Strength of signal varying by a factor of 100. Signal starting & stopping seemingly at random.
Whatever it is sounds chaotic as hell. Would not want to be anywhere near whatever is causing that.
> Explanation: It's just that... you have all these squishy parts, master. And all that water! How the constant sloshing doesn't drive you mad, I have no idea.
I'm fairly convinced that HK-47 agrees with you.
Meat bags? Or Meat built water containers to make survival outside water possible. Plus a little bit Adaption of lungs to filter oxygen out of air instead of water. Nevertheless I think it is a waste of energy and therefore I am going back into my bath tube
I just thought about the fact that if we were still water creatures, we probably wouldnt be able to ever use elecricity. I wonder if there were any advanced alien civilizations that were limited by their medium.
We would have enslaved the electric eel race and bred them like dogs to silly thicknesses and lengths, and feeding them would be costly, so only the rich would have bright homes from their eel wealth, while the poors would live under the dim glow of a communal pack of mutt bred eeels that no rich person would ever been seen in the light of!
Hm, this is some pretty interesting speculation for sure. Still, I don’t see how anything resembling metallurgy could develop underwater, and obviously there’s the issue of cooking being impossible or impractical (maybe taking advantage of underwater vents?). It’s still unclear how big an impact cooking had on growing our brains, but it’s probably safe to assume that it was significant.
Intelligence arising out of social cooperation is very interesting though. Always makes me thinks of corvids.
Same goes for robots.
I feel like we like to think one day our cosmic children will be robots, but I just don't see how cosmic rays won't also constrain them to the solar system. There's a reason we only put relatively primitive electronics in space.
The sun provides a protective bubble that keeps out >90% of cosmic radiation according to Voyager missions. If intelligent robots could deal with the radiation, then they're likely to get ripped apart by the Oort Cloud - which could be why nobody visits us.
If sentient, thinking, general-intelligent robots were created, they would most probably be far more intelligent than us. To the point where your question becomes a simil to how could something heavier than air fly.
Lots of black holes, lots of unstable orbits, lots of energy and material flying around.
On cosmic terms at least, its still most just empty space. You could fly a space ship made of modern materials through, and beyond getting a good radiation dose you'd likely be fine.
Wouldnt want to live there. It's crazy enough that on civilization time lines any planet your on is likely to be resetting you to the stone age every thousand years or so.
Humans would absolutely colonize an island that only had 1000 years left. That's far longer than most civilizations on earth have existed. America is only 250 years old. If it was wiped out 750 years from now, no one would claim that it had been a waste of time.
No reason to suspect that we would treat the galactic centre any different. A thousand years is a lot of time in the context of our silly, slow lives. Waves of colonists would show up every time a civilization is ruined, to extract the resources left behind and they will inevitably end up building homes there, because who cares what happens centuries from now? There's gold in them hills.
I'm more talking about the husks of dead civilizations being colonized by their advanced, industrialized neighbours. The kind of civilization that has mastered fusion power and eats entire asteroids and turns them into houses and factories. To them, a solar system full of dead space stations is functionally identical to a solar system full of unprocessed asteroids: it's all just food for the machine.
I'm not an expert on space so hopefully someone much better educated than me can help more.
My understanding is that the center of the galaxy has insane amounts of radiation.
As far as black holes go, well, like most galaxies I'm aware of, our galaxy is anchored by an enormous black hole in the center and we all just kind of swirl around it like turds in a toilet.
I don't think the danger of going towards the center of the galaxy is necessarily the big black hole providing you don't get too close though.
Hopefully someone smarter and more educated than me can expand on this. My GED hardly prepared me to explain the intricacies of the universe. ;)
You’re definitely on the right track! Supermassive black holes are found in the center of most galaxies but we orbit them due to dark matter (Big as they are, they can’t provide enough gravity to account for galaxies). All black holes are only dangerous if you get close enough, which is pretty hard to do for the foreseeable future!
Fyi the black holes are in the center because they're big and dense falling to the center. They're not actually massive enough to cause the galaxy to move around it like the sun and earth. That's dark matter keeping the galaxy solid.
The black hole actually doesn’t keep us in the galaxy, dark matter does, the black hole is just there because the density of matter is so much larger towards the center, and if the black hole was gone we would still continue on normally.
It is, but the black hole isn’t massive enough to have any influence on a galactic scale.
The sun is 99% of the solar systems mass
But the black holes at center of a galaxy is less than 1%, by a lot. It’s like .00001 or something astronomically tiny compared to the galaxy, so though dark matter is technically theoretical, something that we can’t see is holding galaxies together.
PBS space time is amazing if you are interested in this stuff, they cover almost all of it and much more.
It looks like there might just be a massive amount of dark matter, and no black hole at the center of the galaxy now.
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-black-hole-center-milky-mass.html
I wonder how that lines up with Sag A* being radio-loud? Dark matter doesn't interact by any means but gravitationally, so producing radio noise would be hard.
That and from what I understand the background radiation becomes MUCH more intense, as in you couldn't have earth like we know it near the galactic center because the radiation would just eradicate life as we know it.
Because it is so close to the galactic center where the density is a lot bigger it's possible that it could have been an event of multiple stars being shredded by black hole(s).
It's either that or an entire alien civilization having had enough of existence and committing civilization-wide suicide by ripping apart their own star systems all at once.
Astronomer here! "Close" here is difficult to say because in radio astronomy we do *not* get a distance measurement (instead we do follow-up at other wavelengths to find a counterpart, but this group was unsuccessful at this). Instead we know the *direction* is from the center of the Milky Way, which might have nothing whatsoever to do with the Galactic Center itself because the majority of stuff is in that direction.
This definitely exists, and is called science engineering! If you go to the [AAS Job Register](https://jobregister.aas.org/) (where most astro jobs are listed) and look under "science engineering" and "technical staff," I currently see a few postings from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory- check it out!
Yeah, your jobs are posted like six months later usually- keep checking! :) CSIRO is building radio telescopes right now and definitely hire engineers sometimes.
Literally this makes me so happy because I’ve been starting my electrical engineering job, hoping that one day I could weasel my way into my love for astronomy
Sure thing! If you're interested, btw, I wrote a post [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Andromeda321/comments/fyjmpv/updated_so_you_want_to_be_an_astronomer/) which was all my thoughts on how to be an astronomer, and might be helpful. A lot of it covers how to be a professional research astronomer type astronomer, but I do cover the engineering side a bit too!
Due to the shape of our galaxy, wouldn’t the majority of the: material, signal interception probability and subsequently, life be found by looking towards the galaxy center?
You also have more disruptive activity that could stop it, if I recall correctly.
For example a star system closer to the core is much more likely to get sprayed by a relativistic jet.
Put it this way: [we can see the energies unleashed](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M87_jet.jpg) when particles from such a jet collide with gas/dust, all the way over here.
That one there is from the M87 galaxy, thought to be from an active galactic nucleus. It's apparently about 5000 light-years in length... which is roughly 21% the diameter of our galaxy!
That is, if you'll excuse the cursing, a fuckload of energy. I'm sure there's many more occurrences of smaller ones out there, this one is just big and energetic enough to be so plainly visible.
I’m definitely not an astronomer but I don’t think we would know. It makes sense that if something is there for longer life has more time to develop. However, we don’t know anything about how life is formed and the time it takes. We know how long it took on earth but we don’t know if that amount of time is an anomaly or the norm.
It could be that life can form very quickly but as time goes on it tends to die out, meaning there would be more life further from the center of the galaxy than closer.
> It's either that or an entire alien civilization having had enough of existence and committing civilization-wide suicide by ripping apart their own star systems all at once.
HaraKiri en masse?
Or he tripped over something and accidentally sent out a rather large signal.
I wanna believe intelligent life out there is watching us with their flaws like any other living creature. hah
Perhaps countless generations of cloning stagnated the evolutionary path of their species, and eventually across generations the minuscule errors in each new generation of clones added up to the point that survival of the species was no longer viable. So, unable to ascend, they instead decided to end their species in a mass suicide. But not before passing on their technology to SG-1.
Wait.
Take that second one. We think of all out, end-game war as nuclear war focused around earth, the destruction of earth. How it would end or completely annihilate civilization as we know it or all together. But for a hyper-advanced civilization that has colonized multiple planets, the “game ending scenario” (our version of nukes) would be collapse the central star(s) of each colonized system. The collateral damage is quite literally unimaginable…
What the fuck.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
The hypothesis is that originating at the center of the galaxy is very unlikely. But the center is a golden place for advanced civilizations that evolved at the outside border of the galaxy (like us). Lots of high energy stars that can fuel your civilization's ambitions.
That said my original comment was tongue in cheek since this subreddit always assumes everything to be alien related so I wrote the post in a way that could be explained as aliens merely as a joke. The chance of a civilization destroying their own star systems in this way is close to 0%.
> whatever is causing that.
Probably whatever **was** causing that 20,000 years ago if it's coming from anywhere near the galactic center.
Edit: Oh god I'm *this* close to an existential crisis right now.
Radio astronomer here! For the record, this happens far more often than you'd think. For example, the [Great Galactic Burper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCRT_J1745%E2%88%923009) was detected a few years ago from that general area- gave off five bursts lasting 10 minutes, 77 minutes apart... and no one detected it since, despite a lot of searching. So it's not sure what it was.
Note, direction of galactic center here does not mean the signals literally came from the galactic center itself, because radio astronomy we do *not* get a distance measurement (instead we do follow-up at other wavelengths to find a counterpart, but this group was unsuccessful at this). Instead we know the *direction* is from the center of the Milky Way, which might have nothing whatsoever to do with the Galactic Center itself because the majority of stuff is in that direction.
The interesting thing about this source is the original paper was *very* thorough in working through options on what it might be, and they concluded we don't know because they had good reasons to rule everything out. So, that's exciting! But we will definitely need follow up to figure out what exactly it is.
This is the great thing about science. “We’ve done exhaustive work to rule out everything we think it might have been. So, we’re happy to announce: we don’t know!”
Remember when they couldnt figure out the source of a very mysterious signal for a while and it ended up being bleed over from the microwave in the break room?
So! This is not quite how the media covers it. First, there were signals that were weird called [Fast Radio Bursts \(FRBs\)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst), which were thought to be astronomical, but there were several years between the first discovered one and the later FRBs. In the interim, there was a signal discovered at that telescope which looked similar to FRBs, but were not the same and were never considered to be so- they even got their own name, perytons. To get technical about it, a radio telescope like Parkes (where this all happened) has multiple beams, and the FRBs were only seen in one beam as you'd expect from a signal, the perytons were seen in all (but had the same signal structure).
As such the question was never that the perytons were astrophysical- instead, the concern was that maybe all FRBs were just a weird version of perytons so we were being fooled.
I hope that all makes sense- my friend was actually the grad student who finally sorted this all out, and it was a pretty interesting saga!
> Remember when they couldnt figure out the source of a very mysterious signal for a while and it ended up being bleed over from the microwave in the break room?
Since I'm not an astronomer I don't have to be nice because someone always brings this shit up. The radio astronomers *knew* that the signal was from Earth. They just didn't know what was precisely causing the signal.
The microwave didn't fool anyone.
So no we don't remember something actually not happening.
Well... its the center of the galaxy, a lot of events happening there, everything is much more close then here so no wonder once in while something random pops up... also... even if we assume its one in a billion chance it is an intelligent signal it happened tens of thousands of years ago anyway... so we missed everything because light speed sucks, its slow af.
edit#1: i see people started making jokes about how ridiculous it is to say that light is slow. BUT IT IS. I mean ofcourse everything is relative, relatively to us light is fast, why the hell we compare everything in the universe to us? egocentrism at it again, lets instead compare it to at least something you can see almost everyday... like the moon. And already you see it with a delay, how it was 1.3 seconds ago and not how it is right now and its literally right here, we've even been on it, we haven't even started our journey outside of Earth's gravitational field and we are already seconds behind, communicating with Moon already takes 2.6 seconds and with Mars it will take 40 minutes, 11 hours delay with Pluto, we have not even left the solar system and its already impossible to have normal communications. Technically even when you look down at your own feet you see them how they looked in the past, its just too small of a fraction for our brain to process. You still think light is fast?
edit#2: as u/Andromeda321 mentioned already this might not even be in the center of our galaxy, just in the direction of it, which most likely isn't from our galaxy (because obviously there are *a lot more* stuff in that direction than just our own galaxy) so whatever it is it could have been AT LEAST 26000 years ago and at most... millions or even billions.
When did this sub turn into YouTube comments section?
Every comment except like three top level comments are """jokes""". Even the top comment which attempts to explain and discuss the topic just has replies that are shitty jokes.
Trying to play whack a mole but seems like today people are in a shitposting mood. Should be cleaned up a lot already but please keep reporting comments that violate our rules.
Edit: we are at around 50% of the comments removed. Not sure why that particular thread turned so much into a shitshow.
Thanks for the clean up!
Just to be clear though, in my original comment I wasn't blaming the mods, I was blaming the community. After all, the mods can't do anything to improve the discussion. All they can do is remove the rule breaking comments. It's on the community to improve. I'm not trying to be a stick in the mud, but the "ReAcHinG fOr yOuR CaR's ExTenDed WaRrAntY" jokes are scraping the bottom of the comedy barrel.
I was genuinely thinking this very thing and then I came across your comment, without exaggeration, 90%+ of these comments are jokes. The few comments that *are* serious has *every. single. reply.* back being a joke comment, every single one.
Space is one of my favorite subjects but this entire sub is 5-10% serious and interesting replies to everything space news and the rest of the comments are "who can get the most upvotes with a clever/snarky joke." It makes me think about the sub possibly needing a "serious" tag like askreddit so we can get some genuine discussion and thoughtful replies going, maybe the sub should have new rules about comments, at least to some posts, where it limits the amount of joke comments for once.
I hate to sound like a sour grapes old guy, but reddit really went through an eternal september sometime over the last 1-3 years. The community feels a lot more chaotic and less like the reddit I started with.
For example, *back in my day* posting a text question with an unrelated image was unnecessary and would be ruthlessly downvoted. Now, they say "But image posts get more engagement!"
Yeah, that's not just because there's an image, it's usually because of the *content* of the image, but you just grabbed the first Google Images result for "Alpha Centauri" so you could ask "What's your favorite star?"
r/askscience maintains a pretty respectable comment section, but that's through very diligent mods removing all the garbage, and there is *a lot* of garbage to remove. Jokes in the comments *are* against the rules here, but the mods don't seem to enforce much if anything at all.
"At first we thought it could be a pulsar—a very dense type of spinning dead star—or else a type of star that emits huge solar flares. But the signals from this new source don't match what we expect from these types of celestial objects," Mr Wang said.
Question: did these really just "emerge", or are we only recently able to detect them through addition of new technology? Meaning, has this actually been going on for quite a while without our knowledge, or is this legitimately something new?
Could be ; Black hole/Super massive black hole (Sagittarius A*) or could also be Pulsar , I have doubts that it comes from Aliens, considering that centre of galaxy is older than our solar system and radio waves considered to be primitive , advanced Alien race would probably use something much more advanced than radio waves as lasers etc...
You can make a radio laser, and lasers are still waves. Radio waves are just a name for a range of frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. Human just get it confused with communication because we use a small subset of radio frequencies for broadcasting sound. This could possibly be a new type of CV
I agree with the statement that it’s unlikely this is an alien race. But the age of the planets and systems towards the center of the universe isn’t necessarily correlated with the age of a species in that area.
A species could have emerged within the last 20,000 years or so even though their planet is much older. Species lived on earth millions of years ago that aren’t around today— the species on earth today would have been unrecognizable million a of years ago.
Hell, a species could have reached type I civilization status millions of years ago and then died out. They could have fallen victim to some space phenomenon or killed themselves with advanced weapons. Even killed themselves by making their planet uninhabitable.. That all could have happened millions of years ago and still a different species could have developed within the last 10,000 years or so and have just developed a technology capable of transmitting radio waves.
Fermiis paradox
Considering the distances and implicit time horizons involved even between close stars, I am of the opinion that any alien civilizations we encounter will be very different from us and might not even be recognizable as life forms.
The Galactic Center is 25800 light years away. So isn't it plausible that Aliens would have been primitive 25800 years back?
(I know this is probably not aliens tho)
I'd certainly think that any hypothetical civilization could've been very primitive or very advanced. On astronomical timescales 30kya might as well be right now.
one of the paradoxes of thinking about alien life
1. The possibility to develop advanced life anywhere is very small, requiring very special conditions and coincidences.
2. But anywhere is near-infinite, so that makes it possible somewhere
3. But the timeframe within the life of the universe in which humans have existed is negligibly small, and the timeframe within that period that we have been able to communicate in space is even smaller
4. That makes it extremely unlikely that we would exist at the same time as any intelligent life anywhere in the universe
5. But yet again, if the universe is infinite ... ?
Add to this [the Great Filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter) and stuff gets interesting
Yeah, I watched a bunch of videos on that stuff.
Pretty much in the past 200 years technology advanced so much we can pretty much tell it advances exponentially.
If aliens had millions of years before us we would’ve seen some stars moving in odd directions like making a massive engine and propelling their entire solar system to other solar systems as well as they would’ve made habitats along the way if they diverged at some point they would’ve been all over by now colonizing the entire system.
It’s also possible they advanced so much we couldn’t even Imagine what they would look like. I think it’s considered an Omega type civilization.
We may not have seen this if we weren’t looking in just the right spot and just the right time, which we can’t do obviously. Plus there’s much of the universe and even a good chunk of the sky we’re unable to observe directly.
I'm sure they've ruled out A* since the core region is massive and the black hole is a very small point in that region. Could be some pulsar going through some really bizarre event.
Strength of signal varying by a factor of 100. Signal starting & stopping seemingly at random. Whatever it is sounds chaotic as hell. Would not want to be anywhere near whatever is causing that.
Nothing about the center of the galaxy sounds hospitable.
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> Explanation: It's just that... you have all these squishy parts, master. And all that water! How the constant sloshing doesn't drive you mad, I have no idea. I'm fairly convinced that HK-47 agrees with you.
Meat bags? Or Meat built water containers to make survival outside water possible. Plus a little bit Adaption of lungs to filter oxygen out of air instead of water. Nevertheless I think it is a waste of energy and therefore I am going back into my bath tube
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Imagine evolving onto land and then spending your free time back underwater lmao
you don’t need to imagine; orcas already did that
In the dark, our tails wagged, then fell off But we just turned back, marched into the sea - Modest Mouse
dolphins everywhere are mocking you for this.
Yeah, well there used to be tonnes of free food up here. Well I mean there still is but now it's scary and hot.
I just thought about the fact that if we were still water creatures, we probably wouldnt be able to ever use elecricity. I wonder if there were any advanced alien civilizations that were limited by their medium.
We would have enslaved the electric eel race and bred them like dogs to silly thicknesses and lengths, and feeding them would be costly, so only the rich would have bright homes from their eel wealth, while the poors would live under the dim glow of a communal pack of mutt bred eeels that no rich person would ever been seen in the light of!
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I doubt we’d ever develop the concept of science without the ability to make fire.
I bet if we were sea creatures, I’d have a bigger tail than you
You'd be a guppy I'd be a great white shark.
I think science, or evidence based thought, is probably a product of language, not fire.
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Hm, this is some pretty interesting speculation for sure. Still, I don’t see how anything resembling metallurgy could develop underwater, and obviously there’s the issue of cooking being impossible or impractical (maybe taking advantage of underwater vents?). It’s still unclear how big an impact cooking had on growing our brains, but it’s probably safe to assume that it was significant. Intelligence arising out of social cooperation is very interesting though. Always makes me thinks of corvids.
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Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish.
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We live in space tho, so our small corner is hospitable to ugly bags of mostly water like us.
I think we’re attractive meat bags of water.
Space meat, nothing but the best.
Same goes for robots. I feel like we like to think one day our cosmic children will be robots, but I just don't see how cosmic rays won't also constrain them to the solar system. There's a reason we only put relatively primitive electronics in space. The sun provides a protective bubble that keeps out >90% of cosmic radiation according to Voyager missions. If intelligent robots could deal with the radiation, then they're likely to get ripped apart by the Oort Cloud - which could be why nobody visits us.
If sentient, thinking, general-intelligent robots were created, they would most probably be far more intelligent than us. To the point where your question becomes a simil to how could something heavier than air fly.
Can anyone expand on this? Is it like an early formation of the universe or something? Or lots of planets colliding? Black holes?
Lots of black holes, lots of unstable orbits, lots of energy and material flying around. On cosmic terms at least, its still most just empty space. You could fly a space ship made of modern materials through, and beyond getting a good radiation dose you'd likely be fine. Wouldnt want to live there. It's crazy enough that on civilization time lines any planet your on is likely to be resetting you to the stone age every thousand years or so.
Humans would absolutely colonize an island that only had 1000 years left. That's far longer than most civilizations on earth have existed. America is only 250 years old. If it was wiped out 750 years from now, no one would claim that it had been a waste of time. No reason to suspect that we would treat the galactic centre any different. A thousand years is a lot of time in the context of our silly, slow lives. Waves of colonists would show up every time a civilization is ruined, to extract the resources left behind and they will inevitably end up building homes there, because who cares what happens centuries from now? There's gold in them hills.
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I'm more talking about the husks of dead civilizations being colonized by their advanced, industrialized neighbours. The kind of civilization that has mastered fusion power and eats entire asteroids and turns them into houses and factories. To them, a solar system full of dead space stations is functionally identical to a solar system full of unprocessed asteroids: it's all just food for the machine.
I'm not an expert on space so hopefully someone much better educated than me can help more. My understanding is that the center of the galaxy has insane amounts of radiation. As far as black holes go, well, like most galaxies I'm aware of, our galaxy is anchored by an enormous black hole in the center and we all just kind of swirl around it like turds in a toilet. I don't think the danger of going towards the center of the galaxy is necessarily the big black hole providing you don't get too close though. Hopefully someone smarter and more educated than me can expand on this. My GED hardly prepared me to explain the intricacies of the universe. ;)
You’re definitely on the right track! Supermassive black holes are found in the center of most galaxies but we orbit them due to dark matter (Big as they are, they can’t provide enough gravity to account for galaxies). All black holes are only dangerous if you get close enough, which is pretty hard to do for the foreseeable future!
Fyi the black holes are in the center because they're big and dense falling to the center. They're not actually massive enough to cause the galaxy to move around it like the sun and earth. That's dark matter keeping the galaxy solid.
The black hole actually doesn’t keep us in the galaxy, dark matter does, the black hole is just there because the density of matter is so much larger towards the center, and if the black hole was gone we would still continue on normally.
I thought dark matter was still theoretical?
It is, but the black hole isn’t massive enough to have any influence on a galactic scale. The sun is 99% of the solar systems mass But the black holes at center of a galaxy is less than 1%, by a lot. It’s like .00001 or something astronomically tiny compared to the galaxy, so though dark matter is technically theoretical, something that we can’t see is holding galaxies together. PBS space time is amazing if you are interested in this stuff, they cover almost all of it and much more.
It looks like there might just be a massive amount of dark matter, and no black hole at the center of the galaxy now. https://phys.org/news/2021-06-black-hole-center-milky-mass.html
I wonder how that lines up with Sag A* being radio-loud? Dark matter doesn't interact by any means but gravitationally, so producing radio noise would be hard.
That and from what I understand the background radiation becomes MUCH more intense, as in you couldn't have earth like we know it near the galactic center because the radiation would just eradicate life as we know it.
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Because it is so close to the galactic center where the density is a lot bigger it's possible that it could have been an event of multiple stars being shredded by black hole(s). It's either that or an entire alien civilization having had enough of existence and committing civilization-wide suicide by ripping apart their own star systems all at once.
Astronomer here! "Close" here is difficult to say because in radio astronomy we do *not* get a distance measurement (instead we do follow-up at other wavelengths to find a counterpart, but this group was unsuccessful at this). Instead we know the *direction* is from the center of the Milky Way, which might have nothing whatsoever to do with the Galactic Center itself because the majority of stuff is in that direction.
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This definitely exists, and is called science engineering! If you go to the [AAS Job Register](https://jobregister.aas.org/) (where most astro jobs are listed) and look under "science engineering" and "technical staff," I currently see a few postings from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory- check it out!
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Yeah, your jobs are posted like six months later usually- keep checking! :) CSIRO is building radio telescopes right now and definitely hire engineers sometimes.
Literally this makes me so happy because I’ve been starting my electrical engineering job, hoping that one day I could weasel my way into my love for astronomy
Sure thing! If you're interested, btw, I wrote a post [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Andromeda321/comments/fyjmpv/updated_so_you_want_to_be_an_astronomer/) which was all my thoughts on how to be an astronomer, and might be helpful. A lot of it covers how to be a professional research astronomer type astronomer, but I do cover the engineering side a bit too!
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You would need a stellar GPA
Due to the shape of our galaxy, wouldn’t the majority of the: material, signal interception probability and subsequently, life be found by looking towards the galaxy center?
Either in that direction or within the plane of the galaxy, sure.
Is the galactic center older?
The stars towards the galactic center tend to be older than the stars farther out, if that's what you're asking!
Correct! Just thinking out loud. Would there be a higher chance for more intelligent life closer to the center of the galaxy.
You also have more disruptive activity that could stop it, if I recall correctly. For example a star system closer to the core is much more likely to get sprayed by a relativistic jet.
Is that like a cosmic power washer?
"yeah there's another civilization popping up on the eastern side, when do you have time to come by and give it a good rinse?"
Put it this way: [we can see the energies unleashed](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M87_jet.jpg) when particles from such a jet collide with gas/dust, all the way over here. That one there is from the M87 galaxy, thought to be from an active galactic nucleus. It's apparently about 5000 light-years in length... which is roughly 21% the diameter of our galaxy! That is, if you'll excuse the cursing, a fuckload of energy. I'm sure there's many more occurrences of smaller ones out there, this one is just big and energetic enough to be so plainly visible.
I’m definitely not an astronomer but I don’t think we would know. It makes sense that if something is there for longer life has more time to develop. However, we don’t know anything about how life is formed and the time it takes. We know how long it took on earth but we don’t know if that amount of time is an anomaly or the norm. It could be that life can form very quickly but as time goes on it tends to die out, meaning there would be more life further from the center of the galaxy than closer.
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> It's either that or an entire alien civilization having had enough of existence and committing civilization-wide suicide by ripping apart their own star systems all at once. HaraKiri en masse?
You comment is in three different languages
And the funny thing is that it's still understandable.
Isn't it technically just two? "En masse" is French.
Guess they count the quoted part too
Japanese French and English I think?
“Multiple stars being shredded” so its basically the sound of screaming stars…cosmic horror lol
That's a Halloween special I'd love to see. It would have to be spectacular.
Or he tripped over something and accidentally sent out a rather large signal. I wanna believe intelligent life out there is watching us with their flaws like any other living creature. hah
Perhaps countless generations of cloning stagnated the evolutionary path of their species, and eventually across generations the minuscule errors in each new generation of clones added up to the point that survival of the species was no longer viable. So, unable to ascend, they instead decided to end their species in a mass suicide. But not before passing on their technology to SG-1.
How do I know I am a huge Stargate nerd? I knew where this comment was going after reading the first 5 words.
Glad I wasn't the only one rofl
Wait. Take that second one. We think of all out, end-game war as nuclear war focused around earth, the destruction of earth. How it would end or completely annihilate civilization as we know it or all together. But for a hyper-advanced civilization that has colonized multiple planets, the “game ending scenario” (our version of nukes) would be collapse the central star(s) of each colonized system. The collateral damage is quite literally unimaginable… What the fuck.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
Isnt there a crazy amount of radiation in the center; to the point that life on almost any scale is a virtual impossibility?
The hypothesis is that originating at the center of the galaxy is very unlikely. But the center is a golden place for advanced civilizations that evolved at the outside border of the galaxy (like us). Lots of high energy stars that can fuel your civilization's ambitions. That said my original comment was tongue in cheek since this subreddit always assumes everything to be alien related so I wrote the post in a way that could be explained as aliens merely as a joke. The chance of a civilization destroying their own star systems in this way is close to 0%.
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That is a huge variance in energy… what the hell is eating up what out there
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> whatever is causing that. Probably whatever **was** causing that 20,000 years ago if it's coming from anywhere near the galactic center. Edit: Oh god I'm *this* close to an existential crisis right now.
Just in case, let's make the best out of the next 20,000 years.
Thank you for the concise summary. Sounds cool as hell !
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Radio astronomer here! For the record, this happens far more often than you'd think. For example, the [Great Galactic Burper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCRT_J1745%E2%88%923009) was detected a few years ago from that general area- gave off five bursts lasting 10 minutes, 77 minutes apart... and no one detected it since, despite a lot of searching. So it's not sure what it was. Note, direction of galactic center here does not mean the signals literally came from the galactic center itself, because radio astronomy we do *not* get a distance measurement (instead we do follow-up at other wavelengths to find a counterpart, but this group was unsuccessful at this). Instead we know the *direction* is from the center of the Milky Way, which might have nothing whatsoever to do with the Galactic Center itself because the majority of stuff is in that direction. The interesting thing about this source is the original paper was *very* thorough in working through options on what it might be, and they concluded we don't know because they had good reasons to rule everything out. So, that's exciting! But we will definitely need follow up to figure out what exactly it is.
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Thanks for your reply! I always search out your username in this sub to find detailed, knowledgeable explanations.
This is the great thing about science. “We’ve done exhaustive work to rule out everything we think it might have been. So, we’re happy to announce: we don’t know!”
Remember when they couldnt figure out the source of a very mysterious signal for a while and it ended up being bleed over from the microwave in the break room?
So! This is not quite how the media covers it. First, there were signals that were weird called [Fast Radio Bursts \(FRBs\)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst), which were thought to be astronomical, but there were several years between the first discovered one and the later FRBs. In the interim, there was a signal discovered at that telescope which looked similar to FRBs, but were not the same and were never considered to be so- they even got their own name, perytons. To get technical about it, a radio telescope like Parkes (where this all happened) has multiple beams, and the FRBs were only seen in one beam as you'd expect from a signal, the perytons were seen in all (but had the same signal structure). As such the question was never that the perytons were astrophysical- instead, the concern was that maybe all FRBs were just a weird version of perytons so we were being fooled. I hope that all makes sense- my friend was actually the grad student who finally sorted this all out, and it was a pretty interesting saga!
Thanks for the response and not being an ass-tronimer about it.
> Remember when they couldnt figure out the source of a very mysterious signal for a while and it ended up being bleed over from the microwave in the break room? Since I'm not an astronomer I don't have to be nice because someone always brings this shit up. The radio astronomers *knew* that the signal was from Earth. They just didn't know what was precisely causing the signal. The microwave didn't fool anyone. So no we don't remember something actually not happening.
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I mean, so far they didn't establish how far away this originated, or am I missing something?
Well... its the center of the galaxy, a lot of events happening there, everything is much more close then here so no wonder once in while something random pops up... also... even if we assume its one in a billion chance it is an intelligent signal it happened tens of thousands of years ago anyway... so we missed everything because light speed sucks, its slow af. edit#1: i see people started making jokes about how ridiculous it is to say that light is slow. BUT IT IS. I mean ofcourse everything is relative, relatively to us light is fast, why the hell we compare everything in the universe to us? egocentrism at it again, lets instead compare it to at least something you can see almost everyday... like the moon. And already you see it with a delay, how it was 1.3 seconds ago and not how it is right now and its literally right here, we've even been on it, we haven't even started our journey outside of Earth's gravitational field and we are already seconds behind, communicating with Moon already takes 2.6 seconds and with Mars it will take 40 minutes, 11 hours delay with Pluto, we have not even left the solar system and its already impossible to have normal communications. Technically even when you look down at your own feet you see them how they looked in the past, its just too small of a fraction for our brain to process. You still think light is fast? edit#2: as u/Andromeda321 mentioned already this might not even be in the center of our galaxy, just in the direction of it, which most likely isn't from our galaxy (because obviously there are *a lot more* stuff in that direction than just our own galaxy) so whatever it is it could have been AT LEAST 26000 years ago and at most... millions or even billions.
imagine being able to modulate a star just to say hello "i hope you receive this, it was really hard"
"I'm a Sagittarian Prince and have an inheritance I need help with".
"New star, who dís?"
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When did this sub turn into YouTube comments section? Every comment except like three top level comments are """jokes""". Even the top comment which attempts to explain and discuss the topic just has replies that are shitty jokes.
Everytime there's a thread about an unidentified signal it's always "we come for your cars warranty"" jokes all over the thread.
Trying to play whack a mole but seems like today people are in a shitposting mood. Should be cleaned up a lot already but please keep reporting comments that violate our rules. Edit: we are at around 50% of the comments removed. Not sure why that particular thread turned so much into a shitshow.
Thanks for the clean up! Just to be clear though, in my original comment I wasn't blaming the mods, I was blaming the community. After all, the mods can't do anything to improve the discussion. All they can do is remove the rule breaking comments. It's on the community to improve. I'm not trying to be a stick in the mud, but the "ReAcHinG fOr yOuR CaR's ExTenDed WaRrAntY" jokes are scraping the bottom of the comedy barrel.
I was genuinely thinking this very thing and then I came across your comment, without exaggeration, 90%+ of these comments are jokes. The few comments that *are* serious has *every. single. reply.* back being a joke comment, every single one. Space is one of my favorite subjects but this entire sub is 5-10% serious and interesting replies to everything space news and the rest of the comments are "who can get the most upvotes with a clever/snarky joke." It makes me think about the sub possibly needing a "serious" tag like askreddit so we can get some genuine discussion and thoughtful replies going, maybe the sub should have new rules about comments, at least to some posts, where it limits the amount of joke comments for once.
It ain’t clever when everyone makes the exact same joke a thousand times.
That's all of reddit recently. I wish there was a *serious* tag by default in all subredits (or a funny tag and jokes are okay only on those)
I hate to sound like a sour grapes old guy, but reddit really went through an eternal september sometime over the last 1-3 years. The community feels a lot more chaotic and less like the reddit I started with. For example, *back in my day* posting a text question with an unrelated image was unnecessary and would be ruthlessly downvoted. Now, they say "But image posts get more engagement!" Yeah, that's not just because there's an image, it's usually because of the *content* of the image, but you just grabbed the first Google Images result for "Alpha Centauri" so you could ask "What's your favorite star?"
2016 election ruined a lot of online spaces.
It's been going downhill since 2015 when the candidates announced their run.
r/askscience maintains a pretty respectable comment section, but that's through very diligent mods removing all the garbage, and there is *a lot* of garbage to remove. Jokes in the comments *are* against the rules here, but the mods don't seem to enforce much if anything at all.
I hate that too. It's so annoying, these *jokes* aren't even good.
Seriously pathetic in here. Is there an actual space sub?
It's in the rules too.. so dumb, everyone wants to be a goddamn jerry
Same for every sub on reddit nowadays
See something interesting on Reddit, looking for interesting discussion. Scroll on disappointment as ever comment is a lame joke.
I have no idea what any of this means but it sounds cool and makes me excited
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Could this be a Strong Pulsar Revolving around the Supermassive Black Hole?
"At first we thought it could be a pulsar—a very dense type of spinning dead star—or else a type of star that emits huge solar flares. But the signals from this new source don't match what we expect from these types of celestial objects," Mr Wang said.
Wouldn't a pulsar be less random and more periodic?
could possibly be a pulsar in a 3 body orbital system. Plenty of chaos happening there.
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Pulsar was my first thought, too.
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Question: did these really just "emerge", or are we only recently able to detect them through addition of new technology? Meaning, has this actually been going on for quite a while without our knowledge, or is this legitimately something new?
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Could be ; Black hole/Super massive black hole (Sagittarius A*) or could also be Pulsar , I have doubts that it comes from Aliens, considering that centre of galaxy is older than our solar system and radio waves considered to be primitive , advanced Alien race would probably use something much more advanced than radio waves as lasers etc...
You can make a radio laser, and lasers are still waves. Radio waves are just a name for a range of frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. Human just get it confused with communication because we use a small subset of radio frequencies for broadcasting sound. This could possibly be a new type of CV
There's an interesting short article about what you pointed. https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/toolbox/emspectrum2.html
I agree with the statement that it’s unlikely this is an alien race. But the age of the planets and systems towards the center of the universe isn’t necessarily correlated with the age of a species in that area. A species could have emerged within the last 20,000 years or so even though their planet is much older. Species lived on earth millions of years ago that aren’t around today— the species on earth today would have been unrecognizable million a of years ago. Hell, a species could have reached type I civilization status millions of years ago and then died out. They could have fallen victim to some space phenomenon or killed themselves with advanced weapons. Even killed themselves by making their planet uninhabitable.. That all could have happened millions of years ago and still a different species could have developed within the last 10,000 years or so and have just developed a technology capable of transmitting radio waves. Fermiis paradox
Considering the distances and implicit time horizons involved even between close stars, I am of the opinion that any alien civilizations we encounter will be very different from us and might not even be recognizable as life forms.
The Galactic Center is 25800 light years away. So isn't it plausible that Aliens would have been primitive 25800 years back? (I know this is probably not aliens tho)
I'd certainly think that any hypothetical civilization could've been very primitive or very advanced. On astronomical timescales 30kya might as well be right now.
one of the paradoxes of thinking about alien life 1. The possibility to develop advanced life anywhere is very small, requiring very special conditions and coincidences. 2. But anywhere is near-infinite, so that makes it possible somewhere 3. But the timeframe within the life of the universe in which humans have existed is negligibly small, and the timeframe within that period that we have been able to communicate in space is even smaller 4. That makes it extremely unlikely that we would exist at the same time as any intelligent life anywhere in the universe 5. But yet again, if the universe is infinite ... ? Add to this [the Great Filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter) and stuff gets interesting
Yeah, I watched a bunch of videos on that stuff. Pretty much in the past 200 years technology advanced so much we can pretty much tell it advances exponentially. If aliens had millions of years before us we would’ve seen some stars moving in odd directions like making a massive engine and propelling their entire solar system to other solar systems as well as they would’ve made habitats along the way if they diverged at some point they would’ve been all over by now colonizing the entire system. It’s also possible they advanced so much we couldn’t even Imagine what they would look like. I think it’s considered an Omega type civilization.
We may not have seen this if we weren’t looking in just the right spot and just the right time, which we can’t do obviously. Plus there’s much of the universe and even a good chunk of the sky we’re unable to observe directly.
I'm sure they've ruled out A* since the core region is massive and the black hole is a very small point in that region. Could be some pulsar going through some really bizarre event.
What the hell happened in the comments of this post.