![]() Unlike in terrestrial laboratory experiments, where masers have been created since 1953 (predating lasers by years, with the latter being known as “optical masers” before the “laser” acronym caught on), there is no possibility of a resonant or oscillatory cavity in space. IC 443 is a naturally occurring megamaser as well, with the supernova shockwave and the interstellar gas colliding to produce it. This colorful view of the supernova remnant IC 443 comes from NASA’s WISE telescope, and possesses emission lines from iron, neon, silicon, and oxygen atoms that were heated by the supernova. Ironically, nothing is being amplified rather, we’ve adopted the modern term laser because of the distaste that would come along with the acronym Light Oscillation by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. It’s these oscillations of the electrons, from the lower energy state to the higher one and back down again, where the last step causes the emission of a photon of a very specific wavelength, that leads to the coherent, monochromatic light that’s characteristic of a laser. And then you pump energy back into the system, causing the de-excited component to enter back into the excited state.You then stimulate that excited state with a photon of the desired wavelength, causing the excited state to de-excite and emit another photon of the desired wavelength.The electron moves into an excited state, one that has the potential to transition to the same lower-energy state every time.You start with a system, like an atom, a molecule, or a crystal, that has multiple allowable energy states.This record-breaking megamaser really is a laser from space, and its story is billions of years in the making. Using the MeerKAT array, scientists recently identified the strongest, most distant maser ever seen: an object so strong that it’s more luminous, just in that one emission line, than the total light emitted from 6,000 Suns. Astrophysically, these objects are known as masers, and arise when energy gets injected into large populations of molecules that only de-excite in specific ways. So long as you continue stimulating the same transition, you’ll keep getting that same frequency light over and over again.īut out there in the Universe, the phenomenon occurs naturally in a number of galaxies at much longer wavelengths than the eye can see: in the microwave portion of the spectrum. By re-exciting the molecule back into that higher-energy state, over and over, light of precisely that same, monochromatic wavelength gets emitted over and over. The underlying physics is straightforward, as a molecule gets excited to a higher-energy state, the electron de-transitions back to the lower energy state, emitting light of a very specific wavelength in the process. Here on Earth, the very idea of a laser is relatively novel, having only been invented in 1958. ![]()
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