Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What's the Huge Large Quasar Group?

Episode Date: March 30, 2021

Daniel and Jorge talk about quasars, large groups of quasars and HUGE LARGE groups of quasars! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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No such thing. Hey, Daniel, I've been wondering something about the large Hadron Collider. Ooh, that's right up my alley. Is it about crazy new particles? Not quite. Is it about making black holes? I am concerned about that, but not this time. All right, shoot, then, what's your question?

All right, why did you call it the large Hadron Collider? Why not the, you know, modestly sized Hadron Collider? Because it's pretty large. In that case, why not the huge Hadron Collider or the ginormous Hadron Collider? That's the plan for the next one, man. You've got to leave something in the tank for the next time around. But when does it end, Daniel? Hopefully, never.

Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I hope to do experiments one day at the very large Hadron Collider. Not just the huge Hadron Collider? Do you plan to retire before the ginormous Hadron Collider? I want to work on the ludicrously sized Hadron Collider. What's the acronym for that one? I don't know, but the VLHC is an actual thing. Really? That's like in the official name? It really is the very large Hadron Collider.

The plan is to put it underground. It's a 100 kilometer radius ring and that's actually what it's called. I guess there's a precedent for that. There's a very large array in New Mexico, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So you could just, after that, just keep adding varies to it, I suppose, the very, very large adjunct glider.

The super duper large hazard collider. But welcome to our super duper podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeard Radio. In which we tackle things which are very, very large and hard to understand and very, very small and hard to grapple with. We talk about all the incredible and amazing things in our universe, all the open questions that scientists are puzzling over,

all the incredible things that we have learned, and explain all of them to you sometimes with a very large banana joke. Because there is a lot out there in the universe to explore and for us to see, but I guess the problem is that we are stuck in a small corner of the Milky Way, which is in a small corner of the universe. And so we need some pretty big telescopes and instruments to see what's out there in this vast cosmos. That's right. We are exploring the universe, but we're doing it just with our eyeballs. Imagine you wanted to know what was all over the earth,

but you were sort of stuck in a lighthouse. And all you could do is look out the window with really powerful telescopes and try to see as far as you could. So that's where we are as a species. We can't yet travel to the stars, but we can wait for information from the stars to come here to Earth and give us clues. Because there is a lot of information coming at us from everywhere, right?

I mean, the universe is basically bathing us in information and stories about what happened and how things came to be and why things are the way they are. and it's really up to us to figure out how to decode this information and how to read it and how to figure out what it means. Yeah, and it's frustrating to me sometimes that we're not doing more to capture that information. You know, to see deep into the universe,

you need to look at really faint signals of faraway galaxies. And those things can't be seen just by your eye. You need like specialized telescopes. And so far, humanity's only built a few of them, which means that most of the information about the secrets and the structure of the universe it's just sort of like landing on earth and getting absorbed by, you know, plants and rocks and stuff. I'm sure the plants are getting some pretty good information about the universe, probably,

that maybe they've already figured things out, Daniel. We thought to ask them. Oh, my God, that sounds like a really fun science fiction movie where we discovered that plants are actually a globe-sized telescope and that they're doing their own astronomy. Wow. Well, I thought you were a couch potato anyways, Daniel. Wouldn't that count as a plant scientist, astrophysicist? Well, that means that couch potatoes are actually doing work, right?

because they're sitting there absorbing information from the universe. Yeah, and so I guess the more we want to look out into the universe, the bigger the telescope we need. And the more we want to probe into the particulars of matter and what everything is made out of, the more powerful and bigger microscopes you need. Yeah, exactly.

And as we peer deeper into the universe with our bigger and bigger telescopes, we're constantly finding new stuff out there. Weird things that we can't understand, things that don't seem to make sense, things that surprise us about what's out there in the universe. But that's what exploration is all about. You don't look out into the universe just to have your ideas confirmed.

You look out there to be surprised, to be shocked, to have your mind blown by the kinds of crazy stuff that we see. Yeah, because it seems that we're discovering that the universe is bigger and bigger and bigger than we expected. I mean, we initially thought that it was just the Earth and then the sun and the moon and the solar system. And now we're up to, you know, bubbles of gigantic, galaxy clusters. Things get pretty big out there. Things get pretty big out there. And one question

we ask is like, how big do things get? What is the biggest thing in the universe? And it feels like every year astronomy crowns a new biggest thing in the universe. I feel like that should have like stadium echo sound effects there. Biggest thing in the universe. Yeah. And that also raises the problem of what do you call the new things when you find out there are bigger things? Because we call something the big dipper, you know, what if you find a bigger? Dipper. Exactly. Well, you call it the bigger dipper or the very big dipper.

And so there is apparently a very large thing, possible large thing out there in the universe, so big that it needs two adjectives to describe how big it is. It's so big, they named it twice. So to be on the podcast, we'll be talking about what is the huge, large quasar group? You can't even get that name out without a chuckle. It's ridiculous. Yeah, I mean, I feel like the most extraneous word there is group. It's the most boring word in there.

Like if you have huge large and quasar, why do you need the group? That's like calling it, you know, the 18 group. It sounds like a consulting firm, doesn't it? Which part, the 18 group or the huge large quasar group? Both, both. We need to optimize the efficiency of this factory. Somebody give a call to the huge large quasar group. They know what they're doing.

I don't know. They sound pretty expensive to me. I would go for the, you know, modestly sized, economically sized, quasar group. That sounds good. But it is a thing out there, the huge, large quasar group. And it sounds self-explanatory, but I'm guessing there are some mysteries and some unknowns about this huge object in space. Absolutely. There are lots of unknowns.

And there are some really basic ideas about how big things can get in the universe. And this thing flies in the face of our concept of size. It's huge. Not just in size, but significant. That's right. It's more than huge. It's huge, large. All right. Well, as usual, we were wondering how many people had heard of this huge large quasar group.

And so Daniel went out there into the wilds of the internet to ask people if they knew what the huge large quasar group is. So thanks to everybody who participated. And if you are willing to volunteer to answer questions about absurdly named astronomical objects in the future, please write to me to questions at Daniel and Jorge.com. So think about it for a second. If someone asks you what you thought the huge large quasar group is, what would you say? Here's what people had to say. I'm going to go wild here.

It's either a band from the 80s or it is a huge, large group of quasars somewhere in our universe. I had a total guess a very large array of radio telescopes, maybe. The huge large quasar group is a group of. of quasars that are somewhere on the outskirts of our galaxy. A big collection of large objects somewhere in the universe, or I would say a region of the universe where you could find a lot of these quasars. I'm guessing this is some form of quasars that have grouped together or clustered together somewhere in the universe that we've been able to find.

Well, most likely it's an area, probably very big, where you can find a number of quasars that it's not common to find it sounds like it's bigger than large quasar group it sounds like it's really huge and it sounds like they're getting pretty lazy with their naming man Jorge's going to have fun with that one I bet it sounds like it's totally awesome it sounds like a group of quasars found that's so awesome that it earned both huge and large in its title.

Well, first of all, that's an amazing name. And second of all, I guess it would just be somewhere out in the observable universe where we've seen a bunch of quasars together in a relatively small area, for which we don't currently have an explanation. Given that quasars are generally very bright objects, they could be potentially quite far away and we can still see them. All right, some pretty fun answers there, including one that predicted I would have fun with this one. And I have to say, I'm having no fun, Daniel.

It's a lot of words to say together. No fun, zero fun. Well, I'm having fun with it. I definitely picked this one just to sort of taunt you about astronomical naming. So this is an actual thing. Like, there are papers with these words in the title, the huge, large quasar group. It's an actual thing. It's actually a subject of controversy.

People fight about the huge, large quasar group. There are like dueling presentations about it. Really? Like, do they fight about whether it qualifies is huge? Like, do you fight over the adjective? Like, no, it's more like a really large or it's more like a ginormous. Huge doesn't capture it. No, actually, what they fight over is the word group.

Yeah, is it a group or is it more like a, you know, a solo endeavor? Yeah, is it a band from the 80s or is it an astronomical object? Right, right. Do they actually, you know, agree on things? Or is it more like a collective? Maybe it's a huge or large quasar collective. It's a co-op, right? They grow their own organic veggies.

All right, well, let's get into what this huge or large quasar group is. And I guess maybe we'll start with one of the first words there. A quasar, Daniel, maybe remind us what a quasar is. Yeah, my favorite thing about the huge large quasar group is that every word you add adds a layer of mystery and intrigue, right? Even just quasars themselves are fascinating. Quasars are some of the brightest things. things in the universe. They are these sources of radiation that come from the centers of galaxies. And they were discovered first in the 1950s, but they were a huge mystery because people found

these things in the sky that were emitting crazy radiation. But then when they looked in the sky to find out what it was, they found these objects that were like really, really, really far away. And so these things seemed to be super bright and really far away, which meant that they must be like incredible sources of radiation to be already that bright when the light gets here to Earth. Right. And how did they know that they were that far away? Can it just be like a nearby star? How did they tell the difference between this kind of object, like a bright thing in the sky or a regular star? Well, it took them decades to figure that out. What they did is they measured the velocity of these things. So you measure the red shift, like how fast are these things moving away from us?

And you can do that by looking at the light spectrum and seeing like, oh, here's the light. we expect from hydrogen or from helium, how far is it shifted by the Doppler effect and that tells you how fast this thing is moving away from us. And because of Hubble's law, we think that things that are further away from us are moving faster. So that helped us place the distance. We say, well, it's moving away from us really, really fast. So it might be really distant. But there was a lot of skepticism. People just didn't believe it. It's like it gave them a number that made no sense. Like how could this thing be billions of light years away and still be. so bright. So they spent a lot of time wondering, just as you say, is it possible? It's actually

something closer that happens to have a high velocity moving away from us for some other reason. So it took a long time before people accepted that these things were actually real. The quasars really were crazy bright sources of light universe. I guess how were they convinced? How did figure out that that was what was going on? It was sort of a typical process in science and that it took one person who was like crusading for it and then the rest of the community gradually came along as the story came together. In order to really build confidence in it, you want an understanding of the mechanism,

like, well, what's generating all that radiation? You can't just believe that it's there. You have to have an understanding of the story. And so in this case, people were wondering, like, what could be creating so much energy? And then in the 70s, when the idea of black holes moved from, like, theoretical concepts to actually observed objects and things we believed existed in the universe,

then we had a candidate for what, it could be providing these crazy amounts of energy needed to produce that radiation. So when we had the idea that maybe there were black holes at the centers to these galaxies and that they were the engine providing the power needed for this crazy radiation, that people started to believe maybe this could be real. I see. And are there a lot of these in this guy or are they pretty rare? Or are they super common?

They're actually both a lot of them in the sky and they're pretty rare. Like we know of about 750,000 quasars out there by now. But it's a very small fraction. Like most galaxies don't have a quasar. Most galaxies are not emitting crazy radiation out into the sky. Yeah, I guess that sounds like a lot, almost a million of them in the sky, but there are billions and billions of stars, right? Oh, yeah.

There are billions and billions of galaxies out there, there are trillions of galaxies, and most of them are not quasars. But, you know, by now we've mapped a lot of them and we've found a good number of them. So there's basically a lot of everything in the universe, just because the universe is so big and so filled with stuff. Or maybe they just have small quasar groups. And it's really fun to think about like what's actually happening there. You know, people hear that black holes are the source of quasars and they might wonder like,

hold on a second, are black holes black like they don't emit anything, right? Well, that's true. But black holes combined with like a big blob of stuff around them can emit a lot of radiation. Because that stuff, the accretion disk is getting sucked in towards the black hole. but it doesn't just like get hoovered up instantly, right? Things are rotating. They're swirling around the black hole. It takes a while before they fall in.

And before they fall in, they get like bumped against each other and ground against each other. And so the friction between all the gases that are swirling into the black hole makes for a very hot and intense environment. And that's actually what's doing the quasering or the quazing. I'm not sure what the verb is.

Really, all that energy and brightness that we see billions of light years away. It's all just from stuff falling into the black hole. hole? Yeah, it's from the black hole's energy. Remember that the black hole has massive gravitational power even outside the event horizon. It squeezes and compresses all these gases that are swirling around it. And that's where the radiation is produced. So the black hole's gravitational power is compressing and squeezing these gases. They're doing the radiating. So it's sort of indirectly from the black hole. I see. Interesting. So really a quasar is a black hole or I guess you would call up quasar the stuff around some black holes? Yeah, the black hole is sort of the engine for the quasar. It's providing the power. It's doing the thing needed to generate the radiation. But the quasar itself is not just the black hole. So, you know, I'd say the stuff at the center of the galaxy that's giving off all this light with the black hole together, that's the whole quasar. I see. And the name comes from quasi-stars originally, right? Like people thought they were

stars, but they're not quite stars, right? Yeah, we didn't understand what it was. So originally they were called quasi-stellar objects, and then that was shortened to quasars. All right, let's get into what a Quasar group is then. I'm going to guess it's not a boy band or a accounting consulting firm, but we'll dig into that and what could be a huge large Quasar group. 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.

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I got to go. I don't know how, but that kicked off the pivot of how to make the transition. Learn how to get comfortable pivoting because your life is going to be full of them. Every episode gets real about the why behind these changes and gives you the inspiration and maybe the push to make your next pivot. Listen to these women and more on She Pivot's now on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And so we talked about what a quasar is. It's a quasi-stellar object powered by a black hole that's giving off a lot of radiation. Now, Daniel, what is a large quasar group?

Right. So a large quasar group is basically a collection of quasars altogether in a way that we don't necessarily expect. That is, we see these things at the center of galaxies, but as we said earlier, they're not that common. Not like every single galaxy has a quasar in it. And so if you see like a bunch of quasars near each other, then you've got to, wonder, like, what's going on? Is there some reason why you got more quasars there than anywhere else? I see. It's like, you see a whole bunch of them together, like in the same neighborhood or like literally one top of the other? Now, just in the same neighborhood, the first one was spotted in 1982

when we saw four quasars really close to each other, not like on top of each other in one galaxy, but like four adjacent galaxies and all of them are quasars. You know, if it's rare to have a single galaxy have a quasar in it, that having four neighbors altogether all be quasars is pretty strange. Oh, I see. Not all galaxies have a quasar at the center of them. No, exactly. It's pretty rare to have a quasar. Right. And so to see four of them together, neighboring galaxies with quasars is rare. It is rare. And quasars are not forever also. Like the conditions you need to create a quasar, a supermassive black hole and the gas that swirls around it may be transient.

So, like, you could have a galaxy that shines as a quasar for a while and then doesn't. So it's sort of like finding four of these things, which are pretty rare, and they're burning at the same time. So it's like an indication that there might be some underlying reason as to why there's this group, why there's this cluster of these rare things happening together. It's like finding four diamonds next to each other. Single diamond is pretty rare. Why, if you find four, you're like, hmm, there's something extra diamondy going on around here. Right, right.

It's a large diamond group. possibly. It's a large diamond group, exactly. The other thing to remember is that quasars are sort of a feature of the earlier universe. Like, we're still making quasars, but not as much as we used to. Like, quasars peaked a while ago. So what do you mean they're a feature of the early universe? Like, we're not making them anymore? Because we still have black holes in the center of galaxies. Why don't we see more quasars? And what happens to them? Do they just turn off? Yeah, so we don't really understand the mechanism for creating quasars. Like, that we don't also understand supermassive black holes very well.

And so this goes to the question of like how galaxies form, how you get this much stuff together to create these scenarios. So we don't understand how quasars form. So we don't really know the answer to the question, why did they form more in the early universe than now? But we see them all really far away. So there aren't any like quasars in our neighborhood, which means that the reason we're seeing them far away is because they're basically

dying out. We're only seeing the ones from the past. Like, the closest quasar to us is about 600 million light years away. We think that the peak era for making quasars in the universe was about 10 billion years ago. And ever since then, like, the number of quasars being produced is smaller and smaller. But we don't know why. That's just what we see. That's just what we see, yeah.

And so this is why quasar groups are really interesting. It's like, well, if they're hard to make and they're not really being made very much anymore, what is it that's making them and how does it make these groups? It's like a clue that might tell us about, you know, the structure of the universe in general and also what the mechanism is for making these quasars. I see. It's probably a good thing that there isn't a quasar next to us, right? Because like if the Milky Way had a quasar, we'd be partly toast, right? Like that much brightness coming from the center of the galaxy, we'd be fried, wouldn't we?

Yeah, exactly. We would be if a quasar was shining right at us. Like, these things can be a thousand times as bright as an entire galaxy. So they're pretty intense. that typically the quasars tend to shoot off sort of perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy to imagine the galaxy is a big disk because the magnetic fields and everything's swirling around

they tend to focus their energy both above and below the disc and so if the Milky Way was a quasar if we had a big quasar at the heart it would probably be shooting off in a space frying other aliens probably not us oh I see they're not like bright objects like the sun that shine in all directions quasars are directional

that they like they only shoot light and radiation in one particular direction. Yeah, exactly. And that comes from the swirl, right? Remember, the disk is swirling around the black hole. So it's swirling around an axis. So it's along that axis that all these x-rays and crazy radiation tends to be emitted. I see.

So there maybe are probably more quasars in the universe. They just maybe are not pointing in our direction. Yeah, absolutely. And when we estimate, you know, the number of things in the universe, we try to take that into account. We try to estimate what fraction of these things could we see and we use that when we estimate, like, how many of them are there that we're not seeing necessarily. All right.

So they only happen with supermassive black holes, not regular black holes. Yeah, exactly. You need a really big black hole to make one of these things. And it's really interesting that they were made in the early universe because we have a lot of questions about, like, how the structure of the universe was formed. You talked earlier about how we have galaxies and then clusters of galaxies and then super clusters of galaxies. We'd sort of weave together to make this amazing cosmic structure, filaments of superclusters and walls surrounding bubbles.

And we'd really like to understand how that structure was formed and sort of what the forces at play were. And so we wonder if quasars are a way to understand that. Like, do they only occur when there happens to be like a real density of matter when things like really came together? You got an extra big scooping of over density from the early universe. So it might be that like these things are a really helpful pro. to show us where there were really dense spots in the early universe. Oh, I see. Like maybe you only get quasars if there's a particular, you know, set of conditions.

And if we can figure out what's going on in these groups, then that could tell us about what was going on early in the universe. Yeah, because we look at the universe and we say, well, well, this is amazing. I see a supercluster here. Why is there a supercluster here? Why is there a supercluster here and not over there? You know, is this really just come from the quantum fluctuations of the early universe? Is there something else going on? Could we like look back to the very history of the early

universe and see this sort of thing play out? I see. Interesting. And so a large quasar group is when you see like four more of them together? So the first one was discovered in 82. It has four quasars cluster together. And that was the first time anybody had seen that. And people were like, whoa, that seems pretty weird. And they calculated the probability of this thing just occurring by chance to being like 10 to the minus 7, like one in 10 million universes, would have a quasar group like that just by chance if the quasars were sort of distributed everywhere evenly. I see. Like from what we know about their distribution and the probability of getting a quasar to see

four of them together is like a weird throw of the die. It's a really, really unusual throw the die. And any time you see something weird like that, you wonder, is there something going on? And there's just something that made this quasar group happen right here, is that the matter was extra dense. And so you got like extra big black holes and that's what's powering these quasars. Or, you know, is there something else going on? You know, there's plenty of room in understanding the structure of the universe for something new, right?

We know something about the history and the expansion of the universe, but there's a lot we also don't know about what's powering it and what's controlling it and why it looks this way and not any other way. Wow. All right. So that was the first group that they found. And how many of them have they seen so far? So only a handful of these things, they're pretty rare. The second one that they found had 23 quasars in it. This is in 1987. And so that blew people's minds. They were like, if four quasars together in a group is shocking, then 23 together, that's like an orchestra, you know? Wow. And so again, these are, you know, like 27 galaxies sort of in the same neighborhood and they all have quasars pointing at us. Yeah, 23 quasars found in 1987, all very close together. And a way that's not consistent with just like, you know, random distribution of quasars. I see.

And they're all pointing at us, which is the weird thing, isn't it? Yeah, it suggests that there's a lot of them over there. Wow. Right. And so we're seeing a tiny fraction of things. And so it suggests, like, are there lots more quasars over there that we're not seeing? And also, like, are there lots more galaxies that we're not seeing? You know, are we just seeing the brightest things that are over there?

And it's a very, very dense region of space. chalk-filled the galaxies and other crazy stuff, you know, it could be that there's a whole structure of stuff over there we've never seen before. Right, right. And so they think quasars maybe are related to density of the early universe, like, you know, the denser things are and were, the more black holes you would have, and so more chances for quasars? Is that the general idea? That's the general idea. But, you know, it's early days in understanding this stuff. So we're at the stage of like, hmm, maybe it works this way. Maybe it works that way. And that's sort of the general idea. And one supporting piece of evidence is that when we look out for superclusters,

you know, like the big collections of galaxies that are loosely grouped together by gravity, we see superclusters at about the same rate as we see large quasar groups. And so people are like, hmm, that's interesting. Maybe super clusters are made by large quasar groups or maybe large quasar groups are an indication of where you're later going to get a super cluster. Oh, I see. It could be the other way around, like, you know, having a lot of quasars in one area somehow, you know, attracts more things to you? Yeah, or it's just an indication that there's already a huge density of mass there, right? If over density creates large quasar groups, then large quasar groups could tell you where those dense spots are, and then later in the formation of the universe, they create

superclusters. So large quasar groups happen sort of early on, like a few billion years after the universe is formed. Superclusters take a longer time. to gather together, it's a race between gravity and the expansion of the universe. So it could be that where we're seeing these large quasar groups out in distant reaches of space, this actual moment right now, there may be super clusters of galaxies there. Wow. All right. So then those are the large quasar groups.

And now they found something even bigger. And so they needed another adjective for these quasar groups, which is the huge large quasar group. Exactly. Now, Daniel, why didn't they just call it the, I don't know, super large? or extra large or, you know, venti. But they call it the huge large quasar group. Do you know what they were thinking? Have you talked to any of them?

I've not talked to them. I imagine that maybe it was just like an honest moment of excitement. You know, like imagine somebody discovering a large quasar group realizing how big it is and then going, oh my gosh, it's huge. And then that name just sticking. It doesn't seem like the kind of name you would, you know, come up with after a committee meets or anything. Right.

Or maybe the lead scientist was named Hugh. and which would be very suspicious in my book. Maybe it's just been a misunderstanding. He meant to name it Hughes Large Quasar Group. And now it's called the Huge. Right. Or maybe it's like a Danish name. It's actually like Hugua.

Hmm. All right. Let's get into what the huge large quasar group is. And let's talk about how huge it actually is. But first, let's take another quick break. Number 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed.

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Well, you know, quasars are big. And then they found groups of quasars. And they were like, wow, these groups are surprisingly large. So they called them large quasar groups. And then they found this large quasar group, which is shockingly large. It's the biggest large quasar group we've ever found. And in fact, it's bigger than anything in the universe is supposed to be. What do you mean?

Bigger than anything is supposed to be? How big are things supposed to be? Yeah. So there's sort of like a maximum size, we think, that things in the universe should be sort of allowed to be based on our understanding of the universe and the age of the universe. Einstein had this idea that the universe should be basically smooth, that if you zoom out far enough, you shouldn't be able to notice any difference

from place to place. Like, everywhere in the universe should be basically the same if you zoom out far enough. Right. But how does that give you a limit? Well, it tells you that you shouldn't see really big structures.

Like, if you zoom out far enough, everything should just be a wash. It should be like the universe is just like static. You shouldn't see like really big effects or, you know, large trends or really big objects. So that gives you a limit

to like how big something can, and B, so that you can zoom out and really not see any features anymore. It's like saying, well, the biggest building in the United States is a certain size. And so if you zoom out far enough, you shouldn't be able to make out any buildings anymore. Oh, I see. It'd be like zooming out of the U.S. and finding bigger and bigger buildings. That would be weird. Yeah, exactly.

It's like zooming out and finding a building that stretches from, you know, Kansas to California. And you're like, whoa, that's bigger than any feature I thought there was. All right, right. All right. Well, I guess maybe step us through here. What is this huge large quasar group and how huge is it? And I guess the question is, why is it considered a structure in itself? Isn't it just a collection of quasars?

Yeah, that's a great question. So it was found in 2013 by one of the same researchers that previously discovered other large quasar groups. So we're sort of an expert in finding these things. And this one has 73 quasars in it. So the previous record was 23 quasars. this one just blows it away. It's 73 quasars all in a big cluster. And it's like 4 billion light years from end to end.

It's like the size of 40,000 Milky Way's put end to end. Wow. That's a lot of light years. And so you're saying in the space of 4 billion light years, there's 73 galaxies in that space that have quasars in them. Yeah, exactly. And are there other galaxies without quasars? Or is it like, you know, only quasars in?

galaxies there. No, there are definitely other galaxies there that don't have quasars, but this is a lot more quasars than you expect per galaxy, and they're clustered together in this sort of interesting sort of blobby shape. And so it looks like a gravitational structure. It looks like it's sort of held together. But again, that's weird because we shouldn't have gravitational structures that are bigger than about a billion and a half light years across. I see. I guess the question is, How do you make determination that it's in the same gravitational structure? Like there's nothing else around this clump or blob of stuff? Yeah, it's a great question.

And it's something that people debate a lot. Like when we look at a supercluster, we ask like, is this thing really held together gravitationally or is it stuff that just happens to be near each other? And I think one way to think about it is like, what is the future of this object? You know, for example, the universe is expanding. And so space is being created everywhere, pulling everything apart. But some objects will survive that, like your body and the solar system. And the reason is that they are gravitationally held together.

They will survive this expansion. They will still be an object in a billion years. People don't know and people argue about whether superclusters are gravitationally bound objects. And what they mean by that is, in a billion years, will this thing still be like this? Or will it be torn apart by dark energy? So really, it's about this battle between gravity and dark energy. The question about being a gravitationally bound object is really, is gravity the dominant force?

Is it the thing that's holding it together or is it really just going to get torn apart by dark energy? I see. So there is sort of a sense that they are going to stick together in the future. That's why you call them a structure. That's the claim. So this guy discovered it. He called it a large quasar group. He said, look how big this is.

It's bigger than anything should be. But it was not universally accepted. in the community to be a large quasar group. There were other people said, well, what if it's just a random collection of quasars that aren't sort of like necessarily grouped together into a gravitational structure? How can they not be?

Like, do you think they're just like ships passing in the night kind of thing or they are too big to be held together by gravity? What would be the alternative? Yeah, the alternative is that it's a random chance that they just happen to be there and that they're not held together by gravity. Remember the reason we're interested in large quasar groups is because we think they might be like indicators of over density.

We think they might be a sign that there's an extra stuff there in the universe and that later that will lead to interesting structures like superclusters, et cetera, et cetera. But it might just be sometimes you get clusters of quasars. Like sometimes you find a bunch of diamonds and they're not connected to each other. So there's a debate about whether they are gravitationally bound or not. And that's hard to resolve. You know, the real way to resolve is to sort of watch it for a billion years and see what happens. I see. Like what could happen? They could like, you know, float away or they could stay clumped together. That's what you mean. Like if they fall away from each other, then they weren't really gravitationally bound. Is that the idea? Yeah, exactly. And that's the way I think about this whole question of like, what is the biggest thing in the universe? You know, you might wonder like, why should the biggest thing in the universe be a billion and a half light years across and not two billion or 10 billion or whatever? And it's really, again, about gravity having time to build things. Like you start from the very early universe.

gravity starts to pull stuff together, it makes stars, it makes galaxies, eventually makes galaxy clusters. Each of these things takes time because gravity is pretty weak and these enormous masses at play here, but it takes a long time for gravity to gather this stuff together. And at the same time, it has an opponent, right? Dark energy is spreading everything out. And you can run a simulation of the universe and say, what's the biggest thing you would expect gravity to have formed by now? Like in the future, the biggest thing in the universe could be bigger, right? If dark energy wasn't playing its game, gravity could make things that are 3, 4, 5, 10 billion light years across. But we don't think it's had time to make anything that big yet, which is why we think the biggest thing in the universe should be a billion and a half light years across.

So this thing being 4 billion light years across, if it is a real thing built by gravity, then we don't know how it was made. Interesting. Like it could have been just like maybe two small groups that just happened to bump into each other. Is that kind of what you mean, or like three groups that just happened to cluster? Yeah, exactly. They're not necessarily one thing. It could just be like three smaller things near each other. And so that's the question.

So there were these papers back and forth in astronomy. People saying, oh, look, we found this big thing. It violates a deep law of the universe and somebody else saying, no, I think it's just random. Here's another way to analyze it statistically that shows it's not actually that unlikely to find that many quasars. And then another paper in response that looked at magnesium and there's absorption of, magnesium gas there, which is another indicator of like an over-dense region. And so I think the consensus right now is that it is a large quasar group, but we still don't understand how you would make something this big, this early in the universe.

I see. And we have a lot of information about it, right? Like you sent you a little picture that shows kind of a 3D map of all of these quasars. Like when you look out there into space and you look at towards this huge, large cluster, can you actually like tell individual quasars apart? Yeah, you can map these individual quasars. They are really, really bright. Now, they're really far away, but they're so bright that you can identify them.

That's how they were discovered in the first place. They're embedded in many, many other galaxies, which are too faint for us to see sometimes, at least without dedicated viewing. So we can spot these things because there are like extraordinarily bright lights really, really far away. And you can definitely resolve individual ones. And yet, they've made this 3D map of them, like what does it look like? You know, they're trying to look at this structure and understand, you know, why is it formed this way, not that way? Is there any pattern in there?

Right, yeah. But generally, are people pretty sure it's a cluster or what's the prevalent thinking about it? Is it a random coincidence or is there an actual, you know, structure that was there from the beginning of time? It's hard to say, you know, the experimental evidence, I think, is pretty strong that it's there and then it's a thing. I think that most astronomers believe that it is a group, but that requires something new. there requires some explanation for how you get something this big. How do you make a building that's from Kansas to California? How do you explain the existence of this string of diamonds in the sky?

We can't explain why it's there, but we think that it is there. And so that's exciting because it tells us that something could be going on in the early universe that we don't understand. I see. It's a huge mystery, or at least a very large one. It's a huge, large mystery. you know, it's the kind of thing where maybe there's some new physics that explains how things that are so far away from each other in the universe that they didn't have time for light to get between them could somehow be connected, right, could somehow have a correlation between them. So it's an opportunity for people to sort of go crazy and think about new ideas to potentially explain the way the universe was formed and the way it expanded in its early days.

Yeah, yeah, because I guess it's crazy if it's four billion light years across, like for one of them to talk to the other, one, at least gravitationally or through light or anything, I mean, that's already like a third of the life of the universe. Exactly. And now we're talking about like forming a structure, you know, that requires a lot of back and forth. There's paperwork, you know, there's meetings. You can't just get together and call yourself a large quasar group.

Yeah, or a huge one by that matter. Yeah. I have to say, I'm a little bit skeptical. I'm like 73 quasars. I mean, I was already kind of used to 40, 20. 73. I don't know if I would qualify that is huge. What do you think?

like maybe very large or extra large but huge like you know what if you find a thousand now what are you going to call that one the mega large quasar group i don't know i think yeah to be impressed we need another digit on that at least something in the triple digits to earn the huge moniker exactly well that's the huge large quasar group another sign that there are still big mysteries out there and not just big mysteries huge mysteries out there in the universe, huge structures, huge objects that we really are still discovering what they're about and what's causing them. That's right. And we are just beginning to explore our universe. We are only gathering a tiny fraction of the light that carries with it evidence for how the universe was made and how it looks now. Most of that is being ignored unless you're counting

the plants. And so I hope that as a species we can build more and more of these eyeballs that let us look deep into the distant universe and map out the structure of our neighborhood and our region and the rest of the universe and learn from that how our universe came to me and maybe something about its future. In the meantime, I guess we should keep looking out. Maybe we will find bigger ones or maybe we will sort of unlock

what this huge structure means and what it can tell us about how everything began. And maybe this time we should be prepared for finding something big, so we come up with a better name for it. Yeah, we should have started with small, like the small quasar group. Like if you discover four of them together,

I don't know if you called it a large, one. I guess that's why the English language has so many words. You can always go with bigger adjectives. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I was diagnosed with cancer on Friday and cancer free the next Friday. No chemo, no radiation, none of that. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beat,

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