This is cool as heck, and now I’m going to go back to my computer job and try not to think about how ridiculously tiny and fragile my little life is.
Importance is a local concept, and it can be quite relevant locally.
I've been trying to adopt this mindset myself in recent years.
It's helped me "cope" and accept certain things about my life. It's not how my mind developed initially, so it doesn't come naturally to me and I sometimes fall into old habits. So, sometimes I need to remind myself to practice it.
Anyway, thanks for the reminder! :)
- Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot
So, I conclude, since our biology is tuned for that -- it's better to keep worrying and enduring, and we will be happier. There must be a contradiction somewhere though.
That being said... I'd love to if I were terminally ill yet capable enough to understand what was happening -- to be yeeted into a super super massive blackhole that was not feeding such that I would not be torn to shreds or vaporized by the accretion disk and ultimately understand what lies at the center of my now time horizon...
> This is cool as heck, and now I’m going to go back to my computer job and try not to think about how ridiculously tiny and fragile my little life is.
There could be an alternative take here: we really lucked out that life as we know it exists at all. So we kinda won the lottery already.
Now there are fuck tonne of filters we passed so far, may very well fail on next one (probably self-destruction), and we are lucky with so far stable good place for life. Given there are billions of trillions of planets, no way we are on the very top of that ridiculous number.
We may be one of the earlier civs but no way we are first neither. But how we would recognize a civilization that has say just a 1 billion years headstart? Dyson spheres are for fools ignoring dark forest stuff, not something really smart cautious beings would do. Matter holds enormous amount of energy, and there are other ways to extract it in a less obvious ways, ie black holes or probably some other ways.
Look at it this way - we are maybe building a small baby steps for one of big civilizations of universe. Still extremely primitive in all possible ways while arrogant enough to mostly not see it, but there is potential for true greatness. Otherwise we will perish, I dont see anything in between.
Accept your fragility, be grateful for what the universe gives you, be humble about your limits and faults, and spread happiness, joy and love to the other fragile, limited beings around you. There’s your cure for existential dread.
Afraid of the impending collision of Andromeda with the Milky Way? Not to worry. Life as we know will be gone by then. Huge processes like galactic mergers are "in slow motion" relative to our every day processes due to light speed bounds. The time they take to occur is enormous because the distances involved are enormous. In a cool way, the presence and influence of an astronomical object is just as insignificant to our processes as the presence and influence of one electron, and for the same reason: enormous difference of scale. The big stuff is no more scary than the small stuff.
"It’s been publicly confirmed that our galaxy is within the open maw of a massive galaxy-eating beast. The beast can’t move faster than light, so it’ll take hundreds of millions of years for it to finally bite down. This is something that humans will just have to live with"
(I don't think you can actually tell a good story with this, it's a background detail you would put in some other story).
Naw!!! We are rare, so rare that we might be unique in our solar system, galaxy! We don't look little and instead the reason for the whole show! "Where is everybody?" -- easy, we're it. Soooo, what's the reason??
The whole event is likely to be an exponential, and the last, ah, after Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Schrödinger, biochemistry, ..., computers, we look like we're at -- a standard for exponential growth, e.g., the question P v NP -- the unique big turn up out of the atmosphere ... blowing past Andromeda at 0.5 c and accelerating.
The research team detected it only through its gravitational lensing effect — the way it slightly distorted the light from a more distant galaxy. There’s no emission at any wavelength (optical, infrared, or radio), and its gravitational signature matches a million-solar-mass clump of invisible mass rather than a compact point source like a black hole.
They specifically interpret it as a dark matter subhalo — one of the small, dense lumps that simulations of “cold dark matter” predict should pepper the universe’s larger halos. It’s too massive to be a single star, far too diffuse to be a stellar remnant, and not luminous enough to be a faint galaxy.
So “dark” here isn’t just shorthand for “too dim to see at this distance” — it’s used in the literal physical sense: matter that doesn’t emit or absorb light at all, detectable only via gravity.
Eventually, all the dark matter clumps into rings around galaxies, but since this one is so distant, ~10B light years, so we are seeing that clump as it was that long ago before it difused into it's ring shape we can see in the galaxies around us.
They're explicitly looking for "Dark Matter", which doesn't "interact" with normal ("baryonic") matter or electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light). So it's not a black hole for sure, as those are composed of regular ol' matter.
RE:"dark star", that's really up in the air, I'd say! AFAICT the only academic reference to that term is for normal stars influenced by dark matter[1], but kinda the whole problem here is that we don't know much about what dark matter is composed of or into. Certainly it's not going to be a star in the traditional sense as it can't emit light, but I'm not aware of any reason this object can't end up being a giant sphere.
FWIW, Wikipedia says "One of the most massive stars known is Eta Carinae, with 100–200 [solar masses]", whereas this object "has a mass that is a million times greater than that of our Sun". If we're going to use metaphors, I think "dark dwarf galaxy" might be more appropriate?
Dust clouds have those mass ranges. It’s not a galaxy-scale mass by any measure.
This thread has a lot of CS people being confident about physics.
I think you mean it doesn't interact electromagnetically with either matter or radiation. It does interact with normal matter via gravity -- that's pretty much the strongest (only?) argument for its existence.
I'm not aware of any reason this object can't end up being a giant sphere
AIUI, most theories posit that solid spheres of dark matter are very unlikely because matter accretion is governed by electromagnetism in addition to gravity, and dark matter is not supposed to obey the former. Most models assume that dark matter is organized in gaseous clouds (halos); strictly speaking that's still a giant sphere, just not in the same way that Jupiter or the Sun or even the Oort Cloud is.
The paper is more about the technical achievement of detecting it, IIUC. It’s not the first dark matter inference we’ve had, and doesn’t really tell us anything new about the stuff.
the lowest mass dark object currently measured
one million times the mass of the Sun
We are surrounded by dark objects, a rock is a dark object, exoplanets are dark objects, and so are black holes. Pretty much everything but stars are dark objects. They are all dark because they don't emit light.
Here, I think they mean stuff (whatever it is) that can only be detected by gravitational lensing, and it makes sense that it has to be extremely heavy, because gravity is so weak.
Dark matter seems more ghostly , like gravitational shadow of matter
There's no reason to think that our senses encompass the vast majority of understanding everything in reality and current evidence that they, in fact, do not, via dark matter as a primary source.
I suspect our senses encompass a meaningless fraction of the noumenon.
- the quotes around image in the title
- the commenter believes image is the correct word in a more literal sense
The title reads like astronomers found a mysterious dark object in another universe. Like a distant solar system or a distant galaxy.
Or am I misunderstanding the findings here?
Would you assume the headline is referring to a galaxy far away (spatially) or your own galaxy in the past?
From the abstract: “This is the lowest-mass object known to us, by two orders of magnitude, to be detected at a cosmological distance by its gravitational effect. This work demonstrates the observational feasibility of using gravitational imaging to probe the million-solar-mass regime far beyond our local Universe.”
Assuming this is repeatable, it will take a while to contextualize.
And if it has a chewy nougat center.
(Sorry. Reminded me of an old TV commercial.)
Why are they there?