On the first Thursday of each month, Astronomy and Astrophysics graduate students at the University of Toronto give you a free opportunity to expand your horizons and realize how just how small we really are. Tonight, it’s PhD candidate Nick Tacik’s turn. He’ll be talking about the extreme parts of the universe, none of which are in our solar system, by the way.
Afterwards, attendees get the choice to peer through one of the four of telescopes on the 15th floor of the McLennan Physical Labs Building at U of T. (Tacik says with some luck, you can see as far as the Andromeda Galaxy.)
If Andromeda isn’t far enough, the lab’s new inflatable planetarium has space for 25 to virtually fly around the universe via live presentation software.
When it’s all done, Tacik says not to feel too badly about our mundane planet, solar system and subsequent existence.
“I’ve come to embrace the insignificance that I feel,” Tacik says. “I see it more about how amazing the universe is.”
Good words of wisdom.
Here are some things you’ll find out about how extreme the universe can get.
1. Cosmic rays
As these particles come in from deep space, they shed their electrons. And they do it with feeling. The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland is our world’s highest energy particle accelerator. These rays have 50 billion times that amount of energy.
2. Stars, beautiful shining stars
We think the sun is big, but it’s not. When stars exhaust all of their fuel, they cool down and expand. VY Canis Majoris, the biggest star we know, is two thousand times as big as the sun. And if you were to replace it with the sun, it would reach past Saturn. Meanwhile, our sun will exhaust its fuel in five billion years or so, so we’ll see what happens to Mister then.
3. Neutron (Super) Stars
These things are super, duper dense. Tacik says the typical neutron star weighs about one and a half times as much as the sun, but its radius is only 10 km. It means if you dropped a marshmallow on the surface of one of these things, it would have the same affect as an atom bomb. It’d just be a lot fluffier on the way down.
4. Round, round get around
Tacik says there are lots of cool things about neutron stars. Not only are they heavy, they rotate super fast. As in, 700 times per second fast. Which is faster than any kitchen blender Tacik could find (which is apparently what PhD candidates in Astronomy do).
5. Magnetism
As if heavy and super-spinning weren’t enough, neutron stars have scary strong magnetic fields of approximately a quadrillion times what we have on Earth. To put it in perspective: if one of them were where the moon is, it would wipe out all of our credit card information, Takic says. Or, if a person were to venture within 1,000 km of one of these things, the slight magnetism of the water in their body would rip apart, and they would, ahem, explode.
Now that’s what we call extreme.
The Guinness Book of Universe Records: The Most Extreme Objects and Environments in Astronomy, McLennan Physical Labs Building, Dec 1., 8 p.m.