This video reminds me of an ancient, yet touching Vsauce video. "The brightest things in the universe, quasars, are caused by the darkest thing in the universe, black holes. The process that unshackles the most light is caused by the thing that the best imprisons it. And as always, thanks for watching ".
Quasars are absolutely mind-blowing! 🌟 A black hole that bright? That's just insane. And the fact that it's consuming a sun a day is pure cosmic madness! 🔥
Survey astronomy has to one of the most tedious disciplines of science. Basically looking through spreadsheets of super dry data of countless entries looking for the datapoints that are somewhat less mundane than the rest. It's like counting grains of sand on a beach while looking for grains that are noteworthy enough to not throw back into the endless sandy expanse
@@XDeserak actually cosmological red shift is caused by the expansion of space, but you can have red shift without the expansion of space too, just from relative motion.
@@jarlsparkleyunless you're dealing with relativistic velocities, red shift due to relative motion is fairly negligible compared to expansion of the universe.
I see ALL of black hole stuff, got many many infos. We will never reach one, its too far away. the big one in milkyway especially, but there are others closer. I would give everything to come extrem close to a BH an "feel" the environment there, must be amazing ^^ My favs are TON618 and Sheppard thing quasar.
5:24 - This isn't quite right. Farther objects look redder even if the expansion of the universe isn't accelerating. I'm old enough to remember the time before we detected that acceleration, and we all still knew farther objects were redder.
Redshift isn't caused by acceleration. The space between us and the source is growing, and the light experiences that growth as it travels through that space as widening gaps between peaks and troughs. Also, just because we'd discovered red shift before the explanation doesn't mean we didn't need the explanation to explain red shift correctly.
There's a bias when trying to estimate the distribution of matter in the early universe. We can see how big a black hole is, but not the distribution of the matter before it went into the black hole. The most that could be said is that it was all close enough to eventually make it into the black hole by the time we're observing it.
Stefan's wearing the FANTAIL SHIRT. Every time I see this shirt I am overcome with such envy. The swag level increases with each goldfish. Also the science is cool too I guess.
Well to be pedantic 😉 it's the accretion disk, in falling matter, and the Jets of ionized gas not the black hole that is the brightest object in the universe.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Also, a 25W lightbulb 2 inches from your face is brighter than any quasar. The sun is still brighter than most lightbulbs even when 2 inches from your eyes.
OK, "luminosity" is an absolute measurement of how much light at any given wavelength, or range of wavelengths, an object emits. An object's "bolometric luminosity" measures the total amount of electromagnetic energy an object emits across all wavelengths, from radio waves to gamma rays, whereas "brightness," or "visual luminosity" refers to how bright an object appears only in visible light (ROYGBIV). An object can have a very low visual luminosity, barely visible to our eyes or through a telescope, but have an extremely high bolometric luminosity. A black hole, by definition, can't be seen. It's a finite mass compressed into zero volume at infinite density (the singularity), which, per Einstein, causes local space to curve around it to form a closed loop (the event horizon). Once inside that closed loop, there are no paths to the outside universe; thus, nothing, not even light, can escape, because there's simply no way to do so. The region inside the event horizon is, for most intents and purposes, essentially a "hole" in space. As matter falls inward towards the event horizon, it must orbit at ever increasing speeds to maintain anything like a stable orbit. The gravitational gradient is VERY steep, such that a difference of only a few centimeters in altitude (distance from the event horizon) results in a significant difference in velocity, causing friction in the dense and dusty accretion disk which heats infalling matter until it glows first in radio, then microwaves, infrared, visible red, yellow, ultraviolet, x-rays and, just before spiraling in to its doom, gamma rays. The laws of physics, as we know them now, only tell us a little about what goes on inside that closed loop, since conditions quickly become so extreme, the math just yields gibberish. For more about black holes and astronomy in general, check out Dr. Becky's channel. She's a totes adorbs 😍 Harvard astrophysicist who specializes in black holes, especially the supermassive ones. 😊
Shouldn't it be talked about in the past tense? The start is 12 billion lightyears away, so it showing us what it looked like 12 billion years ago. Which raises the question: why don't we have any massive black holes closer to us?
Statistics. If you double the distance away from us you increase the number of objects near tenfold. (8x). If we consider a sphere 4 billion LY in size around us, we'd expect only a millionth of the observable universe's objects to be in it.
Sag A* is a super massive black hole at the center of the milky way. Andromeda, one of the closest galaxies near us, more than likely has a super massive black hole. Triangulum, also "near by" probably has one.
Humans do not grow due to the universe’s expansion. The universe’s expansion is just galaxy groups going away from each other, almost everything at smaller scales is bound together by gravity
Black holes surrounded by a very bright mass absorb a huge quantity of light. Photons have zero mass at rest, but as they are never at rest, they have mass. So, black holes absorbing a lot of light also absorb a lot of mass. No wonder some are immensely massive!
Blows my mind that we measure and talk about these objects as if they exist. We see their light but the object itself is long gone. It's not the brightest because it doesn't exist, simply its light. Being the brightest is nothing but a memory of the distant past for the object that exists in its wake.
Depends on what you are talking about. The galaxy might be gone and in that sense the quasar as well, but the black hole probably isn't (although it might have merged with another one, we can't say).
It's a convenient fiction and it has no functional effect on understanding. And misunderstanding it has no functional effect on the daily life of anyone without sufficient knowledge of astrophysics and cosmology. You're not wrong but it's also not a big deal.
@@richardl6751 the universe is supposed to be 13 billions years old and with that calculation this quasar is only 200 millions before after the so called garbage big bang theory
Confusing the forest for the trees, friend, seeing an object isn't the same as seeing its effect. I'm sure there's a decent comparison; wind blowing or somesuch, but it's late and I'm disinclined to put energy into finding a suitable one.
@@Eeraschyyr Well... We werent talking about its effect. Nor can a black hole be SEEN in any conventional way, ofcourse. That movie with that ooh-so-realistic black hole. Interstellar, right. Where they drive a space ship right up to a black hole and due to the time dilation, the dude back at the space ship has to be there for like decades. NOTHING can exist close enough to be near a black hole. Or even look at it with your own eyes. If a supermassive black hole, the kind you see in the centre of galaxies, is more than a single pixel on a computer screen, then you are already fried to a mist of single particles by the insane radiation reaching out for light years to every direction. And to look directly at a black holes accretion disk... Would be to stare directly into a nuclear explosion right in front of your face, that doesnt stop exploding. Not for thousands, even millions of years, and then trying to explain what that looks like. So, yeah. SEEING one with your own eyes is completely out of the question either way.
Kinda large speculation saying that most of them have an accretion disk, no? Especially since we don't detect any that don't have one.. Seems kinda strange to put that out there with the added "easy to spot" given that there's vast amounts of interference via everything else in the universe blocking the observational availability. Hence why gravitational lensing is so amazing. Just feels like given the extreme size of the universe, saying that something we see 12.8 billion years ago is "not difficult to see" sounds pretty ridiculous lmao. But hey, who am I to say. Just a commenter on the internet. Also, they didn't ride the ship up to the black hole where the dude on the ship aged because of time dilation in Interstellar, it was the planet orbiting the BH ... lol. Which is definitely possible. The rest of it is just make-believe with our boy Matt going into the singularity to some 5th dimensional tesseract. I mean, we threw out logic well before.
@@Timmycoo Kinda makes space a really dangerous place to be even if you build effective ships. Just imagine you're traveling normally and run into a black hole that lacks an accretion disk and without warning you're just instantly dead and no one would ever know what did you in unless you're beaming your exact coordinates all the way up to that point.
@@setcheck67 The that that we're only just finding intermediate black holes that were just hypothetical (because it went from stellar massive black holes to supermassive black holes before this - with nothing in between lol) is super scary. Things we don't/can't see but we suspect are out there freaks me out.
@@ajburt1998 No, this isn't my first YT video, but am I still allowed to protest its growing commercialization? This isn't old RUclips anymore, this is YouAd. I can understand about the badges, but now I'm expecting a full clothing line for the nerdy kid.
This video reminds me of an ancient, yet touching Vsauce video.
"The brightest things in the universe, quasars, are caused by the darkest thing in the universe, black holes.
The process that unshackles the most light is caused by the thing that the best imprisons it.
And as always, thanks for watching ".
Thank you for illuminating us.
HA
Don't we all feel brighter 😊
Quasars are absolutely mind-blowing! 🌟 A black hole that bright? That's just insane. And the fact that it's consuming a sun a day is pure cosmic madness! 🔥
Dead internet theory ahh comment
@@CtRAlTtAb Bet you think I’m ChatGPT, huh? Sorry to disappoint, I’m the upgraded version! =))
@@LFacts-news beep boop bop
@@CtRAlTtAb I'm a robot from the future. Beep boop, hhhh
@@LFacts-news And I'm an avian dinosaur, I sure have a lot of "past" to back me up. I also feel super-symmetric SQARK
Very informative video as always. And great host. Thank you!
Survey astronomy has to one of the most tedious disciplines of science. Basically looking through spreadsheets of super dry data of countless entries looking for the datapoints that are somewhat less mundane than the rest. It's like counting grains of sand on a beach while looking for grains that are noteworthy enough to not throw back into the endless sandy expanse
"Brightness and luminosity can be confusing"
> Proceeds to confuse us even further by using both
YOU RASCAL!
YOU ABSOLUTE RAPSCALLION!
There's a reason for synonyms... I don't know what it is except "it's complicated".
Red shift isn't "like" the Doppler effect, it IS the Doppler effect.
yeah I was like..doppler effect doesn't only apply to sound waves dude
Not exactly. Doppler effect is caused by relative motion, red shift is caused by the expansion of space.
Same result, different mechanism.
@@XDeserak Different cause, same effect.
@@XDeserak actually cosmological red shift is caused by the expansion of space, but you can have red shift without the expansion of space too, just from relative motion.
@@jarlsparkleyunless you're dealing with relativistic velocities, red shift due to relative motion is fairly negligible compared to expansion of the universe.
To anyone reading this, Youre the brightest thing in the universe
No, you. No…you.
No, YOU. No, …
That's sweet ☺️
To anyone reading this: no, you are not. But that's still okay.
Yes I am the center of the universe
why thank you very much
Also with blasars, which are technically the same thing.
Happy New Year 2025 SciShow!
I'm not sci-show, but you too 🥃
Happy new year
The originality of the title and the thumbnail are the two brightest ideas in the universe. 👍
I see ALL of black hole stuff, got many many infos. We will never reach one, its too far away. the big one in milkyway especially, but there are others closer.
I would give everything to come extrem close to a BH an "feel" the environment there, must be amazing ^^ My favs are TON618 and Sheppard thing quasar.
Now I know I'm a sock person.
really instructive content you got here ! Thx for your work !
It makes sense as they are absorbing light that light can be seen from a myriad of places in the universe
5:24 - This isn't quite right. Farther objects look redder even if the expansion of the universe isn't accelerating. I'm old enough to remember the time before we detected that acceleration, and we all still knew farther objects were redder.
Attributed to Hubble in 1929, but derived by Friedman in 1922. How old are you?
Redshift isn't caused by acceleration. The space between us and the source is growing, and the light experiences that growth as it travels through that space as widening gaps between peaks and troughs.
Also, just because we'd discovered red shift before the explanation doesn't mean we didn't need the explanation to explain red shift correctly.
There's a bias when trying to estimate the distribution of matter in the early universe. We can see how big a black hole is, but not the distribution of the matter before it went into the black hole. The most that could be said is that it was all close enough to eventually make it into the black hole by the time we're observing it.
Stefan's wearing the FANTAIL SHIRT. Every time I see this shirt I am overcome with such envy. The swag level increases with each goldfish. Also the science is cool too I guess.
3:56 Ah yes... The record setting Quasar has the most catchy name. Science at it again!
Well to be pedantic 😉 it's the accretion disk, in falling matter, and the Jets of ionized gas not the black hole that is the brightest object in the universe.
Technicalities 😁
I mean the black hole is the cause of all of those
Nice. Black is the new bright
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Well, it's _definitely not_ on Earth itself 😏😅
3:54 skip ad
thanks
This is the Stefan appreciation comment
I wonder if Good Store must really be threatening some market share if Bombas is marketing on Sci-Show videos.
If you were to view that thing today would it be dead or inactive?
Also, a 25W lightbulb 2 inches from your face is brighter than any quasar. The sun is still brighter than most lightbulbs even when 2 inches from your eyes.
Wouldn't the space around it be bright but not the hole itself?
If the light from a quasar we detect today is billions of years old, how big is it now?
What does the red spectrum tell us about quasars?
How would our (night)sky look if our Galaxy whould be active.
BOMBAS socks a awesome. i got some for christmas. super comfy. got get some!!!
Ton 618 center black hole
I feel like the title is prone to walking into a yo mama joke
OK, "luminosity" is an absolute measurement of how much light at any given wavelength, or range of wavelengths, an object emits. An object's "bolometric luminosity" measures the total amount of electromagnetic energy an object emits across all wavelengths, from radio waves to gamma rays, whereas "brightness," or "visual luminosity" refers to how bright an object appears only in visible light (ROYGBIV). An object can have a very low visual luminosity, barely visible to our eyes or through a telescope, but have an extremely high bolometric luminosity.
A black hole, by definition, can't be seen. It's a finite mass compressed into zero volume at infinite density (the singularity), which, per Einstein, causes local space to curve around it to form a closed loop (the event horizon). Once inside that closed loop, there are no paths to the outside universe; thus, nothing, not even light, can escape, because there's simply no way to do so. The region inside the event horizon is, for most intents and purposes, essentially a "hole" in space.
As matter falls inward towards the event horizon, it must orbit at ever increasing speeds to maintain anything like a stable orbit. The gravitational gradient is VERY steep, such that a difference of only a few centimeters in altitude (distance from the event horizon) results in a significant difference in velocity, causing friction in the dense and dusty accretion disk which heats infalling matter until it glows first in radio, then microwaves, infrared, visible red, yellow, ultraviolet, x-rays and, just before spiraling in to its doom, gamma rays.
The laws of physics, as we know them now, only tell us a little about what goes on inside that closed loop, since conditions quickly become so extreme, the math just yields gibberish.
For more about black holes and astronomy in general, check out Dr. Becky's channel. She's a totes adorbs 😍 Harvard astrophysicist who specializes in black holes, especially the supermassive ones. 😊
Deja Vu
Shouldn't it be talked about in the past tense? The start is 12 billion lightyears away, so it showing us what it looked like 12 billion years ago. Which raises the question: why don't we have any massive black holes closer to us?
Statistics. If you double the distance away from us you increase the number of objects near tenfold. (8x). If we consider a sphere 4 billion LY in size around us, we'd expect only a millionth of the observable universe's objects to be in it.
There are plenty of close supermassive black holes, they just aren't active any more
from the perspective of an observer everything happened in the past!
Sag A* is a super massive black hole at the center of the milky way. Andromeda, one of the closest galaxies near us, more than likely has a super massive black hole. Triangulum, also "near by" probably has one.
LOVE FROM PUNE MAHARASHTRA🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳 🥰😉😀❤😘🧡😊😎🤝👍😍😘❤🥰
Why
Technically the stuff around the black hole is
lol, one Sun per day keeps the doctor away.
Can anyone answer me the question if or how much a human grows during its lifetime due to the expansion of the universe?
Humans do not grow due to the universe’s expansion. The universe’s expansion is just galaxy groups going away from each other, almost everything at smaller scales is bound together by gravity
@zlodevil426 thanks
4:03 The brightest quasar yet*
Black holes surrounded by a very bright mass absorb a huge quantity of light. Photons have zero mass at rest, but as they are never at rest, they have mass. So, black holes absorbing a lot of light also absorb a lot of mass. No wonder some are immensely massive!
I thought the certral black body was wider then the solar system
Bring back Sci Show Space 2025
The term „luminous“ was actually derived from the name of the scientist Luis Meenas. A fact that always gets forgotten in science history…
Vsauce did it 12 years ago
I miss scishow space 😓
Very infirmary
Redde quasari quae sunt quasaris.
here 59 minutes after it was released
Do you want a metal or a black hole to pin it on?
Tomorrow’s 2025🎉
All holes matter
Hello from 907!
Nice to know that I am the brightest thing in the universe ☺️
Core. He said galactic *core*
You can’t define a word by using that word…
Said my mom every time we were going over my vocabulary words in school!
Since we use words to define words, all definitions are eventually circular
Yes you can
@Lemon10.5 “The brightness depends on how bright is it”
@d.b.1176 Yes thats the definition of brightness. Explain it to me another way that makes more sense please
Blows my mind that we measure and talk about these objects as if they exist. We see their light but the object itself is long gone. It's not the brightest because it doesn't exist, simply its light. Being the brightest is nothing but a memory of the distant past for the object that exists in its wake.
Depends on what you are talking about. The galaxy might be gone and in that sense the quasar as well, but the black hole probably isn't (although it might have merged with another one, we can't say).
It's a convenient fiction and it has no functional effect on understanding. And misunderstanding it has no functional effect on the daily life of anyone without sufficient knowledge of astrophysics and cosmology. You're not wrong but it's also not a big deal.
@6:02 A 12.8B year old quasar in a Universe only 860M years old? Is this an error? 😅
No."We’re seeing this quasar as it looked about 12.8 billion years ago, and when the universe was about 860 million years old."
@@richardl6751 the universe is supposed to be 13 billions years old and with that calculation this quasar is only 200 millions before after the so called garbage big bang theory
Thaaanks. The total number of years should have been obvious if thinking pragmatically, but I got hung up on semantics. 🤷🏾♀️
First
Distant galaxies are like white skin, the longer (farther) out there, the more red it gets, according to the star or galaxy.
You’re the brightest thing in my universe 🫶🏻
Wow caught super early.
Well, isn’t the center of each galaxy a black hole which the stars are spinning around?🤔
Must be the size of the b.h. that doesnt allow time for light to shine along the plane instead it wraps.itself with the light
No, its not difficult to see black holes. They mostly have an accretion disk very close to them. Which makes them easy to spot. Especially quasars.
Confusing the forest for the trees, friend, seeing an object isn't the same as seeing its effect.
I'm sure there's a decent comparison; wind blowing or somesuch, but it's late and I'm disinclined to put energy into finding a suitable one.
@@Eeraschyyr
Well... We werent talking about its effect. Nor can a black hole be SEEN in any conventional way, ofcourse.
That movie with that ooh-so-realistic black hole. Interstellar, right. Where they drive a space ship right up to a black hole and due to the time dilation, the dude back at the space ship has to be there for like decades.
NOTHING can exist close enough to be near a black hole. Or even look at it with your own eyes. If a supermassive black hole, the kind you see in the centre of galaxies, is more than a single pixel on a computer screen, then you are already fried to a mist of single particles by the insane radiation reaching out for light years to every direction.
And to look directly at a black holes accretion disk... Would be to stare directly into a nuclear explosion right in front of your face, that doesnt stop exploding. Not for thousands, even millions of years, and then trying to explain what that looks like. So, yeah. SEEING one with your own eyes is completely out of the question either way.
Kinda large speculation saying that most of them have an accretion disk, no? Especially since we don't detect any that don't have one.. Seems kinda strange to put that out there with the added "easy to spot" given that there's vast amounts of interference via everything else in the universe blocking the observational availability. Hence why gravitational lensing is so amazing.
Just feels like given the extreme size of the universe, saying that something we see 12.8 billion years ago is "not difficult to see" sounds pretty ridiculous lmao. But hey, who am I to say. Just a commenter on the internet.
Also, they didn't ride the ship up to the black hole where the dude on the ship aged because of time dilation in Interstellar, it was the planet orbiting the BH ... lol. Which is definitely possible. The rest of it is just make-believe with our boy Matt going into the singularity to some 5th dimensional tesseract. I mean, we threw out logic well before.
@@Timmycoo Kinda makes space a really dangerous place to be even if you build effective ships. Just imagine you're traveling normally and run into a black hole that lacks an accretion disk and without warning you're just instantly dead and no one would ever know what did you in unless you're beaming your exact coordinates all the way up to that point.
@@setcheck67 The that that we're only just finding intermediate black holes that were just hypothetical (because it went from stellar massive black holes to supermassive black holes before this - with nothing in between lol) is super scary. Things we don't/can't see but we suspect are out there freaks me out.
Maybe quazars are like white holes.
Had to stop the video when you started peddling socks to me. Are you out of your minds?
And the award for witless dolt goes to Jerehmia
Is this your first RUclips video? God forbid their researchers pay their bills.
@@ajburt1998 No, this isn't my first YT video, but am I still allowed to protest its growing commercialization? This isn't old RUclips anymore, this is YouAd. I can understand about the badges, but now I'm expecting a full clothing line for the nerdy kid.
FOURTH
So AI makes mistakes
no it's not. it's what's orbiting it. always with these sensational titles.
love your channel but you have too much unnecessary data. kind of hard to watch, but then again, I'm not the algorithm