• procrastitron@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    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.

    • OrteilGenou@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      When I first saw pictures of galaxies as a kid I noticed they all looked like black holes.

      In a way we’re all just bits of organic matter mid-flush, waiting for the Drainpipe of Destiny

      • MintyFresh@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        In a way we’re all just bits of organic matter mid-flush, waiting for the Drainpipe of Destiny

        Word

    • Olhonestjim@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Interestingly, galaxies at the edge of our ability to perceive are in fact receding away from us at velocities greater than the speed of light.

          • Ledivin@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Light can enter a black hole perfectly fine - we would be able to see things outside of it, because the light is still following us. No light leaves the black hole (if it’s past the event horizon), so you can’t see into it.

  • fartographer@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Okay, so now you can barely afford your rent inside a black hole. Enjoy the enhanced granularity of your desperation!

  • Geodad@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    What if we’re not in a black hole, but in the aftermath of a vacuum decay event?

    • LOGIC💣@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I suddenly feel something trickling down from above. Is this what they were talking about all these years? Is this a good thing? It smells bad, like really bad. Like somebody is cooking meth while they have a near fatal case of diarrhea. What am I supposed to do?

    • rozodru@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      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.

      • Zron@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        It’s entirely possible that there are no aliens in the “New York City” part of the universe.

        Dense regions of space will have much more interactions between stellar systems and may not be stable enough for life to evolve. It could be why we haven’t seen anyone else, they’re all in their own little pockets of peace.

      • III@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Being from Iowa, I take offense to that… But yes, you are correct.

    • niktemadur@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      But then there’s the guy who added all the mass and energy of the observable universe, calculated its’ Schwarzschild Radius, and came up with 13.8 billion light years.

      There’s also how our observable universe’s Hubble Horizon acts like a black hole event horizon, the way in which even the speed of light is insufficient to escape beyond.

      A lot of the math inside a black hole is eerily similar to the math of our own horizon, as traced by the age of the universe plus the speed of light.

      • Frostbeard@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Scientific American points to an important fact.

        "With our latest surveys, such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and Euclid, by my very rough estimation, we’ve taken pictures of somewhere around 100 million galaxies out of the two trillion or so estimated to exist in the entire observable universe.

        Shamir’s paradigm-shattering conclusion relies on 263 of them."

        They are discussing bias in the selection.

        “Unfortunately, this kind of extreme selection introduces many opportunities for bias to creep in. When we test a new idea in cosmology—indeed, in all of science—we work to make our conclusion as robust as possible. For example, if we were to change any of these filtering steps, from the selection of survey region to the threshold for deciding whether to include a galaxy in the analysis, our results should hold up or at least show a clear trend where the signal becomes stronger. But there isn’t enough information about such methodological checks in Shamir’s paper to make that judgment, which casts doubt on the validity of the conclusions.”

  • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Don’t get me wrong, understanding the nature of the universe is valuable and noteworthy. But how would that information meaningfully impact anyone’s life or change their behavior or worldview beyond a general awe at the unfathomable mysteries we already have towards space as we’ve understood it for centuries? Especially in a way that would ne noticeable to this person. Am I meant to stare up at the sky from 8:15 to 8:30 every other night with my mouth agap while I try to wrap my mind around the spacetime bubble we all exist on the surface of? Or can I just eat dinner?

    • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 months ago

      Astronomy is critical towards understanding the foundational principles of reality. Observing the universe around us is the guide for where physics should follow

      And I think most people would agree that understanding how our world works, the physics of it all, is very very useful in unforeseen ways. Cannot hope to make a circuit if you don’t know how electricity works, right?

      • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Again, I’m not poopooing scientific endeavor. I love science. But this person seemed to be mystified that we weren’t all majorly reacting to this news as if this possible fact, in itself, was life changing. For most people, it changes nothing about their day to day lives.

  • shneancy@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    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

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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    3 months 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.