You load 618 ton, and whattaya get? Another light year older and deeper in the event horizon.
St. Hawking don’t you call me 'cuz I can’t go…
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IIIIIIII was born one mornin’ in the habitable zone
I picked up my inertia and warped to the unknown
What the hell are you guys singing?
we’re making up lyrics for a space themed parody of 16 Tons.
Dolly Parton’s Nine to Five
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I oweeeeeee my Sol to the black hole…
I owe my soul to the big black hole
Flows a bit better
Sooome people say a star is made out of mud…
*cosmic dread intensifies
I’m in this picture…and I like it.
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You’re nothing and nothing matters and that’s ok. It’s beautiful.
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Man, I think about that all the time. We aren’t even a drop in the bucket, not a blip in the history of the universe. To me that makes life immeasurably precious. We get to experience and explore a small moment of infinite vastness
Yes, and you are very correct.
It’s not really possible with our minds.
Much like with numbers, anything beyond small numbers/points our minds just turn into representative idea (a meme) which we tend to perceive on a logarithmic scale (like how people tend to think a thousand, a million, and a billion are apart by about the same-ih or only a bit differently). Thats even how our biosensory bits work, along with how we interpret/perceive information from them.It’s great for achieving practical stuff, but it’s not real.
Every time I see these ultramassive black holes all I see is the megastructure uber planet you can build around them, or if organic life has gone out of fashion at that point, the megastructure uber computer.
Sounds like some shit the Culture does
Or the Bobs
Great reference. The Bobs haven’t really achieved anything on this scale yet, though. The closest is the Skippies’ Matryoshka Brain, but IIRC they’re using a system of satellites around a brown dwarf star, which would be somewhat comparable in size to Jupiter. The Others’ Dyson Sphere project is closer, but I don’t think we really got a sense for how far along they were, and it looks like their home star is only a bit larger than Sol.
Sorry if that came across as nitpicky, I was just excited to see a Bobiverse reference in the wild.
Edit: Got the Others’ star mixed up in my head, it looks like it’s either a red dwarf or completely fictional.
Hard to find enough material to encircle that one.
Maybe that’s why those “dark matter only” galaxies exist.
It would take multiple galaxies of matter to pull the material together, but if you’re planning on building a megastructure of this scale that’s probably not any trouble for you
Now compare TON 618 with Phoenix A.
That’s it… I’m not getting out of bed today.
I feel insignificant, what’s the point of life even.
there isn’t one! So feel free to make it up, you probably won’t find it, or won’t know when you’ve found it, but the mere act of looking will point you in the right direction - going out and enjoying the absurdly rare phenomenon of being alive. You and I are a cosmic anomaly, friend, isn’t that cool?
for a more comprehensive guide on what do when you realise life is meaningless: refer to existentialism and absurdism
Aww, I appreciate the intent but it’s a joke. Thanks for looking out for your fellow humans, though. Good human.
Somewhere in late 2000s I saw one of the most mind-melting GIFs I’ve seen that compared the Solar System objects to the largest known stars at the time. This kinda reminded me of that.
This gem also springs to mind
ok so, this post reminds me, a while ago i archived all of the older Vsauce content, and i binged through the vast majority of it, and i can swear there was a video from him about the scale of the universe, or the scale of things in the universe, but i can’t for the life of me find it.
Either it’s hiding somewhere, or i’m making some shit up and it isn’t real lol.
it’s quite possibly somewhere in there. The blessing and the curse of Vsauce videos is that you never know what’s going to be inside of it
yeah, that’s kind of the problem i’m having lol, doesnt help that his video titles are often a little obtuse.
you got me to rewatch a couple of my favourites and there’s a bit about the scale of the singal we send out to space in Messages For the Future. Maybe it was that?
could be, but i remember a video covering the scales of stars either as a focus, or as a reference, including a segment where the earths sun is quite literally too small to see. But i might be making that last part up.
There’s always a bigger, uh, sun.
Astrophysicist here. Yes, space is crazy, but interesting things to keep in mind:
- The size of a star is determined by something called the photosphere. With those extremely massive stars, you can be hundreds of millions of kilometres “inside” and not yet know it.
- Similar story with supermassive black holes, from the perspective of an astronaut falling in, they wouldn’t really be able to tell when they cross the horizon because the tidal forces there are very small (they will inevitably fall towards the centre and get spaghettified at some point)
as a non astrophysicist, or just a non astronomer in general. it weirds me out every time i remember that there is literally a part of the universe that apparently exists, of which we will never be able to see, because the light from that part of the universe, quite literally hasn’t reached us yet.
The observable universe is inconceivably massive. But it just keeps going.
And to think it’s not an improbable concept for humanity to recreate the physics behind a big bang in a controlled setting, somewhere down the line from here, is certainly an interesting thought.
the light hasn’t reached is yet
The light will never reach us, space is expanding faster than light between here and there
Hi Astrophysics,
I always wondered why they draw black holes like they do in that the accretion looks like it’s drawn in two planes. I would have thought it would have looked a bit more like a saturns rings? Or is it exactly like saturns rings but we see the whole ring bent round the top because a black hole bends the light around so we can see it? Or is it something else entirely that they are trying to depict here?
Yep, you got it right. The accretion disk is actually really flat. Those images are produced in simulations that take into account the curved (and very complex) paths light takes in the vicinity of a black hole. These images really depend on the angle between the line of sight and the disk.
Black homes are so massive and heavy that they bend light (well, technically every piece of mass does, even yo momma). It’s bend so extreme that that accretion disk appears warped.
A similar thing happens with neutron stars that can also bend light in such a way that you can actually see part of the back of the star (if you were able to see it anyway, it would be dark) as light that would be emitted from parts of the back would warp around to the front where you could see it
The second one. The image is simulated as how an external observer would see it. It was firstly done for the Interstellar movie.
The first simulated images were actually computed decades ago, but I think Interstellar had the most detailed simulation by a high margin
https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/first-ever-image-black-hole-cnrs-researcher-had-simulated-it-early-1979
Interstellar spent 100 hours of mainframe compute time per frame to simulate a black hole
THE UNIVERSE
I was just thinking of such a similar comparison today with a similar way of comparing them! (Earth<<Sun<<SagittariusA)
#4 Op’s mom
