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Astronomers 'image' a mysterious dark object in the distant Universe
- orliesaurus 1y agoa far away civilization probably draining energy from the emptiness of space to power some AI datacenters /s
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jsbisviewtiful 1y agoThose gen AI images of cats playing poker won't create their own energy, you know T_T
- excalibur 1y agoIt's our descendants. They had to travel back in time to escape entropy and find sufficient quantities of energy to sustain them, which is why they're 10 billion light years away.
- DaveZale 1y agoalso, they didn't like what the future looked like
- baggachipz 1y agoThey're blaming Tylenol?! That's it, we're out of here.
- delichon 1y agoThat would be about 2.5 on the Kardashev scale, and in terms of heat, between Kim and Khloé on the Kardashian scale.
- daxfohl 1y agoAI to the edge meant they had to port CUDA to a JS framework.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- alansaber 1y agoI look forwards to the python tutorial for building gpt-2 with string theory
- DonHopkins 1y agoThat is literally the plot of the game Dyson Sphere Program. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_XqHWx-v_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_XqHWx-v_Y
- KolibriFly 1y agoMeanwhile we're down here burning rocks to run LLMs that still confuse "their" and "they're"
- jagged-chisel 1y agoIs this the first time this article author has seen “image” used like this? We image human anatomy the same way - sophisticated algorithms take the output of CT, ultrasound, MRI and build something we can interpret visually.
- momoschili 1y agowhy would you get that impression?
- nonethewiser 1y agomy read on it. - the quotes around image in the title - the commenter believes image is the correct word in a more literal sense
- huflungdung 1y ago[dead]
- jagged-chisel 1y agoIt is also in quotes in one of the image captions
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- staplers 1y agothe lowest mass dark object currently measured one million times the mass of the Sun Sometimes you read things that remind you how vast and untamable our universe really is.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- catigula 1y agoIf you think that's crazy, it's likely a drop in the bucket comared to the noumenonal world. There's no reason to think that our senses encompass the vast majority of understanding everything in reality and current evidence that they, in fact, do not, via dark matter as a primary source. I suspect our senses encompass a meaningless fraction of the noumenon.
- procflora 1y agoIn what way is dark matter not a phenomenon? Just because we don't know what it is doesn't make it a noumenon.
- catigula 1y agoIt's that it demonstrates that some sort of noumenon can likely have partial but not 'full' overlap as we understand it with a phenomenon. To elaborate, the noumenon can have properties that are unknown to us and outside the purview of certain senses (if not all) but still have partial phenomenal effects such as gravitational effects. Given partial overlap, we could, and likely should, surmise that overlap, if partial, can also be zero. In fact, partial overlap with certain things (such as the gravitational field) but no sensory experience is exactly what we'd predict if this were true. The mistake is thinking I'm asserting that things are phenomenon or noumenon when that's not quite right. Mostly, the supposition is that things can exist and have either 'full' (unlikely I think), partial, or zero overlap with our sensory experience. Things that demonstrably have partial overlap suggest a wider world of things. I simply find the idea that our evolved sensory experience encompass even a sizable fraction of reality to lack epistemic humility. This is obviously speculative.
- sixo 1y agoCan someone knowledgeable weigh in: is the "dark object" here believed to be a localized blob of dark matter? A dark star or black hole? Or is "dark" being used generally to mean "not bright enough to see at this distance"?
- b112 1y agoOr a cloaked ship?
- gclawes 1y agoEXCESSION
- sixo 1y agoIf so it's a big one, 1M solar masses.
- layer8 1y agoThat’s just how warp drives happen to appear from the outside.
- preisschild 1y ago... and its heading right for us :P
- alansaber 1y agoThey found a statistical anomaly that they're trying to atrribute to new physics, using some novel maths. So a tiny speck of evidence towards a new theory of matter (i know nothing about astro, just my supposition)
- momoschili 1y agoDark in the context of astrophysics means specifically that the object/matter does not interact directly with electromagnetic radiation (eg absorb an optical/microwave/radio photon). So it is probably dark matter, but probably unlikely to be a black hole because we can typically detect a black hole's effects in an indirect manner :P
- tiffanyh 1y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45538113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45538113
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- layer8 1y agoActual paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02651-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02651-2 From the abstract: “This is the lowest-mass object known to us, by two orders of magnitude, to be detected at a cosmological distance by its gravitational effect. This work demonstrates the observational feasibility of using gravitational imaging to probe the million-solar-mass regime far beyond our local Universe.”
- blamestross 1y agoAnd when you are trying out a new imaging method, the selection bias for "long tail weird stuff" that shows up is pretty high. Assuming this is repeatable, it will take a while to contextualize.
- personomas 1y ago[dead]
- geniium 1y agoProbably a small bug in the matrix
- deadbabe 1y agoIt’s nothing, mostly empty space.
- baconbrand 1y agoI have nothing but admiration for people who can study space and not melt down into a permanent existential crisis. This is cool as heck, and now I’m going to go back to my computer job and try not to think about how ridiculously tiny and fragile my little life is.
- HPsquared 1y agoConversely, people who study microscopic phenomena might end up with gigantic inflated egos. "Lord of the atoms"
- dgfl 1y agoIt’s our job. It’s mundane. It’s only cool again when you step back for these kind of publications, or when you go to a conference and you see a bunch of adjacent (and importantly, completed) work. 99% of the time we look at a screen / piece of paper / whiteboard.
- somenameforme 1y agoAnother fun one. The Cosmic Calendar. [1] Imagine breaking down the history of the universe into a single year. It really offers some amazing perspective on the length of life, and what it means. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln8UwPd1z20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln8UwPd1z20
- VTimofeenko 1y agoI wonder if it's similar to how mefical doctors feel about their jobs. It's gotta turn into a bit of a routine, otherwise they will just spend time in that existential crisis and not get anything done. > This is cool as heck, and now I’m going to go back to my computer job and try not to think about how ridiculously tiny and fragile my little life is. There could be an alternative take here: we really lucked out that life as we know it exists at all. So we kinda won the lottery already.
- kakacik 1y agoSome form of life is probably quite common given the scale of entire universe, amino acids could be found in space for example coming from pre-solar times. If you understand what I just wrote you have to accept above as fact. Now there are fuck tonne of filters we passed so far, may very well fail on next one (probably self-destruction), and we are lucky with so far stable good place for life. Given there are billions of trillions of planets, no way we are on the very top of that ridiculous number. We may be one of the earlier civs but no way we are first neither. But how we would recognize a civilization that has say just a 1 billion years headstart? Dyson spheres are for fools ignoring dark forest stuff, not something really smart cautious beings would do. Matter holds enormous amount of energy, and there are other ways to extract it in a less obvious ways, ie black holes or probably some other ways. Look at it this way - we are maybe building a small baby steps for one of big civilizations of universe. Still extremely primitive in all possible ways while arrogant enough to mostly not see it, but there is potential for true greatness. Otherwise we will perish, I dont see anything in between.
- hearsathought 1y agoNot a "distant universe" but our universe distant in time ( aka our universe in the past when it was younger ). The title reads like astronomers found a mysterious dark object in another universe. Like a distant solar system or a distant galaxy. Or am I misunderstanding the findings here?
- aethrum 1y agono it doesn't
- hearsathought 1y ago"Astronomers 'image' a mysterious dark object in the distant galaxy". Would you assume the headline is referring to a galaxy far away (spatially) or your own galaxy in the past?
- cellular 1y agoWhat are the white blocky pixels in the picture? Why are they there?
- womitt 1y agoThe big intergalactic 220V plug
- originHarbor1 1y agoWhen the smallest dark object we can find is still a million times heavier than our sun, maybe it's time to stop worrying about that Monday meeting.
- KolibriFly 1y agoPretty wild that we can now detect million-solar-mass objects that are completely invisible, just by noticing tiny pinches in gravitational arcs from galaxies billions of light-years away. It's like doing cosmic archaeology with a microscope made of math and radio waves
- assimpleaspossi 1y ago>> a key question for astronomers is whether dark matter is smooth or clumpy And if it has a chewy nougat center. (Sorry. Reminded me of an old TV commercial.)
- Alary2006 1y ago[dead]
- maximium 1y agoMy theory is it's maybe was a supermassive black hole and it was too big for it to keep its energy and then it exploded into something like looks like a dark matter or it's rather can be two black holes collision together and then when the time fast those mini dark matter it's still sucked in and created what I call naderod black hole