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Astronomy Part Seven

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What is a Quasar?

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[ bird caws ]

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What is a quasar?

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A quasar is actually a black hole.

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Oh.

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

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

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So, black holes, they rotate.

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Most of them do.

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And -- Everything in space rotates, right?

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

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They're sucking things in

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and they're rotating,

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

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this spinning cloud of debris

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that forms around this.

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And it's called an accretion disc,

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because all of this stuff is accreting

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onto the black hole.

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And when this happens,

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you can get a ton of energy

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from stripping things apart

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and the friction of things smashing into each other

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and stuff like that.

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And so these black holes,

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which are actually totally dark,

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have accretion discs around them

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

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Wow. And they're bright just because

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it's heat and compression

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

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Yeah. If you can imagine

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the Earth or something like that

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being stripped apart,

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how much friction and energy would be released

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if you were to see that.

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And that's kind of what's happening

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with large portions of galaxies and stars and stuff like that

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being swallowed up into this cosmic drain pool.

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[ evil laugh ]

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