paying rent sometimes feels like throwing money into a black hole
Therefore your landlord’s bank account is a black hole. Therefore black holes are inside banks. Therefore the universe is inside a bank.
cosmic horror
Don’t worry, the money goes to paying your landlord’s mortgage.
What if we’re not in a black hole, but in the aftermath of a vacuum decay event?
That is literally what the current big bang theory says! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflationary_epoch?wprov=sfla1
Look up vacuum decay. It’s theoretically a thing that can rewrite spacetime at a lower energy level, and would expand out from a point in a bubble. The expanding bubble would erase and rewrite everything it touched into the lower energy level.
Yes I know what vacuum decay is, and the thing I referenced, the inflaton field, is a hypothetized false vacuum near the very start of the universe, that went through this exact process, giving rise to our current vacuum and ending the hypothetized inflation era
I know there’s a hypothesis that our current vacuum could be metastable as well, but that’s a seperate thing
Yeah, I believe the Higgs field showed us to be metastable, unless new findings have invalidated that.
We’re inside a dust cup?
Ok I’ve been meaning to ask this in the Space community or the NoStupidQuestions community. I’ve seen this news circling around the past 2 weeks and have been watching videos of people talking about it.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong but I think the gist is that astronomers discovered with the JWST that some galaxies at the end of the observable universe appear to be younger than they are supposed to be. So it kinda blows a hole in the big bang expansion where objects farther away should be older. And that somehow ties in with the theory that our universe is inside a blackhole.
It’s fascinating but I don’t know what to do with that information other than just be fascinated. I think it was Neil deGrasse Tyson who said “what does it matter to us? nothing”, because us being in a blackhole doesn’t change anything in the scale of our universe.
From what I’ve seen, it’s not that they’re “young” galaxies, but that they shouldn’t have had enough time to develop if the universe were truly so crazily homogenous from the big bang. It doesn’t necessarily disprove the big bang, just means the universe might not be as “smooth” as previous assumptions.
Any scientist worth their salt should be readily able to admit it was always an assumption, just one that proved congruent with observations until now.
I’ve always liked this theory, imagining the cosmos is just a series/web/tree of black holes draining into the next. Everything gets recycled eventually.
It meshes well with my occasional feeling that reality is just circling the drain.
Clockwise or counterclockwise?
I gave it some thought and got vertigo. I’m going with counterclockwise.
I think it depends if you’re in Australia.
note that we’re all circling the sun but still not getting closer an inch per year
actually, we are inside the dream of someone else, and that one too is again in a dream …
Am I a man dreaming I’m a butterfly?
Maybe the far away galaxies are just the close galaxies seen from the other side?
Nah, that would require spacetime to curve a lot more than it does. It’d also have to curve in the other direction (local spacetime is hyperbolic, “local” as in basically all of the observable universe). Calculations show the universe must be several times larger than the observable universe (I forgot the exact numbers, but iirc it’s in the single digits or low teens) in order to match even Hubble observations, let alone JWST observations.
IMO, it’s likely that the universe just isn’t as homogenous as assumed, or maybe that certain geometries that span across spacetime or movement of the galaxies simply make us think the galaxies are further away than they actually are, or both.
I was joking. Unless it was genius of course.
I seem to remember that the science isn’t totally settled on the distance to stars in our own galaxy so I am quite chill about cosmology.
There is little to no reason to doubt the measurements within the galaxy, as that’s not far enough for any presence of dark matter to really skew things, nor does dark energy have a marked effect within areas of enough mass, like within galaxies. Though yeah there is some wiggle room on further measurements, hence the recent news furthering the idea that our galaxy sits in a less dense region. We’ve had evidence for probably multiple decades, but nothing is certain until it’s proved in several unquestionably accurate ways.
NOT “discovered inside black hole”, just gained further theoretical evidence for the Earth being in a less dense area of the universe. There has been actual evidence of such for some time (at least a decade), but there is uncertainty at such large scales so it cannot be called conclusive based only on a couple types of observation that may have erroneous procedures.
so basically We’re out in butt fuck no where in space and the aliens aren’t coming any time soon cause they essentially live in New York City and we’re in a town in Iowa that no one has ever heard of.
typical.
Less dense as in ~20% less dense. It’s absolutely nowhere near the population density difference of rural vs NYC, even assuming matter == chance for life, which simply is not the case, either.
Considering NASA could be canceled by an ass hole, I think we have other problems.
Man I really wish we had super fast space travel like star wars…
hasn’t this been a theory for a while now? The event horizon of a black hole keeps information minus one dimension. and the theory goes that our entire universe is just at the edge or a black hole in a 4D universe
Yes. It’s basically how the holographic principle got started, and that was decades ago.
Yes, we ignore it. Given the size of the universe, if being inside a black implies any conseqences that will ever hurt us, it will be a process that takes billions of years to develop, giving the human race billions of years to either become extinct or solve the problem.
There is no problem introduced by noticing that there exists a horizon to the universe. It’s also in no way what so ever a new “discovery”, but a basic concept based on how horizons work in the first place.
The only “new” “discovery” I’m aware of is just a theory about our galaxy being roughly in the center of a less dense area of the universe that’s ~ 2 billion lightyears across. There has been observational evidence for it for many years, but the new info correlates it with dark energy observations as well as distance/density observations, or thereabouts.
There’s that and what seems to be a preferred direction of spin on a galactic scale. But it’s not every galaxy.
Yea, that’s definitely a detail that doesn’t jive with the homogeniety assumed of the universe for the Big Bang model, but a lack of perfect homogeniety doesn’t itself disprove the big bang, it just means the single assumption about the smoothness of space needs to be thrown out.
It’s just black holes all the way down.
One has to wonder lol.
I got it! We’re within a simulation of the innards of a black hole. And that is the first time I’ve used the word “innards”. Lol
we could acknowledge it as a possibility AND work to better our um… local frame of reference.
If we are in a black hole, then the thing you feared most about falling into a black hole must be bullshit since we are quite fine. Relative to the vastness of shit in the universe, anyway.
This is a postulation not a discovery.
Someone did a weird math thingy that gave a word result and this was how they tried to explain it. There’s been zero confirmation this is actually the case. Just like they can’t decide if dark energy/matter is a thing.
We have a theory for expansion of the universe. It is called “the big bang theory”.
However according to the math our universe should slow down expanding, but we can observe it is speeding up. Solution? Dark Energy.
There are models that try to simulate the orbits and shit of things we can see. Now those models aren’t working however… Solution? Dark matter.
This is very run down concept of what dark matter and energy is. Basically shit we need for the math to work out to the observation we make.
However I don’t think we are inside a black hole. This would mean that instead of mostly nothing our universe would be cramped with matter…
I took a physics course at a community college over 20 years ago and one of the things that stood out to me was the professor telling us not to overthink or assign too much romanticism to the idea of black holes.
His message was basically “it just means the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light… if you plug the size and mass of the universe into the escape velocity formula, the result you get back is greater than the speed of light, so our entire universe is a black hole.”
If this was being discussed at a community college decades ago then I think the new discoveries aren’t as revelatory as they would at first appear to the general public.
another thing I learned at some point: Just because a physics formula returns a result, doesn’t mean that it’s reality
Theory is one thing.
Observation is the next step.Nah really it was probably some small thing the media got a hold of and just ran with. I think you’re spot on
And a relevant smbc for good measure.
Smbc is Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, but what does xkcd stand for?
Xaturday Korning Creakfast Dereal
I mean, I think it’s fair to ignore it 99% of the time. Frankly, as much as I love space science and science in general, we all should have a responsibility to solve real problems here and now. That’s been my issue with a lot of science, currently - we need problem solvers rather than idle explorers.
That’s not what science is, though. Science is about pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. Science isn’t about having a problem and trying to find a solution – that’s engineering, which is informed by science.
I can barely afford rent!
Well… the good news is you can stretch your income a bit further with spaghettification!
nuclear pasta is very energy dense
