Well, the photon turns into an electron and positron pair,
and those carry the momentum of the original photon, and
then we have layers of detector, So we have like
ten or one hundred layers that detect the motion of
the particles that come from the photon, and then we
can reconstruct that track and it points back to where
it came from.

Speaker 4 (46:49):
Oh, I see, It's like a sort of like a cake.
You know, like if you stick your finger in a cake,
you can sort of trace which direction the finger was poking.

Speaker 1 (46:57):
Yeah, imagine like a hundred layer cake and you you
like shoot a bullet through it, and then you'll take
slices of that cake and you traced where that bullet
hole was. You could figure out what direction the bullet
came from.

Speaker 4 (47:08):
Yeah, there you go. Just don't eat the bullet.

Speaker 1 (47:12):
I was going to go with a JFK analogy, but
I decided to go with cakes.

Speaker 4 (47:18):
We got GfK, We got the boat.

Speaker 1 (47:21):
The mystery gamma ray burst came from the direction of
the Texas school Book Depository. It's all a big conspiracy theory.

Speaker 4 (47:27):
Yeah, yeah, it's a cosmic conspiracy theory. All right. So
this was detected just last year and who detected it?

Speaker 1 (47:34):
So it was detected all over the Earth. It was
seen by Fermi Laugh which is a big collaboration of
scientists from across the world. It was also seen by
the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory in China, and
then there was a Russian facility that saw it also,
and this observatory in China is only for very very
high energy photons, and they only ever seen a few

(47:57):
photons very high energy, and this time they saw five
thousand photons just from this one gamma ray burst. It's
like ten times as many as they've ever seen in
the entire history of the entire detector. They saw in
this one day. This one period lasted about seven minutes.

Speaker 4 (48:15):
Long wait weaning that it was visible to the naked eye,
or you could only see it in gamma rays.

Speaker 1 (48:19):
You could only see it in gamm rays. You cannot
see gamma rays with the naked eye. They're way too
high energy. And one of the most interesting and weird
things about this gamma ray burst if not just the intensity,
like the number of photons, but the energy of each
individual photon. So this thing also set a record as
sending the highest energy photon ever seen. This one photon

(48:40):
had eighteen terra electron volts, which is like much more
energy than protons have the Large Hadron collider. And yes,
it means it's a very very high frequency, very short wavelength.
This is the highest energy photon ever seen by a
factor of four. So like this thing is really far
out there on the tails.

Speaker 4 (48:58):
Wouldn't it mean that it's really close, right, because then
don't photons kind of get stretched out as they go
further out in space.

Speaker 1 (49:05):
Absolutely, it's very weird for us super high energy photon
to come from really far away for two reasons. One
is you're right, if it's coming from really far away,
then as the universe expands, those photons get stretched out,
they get red shifted, right, so they get lower energy,
which means originally it had even more energy. The other
reason is that the universe is actually not very transparent

(49:27):
to super high energy photons. As particles get really really
high energy, they start to interact with the cosmic microwave
background radiation like protons and other cosmic ray particles. If
they're super high energy, they'll collide with the photons from
the cosmic microwave background, the remnants of the Big Bang,
and interact and disappear. The same thing is true with

(49:49):
super duper high energy photons interact with those photons from
the CMB. So we shouldn't be able to see photons
from really really far away because they should get absorbed
by the universe. So here we're seeing a super high
energy photon from what seems like really really far away.
It's very weird.

Speaker 4 (50:05):
So we can trace where the burst came from. And
when we look in that direction, we see some galaxy
where maybe it came from. That's why you think it
came from that galaxy.

Speaker 1 (50:15):
But that's you know, very speculative. It's like, yeah, it's
in the same direction in the sky, right, and that's
the first thing we see there. That doesn't mean it
came from that. I could have come from behind that.
There could be something else between us and there. Right,
we're really limited by our vantage point.

Speaker 4 (50:29):
Like it could be an alien in between us and
this galaxy with like a laser pointer that SHOs lighting
the gama right direction and they're just messing with us.

Speaker 1 (50:38):
Yeah, absolutely, it could be or you know, it could
be that it just came from something else and it
happened to land here on Earth. This one special photon
happened to land here on Earth at the same time
as this gamma ray burst. Right. That could have been random, or.

Speaker 4 (50:51):
Maybe it's not random. What if it's like a phone.

Speaker 1 (50:53):
Call, it's like a voicemail. It's like in your hotel
room when you ignore that.

Speaker 4 (50:59):
Play like it's an emoji. It's a text message that
says you up.

Speaker 6 (51:06):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (51:06):
It's a late night booty call from aliens.

Speaker 4 (51:10):
Hopefully not a booty call hopefully to science.

Speaker 1 (51:13):
Call family friendly. But you know, there's a lot of
really interesting science that could be done with this, because again,
people don't understand how a photon with that much energy
could travel that far across space. One fun paper I
read suggests that maybe it wasn't a photon the whole time.
Maybe it converted to this weird theoretical particle called an axion.
There's this idea that maybe axion particles are the dark matter,

(51:37):
and they couple a little bit to photons, and so
photons can sometimes turn into axions. There's a set of
experiments called light shining through walls where people look for
photons penetrating stuff that photons shouldn't be able to penetrate
by turning briefly or for a while into axions and
then converting back into photons when they come near the Earth,
for example, and hit our magnetic field. So some people

(51:59):
argue that this might be evidence that this photon turned
into an axion, flew across the universe, and then came
back into photon. Modes so we could see it.

Speaker 6 (52:07):
WHOA.

Speaker 4 (52:08):
That's a little too convenient though, isn't it.

Speaker 1 (52:11):
It's just hard to explain that we have no actual
explanation for this photon, like there is no way we
should see It's like an impossible photon. I mean, the
most boring explanation for this crazy photon is that it's
a mistake that we don't know how to measure the
energy of particles with super duper high energy, because remember,
we're always reconstructing these things. This is an air shower observatory,

(52:32):
which means you're not seeing the original photon. You're seeing
the particles that turned into when it's slammed into the
atmosphere and created this cascade of particles that are shining
and flashing light.

Speaker 4 (52:44):
Meaning it could have been something else not a photon.

Speaker 1 (52:46):
It could have been something else not a photon, or
it could have been something with lower energy. You know,
the uncertainty on this resolution is significant. We should also
say the Russian observatory reported an even higher energy photon
two hundred and fifty et terra electron bolts, like more
than ten times the energy of this one scene in China.
But the truth is nobody believes them. They're like, yeah, no,

(53:08):
you guys messed up.

Speaker 4 (53:09):
Let me get this straight. We don't know what cost
this burst. We don't know where it is exactly. We
don't even know if it is a burst.

Speaker 1 (53:17):
We know it's a gamma y burst. It was very,
very intense, but it has these special photons in it
that really raise some questions. Maybe we've mismeasured them, or
maybe they're evidence of axion, dark matter, or something else happening.
But there's a lot of uncertainty in these things, and
you know, the frustrating thing in astronomy is you can't
control these experiments. Like if this was something you were

(53:37):
doing in your lab, in your basement, or even if
a large hadron collider, you could say, let's do it
again and check. But these are just things we're lucky
or unlucky enough to see in the sky and have
to wait for it to happen again before we can
convince ourselves it's real.

Speaker 4 (53:51):
I wonder then we should maybe retitle the episode, because
really we're just talking about the brightest flash we've ever seen.
We don't even know if it came from an explosion
or an alien laser or an alien phone.

Speaker 1 (54:04):
Call right, yeah, or space unicorn farts yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 4 (54:08):
Yeah, a very focused space unicorn part.

Speaker 1 (54:12):
Maybe they are the aliens woo, I'm unifying the theories.

Speaker 4 (54:15):
That's how they make phone calls to their fart network,
in which case it is sort of technically a booty call.

Speaker 1 (54:24):
People are doing a lot of work to try to
understand this better. They're trying to see, like was there
a jet of material that was emitted. By looking at
the spectrum of light that comes in the gamma ray burst,
they can try to get a sense for like what
was in that jet. Was it wide, was it narrow?
Did they have the kind of material we expect from
a collapsing star. What can we learn about the origin star?

(54:45):
Maybe there was something weird about the star that collapsed
that generated this incredibly bright source of light. And so
there's a lot of sort of conflicting studies still about this.
Some people say the jet was really really narrow, that's
why I was bright. Another study said, no, actually the
jet looks like it was wide. But you know, there's
a lot of questions. This is early days in understanding this.
But unless we're lucky to have to see a brighter one,

(55:06):
this is going to be a boat for a while.

Speaker 4 (55:08):
Is it possible also that maybe it was like focus somehow, right,
because isn't there a sort of lensing out there by
dark matter or maybe other things? Could something have lensed
this light to make it seem more intense?

Speaker 1 (55:20):
Mm hmm, Yeah, that's certainly a possibility. There's some really
cool studies to try to understand how much dark matter
there is between us and any point in the sky
by looking for evidence of lensing. We don't see lensing
evidence in this distribution, but it's certainly possible. We don't
have a great map of where the dark matter is
in the universe, and you know that's fundamental limitation to

(55:40):
looking at the universe only from the surface of one planet.
Anytime you get a photon, you don't exactly know where
it came from, what happened to it along the way,
And you have to try to untangle all of these
mysteries simultaneously, Right, how much dust is there between us
and there? How much dark matter is there? How much
is the universe stretching? Is that even? Is that isotro
because there's other weird stuff going on simultaneously. We have

(56:03):
to try to unravel these mysteries to explain this incredible
mosaic we see in the night sky.

Speaker 4 (56:09):
Amazing, But I guess maybe the overall message is that
we've seen something that is brighter than what we thought
was possible, and it's pretty incredible that we're still doing that, right,
We're seeing things we didn't think could exist before.

Speaker 1 (56:22):
Yeah, and it's stunned astronomers. I mean, astronomers are used
to big numbers about the universe, but even this one
sort of like you can tell, it rocked them back
on their heels.

Speaker 4 (56:32):
Well, wait, it shocked even the bright ones exactly.

Speaker 1 (56:35):
Eric Urns is an astronomer who studies this kind of stuff, said, quote,
the energy of this thing is so extreme that if
you took the entire Sun and you converted all of
it into pure energy, it still wouldn't match this event.
There's just nothing comparable.

Speaker 4 (56:51):
Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah, unless you consider farting unicorns in
this case, anything's possible. All right, Well, an interesting exploration
of an you universal or at least local world record
of the brightest flash we've seen. And it's mysteries.

Speaker 1 (57:06):
And one thing we do know is that the universe
contains enduring mysteries. And the more we look out there
in the universe, the more we understand, and the more
we are shocked by what's out there.

Speaker 4 (57:15):
Yeah, and the more that we need bright people like
maybe you out there to figure out the mystery.

Speaker 1 (57:22):
He's talking to you, folks, guys, not to me.

Speaker 4 (57:24):
We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See
you next time.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
For more science and curiosity, come find us on social
media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, This, Org, Insta,
and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel
and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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