Size matters

Something odd happens when we consider scales much larger or smaller than our ordinary experience; our imagination fails.

It's why people seem not to comprehend the difference between millionaires and billionaires.  Millionaires are wealthy, yes.  But billionaires?  

If a person with a billion dollars gave away a million dollars a day, 365 days a year -- in other words, creating one new millionaire every day -- (s)he wouldn't run out for almost three years.  The fact that people lump together millionaires and billionaires as both simply "rich" indicates we don't have a good way to conceptualize how big a billion actually is.

The same thing happens when you look at anything that's very small.  In my biology classes, we did a lab where students learned how to estimate measurements using a microscope.  Knowing the magnification and the field diameter (the actual width of the bit of the slide you're looking at), it's a fairly simple calculation to estimate the size of (for example) a cell.

What I found the most interesting was that after performing the calculation, most students had no clue whether the answer they'd come up with was even within the ballpark.  Most of the time, if they did make an error, it was a simple computational goof; but the curious thing was that they couldn't tell if they were even in the right realm.  0.001 meters?  0.000001 meters?  0.000000000001 meters?  All looks pretty similar -- "small."

(Then there's the student who multiplied when she should have divided, and told me that a plant cell was 103 meters in diameter.  "Don't you think that's a bit... on the large size?" I asked her.  She responded, "Is it?"  I told her 103 meters was a little longer than a typical football field.  She responded, "Oh.")

This problem crops up in fields like subatomic physics (on one end) and, germane to today's topic, astrophysics (on the other).  What got me thinking about it was a paper this week in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics about a distant quasar with the euphonious name VIK J2348-3054.  Quasars are extraordinarily luminous objects which were a puzzle for a long time -- viewed through earthly telescopes they appear as single dim, star-like spots, but based on their redshifts they are enormously far away (and thus, even to be visible at all from that distance their actual luminosity has to be crazy high).  The current models support quasars as being supermassive black holes at the centers of young galaxies, emitting high-energy radiation and particles as they swallow vast amounts of gas and dust in a wildly spinning whirlpool called an accretion disk.

[Image credit: M. Kornmesser/European Southern Observatory]

An energy output that high causes disruption in the entire region surrounding it.  It heats and/or blows away gas and dust nearby, which overcomes the gravitational collapse of clumps of material and thus suppresses star formation.  And this quasar is so powerful it has stopped the formation of new stars in a region with a radius of over sixteen million light years.

Stop and ponder that for a moment.

Sixteen million light years isn't just big, it's abso-fucking-lutely enormous.  It's six times the distance between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy.  Put into units that more of us are comfortable with, this is about 160,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers.

Of course, I'm not sure how much even that helps.  Once again, our imaginations simply fail us.  Perhaps this will frame it better; the fastest human-made vehicle, Voyager 1, is traveling at about 61,000 kilometers per hour.  At this rate, Voyager 1 will have covered one light year in about eighteen thousand years.  And that's not even the distance to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri (if it was heading that direction, which it's not).

To travel the distance that has been cleared by this quasar, Voyager 1 would take a bit less than three hundred billion years -- about twenty times the age of the universe.

I don't even know how to wrap my brain around a number this big.  I may not have the difficulty with numbers my long-ago student had with her football-field-sized plant cell, but I have sat here all morning trying to understand what it means for something to work over this kind of size range, and I just can't manage it.

The inevitable result is that this kind of thing makes us feel pretty small.  I'm actually okay with that.  The universe is a grand, beautiful, and abso-fucking-lutely enormous place.  It's a good thing to look up into the night sky and feel awe, to realize that every star you see is (relatively speaking) close by, occupying a small spherical region in one arm of a completely ordinary galaxy, of which there are millions more scattered across the vastness of space.

We humans get a little big for our britches, sometimes.  A dose of humility is needed every so often.

And if it comes from the realm of science, so much the better.

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Biggest and brightest

If you're the kind of person who likes having your mind blown by superlatives, astrophysics is the science for you.

I ran into two really good examples of that last week.  In the first, a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, from research led by astrophysicist Ruth Daly of Pennsylvania State University, found that the massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way -- Sagittarius A* -- is spinning so fast it's actually warping the fabric of space time around it, flattening it into the shape of a football.

The "no-hair theorem" of the physics of black holes states that they are rather simple beasts.  They can be completely characterized using only three parameters: their mass, charge, and angular momentum.  The name comes from the quip by physicist John Archibald Wheeler that "black holes have no hair," by which he meant that there are no other adornments you need to describe to get a full picture of what they're doing.  However, I've always been puzzled by what exactly it means to say that a black hole has angular momentum; objects with mass and spin, such as a twirling top or the rotating Earth, have angular momentum, but since the mass in a black hole has (at least as far as we understand them) collapsed into a singularity, what exactly is spinning, and how could you tell?

Last week's paper at least answers the second half of the question.  Using data from x-ray and radio wave collimation and material outflow from Sagittarius A*, astrophysicists can determine how much spacetime is being deformed by the angular momentum of the black hole, and from that determine its rate of spin.

And it's spinning fast -- an estimated sixty percent of the maximum possible rate, which is set by the universal speed limit that matter can't travel at or faster than the speed of light.  The deformation is so great that the fabric of spacetime is compressed along the spin axis, so it appears spherical from above but flattened from the side.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

The second piece of research comes from a study at the European Southern Observatory, and was published in Nature Astronomy.  It looks at the recent discovery of the brightest object known, a quasar (an active galactic nucleus containing a supermassive black hole) that -- get ready for the superlatives -- is five hundred trillion times more luminous than the Sun, contains a black hole that has seventeen billion times the mass of the Sun, and is consuming one Sun's worth of mass a day.  This object, given the unassuming name of J0529-4351, is twelve billion light years away, making it also one of the most distant objects ever studied.

"All this light comes from a hot accretion disk that measures seven light-years in diameter -- this must be the largest accretion disk in the Universe," said study co-author Samuel Lai, of Australian National University.  If he sounds a little blown away by this -- well, so are we all.  A seven-light-year accretion disk means that if it were placed where the Sun is, not only would its accretion disk engulf the entire Solar System, it would extend outward past the five nearest stars -- the triple-star system of Alpha/Proxima Centauri, Barnard's Star, and Luhman 16.

I don't know about you, but something on that scale boggles my mind.

And that's not a bad thing, really.  I think we need to be reminded periodically that in the grand scheme of things, the problems we lose so much sleep over down here are pretty minuscule.  Also, it's good to have our brains overwhelmed by the grandeur of the universe we live in, to be able to look up into the night sky and think, "Wow.  How fortunate I am to be able to witness -- and in some small way, understand -- such wonders."

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The fingerprints of the Manatee

Cosmic ray is a catch-all term for the high-energy particles that constantly bombard the Earth's upper atmosphere.  The majority of them are deflected by the Earth's magnetic field or absorbed by the atmosphere, but a very few are energetic enough to reach the surface of the planet.  About 90% of cosmic rays are protons; a good chunk of the remaining ten percent are alpha particles (helium nuclei, consisting of two protons and two neutrons bound together).  The rest are varying mixes of particles from the subatomic zoo, sometimes even including positrons and antiprotons -- particles of antimatter.  They were discovered in 1912 by Austrian-American physicist Victor Hess in 1912, for which he won the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The lion's share of cosmic rays that strike the Earth originate from the Sun, but some come from much farther away.  As we've seen here several times at Skeptophilia, the universe is an energetic and often violent place, not lacking in mechanisms for sending bits of matter careening across the universe at a significant fraction of the speed of light.  As you might expect, supernovae produce cosmic rays; so do gamma ray bursters, Wolf-Rayet stars, and quasars.  The last-mentioned are thought to be supermassive black holes surrounded by an inward-spiraling accretion disk of gas and dust, which accelerates as it tumbles toward the event horizon and gives of one final death scream of radiation.  This makes quasars one of the brightest objects in the known universe, with luminosities tens of thousands of times that of the Milky Way.

Trying to pinpoint the origin of particular cosmic rays is tricky.  Being mostly made of charged particles, they're deflected by magnetic fields; so even if you find one and know the direction it was traveling when it hit your detector, you can't just trace the line backwards and assume that's the point in the sky where it originated.  So scientists who are interested in figuring out where the highest-energy cosmic rays come from -- ones that almost certainly weren't created by our placid, stable home star -- have a difficult task.

A team led by Laura Olivera-Nieto of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics has tackled this problem, and in a paper published last week in Science, came up with an answer for at least some of these mysterious particles.  Working at the High-Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS -- a nice nod to the discoverer of cosmic rays) in Namibia, Olivera-Nieto and her team are studying a curious source of cosmic rays -- black holes that are in a binary system with another star.

The current study is of an object called SS 433, a source of x-rays so powerful it's been nicknamed a "microquasar."  It lies in the middle of the Manatee Nebula in the constellation Aquila, a shell of gas and dust blown outward when a star went supernova between ten and a hundred thousand years ago.  The supernova resulted in a black hole as the doomed star's core collapsed, but its companion star lived on.

The Manatee Nebula [Image credit: B. Saxton, (NRAO/AUI/NSF) from data provided by M. Goss, et al.]

Well, after a fashion.  The enormous gravitational pull of the black hole is siphoning off matter from the companion star, and as that plume of gas spirals inward, it accelerates and gives off radiation -- just as the accretion disk of a quasar does.  The result is a jet of cosmic rays, including not only the typical charged particles but x-rays and gamma rays, which (unlike charged particles) are unaffected by magnetic fields.  This allows astronomers to pinpoint their sources.

So in the midst of this seemingly placid bit of space is a whirling hurricane of gas and dust that is accelerated so strongly it creates jets of particles moving at nearly the speed of light.  (Exactly the speed of light, in the case of the x-rays and gamma rays.)  Some of those particles eventually reach the Earth -- a few of which are picked up by Olivera-Nieto's team at HESS.

And those cosmic rays allows us to discern the fingerprints of an incredibly violent process taking place eighteen thousand light years away.

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A glimpse of a monster

Ever heard of TON 618?

I hadn't until a few days ago, which is surprising considering my dual fascination with (1) astronomy, and (2) things that are huge and violent and could kill you.  TON 618 is a quasar, a luminous active galactic nucleus common in the universe's distant past.  Thankfully the cosmos has settled down a bit, because these things are so energetic their light is still visible today from billions of light years away.

Even by quasarian (I just made that word up, you should find a way to incorporate it into your daily speech) standards, TON 618 is impressive.  It showed up in a 1957 survey of faint blue stars, but its intense red shift indicated it was extremely distant and therefore a lot brighter than it looked.  It was entry #618 in the Tonantzintla Catalogue, a list of stars described in the bulletin of the Tonantzintla and Tacubaya Observatories in Mexico, and that's what gave it its rather unassuming name.

Once you start looking into this thing, though, you find it's anything but unassuming.

First, it's huge.  The black hole at the center of TON 618 is forty billion times more massive than the Sun.  If you put it where the Sun is, the entire Solar System would be inside its event horizon -- in fact, its event horizon is estimated at forty times the orbit of the planet Neptune.

Because of this, it has an impossibly high gravitational field, and is the center of a turbulent infall of matter.  This unfortunate gas and dust, as it accelerates toward its inevitable doom, is compressed and heated, emitting enough light to make TON 618 one of the most luminous objects in the known universe.  If the above comparisons weren't enough to blow your mind, TON 618 is estimated to have a luminosity of 4 x 10^40 watts -- about 140 trillion times brighter than the Sun.

It's also what is known as a Lyman-alpha blob.  This is another astronomical creature I just learned about, only found in the early universe (and therefore at this point, very far away).  The name comes from its extremely high emission of the Lyman alpha emission line of hydrogen, which has only been used as a tool for astronomers in recent years; it is so strongly absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere that it is essentially invisible to ground-based telescopes.  With the advent of orbiting telescopes like the Hubble, Kepler, and James Webb Space Telescopes, astronomers are finding more and more Lyman-alpha emitters in the distant (i.e. early) universe, but the debate goes on about what those emissions mean -- and why they aren't seen in nearby objects.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons J.Geach/D.Narayanan/R.Crain, Computer simulation of a Lyman-alpha Blob, CC BY 4.0]

The most fascinating question about all this is where -- and what -- are quasars now?  The surmise is that for the most part they've settled down to become quiet, ordinary galactic nuclei.  But what about monsters like TON 618?  It's on the order of ten thousand times more massive than Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way; so if this eventually evolved into a galactic center, it would have to be one big-ass galaxy.

To put it in quantitative scientific terms.

Of course, there's no way to find out for sure.  When you look into the distance, you're also looking into the past, because the light that reaches your eyes (or telescope) took a finite length of time to arrive.  So you're always seeing things as they were, not as they are, and the farther away something is, the further back in time you're looking.  We're seeing TON 618 as it was about 10.8 billion years ago -- there's no way to know what, or where, it is now.

But that doesn't stop it from being an astonishing object.  The more sophisticated our instruments get, and the more detailed our scientific knowledge, the more weird and wonderful and magnificent the universe becomes.  

Even so, I'm glad that TON 618 -- whatever it is -- is located at a safe distance.  As fascinating as it is, it wouldn't make a good neighbor.

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World enough and time

Because I'm writing this in the last hours of the Trump presidency, and my other alternative is to become so anxious about what his followers might still do to fuck things up that I chew my fingernails till they bleed, today I'm going to focus on things that are very, very far from planet Earth.

Let's begin with the closest-to-home, three thousand light years away, which seems like it might be almost far enough for safety.

A new study of planetary nebulae -- gas and dust clouds that are what's left of stars that went supernova -- was the subject of a talk at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society last Friday.  Using the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera, astronomers were able to photograph these amazing stellar remnants panchromatically (across the frequency spectrum of light).  And what they're learning is changing a lot of what we thought we understood.

Take, for example, NGC 6302, better known as the Butterfly Nebula.  It got its name because of symmetrical "wings" of debris that were thrown out when the central star blew up.  Why it has this strange symmetry is probably due to the magnetic field of the central star, but what's most surprising is that what astronomers thought was the central star doesn't seem to be, but is simply a white dwarf much closer to the Earth that happens to lie between us and the nebula.  Wherever the actual central star is, it's a doozy; from the spectral lines of the nebula, created when light from the star is absorbed and then re-emitted by the dust plumes, its surface is one of the hottest known, at a staggering 250,000 C.  (By comparison, the surface of our own Sun is a paltry 6,000 C or so.)

The Butterfly Nebula [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA/JPL]

Then there's NGC 7027, the Jewel Bug Nebula, which is also remarkable because of its symmetry -- depending on what feature you're looking at, it shows spherical symmetry (symmetry around the center, like a basketball), axis symmetry (symmetry around a line, like the letter T), or point symmetry (symmetry across a central point, like the letter N).  It's simultaneously one of the brightest planetary nebulae and one of the smallest, and the new study confirms that it's a recently-formed object -- it's only six hundred years old.  (Of course, since it's three thousand light years away, the structure is actually 3,600 years old; but what we're seeing is what it looked like when it was a mere six hundred.)

"We're dissecting [planetary nebulae]," said Joel Kastner, a professor in the Rochester Institute of Technology's Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science and School of Physics and Astronomy.  "We're able to see the effect of the dying central star in how it's shedding and shredding its ejected material.  We're able to see that material that the central star has tossed away is being dominated by ionized gas, where it's dominated by cooler dust, and even how the hot gas is being ionized, whether by the star's UV or by collisions caused by its present, fast winds."

Moving farther afield, another paper presented at the AAS meeting is about a weird object in NGC 253, the Sculptor Galaxy, which is 11.4 million light years away.  It's called a magnetar, and is another stellar remnant, but this one of a supergiant star.  The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the Mars Odyssey orbiter both picked up a 140-millisecond-long pulse of gamma rays which seems to have been caused by a starquake on the surface of this object, a cosmic shudder that in one burst released one thousand trillion trillion (10 followed by 27 zeroes) times more energy than the largest recorded earthquake Earth has experienced.  The quake ejected a blob of plasma at nearly the speed of light, and the acceleration is what caused the gamma rays.

The new study gives us a lens into the behavior of some of the oddest structures in the universe, and one that may also be responsible for "fast radio bursts" -- quick pulses of radio waves whose source has been a mystery up until now.  "The apparent frequency of magnetar flares in other galaxies is similar to the frequency of fast radio bursts," said astrophysicist Victoria Kaspi of McGill Space Institute.  "That argues that actually, most or all fast radio bursts could be magnetars."

Last, we go out an astonishing thirteen billion light years, which is only seven hundred million light years shy of the radius of the observable universe.  Another paper at the AAS meeting describes a quasar -- an ancient supermassive black hole that is radiating energy from infalling material, and is one of the brightest objects known -- that lies at the center of a galaxy, and now holds the record for the oldest black hole ever observed.

Like all good scientific discoveries, this one raises almost as many questions as it solves, especially about how such a massive object could have formed so early in the life of the universe.  "A gargantuan seed black hole may have formed through the direct collapse of vast amounts of primordial hydrogen gas," said study co-author Xiaohui Fan, of the University of Arizona in Tucson.  "Or perhaps J0313-1806’s seed started out small, forming through stellar collapse, and black holes can grow a lot faster than scientists think.  Both possibilities exist, but neither is proven.  We have to look much earlier [in the universe] and look for much less massive black holes to see how these things grow."

So that leaves us all the way across the universe, which is a nice comfortable distance to put between myself and the Proud Boys.  It'd be better still to have me stay here and send the Proud Boys out to the farthest reaches of interstellar space, so that their inevitable tweets about what a god-figure Trump is and what a libtard snowflake I am will take thirteen billion years to get here.

But I guess that's not gonna happen.  We all have to stay here and solve our own problems, quasars and magnetars and nebulae notwithstanding.  I'll end with a quote from Doctor Who, which seems apt somehow given the voyage through time and space we just took: "I do think there’s always a way to put things right.  If I didn’t believe that I wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning,  I wouldn’t eat breakfast; I wouldn’t leave the TARDIS ever.  I would never have left home.  There is always something we can do."

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I'm always amazed by the resilience we humans can sometimes show.  Knocked down again and again, in circumstances that "adverse" doesn't even begin to describe, we rise above and move beyond, sometimes accomplishing great things despite catastrophic setbacks.

In Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Hidden Order of Life, journalist Lulu Miller looks at the life of David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist whose fascination with aquatic life led him to the discovery of a fifth of the species of fish known in his day.  But to say the man had bad luck is a ridiculous understatement.  He lost his collections, drawings, and notes repeatedly, first to lightning, then to fire, and finally and catastrophically to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which shattered just about every specimen bottle he had.

But Jordan refused to give up.  After the earthquake he set about rebuilding one more time, becoming the founding president of Stanford University and living and working until his death in 1931 at the age of eighty.  Miller's biography of Jordan looks at his scientific achievements and incredible tenacity -- but doesn't shy away from his darker side as an early proponent of eugenics, and the allegations that he might have been complicit in the coverup of a murder.

She paints a picture of a complex, fascinating man, and her vivid writing style brings him and the world he lived in to life.  If you are looking for a wonderful biography, give Why Fish Don't Exist a read.  You won't be able to put it down.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A window on the deep past

When I was a kid, I always enjoyed going on walks with my dad.  My dad wasn't very well educated -- barely finished high school -- but was incredibly wise and had an amazing amount of solid, practical common sense.  His attitude was that God gave us reasoning ability and we had damn well better use it -- that most of the questions you run into can be solved if you just get your opinions and ego out of the way and look at them logically.

The result was that despite never having had a physics class in his life, he was brilliant at figuring things out about how the world works.  Like the mind-blowing (well, to ten-year-old kid, at least) idea he told me about because we saw a guy pounding in a fence post with a sledgehammer.

The guy was down the street from us -- maybe a hundred meters away or so -- and I noticed something weird.  The reverberating bang of the head of the sledge hitting the top of the post was out of sync with what we were seeing.  We'd see the sledge hit the post, then a moment later, bang.

I asked my dad about that.  He thought for a moment, and said, "Well, it's because it takes time for the sound to arrive.  The sound is slower than light is, so you see the hammer hit before you hear it."  He told me about how his father had taught him tell how close a thunderstorm is by counting the seconds between the lightning flash and the thunderclap, and that the time got shorter the closer it was.  He pointed at the guy pounding in the fence post, and said, "So the closer we get to him, the shorter the delay should be between seeing the hammer hit and hearing it."

Which, of course, turned out to be true.

But then, a crazy thought occurred to me.  "So... we're always hearing things in the past?"

"I suppose so," he said.  "Even if you're really close to something, it still takes some time for the sound to get to you."

Then, an even crazier thought.  "The light takes some time, too, right?  A shorter amount of time, but still some time.  So we're seeing things in the past, too?"

He shrugged.  "I guess so.  Light is always faster than sound."  Then he grinned.  "I guess that's why some people appear bright until you hear them talk."

It was some years later that I recognized the implications of this -- that the farther away something is, the further back into the past we're looking.  The Sun is far enough away that the light from it takes eight minutes and twenty seconds to get here, so you are always seeing the Sun not as it is now, but as it was, eight minutes and twenty seconds ago.  The closest star to us other than the Sun is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.3 light years away -- so here, you're looking at a star as it was 4.3 years ago.  There is, in fact, no way to know what it looks like now -- the Special Theory of Relativity showed that the speed of light is the fastest speed at which information can travel.  Any of the stars you see in the night sky might be exploding right now (not that it's likely, mind you), and not only would we have no way to know, the farther away they are, the longer it would take us to find out about it.

This goes up to some unimaginably huge distances.  Consider quasars, which are peculiar beasts to say the least.  When first discovered in the 1950s, they were such anomalies that they were nicknamed quasi-stellar radio sources mainly because no one knew what the hell they were.  Astrophysicist Hong-Yee Chiu contracted that clumsy appellation to quasar in 1964, and it stuck.

The funny thing about them was on first glance, they just looked like ordinary stars -- points of light.  Not even spectacular ones -- the brightest quasar has a magnitude just under +13, meaning it's not even visible in small telescopes.  But when the astronomers looked at the light coming from them, they found something extraordinary.

The light was wildly red-shifted.  You probably know that red-shift occurs because of the Doppler effect -- just as the sound of a siren from an ambulance moving away from you sounds lower in pitch because the sound waves are stretched out by the ambulance's movement, the light from something moving away from you gets stretched -- and the analog to pitch in sound is frequency in light.  The faster an object is moving away from you, the more its light drops in frequency (moves toward the red end of the spectrum).  And, because of Hubble's law and the expansion of space, the faster an object in deep space is moving away from you, the farther away it is.

So that meant two things: (1) if Hubble's law was being applied correctly, quasars were ridiculously far away (the nearest ones estimated at about a billion light years); and (2) if they really were that far away, they were far and away the most luminous objects in the universe (an average quasar, if placed thirty light years away, would be as bright as the Sun).

But what on earth (or outside of it, actually) could generate that much energy?  And why weren't there any nearby ones?  Whatever process resulted in a quasar evidently stopped happening a billion or more years ago -- otherwise we'd see ones closer to us (and therefore, ones that had occurred more recently; remember, farther away in space, further back in time).

Speculation ran wild, mostly because the luminosities and distances were so enormous that it seemed like there must be some other explanation.  Quasars, some said, were red-shifted not because the light was being stretched not by the expansion of space, but because it was escaping a gravity well -- so maybe they weren't far away, they were simple off-the-scale massive.  Maybe they were the output-end of a stellar wormhole.  Maybe they were some kind of chain reaction of millions of supernovas all at once.

See?  I told you they didn't look that interesting.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons ESO, Quasar (24.5 mag ;z~4) in MS 1008 Field, CC BY 4.0]

Further observations confirmed the crazy velocities, and found that they were consistent with the expansion of space -- quasars are, in fact, billions of light years away, receding from us at what in Spaceballs would definitely qualify as ludicrous speed, and therefore had a luminosity that was unlike anything else.  But what could be producing such an energy output?

The answer, it seems, is that what we're seeing is the light emitted as gas and dust makes its last suicidal plunge into a galaxy-sized black hole -- as it speeds up, friction heats it up, and it emits light on a scale that boggles the mind.  Take that energy output and drag it out as space expands, and you get the longest-wavelength light there is -- radio waves -- but produced at at a staggering intensity.

All of this comes up because of a series of six papers last week in The Astronomical Journal about a discovery of three quasars that are the most energetic ever discovered (and therefore, the most energetic objects in the known universe).  The most luminous of the three is called SDSS J1042+1646, which brings up the issue of how astrophysicists name the objects they study.  I'm sorry, but "SDSS J1042+1646" just does not capture the gravitas and magnitude of this thing.  There should be a new naming convention that will give the interested layperson an idea of the scale we're talking about here.  I propose renaming it "Abso-fucking-lutely Enormous Glowing Thing, No, Really, You Don't Even Understand How Big It Is."  Although that's a little cumbersome, I maintain that it's better than SDSS J1042+1646.

But I digress.

Anyhow, the energy output of this thing is 5x10^30 gigawatts.  That's five million trillion trillion gigawatts.  By comparison, your average nuclear reactor puts out one gigawatt.  Even all the stars in the Milky Way put together are a hundred times less energetic than this one quasar.

See?  I told you.  Abso-fucking-lutely enormous.

These quasars have also given astrophysicists some insight into why we don't see any close by.  They are blowing radiation -- and debris -- out of the core of the quasar at such high rates that eventually they run out of gas.  The matter loss slows down star formation, and over time a quasar transforms into an ordinary, stable galaxy.

So billions of years ago, the Milky Way was probably a quasar, and to a civilization on a planet a billion light years away, that's what it would look like now.  If you wanted your mind blown further.

The universe is a big place, and we are by comparison really tiny.  Some people don't like that, but for me, it re-emphasizes the fact that our little toils and troubles down here are minor and transitory.  The glory of what's out there will always outshine anything we do -- which is, I think, a good thing.

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In the midst of a pandemic, it's easy to fall into one of two errors -- to lose focus on the other problems we're facing, and to decide it's all hopeless and give up.  Both are dangerous mistakes.  We have a great many issues to deal with besides stemming the spread and impact of COVID-19, but humanity will weather this and the other hurdles we have ahead.  This is no time for pessimism, much less nihilism.

That's one of the main gists in Yuval Noah Harari's recent book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.  He takes a good hard look at some of our biggest concerns -- terrorism, climate change, privacy, homelessness/poverty, even the development of artificial intelligence and how that might impact our lives -- and while he's not such a Pollyanna that he proposes instant solutions for any of them, he looks at how each might be managed, both in terms of combatting the problem itself and changing our own posture toward it.

It's a fascinating book, and worth reading to brace us up against the naysayers who would have you believe it's all hopeless.  While I don't think anyone would call Harari's book a panacea, at least it's the start of a discussion we should be having at all levels, not only in our personal lives, but in the highest offices of government.