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Astronomy: What is a Quasar? 333 Views


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Description:

Check out this video to learn about Quasars and black holes. But don't stand too close...we've lost a few too many Shmoopers that way...


Transcript

00:01

We speak student!

00:03

Astronomy Part Seven

00:05

What is a Quasar?

00:08

[ bird caws ]

00:08

What is a quasar?

00:11

A quasar is actually a black hole.

00:14

Oh.

00:14

It's just a black hole with a very cool environment

00:19

around it of all of this stuff that's kind of --

00:22

So, black holes, they rotate.

00:24

Most of them do.

00:25

And -- Everything in space rotates, right?

00:28

So they rotate. And when they do this, they --

00:31

They're sucking things in

00:33

and they're rotating,

00:34

and so you kind of get this cloud of debris --

00:36

this spinning cloud of debris

00:38

that forms around this.

00:40

And it's called an accretion disc,

00:41

because all of this stuff is accreting

00:43

onto the black hole.

00:44

And when this happens,

00:46

you can get a ton of energy

00:48

from stripping things apart

00:50

and the friction of things smashing into each other

00:54

and stuff like that.

00:55

And so these black holes,

00:57

which are actually totally dark,

00:59

have accretion discs around them

01:02

- that are the brightest objects in the Universe. - Hmm.

01:05

Wow. And they're bright just because

01:08

it's heat and compression

01:09

and it's just giving off the energy that then we see?

01:12

Yeah. If you can imagine

01:14

the Earth or something like that

01:17

being stripped apart,

01:19

how much friction and energy would be released

01:21

if you were to see that.

01:22

And that's kind of what's happening

01:25

with large portions of galaxies and stars and stuff like that

01:30

being swallowed up into this cosmic drain pool.

01:35

[ evil laugh ]

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