6 ms·
Ring of galaxies challenges thinking on cosmos
- ldoughty 3y agoBuried an interesting fact at the bottom -- This is seen as a ring, but likely a coil aligned with our viewpoint. I don't know much about astronomy, but that fact changed how I played with the idea in my head.
- stoneman24 3y agoYes, I might be able encompass how a set of galaxies evolve into a ring structure but what process would end up with the galaxies in a coil configuration (viewed end on). To my mind, the coil structure is the bigger headline, a bit buried in the BBC article. I’ll try to get and read the AAS paper at the weekend, perhaps that will help me.
- Keysh 3y agoThis was a presentation at a conference; there’s probably no paper to read (yet, anyway).
- steve1977 3y ago> what process would end up with the galaxies in a coil configuration (viewed end on). Something that has both a linear and an angular momentum or spin while pushing things (galaxies in this case) away? I’m not a physicist in any way, so I might use terms incorrectly, but I hope the point got across.
- spacecadet 3y agoAny circle might be a coil in more than 2 dimensions.
- willis936 3y agoAny coil might have inductance.
- r2_pilot 3y agoElectric universe theory confirmed!
- spacecadet 3y agobzzz bzzz
- oneman 3y ago[dead]
- RufusJacksons 3y agoI’ve been reading a lot about simulation theory after recently watching the Matrix again, and hot damn does this fit right into that narrative…
- robertlagrant 3y agoI have good news: everything can fit into that narrative.
- ofisboy 3y agoIf you’re into that stuff and also like animes, recently I finished watching the “Pantheon” series and it has an even more interesting and somewhat more realistic plot compared to Matrix and super scary and exciting at the same time.
- RufusJacksons 3y agoI’ll check it out! Thanks!
- heads 3y agoYes! It is a very exciting concept in science fiction, indeed! Some other similar ideas that come to mind are the multiverse quartz megaspheres in the second half of Diaspora and the message embedded in pi in Contact, the novel. These are stories of course, but the cosmic microwave background radiation is a real life megastructure that encodes the remnants of the Big Bang and that is terrifyingly fascinating. Another real world one is the giant foreboding galaxies in the background of the Angular Diameter Turnaround xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2622/ https://xkcd.com/2622/ What other examples, fictional or real, are there of giant monumental pieces of information encoding?
- clownpepe 3y agoAlways find it interesting how people (not OP particularly) can hate on religion, but can entertain the ‘simulation theory’.
- 3y ago
- kseistrup 3y agoThe Danish mysticist and spiritual teacher Martinus started talking about such structures in cosmos about a century ago.
- ChatGTP 3y agoIt could've just been a coincidence too?
- kseistrup 3y agoYour guess is as good as mine.
- tokai 3y agoMartinus' spirals are metaphysical and has nothing to do with lumps of galaxies. He's not talking about the structure of the physical universers at all. When he is describing the cosmos its about esoteric truths.
- kseistrup 3y agoWell, yes and no. I was not referring to his spirals as such, but to the fact that Martinus claims that all structures in the universe are simultaneously a micro- and an macro-organisms (with God defined as the only being that doesn't “have” a macro-organism). And when Martinus talks about X3 he is definitely talking about the physical universe that ranges from the late half of the realm of bliss through the realm of instincts and the realm of the killing principle to the first half of the realm of real humans: all of these have physical bodies, so to speak, and what we as humans see in the sky are but the physical bodies of giantic organisms, according to Martinus' worldview. However, Martinus also claims that the physical appearance of every object/being in the universe is but the letters in a book and that the “real life” is the story in that “book” — Book of Life (“Livets Bog” in Danish) — and that's where it all gets metaphyscial / esoteric. At least that's my understanding.
- tokai 3y ago
- kaon123 3y agoSorry, why can this not be a coincidence? I understand that the universe is smooth across large spaces similar to how a fog is smooth on larger spaces, and coarse on smaller ones. But even then, given a large universe, why would this be mathematically impossible? If galaxies formed evenly everywhere, couldn't this have happened by coincidence? Which theory is violated here? Sorry my knowledge is a limited "The great courses Cosmology" course from 2009
- simonh 3y agoIt should be possible to calculate them likelihood of distributions with a given degree of apparent structure. Not a given structure, but the degree of variance from a typical random distribution.
- The_Colonel 3y agoThis structure is too large in relation to our observable universe for it to be explainable by a mere coincidence. It's 1.3bn light years in diameter, while the observable universe is 93bn light years in diameter. This is also not the only such structure found, some other examples are even larger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cosmic_structures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cosmic_structu...
- danparsonson 3y ago> This structure is too large in relation to our observable universe for it to be explainable by a mere coincidence. It's 1.3bn light years in diameter, while the observable universe is 93bn light years in diameter. Why is that important?
- thriftwy 3y agoMaybe the matter is still spread smoothly across the whole cosmos, but the observable universe is tiny enough so that it is not completely smooth and some we see some local artifacts, which would have been smoothed out / insignificant if we saw way more of it inside our viewport. That would still be a valuable find, though.
- geijoenr 3y agoIt looks to me like an alien smiley :) of course aliens have only one eye.
- jajag 3y agoEarlier post about this with link to the university's press release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38960728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38960728
- dav_Oz 3y agoNot entirely sure if it applies to this two cases "Big Ring" and "Giant Arc", here, but other large "structures" have been found in the past and this paper "Seeing patterns in noise: gigaparsec-scale "structures" that do not violate homogeneity (2013)[0] addresses the possible randomness: >In general when using an algorithmic approach to identify clusters of points in a distribution, one must employ some criterion in order to decide whether the results obtained correspond to ‘real’ structures in the Universe, or are merely artefacts of the algorithm. One possible criterion is theoretical: if there is a good reason to believe that the points in the cluster are in fact gravitationally bound, for instance, or if its properties match those of structures that are expected to exist in the real Universe, it may be regarded as real. Alternatively, to assess unusual clusters which do not conform to theoretical expectation, the relevant criterion is whether they are unlikely to have arisen purely from noise. Since the linkage length used to identify the Huge-LQG is so large, there is no reason I know of to believe that it forms a gravitationally bound structure. Certainly no real structures of such size are expected in the standard cosmology. On the other hand, when using this linkage length the clustering algorithm often finds such extended structures even in pure Poisson noise. It therefore appears that the Huge-LQG fails to satisfy either criterion, and so its interpretation as a ‘structure’ is highly questionable. This conclusion is even more applicable to the other slightly smaller quasar groups whose existence has also been claimed. [0]https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/434/1/398/997865 https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/434/1/398/997865
- irrational 3y ago> While the Big Ring appears as an almost perfect ring on the sky, analysis by Ms Lopez suggests it has more of a coil shape - like a corkscrew - with its face aligned with Earth. I wonder if there are other structures, but we can’t (easily?) tell because of how they are aligned with Earth.
- throwaway4aday 3y agoA budding Kardashev IV civ https://kardashev.fandom.com/wiki/Type_IV https://kardashev.fandom.com/wiki/Type_IV
- Solstinox 3y ago"Such large structures should not exist according to one of the guiding principles of astronomy, called the cosmological principle. This states that all matter is spread smoothly across the Universe." This passage/article doesn't make intuitive sense to me here. What in this physical universe is smoothly spread? Only if you average or look at a massive aggregate level, sure. But at each "zoom level" there should be another non-smooth structure, while things at a smaller level smooth out. It's more or less fractal all the way up and down. I don't think this challenges our thinking on the cosmos?
- T-A 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle
- danparsonson 3y agoTo put it crudely, it's about how it started vs how it's going - initial distribution is expected to have been uniform with small fluctuations that over time were exacerbated by gravity resulting in the Universe we see today. A ring of galaxies implies some unexpected very early structure - like seeing shapes in an explosion.
- sinuhe69 3y agoI don’t find the part, explaining why they think it is a structure and not say an optical illusion? Are all these galaxies of the same-ish distances to us? Are they gravitationally bound together or how should we understand the term “structure” here?
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38963315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38963315