This is also roughly the amount of energy contained in a tornado or in a small earthquake. A very different scale is needed for astronomical power. Even this immense quantity is tiny by cosmic standards. An average galaxy may contain 100 billion stars, many comparable to the Sun. The strange, distant objects called quasars are even more powerful, some individually releasing as much energy as a million galaxies.
Energy has many different forms in space.
Energy is present in light, in the motions of particles, in magnetic fields, and in gravitational attraction. The temperature of atoms and mole cules moving randomly in space is proportional to the energy contained in each particle. As each particle moves, it radiates energy. By detecting and measuring this energy, we can measure the particle temperatures at dis tances of thousands of light years. Most of the universe is made of hydrogen, and for this reason the temperature of 10,000 C is a critical threshold.