Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What is the biggest explosion in the universe

Episode Date: March 10, 2020

What is the biggest explosion in the universe that mankind has ever witnessed? Find out with Daniel and Jorge. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

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Hey, Daniel, I have a physics question for you. All right. I didn't have a daily banana, but I'm ready. What makes explosions so awesome? They are awesome, but is that a physics question? Yeah, you know, like in the movies, they always show the action here, walking away from an explosion in slow motion, and it looks really cool.

You know, does physics tell us why that is so cool? Physics is the reason why it's cool, man. Physics makes things cool. Everything except physicists. I'm pitching a movie where a physicist is the action hero's slow motion walking away from the explosion. It's called Lapcoat Action Hero. You're not going to fund a sequel for that one. Keanu Reeves, I'm issuing an invitation for a screen test.

They tried that, didn't they? That was that movie where he, that's your wife's favorite movie. Cold Fusion, yeah. Cold Fusion, yeah, he's an action hero and he's a physicist, right? There you go, so you can happen. Cold Fusion, too, more slow motion explosions. Does that make you feel funny, like to know that your spouse's favorite movie is about a physicist portrayed by Ken Reeves? No, it makes me feel like she thinks physicists are sexy.

I mean, I'd rather that than having a physicist be played by Danny DeVito. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of Ph.D. Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel Whiteson. I'm a particle physicist and I don't wear a lab coat, but I consider myself a science action hero. Nice. Do you code in slow motion, too? My code explodes, man. I walk away. It blows people's minds. Yeah, the explosions are all mental. I blow your mind with my amazing coding. Well, welcome to our mind explosion of a podcast, Daniel and Jorge.

Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio. In which we talk about all the things in the universe that do blow our minds and that are currently blowing the minds of scientists today. And we walk you through them and explain them to you in what we hope is an understandable and maybe even entertaining style. Yeah, we talk about all the amazing stuff out there that is just sitting there waiting for us to discover it and to tell us about things that we want to know about the universe. but we also talk about the events

and all the crazy and wild and sometimes dangerous stuff that happens out there in the cosmos. That's right, because if you look up at the night sky, you are looking at one of the most amazing shows in the universe. It's not necessarily put on for your enjoyment, but it's a pretty spectacular fireworks display.

You know, it is true that when you look out into the night sky and you look at all the stars, you think that they look pretty and twinkling, but really what you're looking at is billions and billions of giant explosions happening all the time. Yes, it is a very dramatic fireworks display and it's going on all the time. It's been going on for billions of years. And I like to think of it as like the best view in the universe because not only is it huge, dramatic explosions bigger than anything we could imagine here on Earth, but you're also looking across billions and billions of miles. It's amazing

to me how much of our lives we spend without looking up at the night sky. You go around your daily business and some people never even look up at the night sky. But there's so much incredible universe out there waiting for us to look at it. But yeah, we like to talk about fun things that happen and big explosions. And sometimes we like to talk about the biggest things that happen out there in the universe. The biggest, the loudest, the craziest, the smallest, the quietest. The wettest, the driest. The extremes of the universe. The extremes. Because they remind us of the scale. cozy little life here on Earth is a very narrow slice of the kind of environments that are out

there in the universe. And so we want to blow your mind by reminding you that most of the universe is quite different. Most of the universe is much more dramatic than the kind of things we experience here on Earth. And one of the best ways to learn that is to go to the extremes, the coldest, the brightest, the darkest, the hottest. Yeah. And so everyone loves explosions, of course. And so to the end of the podcast, we'll be asking a question about... What is the biggest explosion in the universe? We've talked about explosions in this podcast before, you know, like supernovas are big explosions and nuclear,

when you blow up a nuclear bomb, what happens? We had an episode about that. But here we're talking about the biggest explosion in the entire universe. Like if you did a survey of everything that is, what would be the coolest explosion to film in slow motion and then have Kenneries walk slowly? away from it. Precisely.

Or Daniel, of course. That's right. Have Daniel float away in slow motion. Or, you know, any lab coat wearing physicists, we are all equally sexy. Do you wear lab coats, Daniel? Is that for safety or just for, because your AC is too high in your office? I wear a lab coat when I'm going to do a really complicated calculation, you know, just for protection because I break something. I see.

Yeah, because the sweat pouring out of your forehead and the intensity of the top. typing, it's just, you want to protect your clothes. Yeah, and, you know, if you think really hard about something, you're creating very high energy density in your brain, which could collapse into a black hole. And, you know, I think a lab coat might be good protection there. Yeah, really, to protect you or? If my grad student is doing all the thinking, then I need a lab code to protect myself.

I see case they explode. Yes, that's really what I'm worried about. But we are talking today about explosions because there was a recent article crowning a new champion explosion of the universe and a lot of our listeners wrote in asking us, could you please explain what's going on? How is this possible? What's the deal with this crazy article? Wow. So this is like hot off the presses. I mean, the article just came out last week crowning the new biggest explosion in the universe. Yeah. Ever seen or did you think this is it? Ever seen? No, I think it's very unlikely that we will see the biggest explosion in

the universe or that we have seen it. But it's the biggest explosion that we have ever seen. I mean, the more you look, the more you see extremes. And for this particular category of explosion, there's a potential for even bigger ones. I guess you kind of maybe don't want to see the biggest explosion in the universe. You want to see it on a movie screen, yeah, but you don't want to be there. Unless you have a really nice lab code that could protect you. Yeah, but as usual, Daniel was curious to see how many people had heard of this discovery or even had thought about what is the biggest explosion in the universe.

So I walked around campus and I asked folks, just after this article came out, What makes the biggest explosions in the universe? So think about it for a second. If someone asks you what the biggest explosion in the universe was, what would you answer? Here's what people had to say. I think it's a supernova. Probably when, like, really big things collide. Really big things like what?

Stars. Stars, I guess. Yeah. Just like normal stars doing their thing? It's when they die, right? Or is it that they collapse when they do that? It's like a star exploding? One of the biggest I can think of.

Explosion of a star? Supernova, I think it's just called or something. Supernovae? Maybe stars dying? Like astronomical. Yeah. And that type of, like, I don't think anything man-made. I want to say stars when they explode.

Well, it was just reported that the most massive explosion ever recorded was a black hole, they believe, or specifically the cavitation of the wall was created by the plasma emitted by the black hole. I can't remember exactly where, or at the center of our galaxy or something like that, maybe. Hydrogen bombs, that's it? A nuke? All right, a lot of great guesses. Most people say it's supernovas. Yep, supernova's a popular one.

People have heard of it. The supernova PR team has done a great job. Well, you know, it does have the name super, super on it, you know. But you know, hypernovas are even bigger, and nobody talks about hypernovas. What? Is that a thing for real? Are you kidding? Hypernovas?

Hypernovas. Yeah, we've talked about on the podcast. They're just like a super big category of supernovas. He's saying I forgot. I guess it's just not as sticky a supernova's, you know. Not as sticky. The focus group for supernovas did a better job. Yeah.

Anyway, it was a popular answer, and it makes sense because those are really big explosions. Some people said nuclear weapons times two, like if you multiplied a nuclear weapon. There were a couple people who said nuclear bombs, and I think they just hadn't really expanded their mind out to the astronomical. They were thinking about the biggest explosions on Earth, even though I asked for the biggest explosions in the universe. So I think those folks sort of had their brains down to Earth. And someone said a black hole merger, which is not very intriguing. Yeah. Which is actually maybe a little bit close to the actual answer.

It's on the right track for sure. Those are all good answers. And so we're looking for the biggest explosion in the universe. And so, Daniel, let's maybe first talk about, you know, what an explosion means and what does it mean for something to explode and how you would, how physicists measure these things? Do you measure it by like Bruce Willis's or Keanu Reeves, units of Keanu Reeves' coolness? The way to think about an explosion is that it's a very rapid release of energy. Like when you have a nuclear bomb, what's happening there

is that you have a rapid release of energy from the fusion or the fission reaction so rapid that it creates like a shockwave that then zooms out. Like if you had that whole thing happen much more slowly, it wouldn't be an explosion. It would just like gradually dissipate. It's like if you gradually, cranked up the heat of something, that heat would spread up and it wouldn't spread out and it wouldn't necessarily create any destruction. But the reason you have destruction from an

explosion at these shockwaves is sudden release of a huge amount of energy. So that's the key for an explosion. Everything is leaving one place really quickly. Energy matter. Yeah. And so the way we measure an explosion is by measuring the energy output. And so we use units of energy. And there's a lot of different kinds of units of energy. So you just got to pick one. Well, what's the standard physics unit for explosions? The unit that they use in astronomy is the erg, which is kind of a funny unit. It sounds sort of like more like a grunt, you know, like... It sort of sounds like an anatopoeia, you know, like, oh, somebody exploded.

Or it sort of sounds like an insult, like, God, can you believe the silly thing that erg said? That erg. That erg can't even calculate the mass of a black hole. Sounds like a bad physics put down or something. It's like what nerds call each other to call each other. out. Yeah. But it's actually kind of a cool unit of energy. And I like it because it has a very understandable example. Like one erg is about as much energy it would take a fly to do a push-up. Wow, it's that small? It's pretty small, yes. So it's an unit of energy like joules or like

joules per second or joules per area? What's the, what am I thinking? Jules is a unit of energy. Jules per second would be power. That'd be like watts. And jules per area would be pressure. But we're talking about just energy, and so erg is a unit. And it's pretty small. You're right. For example, if you calculated like how many ergs are in the rolling of a bowling ball, that's about a billion ergs. So every time I'm bowling, I'm like outputting a billion ergs.

And like an actual erg because you pull your back, you're like, the energy you spend in rolling that bowling ball is the same as if one billion flies simultaneously do one push-up. It's a bit of a weird unit because it's so small. And it's really popular in astronomy where the numbers are really big. So I wonder if like astronomers use this unit to make their numbers seem bigger. I don't think astronomers need to inflate their numbers, you know? They're like, you know, a billion light years just doesn't seem like a lot.

Let's go with a billion light seconds. Yeah, well, it's weird because the ERG was officially discontinued as a unit. People are like, don't use ERG. It's ridiculous. But astronomers still use it. They just like, they ignored that. ruling officially from the International Court of Units. And I made that up, by the way.

And they just keep on using it. So we get really big, ridiculous numbers. So does it stand for something? Or they, it literally just, it's just a weird word, erg. Or is it kind of like one of these new millennial, you know, text contractions? You know, they're too lazy to write energy. So they just pick the E, the R, and the G. A little bit.

It's actually got a nice history. It comes from a Greek word Ergon, which is the unit of energy. And it's from like the 1800s. And so it's a bit outdated and it's past its prime, but it still lives on in astronomy. Okay, so it's like an unit of energy like the jewels or a calorie or something like that. And it tells you kind of how much energy comes out of this explosion or thing exploding in a second or at a time or? Just the total energy. Yeah.

So you'd have to integrate over time. And so for example, if you look at something that's continuous explosion like our sun, our sun is just a constant. exploding fusion bomb, then you can quote the energy like per second, for example, the sun puts out 10 to the 34 ergs per second. So that's a lot of ergs per second. That's a lot of flies doing a lot of push-ups every second. How many? That is basically 10 to 34 flies. Every second. But then it depends on the time, right? The sun is not just one explosion. So it's a constant explosion. And it only explodes in the day, of course, at night. It tucks away and turns out.

This is a science podcast, so let's not spread misinformation. And in a year, you know, it'll put out like 10 to the 41 ergs. So that sounds like a lot, but it's sort of a touch on. So the bowling ball is 1 billion ergs. The sun is 10 to the 34 ergs per second. Yeah. So that's how much energy is coming out of this explosion. Yeah.

And then a popular answer, of course, with supernovas. And it's a great answer because there's a lot of energy put out by a supernova. very short amount of time that's like 10 to the 51 ergs so that's you know a lot more than an individual star and is a very short amount of time right yeah it's like five orders of magnitude yeah it's like 10 orders of magnitude compared to one year and so a supernova puts out about as much energy as our sun does in its entire lifetime but the whole thing happens over billions of years over billions of years but the whole thing happens over just you know days so it's a pretty incredible explosion. If you take all of the energy that a sun makes over billions of years and compress it to

one instant, that's a supernova. That's a supernova. And that's why it's dramatic. That's what makes an explosion is this release of energy in a very short amount of time. If it just gradually leak that energy under the universe, it wouldn't be as dramatic. It's all about concentrating that energy in a short period. That's why supernovas are so super. It's almost like, you know, concentrating a billion suns in one instant. Yeah, yeah. And that's why they can outshine an entire galaxy. for a very short amount of time. They're brilliant, literally. But you're saying the supernovs

are not the biggest explosions in the universe. So even if you take a billion suns at the same time and exploded them in one instant, that wouldn't give you the big explosion in the universe. No, so if you put that into your screenplay and expect everybody to be impressed, then astronomers would be underwhelmed. They'd be like, erg.

That's a lot of ergs, but it still don't impress me. No, that is not the biggest explosion in the universe and not even close. There are much bigger explosions, but it's a little bit counterintuitive because they come from black holes. Oh, yeah. Somebody said in the answers

that a black hole merger may be the biggest explosion in the universe. So how, how explode are black hole merger? They are explodeocious. They release like a thousand times as much energy as a supernova. Wait, so if you take a thousand supernovas,

put them together, that's one black hole merger. That's one black hole merger. Now, it depends, of course, on the mass of the black holes and a little bit in the configuration. But we've only seen a few examples, and they were pretty dramatic. Wow. So if a supernova outshines the galaxy, then a black hole merger totally kind of obliterates it, right?

Yeah, but you have to compare how the energy is being released. For a supernova, a lot of the energy is released in the visible spectrum, but most of it is actually invisible. A huge fraction of it is in the neutrinos and in other particles that aren't visible light. So supernova's super duper bright, but most of the energy is not visible. For a black hole merger, almost all of the energy goes out in invisible forms, like creation of gravitational waves, which you need special devices to even see, so that there are huge releases of energy, but not necessarily bright.

It's like a silent killer. It's a dark explosion. There's the title of our movie. Whoever smelted, dealt it, or merged it. Whoever smelt it, merged it. Oh, you're right. Dark explosion is not a good name for a movie. It is an obvious part joke there.

But even at a thousand times bigger than a supernova, a black hole merger is still not the biggest explosion in the universe. It is not. It is not even close to King of the Mountain or Queen of the Castle. All right. Let's get into what is the biggest explosion in the universe and let's talk about this recent discovery of them finding it. But first, let's take a quick break.

December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually. impelled metal glass.

The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order. criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious oh wait a minute sam maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot he doesn't think it's a problem but i don't trust her now he's insisting we get to know each other but i just don't water gone. Now hold up, isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them.

I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. says, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards,

you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt and it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand.

It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Okay, Daniel, we're talking about the biggest explosion in the universe, and we're not just talking about Mel Gibson's career here. And you're telling me that supernoas are pretty big.

They're like a billion suns exploding at once, but those are nothing compared to black hole mergers, which are a thousand times bigger. and those even are not the biggest explosions in the universe. Yeah, the biggest explosions in the universe come not from black hole mergers, but from individual supermassive black holes and the chaos that they create around them. That's right because there are different categories of black hole. So like if two little black holes merge, which I think happens fairly often, right?

Surprisingly often. You get the mergers of black holes. And those black holes can be, you know, the masses of a few sons or tens of sons or hundreds of suns. But there are other kinds of black holes like the kind we see in the center of our galaxy that can have millions and millions of solar masses. Oh, and those themselves are,

you're saying, are some of the brightest or biggest explosions in the universe. Yeah, these are things we do not understand very well, but they are gargantuan. And they're basically king or queen in every category. They can get pretty crazy massive. So some black holes are, you know, thousands or millions of times.

the mass of our sun. Yes. And that creates an very intense gravitational field nearby. And so what happens is that the stuff near the black hole gets squeezed and pushed and excited. And you can generate incredible amounts of radiation and also sometimes enormous explosions on the vicinity of the black hole. Oh, I see. So just their very existence and the chaos they produce around them just from being so crazy massive, creates the biggest explosions in the universe, bigger than these black hole mergers and supernovists. Yeah, and it's not something that we understand very well. Like, we keep being surprised.

We find a huge explosion and we're like, wow, that's bigger than we thought possible. And then somebody finds one that's 10 times bigger. And they're like, that's insane. What are you talking about? Then we're going to see one that's a thousand times bigger and then we'll be over. But it's incredible, the scale of these things, the mass of these objects, the amount of energy that's stored in them, the amount of energy that's radiated out from them. Nobody has a calculation that explains this.

Nobody can say, here's my black hole simulation, and it describes how these black holes were formed and explains why they radiate and explode so much. I see. We've seen these crazy explosions from these big black holes, but nobody can actually sort of work it out how that works. Yeah. Nobody can even explain why we have these super massive black holes. If you do simulations of galaxies forming, you don't get black holes this big.

And so we don't even understand like what's making these. We'll do a whole other podcast episode about like the weird science behind how these things form. But once you have them, then they do all sorts of crazy stuff. You know, people out there might be thinking like, hold on a second. How do black holes explode or how do black holes emit radiation because they're black? Nothing's supposed to be. They're holes. They're supposed to be sucking stuff in.

And they do, they do suck stuff in. So anything that goes past the event horizon, definitely never coming out. But we're talking about the stuff. in the neighborhood, right? A black hole like this is so powerful that it's going to mess up everything nearby. Is it kind of like, you know, those, sometimes you go to like a public

toilet and you flush it and it's like turbocharged. Do you know what I'm talking about? Like, there's just like preloaded or something. And you flush and it's like everything, things are sucking down the toilet, but they're also kind of exploding at the same time. I have no idea what you're talking

about, but that sounds like a perfect analogy, yes. And especially because black holes do this really weird thing that they have these jets. There's two main structures around a black hole that people should be familiar with. One is the accretion disk. That's this disk of stuff that's swirling around the black holes like on deck to get sucked in. And people are generally familiar with that. But then shooting out sort of perpendicular to the plane of the accretion disk, like on the north and the south pole,

are these enormous jets of matter and radiation that can be like longer than entire galaxies. Yeah, I think maybe like a good visualist, kind of like how you imagine Saturn, the planet, to have this ring around it. Black holes kind of have a ring of stuff around them, too. They have a ring around them, yes. Yeah, and it's like glowing, and it's gassy and glowing and wild as well, because it's being sucked into the giant toilet. Yeah, and the jets create this radiation, which is huge. We call those quasars, and we don't understand what's going on there. We think there's some weird thing going on with intense magnetic fields.

It's like funneling really high energy particles towards the North Pole. It's like some sort of reverse northern lights effect. And if it's pointed right at Earth, then we call it a blazar. Those are some of the brightest things in the universe. Yeah, we had a whole podcast about the brightest things in the universe. Yeah, but on top of being the brightest things in the universe, the most massive things in the universe and being a mystery under themselves, they also create ridiculous explosions because quasars are not explosions.

They're just like a constant funneling of enormous energy. Like a flashlight kind of. Yeah, they're like a flashlight. But on top of that, these black holes sometimes also create really dramatic explosions. Really? Yeah, like on top of the quasars. On top of the quasars, like, that wasn't enough. They're also doing stuff on the side.

And that comes from things going on in the accretion disk. Like, you know, there's lumps. Accretion disks aren't totally smooth. You got like, you know, masses and masses of stars in there. whole solar systems and enormous lumps of rock bigger than you can imagine. And this stuff sometimes smashes into itself or gets torn apart until you get really enormous explosions. And again, not something that's well understood. Like, you see these explosions and it seems like there's more energy in the explosion than is contained in the entire system there. But how does that

even work? It means that there's stuff going on there that we don't yet understand. I guess how do you know that it came from somewhere around a black hole? Like if you see a giant explosion, how do you How can you tell that where it came from? Well, you just look for the center, right? You look for the stuff that it hit and you sort of point it all back. And so in the case of these explosions, you can see the effect of these explosions on like nearby gas clouds. And for example, you look at a gas cloud and it has like a shell in it. It's like it looks like part of a sphere.

And you can tell sort of that sphere points back to where. And so you can reconstruct where the explosion was. You know, it's like if somebody drops their coffee and you look at the spill pattern, you can pretty much tell where the coffee hit, right? It's the same story. Oh, I see. And you track it down to where it came from and you see, oh, there's a giant black hole there. Precisely.

So it must have been an explosion that happened not in the black hole or shooting from the black hole, but just in the chaos around the black hole. Yeah, because we don't think that black holes emit anything. Like, we don't know what's going on inside a black hole. It's one of the favorite questions people writing about like, like, what's going on inside a black hole? Does it look like this? Does it look like that? And I always have to write back and say, we have no idea because nobody knows what's going on inside a black hole.

Only Matthew McConaughey knows. Nobody knows. And so we can only imagine. But if there are dramatic explosions inside the black hole, they're definitely not getting out. They're not coming out. Oh. You could have way crazier stuff happening inside of the black hole, but we would never know. Yeah.

Well, remember, we asked that quantum gravity theorist, what she thought was going on inside a black hole. and she went off on that hilarious digression. You know, maybe there are a whole universe is in there doing who knows what. And so that's a deep, deep mystery. She used several ergs of brain power to come up with a creative answer to that question. Okay, so you're saying the biggest explosions in the universe are not even black holes themselves. There's just the craziness that comes from getting sucked into a giant black hole. I don't know.

Don't try to take the credit away from the black hole. Like, it's doing all the work there. Its gravitational energy is fueling this craziness. Yeah, but it's happening sort of outside of it, not as part of its existence. It's definitely passed its event horizon, and that other time we talked about where it had the size of black holes and we decided to use the event horizon as the radius. But, you know, if all the stuff nearby the event horizon is because of the gravity of the black hole, then I think it gets credit.

I guess I'm saying, you know, if my kids create a little explosion here, I'm not taking credit for that. If your kids flush your toilet and it splashes onto you, you're going to blame them for that, though, aren't you? Yeah. I'm going to blame it on the toilet manufacturer, not me or my kids. They expect the lawsuits, folks. And so this is just stuff that's around the black hole smashing into itself or being

pulled apart or does it create like a chain reaction? What's actually going on? Like, can a collision of things really create something bigger than, you know, a thousand black hole mergers? Well, you are now at the forefront of knowledge because all the ideas you just had are basically what's happening inside offices in astrophysics departments around the country. People are asking the same question. Minds are being blown by this discovery we just made. And people are like, well, maybe it's this, maybe stuff. That's exactly how we start. We're like, I don't know, what are your five top ideas for what this might be. What would that look like?

How can we rule those out? Do we know anything about these? And that's how these theories start forming. So we're really at the beginning stages of trying to understand what could cause these explosions. Like if we hadn't seen them, nobody would have predicted them. So this is where we are. We've seen these explosions. We're like, whoa, these things are bigger, even that black hole mergers. And we've traced them to supermassive black holes, or at least the area around them. But we don't know what's going on. Yeah, we just know there are crazy intense forces there. And there's really basic stuff about black holes we don't know. Like, for example, do they spin? We think they probably spin sometimes because the stuff falling into them spins, and, you know, angular momentum is conserved in our universe.

And so, but we don't know. And that could be an enormous source of energy. Like, you look at a black hole, it has huge amount of energy just from the mass it's storing. It could additionally have even more energy from its rotation. And that rotation could be fueling all sorts of stuff, like these magnetic fields and these explosions could come from the black hole spin, but we don't even know if that's a thing. It's like the toilet itself could be spinning. Yeah, there could be all sorts of weird stuff. And, you know, remember how little we really understand about the fundamental nature of the universe. We've explained a tiny fraction of it. And these are the most intense environments anywhere. So there are definitely secrets to be revealed. All right. Let's get into

what this recent discovery was and what they found and what scientists think could be happening in these giant explosions. But first, let's take a quick break. November 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass.

The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious.

Well, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor. and they're the same age.

And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale,

listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper, into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations

with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors,

musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing Vibras you've come to expect. And, of course, we'll explore deeper topics

dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash, because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you.

Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Daniel, so take us through the news reports from last week. They think maybe they found the biggest explosions in the universe ever recorded by humans. That's right. There were a lot of articles going around last week talking about the biggest explosion ever found.

And I first got wind of it when I got a tweet from somebody who sent me this headline from the Guardian. that read, Biggest Cosmic Explosion ever detected left huge dent in space. And somebody sent me this and said, what is going on here? This was Mike Kernow. And he asked me to explain that.

And so I started reading about it. That it caused a dent in space. It caused a dent in space. And, you know, I'm not a big fan of a lot of science reporting. It's a hard job. And they have to try to communicate scientific stuff to the general audience

in a way that makes sense, and you know, I know that's difficult, but a dent in space, I don't even know what that means. Maybe this reporter should get a noble prize. Just invented a new physics phenomenon. Yeah. Well, you know, in one sense, like there are dents in space all over the place. Like every massive object bends space. So you're denting space, and I'm denting space.

I'm causing a dent in space right now, right? I hope that buffs out, you know? Like, do you have insurance for those dents? And my kids are causing a dent in my wallet as well. So, but there was a really big explosion. And it's a really amazing story because it takes place in the center of a galaxy cluster. A galaxy cluster, remember, is a bunch of galaxies all sort of gravitationally bound together. And in that cluster, there's also a lot of leftover gas that was used to make the galaxies.

Remember, galaxies are gas that's been coalesced by gravity into stars that are burning. It's a cluster of galaxies. So it's not just like a Milky Way, it's like a group of Milky Way's. Yeah, it's a big group of galaxies, and there's a bunch of gas that's sort of spread out in between them. Must be a huge gas cloud. Yeah, it's a huge gas cloud. It's bigger than galaxies, absolutely. It's a massive scale thing.

And about 2016, they were looking at this thing in the x-ray, which is a good way to look at the shape of gas clouds because they emit in the x-ray. And what they noticed was what looked like a crater. They saw sort of an edge, like a circular edge, and they were like, huh, that looks like sort of the edge of a bubble, Almost as if there was a huge explosion. It looks like a constant gas cloud, but inside of it they saw like an empty space. Yeah, they saw a big bubble inside the gas cloud. But this is 2016. They didn't think that was an explosion for one reason is it would have to be ridiculously big,

like bigger than any explosion ever. So they were just kind of skeptical. Like as big as a galaxy or bigger. Bigger. Like this gas cloud bubble is 15 times bigger than our galaxy. What? A bubble inside of a cloud, the size of, 15 Milky Ways.

15 Milky Ways. Like, how many Keanu Reeves do you need to walk away from that explosion? Just one, man. There's only one Ken Reeves. He's galactic. He can handle it. I'm sure he can do it. He's super galactic.

I mean, he can handle three John Wick movies that are just one long fight scene. I'm sure he can handle this. And so that was 2016. And you can look at the edge of that bubble and try to find the center of it. And they did. And at the center of it is a galaxy. And that galaxy has at its center. a super crazy redonculus black hole.

Oh, they look at the center of the bubble and there's a, you can actually see the galaxy in the middle? You can see the galaxy in the middle because it shines in visible light. And it's called the Ophiuchus. How do you pronounce this? Ophiuches galaxy? Ophiocas. Ophiocas.

Ophiocas. But you can actually see a black hole in the galaxy, but it's so far away. That's crazy. Well, you can see the galaxy and they know that there's a black hole there just sort of by looking at the math distribution. And so, you know, most of these black holes have not been directly imaged. Only a few of them have. That's very difficult.

You remember that came out last year. But we can infer the mass of the black hole without directly imaging it just by sort of the orbiting speeds and stuff like that. It's almost like there was an explosion and there was somebody left in the middle of it. But, you know, I guess my question is, wouldn't that galaxy also have blown up? Why didn't that galaxy blow up, too, if it pushed away all that gas? That's a great question. You should be an astrophysicist because that's exactly on the list of questions people are wondering.

Like, a lot of this story makes sense and is consistent with a huge explosion, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions. I think maybe the galaxy just farted and everyone was just like, clear the room for 15 galaxies away. So that was 2016, and the reason it's making news now is that the skepticism has been sort of overcome because they found a new piece of evidence to support this, like, gigantic explosion hypothesis. What did they find? Well, if they looked inside that bubble, and they looked for really high-speed electrons. Basically, they looked for the stuff doing the exploding, and they found radio emissions consistent with, like, really, really high-speed, relativistic electrons. And that's what you would expect if there was a huge explosion, that these, like, electrons

would get boosted by those shockwaves. Fast-moving electrons have kind of, like, a signature? Yeah. They give off a special signal. Mm-hmm. They do. And you can see those in the radio waves. And so what they've seen is like the crater, and then inside the crater in the radio waves,

they've seen electrons emitting at very high speeds in exactly the shape that fits right into the crater. And so it really looks like you have an edge there, like the edge of a shockwave. And those are the two things you would expect to see if you had an explosion, the stuff doing the explosion, and then the sort of the gas being pushed away by those electrons and the shockwave. So that was like a second piece of information that really made it seem like, wow, there was something doing some explosion. here. But as you said, it doesn't answer every question. There's still a lot of things about it we don't understand. So you can see both. You can see like the hole and made in the gas cloud. And you can also see the stuff still coming out of this explosion. Yeah, precisely.

And you can use all that together to measure the energy of this, you know, grandma explosion, the champion of the world. All right. Hit us with the ergs. How many ergs? How many flies are pushing up in this explosion that's the size of 15 Milky Ways? Yeah, so remember, supernova is 10 to the 51. Black hole mergers are like 10 to the 54. This thing is like 10 to the 61 or 10 to the 62 ergs. I don't even know the name for that scientific prefix. What is it a million times more than a black hole merger?

Which is itself, you know, a bazillion times more than a supernova? Yeah, it's something like millions or 10 million black hole mergers simultaneously. So this is the biggest explosion anybody. has ever seen and you know like I said earlier this is the big explosion we've seen we haven't even been looking that long and so there's definitely more stuff going out on out there like if every time we look we see something bigger that suggests that there's a lot more stuff out there we haven't even seen there could be something bigger explosion than this almost certainly almost certainly and

especially because we don't understand the mechanism right and we think that all you need are super massive black holes and we know there's a lot of those out there and so there's a lot of opportunity for bigger explosions so they'll probably be a new king you know a new new champion explosion crowned every few years from now on you're king of the ergs but like I said there's a lot of things we don't understand about it one question is when you raised is like why is that galaxy still there still there right and so they're trying to understand like maybe the explosion happens slightly off center or only went in one direction

because they see this only on one side of the black hole but not on the other like where is the explosion on the other side it's sort of missing which is what what do you mean like it it only exploded to one side not like a sphere we can't see it on the other side and it might be that it did explode in that side but it didn't there wasn't gas there to sort of leave this impression or the thing explosion was like weirdly asymmetric which would be really weird because then it would like be a jet it would like push this galaxy through the universe which would be crazy oh wow so it sort of exploded towards us, kind of, until we can't tell what's on the other side.

Well, it didn't explode towards us, exploded sort of in an angle that's not exactly towards us and not exactly perpendicular, but in the direction of a big cloud of gas, it sort of left a big footprint. On the other side, either there's not gas there to leave a footprint, or the explosion didn't happen, so we're not quite sure. We don't have evidence, and absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, so we don't really know what's going on on the other side. Well, I think, I think, Daniel, you can just go ahead and press your alien button.

I know you're dying to press the alien button. It's aliens who build a giant galaxy engine, and they're moving their galaxy, isn't it? Or, you know, blame it on alien physicists. Some alien physicists built a particle collider, and it went bad, and wow, was there a bad explosion? It doesn't matter how many lab coats they were wearing, they are obliterated. Oh, man. So, the big mystery, nobody knows what could have cost this, or how it could have. been so big and nobody knows why that galaxy is still standing there.

Yeah, but it's exactly the kind of mystery we need to advance science. Whenever we see something out on the extreme, something that tells us what's possible, it makes us think more broadly, but the kind of things that are happening out there, it's exactly what we need to sort of open our minds and push our ideas even further. And so every time we discover something bigger, something heavier, something smaller, it pushes these extremes. And the extremes are really valuable for helping us understand what's possible. because that's going to reveal sort of the fundamental nature of the whole structure.

It gets you to rethink about the rule, what you thought were the rules of the universe. Yeah. And so people are excited to work on this kind of stuff, you know, and answering questions like, why is the galaxy still there? What happened down the other side? Or why isn't the explosion still going on? Or are more explosions going to come from this black hole? We don't know. But it makes people excited to monitor other supermassive black holes around here. And also, people should not be worried because this happened. 390 million light years away, and obviously a long time ago. A long time ago, yeah. Yeah, and so the energy of that enormous explosion dispersed so much that, you know, we're not in danger.

All right, so that is officially the new biggest explosion in the universe is, what's the name again, Ophiocas. Congratulations to the Ophiokas Galaxy, and maybe in your press release you should include some information about how to pronounce your name. Yeah, that would help. That would be helpful. But it's still a giant mystery, it seems. It seems like we are trying to find out, but we may never find out. Yep.

And it just continues the run of black holes, sort of maxing out all the categories. They are the most powerful. They are the brightest. They are the darkest. They make the biggest explosions. They're sort of hogging all the champion categories in sort of the universe extremes. Until somebody finds hyper black holes. Blacker holes.

Blacker holes. They seem to break all the rules. They hold secrets of the universe. They're incredible objects. And I hope that one day we get to explore one from a safe distance. Yeah, maybe somebody listening to this podcast. One of our young listeners might be the one who discovered these things or goes there even. Yeah, or just cracks open the secret to make black holes work and reveals something incredible about the universe and changes the way we think about our universe.

and the way we fit into it. I mean, that's the scale of discoveries that's available when it comes to black holes. People will look back in 100 or 200 years and be like, wow, those people understood nothing. So the next time you look out into the nice guy and see all the amazing things and potentially giant exploding things

that are happening out there, I hope you take a minute and you think. Erg. So congratulations to our new champion, and thank you to all the listeners who wrote in and asked us to talk about this topic. it was a lot of fun. Thanks for joining us.

See you next time. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word,

or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged. Terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot.

He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases.

Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.