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Comment by simonhamp | Hacker News Reader

I'm no physicist, but I do enjoy hypothesising what these sorts of things could be.

It's interesting when the question of what is driving electrons across these filaments at near-light speed is still open... could they be natural accelerators? What if you could ride one of these filaments?

Or what if they're like the exhaust trails of an FTL vehicle/body? Or something inter-dimensional?

Knowing they're very far away, are we looking for them closer to home? Can they even be observed with such clarity if they were closer to us?

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It's never aliens.

Black hole accretion disks are my bet. Accretion disks are the most hot and violent places we know of. The more powerful the plasma dynamo, the larger the magnetic field lines will be. Think Van Allen belts but galactic scale.

Electrons move freely along magnetic field lines and they are very lightweight. Moving at near light speed along them isn't a unique phenomenon. Hell, every TV on the planet until 20 years ago used to make an electron beam.

And electrons avoid close proximity to each other? But of course this is not exactly what we usually call "close"..

But it would fit so well, because those wobbly curves almost scream "vortex" to my eyes. Interplay between forces towards some sink/collector and repulsive forces amongst the attracted, doesn't this almost always end up looking like that? If a mathematical pattern can be found across a range as wide as bathtub sinks and tornadoes, perhaps we should not be surprised to find it on galactic scale as well. But the dimensions involved, the fact that this whole thing apparently emits sufficient waves/particles for us to detect, crazy!

The primary requirement on any accounting is to explain why the streaks run parallel and equidistant.

One could imagine black holes forming far out in the accretion disk of a supermassive black hole, with the matter already organized by the central mass. That would seem to demand a collection of coplanar accretion discs around the baby holes (which could themselves be quite large), and the holes themselves in that plane. (But we still need to explain their regular spacing.)

Maybe that would also help explain how the "impossible"-mass holes seen by LIGO form?

I wonder if they are interference patterns from some massive waves interacting.

Came here to ask this. A 1-D artifact with even or periodic spacing really suggested an interference pattern to me as well.

Yeah, this is pure uninformed speculation, but what if they're the edge of cosmic ray propagation. Where they lose most of their energy between stars ans are still bound by gravity and just interact with other edges forming resonating lines.

>Knowing they're very far away, are we looking for them closer to home?

Not only that but they're also huge. If we were inside one we may see them as some sort of an almost uniform, isotropic field ... perhaps like cosmic background radiation?

True, but if another filament, not parallel to us, can interact with ours, it will still be visible.

The CMB is fairly uniform in all directions whereas this beam would appear very red/blue shifted depending on the direction you look.

>what if they're like the exhaust trails of an FTL vehicle

That would be rather depressing, if true. There's only a couple strands, so it would seem that FTL travel is very very rare. Among the 100 billion stars in our galaxy, only a handful have used FTL travel in the last 25,000 years?

How is it depressing if something previously thought of as impossible turns out to be possible?

Maybe the costs are *ahem* astronomical, so the tech is reserved for very large ships, only needing or affording a few trips. You know, like our one ever visit to the Moon.

Maybe they’re the tubes connecting gates or wormholes carrying a regular traffic of thousands of ships.

> You know, like our one ever visit to the Moon.

You know this is not factually true, even if you just consider the Apollo project.

Well, if FTL travel were even possible, it would consume monumental amounts of energy (current known physics say you need an infinite amount to accelerate a mass to v=c), so it would have to be an extremely rare event.

It probably goes down after that, cause you’re traveling back in time. Just a leverage from Quantum Gods, not a real investment. /jk

The current situation is more depressing that we have zero evidence of any life outside Spaceship Earth.

One single evidence of physics breaking aliens would be the most cheerful thing in my lifetime.

I agree. Not because I’d ever hope to meet them in my lifetime, but I could know that our people could reach those same heights, and in small ways, each of us can be part of that story.

We have evidence of life on Mars from the Viking landers, we just ignored it because it's inconvenient.

Since the strands cut across the galaxy, if they are FTL trails whoever left them was probably just passing through, in equally spaced formations.

Maybe they're highways, scars from millions of ships taking the same route.

Lines for communication and direct energy transfer at the Galaxy's center?

> Or what if they're like the exhaust trails of an FTL vehicle/body?

Thank you for saying it. I desperately want this to be the case.

Me too. Even if an alien race that wants to annihilate us had them. It would be just awesome to know if it was indeed possible to craft such devices.

My less than plausible wishful thinking theory -

The balloon structures are civilizations with the ability to move at least throughout their local group, the strands are results of experimentation for whatever technology allows them to do so. :)

I had pretty same thoughts about it!

Or Astrophage???

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