How Do Megamasers Work?

new objects and phenomena. Sometimes they're pretty close to Earth, like surprising new asteroids that go whizzing by, and other times they're more distant than anything we've ever observed before. Today we're talking about an example of the latter. Back in April of twenty twenty two, astronomers made headlines for detecting a phenomenon that occurred roughly five billion years ago.

A light from it traveled some thirty six thousand bills billion billion miles to reach the telescopes that measured it, which is about fifty eight thousand billion billion kilometers, which either way is a lot. This record breaking observance was conducted by the mere caat telescope in South Africa and nicknamed Nkala kata, an Isuzulu word meaning big boss. The scientific name for this type of phenomenon is pretty cool too. It's a mega maser, which is not a supervillain's weapon

that I'm aware of personally. No, Mega masers are a fascinating fact of life out there in the universe. But okay, before we talk about what a megamser is, let's talk about how a regular maser works. Strictly speaking, a maser is a human built device that produces and amplifies electromagnetic waves, much like the better known laser. Masers actually came first. The word is an acronym that stands for microwave amplification

by stimulated emission of radiation. That's because the first masers produced electromagnetic waves in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The original was built in nineteen fifty three. Lasers were actually called optical masers when they were first developed a few years later before they got their current name, and several scientists were awarded the nineteen sixty four Nobel Prize in Physics for the groundwork that made the first maser possible.

Since then, researchers have been able to build masers in other regions of the spectrum, including in the radio and infrared parts. Researchers have proposed changing the M to stand for molecular instead of microwave. All of this has made masers useful as microwave amplifiers in radio telescopes and deep space spacecraft communication round stations. However, when we speak about masers and space, there is another way to define the term.

An astrophysical maser is a naturally occurring emission. It's a burst of electromagnetic waves, usually in the microwave part of the elect her magnetic spectrum. While you may have never heard of a mega maser, astronomers have been measuring them since the late nineteen seventies. The first extragalactic maser, that is a maser from outside the Milky Way, was observed

in nineteen seventy seven. By the mid nineteen nineties, several megamsers have been discovered, so named because of how luminous they were to observers using the right tools to spot them. Speaking of mega maser is an objectively cool name, but the mega isn't just a fun adjective. It's an actual distinction of brightness. The term kilo maser is used to describe extragalactic masers that are thousands of times brighter or stronger than the masers that we've observed within the Milky Way.

Mega masers are typically one hundred million times brighter, and a gigamaser is billions of times stronger than Milky Way masers. Scientists continue to research mega masers as it's believed that they occur when galaxies collide, events that have become less common in the history of our universe over the billions of years of its existence before the article. This episode is based on How Stuff Works. Spoke with Jeremy Darling, a mega mazer expert and professor of astrophysical and planetary

sciences at the University of Colorado. He explained when to galaxies like the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy collide, beams of light shoot out from the collision and can be seen a cosmological distances. Mega mazers act like bright lights that say, here's a collision of galaxies that's making

new stars and feeding massive black holes. These astrophysical phenomena are so interesting because their brightness could help us sort of double check our measurements of distance too far off galaxies and studying some of them could help us learn more about how new stars and galaxies four, So astronomers continue to peer further into our universal history to find them.

The oldest mega mazer measured so far, estimated to have been emitted some five to six billion US years ago, is the one observed in twenty twenty two from the radio telescope in South Africa. We look forward to hearing more about what researchers learn from observing these phenomena, especially as our astronomical tools get better appearing farther into the universe. Today's episode was recorded live at the iHeart Podcasts Studio powered by Bose at the House of Music at iHeartRadio

Music Festival. It's based on the article like from thirty six thousand, billion billion miles away, Yep, I'm mega maser on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by Valerie Steinach. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows