Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff.
Speaker 1: Lauren Voldebam here and I am recording this episode live
Speaker 1: from the iHeart Podcast Studio powered by Bows at the
Speaker 1: House of Music at the iHeartRadio Music Festival, which is
Speaker 1: a wild experience and really wonderful. So Hi, thank you
Speaker 1: for joining me. Okay, if there is one thing that
Speaker 1: we know for sure about our universe, it's that we
Speaker 1: actually know very little about it. Every year astronomers discover
Speaker 1: new objects and phenomena. Sometimes they're pretty close to Earth,
Speaker 1: like surprising new asteroids that go whizzing by, and other
Speaker 1: times they're more distant than anything we've ever observed before.
Speaker 1: Today we're talking about an example of the latter. Back
Speaker 1: in April of twenty twenty two, astronomers made headlines for
Speaker 1: detecting a phenomenon that occurred roughly five billion years ago.
Speaker 1: A light from it traveled some thirty six thousand bills
Speaker 1: billion billion miles to reach the telescopes that measured it,
Speaker 1: which is about fifty eight thousand billion billion kilometers, which
Speaker 1: either way is a lot. This record breaking observance was
Speaker 1: conducted by the mere caat telescope in South Africa and
Speaker 1: nicknamed Nkala kata, an Isuzulu word meaning big boss. The
Speaker 1: scientific name for this type of phenomenon is pretty cool too.
Speaker 1: It's a mega maser, which is not a supervillain's weapon
Speaker 1: that I'm aware of personally. No, Mega masers are a
Speaker 1: fascinating fact of life out there in the universe. But okay,
Speaker 1: before we talk about what a megamser is, let's talk
Speaker 1: about how a regular maser works. Strictly speaking, a maser
Speaker 1: is a human built device that produces and amplifies electromagnetic waves,
Speaker 1: much like the better known laser. Masers actually came first.
Speaker 1: The word is an acronym that stands for microwave amplification
Speaker 1: by stimulated emission of radiation. That's because the first masers
Speaker 1: produced electromagnetic waves in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Speaker 1: The original was built in nineteen fifty three. Lasers were
Speaker 1: actually called optical masers when they were first developed a
Speaker 1: few years later before they got their current name, and
Speaker 1: several scientists were awarded the nineteen sixty four Nobel Prize
Speaker 1: in Physics for the groundwork that made the first maser possible.
Speaker 1: Since then, researchers have been able to build masers in
Speaker 1: other regions of the spectrum, including in the radio and
Speaker 1: infrared parts. Researchers have proposed changing the M to stand
Speaker 1: for molecular instead of microwave. All of this has made
Speaker 1: masers useful as microwave amplifiers in radio telescopes and deep
Speaker 1: space spacecraft communication round stations. However, when we speak about
Speaker 1: masers and space, there is another way to define the term.
Speaker 1: An astrophysical maser is a naturally occurring emission. It's a
Speaker 1: burst of electromagnetic waves, usually in the microwave part of
Speaker 1: the elect her magnetic spectrum. While you may have never
Speaker 1: heard of a mega maser, astronomers have been measuring them
Speaker 1: since the late nineteen seventies. The first extragalactic maser, that
Speaker 1: is a maser from outside the Milky Way, was observed
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy seven. By the mid nineteen nineties, several
Speaker 1: megamsers have been discovered, so named because of how luminous
Speaker 1: they were to observers using the right tools to spot them.
Speaker 1: Speaking of mega maser is an objectively cool name, but
Speaker 1: the mega isn't just a fun adjective. It's an actual
Speaker 1: distinction of brightness. The term kilo maser is used to
Speaker 1: describe extragalactic masers that are thousands of times brighter or
Speaker 1: stronger than the masers that we've observed within the Milky Way.
Speaker 1: Mega masers are typically one hundred million times brighter, and
Speaker 1: a gigamaser is billions of times stronger than Milky Way masers.
Speaker 1: Scientists continue to research mega masers as it's believed that
Speaker 1: they occur when galaxies collide, events that have become less
Speaker 1: common in the history of our universe over the billions
Speaker 1: of years of its existence before the article. This episode
Speaker 1: is based on How Stuff Works. Spoke with Jeremy Darling,
Speaker 1: a mega mazer expert and professor of astrophysical and planetary
Speaker 1: sciences at the University of Colorado. He explained when to
Speaker 1: galaxies like the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy collide,
Speaker 1: beams of light shoot out from the collision and can
Speaker 1: be seen a cosmological distances. Mega mazers act like bright
Speaker 1: lights that say, here's a collision of galaxies that's making
Speaker 1: new stars and feeding massive black holes. These astrophysical phenomena
Speaker 1: are so interesting because their brightness could help us sort
Speaker 1: of double check our measurements of distance too far off
Speaker 1: galaxies and studying some of them could help us learn
Speaker 1: more about how new stars and galaxies four, So astronomers
Speaker 1: continue to peer further into our universal history to find them.
Speaker 1: The oldest mega mazer measured so far, estimated to have
Speaker 1: been emitted some five to six billion US years ago,
Speaker 1: is the one observed in twenty twenty two from the
Speaker 1: radio telescope in South Africa. We look forward to hearing
Speaker 1: more about what researchers learn from observing these phenomena, especially
Speaker 1: as our astronomical tools get better appearing farther into the universe.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was recorded live at the iHeart Podcasts Studio
Speaker 1: powered by Bose at the House of Music at iHeartRadio
Speaker 1: Music Festival. It's based on the article like from thirty
Speaker 1: six thousand, billion billion miles away, Yep, I'm mega maser
Speaker 1: on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by Valerie Steinach. Brain Stuff
Speaker 1: is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot Com
Speaker 1: and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my
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