Bizarre space circle captured in unprecedented detail
nature.com
nature.com
Do we humans represent something greater? Are we just a smear of pixels, a trivialising of some incomprehensibly large object? Are we really just this small? Are we a galaxy to some other being in some microscopic dimension, imaged with technology of a totally alien nature? Maybe these aren't logical questions.
I mean, there are plenty of photos like this, where you can just barely begin to appreciate the scale of the visible universe, but yeah, this one just got me today.
But, on a flip side - somewhat tangentially, I've recently become interested in molecular biology. The strides we're making within the field is incredible.
Perhaps it isn't as sexy as astronomy, but it's far more within our grasp, and arguably has a far bigger impact on us, at least right now
There will always be an uncertain countdown.
In essence, given some function that takes in:
- a graph of stars/blackholes (energy sources), with:
- the distances between each energy source
- the expected remaining lifetime of the source
- (optionally) the probable locations of new sources, and their expected time to maturity
and:
- a set of starships, with:
- the maximum material lifetime of the starship (e.g. of solar panels)
- the percentage of material renewal possible at each node
- the energy consumption of the starship
is there a finite longest path, that is meaningfully smaller than the universe?
And what is the probability that we will encounter a life-bearing planet on this path, which we will have to mine to oblivion to enable the renewal of our starship(s) for the survival of our own species?
I can hardly look at the sky (at night) without getting a panic attack, for that exact reason: the enormity of it all. It scares me to death thinking about the time and the distances. And I never met people who have that too.
I alt-F4'd Space Engine in panic when I told it to zoom to a black hole and I saw this circle of emptyness rapidly opening in my screen and distorting the infinity of stars in the background. I swear I found a dozen other people on forums mentioning their phobia of black holes caused by Space Engine.
Space is scary. Everything outside Earth's atmosphere is by definition alien and unnatural. Yet so fascinating.
1: https://store.steampowered.com/app/773370/Exo_One/ (it's actually pretty good)
(I was today years old that that's a Dr. Strange quote, sigh. I thought it was more profound, lovecraftian or something).
At least know that in that vast universe you're not alone in your fears!
Also anytime there’s an article about the sheer size of the universe, trying to get you to understand the enormity, I feel my grip on reality start to lessen and have to pull myself back and stop thinking about it.
I’ve noticed the moon doesn’t cause similar anxiety, maybe because it’s so close and tangible compared to everything else?
I’ve never met a fellow astrophobe, either. Hang in there.
Once we become less rocks-banging-on-rocks primitive, the first order of business will be to get the hell out of the galaxy.
(Unless you mean to move outside the Solar system. I've seen plenty people confuse the two.)
Just moving out of the solar system would be pointless, except to obtain a ready supply of cold. We may expect cold to remain essential to anybody still bound by laws of thermodynamics.
The whole "Kardashev" business, anyway, comes from an extremely primitive outlook. Once a culture gets a handle on mass/energy conversion, relying on stars to provide process energy gets left behind, and other resource limits become important instead. Safety from nearby magnetar quakes and merging black holes, for example.
Now consider the size of the sphere! It's amazing anything reach us at all.
Add to this the scale of time - just remember that in 500 million years after all evidence of us is long, long, LONG gone that the clouds will still form and the waves will still crash on the shore.
That we are here and potentially meaningless isn't something to fear, it is something to cherish.
I see it the other way around - we are the only thing that is relevant, and the rest of the universe isn’t. Yes, it is big (to put it mildly) and hostile, and some people feel that thinking about it is somehow “liberating,” which, in fact, is merely a fleeting illusion, because the excitement quickly passes as soon as you go back to your daily minutia and have to continue to put up with all the bullshit and what not that’s happening around you. (The thought of the impending death may be just as “liberating” except that it’s not and never has been. You simply go through you daily routine until, say, you get sick and die. That’s it.)
I think the feeling of being "minuscule" starts at a much lower scale. Who am I in this city? No one relevant. 40-50 people might feel sad if I die today. The remaining X million won't care. Does that make me feel bad or irrelevant? Not really...I'm relevant to 40-50 people and very relevant to my close family and friends.
I'm not too attached to the human species either. I think we have some great things, but even in terms of the earth we've only existed for a tiny bit (and maybe we won't be for much longer....100 thousand more years?). I'm also fine with that.
My hypothesis is that many people feel very strongly things like the soul is eternal or that humans have a unique and uber-important destiny in the universe. If you feel that, contemplating how minuscule we are when considering time-space will make you feel weird because it contradicts those very strong feelings.
What is it? An odd circle of radio waves. What are we going to call it? Well, if we call it an "odd radio circle" the initialization is the same as the monstrous bad guys from a classic fantasy novel.
ORCs it is then!
In the post-modern era (roughly 1945-20??) people were highly skeptical of their egos and of power, advertised humility, and consequently had a sense of humor about themselves and the world. Thus you get names like quark and Google.
Now in the newly-born (reactionary?) era, ego is our God, and we get names like Uber. Physics perhaps hasn't quite joined the new era, yet.
I dunno, I've noticed that most physicists I've met have the "ego is God" vibe pretty well cooked in, and they will definitely let you know it.
Social constructivism and the like also aren't anti-facts or pro-subjectivity (assuming that's what you were implying, just a guess though) - it's about acknowledging which things we consider objectively true are actually only true by convention or tradition rather than being rooted in physical laws. Also how the human mind models knowledge and the relations between our models of reality and reality itself, so we don't mistake the map for the territory.
I agree completely! The "new era" to which I referred is not post-modernism, but what I describe as the current 'reactionary' era in my earlier post (the GGGP, beginning "An hypothesis ..."). Sorry if that was confusing.
Some humantities and social science academics I know disdain post-modernism, with all the scholarly reason and social momentum of being 'no longer cool' in high school - 'you're still wearing those shoes?'. I asked one, in front of their friend, about the post-modern person on whom they wrote their thesis. They changed the subject and then later told me quietly, 'I don't read that anymore'.
For all the ridiculousness of that, it's serious business. Post-modernism contained the weapons and armor against fascism and other ideology, and we've disarmed ourselves. What do people intend to replace it with?
They got sued for using the word "cab" in "UberCab", and just shorted the name to "Uber".
It would be ego-less if they called it CabApp or something.
All the other cabapp names are egoless
Also compare the word 'uber', however you interpret it, with words like 'google', 'yahoo', 'GNU', 'quark', 'charmed', 'C', 'C++', etc. Those have wit, humor, and disarm ego. (In fairess, maybe there are similarly witty names now that I'm not thinking of?)
And you are factually wrong: UberCab was created without Travis Kalanick, by Garrett Camp. Travis invested in UberCab 6 months later or so, and he became CEO as part of the deal.
Do your research please.
Lift, Cabify and Freenow are slightly more down to earth ;)
Even so, your thesis was falsifiable which makes it good in my book :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch#Use_by_the_Naz...
> So much for ego being a new thing and cherry picking how in olden times things were better.
I never said ego was a new thing, or that all of history was better. In fact, I chose the post-war period - whose culture, I would guess, was partly a reaction to the fascist ideology (or any ideology).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telesco...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Attractor
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Magellanic_Cloud
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Magellanic_Cloud
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Void
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Void
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fury_and_Hecla_Strait#%22The_P...
> The odd radio circle’s large outer circle is possibly more than a million light years across
The entire Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across: https://www.universetoday.com/75691/how-big-is-the-milky-way...
How far away is it? There appear to be some odd-shaped objects in the background that look like some galaxies from the Hubble Deep-space images. But HDS is optical, and this is radio.
What RF frequencies are represented by the blue-grey haze? That info would make it possible for a layman to speculate about what material was doing the radiating.
It does seem mysterious. If that thing's really a million ly across, then it's surely hard to explain. Any event at the centre most probably happened in a galaxy, and I would expect the galaxy itself to have captured most of the energy from the event.
Have they tried to look at the central galaxy in optical? Does it look like an watermelon that's been blasted with a 12-bore?
So we're talking about an event that occurred 1 million years ago, plus the time light took to get here. Perhaps it's a hugely energetic event that has illuminated and ionised intergalactic gas? But I can't imagine what kind of event that could be (the merger of two black holes doesn't seem to me to be right, but what do I know).
The observations covers the range of 880 MHz to 1680 MHz (with some gaps to avoid RFI, see their table 2), find a spectral index between -1.9 to -0.9 with a median of -1.6. Also the image is an interferometric measurement.
Genuinely interested what is the reason behind questions like that. In general, it's definitely cool and understandable to me to question the competency of anyone, but if (as in this case) a researcher researches a quite deep detail of a very specific field, using a very rare resource (a space telescope, which I assume requires some credibility to even ask for observation time) how do you assume they didn't check all boxes before writing a paper?
No need to for you to be defensive on the scientist’s behalf.
Perhaps he was just seeking knowledge. There may be an interesting reason why these radio wave patterns may or may not be affected by lensing.
Also, if you have been around as long as I have, it is not that uncommon for experts to be missing something obvious, or for science articles to exclude certain details in order to appear more fascinating.
I didn't assume the GP to be ignorant or distrusting the credibility of the researcher, and the question was valid in my point of view as well from that perspective.
"I am but a casual reader with an interest in this topic. I have read about Gravitational Lensing, and the pattern matching algorithm in my brain finds a loose match between that an this phenomenon. I am curious as to the particulars of this that makes it different from what I've read before, such that this requires a different explanation".
Of course, that is way to many words, an the shortcut of "Why isn't this Gravitational Lensing" is a more succinct way of asking the question. Which is a major reason why HN has as one of their guidelines "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. "
Ignorance is all it is - and not in a bad way. They don't know something, they're curious about it, so they're asking. It's legitimately as simple as that.
Since I believe you are also asking genuinely, I will attempt to disambiguate the two cases with illustrations:
1. OP states the question as "Could this be the same?". This expresses uncertainty of the form "Is this possible?" and "Are these simpler explanations still on the table?"
2. OP may have stated the question as "Did they consider X?". I think this moves closer to the idiot advice that is often of the form "Did they consider correlation is not causation?" etc. etc.
3. OP may have stated opinion directly: "They did not consider X". In this case, lacking knowledge of OP expertise, you may safely conclude that this is a statement from an armchair expert.
Of course there are an infinitude of statements and responses. But hopefully these 3 examples will help.
Edit: To be more clear, I mean the implication (no matter how qualified) that it is remarkable to even ask a question based on how likely it is that experts have already answered the question. That premise doesn't seem to make any sense: First, non-experts have no context for knowing what experts have likely ruled out and what they haven't, by definition. Second, if experts have ruled it out, the answer to the question is still valuable (how/why did they rule it out).
I could parrot your own comment back to you and say, do you really assume that the person didn't realise that only experts use giant telescopes and know what they're doing? Maybe they're hoping one of those experts will somehow come up with a good explanation and maybe some links to further reading.
Sometimes people read an aggressive or condescending tone into perfectly neutral comments and it really confuses me.
So, to me it boils down to: is there's something about the GP's question I missed, which is what I'd like to learn about? If not all is fine. If so, I'd like to learn the reason behind it.
I'm not a native english speaker.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.14805
They talk about your option in 5.11, "Einstein rings." For reasons that I don't understand (but I don't understand anything about optics) they come to the conclusion that the gravitational lens would have to be really large, and it is unlikely that such a large, well-structured lens would exist.
Some curiosities behind the question were whether optical and radio frequencies behave the same with lensing. And how to tell if the radio image is in front of or behind the stars.
I'm an armchair astronomer if that, and obviously didn't read the source paper. Appreciate your thoughtful response!
https://www.brightmast.com/ask-ap/
Also apparently ASKAP is doing double duty on payroll, taking care of the elfs for us.
And the hobbitses?
Or maybe that would give it a face?
I wonder if any life in such a galaxy could survive such an event.
> Circular features are well-known in radio astronomical images, and usually represent a spherical object such as a supernova remnant, a planetary nebula, a circumstellar shell, or a face-on disc such as a protoplanetary disc or a star-forming galaxy.
They describe these things as circles because that's how they show up on the radio telescopes. They are being precise about what they detected, I think. These are hard signals to even pick up, after all, no need to introduce a made up interpretation to further confuse things.
Would we get better data/images from it than from MeerKAT?
It’s already been cleansed. Nothing more to do."
- Death's End, Liu Cixin
Can we detect single-star Dyson spheres as the disappearance of stars before their expected end?
"The new MeerKAT radio data shows that the ORC’s large outer circle is possibly more than a million light years across, ten times the diameter of the Milky Way, with a series of smaller rings inside"
It actually sounds more like the wisps of gas seen jetting through the Milky Way and being irradiated by something. That alone, I think, isn't too unnatural of a thing to see out there.
Maybe someday this sort of thing will enlighten us on how matter dispersed in the early universe i.e. when these galaxies were forming out of still larger areas of matter. Who knows, maybe there's some dark energy/matter information to be gleaned in there, too.
You know, if I was a hairbrained, mega-structure scientist from some future, highly advanced civilization that otherwise couldn't study or explain dark energy/matter, one way to simply gather data would be to fill huge regions of space with matter and watch how my known input evolves and changes over time. If science up to that point can explain 100% of the movements of the matter from then on, then I know my theories and data are widely in agreement. If I know nothing else has perturbed that matter and the data are off, then the disagreement tells me something about how physics works at super large scale. [If I know physics with plenty of certainty at those scales and something changes outside of my expectation then something/someone new to the scene perturbed that matter.]
Which is to say, I wonder if there isn't a way to turn these oddballs into very valuable scientific data. Build radio-telescopes large enough to gather as fine grained data about these ORCs as possible and model away. Maybe something in there does translate to physics which explain dark energy/matter.
This is just a region of the universe that started out with a smattering of mass-energy in the early universe. What we're seeing now is the residue around the edges after gravity has merged the denser lumps of mass-energy into galaxies, black holes, stars, planets, etc. Subtracting out the initial mass-energy, but missing certain regions of sparse mass-energy due to relative gravitational isolation. Throw in whatever topological changes in spacetime due to inflation, perhaps, if so affected.
We've had the ability to detect and track such changes in star radiation for roughly a century. The potential scale of intelligent life is on the order of ten billion years and counting. That's a 1 in 10^8 chance that they're doing it at the same time as we happen to be looking.
Also, a Dyson sphere isn't invisible - the star doesn't exactly disappear. The material will absorb some radiation, heat up, and glow in the infrared. We've calculated what such a heat signature would look like, and haven't found any such thing yet.
We have a dozen or so stars within 10 light years. This circle is a million light years across. So I’m guessing it would be a ludicrous number of Dyson spheres.