32 ms·
Nearly 1k mysterious strands revealed in Milky Way’s center
- flatiron 5y agoIt’s the second trisolarian fleet! (Three body problems books. Highly recommended)
- eecc 5y agoPlasma pinches? https://www.plasma-universe.com/pinch/ https://www.plasma-universe.com/pinch/
- ncmncm 5y agoYes, I would like to know what the plasma physicists can suggest. Plasma physics is the hardest kind of physics, so plasma physicists have to be better than other physicists. What they say deserves more attention. Most who have found employment actually doing science study the sun, I think. But fusion projects divert many of them.
- andrewflnr 5y ago> Plasma physics is the hardest kind of physics, so plasma physicists have to be better than other physicists. I'm pretty sure this is a joke, but I could use some reassurance.
- ncmncm 5y agoNo joke. Quantum field theory seems easy when compared to plasma fluid dynamics.
- raattgift 5y agoSee also this very high-res image (7530x4684) of the spectral density of the Milky Way in radio, which clearly highlights (among other things) these filamentary structures: https://www.flickr.com/photos/astro_jcm/51847931721 https://www.flickr.com/photos/astro_jcm/51847931721
- m4x 5y agoThat is a strikingly beautiful photo. Thanks for sharing it
- jiggawatts 5y agoBut it’s in Flickr, so all interaction is blocked including zoom. I see about 600x400 pixels of that photo. What a wonderful Internet we’ve made for ourselves.
- leijurv 5y agoThere's a download button in the bottom right, if you hit Original you get the actual original. Here it is: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51847931721_c3feebd201_o_d.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51847931721_c3feebd201_o...
- _ph_ 5y agoI am just wondering what is it that prevents that link to open the image in a browser window but forces a download of it?
- danielbln 5y agoUsually it's a HTTP header that's sent to your browser: Content-Disposition: attachment
- _ph_ 5y agoThanks, I had always wondered why some sites behave differently with some file types. A bit annoying, if you just want to glance at something for a while but not keep it around for longer.
- danielbln 5y agoThere are browser addons that force the browser to ignore this header, for chrome e.g. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/undisposition?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/undisposition?hl=e....
- steve_adams_86 5y agoThere's something so striking about how non-intuitive these strands are. I'm not well versed in astronomy or physics, but these seem to go against my mental model of how the galaxy organizes itself. They're like massive cosmic aberrations. Though now I suppose in time they'll make perfect sense.
- eleitl 5y agoThese can't be cosmic strings, right?
- zmgsabst 5y agoI would argue they’re galactic, not cosmic strings — places that the quasar formed “loop” excitations which were somehow frozen in place when it extinguished. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyon
- steve_adams_86 5y agoWow, I had no idea about anyons. What a fascinating concept. This is probably a stupid question, but how can anything in our three dimensional world truly be two dimensional? How is that imposed on matter or energy? I thought we used 1/2/3 dimensions to help ourselves understand our world better; like theoretical tools we can use on paper or a computer to simulate and explore reality. But we actually have 2 dimensional objects in the world?
- WpgRubyDev 5y agoI don't have a reply to your question but another comment above [0] argues that Anyons don't do much to explain this particular phenomena. [0] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30160407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30160407
- zmgsabst 5y agoSibling makes a good suggestion to read the better physics reply, and my response to it. Anyons don’t only exist in lower dimensions: because of how knot theory works, we found the simplest cases in a highly confined electrons — but there’s higher dimensions analogs for higher dimensional knots. You no longer get anyons from particles exchanging position, but rather, from when fields tangle in 2-knots. However, the rings in a magnetic field form a torus, so tangles in the magnetic field can (theoretically) knot fairly easily, eg from energies swirls in an accretion disk.
- zmgsabst 5y agoAre these “frozen” quasar anyons? Nobody has ever addressed my question about how the braiding you’d expect to form in a quasar would unwind — and if it doesn’t, we should expect to find most structures along “cooled, inflated” braiding. Which we seem to. > Explained in a colloquial manner, the extended objects (loop, string, or membrane, etc.) can be potentially anyonic in 3+1 and higher spacetime dimensions in the long-range entangled systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyon In particular, the “loops” would be magnetic field lines from the singularity to the disc (and back), which would become tangled via swirls within the disc as it spiraled inwards. While each piece would be small, the total braid would be quite large — due to number of particles and chaotic nature of the disc. I know a single anyon doesn’t weigh much - but is there an estimate of “anyonic mass” to the galaxy, stores as tangles?
- raattgift 5y ago> Nobody has ever addressed my question Ok, I will try. I have to admit I do not fully understand what you are asking. As noted in the link at the top, it is reasonable to speculate that these filaments are related to the activity of the galactic centre supermassive black hole. However, we do not have a quasar in our galaxy, and it is hard to imagine (consistent with evidence from this and similar galaxies at various cosmological redshifts) that the Milky Way possessed an active galactic centre which subsequently was quenched. Indeed, part of the mystery here is that there is a quite weak magnetic field permeating the galactic centre, and little outward cosmic ray pressure. The spectral index (more details at https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10552 https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10552 §3.1, "nonthermal radio filaments that have broad spectral index distribution as well as the steepest spectral index that can readily be discerned at high latitudes", cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_index although neither link is especially friendly to non-experts) is entirely consistent with synchrotron radiation, which does not require any exotic particles at the filamentary sources of the radio emissions. As discussed in §3.2 of the arxiv preprint, all we need is highly accelerated electrons. The mechanism for accelerating the electrons is unknown, but there are several explanations available that do not require exotic particles. §4.3 discusses several plausible alternatives. I'm no expert on anyons but I do know how Wilczek described them when he first proposed them, and Keilmann's observations of his humour, and I struggle to see what problems introducing anyons might reasonably solve at these bulk scales. Additionally, I do not see how anyonic behaviour -- rather than straightforward magnetobremsstrahlung -- could be relevant, much less a better description, at the warm temperatures in the environments of these filaments and galactic centre molecular clouds. Unfortunately, I don't understand your second last paragraph at all.
- scrdhrt 5y agoThese are wormholes, obviously. On a serious note, beautiful and awe-inspiring!
- KronisLV 5y ago> Among the remaining mysteries, Yusef-Zadeh is particularly puzzled by how structured the filaments appear. Filaments within clusters are separated from one another at perfectly equal distances — about the distance from Earth to the sun. Sounds like the wake of shipping lanes, the ships even follow regulations to stay a safe distance away from one another, though they really should do something about those older engines that mess up the landscape for everyone with the wakes. If that's not a sci-fi story yet, it probably should be! I wonder what those actually are, though.
- thelittleone 5y agoLooks almost mycelial to me.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Jaruzel 5y agoClearly warp-drive signatures.
- simonhamp 5y agoI'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?
- mNemoN 5y agoI had pretty same thoughts about it!
- dave_sullivan 5y agoLines for communication and direct energy transfer at the Galaxy's center?
- idontwantthis 5y agoI wonder if they are interference patterns from some massive waves interacting.
- motohagiography 5y agoCame here to ask this. A 1-D artifact with even or periodic spacing really suggested an interference pattern to me as well.
- Atlas667 5y agoYeah, 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.
- sbierwagen 5y ago>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?
- thinkingemote 5y agoIs it puzzling that they all seem to be aligned / orientated perpendicular to the galactic plane - they are not randomly orientated at all. Or at least the ones we see. How would they look like if viewed from above?
- misja111 5y agoI guess that could be a form of survivor bias; we can only detect them well if they have this orientation towards us.
- stargazer-3 5y agoThey could be aligned with the magnetic field lines around the Galactic Center: https://media.springernature.com/original/springer-static/image/chp%3A10.1007%2F978-981-10-3445-9_5/MediaObjects/420898_1_En_5_Fig1_HTML.gif https://media.springernature.com/original/springer-static/im...
- willis936 5y agoIf they are from accretion disks then it would make sense. The average velocity of matter in the milky way is rotational, so most black holes should also have rotating dragged frames in the galactic plane as matter from different altitudes are accreted.
- raattgift 5y agoThere is ample evidence contradicting the idea that the poles of pulsars are aligned with galactic north-south. Indeed, our own solar system is not aligned with galactic north-south, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Motion_of_Sun,_Earth_and_Moon_around_the_Milky_Way.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Motion_of_Sun,_Earth... and that is hardly unusual or unexpected: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/159-our-solar-system/the-sun/the-solar-system/236-are-the-planes-of-solar-systems-aligned-with-the-plane-of-the-galaxy-intermediate http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/159-our-solar-syst... And while we don't have many galactic black hole candidates, the ones we have and can see beaming are haphazardly oriented, and there's no reason why black holes should behave differently from their progenitor stars (oriented haphazardly) or other compact objects (the pulsars mentioned above).
- Zenst 5y agoAll this time spent on string theory and we find strands. "Stretching up to 150 light-years long, the one-dimensional strands (or filaments) are found in pairs and clusters" This is surely very interesting and raises lots of lovely questions, found in pairs aspect must be indicative of something. Would love to know if the pair's spacing constant. Also, how can they be one-dimensional as my understanding is, we would not be able to measure them far away if that was the case.
- 00000000005 5y agoAll cosmos related reporting must say something like; “these strands indicate the possibility of life on other worlds”.
- makerofthings 5y agoGalaxy lightning. Or maybe FTL Vapor trails.
- varjag 5y agoFound them missing strings from the strings theory!
- albertzeyer 5y agoIntergalactic chemtrails!
- WediBlino 5y agoPetrova Lines?
- johnjungles 5y agoAmazing book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54493401 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54493401
- nkozyra 5y agoI found the concept pretty goofy when I was reading it but then I had to stop and remind myself that not only do I know shockingly little about the universe, our greatest experts do, too. Whatever fantastical concept we can imagine likely exists in some iteration out there.
- The_Colonel 5y agoI liked the concept, but the execution was ... lacking. Some aspects like language (hopefully not spoiling too much) seemed to me treated very naively.
- nkozyra 5y agoI do agree on that, I wasn't a huge fan of the storytelling which did a lot of belabored hand-holding and did indeed feel like an amateur who did just enough research to treat the reader like a naive student. That's a hard trick to pull, though. How do you tell an expert's tale without a) getting too technical for most or b) getting to ELI5 for the few?
- hoseja 5y agoThose were spectral lines.
- tasubotadas 5y agoIt's the Webway! https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Webway https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Webway
- pndy 5y agoNo no, it's clearly the Splitstream - https://andromeda.fandom.com/wiki/Slipstream https://andromeda.fandom.com/wiki/Slipstream
- irthomasthomas 5y agoJust when you thought the vastness of space could not get any more mind blowing, you learn about filaments and superstructures spanning billions of light years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules%E2%80%93Corona_Borealis_Great_Wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules%E2%80%93Corona_Boreal... This one measures 10 billion light years. Now recall that 1 light year is about 10 trillion kilometers... tick, tick, tick, boom! Mind blown again.
- eXpl0it3r 5y agoWorking link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules%E2%80%93Corona_Borealis_Great_Wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules%E2%80%93Corona_Boreal...
- irthomasthomas 5y agoThanks!
- go_elmo 5y agoThats totally ungraspable for human brains, mind blowing! Thats 10^23 kilometers, the same order of magnitude as the avogardo constant, means e.g. 14 gramms of carbon correspond to about 6.22 * 10^23 atoms of carbon, its the same magnitude to some of the larger smallest things...
- holoduke 5y agoYou can a bit actually by scaling down everything. Imagine earth is the size of a grain of sand. Nearest star would beat approximately 4000km away. Light would travel at 0.3m/sec. Moon is only 4mm away. The sun only 16 meters.
- maybeOneDay 5y agoand how long is this strand in question?
- timonoko 5y agoOne of the strands is Puppeteers' planet constellation, which is escaping, because this galaxy is imploding. It takes 10,000 years when we know about it, and then it is too late.
- deepsun 5y agoPretty good desktop background picture I have now.
- jacquesm 5y agoWhat are the chances of these being an artifact of the observation equipment? Just like you can have all kinds of optical aberrations, does the same go for radio based observations? For instance, isn't it odd that most of them happen to lie in the vertical direction of this particular observatory across many lightyears of distance?
- augustl 5y agoI'd love to read more about this, in all aspects of astrophysics! It's not that I doubt that astrophysicists take this into account, I'm sure they do! But when we see an "image of a black hole", that's really a gazillion data points from a multitude of different observatories, processed by human made algorithms with human made models and biases, and it happens to look just like we expected - how do we know it's not just our assumptions that made it into the processing and modelling? Again, I'm sure every astrophysicist ever has thought about this and knows how it's handled, so it's not a criticism. I'd just love to read more about it, as a layperson :)
- jcims 5y ago(not an expert in this, just a fan) Always a possibility and RF is generally more prone than visible light to artifacts, in part because its much harder to eliminate from the environment. However, in this case the brighter filaments have been observed for decades, the wide angle view of this image is from 1989 from the VLA array in New Mexico with some data augmentation from Spitzer space telescope. https://public.nrao.edu/gallery/the-center-of-our-galaxy-2/ https://public.nrao.edu/gallery/the-center-of-our-galaxy-2/ The MeerKAT study just increases the resolution and signal to noise ratio, which has allowed us to see many more of them, but we can see the 'old' ones as well. The emission phenomena is pretty well understood AFAIK, the mystery just being mostly when/why/how they got there. The other thing to keep in mind is that these filaments are huge in the night sky. The image we see is a mosaic of many observations that spans 3.5 x 2.5 degrees. The moon is ~.5 degrees, or about the same size as that giant bubble on the lower right. Here's the paper. I just scanned through it and its relatively approachable - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.10541.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.10541.pdf Edit: Check out the section 'OBSERVATIONS AND DATA PROCESSING'
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- augustl 5y agoThese sorts of images always makes me wonder about how many of the images of the universe we see, are how they look from our perspective, vs how they look from "above" etc. I suppose this one is from our perspective? How we know that the arms of the milky way are bent when viewed "from above"? Imagine if they were straight lines when viewed from above. From our perspective, they would appear to be spiraling arms, since the light at the far end of the arm would take longer to reach us. I'm not doubting astrophysics here, I'm just a layperson that wonders how these things are properly taken into account.
- nbaugh1 5y agoI'm guessing, in terms of angle (ie "above" or "our perspective"), this is pretty much what you'd see. We collect data sitting here on planet earth, so more or less, everything we see is from the same vantage point in the universe. The overall size and shape of things can be calculated by relative motion of objects in space. We also can make educated guesses about the shape of our own galaxy by observing others from the outside.
- Nition 5y agoOne day humanity will gain the ability to simulate these filaments as viewed from directly top-down and discover that the lines converge to spell out TEXT GALAXY PLEASE IGNORE.
- amelius 5y agoLooks like DNA strands. We're part of a big cell ...
- mensetmanusman 5y agoI wonder if they are the signal of smaller spinning black holes that have been whipped by larger ones to near the speed of light such that the Hawking radiation is magnetic in nature due to spin.
- ComputerGuru 5y ago> Stretching up to 150 light years long, the one-dimensional strands (or filaments) are found in pairs and clusters, often stacked equally spaced, side by side like strings on a harp. Are they really one-dimensional or is it just relative to their 150 LY length?
- xqcgrek2 5y agoWhy does northwestern have a press release on a result they were not involved with? The new measurement was by South African and European scientists. What a sad bunch of derivative scientific clout chasers.
- dicroce 5y agoOdds these structures can help explain away dark matter?
- Shadonototra 5y agowe perhaps live inside an atom that lives inside an atom that lives inside an atom that lives inside and atom that lives inside an atom everything is a matter of point of view and perspective
- l33tman 5y agoWhile not directly related to these magnetic strands, but regarding superstructure, compare with the latest 2.1 trillion body simulation of a universe formation, mapped as well as possible to the observed universe properties: https://youtu.be/R7nV6JEMGAo https://youtu.be/R7nV6JEMGAo described at http://skiesanduniverses.org/Simulations/Uchuu/ http://skiesanduniverses.org/Simulations/Uchuu/ That's another kind of superstructure, the dark-matter-guided scaffold of galaxy formation in the observable universe volume.
- _3u10 5y agoAre they transwarp conduits?
- _gy5c 5y ago[flagged]
- kbelder 5y agoI don't see any reference to strands in any other galaxy. Are these strands too faint to be detected if they were present in Andromeda or any other galaxy?
- raattgift 5y ago"Didn't know to look for them; will look for them now", essentially. Whether it's easy to resolve them (or rule them out, if not resolved) in M31 is a good question for radioastronomers. However, from a broad Copernican Principle perspective, it would be very strange if they were in our galaxy but not M31 or other spiral galaxies.