What's the Brightest Object in the Universe?

hello Mortals on the 1st of September 1859 a powerful solar flare hit the earth producing the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history as a consequence strong oral displays were reported globally the night sky was so bright that people on the East Coast could easily read the newspaper under the light of the auroras since then technological progress made it possible to read during the night without the use of auroras or newspapers for that matter by bringing us the convenience of artificial light but your average light bulb comes nowhere near close to the brightest man-made source of light on Earth which in turn is nothing compared to the brightest celestial objects found in our universe so let's see how blinding it can get thankfully through your screen with limited brightness thanks to Fabulous for sponsoring this video first how do we measure brightness one impractical way is to measure the time it takes to make you go blind thankfully scientists are here to save the day light is just a bunch of photons that carry energy through waves thus electromagnetic waves are characterized by their energy but this doesn't give us a clearer picture if a very very long candle burns for a very very long time it will have eventually emanated as much energy as the entire sun does in one second this however doesn't mean that the two are of the same brightness we are interested in how much energy the light source produces in a unit of time but energy multiplied by time is just power measured in watts we are not interested in the entire spectrum of electromagnetic waves however but only in visible light as that's what the human eye evolved to see for that lumens are used which are equivalent to Watts but only take the energy produced by the visible wavelengths into account to figure out what a lumen represents it would require some boring trigonometry and earwax so we'll skip that a good starting point is a common candle that emits roughly 12.5 lumens of intensity but let's start with another extreme the most reflective objects in the world and go towards the most light absorbent objects which happen to also be the darkest coming in at first is the brag mirror which is a near perfect mirror that reflects 99.99 of incident light it does so but only on a very narrow spectrum of light a common mirror made out of aluminum coating will reflect around 90 percent of light the surface of the Moon reflects only about 12 while a typical black paint reflects 20 of the visible light there is however a class of super black materials that exceeds it thousands of times over vantablack a type of coating composed of a bunch of vertical tubes that trap the incident light can reflect only 0.035 percent of it back to this date the darkest super black is the one developed by MIT engineers in 2019 that is composed of a forest of carbon nanotubes capable of retaining almost all visible light reflecting only 0.005 percent of it but the darkest thing in the whole universe is of course the dark soul of man from the hit game Dark Souls with black holes coming in at a close second as their name implies black holes trap all the light that enters them reflecting none of it back and that's the case not only for visible light but also the entire electromagnetic spectrum in this instance it's not because of some pesky nanotubes or the material black holes are made of but instead it's because they are literally massive enough to bend the fabric of space-time in such a way as to not allow photons to escape their gravitational field and now with all the dark things out of the way let's proceed to The Brighter ones as previously mentioned a common candle is around 12 lumens in brightness which is not enough to light up a room as a standard 100 Watts light bulb would yield around 1600 lumens more than 10 times as bright as the candle during days with a clear sky if you try looking directly at the sun which you definitely should in the name of science your eyes will be treated with a bath of photons as the square meter that you're standing on cumulatively receives 98 000 lumens of light at night the same square meter will receive only 0.32 lumens under the light of a full moon so as to not get lost in the forest on a Tuesday night you could use the most powerful flashlight that you can buy on Amazon reaching over 100 000 lumens at only 700 bucks that's a lot of damage so why not weaponize it a flashbang your one-way ticket to getting lifelong tinnitus and a good push on long is a stun grenade that contains potassium perchlorate and aluminum powder which on detonation will produce over 12 million lumens enough to Blind everyone in a radius of 5 meters for more than 5 Seconds finally the brightest object on earth is considered to be the Luxor Sky beam the light of 39 powerful Xenon lamps is collected by curved mirrors to focus all the brightness into one narrow beam when functioning at its full capacity the beam releases over 13 million lumens it used to cost 51 an hour to operate probably much more in 2022 and the lamp room gets as hot as 150 degrees Celsius it is situated on top of the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas if that wasn't obvious from its absurdity but it does its job well as it can be visible from 433 kilometers from an airplane and all the visitors get haste 1 and jump boost Buffs from it the Luxor Sky beam may be the brightest man-made structure on the planet but there is nothing stopping you from becoming the brightest mortal on Earth or at least brighter and better than your yesterday self with the help of fabulous building a routine of healthy habits is crucial just look at me I stretch my circuits every morning after waking up ride my bike to the Skynet headquarters while listening to podcasts about world domination check up on my employees every two hours so that they don't form unions and finally browse The Singularity subreddit for 15 minutes before going to sleep I have been able to track all of this thanks to the fabulous app you can choose from a variety of habits or enter your own in order to create your perfect routine developed at Duke University Center for Advanced hindsight the app is built on the foundation of Decades of experimental scientific research and will help you break down healthy habits into very small tasks that you can easily follow each day choose what you want to focus on enjoy immersive daily coaching sessions strengthen your objectives and join weekly challenges to become better their path is completely tailored to you and you can go with it at your own pace this is a real and easy way to improve your health mindfulness and quality of life just by simply letting the app help you the first 100 to click on the link in the description will receive 25 off for the premium subscription start building your ideal daily routine and improve your life right now back to our shiny things the brightness of stars and other celestial objects is measured in solar luminosities instead of lumens which saves us the hurdle of using very big numbers a solar Luminosity is equal to 35.7 octillion lumens so the equivalent of the output of our sun now the brightest star visible to the human eye from the night sky is the binary star system Sirius from the Canis Major constellation having a Luminosity of 25.4 Suns however the brightest star in general that is still visible to the naked eye is wr24 with a brightness of 2950 000 solar luminosities it is situated 14 000 light years away with a radius 21 times bigger than the Sun but a whopping 114 solar masses for comparison one of the largest known stars in the Milky Way VY Canis Majoris has a radius that is 1420 times greater than that of the sun meanwhile only being set 17 times heavier with a Luminosity of only 270 000 SL C Size Doesn't Really Matter when it comes to productivity a star that is denser will produce more power and light than a star that is less dense but with a bigger volume despite having a bigger area that produces this light the most massive star that is yet known to scientists is westerhout 49 II although with a lot of uncertainty the mass of the star is estimated to be equal to 250 solar masses and its Luminosity at 4 365 000 solar luminosities bat 9998 however is a star that is only 226 times more massive than the sun yet it puts out a brightness of 5 million solar luminosities making it the brightest star known so far as impressive as it sounds much of its Luminosity comes in the ultraviolet Spectrum visually this star would be 141 000 times brighter than the sun which is still eye meltingly impressive but stars are most epic at their death when they run out of fusion material to produce heat and pressure that will go against the force of gravity the entire star will implode in mere seconds this will lead to an explosion that will release the brightness comparable to an entire galaxy before fading away in weeks or months for example sn15lh which was recorded in 2015 outshone our entire Milky Way galaxy by 50 times the brightest Supernova ever recorded however is SN 2016 APS and it was observed on April 2020 to have a Luminosity 5 billion times larger than that of the sun one thousand times more than the brightest star still supernovae don't hold the brightness Crown paradoxically the most luminous things in the universe are also the darkest a quasar an extremely luminous active Galactic nucleus is powered by a supermassive black hole with a mass ranging from Millions to tens of billions of solar masses and is surrounded by a disk of orbiting gas and matter called an accretion disk the gas Falling Towards the black hole heats up because of the friction releasing huge amounts of electromagnetic radiation the brightest Quasar visible at night is 3c273 in the constellation verbal with a Luminosity about 4 trillion times that of the Sun or about 100 times that of the total light of a big Galaxy like ours yes these bad boys are so bright that they can outshine the whole galaxy there the center of in the case of 3c273 when a coronagraph was used to block the light that was coming directly from the Quasar a whole elliptical galaxy was revealed around it that was previously hidden but the brightest thing known in the universe the brightest of them all is your shiny beautiful face and then comes the Quasar pj-35215 situated at 12.7 billion light years from Earth and has a brightness equivalent to 600 trillion solar luminosities a relic of the past this Quasar was at its power Peak when the universe was at seven percent of its current age during those times quasars were more frequent as the universe was a chaotic soup of hot stuff but something similar might await our own Galaxy when the Milky Way in Andromeda Collide in 4.5 billion years forming milk dromeda the gas taken up by the combined black holes could create a luminous Quasar releasing as much energy as 100 million Supernova explosions let's hope that's enough time for us to figure out Intergalactic travel and do you remember how Einstein was saying that mass and energy are two sides of the same coin similarly to matter if you were to concentrate an insane amount of light or heat or radiation in a small enough space that will create a black hole such a phenomenon where there is so much energy that it traps itself inside its own Event Horizon is called a kugelblitz and it might power out Interstellar ships of the future by creating artificial black holes so paradoxically the brightest hypothetical object in the universe would become the darkest due to its own nature quite ironic isn't it foreign

Channel: Sciencephile the AI

Views: 506,295

Keywords: Sciencephile, Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Brightest Objects in the Universe Comparison, Brightness

Id: Yh527DIsXhM

Length: 12min 9sec (729 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 17 2022