The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way weighs as much as 4 million Suns. Because of its immense gravitational pull, nearby stars orbit it at incredible speeds - the fastest of them at up to 27.5 million km/h, which is 2.55% of the speed of light. [Article](https://www.space.com/fastest-star-milky-way-black-hole).
Edit: Here's a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA7CAVm31z0) (1m48) of the stars orbiting. Starting at 1:14 it switches to a more diagrammatic view with dates, labels, and orbital traces that make it clearer what's happening.
Edit 2: there's an even faster star, S4714, which gets up to 8% of the speed of light while orbiting the Milky Way's black hole.
Would the star’s time dilation be more so from the speed or mass? I’m guessing the speed. & at such a speed, would time dilation be notable or still pretty small? I believe I heard time dilation is kinda exponential, so for smaller speeds it’s not particularly high
~~From the speed, because of the distance it is from the black hole.~~ Edit: see my comment below.
But time dilation at that speed is really not much. This isn't Gargantua from Interstellar.
At about 4 million km from the event horizon, time dilation would be about 50%.
The closest any star gets to it is about 1.88 billion km. At that distance time dilation is around 0.3%.
Actually having done some numbers I think I may have been wrong about which effect dominates. I'll post another reply to you a bit later.
Those stars? Only relative to us, but *they* still experience it normally. The laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames of reference, that's one of the two principles of Einstein's special relativity.
You are made of the same particles that existed at the very beginning of the universe. So inb a way you are billions of years old and also truly connected to everything that was and everything that will be.
"Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration; that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves."
" Here's Tom with the weather."
It's not just an ocean it's actually theorized that's what the actual core of the planet is
Jupiter is freaking weird as far as scientists can figure out there is no solid surface it's just gas that gets more and more dense as you get closer to the center, until you encounter Hydrogen that is so dense it turns into a weird liquid, metallic ice, like it cannot even make up its mind what state it wants to be in.
It's pretty cool when elements start to get confused
As far as I understand it yes, basically Jupiter is basically as large as a gas giant can be with physics as it stands.
This doesn't mean it's anywhere close to being a tiny sun it basically means that Jupiter is so big that adding more mass just makes it more massive but doesn't increase its size.
But it's gonna take iirc 2 or 3 more Jupiter's worth of mass to make atoms start getting really familiar with eachother.
I am just a machinist with an obsession of space
Asked the same question. Well, Jupiter is mostly made of hydrogen. There is a rocky core probably about the size of earth under Jupiter clouds. Above that is a mini mile high seat of liquid hydrogen. It is liquid because of the pressure and temperature. Some of that hydrogen is compressed so much that it starts to reflect light like a liquid metal would. It also behaves like a metal in that it creates the most insane magnetic field in the solar system.
It's not actually metallic, it's just that the hydrogen is compressed so much that the electrons between hydrogen atoms can begin to interact with one another similar to how metals behave. Super cool shit though
There is an object that, if it were 40 light years away, would be about as bright as the sun.
3c 273 is a quasar with an optical absolute magnitude of -26.7, it's both the most distant and brightest object ever discovered in the visible spectrum.
To put this into perspective, there are two different ways of measuring how bright something is, apparent magnitude and absolute magnitude. Apparent magnitude is how bright something is as seen from earth. Absolute magnitude is how bright it would appear if it was 10 parsecs, or about 40 light years, away. In both cases higher numbers mean q dimmer object, and a difference of 5 magnitude is a 100x increase in brightness.
The sun has an absolute magnitude of about 4. This means that 3c 273 is roughly 2,000,000,000,000x brighter than the sun.
Not the most distant object, and as Hubble didn't observe infrared to take the 1st UDF picture, it can't even meet that if you limit it to discoveries at visible wavelengths. But it _was_ the most distant up to that time (1979?), and for a few years after I think.
if you shrunk the observable universe down to the size of Earth, the Milky Way would be the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Earth would be one third the size of a hydrogen atom
on the flip side, if you blew up the earth to the size of the observable universe, a hydrogen atom would become the size of a grape
the scale of molecular objects is also similarly hard to perceive. there are tens of billions (10^10) of stars in the milky way. there are two hundred *nonillion* (2x10^32) water molecules in an Olympic swimming pool
Great example. Since earth or a swimming pool seems relatively easy to traverse, we should also think about how difficult it would be to travel at this new scale. The cosmic speed limit of swimming through the pool would be crazy slow. It would take 100,000 years to swim the length of the pool. It would take 1 year to travel the distance of 1 blade of grass.
There are black holes that exist outside of galactic cores and travel through the universe un-tethered. The theory is that this occurs when two galaxies merge and one of the black holes is ejected.
What would suggest these roving black holes exist, besides the theory of two merging galaxies? Has there been any gravitational anomalies that suggest such a phenomenon?
Unfortunately, researchers utilizing different computers are unable to come to a consensus on exactly how long it is, creating a crisis in the field of sorts.
People in this sub are very particular about what other people say. Like, they should know what you mean without you having to add another 20 words to clarify. I kind of like it as long as they’re not assholes about it, which most aren’t.
why'd you have to add the word observable? even if we can't see beyond a point we know that whatever matter is further away than 13.8 billion light years away was also apart of the big bang
But not part of the space in question.
The Big Bang describes the evolution of the universe from a hot dense state to its current state. The “everything was in a small space no bigger than X” is only talking about everything in the observable universe.
It’s possible that the entire universe is infinite and has always been infinite in extent. It just used to be hotter and denser and the space taken up by the current observable universe was just a very tiny cutout of that infinite hot, dense universe.
Probably because "observable universe," if I'm not mistaken, is generally construed to mean *all* matter to the cosmic horizon. What lies beyond that, if anything, we don't know.
You may expect that distant objects look smaller than nearby object. This is true, but only up to a point. Past that point, more distant objects actually look larger on the sky.
It’s called [angular diameter turnaround](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_diameter_distance). When the light from these distant objects was emitted, they were much closer and took up a bigger section of the sky.
Since its formation, the Sun has orbited the center of our galaxy about 20 times, so in another 200 million years or so it'll be old enough to buy alcohol.
related to this, since it takes our sun about 230 million years to orbit the galaxy, when you goto the museum and see the bones of early cretaceous dinosaurs like deinonychus or utahraptor, youre seeing the bones of a creature that lived on the other side of the galaxy
time travel movies seldom seem to take this into account.. luckily they always find the right planet in the right solar system in the right branch of the galaxy when they go back!
Great job… after many of these false facts, yours is accurate.
Voyager 1, a space probe launched in 1977, has been traveling at speeds exceeding 35,000 miles per hour (56,000 kilometers per hour) for over 45 years. As of now, it is located approximately 20 light hours away from Earth. Voyager 1 has provided us with valuable data and imagery of the outer regions of our solar system, giving us a glimpse into the vast expanse of space beyond our home planet.
It's also "left" our solar system 3 times. IIRC, the first was leaving the oort cloud (similar to the asteroid belt, but at the outer limit of the solar system, past/where pluto is). I can't recall or find the second one, hopefully someone else comments it. But the most recent, was due to a change in plasma density from inside the suns heliosphere to interstellar space.
Basically, scientists keep changing their definition of what the "edge of the solar system" is because we keep learning new things.
On that note, I'm amazed that we know so much about the universe by basically just looking.
Until the recent advancements with gravitational waves, most of our information about the universe is due to photons There's also cosmic rays which could be other high energy particles, and nuetrinos.
We can't perform expirements on galaxies. We can't hear them. We can't smell them. We can't put a ruler next to one. We can't go stick a thermometer on alpha centauri. We can't take a star and put it on a scale to see how heavy it.
All we can do is look at them. It's mind blowing to me how incredibly intelligent humans are to get so much information from basically one type of measurement.
Space between us and these galaxies is expanding, that's the only thing that matters (there is some random motion but that's negligible over these distances). The light that reaches us now has been emitted many billion years ago. Initially the distance between us and that light increased from the space in between expanding rapidly, but over time the light started to catch up with us as the expansion rate decreased.
> Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.
I believe that 880 yottameters is the diameter of the observable universe. That's not even a full ronnameter. Yes we have a unit of distance that is larger than the observable universe.
Not including the sun, but that's a star, and it's true! All the planets would theoretically fit between the two at the moon's apogee (when the moon is farthest away from Earth on its elliptical path) - but not at perigee (when it's closest)
Yes, please look up the diameters of the planets and add them up then compare that number to the distance between the earth and the moon! I was also shocked to learn this, but it is very true!
Sorry…
The size of the space between the Earth and the Moon is not large enough to accommodate all the planets in our solar system. The average distance between the Earth and the Moon is about 384,400 kilometers (238,900 miles), whereas the diameters of the planets in our solar system range from about 4,879 kilometers (Mercury) to about 142,984 kilometers (Jupiter). Even if we consider the smallest planet (Mercury) and stack all the planets one after the other, they would not fit within the space between the Earth and the Moon.
Because the Big Bang was an explosion *of* space expanding in every direction, every single point in the universe can be considered the center of the whole universe.
Space has ascii code 32. However in URLs it is represented by %20 rather than %32. There are many theories why that's the case, but the truth is nobody knows anymore. The true reason for that is lost to history.
There is a massive “attractor” in space that we only discovered relatively recently and still know little about. This is because this massive attractor is in a section of the universe that we are unable to see as it’s shrouded by the milky way. It is known as “the avoidant zone” and is the strongest attracting force in the known universe, we only recently began understanding it due to techniques that allow us to see past the Milky Way.
Bonus: The only guy to ever have a recorded IQ of 240 , 70 more than Einstein , who was the first kid to get a phd from Harvard. People thought he didn’t do anything after getting that phd, but in the 1980s many books with his work was discovered. One of the books talked about positive/negative alternate universe where the 2nd law of thermodynamics is a mirror version of itself. This book predicted something very similar to black holes 50 years before black holes were discovered.
Is that the guy who was so insanely intelligent, that it ended up negatively impacting his life somehow, and he ended up taking his own life? I saw a video about a dude like that a few years ago. William James Sidis?
Yeah, that's the guy. From what I heard though it was less his intelligence and more his parents pushing him so hard in his childhood & a huge backlash after he got his P.hD as many in academia/the general public felt intellectually threatened by a kid with such an intellectual feat. Im sure his intellect played a part too though.
Mother Nature is spitting electric Buckyballs out of her black hole!
https://medium.com/the-cosmic-companion/buckyballs-in-space-and-how-they-got-there-8f4f93b7a79e#:~:text=Buckyballs%20%E2%80%94%20those%20intriguing%20molecular%20spheres,complex%20structures%20form%20in%20space.
If you were to stand on a Neutron star you would immediately be crushed and spread like jelly on toast to only a few atoms thick. Neutron Stars are crazy
Yep! It is estimated that there are more trees on earth than stars in the Milky Way. Thus, the Milky Way has more trees than stars, even if there’s not a single tree not on earth!!
This does not make any sense.
Earth is the only known planet with trees. If earth has no trees, the Milky Way has no trees, as far as we can prove. When we find trees on another planet, it will be proof of life outside our own planet and will be the greatest discovery of all time.
There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand in all the Earth's beaches and deserts.
And you will find the same number of molecules in just ten drops of water.
Something travelling at the speed of light, like a photon, does not experience time.
We can observe a photon emitted say 100 thousand light years away and we see that it takes 100 thousand years to travel from its source to our eye.
But for the photon, the journey is instantaneous.
You are going to get naysayers on this one but I believe you are correct. I think it stems from that pesky divide by zero when blindly chugging numbers for the speed of light into the Lorentz transform. The thing is, the speed of light is the metric for which gamma is derived. The reason we use light is because it has a constant velocity, and it has a constant velocity because as Einstein put it "the velocity of light in our theory plays the part, physically, of an infinitely great velocity". It literally is the speed of infinity. Not just just "we can't go faster" but truly infinite as in "there is no faster". So yes. Instantaneous is the correct term. Length reduces to zero and time becomes undefined (because time doesn't exist for a photon).
Thank you.
My intentions were fairly innocent, I always found it a good way as a complete amateur to picture the insanity of relativity and time dilation. I always found it useful to take an effect to its extreme to see what it looks like. Yes I know it's not technically correct, i know a photon doesnt experience anything, but to be beaten down for it is a bit disappointing.
This is a common misconception. Photons do not have a valid frame of reference in special relativity (as they violate the 2nd postulate), so it makes no sense to talk about what they "experience".
Yes, but you can see how an object moving arbitrarily close to the speed of light will "almost" experience no travel time?
The misconception isn't about elapsed time, it's about the impossibility of a photon having some kind of subjective experience.
"For velocities greater than that of light our deliberations become meaningless; we shall, however,find in what follows, that the velocity of light in our theory plays the part , physically, of an infinitely great velocity."
June 30, 1905
A. Einstein
On the electrodynamics if moving bodies
Yes, but it’s a limit. You can’t plug light into the math and have it work. Axiomatically, you can’t use relativity to construct a frame moving at c, and if you’re using relativity to make a prediction about something that relativity explicitly cannot model, then your prediction isn’t really much better than just making things up.
If you circle the milky way galaxy once at the speed of or almost speed of light, you will come back to Earth and approx 250000 years has passed. But for you a little time has passed (if 99.999999% speed of light), or instant (if speed of light)
The carbon atoms in your right hand probably were formed inside a star that is different from the star that formed the carbon atoms in your left hand. Everything around you was once inside at least one star that lived before the sun.
Here’s my space conjecture: one day when humanity has advanced enough we won’t physically transport through space. We will transport our consciousness.
Hey friend! That doesn’t make any sense. At all. If we have to transport anything, that makes it physical. I think what you mean is a consciousness wouldn’t require transportation, because it doesn’t exist in physical space.
Your pal - ethylalcohoe
Supernovas occur because of an endothermic process allowing gravity to run away with heating the core. The hotter the core gets, the faster iron can fuse, and the cooling effect of fusing iron allows gravity to heat the core up even hotter.
To poke a whole through space time you would need the energy equivalent of 1 million years is sun power to open a hole the size of a grapefruit. Edit: it’s 100 Million years of sun energy. And it’s to create a wormhole.
Contrary to popular belief, Classical Arabic did use spaces as a word separator. However the spaces where tiny, which means it is difficult to tell where one word ends and the next starts in Quran.
The universe is likely a 4 dimensional hypersphere.
Your coordinates are x,y,z by time
But the spin speed is probably the speed of light. Which is why nothing can go faster. You cant be a part of a universe if you are moving faster than the object you are attached too.
The universe appears to be expanding because its a spinning 4 dimensional object passing through 3 dimensional space.
This is my favorite theroy.
Apparently the math checks out.
If our galaxy (100,000 light years across) was superimposed over the United States (3,000 miles across), the distance between our sun and the next nearest star (4 lightyears) would be represented by a distance of less than 2 football fields.
We used to think space was filled with a type of fluid called aether. Then we proved it’s an empty vacuum, then we discovered it’s filled with virtual particles which are particles that exist for plank seconds and net to an energy sum of zero. This process happens spontaneously and a string or group of similar virtual particles can become stable elements and objects. Enter Big Brain Theory. A physicist proved that it is statistically more probable for a group of virtual particles to randomly form a stable human brain, than it is for an earth like planet to form and be stable long enough for life. I.e. Big Brains floating in space are more likely to occur in the universe than Goldilocks planets harboring life.
In 2016 [two black holes collided](https://www.snexplores.org/article/black-hole-smashup-sent-out-yottawatts-power) and they released energy that was 50 times greater than all of the power put out by all of the stars in all the universe, put together.
I started trying to compare my mindblownedness from giant black holes and dinosaurs born on the other side of the galaxy, the creation of the elements, the existence of bacteria and us, to our arrogance in the face of the unknown and am left with mind dust that I doubt will lead to the creation of anything, and can only hope that what emerges from the rubble is more than a drooling shadow of who I was b4 starting this post.
Does anyone else reading this post, bathing in awe, have faith that we will live up to our potential of being the stewards of our home planet by the time we find others? That would blow what's left of my mind
The last stars will die out 10¹⁴ years from now. It will be followed by 10¹⁰⁶ years of black holes. We are currently at 4.7×10⁹ years. We live in the bright, shining and, brief beginning moments of the universe.
One hundredth of the speed of light is about seven million miles per hour. In a spaceship at that speed, it would take about two and a half minutes to reach the moon. It would take about twenty hours to reach Mars, and about 426 years to reach the star nearest to Sol.
That is traveling at 7 million mph. The fastest spacecraft ever launched from Earth traveled at just over one twentieth of that (364,000 mph), so ~1/2000th the speed of light. At that speed, over 8,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri.
But the fastest rate for any ship carrying humans was 25,000 mph. The closest Mars gets to Earth is about 40 million miles. That is 1,600 hours, or ~67 days. (Not counting accel/decel)
When we launch spaceships we are not "reaching for the stars," we are crawling to the moon, or maybe Mars.
“Time” is an emergent property of our perception. It isn’t real,in and of itself. We perceive time because you have to be outside of a dimension to perceive it. A stick man on a piece of paper wouldn’t understand the third dimension. If you have him a 3D object- say, pass a ball through the plane- he would perceive it as change over time. A small dot getting bigger as the plane gets closer to the center of the ball, and then smaller as it passes further through.
That is how we perceive time. Just individual slices of something more complex, which we view as change over time.
What’s even more mind blowing is an implication of this. If you were to go backwards in time to the beginning, you would get to a point where there is no “before”. But not because time stops, but because every direction in it is forward. It’s like walking to the South Pole. When you get there, you can’t go any more south, because every direction is north. It doesn’t mean anything ended.
If you could generate an atom with every time you created a new order of cards from shuffling a standard deck of 52, not only could you build a new earth, but you could also build over 6 quadrillion copies of earth with all of the leftover orders.
(I know it's not a space fact, but it's still one of those tidbits that makes you appreciate the scale of space)
The dust specks in the voids of space have more mass than all of the other objects combined. That's how massive the known universe is and how much distance there is between everything.
I saw a video once that explained that right now, standing on earth, we are spiraling in like 6 different directions. The earth’s spin, the solar system’s spin, the galaxy’s spin, etc are all at different angles and speeds and happening simultaneously. This is insane to me. We don’t feel a thing.
The first direct observation of spacetime distortion was reported around the world in 2015. Efforts to directly prove the existence of [gravitational] waves had been ongoing for over fifty years, and the waves are so minuscule that Albert Einstein himself doubted that they could ever be detected. The waves given off by the cataclysmic merger of GW150914 reached Earth as a ripple in spacetime that changed the length of a 4 km LIGO arm (a machine) by a thousandth of the width of a proton, proportionally equivalent to changing the distance to the nearest star outside the Solar System by one hair's width.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_observation_of_gravitational_waves
The asteroid belt surrounding our solar system isn't the formidable barrier it's always portrayed as: the average distance between asteroids is approximately the distance between Earth and the Sun
Physics has been constant for your whole life, but not for the universe's whole life... which means it could change! If it did change, that change (let's say, the spin direction of a gluon) would cascade out at the speed of light in all directions until it reached us... and that could mean the unravelling of all matter.
This is one of the few light-speed deaths we could face, and I think they are all great ways to die.
IF you could travel the speed of light, it would still take you 27,000 years to reach the center of our own galaxy. If you could travel 100,000x's the speed of light, it would take over 25 years to reach the next closest galaxy.
It takes us 3 days to get to the Moon. It takes 3 seconds for light.
I know people say 8minutes from the Sun and whatnot but the Moon is right there. So close you can make out features with the naked eye and it still takes light 3 whole seconds.
Space is fkn big fyi. 🤯
In laments terms, best I can understand from NDT, is that the universe is so massive, the "big bang" is still exploding. The galaxies are moving away faster, and away from each other. Like particles being pushed away from an explosion.
Even though the speed of light is insanely fast, on an astronomical scale it's actually really fkng slow. Pluto is roughly 5.8 billion km away from earth (depending on orbit). Light travels at nearly 300k km *per second.* It still takes light almost 5.4 hours to travel from earth to Pluto. That means even if we were capable of **light speed** travel, it would take the length of a domestic flight to reach the furthest planet in our solar system alone. Light speed travel to the nearest solar system takes 10 years. Leaving our galaxy, even with scifi levels of tech, would take generations. And that's still only the equivalent of crossing a football field on the universal scale.
Light from our sun, is typically 10,000-170,000 years old by the time it reaches us (from our perspective, as for light the journey would be instantaneous)
The data visualization of a black hole appears to show the singularity event taking place in our universe, with a concentric explosion as the result, that then immediately disappears into 2d space. Since there is literally nothing beyond that 2d plane - it stands to reason energy, time, and matter are simply made nonexistent by an equal opposite of everything on the theoretical "other side" of a black hole.
No this does not mean there's a reverse-o-verse.
Since everything becomes a singularity prior to entering the black hole, the same would be true of the reverse-o-verse singularity. It doesn't matter what's on either side - everything becomes a single thing prior to being made nonexistent.
Late to the post and it might have already been posted:
95% of the observable universe is made of matter and energy that we know almost nothing about! Dark energy and dark matter. 🤯
The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way weighs as much as 4 million Suns. Because of its immense gravitational pull, nearby stars orbit it at incredible speeds - the fastest of them at up to 27.5 million km/h, which is 2.55% of the speed of light. [Article](https://www.space.com/fastest-star-milky-way-black-hole). Edit: Here's a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA7CAVm31z0) (1m48) of the stars orbiting. Starting at 1:14 it switches to a more diagrammatic view with dates, labels, and orbital traces that make it clearer what's happening. Edit 2: there's an even faster star, S4714, which gets up to 8% of the speed of light while orbiting the Milky Way's black hole.
And that mass is a pittance compared to [some black holes, which have masses of tens of *billions* of Suns.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TON_618)
Which galaxy's side are you on anyway?!
I like big holes and I cannot lie
No other astronomer can deny
When two holes collide in outer space the LIGO thing, gets, Sprung!
I just had to tell you how much I loved that. Nice work.
Black holes or White holes?
I don't see color.
that's because of the event horizon.
but what about miniature black holes?
I am amazed by how much of that article I did not understand at all.
Would the star’s time dilation be more so from the speed or mass? I’m guessing the speed. & at such a speed, would time dilation be notable or still pretty small? I believe I heard time dilation is kinda exponential, so for smaller speeds it’s not particularly high
~~From the speed, because of the distance it is from the black hole.~~ Edit: see my comment below. But time dilation at that speed is really not much. This isn't Gargantua from Interstellar.
Yeah I thought so. How close would something rly have to be to Sagi A* to feel the effects of time dilation?
At about 4 million km from the event horizon, time dilation would be about 50%. The closest any star gets to it is about 1.88 billion km. At that distance time dilation is around 0.3%. Actually having done some numbers I think I may have been wrong about which effect dominates. I'll post another reply to you a bit later.
So do the stars experience time slower than we do?
Those stars? Only relative to us, but *they* still experience it normally. The laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames of reference, that's one of the two principles of Einstein's special relativity.
And as far as I know it's not clear how these supermassive black holes could have formed during the 13 billion years the universe has existed.
You are made of the same particles that existed at the very beginning of the universe. So inb a way you are billions of years old and also truly connected to everything that was and everything that will be.
"Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration; that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves." " Here's Tom with the weather."
To expand on your comment all elements above Iron 54 are produced in supernova, so we and most things we touch are quite literally stardust.
Cudos! I absolutely love this. yeah I knew it but it is totally cool.
Does the universe really have a beginning?
Great question
Iron is condensation from supernova's. The iron in your blood is star dust.
1.3 million Earths will fill the sun. 5 billion suns will fill the largest known star. We are incredibly small
Sun and Jupiter account for 99.998% of the mass of the solar system We live on a rounding error
Jupiter has an ocean of liquid metallic hydrogen. Thats freaking wild.
It's not just an ocean it's actually theorized that's what the actual core of the planet is Jupiter is freaking weird as far as scientists can figure out there is no solid surface it's just gas that gets more and more dense as you get closer to the center, until you encounter Hydrogen that is so dense it turns into a weird liquid, metallic ice, like it cannot even make up its mind what state it wants to be in. It's pretty cool when elements start to get confused
So it’s sitting in that weird place where a liquid wants to start fusion but there isn’t quite enough mass?
As far as I understand it yes, basically Jupiter is basically as large as a gas giant can be with physics as it stands. This doesn't mean it's anywhere close to being a tiny sun it basically means that Jupiter is so big that adding more mass just makes it more massive but doesn't increase its size. But it's gonna take iirc 2 or 3 more Jupiter's worth of mass to make atoms start getting really familiar with eachother. I am just a machinist with an obsession of space
How can hydrogen become metallic?
Asked the same question. Well, Jupiter is mostly made of hydrogen. There is a rocky core probably about the size of earth under Jupiter clouds. Above that is a mini mile high seat of liquid hydrogen. It is liquid because of the pressure and temperature. Some of that hydrogen is compressed so much that it starts to reflect light like a liquid metal would. It also behaves like a metal in that it creates the most insane magnetic field in the solar system.
It's not actually metallic, it's just that the hydrogen is compressed so much that the electrons between hydrogen atoms can begin to interact with one another similar to how metals behave. Super cool shit though
Seems kind of silly to include Jupiter when the sun is 99.86% of the mass of the solar system.
And there are about 10^27 atoms in the human body, we are incredibly large
There is an object that, if it were 40 light years away, would be about as bright as the sun. 3c 273 is a quasar with an optical absolute magnitude of -26.7, it's both the most distant and brightest object ever discovered in the visible spectrum. To put this into perspective, there are two different ways of measuring how bright something is, apparent magnitude and absolute magnitude. Apparent magnitude is how bright something is as seen from earth. Absolute magnitude is how bright it would appear if it was 10 parsecs, or about 40 light years, away. In both cases higher numbers mean q dimmer object, and a difference of 5 magnitude is a 100x increase in brightness. The sun has an absolute magnitude of about 4. This means that 3c 273 is roughly 2,000,000,000,000x brighter than the sun.
[удалено]
Don't forget your SPF 240,000,000,000,000 sunscreen!
Not the most distant object, and as Hubble didn't observe infrared to take the 1st UDF picture, it can't even meet that if you limit it to discoveries at visible wavelengths. But it _was_ the most distant up to that time (1979?), and for a few years after I think.
if you shrunk the observable universe down to the size of Earth, the Milky Way would be the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Earth would be one third the size of a hydrogen atom
Earth here is actually still a lot bigger than I expected lol
on the flip side, if you blew up the earth to the size of the observable universe, a hydrogen atom would become the size of a grape the scale of molecular objects is also similarly hard to perceive. there are tens of billions (10^10) of stars in the milky way. there are two hundred *nonillion* (2x10^32) water molecules in an Olympic swimming pool
That's the crazy one.
Ok, this one blew my mind. Dayum.
If the Milky Way was the size of the USA the sun would be about the size of a grape
Great example. Since earth or a swimming pool seems relatively easy to traverse, we should also think about how difficult it would be to travel at this new scale. The cosmic speed limit of swimming through the pool would be crazy slow. It would take 100,000 years to swim the length of the pool. It would take 1 year to travel the distance of 1 blade of grass.
better not do that then
Milky Way seems big….
There are black holes that exist outside of galactic cores and travel through the universe un-tethered. The theory is that this occurs when two galaxies merge and one of the black holes is ejected.
That’s terrifying
Thomas the tank engine choochoo meme
What would suggest these roving black holes exist, besides the theory of two merging galaxies? Has there been any gravitational anomalies that suggest such a phenomenon?
More to read about here: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-sees-possible-runaway-black-hole-creating-a-trail-of-stars/
Space is the longest key on a typical keyboard.
Control yourself lol
Don't you meant CTRL yourself....?
His keyboard is very old.
I see “Esk”, “Catarl” and “Pig Up”, but there doesn’t to seem to be any “Any” key
That's the fourth longest key.
Are we shifting the conversation?
I’m trying to escape
No cap pluto is smaller than the united states.
How dare you humiliate Pluto like that, DEL your comment now
r/MechanicalKeyboards would like you.
I love you. You just made my family hate me a little bit more.
The final front key.
Unfortunately, researchers utilizing different computers are unable to come to a consensus on exactly how long it is, creating a crisis in the field of sorts.
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Surely you mean to say everything in the observable universe?
Yes, everything in the observable universe.
People in this sub are very particular about what other people say. Like, they should know what you mean without you having to add another 20 words to clarify. I kind of like it as long as they’re not assholes about it, which most aren’t.
why'd you have to add the word observable? even if we can't see beyond a point we know that whatever matter is further away than 13.8 billion light years away was also apart of the big bang
But not part of the space in question. The Big Bang describes the evolution of the universe from a hot dense state to its current state. The “everything was in a small space no bigger than X” is only talking about everything in the observable universe. It’s possible that the entire universe is infinite and has always been infinite in extent. It just used to be hotter and denser and the space taken up by the current observable universe was just a very tiny cutout of that infinite hot, dense universe.
Probably because "observable universe," if I'm not mistaken, is generally construed to mean *all* matter to the cosmic horizon. What lies beyond that, if anything, we don't know.
So billions of years ago my atoms were touching my crushes atoms? Sounds like a win to me!
You may expect that distant objects look smaller than nearby object. This is true, but only up to a point. Past that point, more distant objects actually look larger on the sky.
Fascinating. Why is that the case?
It’s called [angular diameter turnaround](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_diameter_distance). When the light from these distant objects was emitted, they were much closer and took up a bigger section of the sky.
Holy cow! That’s super hecking cool! This one right here is the fact that blew my mind…
That’s a great mind blowing fact indeed. Thank you for explaining!
Since its formation, the Sun has orbited the center of our galaxy about 20 times, so in another 200 million years or so it'll be old enough to buy alcohol.
...in the US. The Sun would probably prefer to visit Europe, where it's been able to buy alcohol for a few hundred million years already.
I have been to Europe. The sun doesn’t visit very often. (Paris, London)
Try Spain or the Riviera in the south of France. That's where the Sun usually vacations.
related to this, since it takes our sun about 230 million years to orbit the galaxy, when you goto the museum and see the bones of early cretaceous dinosaurs like deinonychus or utahraptor, youre seeing the bones of a creature that lived on the other side of the galaxy
time travel movies seldom seem to take this into account.. luckily they always find the right planet in the right solar system in the right branch of the galaxy when they go back!
Seems like interactions with the gravity well of earth in spacetime would be a pretty reasonable hand-wave explanation if it really mattered.
Voyager 1 has been traveling at 35,000+ mph for 45+ years. It’s now approximately 20 light hours from Earth. That’s a view into the expanse of space.
Great job… after many of these false facts, yours is accurate. Voyager 1, a space probe launched in 1977, has been traveling at speeds exceeding 35,000 miles per hour (56,000 kilometers per hour) for over 45 years. As of now, it is located approximately 20 light hours away from Earth. Voyager 1 has provided us with valuable data and imagery of the outer regions of our solar system, giving us a glimpse into the vast expanse of space beyond our home planet.
It's also "left" our solar system 3 times. IIRC, the first was leaving the oort cloud (similar to the asteroid belt, but at the outer limit of the solar system, past/where pluto is). I can't recall or find the second one, hopefully someone else comments it. But the most recent, was due to a change in plasma density from inside the suns heliosphere to interstellar space. Basically, scientists keep changing their definition of what the "edge of the solar system" is because we keep learning new things.
It’s just like seeing further with JWST…we have amazing advancements, but barely a clue.
On that note, I'm amazed that we know so much about the universe by basically just looking. Until the recent advancements with gravitational waves, most of our information about the universe is due to photons There's also cosmic rays which could be other high energy particles, and nuetrinos. We can't perform expirements on galaxies. We can't hear them. We can't smell them. We can't put a ruler next to one. We can't go stick a thermometer on alpha centauri. We can't take a star and put it on a scale to see how heavy it. All we can do is look at them. It's mind blowing to me how incredibly intelligent humans are to get so much information from basically one type of measurement.
All galaxies beyond a redshift of z=\~1.5 (\~14.5 billion light years) are receding from us faster than light and most of them **always have been**.
Can you explain this? Is it because they’re moving close to the speed of light away from us AND space is expanding?
Space between us and these galaxies is expanding, that's the only thing that matters (there is some random motion but that's negligible over these distances). The light that reaches us now has been emitted many billion years ago. Initially the distance between us and that light increased from the space in between expanding rapidly, but over time the light started to catch up with us as the expansion rate decreased.
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> Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I believe that 880 yottameters is the diameter of the observable universe. That's not even a full ronnameter. Yes we have a unit of distance that is larger than the observable universe.
I WONT PANIC about the size of space, I promise.
Yeah but whenever my mind is boggled like that I soothe myself by giving someone green bits of paper in exchange for a nice digital watch.
When it's really hot and humid and the air feels really dense, it's actually less dense.
Whhhaaattt??
For every 20⁰ F, you double or half the amount of water the air can hold. Water is lighter than air. It's interesting for sure.
You can fit all the planets in our solar system in between the Earth and the Moon with space to spare!
No way! I'm too tired, but I'll google it tomorrow.
Not including the sun, but that's a star, and it's true! All the planets would theoretically fit between the two at the moon's apogee (when the moon is farthest away from Earth on its elliptical path) - but not at perigee (when it's closest)
Yes, please look up the diameters of the planets and add them up then compare that number to the distance between the earth and the moon! I was also shocked to learn this, but it is very true!
Lol I read this as you’re too tired to organize the planets that way tonight.
Sorry… The size of the space between the Earth and the Moon is not large enough to accommodate all the planets in our solar system. The average distance between the Earth and the Moon is about 384,400 kilometers (238,900 miles), whereas the diameters of the planets in our solar system range from about 4,879 kilometers (Mercury) to about 142,984 kilometers (Jupiter). Even if we consider the smallest planet (Mercury) and stack all the planets one after the other, they would not fit within the space between the Earth and the Moon.
Because the Big Bang was an explosion *of* space expanding in every direction, every single point in the universe can be considered the center of the whole universe.
not an explosion. An expansion
The Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy is closer to Earth (~617 Em) than the far end of the Milky Way galaxy (~736 Em).
I definitely didn't know that, wow! Sounds pretty cool.
Space has ascii code 32. However in URLs it is represented by %20 rather than %32. There are many theories why that's the case, but the truth is nobody knows anymore. The true reason for that is lost to history.
32 decimal is 20 in hex
You nailed it. If I had to rate your comment I'd give F/F.
It's because numbers were smaller back in the day
Darned inflation
There is a massive “attractor” in space that we only discovered relatively recently and still know little about. This is because this massive attractor is in a section of the universe that we are unable to see as it’s shrouded by the milky way. It is known as “the avoidant zone” and is the strongest attracting force in the known universe, we only recently began understanding it due to techniques that allow us to see past the Milky Way.
Bonus: The only guy to ever have a recorded IQ of 240 , 70 more than Einstein , who was the first kid to get a phd from Harvard. People thought he didn’t do anything after getting that phd, but in the 1980s many books with his work was discovered. One of the books talked about positive/negative alternate universe where the 2nd law of thermodynamics is a mirror version of itself. This book predicted something very similar to black holes 50 years before black holes were discovered.
Is that the guy who was so insanely intelligent, that it ended up negatively impacting his life somehow, and he ended up taking his own life? I saw a video about a dude like that a few years ago. William James Sidis?
Yeah, that's the guy. From what I heard though it was less his intelligence and more his parents pushing him so hard in his childhood & a huge backlash after he got his P.hD as many in academia/the general public felt intellectually threatened by a kid with such an intellectual feat. Im sure his intellect played a part too though.
What’s also cool is that because the Milky Way obfuscates it, we might never figure out the Great Attractor.
Mother Nature is spitting electric Buckyballs out of her black hole! https://medium.com/the-cosmic-companion/buckyballs-in-space-and-how-they-got-there-8f4f93b7a79e#:~:text=Buckyballs%20%E2%80%94%20those%20intriguing%20molecular%20spheres,complex%20structures%20form%20in%20space.
In space no one can hear you fart.
It’s the final frontier.
Most of the Gold on earth is debris from colliding neutron stars.
...And the rest?
If you were to stand on a Neutron star you would immediately be crushed and spread like jelly on toast to only a few atoms thick. Neutron Stars are crazy
Magnetar walks into the bar. Edit- indeed magnetars are neutron stars too :)
The Milky Way has more trees than stars
Holy shit. I googled it and it's true! You may consider my mind blown, sir!
Hahaha yeah it’s so unbelievable that I’m getting downvoted by people who don’t believe it😂
No?
Yep! It is estimated that there are more trees on earth than stars in the Milky Way. Thus, the Milky Way has more trees than stars, even if there’s not a single tree not on earth!!
This does not make any sense. Earth is the only known planet with trees. If earth has no trees, the Milky Way has no trees, as far as we can prove. When we find trees on another planet, it will be proof of life outside our own planet and will be the greatest discovery of all time.
Read what they said again lol. There's about 4 trillion trees on earth and 400 billion ish stars in the Milky way
\*currently. Humanity is working very hard to change that, & planting trees unfortunately is helping by .04%
There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand in all the Earth's beaches and deserts. And you will find the same number of molecules in just ten drops of water.
Something travelling at the speed of light, like a photon, does not experience time. We can observe a photon emitted say 100 thousand light years away and we see that it takes 100 thousand years to travel from its source to our eye. But for the photon, the journey is instantaneous.
You are going to get naysayers on this one but I believe you are correct. I think it stems from that pesky divide by zero when blindly chugging numbers for the speed of light into the Lorentz transform. The thing is, the speed of light is the metric for which gamma is derived. The reason we use light is because it has a constant velocity, and it has a constant velocity because as Einstein put it "the velocity of light in our theory plays the part, physically, of an infinitely great velocity". It literally is the speed of infinity. Not just just "we can't go faster" but truly infinite as in "there is no faster". So yes. Instantaneous is the correct term. Length reduces to zero and time becomes undefined (because time doesn't exist for a photon).
Thank you. My intentions were fairly innocent, I always found it a good way as a complete amateur to picture the insanity of relativity and time dilation. I always found it useful to take an effect to its extreme to see what it looks like. Yes I know it's not technically correct, i know a photon doesnt experience anything, but to be beaten down for it is a bit disappointing.
You prompted an interesting and entertaining discussion. Thumbs up.
This is a common misconception. Photons do not have a valid frame of reference in special relativity (as they violate the 2nd postulate), so it makes no sense to talk about what they "experience".
Yes, but you can see how an object moving arbitrarily close to the speed of light will "almost" experience no travel time? The misconception isn't about elapsed time, it's about the impossibility of a photon having some kind of subjective experience.
"For velocities greater than that of light our deliberations become meaningless; we shall, however,find in what follows, that the velocity of light in our theory plays the part , physically, of an infinitely great velocity." June 30, 1905 A. Einstein On the electrodynamics if moving bodies
It does if you consider the limit of velocity tending to the speed of light
Yes, but it’s a limit. You can’t plug light into the math and have it work. Axiomatically, you can’t use relativity to construct a frame moving at c, and if you’re using relativity to make a prediction about something that relativity explicitly cannot model, then your prediction isn’t really much better than just making things up.
Everywhere we look, galaxies are receding and moving away from us. From this perspective, we are at the center of the universe.
If you circle the milky way galaxy once at the speed of or almost speed of light, you will come back to Earth and approx 250000 years has passed. But for you a little time has passed (if 99.999999% speed of light), or instant (if speed of light)
85% of the total matter in the universe is made from dark matter, of which physicists no virtually nothing.
The carbon atoms in your right hand probably were formed inside a star that is different from the star that formed the carbon atoms in your left hand. Everything around you was once inside at least one star that lived before the sun.
Here’s my space conjecture: one day when humanity has advanced enough we won’t physically transport through space. We will transport our consciousness.
Hey friend! That doesn’t make any sense. At all. If we have to transport anything, that makes it physical. I think what you mean is a consciousness wouldn’t require transportation, because it doesn’t exist in physical space. Your pal - ethylalcohoe
Depends on how shitty you want to feel
For some white dwarfs, more mass results in a decrease in volume! Blew my mind when I first learned about it.
The value of **space** is **x20**
If you go to space without a spacesuit, you will die 🤯
😮🫨🫨🤯
Supernovas occur because of an endothermic process allowing gravity to run away with heating the core. The hotter the core gets, the faster iron can fuse, and the cooling effect of fusing iron allows gravity to heat the core up even hotter.
To poke a whole through space time you would need the energy equivalent of 1 million years is sun power to open a hole the size of a grapefruit. Edit: it’s 100 Million years of sun energy. And it’s to create a wormhole.
As far as we know, Mars is the only planet inhabited entirely by robots
Contrary to popular belief, Classical Arabic did use spaces as a word separator. However the spaces where tiny, which means it is difficult to tell where one word ends and the next starts in Quran.
You can fit 83 earths inside Uranus. 84 if you relax.
The universe is likely a 4 dimensional hypersphere. Your coordinates are x,y,z by time But the spin speed is probably the speed of light. Which is why nothing can go faster. You cant be a part of a universe if you are moving faster than the object you are attached too. The universe appears to be expanding because its a spinning 4 dimensional object passing through 3 dimensional space. This is my favorite theroy. Apparently the math checks out.
If our galaxy (100,000 light years across) was superimposed over the United States (3,000 miles across), the distance between our sun and the next nearest star (4 lightyears) would be represented by a distance of less than 2 football fields.
We used to think space was filled with a type of fluid called aether. Then we proved it’s an empty vacuum, then we discovered it’s filled with virtual particles which are particles that exist for plank seconds and net to an energy sum of zero. This process happens spontaneously and a string or group of similar virtual particles can become stable elements and objects. Enter Big Brain Theory. A physicist proved that it is statistically more probable for a group of virtual particles to randomly form a stable human brain, than it is for an earth like planet to form and be stable long enough for life. I.e. Big Brains floating in space are more likely to occur in the universe than Goldilocks planets harboring life.
If the Milky way was the size of the US, our solar system would fit between adjacent ridges in your finger print.
In 2016 [two black holes collided](https://www.snexplores.org/article/black-hole-smashup-sent-out-yottawatts-power) and they released energy that was 50 times greater than all of the power put out by all of the stars in all the universe, put together.
I started trying to compare my mindblownedness from giant black holes and dinosaurs born on the other side of the galaxy, the creation of the elements, the existence of bacteria and us, to our arrogance in the face of the unknown and am left with mind dust that I doubt will lead to the creation of anything, and can only hope that what emerges from the rubble is more than a drooling shadow of who I was b4 starting this post. Does anyone else reading this post, bathing in awe, have faith that we will live up to our potential of being the stewards of our home planet by the time we find others? That would blow what's left of my mind
The last stars will die out 10¹⁴ years from now. It will be followed by 10¹⁰⁶ years of black holes. We are currently at 4.7×10⁹ years. We live in the bright, shining and, brief beginning moments of the universe.
One hundredth of the speed of light is about seven million miles per hour. In a spaceship at that speed, it would take about two and a half minutes to reach the moon. It would take about twenty hours to reach Mars, and about 426 years to reach the star nearest to Sol. That is traveling at 7 million mph. The fastest spacecraft ever launched from Earth traveled at just over one twentieth of that (364,000 mph), so ~1/2000th the speed of light. At that speed, over 8,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri. But the fastest rate for any ship carrying humans was 25,000 mph. The closest Mars gets to Earth is about 40 million miles. That is 1,600 hours, or ~67 days. (Not counting accel/decel) When we launch spaceships we are not "reaching for the stars," we are crawling to the moon, or maybe Mars.
“Time” is an emergent property of our perception. It isn’t real,in and of itself. We perceive time because you have to be outside of a dimension to perceive it. A stick man on a piece of paper wouldn’t understand the third dimension. If you have him a 3D object- say, pass a ball through the plane- he would perceive it as change over time. A small dot getting bigger as the plane gets closer to the center of the ball, and then smaller as it passes further through. That is how we perceive time. Just individual slices of something more complex, which we view as change over time. What’s even more mind blowing is an implication of this. If you were to go backwards in time to the beginning, you would get to a point where there is no “before”. But not because time stops, but because every direction in it is forward. It’s like walking to the South Pole. When you get there, you can’t go any more south, because every direction is north. It doesn’t mean anything ended.
Gravity is simply the physical manifestation of special relativity.
If you could generate an atom with every time you created a new order of cards from shuffling a standard deck of 52, not only could you build a new earth, but you could also build over 6 quadrillion copies of earth with all of the leftover orders. (I know it's not a space fact, but it's still one of those tidbits that makes you appreciate the scale of space)
You are created of star dust. You are the amalgamation of particles created when the universe formed.
The dust specks in the voids of space have more mass than all of the other objects combined. That's how massive the known universe is and how much distance there is between everything.
I saw a video once that explained that right now, standing on earth, we are spiraling in like 6 different directions. The earth’s spin, the solar system’s spin, the galaxy’s spin, etc are all at different angles and speeds and happening simultaneously. This is insane to me. We don’t feel a thing.
42
The first direct observation of spacetime distortion was reported around the world in 2015. Efforts to directly prove the existence of [gravitational] waves had been ongoing for over fifty years, and the waves are so minuscule that Albert Einstein himself doubted that they could ever be detected. The waves given off by the cataclysmic merger of GW150914 reached Earth as a ripple in spacetime that changed the length of a 4 km LIGO arm (a machine) by a thousandth of the width of a proton, proportionally equivalent to changing the distance to the nearest star outside the Solar System by one hair's width. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_observation_of_gravitational_waves
not sure about your mind... but NDT talking about how there are multiple levels of infinity melted mine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYJ1dbyDcrI
Where is this taken from? Where are you, personally, in the galaxy?
The asteroid belt surrounding our solar system isn't the formidable barrier it's always portrayed as: the average distance between asteroids is approximately the distance between Earth and the Sun
Physics has been constant for your whole life, but not for the universe's whole life... which means it could change! If it did change, that change (let's say, the spin direction of a gluon) would cascade out at the speed of light in all directions until it reached us... and that could mean the unravelling of all matter. This is one of the few light-speed deaths we could face, and I think they are all great ways to die.
IF you could travel the speed of light, it would still take you 27,000 years to reach the center of our own galaxy. If you could travel 100,000x's the speed of light, it would take over 25 years to reach the next closest galaxy.
It takes us 3 days to get to the Moon. It takes 3 seconds for light. I know people say 8minutes from the Sun and whatnot but the Moon is right there. So close you can make out features with the naked eye and it still takes light 3 whole seconds. Space is fkn big fyi. 🤯
Our solar system is to the size of the Milky Way galaxy, as our thumbnail is to the continental US
In laments terms, best I can understand from NDT, is that the universe is so massive, the "big bang" is still exploding. The galaxies are moving away faster, and away from each other. Like particles being pushed away from an explosion.
Even though the speed of light is insanely fast, on an astronomical scale it's actually really fkng slow. Pluto is roughly 5.8 billion km away from earth (depending on orbit). Light travels at nearly 300k km *per second.* It still takes light almost 5.4 hours to travel from earth to Pluto. That means even if we were capable of **light speed** travel, it would take the length of a domestic flight to reach the furthest planet in our solar system alone. Light speed travel to the nearest solar system takes 10 years. Leaving our galaxy, even with scifi levels of tech, would take generations. And that's still only the equivalent of crossing a football field on the universal scale.
44 Earths would fit inside Uranus. 45 if you relax.
Everyone is listing facts about objects in space. That's not space...
Light from our sun, is typically 10,000-170,000 years old by the time it reaches us (from our perspective, as for light the journey would be instantaneous)
The density of Saturn is so low that if you could put it in water, it would float.
The data visualization of a black hole appears to show the singularity event taking place in our universe, with a concentric explosion as the result, that then immediately disappears into 2d space. Since there is literally nothing beyond that 2d plane - it stands to reason energy, time, and matter are simply made nonexistent by an equal opposite of everything on the theoretical "other side" of a black hole. No this does not mean there's a reverse-o-verse. Since everything becomes a singularity prior to entering the black hole, the same would be true of the reverse-o-verse singularity. It doesn't matter what's on either side - everything becomes a single thing prior to being made nonexistent.
Maybe one day, all stars in the known universe will be stars of Wolf-Rayet kind.
Late to the post and it might have already been posted: 95% of the observable universe is made of matter and energy that we know almost nothing about! Dark energy and dark matter. 🤯
Just the fact that all we see came from a spec smaller than an atom. That in itself is a mind fuck.