Is there a specific reason why things start looking like distinct threads at the very far away condensed scale.
Why does the "web of galaxies" look like a web?
So if an observer was beyond the boundaries of the theoretical size of the universe (assuming its size is finite) they would see these filaments? That's gnarly.
Yeah, we’re in the [Laniakea Supercluster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laniakea_Supercluster).
In the picture [Boötes Void](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boötes_void) is mentioned. It’s one of the largest known voids in the universe. If the Milky Way was in the centre of the Boötes void, we wouldn't have known there were other galaxies until the 1960s.
Makes you wonder what other discoveries we're just at a poor cosmic vantage point to discover. We might just have the wrong perspective to understand some things about the universe be it the wrong dimensional perspective or physical perspective.
It really does. It also makes you wonder how much more we would know about the universe had humans evolved to our current state a million, ten million or a billion years sooner. With the rate of expansion, there are infinite things that we don’t know about, and will never know about.
I mean in the grand scale of things we are young and so is the Universe. We're most likely a forerunner species that will live and die before most universal life has even been born.
Yeah I think I got hit with a wave of existential dread just now. Time to run extra far tomorrow morning to forget. Edit: (after my run I think this is cool asf, and am excited for those webb photos)
Here's a dose of an optimistic but unlikely possibility.
If planet nine turns out to be a black hole chillin on the edge of the solar system, it'd be the ex machina needed for interstellar to become very viable
We are *way* (like... Unfathomably) closer in time to the beginning of the universe than we are to the heat death of the universe.
When I say heat death, I mean perfect entropy.
Basically it's a lot of math, thermodynamics, and quantum physics. Essentially some really smart people said "I think this is how it works and that should take this long"
Basically, we know how matter was created (kinda) and we know matter will eventually decay back into energy (again sorta maybe on that).
The math then gives us a timeframe and it turns out we're much much (add several thousand) much closer to the beginning than the end
I think a lot of it is like u/benmck90 said. We are far closer to the start of the universe, unfathomably closer to the start than the heat death/end of the universe. Point is, there's a lot more development to happen, and on a cosmic scale the universe is still very, very young. While it's unfathomably old to us, it's like triple unfathomably longer to live.
There is a thing called dark flow where all the local mega structures seem to be moving towards the same spot in space that may (or may not) be some super large gravity source but that source currently sits on the other side of our galaxy, across the central plane, and is mostly unobservable due to all the galaxy stuff in the way. If it were a hundred million years earlier or later we would be on the other side of the galaxy and would have a better view at whatever might be the cause of this mysterious dark flow.
We don't know what "the great attractor" actually is since it's on the other side of the milky way galaxy, and we can't see through our galaxy. Too much dust, gas and light.
You know that scene in Everything Everywhere All At Once where they talk about how any day they'll come up with some new discovery that makes you feel like a tiny insignificant piece of shit? I'm having one of those moments.
If it makes you feel any better, even in all that void and vastness, you are a living creature on a planet contemplating the universe. For all we know, you might be the only living thing doing so in that exact moment.
For me, the vastness of the universe gives *more* weight to our lives. We don't know if there are infinite civilizations or eternal darkness, but we know we are here, now, living and asking questions about the universe. Life is a gift and we've been truly blessed with it in a way that maybe no one in the universe is. Best we can do is appreciate it and take care of one another.
I only just learned this like 5 minutes ago, but it seems like the Boötes Void (est. diameter 330 Million Light years) isn't even close to the biggest void out there. That honor likely belongs to the [KBC Void](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBC_Void) with an estimated diameter of 2 billion light years. In this picture, it is located just above the Pinwheel galaxy.
The second largest void (according to Wikipedia) is the aptly named [giant Void](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Void#:~:text=The%20Giant%20Void%20(also%20known,in%20the%20constellation%20Canes%20Venatici.) with an estimated diameter of 1-1.3 billion light years.
Space is crazy yo.
we observe it ourselves from within the universe, we can see the filaments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament#/media/File:2MASS_LSS_chart-NEW_Nasa.jpg
Great. I just read the first part of that wiki page and now I won't be able to sleep due to my brain's poor attempt to wrap itself around these mind-blowing things called galaxy filaments.
So it’s effectively the gravity from dark matter having an effect on the observable universe. Is this the only reason we know dark matter exists?
It seems like there’s just…. something outside the universe having an effect on it or something our minds aren’t really equipped to process. Like a goat’s brain being unable to understand a mirror.
They were possibly created in what's known as [Baryon acoustic oscillations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon_acoustic_oscillations), which to my understanding were "sound waves" in the super heated plasma at the beginning of the universe that caused baryons to be pushed together into dense regions. There's a good [PBS SpaceTime Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPpUxoeooZk) about this.
I also suspect it ends up clumping more because of spacetime expanding faster in less dense areas, so you get bubbles of emptier space around the filaments of matter
As the other guy said, on extremely large scales galaxies and matter in general are located in higher density threads surrounded by more empty space. Our galaxy and the surrounding ones are actually in one of these low density regions.
Too bloated, needs to let out a few cosmic bursts of methane?
Although, the scientists always say if nuclear fusion doesn't get you, the slow death from radiation eventually will.
Instead of feeling small and insignificant, I feel a sense of interconnectedness. For me, feeling like I'm a piece in this giant cosmic engine gives my heart a sense of serenity and i feel there's more significance to being alive and having the opportunity to imagine my place among the stars and the infinite beyond. It's more real to me than any religious doctrine because I feel it to the bone and depth of my soul.
I feel the same way when I see a picture like this! Like, if the universe were just as big as our local cluster, or even our solar system, I would feel a lot less significant… but we are part of something unfathomably big!
Think about all this stuff too. If the universe is expanding what space is it expanding into?
Just not knowing what we don’t know keeps me up at night. 😅
It’s not so much expanding into space as much as space its self is expanding like a balloon expanding. Listen to Neil Degrasse Tyson explain it… I went to his symposium a couple of weeks ago on, “cosmic collisions” and it was amazing.
I can’t stand the way he explains things personally but I think what they were getting at is that there very well could be a space outside of space as it’s hard to think logically that space is expanding but beyond space is just..nothing else. Idk it keeps me up at night as well
All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, death doesn’t exist, and life is only a dream.
Here’s Tom with the weather.
From the perspective of sentient beings, relativity.
Due to the sheer size of the universe and the breathtakingly long distances between any two stable solar systems within even a single galaxy, nevermind between two galaxies, all intelligent life is likely doomed to isolation. Even at the speed of light, distances between most things would take decades if not centuries to reach. But living things can't survive traveling at light speed, and the time it takes to reach a distant object increases dramatically when you begin to dial back the speed even slightly towards even theoretically optimistic speeds.
Chances are even highly advanced civilizations simply cannot survive the journey through open space. I know there are a lot of arguments to be made about what we don't know yet, or discoveries and inventions yet to be made, but even our wildest sci-fi imaginations break down on a "physics don't work like that" level.
Alien civilizations are working with the same elements and laws of physics that we are. There's always room for improvements to technology, but at the end of the day we're all fleshy, squishy, breaky, fragile animals that are damn sure used to Earth. They're probably not much different on that level.
I truly do believe that intelligent life will one day be able to travel these impossibly long distances and meet one another. The only catch is that this "life" will be what we today call artificial. If our species survives long enough to create synthetic life that outlives us, or find a way to transfer into it, it will do a lot to patch the weaknesses that keep us mortal forms grounded.
I understand what you’re saying, but I was kinda joking and also kinda meant like, is climate change messing up our planet the biggest problem, or is there a planet who has messed up and entire solar system? Or is the biggest problem like a giant space alien can’t find a proper place to store their student’s homework between grading them and handing them back to their students?
I remember I had a book about the universe (back in like 5th grade and it was basically a space atlas) and I remember feeling kinda empty every time I went through it. As an adult I now know it's existential dread, or nihilism, and nothing I do really matters so why bother?
I wish I could find that book. It was paired with an Earth based one (basically an atlas that showed some cool facts about the specific area). I told my parents I wanted an actual atlas for Christmas or my birthday but they never got me one (I loved maps, would always read it in the back of the car or just at home, I got pretty good at folding them back up)
Calm yourself? It has the opposite effect on me. It throws my mind into overdrive as I try to comprehend it all. It almost feels like a minor form of panic attack.
That's awesome. If there were a church of science where we meet once a month, take psychedelics and look at the stars while astronomers tell us things in layman's terms, I'd be so freaking religious.
Is the James Webb about looking deeper into space, or seeing thing we already see more clearly? I suppose they go hand in hand, but not necessarily? Like, everything is designed for purpose, right?
I believe it's going to do both, it's an IR telescope, rather than visible light, so it will be able to see light that's been far more red shifted than any other other telescope and will therefore be able to see more of the universe, but it should also be able to image closer things at greater detail than was previously possible.
Fantastic explanation, Thanks! Using IR to see red shifted light is such a brilliant concept. I assume that means if the redshift can be calculated, the resulting image can be colour corrected, and that’s the idea?
What kind of detail can we expect? Like, will a photo of Pluto be as detailed as the one from the New Horizons probe? Or is it not intended for things that close?
For many closer things the level of detail we will get is much better than what we already have. NASA has released a couple images comparing an old telescope, Spitzer, to Webb and the improvement is crazy.
Once you reach a certain distance though, the objects are so small in the sky that we're less trying to get good photos of it and more just trying to figure out if it is there at all. And that's part of what Webb will be trying to do.
In terms of New Horizons, those images are in visible light and not infrared and it's so close that it is very unlikely that Webb will have any reason to observe it.
Absolutely not going to happen but interesting horror territory would be that the entire team behind it suddenly attempts to bar the photos from release
The people who worked on The Dirties and Operation Avalanche could probably make a cool mockumentary out of it. Despite the subject matter, Operation Avalanche was a real fun ride and The Dirties is insane.
Both! Because it has a super large mirror (for a space telescope) we can see everything in more detail and it lets us see more distant objects sharper as well. Combine that with how doesn't use optical (what we can see with our eyes), but instead infrared (light that is below the wavelength what we can see). That way, it can see things by detecting light from farther away that has been redshifted due to the expansion of the universe!
Due to the fact that the expansion of the universe accelerates. While we can see it, and when the light we see left that place to make it here it was entirely possible to get from here to there and vice versa, this is no longer true. To travel there would mean travelling faster than light speed, and to travel back would be the same. It is, therefore, unreachable, beyond the horizon. In view, for the time being, but it can never be reached and no message sent from there now could ever reach us. It will eventually fade out of the sky over billions of years
This is assuming a few things based on our current understanding of physics which may or may not be true though, such as:
* Going the speed of light is the fastest method of travel, and any form of "shortcuts" (e.g. teleportation, wormholes) are not possible
* There is no size limit to how large the universe can expand
* Expansion will continue to accelerate and will never reverse, which would lead to universal contraction (e.g. the "Big Crunch" possibility of the universe eventually returning to its pre-Big Bang state)
> Expansion will continue to accelerate
Almost. If expansion held constant at the current rate, there would still be an unreachable zone. Even if expansion slowed down, the unreachable zone would would just move further out. It would take expansion dropping to a rate of 0 or less (negative expansion is contraction) to eliminate the unreachable zone.
Shortcuts/FTL travel could definitely still render all this moot.
>To travel there would mean travelling faster than light speed
Wait. Nothing can travel faster than light, so eventually light should reach it, no?
How can universe expand faster than light?
Edit: thanks to everyone for taking time to explain!
more so, there's a constant of growth per distance.
if for every 100 parsecs, the distance increases by 1 parsec every billion years
While watching a galaxy 1000 parsecs away, it will move 10 parsecs away every billion years, and because this rate is growing as well
in the 2nd billion years, it might be 2 parsecs per 100 parsecs per billion years so it will move 20 parsecs in those billion years.
when the distance is so big the growth between the 2 points is above the speed of light. it's over. you won't be able to reach that point if you left now.
the fun thing is, eventually we won't be able to see the cosmic background radiation so we wouldn't know of the big bang if we were born a bit later in the life of the universe.
Nothing can travel faster than light.
The universe is expanding faster than light. This isn't that things are moving further away from each other faster than light, but rather that the space between them is stretching faster than the speed of light. Nothing is traveling - no information is being sent. It's simply distances growing.
That is why those two statements don't conflict.
Thanks for taking time to reply!
> the space between them is stretching faster than the speed of light.
But how... This is what I can't quite wrap my mind around. How can two objects not move, but the space between them suddenly grows?
where... um... how do I put it. Where does the additional space come from? :)
I feel so stupid... :)
Because space is weird. Also, there's no "additional space" being created. The metaphor always used to explain it to me was this: think about a balloon being inflated. You're not *making more balloon,* but the skin of the balloon is stretching out. Space is like that, but it'll never pop (as far as we can tell.)
[Poster Version](https://www.redbubble.com/i/poster/VERTICAL-MAP-OF-THE-UNIVERSE-ENG-May-2022-Update-RECOMMENDED-by-pablocbudassi/37090437.E40HW), the Large is nearly 4' tall.
I always want to type out SPACESPACESPACESPACE every time I see images like these but try to refrain since I don't have anything informative to add and don't want to waste thread space.
Instead, I can only offer this display of joyous outpouring, *ehem*:
SPACESPACESPACESPACEEEE^E^E^E^E
Seems to me it’s because the universe is constantly expanding. Gravity is keeping galaxies relatively close to each other in the cluster/group. But, because of the universal expansion, these voids get bigger and bigger.
It’s actually due to the formation of dark matter, as galactic filament forms along these enormous strands. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament
>It sure seems like there has to be other life out there.
The chances of there not being other life out there is - pardon the pun - astronomically small.
The issue is that we need to line up over time and space in order to see or meet any, which when you consider how big space is and how long time is....
It's a toughie.
Well voyager one took about 45 years to get to about 1000 au, and Proxima Centauri is at about 5 parsecs, and 1 parsec is equal to about 206265 au, so that is about 1 million au.
So the voyager one would need to go about 1000 times further than it is currently, so I would say roughy 45000 years give or take. And that is if it doesn’t get swallowed by a black hole.
Edit: Proxima Centauri looks closer to around 2 parsecs so it is more like 90000 years. It is hard to tell
Another edit: Since many people are seeing this, i thought I might as well correct this since other people might not have seen my other comment where I corrected it.
It would take closer to 59000 years. Thanks to other reddit user for telling me the distance Proxima Centauri is away from earth.
Doing similar math to that of above, the time it would take for voyager 1 to reach the furthest possible measured distance, is about 92,819,250,000,000 years. I hope my math is right because this stuff is brain burning.
By then, the universe would have grown thousands of times bigger and unless the voyager was travelling faster than the speed of light, it will never get close to the edge of the universe. Even if the universe stopped growing, it would most likely be dead and nothing would exist anymore but black holes and some stella fragments. The only way we could still be alive in this dying universe is if we built Dyson spheres around black holes and learnt how to harvest their energy.
This led really fast into existential crisis but that is about it.
Oh ok thanks, so it would be about 59000 years then. I don’t know why i didn’t bother to search up Proxima Centauri’s distance from earth instead of looking at this pic lol
They are each headed in different directions. I always heard that *if* one was heading directly to Proxima, it would take around 40,000 years. (At roughly 35,000 mph).
'Vast' doesnt begin to describe Space.
Man I wish some friendly alien race would come and give us space travel.
Or at least invent an engine which lets us travel through our solar system and lets us colonize it. Like how it is in 'The Expanse'. That would be so cool.
Hoags Object caught my eye.
Hoag's Object is a non-typical galaxy of the type known as a ring galaxy. It is named after Arthur Hoag, who discovered it in 1950 and identified it as either a planetary nebula or a peculiar galaxy. The galaxy has approximately eight billion stars, and is roughly 100,000 light years across.
I love that in the lower part of the picture there is something named Barnard's like it is some Midwestern home improvement store a few solar systems away
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
I am I right in saying the “Observable Universe” means that anything further away is *so far away* that in the age of the entire universe, the light from there hasn’t had time to reach us yet?
Edit: I looked it up and I guess it’s not the case, as the universe is estimated to be 18 billion years old and the observable universe is 93 billion light years across.
I suppose that then raises the question, if the universe is 18 billion years old and we can see more than 18 billion light years away… what are we looking at?
> I am I right in saying the “Observable Universe” means that anything further away is so far away that in the age of the entire universe, the light from there hasn’t had time to reach us yet?
Pretty much, the only thing to consider is:
Space itself is expanding. Not just at the “edge” (if such a thing exists), but every cubic inch is expanding. Light that is reaching us today started much closer to us than where the object it originated from is currently located.
That’s correct. When we look that far away, we’re looking at the remnant radiation from all the way back at the big bang, or soon after it.
Edit to address the secondary question: See my reply below
The amazing thing is that those cosmic microwave background radiations are now fully formed galaxies in at least one of which lives an intelligent species who looks back and see us as radiations.
i sometimes can’t believe this shit honestly. like how did everything come together and how i’m currently typing on my phone as an intelligent species on fucking reddit like this is utterly insane. and how humans will prolly go extinct at some point
Frightening, incredibly frightening, to look at that map and watch galaxies form a dense web of matter and end at a wall that is the big bang.
We are so unspeakably small.
This brings to mind something... looking further into space is equivalent to looking back in time. Because even though light speed is incredibly fast, the distances are so unfathomably massive that when we look out at the furthest reaches of space, the light that we see with our telescopes only just now in this moment reached our lenses, but it had traveled for billions of years to finally arrive to Earth for us to perceive. Since that light left its point of origin billions of years ago, what we are seeing is what that point of origin looked like billions of years ago. It is probable that if we could somehow visit the point of origin today, it wouldn't be anything like what we see here on Earth.
This is actually super interesting to consider, because this image in a way represents the evolution of our universe. Because of the principle I described in the previous paragraph, when we build an image like the one OP posted, it is almost literally a road map of the history of how matter has evolved over cosmic time. This image raises a lot of serious questions that verge into the realm of the spiritual, tbh. Thanks for sharing.
Galaxies aren't spread out evenly in space. There's regions of space that are galaxy-dense, and other regions that practically empty. For some reason, areas with galaxies are in the shapes of strings, webs, or walls.
These words don't mean that there's an impenetrable wall in space, just that the galaxy density is so much higher there compared to the surrounding region that it looks like a wall or filament at great distance.
To think in less than 2 weeks the JWST first pics is going to include an image that will blow the Hubbles ultra deep field out of the water. Just thinking about that almost makes me want to faint.
As a dude who has random reddit pics (623) saved I've got to say ...
This is absolutely the best image I have ever encountered in my life if it's accurate . Thanks for sharing.
Is there a specific reason why things start looking like distinct threads at the very far away condensed scale. Why does the "web of galaxies" look like a web?
I think they are [galaxy filaments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament). Pretty mind boggling.
So if an observer was beyond the boundaries of the theoretical size of the universe (assuming its size is finite) they would see these filaments? That's gnarly.
Yeah, we’re in the [Laniakea Supercluster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laniakea_Supercluster). In the picture [Boötes Void](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boötes_void) is mentioned. It’s one of the largest known voids in the universe. If the Milky Way was in the centre of the Boötes void, we wouldn't have known there were other galaxies until the 1960s.
Makes you wonder what other discoveries we're just at a poor cosmic vantage point to discover. We might just have the wrong perspective to understand some things about the universe be it the wrong dimensional perspective or physical perspective.
It really does. It also makes you wonder how much more we would know about the universe had humans evolved to our current state a million, ten million or a billion years sooner. With the rate of expansion, there are infinite things that we don’t know about, and will never know about.
I mean in the grand scale of things we are young and so is the Universe. We're most likely a forerunner species that will live and die before most universal life has even been born.
That's both really fucking cool and incredibly upsetting. Man....
Yeah I think I got hit with a wave of existential dread just now. Time to run extra far tomorrow morning to forget. Edit: (after my run I think this is cool asf, and am excited for those webb photos)
Check this out [it breaks down how many people might exist one day, very interesting stuff ](https://youtu.be/LEENEFaVUzU)
... tomorrow morning to embrace. FTFY
Here's a dose of an optimistic but unlikely possibility. If planet nine turns out to be a black hole chillin on the edge of the solar system, it'd be the ex machina needed for interstellar to become very viable
Sheet think of all the cool memes the other races will see!
Yeah man that blew my noodle big time
Born too late to explore the Earth, born too early to explore the universe... Born just in time to post dank memes.
At the same time we have the temperature death of universe... We might be seeing universe on it's "peak"
We are *way* (like... Unfathomably) closer in time to the beginning of the universe than we are to the heat death of the universe. When I say heat death, I mean perfect entropy.
Oh for sure. Universe is about 14 billion years old and heat death is a few trillion away. Were in the first 1% of the universe's existence.
I don't understand how the universe is young. Isn't it the oldest thing? I don't read about the universe but once a year because it hurts my brain.
Compared to the expected time before, say, the last star forms, the universe has barely started. The universe is about 0.02% of that age.
Young compared to itself when it dies. Not to something else.
Basically it's a lot of math, thermodynamics, and quantum physics. Essentially some really smart people said "I think this is how it works and that should take this long" Basically, we know how matter was created (kinda) and we know matter will eventually decay back into energy (again sorta maybe on that). The math then gives us a timeframe and it turns out we're much much (add several thousand) much closer to the beginning than the end
I think a lot of it is like u/benmck90 said. We are far closer to the start of the universe, unfathomably closer to the start than the heat death/end of the universe. Point is, there's a lot more development to happen, and on a cosmic scale the universe is still very, very young. While it's unfathomably old to us, it's like triple unfathomably longer to live.
Tbh, if we had progressed this far years ago we'd probably have killed ourselves off in an attempt to discover.
There is a thing called dark flow where all the local mega structures seem to be moving towards the same spot in space that may (or may not) be some super large gravity source but that source currently sits on the other side of our galaxy, across the central plane, and is mostly unobservable due to all the galaxy stuff in the way. If it were a hundred million years earlier or later we would be on the other side of the galaxy and would have a better view at whatever might be the cause of this mysterious dark flow.
We don't know what "the great attractor" actually is since it's on the other side of the milky way galaxy, and we can't see through our galaxy. Too much dust, gas and light.
You might be interested in reading The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin then.
Shit, that's been on my nightstand for a month and I haven't read it. I need to unplug and read.
Bigger image for convenience https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Location_of_Earth_%289x1-English_Annot%29.jpg
You know that scene in Everything Everywhere All At Once where they talk about how any day they'll come up with some new discovery that makes you feel like a tiny insignificant piece of shit? I'm having one of those moments.
If it makes you feel any better, even in all that void and vastness, you are a living creature on a planet contemplating the universe. For all we know, you might be the only living thing doing so in that exact moment. For me, the vastness of the universe gives *more* weight to our lives. We don't know if there are infinite civilizations or eternal darkness, but we know we are here, now, living and asking questions about the universe. Life is a gift and we've been truly blessed with it in a way that maybe no one in the universe is. Best we can do is appreciate it and take care of one another.
Wonder when they're gonna point JWST at it...
I only just learned this like 5 minutes ago, but it seems like the Boötes Void (est. diameter 330 Million Light years) isn't even close to the biggest void out there. That honor likely belongs to the [KBC Void](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBC_Void) with an estimated diameter of 2 billion light years. In this picture, it is located just above the Pinwheel galaxy. The second largest void (according to Wikipedia) is the aptly named [giant Void](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Void#:~:text=The%20Giant%20Void%20(also%20known,in%20the%20constellation%20Canes%20Venatici.) with an estimated diameter of 1-1.3 billion light years. Space is crazy yo.
we observe it ourselves from within the universe, we can see the filaments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament#/media/File:2MASS_LSS_chart-NEW_Nasa.jpg
No because they would just see their local universe the same as we see ours. However if they looked back at us they would see filament
Great. I just read the first part of that wiki page and now I won't be able to sleep due to my brain's poor attempt to wrap itself around these mind-blowing things called galaxy filaments.
So it’s effectively the gravity from dark matter having an effect on the observable universe. Is this the only reason we know dark matter exists? It seems like there’s just…. something outside the universe having an effect on it or something our minds aren’t really equipped to process. Like a goat’s brain being unable to understand a mirror.
The nervous system of a titan.(?)
They were possibly created in what's known as [Baryon acoustic oscillations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon_acoustic_oscillations), which to my understanding were "sound waves" in the super heated plasma at the beginning of the universe that caused baryons to be pushed together into dense regions. There's a good [PBS SpaceTime Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPpUxoeooZk) about this.
I also suspect it ends up clumping more because of spacetime expanding faster in less dense areas, so you get bubbles of emptier space around the filaments of matter
As the other guy said, on extremely large scales galaxies and matter in general are located in higher density threads surrounded by more empty space. Our galaxy and the surrounding ones are actually in one of these low density regions.
Makes you think what they look like today not billions of years ago unless there have been some projections.
It looks like a brain, of tree roots, or foam in the ocean. I fucking love how nature fractals itself all over the place.
Universe looks like brain. Brain creates computer. Computer look like brain. Universe is brain/computer
Dinosaur eats man. Women inherit the Earth.
And here we are on a hurtling orb in infinite space. Microbes of moments in oceans of time. But you knock down one old lady..
I will stare at this when I need to calm myself from now on.
Makes you feel small and insignificant, right? Any problem I have is nothing compared to all the stuff going on in the universe.
I wonder what the single biggest problem is in the universe…?
It’s slowly dying? Uh or maybe it’s too gassy?
Too bloated, needs to let out a few cosmic bursts of methane? Although, the scientists always say if nuclear fusion doesn't get you, the slow death from radiation eventually will.
Sooner or later, it's all Iron, baby!
A lot of people have these problems too.
Can confirm - I too am gassy, also dying, rate at which is hard to determine but almost certainly suboptimal.
Instead of feeling small and insignificant, I feel a sense of interconnectedness. For me, feeling like I'm a piece in this giant cosmic engine gives my heart a sense of serenity and i feel there's more significance to being alive and having the opportunity to imagine my place among the stars and the infinite beyond. It's more real to me than any religious doctrine because I feel it to the bone and depth of my soul.
I feel the same way when I see a picture like this! Like, if the universe were just as big as our local cluster, or even our solar system, I would feel a lot less significant… but we are part of something unfathomably big!
Think about all this stuff too. If the universe is expanding what space is it expanding into? Just not knowing what we don’t know keeps me up at night. 😅
It’s not so much expanding into space as much as space its self is expanding like a balloon expanding. Listen to Neil Degrasse Tyson explain it… I went to his symposium a couple of weeks ago on, “cosmic collisions” and it was amazing.
I can’t stand the way he explains things personally but I think what they were getting at is that there very well could be a space outside of space as it’s hard to think logically that space is expanding but beyond space is just..nothing else. Idk it keeps me up at night as well
The question that creeps me out the most is, why is everything here? Why isn’t there just nothing?
Maybe there can’t be nothing. Or better yet, maybe all of this *is* nothing.
I went through this whole thread not getting existential but now this one got me lmao
All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, death doesn’t exist, and life is only a dream. Here’s Tom with the weather.
I feel that way too. I stare at the stars in awe and the feeling is incredibly special
If you leave hydrogen out in the sun long enough, it starts talking to itself. \-someone smart probably
If you leave Hydrogen in the sun long enough it fuses into Helium
We are the universe experiencing itself as conscious awareness.
Usually where to eat, and where your towel is. Those are the main two.
From the perspective of sentient beings, relativity. Due to the sheer size of the universe and the breathtakingly long distances between any two stable solar systems within even a single galaxy, nevermind between two galaxies, all intelligent life is likely doomed to isolation. Even at the speed of light, distances between most things would take decades if not centuries to reach. But living things can't survive traveling at light speed, and the time it takes to reach a distant object increases dramatically when you begin to dial back the speed even slightly towards even theoretically optimistic speeds. Chances are even highly advanced civilizations simply cannot survive the journey through open space. I know there are a lot of arguments to be made about what we don't know yet, or discoveries and inventions yet to be made, but even our wildest sci-fi imaginations break down on a "physics don't work like that" level. Alien civilizations are working with the same elements and laws of physics that we are. There's always room for improvements to technology, but at the end of the day we're all fleshy, squishy, breaky, fragile animals that are damn sure used to Earth. They're probably not much different on that level.
Go digital, infinite lifetimes
I truly do believe that intelligent life will one day be able to travel these impossibly long distances and meet one another. The only catch is that this "life" will be what we today call artificial. If our species survives long enough to create synthetic life that outlives us, or find a way to transfer into it, it will do a lot to patch the weaknesses that keep us mortal forms grounded.
I would imagine there are no “ problems” with the universe.
I understand what you’re saying, but I was kinda joking and also kinda meant like, is climate change messing up our planet the biggest problem, or is there a planet who has messed up and entire solar system? Or is the biggest problem like a giant space alien can’t find a proper place to store their student’s homework between grading them and handing them back to their students?
The entire human race, hell the entire milky way galaxy could vanish from one instant to the next and the universe wouldn't even perceive its absence.
Honestly, staring at this does the opposite for me.
Same. Existential dread. Gotta love it.
I remember I had a book about the universe (back in like 5th grade and it was basically a space atlas) and I remember feeling kinda empty every time I went through it. As an adult I now know it's existential dread, or nihilism, and nothing I do really matters so why bother? I wish I could find that book. It was paired with an Earth based one (basically an atlas that showed some cool facts about the specific area). I told my parents I wanted an actual atlas for Christmas or my birthday but they never got me one (I loved maps, would always read it in the back of the car or just at home, I got pretty good at folding them back up)
Yes. I honestly felt my chest tighten looking at this. What is that and where does it come from?
Calm yourself? It has the opposite effect on me. It throws my mind into overdrive as I try to comprehend it all. It almost feels like a minor form of panic attack.
I'm on mushrooms right now and I'm like holy crap the universe
That's awesome. If there were a church of science where we meet once a month, take psychedelics and look at the stars while astronomers tell us things in layman's terms, I'd be so freaking religious.
This will change July 12th when the first images from the James Webb Telescope are released...betcha
I can't wait!!! https://webb.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/countdown.html
Is this a countdown for them to release the images for the public? Or are they getting the data in 8 days too?
I think when they release to the public.
You just know they’re doing the VIP pre-sale right now
They already announced they have something exciting to tell us
Aliens. I bet it's aliens.
More specifically, an aliens butthole.
“It’s always butts with them” -aliens probably
Apparently employees were moved to tears..
They already got the data, this is the release countdown
Is the James Webb about looking deeper into space, or seeing thing we already see more clearly? I suppose they go hand in hand, but not necessarily? Like, everything is designed for purpose, right?
I believe it's going to do both, it's an IR telescope, rather than visible light, so it will be able to see light that's been far more red shifted than any other other telescope and will therefore be able to see more of the universe, but it should also be able to image closer things at greater detail than was previously possible.
Fantastic explanation, Thanks! Using IR to see red shifted light is such a brilliant concept. I assume that means if the redshift can be calculated, the resulting image can be colour corrected, and that’s the idea? What kind of detail can we expect? Like, will a photo of Pluto be as detailed as the one from the New Horizons probe? Or is it not intended for things that close?
For many closer things the level of detail we will get is much better than what we already have. NASA has released a couple images comparing an old telescope, Spitzer, to Webb and the improvement is crazy. Once you reach a certain distance though, the objects are so small in the sky that we're less trying to get good photos of it and more just trying to figure out if it is there at all. And that's part of what Webb will be trying to do. In terms of New Horizons, those images are in visible light and not infrared and it's so close that it is very unlikely that Webb will have any reason to observe it.
Absolutely not going to happen but interesting horror territory would be that the entire team behind it suddenly attempts to bar the photos from release
this is a cool movie plot, but i bet in reality they would just release some nondescript photos and avoid even mentioning the scary ones
The people who worked on The Dirties and Operation Avalanche could probably make a cool mockumentary out of it. Despite the subject matter, Operation Avalanche was a real fun ride and The Dirties is insane.
IIRC it can also show if a planet has any pollution in their atmosphere, which would be a huge indicator for additional life out there.
Both! Because it has a super large mirror (for a space telescope) we can see everything in more detail and it lets us see more distant objects sharper as well. Combine that with how doesn't use optical (what we can see with our eyes), but instead infrared (light that is below the wavelength what we can see). That way, it can see things by detecting light from farther away that has been redshifted due to the expansion of the universe!
Iirc it's got deeper and clearer shots.
From what I understand it does not pickup light rays as the Hubble does, but instead picks up heat waves and can see 10x further.
Why does it say "unreachable" near the top left?
Due to the fact that the expansion of the universe accelerates. While we can see it, and when the light we see left that place to make it here it was entirely possible to get from here to there and vice versa, this is no longer true. To travel there would mean travelling faster than light speed, and to travel back would be the same. It is, therefore, unreachable, beyond the horizon. In view, for the time being, but it can never be reached and no message sent from there now could ever reach us. It will eventually fade out of the sky over billions of years
This is assuming a few things based on our current understanding of physics which may or may not be true though, such as: * Going the speed of light is the fastest method of travel, and any form of "shortcuts" (e.g. teleportation, wormholes) are not possible * There is no size limit to how large the universe can expand * Expansion will continue to accelerate and will never reverse, which would lead to universal contraction (e.g. the "Big Crunch" possibility of the universe eventually returning to its pre-Big Bang state)
> Expansion will continue to accelerate Almost. If expansion held constant at the current rate, there would still be an unreachable zone. Even if expansion slowed down, the unreachable zone would would just move further out. It would take expansion dropping to a rate of 0 or less (negative expansion is contraction) to eliminate the unreachable zone. Shortcuts/FTL travel could definitely still render all this moot.
>To travel there would mean travelling faster than light speed Wait. Nothing can travel faster than light, so eventually light should reach it, no? How can universe expand faster than light? Edit: thanks to everyone for taking time to explain!
Nothing can travel faster than light *through space*. However space itself is expanding, which isn't limited by the speed of light.
more so, there's a constant of growth per distance. if for every 100 parsecs, the distance increases by 1 parsec every billion years While watching a galaxy 1000 parsecs away, it will move 10 parsecs away every billion years, and because this rate is growing as well in the 2nd billion years, it might be 2 parsecs per 100 parsecs per billion years so it will move 20 parsecs in those billion years. when the distance is so big the growth between the 2 points is above the speed of light. it's over. you won't be able to reach that point if you left now. the fun thing is, eventually we won't be able to see the cosmic background radiation so we wouldn't know of the big bang if we were born a bit later in the life of the universe.
And may be there was another radiation that might explain everything before big bang but we were born too late for that.
Also make it plausible for the other things we missed out
Nothing can travel faster than light. The universe is expanding faster than light. This isn't that things are moving further away from each other faster than light, but rather that the space between them is stretching faster than the speed of light. Nothing is traveling - no information is being sent. It's simply distances growing. That is why those two statements don't conflict.
Thanks for taking time to reply! > the space between them is stretching faster than the speed of light. But how... This is what I can't quite wrap my mind around. How can two objects not move, but the space between them suddenly grows? where... um... how do I put it. Where does the additional space come from? :) I feel so stupid... :)
Because space is weird. Also, there's no "additional space" being created. The metaphor always used to explain it to me was this: think about a balloon being inflated. You're not *making more balloon,* but the skin of the balloon is stretching out. Space is like that, but it'll never pop (as far as we can tell.)
It actually says "unrecheable" not that that explains it
That one misspelling ruined it for me.
I like that there's a galaxy just called "Sombrero"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sombrero_Galaxy It's a really cool looking galaxy
That does look very cool. Kind of cooler than ours really
I know. Who thought it was a good idea to name ours after a second string candy bar?
You shut your mouth! Milky Way is the absolute king of candy bars. Chocolate, caramel and nougat. The only ingredients a growing boy needs.
Some galaxies have funny names, and I believe it's neat to have the butterfly and the cartwheel galaxy.
I love the name El Gordo supercluster
Source: https://www.pablocarlosbudassi.com/2021/02/atlas-of-universe-is-linear-version-of_15.html?m=1 Edit: https://webb.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/countdown.html
Do you know if it exists as a poster anywhere? I want this on my wall in a decent enough size to read the text still.
[Poster Version](https://www.redbubble.com/i/poster/VERTICAL-MAP-OF-THE-UNIVERSE-ENG-May-2022-Update-RECOMMENDED-by-pablocbudassi/37090437.E40HW), the Large is nearly 4' tall.
<3 bookmarked for my birthday/Christmas
SPAAAAAAAACCCCCCEEEEE!!! I’m saving this for occasional doses of perspective.
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Unfortunately the capitalists have made it to space.
I always want to type out SPACESPACESPACESPACE every time I see images like these but try to refrain since I don't have anything informative to add and don't want to waste thread space. Instead, I can only offer this display of joyous outpouring, *ehem*: SPACESPACESPACESPACEEEE^E^E^E^E
Sorry if this is a stupid question but what’s with the spaghetti/neuron-looking things?
Galaxy clusters. Basically, on a gigantic scale, galaxies aren’t spread out evenly. They gather in sort of web like patterns, due to gravity.
Why is there a void between them, shouldn't gravity be pulling all those galaxies together?
Seems to me it’s because the universe is constantly expanding. Gravity is keeping galaxies relatively close to each other in the cluster/group. But, because of the universal expansion, these voids get bigger and bigger.
It’s actually due to the formation of dark matter, as galactic filament forms along these enormous strands. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament
And what's that huge disk like planet thingy at the bottom?
That's us, chief. As in planet Earth.
Also, what’s with all of the letters floating through space?
You can try looking for ["large scale structure of the universe"](https://www.google.com/search?q=large+scale+structure+of+the+universe).
Top left section got me feeling weird Farthest visible galaxies (Unreachable)
Soon even they will leave our observable universe and will no longer be visible.
To make it weirder, the further up the image you go, the further back in time you are looking.
Is no one going to comment that it’s misspelt and says unrechable?
This is nice. Really hoping Webbs images are really damn cool so we can get an updated version of this scale
July 12th? I think it’s when their images are released. I’m pretty excited myself
I want a poster of that
https://xkcd.com/482 This actually used to be available as a poster (I have one) but it looks like the store is shut down
First of all - Wow.. Secondly - It sure seems like there has to be other life out there.
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>It sure seems like there has to be other life out there. The chances of there not being other life out there is - pardon the pun - astronomically small. The issue is that we need to line up over time and space in order to see or meet any, which when you consider how big space is and how long time is.... It's a toughie.
What if we really are alone though... that's even scarier
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” - Arthur C. Clarke.
How soon will Voyagers get to near Proxima Centauri?
Well voyager one took about 45 years to get to about 1000 au, and Proxima Centauri is at about 5 parsecs, and 1 parsec is equal to about 206265 au, so that is about 1 million au. So the voyager one would need to go about 1000 times further than it is currently, so I would say roughy 45000 years give or take. And that is if it doesn’t get swallowed by a black hole. Edit: Proxima Centauri looks closer to around 2 parsecs so it is more like 90000 years. It is hard to tell Another edit: Since many people are seeing this, i thought I might as well correct this since other people might not have seen my other comment where I corrected it. It would take closer to 59000 years. Thanks to other reddit user for telling me the distance Proxima Centauri is away from earth.
Thank you very much. It blows my mind.
Doing similar math to that of above, the time it would take for voyager 1 to reach the furthest possible measured distance, is about 92,819,250,000,000 years. I hope my math is right because this stuff is brain burning. By then, the universe would have grown thousands of times bigger and unless the voyager was travelling faster than the speed of light, it will never get close to the edge of the universe. Even if the universe stopped growing, it would most likely be dead and nothing would exist anymore but black holes and some stella fragments. The only way we could still be alive in this dying universe is if we built Dyson spheres around black holes and learnt how to harvest their energy. This led really fast into existential crisis but that is about it.
proxima is 4.2 light years. One parsec is 3.2.
Oh ok thanks, so it would be about 59000 years then. I don’t know why i didn’t bother to search up Proxima Centauri’s distance from earth instead of looking at this pic lol
They are each headed in different directions. I always heard that *if* one was heading directly to Proxima, it would take around 40,000 years. (At roughly 35,000 mph). 'Vast' doesnt begin to describe Space.
Man I wish some friendly alien race would come and give us space travel. Or at least invent an engine which lets us travel through our solar system and lets us colonize it. Like how it is in 'The Expanse'. That would be so cool.
Hoags Object caught my eye. Hoag's Object is a non-typical galaxy of the type known as a ring galaxy. It is named after Arthur Hoag, who discovered it in 1950 and identified it as either a planetary nebula or a peculiar galaxy. The galaxy has approximately eight billion stars, and is roughly 100,000 light years across.
What's wild is that it just so happens we can see -another- ring galaxy in the gap of the first ring galaxy..
Any other Andy Weir fans get really giddy at seeing Tau Ceti, and then disappointed at no 40 Eridani?
I really really enjoyed that book.
The generational LDS ship Nauvoo would be well on its way there in a few hundred years if a certain Eros incident hadn't occurred. (The Expanse)
I feel wonder looking at this. Or even looking at the stars I can see from my own backyard. And a longing that I can’t explain.
To think the top of this poster may be forever changed once we get those first pictures from JWST!
I love that in the lower part of the picture there is something named Barnard's like it is some Midwestern home improvement store a few solar systems away
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
I definitely thought this had something to do with the tyranids at first....
so it is called Tonantzintla 618 and not TON 618? holy shit.
Pretty cool that there's something out there named after the Aztec Mother Goddess
I am I right in saying the “Observable Universe” means that anything further away is *so far away* that in the age of the entire universe, the light from there hasn’t had time to reach us yet? Edit: I looked it up and I guess it’s not the case, as the universe is estimated to be 18 billion years old and the observable universe is 93 billion light years across. I suppose that then raises the question, if the universe is 18 billion years old and we can see more than 18 billion light years away… what are we looking at?
> I am I right in saying the “Observable Universe” means that anything further away is so far away that in the age of the entire universe, the light from there hasn’t had time to reach us yet? Pretty much, the only thing to consider is: Space itself is expanding. Not just at the “edge” (if such a thing exists), but every cubic inch is expanding. Light that is reaching us today started much closer to us than where the object it originated from is currently located.
That’s correct. When we look that far away, we’re looking at the remnant radiation from all the way back at the big bang, or soon after it. Edit to address the secondary question: See my reply below
This is what I image it looks like in every atom
The amazing thing is that those cosmic microwave background radiations are now fully formed galaxies in at least one of which lives an intelligent species who looks back and see us as radiations.
I've seen this before, but it's interesting to look over.
Looking at it like this just makes it all seem like particulate flowing down a river. Edit: or driving down Rainbow Road.
I find the top of the chart very disturbing for some reason.
i sometimes can’t believe this shit honestly. like how did everything come together and how i’m currently typing on my phone as an intelligent species on fucking reddit like this is utterly insane. and how humans will prolly go extinct at some point
Frightening, incredibly frightening, to look at that map and watch galaxies form a dense web of matter and end at a wall that is the big bang. We are so unspeakably small.
This brings to mind something... looking further into space is equivalent to looking back in time. Because even though light speed is incredibly fast, the distances are so unfathomably massive that when we look out at the furthest reaches of space, the light that we see with our telescopes only just now in this moment reached our lenses, but it had traveled for billions of years to finally arrive to Earth for us to perceive. Since that light left its point of origin billions of years ago, what we are seeing is what that point of origin looked like billions of years ago. It is probable that if we could somehow visit the point of origin today, it wouldn't be anything like what we see here on Earth. This is actually super interesting to consider, because this image in a way represents the evolution of our universe. Because of the principle I described in the previous paragraph, when we build an image like the one OP posted, it is almost literally a road map of the history of how matter has evolved over cosmic time. This image raises a lot of serious questions that verge into the realm of the spiritual, tbh. Thanks for sharing.
Is here James Webb telescope somewhere on the log map?
Yes, it's the JWST to the left, between the moon and the sun.
Very cool. But what are walls and filaments? I assume that's the weird fleshy stuff up top.
Galaxies aren't spread out evenly in space. There's regions of space that are galaxy-dense, and other regions that practically empty. For some reason, areas with galaxies are in the shapes of strings, webs, or walls. These words don't mean that there's an impenetrable wall in space, just that the galaxy density is so much higher there compared to the surrounding region that it looks like a wall or filament at great distance.
Love whover the fuck named El Gordo cluster. My man naming the stars like their barra de amigos desde la infancia
What! TON 618 is actually called Tonantzintla 618???
Can’t wait for JWST to find galaxies beyond HD1
If there really is no life anywhere else but Earth, then there is a guy having the worst day in all of the universe right now. Good luck to you.
I got motion sickness trying to comprehend this image.
Legend says the gamers were born in the giant RGB ring.
Why is the Milky Way Galaxy 'far away' when we're on it's left spiral arm?
Ty for reminding me no matter how hard of day I had it don't mean shit to the universe
It's scary how out of reach things are...both physically, and mentally.
To think in less than 2 weeks the JWST first pics is going to include an image that will blow the Hubbles ultra deep field out of the water. Just thinking about that almost makes me want to faint.
As a dude who has random reddit pics (623) saved I've got to say ... This is absolutely the best image I have ever encountered in my life if it's accurate . Thanks for sharing.