Scientists Discovered a Gigantic Structure in a Hidden Zone of Space
vice.com
vice.com
Why not say "Scientists Observe a New Cosmic Structure for the First Time"?
Discovered -> "Observe" is better
Gigantic Structure -> "Cosmic structure" is better than the subjective "gigantic", as everything cosmic is by definition gigantic and it seems to imply some sort of amazement at its size
in a
Hidden Zone of Space -> "Obscured" zone of space would again be better
So how about "First Observation of Cosmic Structure in Obscured Zone of Space"
I'm not an editor, and if I can come up with a more accurate and less sensationalized title, one can only conclude that whichever editor was behind this specific headline was deliberate in their choice of its clickbaity feel
And it is one of the largest we’ve seen, and it’s very close, so there is some amazement.
Given that one of the functions of a journalist is to clearly communicate, they're either incompetent or they're deliberately misleading. And it's pretty clear it's the second.
When has journalism ever stuck to facts? When has the “news” been more than stories and opinion?
Hint: Never
Your assumptions aren’t based in fact and smack of elitism. Press has no responsibility to meet your personal idea of competency.
Read: A History of News by Mitchell Stephens https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1854941W/A_history_of_news
Read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
Read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French_journalism
And frankly when you or anyone starts with "Respectfully", you're typically not. Your post certainly only has a thin veneer.
Again, who are you that your standards are worthy meeting?
The role of press is to exist.
The sooner you understand this then you’ll have a better appreciation for all press outlets even those you disagree with.
It's not even that "structure" necessarily implies planned assembly. There are "structures" in biology, geology, and meteorology, and none imply a builder or designer.
From the preprint - "The South Pole Wall rivals the Sloan Great Wall in extent, at a distance a factor two closer. The iconic structures that have transformed our understanding of large scale structure have come from the observed distribution of galaxies assembled from redshift surveys: the Perseus−Pisces filament (Giovanelli & Haynes1982), the CfA Great Wall (de Lapparent et al.1986), the Sloan Great Wall (Gott et al. 2005)"
To do this you have to focus on communicating understanding rather than pure technical accuracy.
If journalists behave this way they can be used by anyone to spread their message unfiltered. This is not what I expect of quality journalism and I will not ever pay for such a careless "work".
Copying headlines can be done by machines more efficiently.
It is a feature of what is known as the large scale structure of the universe. In that context the use of the word structure is entirely appropriate since there is no ambiguity. The wording of the title feels odd because I don't recall individual parts of the large scale structure being referred to as structures, but my memory may be hazy since I have been out of the field for well over a decade.
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab9952
1) What do we actually know about these "structures", and fundamentally how certain are we that they have any consequence whatsoever to our understanding of the universe? Is it possible that the patterns we notice are just us being humans noticing patterns in randomly generated white noise?
2) Could there be emergent behaviours at the super-astronomical scale where just like electrons and protons and other elementary particles combine to all sorts of emergent higher order behaviour in atoms and elements, could there be similar outcomes at the multi-galaxy-cluster scale that would be impossible to observe at the human scale?
When you play billiards you don't expect them to gravitate toward each other! If they were on the scale of planets though, you might (it depends on how you scale their velocities). Or if you waited extremely long times, and were not under the influence of Earth's gravity you also might notice in billiards.
Although, galaxies aren't just made of things only made out of atoms. Most of the important stuff is not simply composed of atoms: black holes, stars, neutron stars, pulsars, dark matter, etc.
I think what OP might've been alluding to is the idea that phenomena like dark energy could have a more elegant explanation that is the result of emergent behavior at large scales. Just like magnetism was originally seen almost like magic, but it was later realized that it's simply an emergent property of the electric force i.e. electromagnetism.
i wonder if there is a possible way to measure that.
It does seem not crazy that if the laws of physics are completely different at nanoscopic scales, they would also be different at gigascopic ones?
2. What happens at very large scales is actually quite simple, from a physical and mathematical point of view. That's because as you zoom out, the Universe eventually becomes smooth and homogeneous. You can model it as a constant-density fluid with slight density perturbations. General Relativity then gives you a set of equations to work with, which describe both how spacetime evolves and how the density perturbations grow over time. Things only get complicated once the perturbations grow large enough that the equations become non-linear. This happens on the scale of galaxies and galaxy clusters, but on the largest scales, things are still linear. Then, you can use numerical simulations to understand the formation of galaxies and galaxy clusters (these simulations do a really good job of reproducing what we see in the real Universe), or you can use heuristic arguments about how over-densities collapse (there are some heuristic arguments that get you pretty close to what the numerical simulations predict), or you can use perturbation theory to try to analyze the non-linear regime (this involves some pretty hard-core mathematical analysis, and it doesn't get you as accurate an answer as the numerical simulations, but it might help you understand what's going on).
TL;DR: The title of this article is very click-baity. A lot of people will read it and think that this discovery overturns what we previously knew about cosmology. It doesn't, as far as I can tell. Cosmology predicts that structures like this should exist. Since the initial conditions of the Universe were random, cosmology doesn't predict where we'll find these structures.
1. A visualization of the formation of a galaxy cluster, from a numerical simulation called Illustris: The Next Generation: https://youtu.be/Rg12ub0PbeA
How can we possibly measure this at the scales you're talking about? I understand we can take a look at the scale of let's say background radiation across multiple galaxies, but how can we really infer anything about the universe at all other than to know that this is how things work at this exact moment in human-scale time?
These scales are readily measurable. Large surveys of galaxies observe galaxies that are Gigaparsecs apart from one another. You can trace out the structure of the observable Universe by looking at where the galaxies are, and there's clumping on "small" scales. But above a certain scale, it becomes smooth. The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is also much larger than this scale. If you measure the CMB temperature, you don't see any correlations in the temperatures of points on the sky separated by more than about one degree.
Take a look at this figure, which compares real observations to the Millennium Simulation: [1]. Each point is a galaxy. As you go farther away from the center of the figure, you're going back in time, which is why there are fewer galaxies and less clumping (gravity has had less time to do its work). If you want to see a large slice of the Universe fixed at a certain time (so there's no look-back effect), you have to go to simulations. Here's what you get: [2]. Above a few hundred Megaparcecs (Mpc), there's no more structure.
1. https://www.mdpi.com/galaxies/galaxies-07-00081/article_depl...
2. https://wwwmpa.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/virgo/millennium/...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2dF_Galaxy_Redshift_Survey
In any case, here's another one: https://in-the-sky.org/ngc3d.php
North/South pole are on that map.
Since we can observe the universe for the same distance in every direction, I guess it makes sense that we'd give the resulting sphere a north and a south pole.
But he/she said that 'clearly' I am wrong. Not thinking that maybe reality isn't quite what we think with the small amount of information that we have at the moment.
The only physical limitation is the Planck length and everything above this is fair game. Our universe could be a solitude brain and the multiverse could be the collective of brains but damn I've been shot-down by a HN subscriber that told me it's clearly bullshit.
I can see both your side and the other commenters side. I think it likely your suggestion isn't true - there is no strong evidence for it and I think therefore the default position should be 'it most likely isn't so but the door is open to convince me otherwise'.
I sincerely hope that isn't our reality because we would then find ourselves in a weird recursive situation where we can never understand the total system.
Gnu's not Unix.
What evidence do you have, other than "gee looks like a brain to me", that your theory might be correct? Is it not, indeed, childish, to hold such a view, out of a trillion other similarly justifiable views?
Just because current information cannot refute your favorite model doesn't mean it's true! This is very basic logic. At least come up with an experiment to verify some aspect of your theory; otherwise you’re going to forever be in the “gee looks like X to me” la-la land of idiots.
In other words, what the hell are you going on about?