If the Answer to everything is 42, that should be the outcome of a Star going Super
Nova... But sometimes it’s a Zombie Star. And... are we only existing because of Quasars? Look at the night sky,
our universe! Isn’t it beautiful?
Everything looks so calm and peaceful. Out of all the galaxies and clouds, look at NGC 2899,
it's a beautiful Space Butterfly!
But what is this? Scars of a galactic sized battle?
This is a scar, caused by two colossal jets blasting out of the core of this galaxy,
right out of the heart of a quasar!
Creating dark stripes of voids on its way! How can something powerful like this be brought to life? For on beginners,
let’s talk about dying stars for a minute,
When the star runs out of fuel, being hydrogen,
the Star can either become a red giant and follow its path to become a white dwarf,
surrounded by planetary nebula and finally die as a black dwarf –OR--
if they are massive enough, they can start to fuse helium into carbon and heavier elements. Eventually,
gravitation will win the fight
shrinking the mass into a neutron core, crushing it further. After heating up to billions of degrees,
we finally get to see a supernova, the death of a star, while giving birth to a neutron star or a black hole.... Or...
If it doesn’t want to die, like iPTF 14hls...
going supernova in
1954 and 2014
and is still continuing to live as a zombie star. While today is not the day to further talk about zombie stars,
lets head back to the emergence of Quasars. Because Quasars still can fuzzle
Astronomers with a lot of questions. One of them being how they come to life and becoming the brightest object in the known universe,
destroying everything in its way. Ripping Galaxies apart, destroying whole solar systems and leaving behind a vast field of
voids. Seriously, seriously powerful quasars with jets are out of scale, being more powerful than the Death Star or even the
Starkiller Base! Are Quasars the baba Yagas of the Universe? He was the one you sent to kill the
boogeyman.
The cat is snoring on the, on the stool.
There are two questions, are Quasars needed for our universe to help create
galaxies and new stars? And if it takes 1 billion years to become a Quasar,
why are there supermassive black holes out there, that have existed less than 1 billion years after the formation of our universe?
What do we need to fire up a quasar?
We need a black hole and enough food to feed it, provided by gas and dust and every now and then,
some stars to speed up the feeding process. Scientists are assuming, that in the center of each and every galaxy sits a black hole.
Scientists discovered over 200.000 Quasars so far
but a lot of them might just be inactive now and only fired up during the early years of our universe.
There are two main types of Quasars out there, Radio-quiet Quasars, making up about 90% of all quasars.
They are lacking the impressive jets and through that only have a relatively weak radio emission. And the Radio-loud quasars,
making up the other 10% of Quasars.
They are the ones, first discovered due to their powerful jets as sources of strong radio-wavelength emissions.
It all began back in the
1960s, when we received strange radio signals for the first time.
These signals didn't have any known physical origin. Only two years later,
Scientists with better instruments figured, that the images at visible wavelength still look like a glowing star
but its light took some billion years, to reach earth. So they named it
quasi stellar... or Quasar, the big question was, what’s behind these mysterious objects?
It was safe to say, that better telescopes were needed to disclose this secret. It took 36 more years, until Scientists
saw that glowing gas coming from the core of a galaxy, many galaxies have this glowing core,
outshining most of its stars. And then, hubble took this amazing picture!
What you are able to see here are bright cores of Galaxies!
But the reason for that is not a thermonuclear reaction, like from stars
-- but a black hole with an active galactic nucleus! The center of a black hole can have the mass of some million
stars and through that, this enormous mass leads to the enormous gravity. That's how it is.
Forcing gas clouds, dust and even other stars towards its center, black holes are voracious eaters, growing larger and larger!
While gas and dust clouds move closer to the black hole,
they’ll start to spin faster, becoming hotter and hotter until the dust and gas becomes plasma, trillions of degrees hot!
Fully charged particles, spinning around, in the accretion disk around the black hole start to create a magnetic field,
with two poles
of course! Until the
gravitational force forms so much tension, that the magnetic field can’t hold everything together and Jets blast
out of the magnetic poles with around 99%
relativistic speed or commonly known as the speed of light. Light moves at an incredible speed of around
300.000 kilometers per second! To become the brightest thing in the known universe, destroying
everything in its way. Ripping Galaxies apart, destroying whole solar systems
and leaving behind a vast field of voids.
Another way to bring a Quasar to live is when two black holes meet and their energetic and powerful love, known as strong
gravitational pull lets them merge together, giving birth to a powerful Quasar,
with jets shooting out, trillions of degrees hot and millions of lightyears in length.
This is one of the greatest puzzles, Scientists got confronted with. Talking about
Quasars and time needed till they turn on and fire their jets. This beauty only took
500 days to fire up his deadly power. Scientists are assuming, that its feeding process got rushed by a super
nova, quickly blasting more food towards it and bumping the accretion process up.
We are talking about a 100 million solar mass black hole here!
However,
this observation pushed the limits of the accretion disk theory and new ways might have to be found to get a better understanding of quasars.
Let's take a look at the types of Black Holes: 1-100 solar masses = stellar mass
100 to 100 000 solar masses = the intermediate-mass black hole
100 000 to billions of solar masses = the supermassive black hole
Types of Quasars: we have the Radio-loud quasars (10%) with Jets Optically violent variable (OVV)
quasars Radio-quiet quasars (90%)
without Jets Broad-absorption-line (BAL) quasars Type 2 (Type II) quasars Red quasars
And last but not least Weak emission line quasars
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...But What about it? What's all the fuzz about quasars? Let's have a look at
TXS 0128 now! At this image, taken at
15.4 gigahertz, it looks like a Tie fighter, but that not being impressive enough, let’s see
what’s really happening here. In this Illustration
we can see the beautiful accretion Disk with the black hole in its center.
Caught in the magnetic field and bursting out into Active jets of gamma rays and Plasma. Finally pluming into the radio lobe!
Let us take a look at our home galaxy, the milky way!
It looks so peaceful here, laying in a rather dark place on an outer arm, drifting through the universe. Providing us
with everything that’s needed to live on our home planet, Earth.
But what about our past? Although the Milky Way is the home of a black hole, named
Sagittarius A Star and recently, scientists discovered something unbelievable!
The Fermi Telescope found a giant structure consisting of X-ray emissions and Gamma-ray emissions.
Two bubbles, blown out upwards and downwards with more than
three million kilometers per hour. With a scale of 50.000 light years itself, stretching, so to speak, from horizon to horizon.
Look at it, this picture is very much reminding me of jets! And how did this structure get there?
It must have been in the active phase of our galaxy.
Like every other galaxy, it had to go through its birth stage and develop further, in the juvenile phase, like all teenagers,
our small black hole ate a lot and maybe a star came a little too close, firing up the active core,
igniting the jets to blast out on both poles. Blasting trillions and trillions and trillions of tons of gas
our of our galaxy. And all of that only 6 million years ago!
That was astronomically speaking only a heartbeat in the past. And the more important question,
can it wake up some time soon, bigger and more destructive... and what would happen to our solar system
if so?
One thing we know for sure is that Andromeda and the Milky Way are on a collision course,
in approximately 4 billion years,
the two galaxies will merge and with them, their black holes. Giving them so much food to blast up
massive jets within a very short time. It would be the biggest explosion
our galaxy has ever known and beside this phenomenon being a very
spectacular view. We wouldn’t be around to watch it.
Even though our sun would have killed us before, our solar system would move closer to the center of our galaxy, having its
atmosphere ripped away, leaving us with a boiling ocean and melting stone underneath our feet. There wouldn’t be much left to live
on. This would mean the end of all living things on planet earth. While we
could assume, that this huge destructive event would be bad for our universe,
some are assuming, that these jet firing quasars are powerful guardians. Meaning, without them,
we might possibly not be here! This powerful guardian could be the ultimate cosmic creator! If we’d take quasars
out of the equation,
we’d have a universe with a lot of galaxies and so much food to create new, hot, blue stars!
While stars are the essence of every galaxy,
too many of them can salt the soup. All of them would eventually die and violently explode in massive supernovas,
making galaxies very violent and chaotic! Large bursts of star formation, killing everything on its way with radiation,
burning out the galaxies. And making life impossible!
So, thank you, quasars, for shooting gas and dust out of the galaxies,
creating a controlled environment for the emergence of new suns and eventually, their death.
I hope you enjoyed this journey through our universe, if so, remember to like and share!
What are your thoughts about quasars? Do you think they are our ultimate cosmic creators
and would you like a first seat view in a starship
when Milky Way and Andromeda collide and huge quasar will fire up its jets in the process?
Tell me in the comments, have a wonderful week and remember to check in next week for more, exciting News! A huge
thank you to all the Patrons and YouTube Members for all your support,
and to the team, always there and ready to help. Thank you Mikko for always checking the script and ironing out my bad grammar!
And yeah, he fixed that sentence, too!