Season
Season 2025 Episode
- Season 2017 How to See Black Holes + Kugelblitz Challenge Answer
- Season 2017 The EM Drive: Fact or Fantasy?
- Season 2017 The Phantom Singularity
- Season 2017 Why Quasars are so Awesome
- Season 2017 The Geometry of Causality
- Season 2017 Telescopes of Tomorrow
- Season 2017 The Eye of Sauron Reveals a Forming Solar System!
- Season 2017 The Treasures of Trappist-1
- Season 2017 The Race to a Habitable Exoplanet - Time Warp Challenge
- Season 2017 Time Crystals!
- Season 2017 Superluminal Time Travel + Time Warp Challenge Answer
- Season 2017 How Time Becomes Space Inside a Black Hole
- Season 2017 Telescopes on the Moon
- Season 2017 The Oh My God Particle
- Season 2017 Are You a Boltzmann Brain?
- Season 2017 Are We Living in an Ancestor Simulation?
- Season 2017 The Great American Eclipse
- Season 2017 Martian Evolution
- Season 2017 The Fate of the First Stars
- Season 2017 Supervoids vs Colliding Universes!
- Season 2017 Anti-Matter and Quantum Relativity
- Season 2017 The First Quantum Field Theory
- Season 2017 Feynman's Infinite Quantum Paths
- Season 2017 Solving the Impossible in Quantum Field Theory
- Season 2017 The Real Star Wars
- Season 2017 The Secrets of Feynman Diagrams
- Season 2017 Dark Flow
- Season 2017 The One-Electron Universe
- Season 2017 Extraterrestrial Superstorms
- Season 2017 First Detection of Life
- Season 2017 White Holes
- Season 2017 Neutron Stars Collide in New LIGO Signal?
- Season 2017 The Future of Space Telescope
- Season 2017 Are the Fundamental Constants Changing?
- Season 2017 When Quasars Collide STJC
- Season 2017 Absolute Cold
- Season 2017 The Nature of Nothing
- Season 2017 The Missing Mass Mystery
- Season 2017 The Vacuum Catastrophe
- Season 2017 Zero-Point Energy Demystified
- Season 2017 Suicide Space Robots
- Season 2017 Citizen Science + Zero-Point Challenge Answer
- Season 2017 Understanding the Uncertainty Principle with Quantum Fourier Series
- Season 2017 The Origin of Our First Interstellar Visitor
- Season 2017 Extinction by Gamma-Ray Burst
PBS Space Time - Season 2017 Episode 4 Why Quasars are so Awesome
10.00 48 minutes When Quasars were first discovered the amount of light pouring out of such a tiny dot in space seemed impossible. A hysterical flurry of hypothesizing followed: swarms of neutron stars, alien civilizations harnessing their entire galaxy’s power, bright, fast-moving objects being ejected by our own galaxy’s core. But by the 1980’s we were converging on the most awesome explanation. It goes a little like this: Take a black hole of millions to billions times the mass of the sun. Where from? It turns out every decent-sized galaxy has one at its core. Now drive gas into the galactic core. One way this can happen is when galaxies merge and grow. That gas descends into the waiting black hole’s gravitational well and gains incredible speed on the way. It is swept up in a raging whirlpool around the black hole that we call an accretion disk, where its energy of motion is turned into heat. The heat-glow of the accretion disk is so bright that we can see quasars to the ends of the universe.
