
Biggest explosion ever documented in the universe [pdf] - bookofjoe
https://www.icrar.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/2002.01291.pdf
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_Understated_
On a side note, I remember watching an episode of How The Universe Works and
they were talking about a massive explosion that was so big and gave off so
much energy in two minutes, the analogy used was this:

It was the equivalent of 1000 trillion nuclear bombs going off every second
for 100 billion years.

And that's what it put out in two minutes!

Mind blown!

Edit: I think the total energy was measured in Yottawatts. Oh and it was
Michelle Thaller and Hakeem Oluseyi that quantified it if it makes any
difference...

Edit2: Found the episode here:
[https://youtu.be/BhME6wejT6U?t=1830](https://youtu.be/BhME6wejT6U?t=1830)

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arethuza
The Soviet Tsar Bomba had a power output of about 5 Yottawatts (about 1% of
the Sun) - only for a few nanoseconds though!

~~~
_Understated_
My puny human mind struggles to comprehend the scale of things like that when
I'm surrounded by things that "only" measure, at most, in KW.

~~~
arethuza
That reminds of part of an XKCD What If - Which of the following would be
brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina:

\- A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or

\- The detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?

[https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/)

~~~
derekp7
What I want to know, is how bright does a light have to be to blind you if the
back of your head is facing it.

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saagarjha
5*10^54 J, or about 50 billion foe. Pretty big!

~~~
brian-armstrong
Eh, I've seen bigger.

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Djemanac
How many nukes equivalent?

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contravariant
The estimates in the article are on the order of 10^61 erg (not sure why they
used this unit), which is around 10^54 Joule, or 10^42 kilotons. Even the
biggest nukes are below 10^5 kiloton, so this would be about 10^37 of them.

Not that you'd ever get that many because 10^61 is about 10^7 solar masses
worth of energy.

~~~
arethuza
Edward Teller did apparently try and push for a 10 gigaton (!) bomb to be
produced:

[https://www.rbth.com/opinion/2016/01/05/nuclear-overkill-
the...](https://www.rbth.com/opinion/2016/01/05/nuclear-overkill-the-quest-
for-the-10-gigaton-bomb_556351)

Edit: Apparently this monster was the infamous "Backyard" bomb - "since that
particular design would probably kill everyone on Earth, there was no use
carting it anywhere."

