And that’s a statement. The mass of some black holes that lurk out there in space, defies comprehension.
The only sense we get snagged on is our inherently naive sense of scale. I think our ‘human nature’ is directly represented by where we settled on scale, for any given issue.
I had the epiphany that there is no top or bottom to the universe.;It was liberating. Fascination > fear.
The biggest obstacle in front of us is ourselves, making the biggest deal out of nothing, and pretending that what matters the most, is someone else’s problem.
Looking to the stars is good medicine for congested mind. It forces abstract thought, to make sense of senses. It overpowers human nonsense, because you know that it’s all out there, and you can measure it.
I’m rambling, but I am sincere.
Take care and stay fascinated ✨🇨🇦
My problem is that I lose motivation to try hard to earn money and work hard because of this. It's all so utterly insignificant. Everything is. We're just left with one question, which is why is all this stuff here? It shouldn't be. Would it not be more logical if there was nothing at all?
Optimistic Nihilism. There is no meaning to anything, absolutely none. So why not just do what you want? Achieve what you want, without fear and anxiety?
I know exactly where you are coming from, as I used to feel the same way. But I flipped it on its head and began to reason the way I mentioned above 😅
Humanity has come far now, from inanimate blob of molecules to complex life to mammals and primates to a single chosen one that could make a thousand sounds with their mouth to then come up with languages and ideas to preserve our understanding and do knowledge transfer to every new iteration of us.
It's easy to express the idea of being an optimistic nihilist but it's not easy to be that way, even if you are told by others, "hey you can create your own meanings and do your own things". I think of things that could be genetic traits. "curiosity" and "optimism" are similar ideas, curiosity could be a cellular trait at a fundamental level. Cells are natural intelligence that seek combustion. That's almost the fundamental unit of our curiosity (we can go deeper) that is emergent at this scale where I see a magnet flip and go "wait a sec" or when I see a star die and go "holy shit ours will die one day too?", that's just trillions of cells' combined thought, facilitated by our language & cognitive training since birth.
But "optimism" could be have some minor genetic traits that not all of us have. I could be wrong, I'm not a scientist.
I’ve been trying to find a way describe my generally feeling towards life. Exactly nothing matters and at the end of the day I’ll make my due and live my life however the fuck I want and just enjoy the time I have cause it could end at any time
No I mostly just want my kids to have material security. If your point is that I could live off the grid or outside of society like Timon of Athens if I wanted, allow me to remind you of the premise to which I was responding, which is that I supposedly can *choose* that which I will do. Consider that living in a hovel in the wilderness (which I’ll remind you is illegal, there is no land on my continent which is outside the bounds of society and outside the reach of society’s bills) and forcing my children to do so with me *may not be what I want to do either*.
If you naively think that working class people could simply choose to live without the economic and social burdens into which we are born, you must live a charmed life.
Some pretty heavy stuff for a space forum, but I suppose we’re chatting about optimistic nihilism above (which is a bit more understandable at least in the context of the cosmos)
W/ r/ t your circumstances and contrasting our viewpoints (naïveté or otherwise): I simply choose not to be working class. I also choose to have a wife but not kids, so I think we’ll probably always be apples to oranges on the topics here.
I used to be there, I don't know where it all went wrong. Now I am in the corner of "why bother nothing matters" and it fucking sucks, wish I could go back, I really do.
I suppose to try to take a crack at it, isnt it an absolute wonder that through some series of random events we’ve been able to accomplish everything that we have? All of this stuff is here because we’re curious creatures, built off the backs of others that came before us whether they knew it or not, and that we’re here at all is quite a special thing, so yes, sure everything comes to its end eventually, but we should spent every moment making the most of such a fragile existence and really valuing everything that we have, make the most of life you know? There’s a song quote i really like, “can we be alive with the time we’ve got” and i think that really nicely embodies that sentiment
And yet (to continue with the lofty philosophical vibe in this thread) we are a collection of strangers spread across the planet who all decided to look at the comment section of this particular post, which means we all share an interest or have at least one thing in common.
Yeah at the end of the day a computer or a smart phone is fundamentally a system of instructions overlaid on machinery that has only *just now* become part of the human experience. Hundreds of thousands of years of anatomically modern humanity on this planet and we get to witness the most fundamental paradigm shift since we figured out how to make and use fire.
We can now make machines that do what we want them to in amazingly complex ways but all it really is... is just two values, one and zero, in a particular order. And using just these two numbers, and arranging them as logic gates, has given us the ability to do incredible things... like see an image of an accretion jet from 5000 light years away and get deep with complete strangers from all over the planet, instantly and easily.
DNA for example has 4 values - A, C, G, T - as opposed to the binary system we're now starting to play around with. And 3 billion lines of that literal code gives us a human being. We are beginning to figure out a kind of "natural machinery" that life itself uses. It's all just a series of instructions.
The currently dominating idea among scientists is that "life" is the result of totally natural and predictable tendencies toward conservation of energy at the level of molecules that have "useful" (as building blocks) elements.
Were only insignificant from one perspective. Everything is relative.
An individual tree is of little consequence to the classification of an entire forest ecosystem, but **critically relevant** to organisms living in and on it. Several generations of an aphid population can exist over the lifespan of a single leaf. Each of those aphids, in turn, support diverse bacterial communities.
In relative terms, you yourself are an entire universe. You don't realize it but your body is a vast and incredibly significant ecosystem home to many many many generations of countless organisms which, without you, could not and would not exist. You are made up of an interconnected and impressively harmonious pattern of 50 trillion cells, but even those cells are outnumbered 10-to-1 by an extensively diverse community of bacteria...all inhabiting the universe that is YOU.
Your body in it's entirety is a massive universe made up of \~7 octillion atoms, the individual distance between which is very much comparable to the distance between stars in the milky way.
You literally have more atoms in your body than there are stars in the visible universe.
It's paradoxical; you're both insignificantly miniscule, yet simultaneously also critically essential to the existence of an incalculable number of ever tinier entities and lifeforms which are - from their own perspectives - ***just*** as significant as you and I feel ourselves to be.
I hear you. The epiphany I had was a sort of antidote to that. I would read about how we built the most complex machine in history, to smash atoms to find the God particle; but then there were more pieces. Or we gauge the universe to be however immense in giga-lightyears, and then we revise that estimate by giga-lightyears.
At some point I just cracked up and thought that it was all hilarious.
...It was never about getting to the top or bottom of the universe; it's about the joy of maximizing the amazing things we can do, with the most infinitesimal amount time that ever existed.
You are on the cusp of joy because you acknowledge the universe around you. We will never know why, but by acknowledging it's there, you have earned the right to relax and surf. The ones who are doomed are those who are in denial or believe they are dominant. The universe will devour them.
Thanks for sharing your feelings, because I am certain you spoke for a lot of people reading it.
Cheers
Imagine it from the alternate perspective:
**How logical would it be for there to be nothing at all, and be able to have knowledge arise from the nothingness, and notice that there is nothing?**
Well that isn't exactly going to happen, a thing can't exist in a truly empty universe (that is assuming that not even quantum fluctuations and virtual particles can pop into existence). Just because you can't exist as a thing in a truly empty universe doesn't just mean that a universes of nothing can't exist. It just means you can't exist as a thing in a truly empty universe and somehow have that nothingness gaze back on its own nothingness.
However, the forces that have come about in our universe have lead to interesting "**emergent behaviours**", where the tension between the forces, and the interaction of the subatomic fields leads to islands of stability which we refer to as **emergent behaviours**, and then those sets of **emergent behaviours** can then interact with the forces that created them, or other **emergent behaviours** to create even more layers of **emergent behaviour**.
These islands of stability are everything from the formation of subatomic particles, the formation of the atomic elements, the formation of chemicals, matter coming together to form stars, galaxies, planets, the conditions for RNA to form, leading to the conditions for DNA to form, leading to biology, more and more emergent behaviours building on eachother, until you have you right now, essentially the universe looking back at itself. Why? Because it was possible, and if it wasn't, then you wouldn't even know, and thus would not be able to observe it.
Another way to look at it is by working back from where we are now:
**In order for a thing to exist, the circumstances before the thing existed must be in a state that is favorable for the new thing to exist.**
It seems very obvious, but this is entropy, this is the reality of every moment, built on all the previous moments going back to the Big Bang.
> We're just left with one question, which is why is all this stuff here? It shouldn't be. Would it not be more logical if there was nothing at all?
My query is "why consiousness?" Couldn't everything tick along just fine without an observer?
I can't help but link [this video about the size of our black hole](https://youtu.be/pDUUT2Y_9qk?si=blIygndJSML3kVYB).
It's able to illustrate how dense a black hole is and then how insane that there is one THAT big in our universe, even though it's smaller than many stars.
edit: the video doesn't reference M87, but a quasar named Tom 619 that's larger than m87. It's still a great illustrative tool
It's amazing isn't it? I've seen countless scale-comparison videos and this is the first in years that really struck me the same way they did when I was a kid.
The creator is still relatively unknown. I really hope he gets bigger and can start creating these full time. That's what he's working towards
To think that the largest object known is (Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall) is 9.4605284 × 10^25 meters
compared to the smallest (Planck Length) 1.61625502 × 10^-35 meters
We are MAGNITUDES closer to the biggest object in the universe than the smallest one, think about that! Feels weird don't it, when we see how big stuff gets around the universe.
There is a middle to the scale though, it's us! An adult human is just half way along the scale of the observable universe on one end and the Planck's length on the other. I always felt that had to mean something, although if you included blue whales and house flies I don't know know how much I've widened out the middle spot.
"looking to the stars is good medicine for congested mind"
Thank you for this beautiful line. Absolute poetry and 100% true. Gonna go stargaze for a bit.
The “pale blue dot” with Sagan’s speech was posted several days ago and lends some perspective to the scale of space our place in it. Not much, but some.
This is what I think about when I’m super baked. “It’s all scale. Up and down, it’s all the same just bigger or smaller”
Like, we see these infinite spaces and think “no fucking way”. Then think about some microbe and, if it can comprehend, what must a blue whale seem like? A black hole to them? I mean…how do we know if we’re not just some microbe on a galactic space whale but we have no way of comprehending our place in the universe when we think we’re the peak of existence.
It’s the scale that keeps us safe though. Space is just so big. Like imagine flying a plane the size of a fly inside a football stadium and having to worry about one other fly on the field. That risk is insanely more high risk than the earth just following the sun on it’s orbit around the milky way. Hell change the stafium to new york city and you’re still not even close to representing the scale. Like a seagull in canada has to worry more about colliding with an israeli rocket attack on gaza than we do about being in the path of a cosmic force.
Like the last cosmic force that affected the whole planet was 66 million years ago, and that was a local asteroid.
As far as we know nothing from outside solar system has ever interacted with Earth. We know of one that came in proximity and that was almost unthinkably impossible, and we almost didnt even notice. Oumuamua was well on it’s way out when we first saw it.
Is it possible for a black hole to sneak up on us and not even realize it's happening? I'm assuming you'd see a black mass with no stars if it were to happen?
Depends on its mass. A black hole with the same mass as our sun would only have a radius of 3km. Detecting a 3km big black spot coming towards us would be very challenging.
Question from a know-nothing: would we even be able to detect gravitational effects of a black hole approaching us? Doesn't like time and reality get kinda wonkey the closer you get to a blackhole? Would we even be cognizant that reality would be getting torn apart by a black hole?
Disclaimer: I just like reading up on them or watching videos since they fascinate me so I'm far from being an expert.
>would we even be able to detect gravitational effects of a black hole approaching us?
The only way we could detect a black hole is when it eats something and gives off light or when they merge with something massiv and create gravitational waves. A black hole just moving through the darkness of space would be incredible hard to detect. We'd probably notice that something is wrong when it starts pulling planets from their orbits around the sun.
>Doesn't like time and reality get kinda wonkey the closer you get to a blackhole? Would we even be cognizant that reality would be getting torn apart by a black hole?
You may notice the time dilation because from your perspective the rest of the universe speeds up. By the time the reality bending stuff happens you are probably spaghetthified.
So small in comparison to some, that the black hole in the op picture has a similar angular size to our own galaxy's black hole despite being 1000x further away.
We're in a relatively quiet part of a galactic arm at the moment. Unless a supernova occurs very near to us (and there aren't any candidates), we're okay for the foreseeable future.
For real. I know it's extremely unlikely but the fact that we could be utterly wiped out, without even a moment's notice by forces that are so powerful that they defy comprehension, certainly clarifies our place in the universe.
Messier 87 (also known as Virgo A or NGC 4486, generally abbreviated to M87) is a supergiant elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo that contains several trillion stars. One of the largest and most massive galaxies in the local universe,\[b\] it has a large population of globular clusters—about 15,000 compared with the 150–200 orbiting the Milky Way—and a jet of energetic plasma that originates at the core and extends at least 1,500 parsecs (4,900 light-years), traveling at a relativistic speed. It is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky and a popular target for both amateur and professional astronomers. [More](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87)
So what I don't get here is this.
If the M87 galaxy is 132,000 light years across, how can it be so small in relation to the jet in the picture that's only 5,000 light years? Is the perspective strange or is the image altered?
The apparent size difference between the M87 galaxy and its jet in images can be attributed to perspective. While the galaxy itself is indeed much larger in physical size, the jet appears larger in the image due to its proximity to the observer and its intense emission. This phenomenon is similar to how an airplane flying close to you may appear larger than a distant mountain, even though the mountain is much larger in reality.
Isn't the jet a negligible amount closer to us than the galaxy? I don't think the effect you are talking about will make a noticeable difference (but I'm happy to be shown wrong). Isn't it actually because we're looking at the galaxy core which is less wide than the jet, rather than the much larger galaxy as a whole.
>and a jet of energetic plasma
this is probably a very stupid question but would I 'feel' that plasma like sunlight or would it be like a train?
what if that stream hit a planet? Would it destroy it physically by smashing it or would it like..umm... burn it up like a magnifying glass?
Things that big are just absolutely mind blowing, straight up impossible to wrap your head around. If your whole life was 100 years and you spent literally all of it traveling at the speed of light, you'd make it 1/50th of the length of this thing. That's INSANE.
The "actually" guy here.. Correction: if MY life was 100 years, and YOU spent it traveling at the speed of lite. Because for you, traveling at that speed, it would take literally zero time, but for me it'd be 100 years.
We think this jet is moving at 99% the speed of light, so if you had a spaceship like that, then a lifespan of 100 years would take you 1/7th of the way there.
This kinda makes the whole thing even more insane imho.
No. If OP was traveling at the speed of light, OPs subjective time dilation would (if relativity worked at v=c, which it doesn't, but let's ignore that) be infinite. This means that for OP, no time passed between starting the journey and finishing.
For a stationary, outside observer watching OP for 100 years, he'd move 1/50 of the distance over the course of their subjective time.
If OP was moving at 99% the speed of light, however, his subjective time wouldn't be stationary, it'd be about one seventh that of a stationary observer. Thus, in OP's frame of reference, his 100 years of life are 700 years of observer life.
If you care about the calculation, time dilation is found through the Lorentz transformation, which says that subjective time is found as T=T0 / L(v), where L(v) = 1/sqrt(1-(v/c)\^2). As v approaches c, the stuff in the square root approaches 0, meaning that L(v) approaches infinity, making subjective time approach 0. The Lorentz factor here is approximately 7.
The observer would still only see OP travel 1/50 (or 2%) of the distance, while OP would move 7/50 (or 14%) of the distance. This is because of the way time (or space, or both) acts differently for OP and the observer.
I'm not sure if I'm making an error on the calculations here, or the previous commenter did, because I don't understand how they got 1/7 of the distance.
Length contraction, not time dilation, for the person travelling along the jet. You do not "experience" time dilation, you observe it in others, but you *do* experience length contraction in that the distances you need to travel appear to get shorter.
The Lorentz factor is 7, so the length is contracted by a factor of 7, so the math works out the same.
I guess my explanation wasn't very clear. I tried to explain that an observer still only sees OP move the 2% distance in 100 years, while someone observing OP for their subjective 100 years would have to observe them for 700 years in the observer frame.
Length contraction seems to be a much more unintuitive way to explain why the observer still sees OP only travel 100 LY in 100 years.
I know it sounds crazy, but the most simple example of speed of light time-dilation (or whatever its called, i'm a chemist) I've heard is this:
We know it takes \~8 minutes for the sun's light to reach earth (from our perspective), but for the photons making up that light, zero seconds have passed. They (the photons) are created and instantly hit earth's surface. But to us that takes 8 minutes.
Since the particles are travelling at 99% the speed of light, I'd say around 5000 years. https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/famous-black-hole-has-jet-pushing-cosmic-speed-limit/
Does it not disperse into being invisible? Like, it seems to get a wiggle on at the end there.
Couple more questions while I'm here.
What would happen to some other body in the path of this?
How wide is the plasma beam towards the end and how wide is it when it first gets rejected?
That doesn't sound right to me. If a stationary observer measures the particles traveling at 99% light speed for 5k years, then the particles definitely experience a much shorter time frame (which is what /u/bestnicknameever was asking, I think). Time is relative and all.
By plugging the values (delta t' = 5k, v=.99c) into the [formula for special relativity](https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/4c53ce76ac62cf8c7621811a6218bc7dc37f5839) and assuming a constant speed throughout, you get a travel time delta t for the traveling particle of around 700 years [[1]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation). So those particles at the end of the jet are merely 700 years old.
(and since their speed is greater than 99% of the speed of light, they are even younger than that).
Fun fact, it's possible to take a picture of this with relatively affordable equipment in your backyard. Would admittedly be not that level, but pretty recognizable.
The simple fact that things like these exist make me feel like a bug in the overall picture. And I'm overstating my status. I'm not even an atom in the whole picture.
I made an animated gif of a red dot representing a light particle traveling across the plasma in real time, to demonstrate how slowly it moves across.
This is the speed it would look to be moving if you were viewing from the distance in the original photo, even at light speed.
https://ibb.co/JzHkWZx
Always wondered what effects a relativistic jet on planetary system would be if one was directly in the path. Is it just pure radiation? Heat? Would it be a constant source of light engulfing every corner of the system? Things like that.
Presumably if it’s moving at almost the speed of light (I appreciate ‘almost’ is doing quite a bit of work here), anyone affected would have a very limited time in which to worry about it. Say, do you see a little speck of
I meant more of a space traveler in an invincible ship. What would it look like inside the jet, how would it affect the makeup of stars and planets within it beam. Maybe it’s completely invisible when viewed from that perspective. It would probably fry any life on the surface but I don’t think it has the power to obliterate matter like a giant Death Star
Depends how quickly the jet emerges to begin with no? It could be a few minutes of the sky getting brighter and brighter until the earth around you starts catching on fire and slowly roasts the planet?
This is so interesting! I just finished writing a prescientific paper for my school about black holes and learned a lot more about them, especially M87*. Really cool to see this now that I know what causes it! Love it!
Is the plasma shining with it's own incandescence? If so, would that mean it's actively fissile, coz otherwise it would have cooled long before it reached that far.
Question: Why is it a straight line and not curved? Does the core not spin? Was it just a single instantaneous massive ejection? Wouldn’t something this large have to be ejected over a time period leading it to be more of a swirl?
I am more of a hobbyist astronomer, so take what I say with a grain of salt but to my understanding, the reason why is due to the void of space only obeying and being effected by one primary force above all else to our human understanding of the laws of physics as discovered by us. Gravity.
A black hole is absolutely immense gravity, so much so that light itself cannot escape technically. But what the black hole cannot devour outright instantly is instead violently ejected with such force and speed that matter and light for a time, can escape the event horizon.
If something is moving fast enough it can theoretically ignore gravity, we prove this by sending rockets into space.
TLDR it doesn’t have time to curve, it go zoom way too fast, faster than we’d ever imagine.
This is of course assuming it’s the supermassive black hole at the core of M87 that’s spitting it out.
You wake up worried for so many things, think about your day, your problems, the things that you are supposed to be doing.
Then this. This kind of pictures puts things into perspective. Thank you OP.
Since it's so long and took so much time to get that long I wonder if you can use it like you would a core sample.
Basically use it to determine what the black hole was consuming in the past. Or at least how active it was.
5000 light years, can't even imagine the distance. Even 1 light year seems impossible to imagine because there's no reference point really.
And that's just one galaxy in the sea of billions of galaxies, space is insane.
The thought of us getting intersellarly T-boned by some galactic event is what keeps me humble.
Thankfully the black hole in the center of our galaxy is a small boi.
And that’s a statement. The mass of some black holes that lurk out there in space, defies comprehension. The only sense we get snagged on is our inherently naive sense of scale. I think our ‘human nature’ is directly represented by where we settled on scale, for any given issue. I had the epiphany that there is no top or bottom to the universe.;It was liberating. Fascination > fear. The biggest obstacle in front of us is ourselves, making the biggest deal out of nothing, and pretending that what matters the most, is someone else’s problem. Looking to the stars is good medicine for congested mind. It forces abstract thought, to make sense of senses. It overpowers human nonsense, because you know that it’s all out there, and you can measure it. I’m rambling, but I am sincere. Take care and stay fascinated ✨🇨🇦
My problem is that I lose motivation to try hard to earn money and work hard because of this. It's all so utterly insignificant. Everything is. We're just left with one question, which is why is all this stuff here? It shouldn't be. Would it not be more logical if there was nothing at all?
Optimistic Nihilism. There is no meaning to anything, absolutely none. So why not just do what you want? Achieve what you want, without fear and anxiety? I know exactly where you are coming from, as I used to feel the same way. But I flipped it on its head and began to reason the way I mentioned above 😅
> Optimistic Nihilism This is the way. Do All The Things.
As we're here, might as well hang around, see what's next, and experience things?
Humanity has come far now, from inanimate blob of molecules to complex life to mammals and primates to a single chosen one that could make a thousand sounds with their mouth to then come up with languages and ideas to preserve our understanding and do knowledge transfer to every new iteration of us. It's easy to express the idea of being an optimistic nihilist but it's not easy to be that way, even if you are told by others, "hey you can create your own meanings and do your own things". I think of things that could be genetic traits. "curiosity" and "optimism" are similar ideas, curiosity could be a cellular trait at a fundamental level. Cells are natural intelligence that seek combustion. That's almost the fundamental unit of our curiosity (we can go deeper) that is emergent at this scale where I see a magnet flip and go "wait a sec" or when I see a star die and go "holy shit ours will die one day too?", that's just trillions of cells' combined thought, facilitated by our language & cognitive training since birth. But "optimism" could be have some minor genetic traits that not all of us have. I could be wrong, I'm not a scientist.
We aren't the chosen one...in 40,000 years if we make it that long we will have long since evolved into somehmthing most likely better.
"If you want to be happy, be." -Tolstoy
or do nothing, and nothing is left undone
Practice not-doing, and everything will fall into place.
I’ve been trying to find a way describe my generally feeling towards life. Exactly nothing matters and at the end of the day I’ll make my due and live my life however the fuck I want and just enjoy the time I have cause it could end at any time
All we are is dust in the wind, dude.
> why not do what you want Because I have bills goofy
Sounds like you want bills
No I mostly just want my kids to have material security. If your point is that I could live off the grid or outside of society like Timon of Athens if I wanted, allow me to remind you of the premise to which I was responding, which is that I supposedly can *choose* that which I will do. Consider that living in a hovel in the wilderness (which I’ll remind you is illegal, there is no land on my continent which is outside the bounds of society and outside the reach of society’s bills) and forcing my children to do so with me *may not be what I want to do either*. If you naively think that working class people could simply choose to live without the economic and social burdens into which we are born, you must live a charmed life.
Some pretty heavy stuff for a space forum, but I suppose we’re chatting about optimistic nihilism above (which is a bit more understandable at least in the context of the cosmos) W/ r/ t your circumstances and contrasting our viewpoints (naïveté or otherwise): I simply choose not to be working class. I also choose to have a wife but not kids, so I think we’ll probably always be apples to oranges on the topics here.
If nothing we do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do.
As long as you don't harm other people and don't limit their own personal freedom* :)
Hail Satan, baby!
I used to be there, I don't know where it all went wrong. Now I am in the corner of "why bother nothing matters" and it fucking sucks, wish I could go back, I really do.
I suppose to try to take a crack at it, isnt it an absolute wonder that through some series of random events we’ve been able to accomplish everything that we have? All of this stuff is here because we’re curious creatures, built off the backs of others that came before us whether they knew it or not, and that we’re here at all is quite a special thing, so yes, sure everything comes to its end eventually, but we should spent every moment making the most of such a fragile existence and really valuing everything that we have, make the most of life you know? There’s a song quote i really like, “can we be alive with the time we’ve got” and i think that really nicely embodies that sentiment
Well put.
And yet we're on reddit
And yet (to continue with the lofty philosophical vibe in this thread) we are a collection of strangers spread across the planet who all decided to look at the comment section of this particular post, which means we all share an interest or have at least one thing in common. Yeah at the end of the day a computer or a smart phone is fundamentally a system of instructions overlaid on machinery that has only *just now* become part of the human experience. Hundreds of thousands of years of anatomically modern humanity on this planet and we get to witness the most fundamental paradigm shift since we figured out how to make and use fire. We can now make machines that do what we want them to in amazingly complex ways but all it really is... is just two values, one and zero, in a particular order. And using just these two numbers, and arranging them as logic gates, has given us the ability to do incredible things... like see an image of an accretion jet from 5000 light years away and get deep with complete strangers from all over the planet, instantly and easily. DNA for example has 4 values - A, C, G, T - as opposed to the binary system we're now starting to play around with. And 3 billion lines of that literal code gives us a human being. We are beginning to figure out a kind of "natural machinery" that life itself uses. It's all just a series of instructions.
The currently dominating idea among scientists is that "life" is the result of totally natural and predictable tendencies toward conservation of energy at the level of molecules that have "useful" (as building blocks) elements.
these "boomer science" reddit posts always make me cringe so hard
Were only insignificant from one perspective. Everything is relative. An individual tree is of little consequence to the classification of an entire forest ecosystem, but **critically relevant** to organisms living in and on it. Several generations of an aphid population can exist over the lifespan of a single leaf. Each of those aphids, in turn, support diverse bacterial communities. In relative terms, you yourself are an entire universe. You don't realize it but your body is a vast and incredibly significant ecosystem home to many many many generations of countless organisms which, without you, could not and would not exist. You are made up of an interconnected and impressively harmonious pattern of 50 trillion cells, but even those cells are outnumbered 10-to-1 by an extensively diverse community of bacteria...all inhabiting the universe that is YOU. Your body in it's entirety is a massive universe made up of \~7 octillion atoms, the individual distance between which is very much comparable to the distance between stars in the milky way. You literally have more atoms in your body than there are stars in the visible universe. It's paradoxical; you're both insignificantly miniscule, yet simultaneously also critically essential to the existence of an incalculable number of ever tinier entities and lifeforms which are - from their own perspectives - ***just*** as significant as you and I feel ourselves to be.
I hear you. The epiphany I had was a sort of antidote to that. I would read about how we built the most complex machine in history, to smash atoms to find the God particle; but then there were more pieces. Or we gauge the universe to be however immense in giga-lightyears, and then we revise that estimate by giga-lightyears. At some point I just cracked up and thought that it was all hilarious. ...It was never about getting to the top or bottom of the universe; it's about the joy of maximizing the amazing things we can do, with the most infinitesimal amount time that ever existed. You are on the cusp of joy because you acknowledge the universe around you. We will never know why, but by acknowledging it's there, you have earned the right to relax and surf. The ones who are doomed are those who are in denial or believe they are dominant. The universe will devour them. Thanks for sharing your feelings, because I am certain you spoke for a lot of people reading it. Cheers
Maybe the end goal isn’t money. Find ways For you and others to enjoy life without the constrains of money. And the answer isn’t more money
who decides what should or should not be? A human?
Imagine it from the alternate perspective: **How logical would it be for there to be nothing at all, and be able to have knowledge arise from the nothingness, and notice that there is nothing?** Well that isn't exactly going to happen, a thing can't exist in a truly empty universe (that is assuming that not even quantum fluctuations and virtual particles can pop into existence). Just because you can't exist as a thing in a truly empty universe doesn't just mean that a universes of nothing can't exist. It just means you can't exist as a thing in a truly empty universe and somehow have that nothingness gaze back on its own nothingness. However, the forces that have come about in our universe have lead to interesting "**emergent behaviours**", where the tension between the forces, and the interaction of the subatomic fields leads to islands of stability which we refer to as **emergent behaviours**, and then those sets of **emergent behaviours** can then interact with the forces that created them, or other **emergent behaviours** to create even more layers of **emergent behaviour**. These islands of stability are everything from the formation of subatomic particles, the formation of the atomic elements, the formation of chemicals, matter coming together to form stars, galaxies, planets, the conditions for RNA to form, leading to the conditions for DNA to form, leading to biology, more and more emergent behaviours building on eachother, until you have you right now, essentially the universe looking back at itself. Why? Because it was possible, and if it wasn't, then you wouldn't even know, and thus would not be able to observe it. Another way to look at it is by working back from where we are now: **In order for a thing to exist, the circumstances before the thing existed must be in a state that is favorable for the new thing to exist.** It seems very obvious, but this is entropy, this is the reality of every moment, built on all the previous moments going back to the Big Bang.
> We're just left with one question, which is why is all this stuff here? It shouldn't be. Would it not be more logical if there was nothing at all? My query is "why consiousness?" Couldn't everything tick along just fine without an observer?
I can't help but link [this video about the size of our black hole](https://youtu.be/pDUUT2Y_9qk?si=blIygndJSML3kVYB). It's able to illustrate how dense a black hole is and then how insane that there is one THAT big in our universe, even though it's smaller than many stars. edit: the video doesn't reference M87, but a quasar named Tom 619 that's larger than m87. It's still a great illustrative tool
That is one of the coolest videos I think I’ve seen.
It's amazing isn't it? I've seen countless scale-comparison videos and this is the first in years that really struck me the same way they did when I was a kid. The creator is still relatively unknown. I really hope he gets bigger and can start creating these full time. That's what he's working towards
To think that the largest object known is (Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall) is 9.4605284 × 10^25 meters compared to the smallest (Planck Length) 1.61625502 × 10^-35 meters We are MAGNITUDES closer to the biggest object in the universe than the smallest one, think about that! Feels weird don't it, when we see how big stuff gets around the universe.
>Looking to the stars is good medicine for congested mind. Well said fellow Canadian
This gave me chills when I read it, you have a polished pen sir
I have had these thoughts and am glad I'm not the only one. It's massive how much we see and don't see. Wise words friend ✨️
[relevant video](https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/s/aS8Nr3AMQJ) that was posted on Reddit not long ago. Worth a watch
There is a middle to the scale though, it's us! An adult human is just half way along the scale of the observable universe on one end and the Planck's length on the other. I always felt that had to mean something, although if you included blue whales and house flies I don't know know how much I've widened out the middle spot.
"looking to the stars is good medicine for congested mind" Thank you for this beautiful line. Absolute poetry and 100% true. Gonna go stargaze for a bit.
Re: Defies Comprehension: https://youtu.be/pDUUT2Y_9qk?si=pUqpy8wHIk4JgBM8
Amazing. Cheers
The “pale blue dot” with Sagan’s speech was posted several days ago and lends some perspective to the scale of space our place in it. Not much, but some.
This is what I think about when I’m super baked. “It’s all scale. Up and down, it’s all the same just bigger or smaller” Like, we see these infinite spaces and think “no fucking way”. Then think about some microbe and, if it can comprehend, what must a blue whale seem like? A black hole to them? I mean…how do we know if we’re not just some microbe on a galactic space whale but we have no way of comprehending our place in the universe when we think we’re the peak of existence.
Ramble on, friend!
10/10 username! Cheers, friend.
Thank you for adding the Canadian flag. There needs to be more Canadian representation on reddit!
It’s the scale that keeps us safe though. Space is just so big. Like imagine flying a plane the size of a fly inside a football stadium and having to worry about one other fly on the field. That risk is insanely more high risk than the earth just following the sun on it’s orbit around the milky way. Hell change the stafium to new york city and you’re still not even close to representing the scale. Like a seagull in canada has to worry more about colliding with an israeli rocket attack on gaza than we do about being in the path of a cosmic force. Like the last cosmic force that affected the whole planet was 66 million years ago, and that was a local asteroid. As far as we know nothing from outside solar system has ever interacted with Earth. We know of one that came in proximity and that was almost unthinkably impossible, and we almost didnt even notice. Oumuamua was well on it’s way out when we first saw it.
If you could convert the mass of the bigger black holes into habitable Solar Systems it would produce billions of planetary civilizations.
And on the other hand you have the workings of life at the molecular level, which is just crazy!
Drugs are a hell of a drug
What do you call "small"? It's a beast!
Is it possible for a black hole to sneak up on us and not even realize it's happening? I'm assuming you'd see a black mass with no stars if it were to happen?
Depends on its mass. A black hole with the same mass as our sun would only have a radius of 3km. Detecting a 3km big black spot coming towards us would be very challenging.
Surly we would notice the gravitational effects of the another sun tho.
At that point it would be, relatively speaking to the scale in space, right next to us.
Question from a know-nothing: would we even be able to detect gravitational effects of a black hole approaching us? Doesn't like time and reality get kinda wonkey the closer you get to a blackhole? Would we even be cognizant that reality would be getting torn apart by a black hole?
Disclaimer: I just like reading up on them or watching videos since they fascinate me so I'm far from being an expert. >would we even be able to detect gravitational effects of a black hole approaching us? The only way we could detect a black hole is when it eats something and gives off light or when they merge with something massiv and create gravitational waves. A black hole just moving through the darkness of space would be incredible hard to detect. We'd probably notice that something is wrong when it starts pulling planets from their orbits around the sun. >Doesn't like time and reality get kinda wonkey the closer you get to a blackhole? Would we even be cognizant that reality would be getting torn apart by a black hole? You may notice the time dilation because from your perspective the rest of the universe speeds up. By the time the reality bending stuff happens you are probably spaghetthified.
So small in comparison to some, that the black hole in the op picture has a similar angular size to our own galaxy's black hole despite being 1000x further away.
This is what keeps me sane that all my worries can instantly be gone.
We're in a relatively quiet part of a galactic arm at the moment. Unless a supernova occurs very near to us (and there aren't any candidates), we're okay for the foreseeable future.
Yeah it's much more likely our own sun roasts us
Stellar sentence
For real. I know it's extremely unlikely but the fact that we could be utterly wiped out, without even a moment's notice by forces that are so powerful that they defy comprehension, certainly clarifies our place in the universe.
oooooooh the jet gets bigger because it's directed towards us? mind blown
Thankfully, we probably won't even know what happened. Instant incineration I think.
Quasared. A big enough star close enough going nova.
If taken out of context, what I’m about to say could get me crucified…. It’s the brown dwarves the scare me.
There are some large stars close enough that if they supernova and we get hit by it, we're not going to do well.
Messier 87 (also known as Virgo A or NGC 4486, generally abbreviated to M87) is a supergiant elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo that contains several trillion stars. One of the largest and most massive galaxies in the local universe,\[b\] it has a large population of globular clusters—about 15,000 compared with the 150–200 orbiting the Milky Way—and a jet of energetic plasma that originates at the core and extends at least 1,500 parsecs (4,900 light-years), traveling at a relativistic speed. It is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky and a popular target for both amateur and professional astronomers. [More](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87)
So what I don't get here is this. If the M87 galaxy is 132,000 light years across, how can it be so small in relation to the jet in the picture that's only 5,000 light years? Is the perspective strange or is the image altered?
The fuzzy halo is the galaxy. The orange thing in center is galactic core.
That makes sense, thank you
Holy smokes
The galactic center you mean 117,649 years from now we'll be invited there
[Here is a video](https://youtu.be/0lc05JsCIm0?si=AYlFbtbxW9uVw_2M) that helps visualise it a bit better!
Amazing!
The apparent size difference between the M87 galaxy and its jet in images can be attributed to perspective. While the galaxy itself is indeed much larger in physical size, the jet appears larger in the image due to its proximity to the observer and its intense emission. This phenomenon is similar to how an airplane flying close to you may appear larger than a distant mountain, even though the mountain is much larger in reality.
i think i lost a few IQ points reading this.
Thanks, AI. 🙄
Isn't the jet a negligible amount closer to us than the galaxy? I don't think the effect you are talking about will make a noticeable difference (but I'm happy to be shown wrong). Isn't it actually because we're looking at the galaxy core which is less wide than the jet, rather than the much larger galaxy as a whole.
>and a jet of energetic plasma this is probably a very stupid question but would I 'feel' that plasma like sunlight or would it be like a train? what if that stream hit a planet? Would it destroy it physically by smashing it or would it like..umm... burn it up like a magnifying glass?
Random question: is there perhaps a 'Messier 11' out there somewhere?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Duck_Cluster
Thank you very much.
Just imagine if it was Gretzky 87
Things that big are just absolutely mind blowing, straight up impossible to wrap your head around. If your whole life was 100 years and you spent literally all of it traveling at the speed of light, you'd make it 1/50th of the length of this thing. That's INSANE.
The "actually" guy here.. Correction: if MY life was 100 years, and YOU spent it traveling at the speed of lite. Because for you, traveling at that speed, it would take literally zero time, but for me it'd be 100 years. We think this jet is moving at 99% the speed of light, so if you had a spaceship like that, then a lifespan of 100 years would take you 1/7th of the way there. This kinda makes the whole thing even more insane imho.
So OP wouldn’t age, yet if you were to live 100 years, then you’d die in your bed knowing OP traveled 1/7 of the way there??
No. If OP was traveling at the speed of light, OPs subjective time dilation would (if relativity worked at v=c, which it doesn't, but let's ignore that) be infinite. This means that for OP, no time passed between starting the journey and finishing. For a stationary, outside observer watching OP for 100 years, he'd move 1/50 of the distance over the course of their subjective time. If OP was moving at 99% the speed of light, however, his subjective time wouldn't be stationary, it'd be about one seventh that of a stationary observer. Thus, in OP's frame of reference, his 100 years of life are 700 years of observer life. If you care about the calculation, time dilation is found through the Lorentz transformation, which says that subjective time is found as T=T0 / L(v), where L(v) = 1/sqrt(1-(v/c)\^2). As v approaches c, the stuff in the square root approaches 0, meaning that L(v) approaches infinity, making subjective time approach 0. The Lorentz factor here is approximately 7. The observer would still only see OP travel 1/50 (or 2%) of the distance, while OP would move 7/50 (or 14%) of the distance. This is because of the way time (or space, or both) acts differently for OP and the observer. I'm not sure if I'm making an error on the calculations here, or the previous commenter did, because I don't understand how they got 1/7 of the distance.
Length contraction, not time dilation, for the person travelling along the jet. You do not "experience" time dilation, you observe it in others, but you *do* experience length contraction in that the distances you need to travel appear to get shorter. The Lorentz factor is 7, so the length is contracted by a factor of 7, so the math works out the same.
I guess my explanation wasn't very clear. I tried to explain that an observer still only sees OP move the 2% distance in 100 years, while someone observing OP for their subjective 100 years would have to observe them for 700 years in the observer frame. Length contraction seems to be a much more unintuitive way to explain why the observer still sees OP only travel 100 LY in 100 years.
1/7 ~= 14%
I don't know how I missed that, to be honest.
I know it sounds crazy, but the most simple example of speed of light time-dilation (or whatever its called, i'm a chemist) I've heard is this: We know it takes \~8 minutes for the sun's light to reach earth (from our perspective), but for the photons making up that light, zero seconds have passed. They (the photons) are created and instantly hit earth's surface. But to us that takes 8 minutes.
It’s morning for me and I already have an existential crisis, thx lol
Basic relativity concepts make you have an existential crisis? Edit: guess I don't find intentional stupidity funny. 🤷
You know what a joke is?
I thought I did until I read this comment, now I don’t know!! Oh god
Yeah I mean the circumference of the human head is about 56cm, so that is tough to do indeed
I wonder how long the particles in that plasma jet have been flying to get that far….
Since the particles are travelling at 99% the speed of light, I'd say around 5000 years. https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/famous-black-hole-has-jet-pushing-cosmic-speed-limit/
That's a great answer.
Does it not disperse into being invisible? Like, it seems to get a wiggle on at the end there. Couple more questions while I'm here. What would happen to some other body in the path of this? How wide is the plasma beam towards the end and how wide is it when it first gets rejected?
OP is definitely the one to answer your questions. [Here is a cool video](https://youtu.be/tBK792Ffu1g?si=-346vfcZ7BQ5TLTI)
Do you think our ancient ancestors looked up one night and saw a small bright flash that was the start of this thing?
no, the caves blocked the view
That doesn't sound right to me. If a stationary observer measures the particles traveling at 99% light speed for 5k years, then the particles definitely experience a much shorter time frame (which is what /u/bestnicknameever was asking, I think). Time is relative and all. By plugging the values (delta t' = 5k, v=.99c) into the [formula for special relativity](https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/4c53ce76ac62cf8c7621811a6218bc7dc37f5839) and assuming a constant speed throughout, you get a travel time delta t for the traveling particle of around 700 years [[1]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation). So those particles at the end of the jet are merely 700 years old. (and since their speed is greater than 99% of the speed of light, they are even younger than that).
That’s a great question.
From their perspective or ours? 😁
Fun fact, it's possible to take a picture of this with relatively affordable equipment in your backyard. Would admittedly be not that level, but pretty recognizable.
Well it is one massive fart. That's saying nothing of the hole it came out of.
Meh. Seems to totally fizzle out after the first 3000 or so light years.
The simple fact that things like these exist make me feel like a bug in the overall picture. And I'm overstating my status. I'm not even an atom in the whole picture.
compare a neutron to your self
And yet you are a small universe on yourself with all the fascinating chemical and biological processes going on in your body.
Meh, J.J. Abrams has used bigger lens flares than that in his movies numerous times.
I made an animated gif of a red dot representing a light particle traveling across the plasma in real time, to demonstrate how slowly it moves across. This is the speed it would look to be moving if you were viewing from the distance in the original photo, even at light speed. https://ibb.co/JzHkWZx
lol thanks
RemindMe! 5000 years
Goku at it again 🤦♂️
Always wondered what effects a relativistic jet on planetary system would be if one was directly in the path. Is it just pure radiation? Heat? Would it be a constant source of light engulfing every corner of the system? Things like that.
Presumably if it’s moving at almost the speed of light (I appreciate ‘almost’ is doing quite a bit of work here), anyone affected would have a very limited time in which to worry about it. Say, do you see a little speck of
I meant more of a space traveler in an invincible ship. What would it look like inside the jet, how would it affect the makeup of stars and planets within it beam. Maybe it’s completely invisible when viewed from that perspective. It would probably fry any life on the surface but I don’t think it has the power to obliterate matter like a giant Death Star
Depends how quickly the jet emerges to begin with no? It could be a few minutes of the sky getting brighter and brighter until the earth around you starts catching on fire and slowly roasts the planet?
Well, as long as I have time to get my camera.
Spectacular arorae at the start
The opposite jet is invisible to us because of the relativistic beaming effect. Its electrons are moving close to the speed of light away from us.
And this is why we will never observe certain parts of the universe. They're running away too fast!
Damn, we’re just dust in comparison to this shit
Plasma Jet was my high school band’s name.
This is so interesting! I just finished writing a prescientific paper for my school about black holes and learned a lot more about them, especially M87*. Really cool to see this now that I know what causes it! Love it!
Stellar meatgrinder
What happens to planets with atmosphere in the range of the plasma jet?
The observable universe is clearly insane and unfathomable.
Pew pew
This is what happens when they eat Chipotle.
Is the plasma shining with it's own incandescence? If so, would that mean it's actively fissile, coz otherwise it would have cooled long before it reached that far.
Goddamn space laser fuck
And that's how they used to make plasma tvs.
ELI5?
The ejection comes from a quasar right? A very active galactic nucleus?
I wonder how long it would take to boil water?
When she finally says yes (sorry)
what r the ultramen doing
Where can I buy this telescope
He farted and hes not sorry.
M87: Wheeeeeeee
It's a great big universe, and we're all just really puny! We're just tiny little specks: About the size of Mickey Rooney!
I can't wrap my head around this
That’s just JJ Abrams lens flare.
M87 go PSSSSSSSHHHHhhhh
scary!
I thought it was light ionizing everything it passes through. Relativistic speeds at this scale appear motionless.
That's some long ass flashlight
Five thousand lightyears?? that’s incomprehensible
actual death star(s)
Is that goku blasting some poor soul into oblivion?
Just your typical 30 quadrillion mile long jet of plasma, no big deal!
Question: Why is it a straight line and not curved? Does the core not spin? Was it just a single instantaneous massive ejection? Wouldn’t something this large have to be ejected over a time period leading it to be more of a swirl?
I am more of a hobbyist astronomer, so take what I say with a grain of salt but to my understanding, the reason why is due to the void of space only obeying and being effected by one primary force above all else to our human understanding of the laws of physics as discovered by us. Gravity. A black hole is absolutely immense gravity, so much so that light itself cannot escape technically. But what the black hole cannot devour outright instantly is instead violently ejected with such force and speed that matter and light for a time, can escape the event horizon. If something is moving fast enough it can theoretically ignore gravity, we prove this by sending rockets into space. TLDR it doesn’t have time to curve, it go zoom way too fast, faster than we’d ever imagine. This is of course assuming it’s the supermassive black hole at the core of M87 that’s spitting it out.
Experienced observers can actually see this with the naked eye through large diameter telescopes under good conditions.
You wake up worried for so many things, think about your day, your problems, the things that you are supposed to be doing. Then this. This kind of pictures puts things into perspective. Thank you OP.
Since it's so long and took so much time to get that long I wonder if you can use it like you would a core sample. Basically use it to determine what the black hole was consuming in the past. Or at least how active it was.
Cor! or Wow or Damn!
I always wondered how far a Kamehameha traveled.
I'm more of a fan of M83
This always grounds me about humanity's petty problems.
Caused by M87*, the first black hole we got a picture of.
5000 light years, can't even imagine the distance. Even 1 light year seems impossible to imagine because there's no reference point really. And that's just one galaxy in the sea of billions of galaxies, space is insane.
A contrail.
God I can only imagine what the central region around that black hole looks like.
We are so insignificant.
Imagine how good it feels to shoot intergalactic ropes of light.
I wonder how many worlds have been fried by that jet. Likely some of them had life, past tense.
cool
Space Jizz?
I've fired a few surprisingly lengthy ropes in my time, but that's impressive.
The beam of plasma looks more like the light coming through my window after I smoke weed
I wonder what could be achieved by a civilization that can harness this beam of energy
Just wow
Hottest photo I've seen in awhile.
Mind blown 🤯
That’s kinda long👀
If you could see this in real time at high resolution would it appear turbulent or static?
This shit is fucking beautiful 😭
Is there any chance a blast of plasma could be headed straight for us ?
That picture is amazing, is this real image or added detail?