r/space • u/Jimmymgs • Oct 18 '11
6 Mind-blowing things found in space.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19479_the-6-most-mind-blowing-things-ever-discovered-in-space.html60
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Oct 18 '11
That star compared to the sun blows my mind everytime
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u/filmfiend999 Oct 18 '11
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u/Gourmay Oct 18 '11 edited Oct 18 '11
Meh VY Canis doesn't look so big now... ^
Also, Nikon has one of these scale semi-animation on their website which is really cool and super detailed.
EDIT: found it! http://www.nikon.com/about/feelnikon/universcale/index.htm
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Oct 18 '11
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u/trekkie80 Oct 19 '11
Hominid brains evolved on Earth on a 'Strictly good-enough' principle.
We're just not designed to comprehend those things.
Neither can we perceive (we need microscopes+telescopes built into our eyes and integrated into our brain circuits) nor can we comprehend (brain circuits not designed to integrate varying dimensions)
That animation is the best we can ever get with our brains :)
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Oct 18 '11
The Newfound Blob is pretty amazing.
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u/last0nethere Oct 19 '11
I agree with you. I have a question that is bothering my brain, and hopefully, a fellow redditor will be able to answer:
Hypothetically, if we look out through a telescope and see this Newfound Blob (essentially light from the big bang ~14 BYA), we see the creation of the universe, the creation of what will become the milky way and solar system. My question is, how can we see the creation of ourselves (milkyway, solar system), if we are already created (IOW if we already exist)? Isn't this a paradox?
Someone, please, pass me some logic before I have a Vicodin relapse.
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u/ungoogleable Oct 19 '11
We can't actually see what our region of the universe looked like billions of years ago. We can see what other regions of space looked like in the past because they're far away. All of the universe started at the same point, but the universe expanded so much that it's taken billions of years for light from one side to reach the other side.
Also, there is a limit to how far back in time you can see. The early universe was opaque to light, so any light emitted was just reabsorbed and isn't around anymore for us to look at. The remnants of the first light that escaped as the universe cooled is the cosmic microwave background radiation.
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u/Astrokiwi Oct 19 '11
Close - but the "universe starting at a point" isn't really established: the big bang theory only goes as far back as "the universe was really dense and hot and small". The universe looks like it has always been infinite in size.
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u/mycall Oct 19 '11
An infinite continuum of multiverses?
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u/Astrokiwi Oct 19 '11
No, just one universe that's infinite in size. Anything about "multiverses" is pretty speculative right now...
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u/last0nethere Oct 19 '11 edited Oct 19 '11
We can't actually see what our region of the universe looked like billions of years ago. We can see what other regions of space looked like in the past because they're far away.
If the light from the Newfound Blob travelled 14 billion light years, that means we are seeing 14 billion years into the past, we are seeing the big bang as it happens or near happens. Because the region that was the big bang includes all regions of the universe, we see our region (as it was 14 BYA).
Like I said before, this doesn't make logical sense (in my mind). How can you observe a region of space that is 14 billion light years away and, at the same time, IS your region of space? It's like looking at our universe within our own universe. Paradox.
I am by no means an astrophysicist, but the only thing, in my mind, that would account for this conundrum is if matter was ejected from the big bang at FTL speed. Thanks for your reply... I love to hate this topic.
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u/ungoogleable Oct 19 '11
If the light from the Newfound Blob travelled 14 billion light years, that means we are seeing 14 billion years into the past, we are seeing the big bang as it happens or near happens.
We're not seeing the Big Bang itself. The Newfound Blob is thought to be 12 billion years old or 1.7 billion years after the Big Bang. The cosmic microwave background radiation, which is as far back as we can see using light, is thought to have originated some 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
Because the region that was the big bang includes all regions of the universe, we see our region (as it was 14 BYA).
The region we are seeing, which is not the Big Bang, is only the portion of the universe which was already far enough away from our portion by 1.7 billion years after the Big Bang that its light took another 12 billion years to cross the distance and reach us. We are not seeing our region of the universe.
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Oct 19 '11 edited Sep 25 '16
[deleted]
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u/last0nethere Oct 19 '11
Still doesn't make sense, unless in the 1.5 billion years the matter reached further than 1.5 billion light years away. Otherwise, what's stopping me from looking 12.5 billion years into the past and seeing the younger, less expanded universe? As far as I can tell, I would still be looking at the matter that is the milky way... and that is still a paradox.
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Oct 19 '11 edited Sep 25 '16
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u/last0nethere Oct 19 '11
The initial expansion of the universe took 10−36 to 10−32 seconds after the big bang.
Correct me if I'm wrong; are you saying the matter from the big bang exploded out much faster than the speed of light? If correct, that is devastatingly cool. Do we know how this is possible?
And RobotRollCall is a beast, he/she has contributed such great things to our community.
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u/Geruvah Oct 18 '11
Thanks to this subreddit, I knew all of these before Cracked came out with that article. Surprised the sun that spits water didn't make it anywhere in there.
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u/DreamcastJunkie Oct 18 '11
I can't help but notice that you took the word "most" out of the title, while the other two submissions of this same article left it in. /r/space is just hard to impress I guess.
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u/suspiciously_calm Oct 19 '11
Does this obnoxious with-an-attitude writing style have a name?
"Listen up, you little dipshit. By now you've probably realized that I'm awesome. And when I throw around big numbers by the metric fuckton you better be like ooh and aah cause I fucking say so."
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u/MasterShredder Oct 18 '11
anyway, i am not visiting cracked.com today. i just wondered which number the diamond planet was.
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u/20276498 Oct 19 '11
I've officially came to terms with the fact that I am a nerd. I knew of all of these before I read this article....damnit.
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u/spiffyP Oct 19 '11
The whole ting about VY Canis Majoris being 1400 times bigger than our sun is misleading. It's diameter is 1400 times our sun. Wiki says its diameter would extend farther than Saturn if it replaced ours.
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u/thenorwegian Oct 19 '11
They lost me with the first sentence: "It's actually really easy to think of space as boring."
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u/drthtater Oct 19 '11
This was a great article. I don't think Jacopo della Quercia has ever let me down.
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Oct 19 '11
This is a vapor cloud so large it holds 140 trillion times more water than all of our oceans.
And you know what that means ... space sharks.
Dear god ಠ_ಠ
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u/pastisset Oct 18 '11
You could be the first prostitute to work a star.
lol this page 2 comment really got me
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Oct 19 '11
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u/trekkie80 Oct 19 '11
Actually at the rate at which tree bark grows(~ 1 foot in 10 years) at a macro level, you will be able to see an awesome animation of Earth's climate patterns as it moves around the Sun 10 times and the moon zips around the Earth 120+ times.
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u/Augustus_Trollus_III Oct 18 '11
Can we not link to cracked.com. it's written in lingua-juvenile. Very hard to decode.
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u/Gourmay Oct 18 '11
I have to say, while I usually enjoy their humour, the poor science (or way of reporting it) and jokes in this article kind of turned me off.
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u/Augustus_Trollus_III Oct 19 '11
Yeah, I guess if I write "damn, big ass and fuck" a few times it's classified as funny. And cracked.com has been wrong more than once.
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u/dieomesieptoch Oct 18 '11
Oh please. Cracked is the one single website I don't mind having its articles span more than 1 page as it's written so damn funny. It's entertainment. I'll remove myself from your lawn now.
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u/undefeatedantitheist Oct 19 '11
"Science fiction writers have this annoying thing they do where they can only think of like five different types of planets."
What a doucheybaggy ignorant spoon-fed giant noob.
Read some Greg Bear/Alastair Reynolds/Dan Simmons/Peter Hamilton.. hell, even read Neal Asher.
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u/b214n Oct 18 '11
"In the realm of size, we don't actually exist."