Astronomers have discovered the largest known structure in the universe, a clump of active galactic cores that stretch 4 billion light-years from end to end. The structure is a light quasar group (LQG), a collection of extremely luminous Galactic Nulcei powered by supermassive central black holes.
So that’s cool and everything, but maybe some of you would be interested to know why this is a significant find? Beyond just its record-setting bigness.
Since Einstein, physicists have accepted something called the Cosmological Principle, which states that the universe looks the same everywhere if you view it on a large enough scale. You might find some weird shit over here, and some other freaky shit over there, but if you pull back the camera far enough, you’ll find that same weird and/or freaky shit cropping up over and over again in a fairly regular distribution. This is because the universe is (probably) infinite in size and (we are pretty darn sure) has, and has always had, the same forces acting on it everywhere.
So why is this new LQG so radical? (It stands for ‘Large Quasar Group,’ btw, not ‘Light Quasar Group.’)
Well, let’s try to comprehend the scale we’re dealing with. A ‘megaparsec,’ written Mpc, is about 3.2 million light years long. The Milky Way is about 0.03 Mpc across (or 100,000 light years). The distance between our galaxy and Andromeda, our closest galactic neighbor, is 0.75 Mpc, or 2.5 million light years. LQGs are usually about 200 Mpc across. Assuming a logarithmic distribution of weird shit outliers (if you don’t know how logarithmic distribution curves work, don’t worry about it), cosmologists predicted that nothing in the universe should be more than 370 Mpc across.
This new LQG is 1200 Mpc long. That’s four billion light years. Four BILLION LIGHT YEARS. Just to travel from one side to the other of this one thing. I mean for fuck’s sake, the universe is only about 14 billion years old! How many of these things could there be?
Right now it looks like the Cosmological Principle might be out the window, unless physicists can find some way to make the existence of this new LQG work with the math (and boy, are they trying). And that’s totally baffling. It would mean—well, we don’t have any idea what it would mean. That the universe isn’t essentially uniform? That some ‘special’ physics apply/applied in some places but not in others? That Something Happened that is totally outside our current ability to understand or quantify stuff happening?
By the way, no one lives there. The radiation from so many quasars would sterilize rock.
are you telling us astronomers have discovered something which is literally fucktuple the size of anything else previously estimated to exist
Anything that fucking rewrites all of what we know about the universe needs to get its ass on my blog. It’s giant, glowy, black hole filled ass.
Hot damn. But also, the Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall discovered in 2013 is 10 billion light-years by 7.2 billion light-years wide (and 900 million light-years thick).
How do they just discover something this big how do they see this through a telescope and have it all in view blurry or otherwise and they say, “well fuck me allen this isnt right” this is completely inconceivable to me. I cant fathom this. I feel small. Goodnight
I’m doing a Philosophy paper on Asexuality. Please reblog if you think Love without Sex is possible! I really need the data. Like if you think love has to have sex.
Can you like and re-blog? Depends on the primal nature of our beings really.
One of the most annoying things that frequently happens at work is when I answer the phone and the person just lists what they want to order while i"m asking them their name and if it’s delivery or pickup or where it is if it is delivery. Like, seriously, I"m like “where too” and they are like “I want a number 9…” I can’t place your order for delivery if I don’t know who it’s going to or where it’s going.
according to USA Today, the average tumblr user spends 2.5 hours a month on tumblr
more like 2.5 hours an hour.
2.5 hrs are 150 minutes. That would be 150 minutes in an about 30 days. That means they would think that the average user spends only 5 minutes a day on tumblr.
I’m really hoping one of your followers might be able to offer me some advice because I don’t know what to do anymore. I work as a cashier in a grocery store and my front end manager clearly hates me, don’t ask me why. I have good attendance, I’m respectful of my customers and coworkers and I’m polite and respectful towards him. He has cut back my hours to the point where I can’t pay my bills. He also puts me on express every day, even though he knows that bagging hurts my back. I even said I would bring a note from my doctor about my back and he said if I did that he would cut back my hours even further. No matter how fast I work he often pulls me aside to literally yell at me about long lines as if I have any control over how few registers we have open. At this point I cry every day on my way to work, and I’m afraid to speak to the store manager or anyone else about this because I know he’ll retaliate and I need this job. I don’t know what to do.
(My advice: I had a front end manager that hated me and tried to find every reason in the book to write me up. He couldn’t cut my hours bc we were so understaffed that it was impossible. But if he were able he would have. My solution was to do my job to the best of my ability. I was a damn good cashier and I’m pretty sure you are too. Own it. If he keeps on picking on you maybe you should try talking to the store manager in confidence. Tell them you’re scared if he knows he will retaliate. They may be more understanding than you know.)
Does anyone else have that friend where it’s just like “Literally nothing you say can shock me anymore. We have said the worst possible things to each other in the form of sarcastic banter to the point that I have become numb to the moral reality of this world.”
