Oliver Morton on The Wonder of Quasars
February 7, 2016 11:40 PM   Subscribe

In the far reaches of the sky there are sun-bright discs as wide as solar systems, their hearts run through by spears of radiation that outshine galaxies. The energies that feed these quasars beggar all metaphor, and their quantification seems all but meaningless. What does it serve to know that they are converting matter to energy at a rate that equates to the complete annihilation of a planet the size of the Earth ten times a second? Or that all the fires of the sun, from its birth to its death, would be a few weeks' worth of work to one of them? No human sense can be made from so inhuman a scale. Boggle, and move on. [via 3quarksdaily]

Or stop, and appreciate that for all their grandeur, quasars are actually rather hard to see. Not one of them is close enough for the naked eye to pick out; even through the largest telescopes their mighty discs are but points of light. Again, the numbers are incomprehensibly enormous: billions of light years, when the longest trip taken by humans, to the Moon and back, is just a few light seconds. Yet here is a human connection that makes something wonderful of the spectacle. The billion-year journeys of the quasars' light end at human telescopes. And there this far-flung light is not merely absorbed, but also understood.
posted by cgc373 (32 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
Look here, on the cover of the Voyager Golden Record. See the starburst pattern on the lower left? It's a quasar-based map of how to find Earth.

The current International Celestial Reference Frame uses 3,000 quasars to define the axes against which all other measurements – of the Earth’s position, of satellites, and of everything else – are made.
posted by sexyrobot at 11:55 PM on February 7, 2016 [3 favorites]


Anybody know where to find a diagram showing the positions of known quasars within the Hubble Volume? After the title "The scale of the universe is amazing – but more astonishing still is the science that lets us understand it" I was disappointed to see that cartoon illustration as the only image within the article. But preliminary googlings have come up with nothing.
posted by XMLicious at 12:21 AM on February 8, 2016


If you’re feeling keen XMLicious, you could obtain a list of quasar sky locations & redshifts from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey & construct one yourself!
posted by pharm at 1:25 AM on February 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


Metafilter: Boggle, and move on.
posted by From Bklyn at 1:28 AM on February 8, 2016


Metafilter: Obtain a list of quasars and construct it yourself...
posted by blue_beetle at 2:01 AM on February 8, 2016 [3 favorites]


Look here, on the cover of the Voyager Golden Record. See the starburst pattern on the lower left? It's a quasar-based map of how to find Earth.

that's a map of local pulsars (with information on their pulse patterns), not quasars.
posted by andrewcooke at 2:22 AM on February 8, 2016 [6 favorites]


Quasars are indeed wondrous objects; however, they are not quite as luminous as Oliver Morton himself, who consumes science and hydrocarbons to synthesise high-energy broad-spectrum information at a similarly prodigious rate. Observations show a particular emissions peak in the profanity region of the spectrum; his erstwhile colleagues at Nature produced the traditional mocked-up front cover of the publication on the occasion of his move to the Economist, which shows him as Captain Haddock, and it is both a shame and a delight that it is so NSFW that I doubt society will ever be ready for it to appear on the ingrate Intarwebs.

(Also, quasars are nowhere near as interesting and productive as pulsars. There. I've said it.)
posted by Devonian at 3:18 AM on February 8, 2016 [4 favorites]


holy crap I totally misread the entire article! I thought it was about quonsars.
posted by From Bklyn at 4:07 AM on February 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


if quonsar is a portly chap then he could make an excellent fancy dress using a swim ring as accretion disk.

sorry prev post was brief - rushing out of door to go to physio. although pulsars and quasars have similar names they're thought to be quite different. pulsars are believed to be rapidly spinning neutron stars (so have a mass similar to other stars) while quasars are supermassive black holes (so have mass similar to galaxies - much more). also, the way that they "work" is different. we see pulsars because they are giant spinning magnets - a spinning magnet creates radio waves we can detect. we see quasars when surrounding matter falls down onto the black hole and is heated to tremendous temperatures, resulting in an incredibly bright region (near, but obviously not inside the black hole).
posted by andrewcooke at 5:02 AM on February 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


Fuck quasars, and everyone who loves them. Just because you like the universe's old stuff better than its recent output doesn't mean we think you are "cool" and your fandom is more "authentic". Quasars are unwatchable bullshit from when the universe was only starting out, and didn't have the skill set to make stuff people wanted to be around. Seriously - if quasars are so great, how come you can't even find one at a regular store that people actually go to, like Walmart or Starbucks? Newsflash, hipsters - people hate that quasar bullshit. Will a quasar ever get an invite to do the Super Bowl half-time show, or a Bond theme? I don't fucking think so! People like Coldplay now - not quasars. COLDPLAY. I hate it too but it's just a FACT.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 5:29 AM on February 8, 2016 [18 favorites]


Will a quasar ever get an invite to do the Super Bowl half-time show

Already confirmed for 2018, actually.
posted by Wolfdog at 6:05 AM on February 8, 2016


The billion-year journeys of the quasars' light end at human telescopes.

Last time I went to do some serious observing of them it ended just a few hundred feet from the telescope on a cloud. So frustrating.
posted by edd at 7:11 AM on February 8, 2016 [7 favorites]


If you're fascinated by this you should read Shane Carruth's unproduced screenplay for A Topiary.

Well, you should read it anyway. But especially if this stuff strikes your fancy.
posted by eugenen at 7:14 AM on February 8, 2016


XMLicious: It's kind of difficult to find a map of all the quasars we know of. It's difficult partly because we keep finding more, and partly because we do that with a bunch of different surveys pointing in different directions with different sensitivities. And because 3D maps are a pain to distribute so you also often get just projections down into 2D.

One example is towards the bottom of this blog post, where the blue points are quasars. That map doesn't mean there aren't any closer though, just that that survey (a later part of the previously mentioned SDSS) aimed to get quasars at around that distance. You can see fairly obviously where the survey hasn't looked as well.

For a tool that lets you get 3D visualisations of this sort of data you might try the free version of the Digital Universe. The Partiview software that's the free bit is a bit unwieldy, but you can also see quasars from SDSS in the latter part of the video on that page.
posted by edd at 7:21 AM on February 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


Quasars are indeed wondrous objects; however, they are not quite as luminous as Oliver Morton himself, who consumes science and hydrocarbons to synthesise high-energy broad-spectrum information at a similarly prodigious rate.
Humans produce ~1.5W/kg heat output (~2500 kcal/day food intake, ~80kg). Our nearest quasar (3C273) is about 0.8W/kg (900 million solar masses, 4 trillion solar luminosities), so it's roughly the same heat output per kilogram for a quasar as a person with maybe the person edging ahead, if I've done things right. Did you intend to be so literally true there?
posted by edd at 7:37 AM on February 8, 2016 [2 favorites]


Thanks edd, the largest-scale illustration in that video is exactly what I was looking for!
posted by XMLicious at 8:18 AM on February 8, 2016


Already confirmed for 2018, actually

Oh - really? OK ... sorry everyone. I guess, uh ... well, maybe I should check out some quasars for myself, rather than just assuming that they're all shit. OK: I'll go check out 3C 273, in Virgo. Does anyone, ah ... know ... is ... is there a bus? Do I just get on the Virgo bus? Sorry if this should be in AskMe. Or QuasMe, I dunno. BusMe, I guess. Thanks.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 8:45 AM on February 8, 2016 [2 favorites]


Fuck quasars, and everyone who loves them.

I'm on board with the second part but the first part will pose some practical difficulties.
posted by dephlogisticated at 8:57 AM on February 8, 2016 [2 favorites]


Do I just get on the Virgo bus?

Set a course just east of Lyra, and northwest of Pegasus.
posted by Wolfdog at 8:58 AM on February 8, 2016


> Quasars are nowhere near as interesting and productive as pulsars. There. I've said it.

Hee hee. We use (radio) quasars as our fixed reference points when we measure the distances and velocities of pulsars across the sky. And some quasars won't even hold still for that.

(And, wow, this was over 10 years ago!)
posted by RedOrGreen at 9:14 AM on February 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


Ok I'm on the Virgo bus, I'll comment again when I get there. The quasar, I mean. I dunno how far it is but my bus ticket was really expensive.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 10:04 AM on February 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh guys the bus was taking ages so I stopped off at the pub. Can I see the quasar tomorrow? It's still on tomorrow, right? Like, it's not releasing the mass-energy equivalent of ten Earths every second just today, right? Cause this pub is really nice, actually.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 10:30 AM on February 8, 2016


Fuck quasars, and everyone who loves them.

I used to work with a dude named Quasar. He was a pain in the ass and was fired for pirating company software and bitching about coworkers non-anonymously online.

So I vote #1 Fuck Quasars. And you should too.
posted by middleclasstool at 10:41 AM on February 8, 2016


Giving a serious answer to a slightly flippant question - quasars do turn off. Most have now - they were a lot more active in the relatively early universe. 3C273 is still quite visible with either a good telescope in good skies, or a moderately reasonable one with a digital camera and a bit of work. I think I could pull it off from some of the worst skies around and a clear night.
posted by edd at 10:43 AM on February 8, 2016


quasars do turn off.

Huh? How do we know that, were there quasars that have "stopped" since the sixties? That seems too close to the (spoilers) punch line of Clarks short story Nine Billion Names of God.

As for a map, good luck displaying all 200k on the laptop monitor. Got a whole lot of extra legos in the basement? :-)
posted by sammyo at 11:32 AM on February 8, 2016


sammyo: you basically look further away, and see more quasars active. Further away is further back in time. You can measure the drop in numbers to present times.

There's also a case or two or more (I'm behind on the literature) of how quickly they can turn off too.
posted by edd at 11:36 AM on February 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


All I know is, I'm not getting on a goddamn bus for 2.4 billion light-years to see a quasar if it's just gonna stop before I get there. I mean, it's not better to burn out than to quase away. It's really not. You started quasing, you should keep quasing. QUASE.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 12:21 PM on February 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


Wow so looking at those charts the quasars are basically gone from the universe? Just a few (hundred?) million years and we'll need a new constant to guide use through our space journeys?

(yeah, don't bother getting on that bus, kinda like hopping on the wrong route on a sunday because there's so few running and having to go to the end to get back downtown to the main terminal but in this case the terminal (Sol) would be fizzled out. )
posted by sammyo at 1:16 PM on February 8, 2016


Wow so looking at those charts the quasars are basically gone from the universe?
The big stuff has gone. The fun stuff... still happening.
posted by edd at 1:42 PM on February 8, 2016


Did you intend to be so literally true there?

No, I did not. I've never done that sum (yay maths), but it's going to make a great pub quiz question. Is that quasar luminosity the total spectral output, or just the same chunk as humans emit?
posted by Devonian at 2:02 PM on February 8, 2016


It's just total luminosity over the entire spectrum. It's a bit unclear what a human actually radiates, as we also lose heat in other ways in practice.

It's also the case that quasars can vary a lot in their output, and I don't know off the top of my head how typical 3C273 is.
posted by edd at 3:12 AM on February 9, 2016


Hm. I don't know how much heat transfer between mediums in convection is mediated by photons. I suppose we could put a human sealed in a thin impervious membrane into space...

Thanks very much for the unexpected twist on a flippant comment. It's lovely to recalibrate.
posted by Devonian at 7:50 AM on February 9, 2016


« Older afrofuturism from the past   |   Website of the Day Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments