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Growing evidence that the universe is connected by giant structures (2019)
- dang 7y agoUrl changed from https://bigthink.com/large-scale-structures https://bigthink.com/large-scale-structures, which points to this.
- corporate_shi11 7y agoIs this really that surprising? I thought that the CMB distribution of matter displays a proto-structure that matches with what we observe today, meaning the large scale structure and congruent behavior we observe is just the result of the initial distribution and motion of matter in the early universe, rather than some mysterious force or effect we have yet to explain.
- colordrops 7y agoOr, it doesn't require mysterious force or effect - it could just be an emergent property of how matter interacts. For instance, basic rules of atomic forces lead to complex behavior in the aggregate, such as life, foam, planets, etc. Not sure why this wouldn't apply to universal size structure as well.
- simonh 7y agoRight, but those forces and effects drop off with distance. The alignments we're observing are many, many, many orders of magnitude too far dispersed to be explainable by known forces. It would be like finding a few dozen planets floating in interstellar space hundreds of lightyears away, much further away than the nearest stars, but on analysis finding that they all happen to be rotating around our sun even though our sun's gravity is utterly overwhelmed by the gravity of other objects much closer to them.
- colordrops 7y agoThe same is true of a skin cell in your foot vs in your ear. You'd find remarkable similarity even though there is no apparent reason they would be similar until you comprehend the superstructure. The idea is that the similarities across vast amounts of space would not be due to first order effects from forces, but rather much more complex and subtle interactions over time that happen to have structure rather than being purely random, just as life emerged from seemingly random interactions in primordial pools.
- simonh 7y agoWell of course it seems likely some form of interaction at some point in the past or present is behind these effects, we just don’t know what it was or is. If that’s all your saying, sure.
- varjag 7y agoI don't know, to me it's fairly surprising.
- mclightning 7y agoso, kind of like a "cosmic inertia"? that would explain it. although I find this problematic explanation in the sense, every force in the universe stems from a shared origin all the way down to big bang. how do we draw the line between what is emergent and what is inherent? inherent being the cosmic inertia. edit: come to think of it, nothing is inherent about the universe except for anything before the big bang; and there we go into the realm of quantum foam, string theory, if I am not mistaken. edit: I went ahead and wrote a thought piece on this; https://medium.com/@suphievrakzade/abstraction-layers-for-the-universe-97bb524269eb https://medium.com/@suphievrakzade/abstraction-layers-for-th...
- joe_the_user 7y agoOne thought that occurs to me is that large-scale structures like sheets and black holes with parallel axes of rotation could be the result large directional explosions soon after the big bang rather than the result of a large force acting now.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoWhere would these directional explosions come from?
- joe_the_user 7y agoWhile I'd note one doesn't necessarily need an set explanation for such directional explosions to formulate decent theory (look at dark matter, etc), I think electromagnetic forces often produce highly directional effects.
- soulofmischief 7y agoThere are large-scale anistropies in the universe, and the origin of symmetry-breaking at cosmological scales is an unsolved problem. Either a force or type of matter is unaccounted for / incorrectly modeled, or the big bang was not symmetrical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil_(cosmology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil_(cosmology)
- s1artibartfast 7y agoI dont even think you need the explosion. You can imagine two gas sheets sliding along eachother. All of the vortices formed between them will spin in the same plane. You can imagine similar trends for interacting spheres and other geometries.
- arthens 7y agoThat was my first thought too, but my knowledge on the topic is tiny and I was hoping the article would explain why that wasn't possible.
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- ieatmyownpoop 7y agoAll i know is: I want stargate to be a thing
- outworlder 7y agoStargate Universe in this case, as Destiny was launched to collect data all across the universe, because the Ancients had identified a pattern in the structure of the universe...
- Izkata 7y agoNot just "the structure of the universe", the Ancients identified structure in the cosmic background radiation. The episode that revealed this aired within a month of a real-world discovery of a pattern in the cosmic background radiation [0]. Unfortunately, it wasn't nearly as enticing as what was in the show. [0] https://www.seeker.com/cosmic-rebirth-encoded-in-background-radiation-1765141336.html https://www.seeker.com/cosmic-rebirth-encoded-in-background-...
- hateful 7y agoAll hail his noodly appendage.
- dkersten 7y agoString theorists got it wrong: the universe isn’t made up of small vibrating strings, it’s made up of small vibrating noodles.
- ur-whale 7y agoGoes to show we just don't have the Math to understand large scale solutions to differential equations for the N-body problem.
- hinkley 7y agoThere's a theory out there that our universe is a pocket universe inside of a supermassive black hole. My relativistic gravity is pretty rusty and was shaky to begin with. If that theory isn't pure fantasy, and we were a pocket universe, and large masses were spinning above the event horizon, we'd experience forces from those objects, right? I'm still kinda fond of the Flatland theory myself. Us poor 4 dimensional beings can't figure out how to build tools that can take 5 dimensional measurements, so we see weird behavior we can't explain.
- rb808 7y agohttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/4/100409-black-holes-alternate-universe-multiverse-einstein-wormholes/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/4/100409-black-.... Personally I always preferred the theory that galaxies were just atoms in a much larger world.
- Already__Taken 7y agoWhat if our sense of scale is off and the universe isn't curved we're just orbiting a black hole 10x the mass of the visible universe. It's not expanding that's us travelling through the gravity well at 99% the speed of light relative to it.
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- brutt 7y agoAnother research about large scale structures: http://irfu.cea.fr/dipolerepeller http://irfu.cea.fr/dipolerepeller
- _bxg1 7y agoIs there no chance these are coincidences? It gives me "Bible Code" vibes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_code#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_code#Criticism "information theory does not prohibit "noise" from appearing to be sometimes meaningful"
- thaumaturgy 7y agoIndeed, or the result of some specific starting conditions in the early universe. But I must assume that these cosmologists have already considered and discarded that. I'd just like to be able to read more about why that guess doesn't fit what they're observing.
- simonh 7y ago'Starting conditions in the early universe' is too vague to actually consider properly. To rise to the level of even thinking about accepting or discarding it, we'd need to know what sort of conditions we're talking about, how they might lead to what we're observing, and preferably also how they might have come about. It's a class of possible explanations, not an explanation itself.
- shakil 7y agoWe know many things in nature are fractals: coastlines, tree branches, blood vessels... What if the Universe is one big fractal, repeating itself at different scales: electrons go around a nucleus, planets around a star, stars/galaxies around blackholes, and so on and so on, building larger and larger structures.
- kochikame 7y agoWhat if? It is.
- _wzsf 7y agoCentral forces don't guarantee that the universe is made of fractals. Nothing, for instance, orbits an electron within an atom (excluding spin-orbit coupling and other such quantum nonsense).
- pg_is_a_butt 7y agoSo everything that orbits an electron orbits that electron, but nothing else?
- flukus 7y agoElectrons don't rotate around the nucleus in the same way that planets go around stars, that's a simplification for high school text books. Supermassive black holes don't keep galaxies together either, galaxies rotate around themselves and even that isn't enough, hence dark matter.
- stkdump 7y agoFractals are not necessarily the same at different scales. They can be self-similar at different scales.
- meroes 7y agohttps://youtu.be/jhnKBKZvb_U?t=3516 https://youtu.be/jhnKBKZvb_U?t=3516
- soul4krsna 7y agoAll modern science is wrong. All is answered in Srimad Bhagavatam 1977 Srila Prabhupada. http://harekrsna.com/sun/editorials/01-20/editorials17559.htm http://harekrsna.com/sun/editorials/01-20/editorials17559.ht...
- gberger 7y agoDear Vice: Either you publish astrology, or you publish astronomy. You can't do both and expect to be taken seriously. [] https://www.vice.com/en_us/topic/astrology https://www.vice.com/en_us/topic/astrology
- gooseus 7y agoJeez, 81 pages of astrology, 25 of astronomy. I'm going to be optimistic today and assume this due to the relative ease of content creation, rather than the relative interest in the subject matter.
- MiroF 7y agoI wish this were the sole cause.
- ggm 7y agoVice is not taken seriously, the premise is false on entry. C'mon, it isn't even trying to be taken seriously. its Weekly World News.
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- whateveracct 7y agoAnti astrology people are so prevalent in tech and also so silly to me. They all are so obsessed with reason and science that they can't understand that astrology is fun and a platform for introspection. It's not some societal ill ruining everything. I get it though - I felt the same way when I was like 15 ;)
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- soheil 7y agoI thought I'd never live to see the day HN is defending actual f*cking astrology.
- dvirsky 7y agoThe title (not the text, though) sounds a bit like the premise of The Flow from John Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collapsing_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collapsing_Empire
- crorella 7y agoI was thinking the same!
- ThomPete 7y agoAny good?
- dvirsky 7y agoYep, not bad, but not in an epic sci-fi way like, say, Hyperion Cantos. It's funny and witty, kinda like a dramedy-political-thriller that just happens to be based in space.
- Flow 7y agoNo, I love Old Man's War but Collapsing Empire was a totally different book. It didn't help that Will Wheaton read it too.
- OrgNet 7y agoCan we teleport to those giant structures?
- grizzles 7y agoI have an unusual idea related to this. You might call it the interconnectedness of all things. (h/t DG) The more you look into quantum systems the more things seem to look like you are looking at the observable universe that we see in the sky. What if they were the same thing and space has somehow folded back upon itself? Of course it's not really a falsifiable conjecture. For example, we have absolutely no idea what's going on inside a proton and we'll probably never know.
- lgl 7y ago> For example, we have absolutely no idea what's going on inside a proton and we'll probably never know. We actually have a pretty good idea of what's going on inside a proton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton
- grizzles 7y agoSure, can you explain it to me and cite your evidence? Because that's the wikipedia article about protons, not an answer. The truth is this is a controversial area of physics heavy on theories and light on experimental data. The simple fact of the matter is we lack the measurement technology to understand the inner workings of a proton. Theories are just that.
- computerex 7y agoThere is an entire theory that describes the strong interactions inside the proton. Please take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chromodynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chromodynamics and experimental evidence for QCD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chromodynamics#Experimental_tests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chromodynamics#Experim... Furthermore particle accelerators have been smashing protons for a long time to probe what's happening inside. The standard model of particle physics is validated by evidence and experiments. I don't think it is fair to say that we don't know what is happening inside a proton. There are many questions in physics still left unanswered but I don't think anyone would classify this as such.
- tabtab 7y agoWhat happens when "God" pulls the plug on his/her experiment? I hope he backs us up.
- LgWoodenBadger 7y agoWhy? You wouldn’t exist to be able to perceive that it happened at all even if he did
- _wzsf 7y agoDon't worry, He'll let all of us (and our civilization) "die" first, provided we don't somehow escape it.
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- ryanthedev 7y agoWe know very little about our universe. We can't even define the Hubble constant. Dark matter theory is a joke imo. These nerds don't even understand refraction. Space isn't empty. If space isn't empty you will never be able to account for the path photons actually travel. Gas causes refraction, how could you be sure the photos that hit the lens in your telescope actually traveled in a straight line. I know this will get down voted to hell. IDC.
- mehrdadn 7y agoAs I understand it dark matter is predicted by one set of observations and confirmed by many others within calculated error bounds. It's not some kind of overfit model trying to explain a single observation. So to discount it you'd need to explain why it just so happens that many observations converge to the same results as that which you would expect from the predicted dark matter distribution. I don't think mere refraction can explain lots of different observations. Dark energy on the other hand is a whole other story.
- ryanthedev 7y agoFirst thing to understand is the only evidence we have for the universe expanding is redshift. Do I believe refraction is at all related to Dark mass/energy? Not all all. Refraction has nothing to do with that. Refraction has to do with redshift being miscalculated. Compression waves are the culprit and the field that propagates those waves for dark garbage. baryonic acoustic waves give direct evidence as the perp.
- ryanthedev 7y agoAlso I would like to add that galaxies have been observed to contain non dark whatever. So baryonic acoustic waves still fit that model.
- mehrdadn 7y agoI think you missed the actual point of my comment? Refraction was kind of irrelevant to it, I was trying to say something about the consistency of different observations and the strength of the evidence behind them. You could replace "refraction" with "squirrels" and it wouldn't really change what I was trying to explain.
- michaelsbradley 7y agoPlasma filaments and other plasma structures can manifest long-range attractive and repulsive electromagnetic forces proportional to d^-1 instead of d^-2. So if those forces are operative at galactic and intergalactic scales (between plasma structures) and we’re not fully taking them into account, then we may be overlooking the most powerful organizing mechanism in the universe.
- RenRav 7y agoWhat kind of movement is it? Calling it a web of filaments doesn't paint a clear picture as to the movement itself. Assuming it's synchronized, I think of child objects moving in sync with some kind of parent structure. That sounds ridiculous though.
- simonh 7y agoI don't understand why you think it's ridiculous for child objects, which formed within a structure, to reflect characteristics of that structure. The movements described in the article are mainly alignment and direction of axial rotation.
- cheez 7y agoThis makes sense. Our roads look like arteries. The universe is fractal. So it makes sense that there are arterial-like structures connecting galaxies.
- todaysAI 7y agoI know another construct that has this structure: the brain.
- mirimir 7y agoI vaguely recall that the observable universe looks a lot like foam. And even more vaguely, that maybe this reflects inflationary expansion of random fluctuations in the early universe. So maybe this apparent connectivity over implausible scales just reflects the fact that stuff used to be much closer together. Edit: There's a great sequence on inflation in Takashi Miike's "God's Puzzle".
- henearkr 7y agoThis is exactly what I thought. Sorry to not be able to comment more usefuly... I was looking for a comment already stating my idea before writing it down and i found it here.
- K0SM0S 7y agoWe used to think so, yes. But our telescopes have improved a lot since then, and we're now able to see with much more detail, our 3D positioning is better too. We've recently observed that the universe, at the largest scales of what's observable to us, looks like this: https://i.stack.imgur.com/lFnDf.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/lFnDf.jpg More picture and explanations on this short SE thread: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/198138/is-most-of-the-matter-in-the-observable-universe-within-galaxies https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/198138/is-most-o... I'll let you ponder how much resemblance this bears to other kinds of structures...
- Filligree 7y agoThat's a screensaver. You've heard of the simulation hypothesis, I suppose. As untestable as it is... wouldn't it be fun if this comment were literally true?
- mirimir 7y agoBut if those were neurons and interconnections, wouldn't we expect to see all sorts of structure inside them? I guess that it could all be dark matter, which we can't directly see. And there could also be all sorts of complexity in dark matter.
- gonational 7y agoMagnetic Universe
- hyfgfh 7y agoThe Coming of the Great White Handkerchief is near!
- ericdykstra 7y agoThis sounds a bit like Bill Gaede's Rope Hypothesis, but I'm not very well-versed in the topic to say for sure. Can anyone confirm/deny?
- lngnmn1 7y agoNo fucking mathematical model could be regarded as an "evidence". This is just bullshitting and abuse of terminology.
- radenska 7y agoif quantum theory can make predictions about the patterns in the CMB, can it also anticipate these structures?
- askvictor 7y agomight fit with the simulation hypothesis?
- tus88 7y ago> as if they are connected by a vast unseen force. LOL. Popsci is hilarious. And physics is in a desperate crisis. We need less science and more philosophy.
- starpilot 7y agoNo!
- Edward9 7y agoIt seems that periodically there is evidence showing that the universe is this or that and yet nothing is and it will never be concrete because it's impossible to find the root of the universe. I see it as a more philosophical question. I think we should be more focused on exploring the universe, not understanding it.
- colordrops 7y agoWe are able to explore the universe because of out attempts to understand it.
- funnygrass 7y agoJust a thought: maybe space is not sparsely populated with bits of stars and rocks. Space is filled with a form of matter we cannot yet detect.
- dannyw 7y agoIf space is a form of matter that does not interact with any known mechanism, then it may as well as not exist. Of course, future generations will find some sort of new matter, or some form of new interaction, but what you're saying doesn't mean anything for our world today.
- ztjio 7y agoNot matter but something is everywhere. Space isn't empty, nothing is empty, it just isn't always interactive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#Higgs_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#Higgs_field
- novaRom 7y agoA long-term motion of large structures of dark matter may be one explanation. We still don't know too much about dark matter except it plays central role in building the cosmic web. I hope James Webb Space Telescope will not fail to operate and its launch will not be delayed again (the project is 25 years old).
- tiku 7y agoEvidence? Observations from our point of view (including readings from space, still fairly close, on scale) are limited to our current position etc. So how can we really tell if it's just not curvature of space and blackholes that distort our point of view and readings? Interesting anyhow, but perhaps a bit soon.
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- ptah 7y ago> “Such studies are statistical and a step forward would require a large amount of polarization data, not easy to gather with current instrumentation.” https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Blinker%20Sync https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Blinker%20Sy...
- cmarschner 7y ago> which is very slowly rotating in a counter-clockwise direction What does this even mean? Would they rotate clockwise when looking from Australia?
- jgalvez 7y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4pWZGBpWP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4pWZGBpWP0 It would be pretty amazing if all this turned out to be true ^