Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What is the brightest thing in the universe?

Episode Date: June 13, 2019

EXTREME UNIVERSE! (Hint: It's not the sun) 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 or 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 and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When your car is making a strange noise, no matter what it is, you can't just pretend it's not happening. That's an interesting sound. It's like your mental health. If you're struggling and feeling overwhelmed, it's important to do something about it. It can be as simple as talking to someone or just taking a deep calming breath to ground yourself because once you start to address the problem, you can go so much further.

The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have resources available for you at loveyourmindtay.org. Hey, Daniel, you have a pretty wild family, right? Well, we don't go to raves or anything. if that's what you mean. I mean, you guys like the wilderness, right? You go camping a lot. That's true.

We are big fans of camping. We do car camping. We do backpacking. We've even rented an RV and driven around Iceland. So, yeah, we like to get out there in the wild. Us too. We also like to go camping. And I think we're mostly good because we just like being out in nature, you know?

I like the campfire. And really, I like being under the stars. I love how you can see so many more stars at night when you're camping. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and an avid amateur camper. And also a physicist, right? You're an avid physicist as well? I am an avid physicist. During the day, I smash particles together at nearly the speed of light underground in Geneva to try to figure out what is the universe made out of? What is the smallest particle? How do forces actually work? Can we make new kinds of matter in the laboratory? All sorts of fun stuff. I like ripping things apart and understanding them from the ground up.

And just to be clear, you are not right now in a basement in Geneva, right? I can neither confirm nor deny that, actually. I see. You may or may not be in your Swiss bunker. That's right. Well, hey, quantum mechanically, I may or may not be anywhere, right? I could be sitting in your living room right next to you right now. You may or may not be. That's right. I may or may not be by the end of this podcast. Who knows, right?

Life is uncertain. This crazy universe. This crazy, beautiful universe that we live in where we can't really understand anything. But this is our podcast in which we try to help you understand everything. And in particular, we try to take topics and tear them apart so that you can understand them. That's right.

Welcome to Daniel and Jorge Explan, Explain the Universe, a production of iHeard Radio. That's right. And every week on this program, we take a topic that we think people are interested in, something where everybody wants to know the answer, but maybe it seems a little bit out of reach technically, or it seems a little bit hard to dig into, and your Google searching is not quite sufficient. And we try to break it down for you and get you to somewhere where you can understand it and maybe laugh along the way. That's right. And today on the podcast, we are going to tackle another subject in our Extreme Universe series. Extreme Universe.

Extreme universe. Exactly. I'm queuing some heavy metal guitar riffs in the background there. Because heavy metal is so in right now. Oh, are we dating ourselves? It was a little bit too much Bill and Ted. Bill and Ted are coming back. Have you not heard?

It's like Bill and Ted escaped the senior citizen home or something. I think Canna Reeves can pull it off. Maybe we should have an episode on why Canna Reeves does not seem to age. He sort of like plateaued around 45. I know. He's like 50-something, and he's a good-looking guy. Him and Paul Rudd, I think, just sort of hits some plateau. Maybe it's like Hollywood cryogenic freezing or something. Or maybe they've been replaced by robots.

Anybody figure that out? Maybe they're time travelers. We should have them as guests on the show. Hey, Keanu, if you happen to be listening to this episode, come on the show, explain it all to us. And if you're Paul Rudd, you're also invited. You can explain Keanu Reeves to us. You guys all know each other, right? I'm sure they're hanging out together listening to our podcast.

Well, so this is a part of our series of extremes of the universe. So we've had episodes about the biggest thing in the universe, the emptiest place in the universe. Well, on today's episode, we'll be talking about... What is the brightest thing in the universe? Like the shiniest, right? Like the one that would totally most blind you if you stared at it without any sunglasses.

That's right, the sparkliest thing in the universe. glitter-covered thing in the universe. Now, I love our extreme universe series because I like that it reminds me and I hope everybody out there listening that where we live in the universe is unusual. It's not the most anything, you know, and that there's whatever you're thinking about, whether it's temperature or brightness or size, there's always something out there to dwarf everything you thought you knew. And that's sort of the larger lesson of astronomy, you know, is that the universe is vast and crazy and there's always something out there to surprise you and so i love this extreme universe series because it shows us how small we are or how dark we are or how cold we are or how slow we are

in the context of the whole universe yeah it's fun to think that um we're kind of in the middle right we're not you know there are extremes in both uh directions where we stand right like we're not the hottest or the coldest the brightest or the darkest you know are you saying we're just right like Goldilocks and her porridge. We are all Goldilocks. That's true. I mean, I wouldn't want to live in a brighter place or a darker place or a hotter place or a colder place. That's why you're in California, right? That's right. That's why I'm in Southern California, where it's

nice weather every single day. But it's cool to learn about it. I like learning, like, where is the tallest mountain in the solar system or where is the hottest spot on Earth, these sort of things? It's just fun to know what's the scale, you know? Oh, man, I want to listen to those podcasts. Yeah, and I also want to remind people that today we're going to be

talking about what is the brightest thing in the universe. And specifically we're talking about things that emit light. But there are other ways to see the universe, right? We see a little bit of the universe, a tiny fraction of it that gives off light that makes itself visible to us. But there's a huge amount of stuff going on in the universe that's invisible to us. So the brightest things in the universe are not even the necessarily the most active things in the universe. They're just the things that emit the most light. The most photons, right? Because you could have something that's more powerful or more energetic that's emitting other kinds of stuff.

Yeah, but of course, light is important to us. You know, we're a visual species. We look at each other. We draw, you know, it's an important part of how we live. And so, of course, it's sort of the beginning of how we explore space. We just turn our eyes skyward and look and that we develop techniques to look deeper and deeper into space.

But the cool thing is that recently, astronomy has developed sort of other kinds of eyes, like other ways to look at the universe that are not with light, but with particles or with gravitational waves. It's sort of cool to think about humanity, opening different new kinds of eyes and seeing different pictures of the universe because every different way you have to look at the universe

gives you a different picture because different things emit different kinds of radiation. And so it's just amazing to think about all the things we will learn once we've developed more and more ways to look at the universe. So anyway, so today we're tackling the brain, brightest thing in the universe. So the thing that gives the most photons per per, I don't know,

per what? Per area? Per looking at it? Per second? We'll talk about some things that give off sustained flows of photons and other things that are very brief. They give off just photons very briefly, but are very, very bright. But I think we'll be talking about things that give off the most

photons sort of at a certain distance. That's a good way to measure brightness. But as a hint, and as a little bit of a spoiler, will say that it is not the sun. If you were thinking that maybe the brightest thing was the sun, you're a bit far off. And as usual, I was curious, what do people think is the brightest thing in the universe?

What do people have in their minds? And so I went around campus at UC Irvine, and I asked folks, what do you think is the brightest thing in the universe? Were you hoping some of your students would say, you, Professor Daniel, you are the brightest thing. Just like with what is the hottest thing in the universe, I wasn't explicitly digging for compliments,

but I guess I was secretly hoping maybe somebody would give me one. You had sort of a response prepared, didn't you? What? Me? That's right. Well, those of you listening, take a second to think about it. If someone asks you on the street, what is the brightest thing in the universe? What do you think you would answer?

Here's what people had to say. To my eyes, the brightest thing I have ever seen is the sun. The sun? The sun? A neutron star. Stars, because that's probably what I'm most familiar with. I don't know. Maybe like a supernova.

I'm surprised how many people said the sun. Well, I think all of these people would have benefited from your hint that it's not the sun, because as you heard, they mostly went for the sun. Maybe it's the brightest thing in their universe, technically, right? Yeah, well, you know, it's the brightest thing you observe mostly. I mean, that's not even actually true, but it's the brightest thing sort of out there in the sky. Yeah, I mean, sort of technically, right? I mean, it's like their observable universe. We all have our little observable universe.

What do you mean? Do you think people have their own universes, like my universe, your universes? No, I guess what I mean is. It's like they're not observable, like if you have your physicist with a billion-dollar telescope, but just from what they can see with their eyes. So this is the thing about brightness, right? It's that remember that brightness falls with distance. You know, some object is giving off light, and that means it's shooting off photons, right?

But as the distance grows from that object, you have the same number of photons, but they're spread out over a larger area, right? And think about a sphere that surrounds the sun or whatever else is giving off light. The size of that sphere, the surface of that sphere, grows with the radius squared because the formula for the surface of a sphere goes like radius squared. And so the same number of photons cover that sphere. So as you get further and further away, the parent brightness falls, right? And it falls like one over distance squared for that same reason because the same number of photons are getting spread over that distance.

So the point is something can be super duper bright, but if it's far away, it won't feel as bright to you. So, yeah, you can have a laser pointer that feels brighter than the sun. Right, and it would probably hurt. So just to work, we're not advocating that you shoot any light into your eyes. But why do you think a lot of people said the sun? Do you think they actually think that's the brightest thing in the entire universe or the brightest thing, you know, do you think maybe they were just not expanding their horizons in your answer?

I think there's a lot of that. I noticed that trend that when I ask people about something, they tend to think about in the solar system. system and not to think more broadly. And sometimes I'll go to them, like, no, no, no, think bigger, the whole universe. And I did that a couple of times here, but people were still like, no, the sun. Maybe it's a bit of local pride. They're like, yeah, our son is awesome, man, it's so good. It's like the way people want to believe that their local sports team is the best, you know?

We got the best son. That's right. Our hometown son is the best son. I think we all sort of do that. Like, if I ask you, hey, Daniel, how's it going? You don't think, well, right now in Alpha Centauri, there's a, right, you sort of, you assume that I'm asking you about you and your day. Yeah, I mean, everybody has a sort of a locus, like a neighborhood they think about.

But also, I think people are just not sure, you know, what else is out there and how different is it. I was imagining, though, that people might think that the sun is not the biggest star, the craziest star. And they would say at least, you know, some other star out there. And we had one guy who said like a supernova or a neutron star or something like that. Maybe they thought you meant what's the brightest thing we can see from Earth. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. Maybe that's what they thought.

And in which case, they would be mostly right. I mean, if you take away all sort of earthbound lasers that could fry your eyeballs, it's true that the sun is the brightest thing you can see from the earth. So good job. Jorge just got you guys all extra credit. Oh, good. Except you already marked them and sneered at them probably. I did not sneer at anybody. Thank you very much.

I'm eternally grateful that UCI students are willing to answer my questions. I was just walking around today, in fact, and not a single person said no to answering my questions. So continued A-plus-plus to UCI students for being open to answering crazy questions without any warning from a stranger. Well, this is a perfect point to take a break. 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. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Othia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right?

That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss Session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

But you do have a pretty interesting, table here that you sent me, which gives us the brightness of things relative to the sun. Yeah, because the brightness of things depends on your distance, I think it's more interesting to answer the question, what is the absolute brightest thing in the universe, not what is the brightest thing in our sky, right? Because there could be something super duper bright, but then it's really far away and it seems dim, but we're interested, like, what is that thing that's making all those photons? So I thought, let's define things in terms of their brightness relative to the sun, and then let's imagine that we're the same distance from that thing

that we are from the sun. So we call that an astronomical unit. It's about 93 million miles. It's the distance between the sun and the Earth. Well, I was thinking that maybe a good way to think about it is that, you know, like if you stood outside right now and it's daylight and you looked at the sun, you would see the sun. But now if you swap the sun with something else, this table tells you how bright that thing would be, right?

That seems like a totally practical experiment. Yeah. I'm going to delete the sun and instantly transport some other crazy object there. And then I'm going to look at it. Yeah. You just swapped it out. Swap out the sun for something else. And this table would tell you how bright that thing is.

Yeah. I'm imagining you have some like app on your phone where you're like, select what you'd like at the center of your solar system. And it's got like a menu or something. And you're like, hmm, let me replace our sun with a supernova and see what that feels like. Anything is possible with quantum physics, right? That's right. Let's disrupt quantum physics with this app. So let's do the exercise.

So now let's say what's something that else is bright? Like let's say we swapped out the moon for the sun. How bright would the moon be? Well, it would be zero because the moon doesn't give off any light, right? So the moon actually just reflects light from the sun, right? So if you had no sun and you just put the moon there, then the whole solar system would be dark. Zero, all right.

But let's say you wanted to upgrade the sun, and you're like, let's look around for sort of a bigger star. And, like, one example of a bigger star is one of them, it's called Serious A. And it's a pretty serious star. It doesn't like to make jokes. But if you took that star and you put it in place of our sun, it would be almost 30 times brighter. So, wait, what is this star? It's like a nearby star, or one of the brightest stars that we know about? It's one of the brightest stars in our sky, which is why I picked it.

And it's bright mostly because it's sort of nearby. It's not that bright on its own, as you can tell, it's only 30 times brighter than our sun. But it's a cool star because it's part of a binary star system, which means there are two stars orbiting each other. So that's why the series A, it refers to which one it is. If you look up in the night sky from Earth, it's one of the brightest stars in the sky. And so if you did the Jorge exercise and you teleported that star to the center of our solar system, then, you know, our days would be 30 times brighter. You would need SPF, 1800, something like that.

Yeah, it would be pretty serious. I mean, I don't even know if life could survive because the temperature would skyrocket and everything would get fried. So not something I recommend. And, you know, or you can think about it another way. Like, if we replace the sun with serious A, then the Earth would have to be further from the sun

in order to have the same temperature. It would have to be 30 times further away, sort of. Well, it would have to be square. root of 30. If you're five times further from the sun, then the brightness is one over 25, right? So, yeah, so you'd have to be like five or five and a half AU from Sirius A to have the same amount of solar activity. And that's what we do. You know, when we find other star systems and planets around them, we ask for that star, where is the Goldilocks zone? Where is the habitable zone? The zone where a planet would have about the same amount of brightness from

their star as we do from our sun and that depends of course on the brightness of that star well that is definitely a serious distance that's right but it turns out the serious is not even really that impressive there's a star in or then the constellation Orion for example and i'm not even sure how to pronounce it i think it's called rijal or rigal um and this is a pretty serious star right and if you put this star in our solar system it would be 33 thousand times brighter than our son so serious which was a much brighter star 30 times is nothing compared to this one, right? This one's 33,000 times brighter than the sun. That's right. It's crazy. It's a sort of a bluish white star. And the other interesting thing about it is that the brightness varies a little bit. Like there's something going

on inside this star that makes it like burn hotter sometimes or burn less, burn colder other times. It's a massive blue super giant. And it's just spewing out photons 33,000 times more than our current sun, which is pretty bright. Yeah, exactly. But it's just much bigger. You know, it's one of these massive super giants, which means it got more stuff, right? So it's denser and hotter in the middle. And it's just, it's a bigger fire burning. You know, like if you're having a little campfire and the guys one campsite over have like bought 10 times as much firewood and having a big bonfire, then yeah, there's just going to be more photons coming out of their fire than yours because they got more stuff. In the same way, this star just has more fuel. So it's

burning more fuel at the same time. It's like a quantity thing. It's not like there's different, you know, physics going on inside of it. It's just, there's more stuff burning. Yeah, exactly. It's just a bigger pile of fuel that got set on fire. Well, 33,000 sounds pretty

bright, brighter than the sun. It sounds pretty bright, but that's not even, like we're not even halfway through the table, right? That's right. There's another star. It's called, this one has an awesome name. Zeta Scorpy. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that correctly. it's a hyper-giant star in the constellation Scorpius.

And this one burns 200,000 times brighter than our sun. So you would need 200,000 suns just to match this one star. That's right, exactly. That's incredible to think of 200,000 of our stars, of our sun. That's right. Or if Earth was orbiting this thing, then you'd have to be, you know, the square root of 200,000 times farther away. that's like 450 times as far away from this star as Earth is from the sun in order to not get fried.

Does that mean that star is 200 times heavier also? Like more massive? Or is it just some sort of... No, it's actually, that's fascinating question. It's actually only about 35 times more massive than the sun. What? But it's burning 200,000 times brighter. Yeah. And, you know, these suns also have different life cycles, right? and they burn colder or hotter or more brighter or dimmer

at different points in their life cycle. So that could be part of it. But also when you get a star that's that much bigger, there can be different physics going on inside. But it's pretty awesome, and that's why they call it a hyper-giant. Plus it has a pretty cool name, Zeta Scorpy. Yeah, it is pretty cool.

But even that's not so impressive compared to the reigning champion of the universe. Right. Is it also a star? It is. Well, in terms of stars, right? We'll get, in terms of stars, this is the brightest star in the universe. But it doesn't have a very cool name. You know, the other one's Sirius and Scorpio. Those are pretty cool.

This one is called, wait for it. R163A1. That's a cool name. You know, if this was like a Star Wars character, you know, you could make it work. Wait, I think I swapped it even. I think it's R136A1. Is that still cool? Yeah, no, that's him.

that one's not as cool this one comes in I think their friends just call them R1 R1 yeah that's pretty cool actually R1 is actually the name of the cafeteria at CERN also short for restaurant 1 so people are always saying hey I meet you at R1 and is the food also bright and shiny and hot

yeah I don't think the restaurant at Cern is famous for its food yeah that's not the it's not the most impressive thing about that restaurant I think the view is better you can see the Mont Blanc You can see also it's of the Alps. It's a gorgeous place to eat lunch. But I hear it's pretty cool because they cook the food like where the particles collide, right? Isn't that how they heat up the food?

They just dip it down into the ground. Yeah, they're like, hey, the meat's getting cold. Crank up the accelerator. No, but back to our star R1, it's 300 times as massive as the sun, but it's 8.5 million times brighter than our sun. Wait, so let me just wrap my head. you would need 300,000 of our sons just to match the size of it and the weight, but then it's 8 million.

No, 300, 300 sons, not 300,000. Oh, 300 sons. 300 sons, but it burns 8.5 million times as bright. 8 million times. So you would need 8 million of our sons just to match the brightness of this one star. Yeah, it's ridiculous. I mean, it boggles the mind. I mean, our sun already is super bright, right?

We're glad we're 90 million miles away from it, and still it can burn your eyeballs, right? Just that's an incredibly bright source of light. And then to imagine something eight million times, it can burn eight million eyeballs much more easily. It's hard to get your head around that. And it's like a sustained fire, right? It's like a, it's just always burning at eight million times brighter than the sun. Yeah, exactly. It's not like an explosion or like a supernova.

It's just like it's just like a something that's just burning super bright. It just keeps going. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's illuminating space all around it. One thing is it's pretty dangerous, right? Because you get too close, you're going to get fried. On the other hand, it's like making things visible. You know, if you were near that solar system, you could see all sorts of interesting stuff. The rocks and the planets and all the stuff around it are shining brightly because of that star. But you need to be pretty far away just to be near it. Yeah, exactly. You couldn't get too close. Exactly. It's a pretty dangerous thing to visit. So any of you guys planning to visit R136A1, Now, you know, pack some protection. That's right.

Bring eight and a half million bottles of sunblock. That's right, exactly. You'd have to be like 3,000 times the distance from the Earth to the sun in order to have the same amount of solar energy. So that's the brightest star that we know about in the universe? Like, that's the raining record holder. Yeah, that's right. That's the brightest star that's been observed.

Wow. And where is it? It's in a neighboring galaxy known as the large Magellanic Cloud. So this is like a big cluster of stuff out there, and it's 163,000 light years away. So it's in another galaxy, so it's not even in our galaxy. Yeah, no, it's not even in our galaxy. Yeah, exactly. So the Milky Way is outstripped by this other star.

And, you know, this is fascinating stuff. And I think from a science point of view, you're always interested in the extremes because you're wondering, like, what is the hottest or the brightest thing? Because we're trying to understand how these stars work, right? We have like models for what's going on inside them, and then they make predictions, and they always go out there, and then they discover something that's like twice as crazy

or twice as bright as anything they understood, and it makes us tweak those models to understand what else could be happening in those stars to produce so many photons. So the extremes are really valuable scientifically because they show us like the boundary of what can happen. And so these are just stars that we're talking about right now, right? There are even brighter things in the universe, right?

There's other kinds of things that are brighter than the brightest stars in the universe. That's right. These stars are crazy bright. Our sun is pretty bright. These other ones totally outstrip it. But when it comes to the record holder, so the brightest things in the universe, these things are pretty dim. All right. So let's get into those things.

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 be.

day. 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 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.

I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls, I sit down with Dr. Othia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we we heal? Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel. It's how our hair is styled. We talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look

put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we're talking about the brinket. brightest things in the universe. And we don't just mean like your kids, Daniel, which I'm sure are very bright. And good looking. And good looking. And they have a great dad, apparently. Yeah, I'd like to meet him someday. My kids basically look like my wife. I mean, it's sort of funny

because I have dark eyes and dark hair. And my wife is Scandinavian. So she has like blue eyes and blonde hair. And interestingly, our kids both came out blonde with light-colored eyes. So genetics, I don't know, explain it to me. Maybe she just cloned herself in the lab. She is a biologist. This sounds like a Game of Throne situation here, Daniel. I'm not sure what you're implying over there. I prefer... I'm just saying the results seem very similar. Yes, that's true. Yes. It's been a mystery for a while. Anyway, but there are brighter things in the universe than even the stars. And, And even my family or yours.

So we left it at the brightest star that we know about in the entire universe, which is R1, 3,6, something, something A1, which was 8.5 million times brighter than our sun, which is mind-boggling, which is amazing. But there are things that are even much more brighter than that, right? That's right. And sort of counterintuitively, these are things associated with black holes, right? Black holes you think of immediately as like, oh, that's super dark.

If you'd ask me what's the darkest thing in the universe, you'd say, black holes. But remember, black holes themselves don't give off much light or much radiation. They're pretty dark. But they're very powerful. They're incredibly strong sources of gravity. And the things that have not yet fallen into the black hole, those things can give off a lot of light. Okay. So the brightest things in the universe then are paradoxically black holes?

Is that what you're saying? No, not even the brightest, but some of the bright, but brighter than something. stars. And so what happens is that you remember that black holes have these things around them, the stuff that has not yet fallen in, right? It's like, you know, the toilet is still flushing. These things are swirling around, about to go inside. And because of the incredible gravitational energy of the black hole, it's creating a lot of stress and strain on this gas and this dust. And so it ends up emitting a huge amount of radiation. We cover this in another podcast episode. These things are called quasars. And they're so bright in the night sky that for a long time,

didn't even understand what they could be because they're incredibly bright and incredibly far away. So people did the math and they're like, what, if it's that bright already and it's super far away? That means if you got close to it, it would be mind-bogglingly bright. So for a while, people didn't even

believe it until they found other ways to prove that these things really were happening. Yeah, we talked about it in an episode. I think the episode was titled Strange Stars, right? Yeah, exactly. The strangest, craziest things in the universe, yeah. Yeah, and so we talked about quasars and blazars, which sound like they were popular in the 80s.

Exactly, shoulder pads. What is the biggest shoulder pad in the universe? That's the whole podcast episode right there. And so if you're curious about what they are and how they work, please check out that podcast. But I don't think in that podcast we talked about how actually bright they are, like in comparison to other things. Yeah, exactly. Well, it's ridiculous.

It's hard to even wrap your mind around. These things, these quasars, for example, one of the brightest quasars we've ever found. has a sexy name of 3C273. It's 4 trillion times brighter than our sun. Like, if you put that thing in the center of our solar system, we would get fried. Well, first of all, who names these things? We're all waiting for you, man.

Everybody's heard that you're good at naming things. They actually get to like 373 of these, and so this one just happened to be the number 273. Yeah, you know, there's just so many things out there. You can't name them all. You just got to give them numbers. But, you know, sometimes one of them gets special, and then it gets a name. And I don't even know how that works.

But this one should deserve a name. I mean, it's the brightest quasar in the universe, right? Give it a name like Thor or something. Like Daniel's kids. That's right. I'd like to name this quasar after my own kids. I'm sure that would fly. No, no, not after your kid.

Just Daniel's son. That sounds like a reference to karate kid. But this thing is, I mean, 4 trillion times brighter than our sun is hard to understand. Remember, there's like 100 or 200 billion stars in the Milky Way, right? Which means that this thing is brighter than all the stars in the Milky Way by like a factor of a hundred. And just to be clear, 4 trillion means 4,000 billion, right? That's right. Or 4 million million. Not just a million times brighter than our sun, but like 4 million and then a million times over again.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, at this point it's basically infinity. I mean, in my head, I can't understand the difference between trillions and quadrillions and whatever. It's just all big number. It's just insanity. It's just crazy. It's insanity. It's intensity, intensities, man.

And so that's a quasar, right? It's giving off a huge amount of radiation. It's super bright. It's not a star, but it is in the same sense sort of in a similar category because it's a huge amount of gas that's being compressed and generating radiation. But it's not technically a star. But then remember that some of these quasars, some of these quasars, we call them blazars because they also emit a beam, right, and the beam is sort of perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy. Remember, a lot of these galaxies are sort of flat.

They're swirling disks and the black holes at the center of it. And Blazars are galaxies that emit these huge jets of radiation sort of perpendicular to the flat plane of the galaxy out from the center. Right. And so you're saying it's their energy and their light is sort of focused, it's concentrated. It's not just like a light bulb shining in all directions. some of these things sort of focus their light in a particular kind of beam. Yeah, exactly.

It's collimated. And we don't really even understand the physics of that. Like, how do you take all this radiation and bend it into one direction? People think it may be crazy magnetic fields. But, you know, there's a huge amount of stuff we don't understand about what's going on in the center of galaxies. But sometimes one of these beams happens to be pointed right at us, you know, just by chance. I mean, there's a lot of galaxies and a lot of quasars, and they're pointing a lot of different directions. And so one of these blazar is going to be shining right at us.

And because of some relativistic physics, when it's shining right at you, the intensity is even higher. And so you can look for which blazar is the brightest from our point of view, right, being pointed at us. And so there's a blazar. Its name is 3C454.4.3. What a sexy name. And what is the point three? I don't know what the point three comes from. Like the third?

You know, like... This is the grandson, grandson of the real grandpappy blazer. I don't know. I cannot give any accounting for how they name these things. But this thing, this monster is 300 trillion times brighter than our sun. You would need 300 trillion pairs of sunglasses just not so that you don't burn your eye out. That's right. You could get 300 trillion sunburns in one.

day. In one millisecond probably. Exactly. Yeah. So we're glad that these things are pretty far away because they're ridiculously bright. I mean, the intensity of light is just incredible. You know, and so there's stuff going out there in the universe, which is insane, you know, which would fry us and destroy us.

Also, you know, it makes me think about, like, our energy problems. Like, we're trying to squeeze a little bits out of energy out of, like, liquid stored underground. But the amount of energy that's out there in the universe is just being like, you know, shot out into space and wasted is incredible. You know, the scale of our problems are really tiny in comparison to the stuff that's happening out there. And so that's the king in terms of constant brightness.

Like that blazer is going, and it's not going to stop anytime soon. It's just pumping out photons constantly at a rate that makes our sun look pathetic. Now, is that still brighter than pointing a laser pointer at my eye? That's still pretty bright, yeah. I mean, it'd be hard to get a laser pointer that's 300,000. trillion times as bright as the sun. So that would be the brightest, constantly shining thing in the universe, you're saying. That's right.

But sometimes there's a crazy event in the universe, and even that gets outshone by something else. So, you know, sometimes stars go to supernova, right? This is when they reach the end of their life, and they decided it's not worth it anymore. You know, I'm done. I'm going to check out. and they have this massive explosion where they basically use most of the rest of their fuel in a very brief moment. And they can outshine entire galaxies, they can outshine sets of galaxies, they can even outshine blazars.

And so there's one, and then they emit these huge things, they're called gamma ray bursts. We had a whole podcast episode about them. There's these brief pulses of gamma rays. Remember, gamma rays are just light, right? Just very high-energy light. And so we keep track of these gamma rays and these gamma-ray bursts, and one of them came and this is gamma-ray burst 080319B, right? Now, to be confused with 19A, it's much dimmer cousin.

Or C. Or C, right, which was pathetic as a sequel. But this one is the brightest sort of emission we've ever seen ever in the universe. And this one is 22 quadrillion times brighter than our sun. Wow, that sounds like a lot. How much is a quadrillion? How much is a quadrillion, he says, as he types that into Google? This is like 10,000 times bright.

than the brightest blazar in the universe, kind of, something along that magnitude, right? Exactly. But the key is that it didn't last very long, right? It's a very short burst. You know, we're talking about things that last seconds. So it's a pretty dramatic way to go out. You know, it's some nice fireworks.

And for a few moments, you outshine the otherwise brightest thing in the universe by a huge factor, right? So that's really like your moment of fame in the universe. But then it fades, right? So, you know, if you want the brightest thing, ever is a gamma ray burst. If you want something consistency, you know, that's going to win the marathon rather than the sprint, then

you want to go for blazars. I guess it depends on what you mean by brightest, right? It depends on the time scale. Yeah, it's an integrated brightness or momentary brightness, right? Or who can shine the brightest thing into Jorge's eyeball, right? Yeah, let's not give our listeners

any suggestions here. How many laser pointers can we shine into an eyeball at the same time? There's a whole podcast episode. I'm sure, yeah. Let's send it to Bill Nye. He knows the answer to every question. So why is it called GRB? Is it just some sort of physics?

GRB stands for gamma ray burst. Oh, I see. Or it could be green, red, blue. Is that what you were thinking? No, I was confused for a second. I thought it was like RGB. No, wait. That's the Supreme Court Justice.

Yeah. He was like, what? Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the brightest thing in the universe? She may be the brightest thing on the Supreme Court. Yeah. She is actually. She's a star, for sure.

All right. So that was a tour of brightness in the universe, the brightest things in the entire universe. We went from zero brightness, which is a black hole, to the brightest things that we know about as human beings, right? That's right. And so next time you're out there camping and you're looking up in the night sky,

remember that there is crazy stuff out there that's pumping out photons at levels we could hardly imagine. Most of it seems dim because it's far away or because you can't see it because your neighbor's port flight. But if you got too close, it would definitely fry you. Well, you know what to say? It's better to light one blazer than to curse the darkness.

Is that right? Who says that, you? I think it's my grandmother. Your grandmother has a lot of funny things. I'd like to meet this lady. All right, well, thank you for joining us. I hope you found that discussion illuminating and shiny. I hope we turned a light on in your mind.

But didn't fry your eyeballs with it or your ears. But thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time. Tune in next time. Thanks very much. And don't forget, if you have a question about what we said or you have a suggestion for a topic you'd like to hear us break down, please send it to us at Feedback at Danielanhorpe.com. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.

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,

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