This symbol, commonly called the Yin Yang symbol, it is a Taijitu meaning diagram of the supreme ultimate. The principle of Yin and Yang, opposites that exist in harmony, is associated with ancient Chinese philosophy. But the first use of this iconography, the classical symbol, actually comes from a shield pattern used by the ancient Romans seven hundred years before its first known use in China. A connection between the two has not yet been found.
Regardless of who came up with it first, the symbol was a bright idea. But today we are going to talk about something way more bright than that. We will discuss “The brightest object in the entire universe.” Well, Apparent Magnitude, commonly used when stargazing refers to how bright an object appears to u. Ffor example when we look up from Earth. It depends on Earth-centered factors, such as how close the object is to our planet. The magnitudes are logarithmic and are arranged like golf, where a smaller number means greater brightness.
But today we want be looking for absolute magnitude, a measure of how bright things across the universe, near and far, would be if we looked at them from the same distance.
The absolute magnitude will guide us towards the most blinding light in the universe, regardless of whether it seems faint to us here on Earth, simply because it is so far away.
The difference is significant. A 100-watt bulb placed less than 8 centimeters (about 3 inches) from the eye will appear brighter than the Sun in the sky. But that’s not fair. If you could see the Sun and the light bulb from the same distance, the Sun would be a septillion times brighter.
That’s great I know. But the Sun shines dimly compared to the rest of the cosmos. If you could align the Sun with everything else in existence, giving every star and cosmological phenomenon a fair chance, the Sun’s absolute magnitude would be 4.8. Nothing bad. But if we start to compaire it with others for example look at R136a1. This nuclear-fueled beast is not the largest star in terms of volume, but it is 256 times more massive than our Sun. It is the most massive star ever found and also the brightest.
Remember that lower absolute magnitudes are brighter. R136a1 is not 4.8, like our Sun, it is -12.6, which means it is 8.7 million times brighter than our own Sun. But R136a1 is not the brightest thing out there. When a giant star dies, it explodes violently in what is known as a supernova or hypernova. supernovae can spew terrifying flashes of radiation known as gamma-ray bursts. Possibly the brightest electromagnetic events in the universe. A typical gamma-ray burst releases as much energy in a few seconds as our Sun would release in its entire 10 billion-year lifespan.
If WR104, a massive star with the potential for a future gamma-ray burst, were to directly hit Earth with such a beam for just 10 seconds, astronomers predict it could deplete 25% of our ozone layer and cause mass extinction and starvation (recent studies suggest these effects also pose an unlikely danger to life on Earth).
The largest thermonuclear bomb ever detonated didn’t do anything remotely close to that and it was exploded right here in our atmosphere. While WR104 is eight thousand light years away. You can’t even see it with the naked eye or with binoculars.
But gamma-ray bursts are simply brief events that last only a few minutes at most, sometimes just a matter of milliseconds. If you want the brightest and most sustained, paradoxically you will have to look at the darkest of things. Black holes.
To be fair, dark matter is apparently darker. But because it has been hypothesized that dark matter doesn’t even interact with light, or even electromagnetism, calling the dark matter “not bright” is kind of not true and doesn’t make sence. It’s like calling your apple “not a fast car”. Actually, it’s not even in the same category. Black holes, however, do interact with light by fully absorbing it and not letting any escape. That really is dark that not even light can come out of. But the intense energies created by black holes in the process of devouring things like stars are anything but dark. Gas and debris from the stars they eat swirl in Arcipluvian cosmic gallows known as accretion disks
Before finally plunging into the black hole. In the disk, debris spins at unfathomable speeds, carried by a black hole billions of times more massive than our Sun. Friction in the accretion disk generates heat at a level that is difficult to fully appreciate. Just as hot things start to glow as well even the disk as well. So brightly that it got it’s own name. “A Quasar”. They are 1000 time more bright then even the brightest stars in the universe. To be honest it’s actually a lot more scarier. Quasars shine thousands of times more brightly than galaxies containing billions of stars.
You might not get a picture of how bright it is. And that’s all right because it’s so bright that we can’t even comprehend it or even fully imagine it. The first identified quasar, 3C 273, has an absolute magnitude of -26.7. That makes it 4 trillion (4000,000,000,000) times brighter than our sun. It’s also about about 100 times more luminous than the total amount of light produced by the entire Milky Way.
If you put 3C 273 33 light years away from us it would shine as brightly as our Sun which is only 8 light minutes away. Blocking the brightness of a quasar with the corona graph reveals that quasars exist in the centers of galaxies that are larger than them in area, but are, nonetheless, drowned out by their light. Such galactic centers are called active galactic nuclei. The bulk of their energy spewing forth in the form of a powerful radiation jet, the length of which puts even our solar system to shame.
The visible part of the jet in this photograph, is acually so long that it could stretch from the Sun to Pluto and back, one-and-a-half million times. Now, specifically, if a large portion of this ejected energy heads toward Earth, it’s responsible for what we call a quasar. But if Earth is right and the active galactic nucleus sights, then it’s got an even scarier name: a blazar.
And it’s blazar 3C 454.3 that clocked in the greatest brightness ever observed. At historically high levels of activity it registered in absolute magnitude of -31.4. To put the brightness of quasars in yet another perspective.
Take a look at the picture snapped by the Hubble telescope. This is a star a few hundred lightyears away. And the other one (Quasar) looks just about as bright, but it is a. 9 billion light years away. You might wonder, Why are quasars so far away? Well, there is a reason for that. They are billions of light years away, which means the light we receive from them, the pictures we take of them, are pictures of things happening billions of years ago. They represent a phenomenon more common early in the universe’s history, when monster black holes hadn’t eaten all the stars around them to fuel their accretion discs and before those holes became too fat to be active.
Neil deGrasse Tyson points out that in order to remain a quasar producer, a black hole must consume about 10 stars a year. Many consume more than a thousand stars a year, 600 Earths worth of matter every single minute. The more stars a black hole consumes, the larger its event horizon becomes until, eventually, it no longer shreds stars apart to fuel an accretion disc. Instead, it just swallows them whole in one dimmer, but still terrifying, gulp.
Quasars are some of the most ancient things in our universe. If you could teleport instantaneously to one right now faster than light, it would most likely no longer be burning. What we see are just their ghosts. The light that left when they were active that traveled longer than they could live. But quasars can still be born. They can even be born right here, in fact. The Andromeda Galaxy is headed our way. In 3 to 5 billion years it will collide with our own galaxy, the Milky Way. And the collision could rearrange stars near the galaxy’s central black holes to be consumed, reigniting a quasar right here, in our galactic backyard. Funny enough, right now very few of us even see Andromeda, even though all you need is your unaided eye.
Light from our cities drowns out the night sky like a quasar drowns out its host galaxy. There are even some sites that show what big cities would look like if all their lights were off and the sky above them could be seen fully. It’s beautiful and rare. In the 1990s, during a blackout in the city of Los Angeles, a number of residents actually called the police. They were afraid of mysterious glowing clouds hovering above the city. They were seeing our galaxy for the first time in their lives.
At night, artificial lights allow us to see what’s around us but we lose what’s above us. The brightest places have the darkest, emptiest skies. There’s Yin and Yang again. A taijitu lurking the entire time. The brightest things in the universe, quasars, are caused by the darkest things in the universe – black holes.
The process that unshackles the most light is caused by the thing that best imprisons it.
And by the way, theoretically, there isn’t a number for how bright can it get because you can always add a little more light to it.
