There's something about this image that almost brings tears to my eyes. It's so big. It's an order of magnitude larger than our ("our") Milky Way. And that little smear to the bottom-left? A whole galaxy with uncountable stars, but also just a few pixels.
Do we humans represent something greater? Are we just a smear of pixels, a trivialising of some incomprehensibly large object? Are we really just this small? Are we a galaxy to some other being in some microscopic dimension, imaged with technology of a totally alien nature? Maybe these aren't logical questions.
I mean, there are plenty of photos like this, where you can just barely begin to appreciate the scale of the visible universe, but yeah, this one just got me today.
> There's something about this image that almost brings tears to my eyes. It's so big.
I can hardly look at the sky (at night) without getting a panic attack, for that exact reason: the enormity of it all. It scares me to death thinking about the time and the distances. And I never met people who have that too.
One thought to give me the heebee-jeebees is imagining to fall into Jupiter. Temperature and pressure aside, the vastness and alienness of falling into an abyss of ammonia clouds for an eternity and plunging into an ocean of liquid metallic hydrogen is terrifying. I could not finish a 3-hour video game[1] set on that very environment. Too scary for me.
I alt-F4'd Space Engine in panic when I told it to zoom to a black hole and I saw this circle of emptyness rapidly opening in my screen and distorting the infinity of stars in the background. I swear I found a dozen other people on forums mentioning their phobia of black holes caused by Space Engine.
Space is scary. Everything outside Earth's atmosphere is by definition alien and unnatural. Yet so fascinating.
You’re not alone! I’m the exact same way, it’s like I try to wrap my head around the enormity of what I see and I’m filled with terror. My wife thinks I’m insane that sometimes I imagine falling in a space suit toward Jupiter and I feel scared.
Also anytime there’s an article about the sheer size of the universe, trying to get you to understand the enormity, I feel my grip on reality start to lessen and have to pull myself back and stop thinking about it.
I’ve noticed the moon doesn’t cause similar anxiety, maybe because it’s so close and tangible compared to everything else?
I’ve never met a fellow astrophobe, either. Hang in there.
It's nice to see that some people share some of my fears. When I still played Kerbal Space Program it used to make me anxious, and even something like the landing zone selection in Rimworld can be a bit scary. I used to have nightmares about being in space too. I'm not that scared of the night sky but when looking at it while laying down and seeing nothing else it can be scary.
At least know that in that vast universe you're not alone in your fears!
Sounds like existential anxiety type issue to me. You might study the stoics or learn to embrace nihilism to get past it. Once you accept how small and irrelevant you are in this big picture, you can stop worrying about success or "winning" and get on with things that are important to you.
But, on a flip side - somewhat tangentially, I've recently become interested in molecular biology. The strides we're making within the field is incredible.
Perhaps it isn't as sexy as astronomy, but it's far more within our grasp, and arguably has a far bigger impact on us, at least right now
There may exist extra timelike dimensions that can be a conduit for information. I hear that the ultrahyperbolic equations this leads to are difficult to comprehend.
Another way to see it is that while we are so small and irrelevant - enjoy the fact that we are irrelevant and yet we get all this.
Add to this the scale of time - just remember that in 500 million years after all evidence of us is long, long, LONG gone that the clouds will still form and the waves will still crash on the shore.
That we are here and potentially meaningless isn't something to fear, it is something to cherish.
I see it the other way around - we are the only thing that is relevant, and the rest of the universe isn’t. Yes, it is big (to put it mildly) and hostile, and some people feel that thinking about it is somehow “liberating,” which, in fact, is merely a fleeting illusion, because the excitement quickly passes as soon as you go back to your daily minutia and have to continue to put up with all the bullshit and what not that’s happening around you. (The thought of the impending death may be just as “liberating” except that it’s not and never has been. You simply go through you daily routine until, say, you get sick and die. That’s it.)
I've heard these kind of feelings many times and I find them particularly interesting because I've never felt anything like that
I think the feeling of being "minuscule" starts at a much lower scale. Who am I in this city? No one relevant. 40-50 people might feel sad if I die today. The remaining X million won't care. Does that make me feel bad or irrelevant? Not really...I'm relevant to 40-50 people and very relevant to my close family and friends.
I'm not too attached to the human species either. I think we have some great things, but even in terms of the earth we've only existed for a tiny bit (and maybe we won't be for much longer....100 thousand more years?). I'm also fine with that.
My hypothesis is that many people feel very strongly things like the soul is eternal or that humans have a unique and uber-important destiny in the universe. If you feel that, contemplating how minuscule we are when considering time-space will make you feel weird because it contradicts those very strong feelings.
If you think the size of the source object is large, consider the size of space its viewable from.
If you see a spec of light from a star, that same spec is visible from every point on a sphere around it (ish)
Now consider the size of the sphere!
It's amazing anything reach us at all.
There's something great about physics and astronomy when it comes to naming things.
What is it? An odd circle of radio waves. What are we going to call it? Well, if we call it an "odd radio circle" the initialization is the same as the monstrous bad guys from a classic fantasy novel.
Continuing the thread, my favourites are the sequence of telescopes named "very large telescope", "extremely large telescope" and "overwhelmingly large telescope"!
In the post-modern era (roughly 1945-20??) people were highly skeptical of their egos and of power, advertised humility, and consequently had a sense of humor about themselves and the world. Thus you get names like quark and Google.
Now in the newly-born (reactionary?) era, ego is our God, and we get names like Uber. Physics perhaps hasn't quite joined the new era, yet.
If you are referring to Uber the app, "Uber" had nothing to do with ego. The cab experience was poor, and the service was called UberCab to delineate a better cab experience. Cab++ if you wish.
They got sued for using the word "cab" in "UberCab", and just shorted the name to "Uber".
This can be really annoying. I went into an ENT for an ear infection. Doctor looks at me really seriously and tells me I have "otitis media". I look it up. It's just latin for "ear infection". That's nice, but I came in to learn what to do about it.
There is also plenty of bad names in physics, the "colour charge" and all other colour related names in quantum chromodynamics would be a very notable example.
https://i.imgur.com/UB2r629.png you can tell it's pioneering science when they've used up all the fancy qualifiers like "polar" and "equatorial" and end up just saying "Another ring"
Anton always presents great videos, but my guess is that it could also be bubbles from the breath of Great A'Tuin, the celestial turtle, as it swims through the cosmic ocean. /s
At first I didn't see the big deal, because it looks just like a nebula, just in RF spectrum. Then I processed the fact that it's over a million light years across.
How far away is it? There appear to be some odd-shaped objects in the background that look like some galaxies from the Hubble Deep-space images. But HDS is optical, and this is radio.
What RF frequencies are represented by the blue-grey haze? That info would make it possible for a layman to speculate about what material was doing the radiating.
It does seem mysterious. If that thing's really a million ly across, then it's surely hard to explain. Any event at the centre most probably happened in a galaxy, and I would expect the galaxy itself to have captured most of the energy from the event.
Have they tried to look at the central galaxy in optical? Does it look like an watermelon that's been blasted with a 12-bore?
So we're talking about an event that occurred 1 million years ago, plus the time light took to get here. Perhaps it's a hugely energetic event that has illuminated and ionised intergalactic gas? But I can't imagine what kind of event that could be (the merger of two black holes doesn't seem to me to be right, but what do I know).
Based on the galaxies inside the ORC, it's probably at z ~ 0.55. With those distances you don't get much detail, everything is mainly slightly squashed smudges.
The observations covers the range of 880 MHz to 1680 MHz (with some gaps to avoid RFI, see their table 2), find a spectral index between -1.9 to -0.9 with a median of -1.6. Also the image is an interferometric measurement.
Readit News
Do we humans represent something greater? Are we just a smear of pixels, a trivialising of some incomprehensibly large object? Are we really just this small? Are we a galaxy to some other being in some microscopic dimension, imaged with technology of a totally alien nature? Maybe these aren't logical questions.
I mean, there are plenty of photos like this, where you can just barely begin to appreciate the scale of the visible universe, but yeah, this one just got me today.
I can hardly look at the sky (at night) without getting a panic attack, for that exact reason: the enormity of it all. It scares me to death thinking about the time and the distances. And I never met people who have that too.
I alt-F4'd Space Engine in panic when I told it to zoom to a black hole and I saw this circle of emptyness rapidly opening in my screen and distorting the infinity of stars in the background. I swear I found a dozen other people on forums mentioning their phobia of black holes caused by Space Engine.
Space is scary. Everything outside Earth's atmosphere is by definition alien and unnatural. Yet so fascinating.
1: https://store.steampowered.com/app/773370/Exo_One/ (it's actually pretty good)
(I was today years old that that's a Dr. Strange quote, sigh. I thought it was more profound, lovecraftian or something).
Also anytime there’s an article about the sheer size of the universe, trying to get you to understand the enormity, I feel my grip on reality start to lessen and have to pull myself back and stop thinking about it.
I’ve noticed the moon doesn’t cause similar anxiety, maybe because it’s so close and tangible compared to everything else?
I’ve never met a fellow astrophobe, either. Hang in there.
At least know that in that vast universe you're not alone in your fears!
Once we become less rocks-banging-on-rocks primitive, the first order of business will be to get the hell out of the galaxy.
But, on a flip side - somewhat tangentially, I've recently become interested in molecular biology. The strides we're making within the field is incredible.
Perhaps it isn't as sexy as astronomy, but it's far more within our grasp, and arguably has a far bigger impact on us, at least right now
Add to this the scale of time - just remember that in 500 million years after all evidence of us is long, long, LONG gone that the clouds will still form and the waves will still crash on the shore.
That we are here and potentially meaningless isn't something to fear, it is something to cherish.
I see it the other way around - we are the only thing that is relevant, and the rest of the universe isn’t. Yes, it is big (to put it mildly) and hostile, and some people feel that thinking about it is somehow “liberating,” which, in fact, is merely a fleeting illusion, because the excitement quickly passes as soon as you go back to your daily minutia and have to continue to put up with all the bullshit and what not that’s happening around you. (The thought of the impending death may be just as “liberating” except that it’s not and never has been. You simply go through you daily routine until, say, you get sick and die. That’s it.)
I think the feeling of being "minuscule" starts at a much lower scale. Who am I in this city? No one relevant. 40-50 people might feel sad if I die today. The remaining X million won't care. Does that make me feel bad or irrelevant? Not really...I'm relevant to 40-50 people and very relevant to my close family and friends.
I'm not too attached to the human species either. I think we have some great things, but even in terms of the earth we've only existed for a tiny bit (and maybe we won't be for much longer....100 thousand more years?). I'm also fine with that.
My hypothesis is that many people feel very strongly things like the soul is eternal or that humans have a unique and uber-important destiny in the universe. If you feel that, contemplating how minuscule we are when considering time-space will make you feel weird because it contradicts those very strong feelings.
Now consider the size of the sphere! It's amazing anything reach us at all.
What is it? An odd circle of radio waves. What are we going to call it? Well, if we call it an "odd radio circle" the initialization is the same as the monstrous bad guys from a classic fantasy novel.
ORCs it is then!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanny%27s_Voorwerp
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telesco...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fury_and_Hecla_Strait#%22The_P...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum
In the post-modern era (roughly 1945-20??) people were highly skeptical of their egos and of power, advertised humility, and consequently had a sense of humor about themselves and the world. Thus you get names like quark and Google.
Now in the newly-born (reactionary?) era, ego is our God, and we get names like Uber. Physics perhaps hasn't quite joined the new era, yet.
I dunno, I've noticed that most physicists I've met have the "ego is God" vibe pretty well cooked in, and they will definitely let you know it.
They got sued for using the word "cab" in "UberCab", and just shorted the name to "Uber".
> The odd radio circle’s large outer circle is possibly more than a million light years across
The entire Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across: https://www.universetoday.com/75691/how-big-is-the-milky-way...
How far away is it? There appear to be some odd-shaped objects in the background that look like some galaxies from the Hubble Deep-space images. But HDS is optical, and this is radio.
What RF frequencies are represented by the blue-grey haze? That info would make it possible for a layman to speculate about what material was doing the radiating.
It does seem mysterious. If that thing's really a million ly across, then it's surely hard to explain. Any event at the centre most probably happened in a galaxy, and I would expect the galaxy itself to have captured most of the energy from the event.
Have they tried to look at the central galaxy in optical? Does it look like an watermelon that's been blasted with a 12-bore?
So we're talking about an event that occurred 1 million years ago, plus the time light took to get here. Perhaps it's a hugely energetic event that has illuminated and ionised intergalactic gas? But I can't imagine what kind of event that could be (the merger of two black holes doesn't seem to me to be right, but what do I know).
The observations covers the range of 880 MHz to 1680 MHz (with some gaps to avoid RFI, see their table 2), find a spectral index between -1.9 to -0.9 with a median of -1.6. Also the image is an interferometric measurement.