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The jets are 23 million light years in length! That's 140 milky way galaxies laid out -- these are sizes I can't even begin to comprehend
by imranq 2y ago
The jets are 23 million light years in length! That's 140 milky way galaxies laid out -- these are sizes I can't even begin to comprehend
- illesteggplant 2y agoPretty crazy!
- ZoomZoomZoom 2y agoImagine a one meter long jet. Congratulations, you've begun to comprehend it and now are at 1/(2.176 × 1023) of the total length.
- wruza 2y ago10^23 is actually easy to comprehend, because it’s close to the amount of h2o molecules in a syringe. Just that many meters.
- takinola 2y agoImagine the amount of energy required to create a jet that large! The scales are so big, it makes me wonder if there isn’t an upper limit to energy density. How much energy can be in one spot before you inadvertently create a Big Bang?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> it makes me wonder if there isn’t an upper limit to energy density Yes, in a sense. The point at which the energy bends space-time into a black hole.
- doctorwho42 2y agoActually, in theory there is one place denser but our models show it can never happen. The moment right after the big bang. As energy can never be created nor destroyed, all the energy in the universe was practically in one point in space-time a femtosecond after the big bang.
- dyauspitr 2y agoThe whole concept of the Big Bang is a mind warp. The whole explosion must have happened in some… space-time thing to begin with. What was that immense point of matter and energy in? What was “around” it? We’ll never know.
- bamboozled 2y agoOne word, AGI
- mkl 2y agoIt wasn't an explosion. Space itself expanded, so there wasn't anything to expand into. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe
- ASalazarMX 2y agoI think there are some philosophical definitions in the way. The Universe is everything we know, it is made of space and time, so of course it cannot expand into any space as it contains all of it. We don't know what's outside the Universe, so we can't say there is nothing, and we can't say there's anything, we don't know what it is expanding into, or if "expansion" even makes sense outside the Universe. If we somehow find out what's outside the known Universe, that will inevitably become part of the known Universe, so we will never know what's outside the Universe.
- edgyquant 2y agoInstead of thinking of it as a bang in an existing space-time, the way to conceptualize it is the collapsing of a universal wave function from a superposition of all possible universal states. Of which our universe is just one potential possibility. Space time is a function of the collapsing state.
- dyauspitr 2y agoI think I understand that to a certain extent. But where does the universal wave function exist to begin with? There must be some construct it exists within.
- fasa99 2y ago[flagged]
- arbuge 2y agoFor comparison that's almost 10 times the distance to the Andromeda galaxy (2.5m ly).